There is a moment that many of us recognize: We are walking in nature, or running, or sitting in meditation. Or in that space right after deep contemplation when the feeling of striving stops and gentleness is expanding instead.

We touch this, the aliveness and the profound connection. The boundlessness that is beyond and can feel more real than our material selves.

And we know that this biggest reality is there: We’ve glimpsed it; felt ourselves expanding to the horizon and beyond while watching the sunset over the sea; sensed that beyondness curling around the world receiving us, as us; touched what we sometimes set aside as ineffable, the bliss here as we’re melting into that one.

It can make everything else feel like we’re just going through the motions: Returning to our desk; homes away from this context; or, to a professional identity.

Deep connection fades.

Not because it isn’t real but because you don’t yet have reliable ways to integrate what you’ve touched into the fabric of daily work, relationships, and decisions.

This is what I hear, again and again, across thirty interviews for Soulsentient: people have had the peak experiences, that’s not the problem.

The problem is integration.

Double trouble — being connected and feeling we can’t explore this

Here’s what people actually said when we talked about what they are seeking:

“I would love to have access to this, constant access.”

“Peak experiences seem relatively common. What’s a problem is the integration of the experience in a way that is integrated with the system.”

“Success is de-energizing. I don’t like the word work anymore. Fulfillment, nourishment, it is a sense of being in service to something bigger.”

“The boundless feels more real than my material self.”

“I run to be moved by life. Everything is letting go, being a part of, merging with, relaxing into. Insights I could never willfully think my way to come to me.”

People aren’t just seeking more peak experiences — regardless of how profound this is when we go there. What’s really real is to live from what they’ve already touched, to:

• Embody the deep knowing.

• To bring it into work circumstances without scaring people off.

• To access that aliveness reliably, not just on actual mountain tops or in seemingly rare moments of grace.

They’re truly seeking to integrate their highest selves so this becomes practical and useful in lived life.

At home, at work and in love.

What holds us back

Two things show up consistently:

Acceptability

How do you bring this into professional life without being seen as having lost your mind?

80% of people feel they can’t even speak to their spouse about this, let alone their colleagues or clients.

Credibility

The risk of perspective-lapse is real and sometimes compounded as the spiritual community can tend towards low discernment. If we are truly hosting our highest-self experiences are we setting aside analytical rigor — once our minds get so open do our brains necessarily have fall out?

So we stay quiet and we compartmentalize. We touch the profound and then set it aside to function in the “real world.”

Meanwhile, the old measures of achievement, success, and optimization aren’t enough anymore. We know there’s deeper knowing available and we’ve experienced ourselves as part of something larger.

That is we intuitively touch a reality that we’re not merely becoming, we’re interbecoming.1 However, we lack the handrails to make this shift without betraying our responsibilities, our relationships, our livelihood.

What soulsentient offers

Soulsentient is a curated container and group experience.

It’s not another course on mindfulness or another peak experience retreat. It’s an:

• Integration practice.

• A metabolic process.

• A way of bringing what you’ve touched into the system around you without collapse, without bypassing, without fragmentation.

We work across five foundations that create the conditions for embodied transformation:

Community — A credible sangha small enough for genuine relationship, large enough for diverse wisdom. Transformation stabilizes in trusted company, not in isolation.

Integration — Methods to metabolize peak experiences into daily life so insight doesn’t fade when you return to work and responsibility.

Clarity — Developing a felt sense of what is yours to do, reducing the circling and second-guessing that dilutes our energy.

Aliveness — Access to vitality becomes steady rather than episodic, supporting resilience and creative momentum instead of burnout and busyness.

Expression — Language and legitimacy to bring deeper knowing into professional life without scaring people off or losing coherence.

If this speaks to you, please reach out and book a call >

The shift we’re making

There are metamorphic moves here as we are looking to shift:

• From glimpses to sustained access.

• From peak moments to embodied presence.

• From knowing something cognitively to living it somatically.

Not set aside the world around us but rather infuse ourselves with it while contributing genuine value back:

• Aliveness, beyond busyness

• Nourishment, beyond achievement

• Passion, beyond performance

• Meaning, beyond metrics

• Fulfillment, beyond accomplishment

These aren’t only distillations. They’re the actual tensions people named in interviews: The shift from de-energizing success to something that feels like home; from performing competence to being moved by life; from optimization to harmonization.

