Meet Manish Srivastava
On reclaiming the artist within
Manish lives in India, but his work as a coach, facilitator, and artist takes him around the world. “My home is in India, but wherever a group of people is gathering to heal the societal wounds, to have authentic and deep conversations… that feels like home too. Every such circle, whether it is in the south or east or west or north… feels like home.”
Journey to the Presencing Institute
In 2006, Manish was working with Unilever when he read a book called Presence, written by Otto Scharmer, Peter Senge, Joseph Jaworski and Betty Sue Flowers. “I fell in love with the book,” Manish remembers. “I was a business leader then, but I longed to be part of a transformation process that heals societal divides. Almost magically, three months later, I was seconded by Unilever on a project called Bhavishya Alliance, which was one of the early long-term, cross-sectoral systems transformation work using Theory U (based on the book Presence).”
Manish worked on that project for two years. In 2008, he took a career sabbatical and came to the US. Here, he met Otto “on a Thursday in August in a Starbucks.” This meeting “started a more formal journey” with the Presencing Institute. Manish stayed in the US for two years working as a research fellow with the Presencing Institute and MIT. After these two years, he returned to India and continued his work as a practitioner and faculty of the Presencing Institute.
He has designed & facilitated several Theory U based long-term, multi-sectoral change labs & award-winning leadership programs across the world for UN Agencies, international governments, the World Bank, MNCs and global social entrepreneurs networks
Reclaiming the Artist Within
In the midst of his international consulting career, Manish was taking another, quieter journey.
In 2008, Manish met his teacher Arawana Hayashi, on a dialogue walk along the Charles River in Boston. “I fell in love with her work and her grace. She gave me her copy of the book: Shambhala: Sacred Path of the Warrior by Chogyam Trungpa. It introduced me to the world of Contemplative Arts and I started being a part of all the experimentation with Social Presencing Theater.” At that point, the Social Presencing Theater (SPT) practices, such as 4D Mapping, were still evolving.
“The reason I loved this practice is because deep down I am an artist, and a poet. But I had hidden all of that when I took the path of a business leader.”
“Learning with Arawana and playing a part in shaping SPT helped me reclaim the artist within me. I was able to integrate art, poetry, embodiment, and systems change. I am deeply grateful to Arawana for this gift!”
This was a key transition for Manish. He remembers: “SPT gave new life to my poetry. That was beauty. I started practicing SPT with what I now call “Embodied Poetry”. For there is a poem in our body, which is a direct perception of reality. And as we tune in, and give it a shape and language, it is able to say much more than what was said in words.”
The Business Leader Meets the Artist
“I always felt that my life walked on two roads : one was a high road where I was a business consultant, working in board rooms with leaders, thinking about strategy and how to make things happen. And the other was a dirt road where I was an artist, a poet, and where I attended to the deep emotions within me and others.”
Encountering and making space for the artist within him helped Manish “have a direct perception of reality and have a sense of what wants to emerge.”
“It was in working with SPT and other practices of Theory U that I was able to sit in the room, fully own myself as an artist and read a poem that inspired business leaders to have deeper conversations. Poetry inspires us to attend to what matters in the moment whether our data tells us or not. Because poetry in itself is deeply felt data.”
Manish remembers how reclaiming the artist within allowed him to bring it more openly to work and help others to do the same . “I was amazed to learn how leaders across sectors were longing for inspiration, heartfulness and spontaneity that social art brought to them naturally.
Manish started integrating SPT, poetry and contemplative art to help leaders access deeper wisdom inherent in bodies and collectives, and co-create innovations that generate well-being for all. His work has helped clients in diverse contexts including: sustainable business entrepreneurship, anti-trafficking, law & justice system, education, UN SDG Lab etc.
His most challenging and rewarding experience was in working with grassroots women leaders, business executives and government officers, in midst of a complex climate change crisis. “When all languages fail, and there are divides in gender, generation, class and race… embodiment and art helps us to communicate and connect with our deepest longings and sadness. That creates the field for systems transformation.”
Trading Armour for a Flower
Near the end of 2019, Manish blessed us with a work of prose and poetry entitled Trading Armour for a Flower: Rise of New Masculine. Living in “a highly patriarchal world,” Manish began inquiring into his own experience of gender roles and expressed this in poetry.
The title of the book, Trading Armour for a Flower, occurred to Manish as an image: “I am walking out of a formation of soldiers and I see a little child in a field holding a flower. I take off my armor and drop it. I go, almost naked, lower down to the level of the child and embrace the flower.” The armor illustrates “the judgements, roles and identities which we hold. It protects us but it also keeps us stuck.” We feel stuck when “the armor starts pinching from within. That’s when we feel a deeper invitation to go beyond the armor, to look within and reconnect with our essence and source… that’s the flower in a way. And that’s the innocence inside us.”
The flower, for Manish, is this “childlike innocence that we all have. It is manifested as courage, clarity, and colors of a flower. The armor is metaphorically the structures, the systems, the identities that we are stuck in. Deep down we all long to trade our armours for a flower.”
The Divine Feminine and Masculine Integrated into the Fullness of Being Human
Manish, alongwith his wife Sonali, hosted 10 poetic dialogue circles across India to help men and women imagine a future where masculine and feminine energies are integrated into the fullness of being human. Collectively they envisioned “a world where we have reverence for the divine feminine, love for the earth and dignity for women. Where we honour for the feminine within man, his longing to care, to belong, and to accept the other as it is.”
And, at the same time, we “honour the divine masculine within us, which means that we take a stand against societal divides. We create new institutions and structures which care for wellbeing of all.” And when we integrate the divine masculine and the divine feminine, “we have spontaneous beauty, grace & power.”
Creating a New World
The riots in Delhi, alongside an upsurge of hate speeches and “the othering and absencing that is taking place” make Manish yearn for a different world. He hopes to “bring people together across sectors, races, class, religions… and create spaces where they can look deep into their own wounds and be able to talk about it. This kind of holding space, in my opinion, can only be enabled through art, embodiment, and contemplative conversation. And that’s the divine feminine.”
Manish continues: “We see frustration being externalized as blame or internalized as shame.” Here, “I want to stay on the threshold.” From this threshold, “I want to invite people to create a new world using whatever methods I know. And that’s my longing for the future: I want to host these spaces where we can go beyond ‘othering’ to see ourselves in each other.”
“The pandemic of COVID-19 has brought humanity face to face with the fragility of our ego. It is also offering us a new portal or a pathway to reimagine a different future.” Manish wonders that “Such imagination is not possible with our habitual, ego-centric way of thinking. That’s why we need to bring forth the artist from within and source deep creative wisdom from our bodies. To tune in and ask — what is my personal, social and earth body really longing for?”
Manish is offering online contemplative social art based workshops to “help participants transform their struggles and wounds into a work of art. It is a bold, creative leadership space where we can co-imagine and co-create a new future beyond our societal divides of race, religion, class or gender.”
The poet Rumi said,“Out beyond the ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing there is a field. I will meet you there.” Manish asks: “How do we uncover this field which is beyond our right and wrong, beyond the man and woman, beyond Hindu or Muslim, beyond black and white? Beyond all this there is a field which we need to access. We need to prepare whatever it takes to uncover that field?”
Video of the interview:
Thank you to Rachel Hentsch, and Zoë Ackerman for their copy-editing support! For more stories on practitioners of societal transformation, follow the Field of the Future blog and subscribe to the Presencing Institute Newsletter.
