Meet Sarina Bouwhuis
On Holding Your “Darlings” Lightly and the Art of Joyfully Letting Go
You might recognize Sarina as a member of the Presencing Institute (PI) core team, and if you participated in the early GAIA sessions, as one of the program coordinators. If you’ve received the most recent newsletters from PI, you will, perhaps unknowingly, also already have encountered Sarina, who, as PI’s Editorial Lead, has been the creative hand and mind behind its most recent editions. Sarina has been with PI since 2016, having initially joined as part of the global u.lab team. Now, she has become central to the Editorial Team.
Sarina is a Dutch-Irish writer, amongst many other things, having obtained her BA in English Language and Culture, and an MA in Postcolonial Literature. She is also a certified yoga teacher with a strong interest in mindfulness practices and meditation. These various threads have woven together in her work with PI, and continue to grow and press forward as Sarina now begins a new chapter in her life. It’s one of her last weeks at PI, and we are excited to speak with her before she moves on to a new episode in her life.
Finding a Language & Joining PI
When living in Berlin, Germany, Sarina and her partner “had developed this desire to see what we could do to contribute to sustainable projects.” Both are trained yoga teachers, and were interested in mindfulness- and awareness-based practices. From that background, they created a community event called Changing Course Berlin. In thinking about how to articulate their vision, they knew that the focus was sustainability, “but it wasn’t just about implementing sustainable actions,” but rather about a “holistic approach to sustainability.”
In a “homemade style,” Changing Course Berlin hosted several community gatherings. During this time, Sarina stumbled upon an introductory video for PI’s u.lab 1x MOOC online. In this video, she heard Otto Scharmer “speaking about the three divides: the social, the ecological, and the spiritual.” This “gave a language” to the questions she and her partner had been “dancing around, and creating things around” with the Changing Course Berlin community gatherings. It “really sparked my best energy,” she remembers. Sarina decided to join the u.lab course, and recalls how her co-workers at Impact Hub Berlin noticed “something really lighting up” in her. A few months later, at a Global Impact Hub gathering, the Berlin community manager ended up in a workshop with Otto Scharmer and Adam Yukelson. “He had remembered that I was completely beaming and happy in doing this course,” Sarina recalls, “and he said: oh, you wanted to set up this hub, right? Shall we do this?” This led to Sarina hosting the u.lab hub at Impact Hub Berlin, “which was just such a wonderful experience.”
Through hosting this hub, Sarina met Angela Baldini, who joined the meetings and ended up in a coaching circle with her — the start of a beautiful friendship. The following year, their coaching circle continued and after engaging in the Presencing Foundation Program in Berlin in 2016, Sarina felt a real connection and commitment to PI’s work. As there were extra hands needed to support the global u.lab team, Sarina connected with Julie Arts around u.lab community support and Adam Yukelson around prototyping the u.lab newsletter. In addition, she helped out with u.lab translations coordination. In this way, she was already informally supporting the core team. By 2018, when PI needed to hire someone “on the ground” in Berlin for the programs that were taking place there, Sarina was a natural choice for the position and officially joined PI’s core team.
Shapeshifting
In 2018, Sarina started off supporting in-person programs in Berlin. “This was a new kind of space for me,” she remembers, “communicating with venues, making sure the spaces were right,” all on a significantly larger scale than she had been used to. To learn how to hold a space like this, with sometimes up to 80 participants, was a “steep learning curve.” She remembers how holding spaces like these was like “engineering the flow of how people would have their experience during a program.” Sarina adds, with a laugh, that “this is vastly different than editing texts and doing translations.”
Because of Sarina’s background in editing and copywriting, it felt very natural to join PI’s editorial team. PI is the kind of organization where “we can each step into various roles, try them on, and see what fits.” Sarina adds, with a smile, that “we’re all shapeshifters.” Therefore, she has been able to take on a whole range of roles over the years, which also includes program coordination for GAIA when it just started up and coordination of translations and language tracks. At the moment, her focus is primarily on the editorial team and the research space. An exciting new project that Sarina has been involved in is the Journal for Awareness-Based Systems Change, which just launched its inaugural issue.
Exploring Spaces for Change
Another aspect of Sarina’s work, or her “hearts work,” has been hosting spaces for mindfulness practices. “My partner in doing that has been my partner in life as well,” she says with a smile. Together, they have co-hosted various kinds of spaces for mindfulness practices, with a background in buddhist meditation and yoga, but also integrating improvisation theater practices. “That combination has been fundamental for those types of workshops,” Sarina reflects.
“We are constantly reinventing what it is that we want to host, and want to create,” Sarina explains, “it’s been an ever-evolving journey.”
The yoga Sarina was trained in focuses not only on the movement of the body, but also on this “deep sense of awareness of not only yourself, but of something bigger” as well. “In retrospect,” Sarina adds, these workshops actually “mirrored the movements of the U.” Similar to the Theory U process, the workshops begin by making sure that the space is set, and that everyone is familiar with one another, “so that it’s not just an individual practice, but we’re here together.” These workshops can then dive into various themes and questions, but a constant and central question is always that of: “what does it mean to show up fully in this space?” Sarina adds that they “always include a journaling practice and sometimes an art practice, which is one of the things we’ve brought in from Theory U.” The workshops often address the question: “how do we bring this learning out into the world?”