This is the antithesis of abandoning the practical world. We’re co-creating and learning to hold: Both the boundless and the embodied; the mystical and the tangible; aliveness and abundance.

How this actually works

Soulsentient unfolds through ten movements that run in parallel, integrating inner experience, grounding it in nature, and translating it into embodied contribution:

1. We establish reliable ways to integrate inner experience so insight becomes stable and usable.

2. We enter and commit to a credible community that supports and reflects our process.

3. We cultivate sustained access to aliveness rather than rely on occasional peak moments.

4. We clarify what is truly ours to do through direct felt discernment.

5. We root into a lived sense of belonging rather than navigate our work alone.

6. We develop language to express deeper knowing with coherence and integrity.

7. We bring deeper knowing consciously into professional life.

8. We embody and stabilize peak experiences so they translate into daily practice.

9. We trust internal sensing without abandoning practical reality.

10. We align work and contribution with deeper knowing in tangible ways.

This is not a linear list. These are movements and they don’t happen sequentially. They weave together, metabolize together, become embodied together.

What people experience

“I love how brazen you are in weaving the mystic with the mundane and supporting the lift of working humanity into humanness again.”

“I was so present in the journey. I felt in a time and dimension travel. I felt so safe and held.”

“I really felt it in the body, the lightness. It’s almost like you stepped into this energy with it. I am the focus of light. It’s a really beautiful state of potential and possibility.”

“A rich, inspiring and well-held space. I too am with my space of inner awe. It’s a beautiful and memorable experience.”

This isn’t about transcending the world — it is about coming home to it.

Finding the call and response with reality and the confirming synchronicities. Being the systems we inhabit while also following our curiosity — dancing with our highest self experiences rather than hiding them.

So is the Tao really smarter than the Dow?2

Increasingly, we believe it is yet we’re not 100% sure what emerges from this — we’re all co-evolving this together. However, the evidence suggests: honor your curiosity; trust the call and response; find your containers.

The aliveness you seek isn’t betrayal — it’s integration.

The invitation

Soulsentient is forming now as a leading-edge network and is part of the Network of Networks. It is a peer community for integrating your peak experiences into life, work, and love while finding credible companionship and developing more discriminating discernment.

We treat our experiences as real and treat them lightly too — what else is real? And do this in service of your highest aspirations and the collective good. Not as separate goals but as metabolically entangled realities.

As, what you’ve touched is not optional.

You’ve glimpsed it. Now we sustain it, together.

To explore whether Soulsentient is for you, book a conversation: https://zcal.co/simondivecha/soulsentient

Pictures: Simon Divecha and NotebookLM with deep gratitude to all the Mindsets of Transformation contributors.

Can I embark upon a life path that puts me at a very low level of bliss all the time where I actually feel like I’m contributing?

Tom Morgan says this pointedly, midway through our conversation.

We are not really seeking peak bliss nor limiting ourselves to flow states on the tennis court.

Rather, we are actually seeking to weave low level bliss into our daily lives and connect this with the circles around us, for genuine contributions. This is far more nourishing.

People aren’t as alive as they want to be

Tom: I see a negative and a positive framing in what is drawing people to this work.

The negative is that people aren’t as alive as they want to be. They’re not sure they deserve to be more alive because they have a high degree of quantifiable success and resources. And they have no idea how to pursue that process of coming more alive without betraying all their responsibilities.

This word — betrayal — and varieties of it keep coming up in your work and in my (Simon’s) Soulsentient interviews. What’s are we being unfaithful to?

In understanding this there’s a performance-related reason — life transitions take a lot more time than the current system can facilitate.

Expansions or integrations of consciousness involve a recognition that zero-sum games are incredibly stupid. However, the problem is that most modern industry is structured around zero-sum games.

Say you’re managing other people’s money and suddenly it becomes obvious, from the way you’re writing or speaking, that you’re becoming more interested in spirituality. People will worry that you won’t have that killer instinct, that competitive edge you need to outcompete the other people in the field.

Simon: Yes, it pushes us. Inwardly and outwardly we feel that sensing into our connections with all things, profound at-one-ness and more — pieces that may be labeled as spirituality — have to be done in private.

I know that has confronted me and it will continue to: When is this a bridge for people? When is it a limitation? My challenge, our challenge, is to sense into this while simultaneously staying open to the realities that both may be true.