“But it’s not just for you. Whatever you’re able to do on the mat, if you’re not able to bring that into the world, it misses the point. The point is not to increase your focus and concentration. The point is to really integrate whatever knowing it is that you’re able to tap into while you’re practising, to also integrate that into your life.”
Moments of Transformation
Since Sarina joined PI in 2018, “a lot has changed.” To start with, the “team has really grown, and continues to grow.” Also, in terms of PI’s programs, there’s been an evolution from “having this online platform [u.lab 1x], which is free and accessible to everyone,” where participants joined “individually to get to know Theory U and develop that for themselves,” to now having “entire teams join this online platform” through u.lab 2x.
Just recently, PI hosted the launch session of u.lab 2x 2021. With more than 1000 people joining the zoom session, and with the extended teams “just growing and growing,” there’s a sense of excitement and energy around this program that’s only been increasing. Sarina reflects on how this energy is “different from an energy of oh this is interesting and we want to listen. It’s gone from that to: this is interesting, and we are ready!” Because of this,
“it feels electric. (…) We can really see the maturity of the field there. (…) People want to get their hands dirty.”
Decolonizing Our Knowing
Sarina also sees a general move toward more local and place-based action, nourished by the global space, but then turning towards shared contexts. This is also exemplified in a strong Latin-American community, 8 different GAIA language tracks, and the Ubuntu.Lab Institute for African countries. Moreover, having done a Masters in post-colonial literature, Sarina has been particularly excited to see the extent to which the organization itself has been engaged in “bending the beam of observation back on ourselves” through which “there’s new layers of learning that we’re coming into,” that “seem rooted in a global learning that we’re all seeing as humanity”.
One concrete theme that has increasingly become important as a result is “that we’re asking more and more explicitly how we can decolonize our knowing”, for instance in the GAIA sessions around Indigenous Wisdom with Melanie Goodchild and the Noongar elders from Australia, the sessions around Black Lives Matter with Dr. Angela Acosta and Dayna Cunningham, and the explorations in the Journal of Awareness-Based Systems Change. She sees that this development is very important and “can only evolve and mature our work further”.
Online vs. Offline Gathering
When asked how it has been to switch from hosting in-person programs to fully going online due to the pandemic, Sarina says that “Many of us have been quite pleasantly surprised at the level of connection that we’re able to achieve online — even many of us who were involved with the u.lab way before.” She continues:
“It’s been quite wonderful to see the depth of space that you can open online if you work together and design it well (…) But it is based on this experience of in-person—nearly the cell memory of what it was like to come together in-person, and to evoke that (…) So, when we’re in a big session for GAIA, and Melanie says ‘I’d like you all to imagine that we’re sitting in circle’, then in that moment, by saying that, I feel like we’re physically sitting in circle.”
However, Sarina also notes that “many of us are feeling the limits of that now,” seeing as “when everything transfers online, you become starved of that in-person interaction.” Once more of us are able to meet in-person again, she sees that “we are now able to create more in-depth experiences and connections online than we knew how to do before (…) But then many of us feel that that needs to be supplemented with in-person interaction.”
Holding Your “Darlings” Lightly
Sarina remembers how, as a child, she “used to just sit in the backseat of the car, singing out words that felt like they had a nice rhythm.” For, ever since she was young, she “just loved words.” There’s “something about language, and expressing yourself” that has allowed this love of language to take root in her from a young age. “I engaged a lot in songwriting as a teenager,” Sarina recalls. With a laugh, she adds: “let’s be honest, I still do.” To this day, language, poetry, and writing in many different forms nourish her sense of creativity.
When asked what she has learned during her time at PI, Sarina responds: “I’ve learned so much during my time at PI.” An example she gives involves a lesson around co-creation.
“In the past,” Sarina explains, “I connected myself very much to my work, taking feedback quite personally.” One of the things that she has learned, “in my bones,” is a different approach to collaboration. “I think it’s the joy of working on something,” which means “really tending to it with care, and then lovingly letting it go by bringing it into the middle, and letting it be co-evolved in a collective.” This allows it to have the “highest possible relevance and highest possible quality,” and to truly be a “co-creation.”
Co-creation is “easy to talk about and set up processes around,” but there’s an “internal posture” that comes with it, which Sarina describes as “not exactly ‘killing my darlings’, but holding my darlings lightly,” or lovingly letting something go by bringing it into the middle of a collective. Such co-creation is “not about your individual contribution,” while, at the same time, “you’ve truly put everything into that contribution.” Sarina adds that “to really joyfully let it go, not begrudgingly, I think is something that’s become part of me… and I’m very grateful for that.”
Looking Ahead
When asked what her heart is beating for looking towards the future, Sarina responds with:
“A sense of rootedness and groundedness that I haven’t had before and am very ready for at the moment. From that place, there is also a renewed excitement around leaving space for creativity and arts, and seeing how that can be connected to social justice activism. I’m excited to explore how to link those two more in the future.”
Video of the interview:
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