80% can’t speak to their spouse about this

Tom: The people I meet are very lonely. They’re being drawn to things they can’t talk to other people about.

About 80% of the people I meet can’t speak to their spouse about this.

In America especially, it’s tougher to find communities interested in this. There’s also the association with low discernment. The fringier topics — downloads from source, psi phenomena, UAPs — have often been discredited.

For example, two people I know — one’s a CEO, the other runs a hedge fund — are both fascinated with UAPs. They feel they can’t talk to most of their families, friends, or investors about these topics. There’s an implied threat, it will be assumed that they’ve lost their mind.

Simon: And there’s a justified angle to that concern?

Tom: Yes. The spiritual community tends to have very low discernment. Very little analytical rigor. There’s this thing where once their minds get so open, their brains fall out.

Once you see through a couple of systems and realize that elements of conspiracy theories you previously regarded as ridiculously fringe might actually be true, you then start to see everything as a potential conspiracy theory — even if you have no basis or understanding of that area.

There are very real risks of discernment lapses.

The integration problem

Simon: This winds into trusting ourselves while simultaneously having powerful structures to challenge our own beliefs. For example, peak experiences are relatively common.1 In some circles psychedelics are now a luxury good risking commoditising insight at the expense of integration and connection.

Mindfulness and yoga, similarly, get detached from deeper meaning, at least as the founding traditions saw this. We can look to them to regulate stress and body image while setting aside the magical profoundness they also evoke. These are inherent across these practices yet we often regard this as just altered, even irrelevant, states.2

Tom: Yes, and the core of this problem runs deep. What’s systematic is the integration of the experience in a way that’s integrated with the system.

It’s not just: Can I get into flow when I’m playing tennis? Acknowledging that is a very Westernized conception of flow.

It’s: Can I embark upon a life path that puts me at a very low level of bliss all the time where I actually feel like I’m contributing?

That’s where most people I speak to want to get to. A lot of them are very wealthy. They’re asking: What am I going to do on a daily basis that is meaningful and brings me that felt sense of meaning and purpose?

That question often requires taking responsibility for forces like attractor intelligence and the Tao that operate beyond the Western paradigm.3

Is the Tao with a T smarter than the Dow with a D?

Simon: I really appreciate how you approach this. Such as by asking is the Tao smarter than the Dow? Are our high-return investments hiding in plain sight?4

Tom: This is probably the most interesting question I struggle with.

If you follow your bliss, in a way that’s integrated with the intelligence of the system we inhabit, will things just work out?

From an abundance perspective, from a life path perspective — will your kids be looked after? Will your wife be looked after? Will things just fall into place?

I increasingly believe that they will. But even I am not 100% sure about that.

Simon: I translate this as trust at one level. And meta-trust at another. Trust: I have a belief that if I’m engaging in community around these practices, it’s all going to work out somehow.

Meta-trust: We’re engaged in co-evolving the universe. There are subtle entities here that are evolving and we are taking on a responsible role in hosting and co-creating that. The latter is a lot harder to trust because it gets tangled up in spiritual community pieces that feel like low discernment.

A wonderfully documented example is when ~100,000 people to meditate together and change the outcome of violence in a war-torn country. There is credible data supporting this that gets ridiculed and questioned as not-real phenomena. A big part of that is we’re stepping outside of current meaning making realities, asking ourselves to consider new ways of knowing.5

The risk is real

Tom: These big experiences can be psychologically destabilizing. They may not be right, even if those experiences are real.

What if the Tao with a T is not smarter than the Dow with a D? You’re going to have a raise in your consciousness and then be destitute.

Poor but pure.

Or what if the Tao is smarter, and you leap and you are held — but you don’t get the things you think you want?

What if my ideal destiny actually has me stocking shelves in Boulder?

I may actually end up wanting that. However, having the faith to assume that’s what I want in advance is a different matter — not knowing what you have to give up in order for the universe to have your back. Even if you believed in all of these things, what do I have to go through to get what the universe wants to give me, is still a very difficult question.

• Will my spouse stay with me?

• Will my family think I’m crazy?

• Will I have to give up all my friends?

These are very real risks that happen all the time. They make the pull to stay with the known extraordinarily tempting.

What people are actually looking for

Simon: I can feel the aliveness and intensity in our conversation. The sense of more-ness around us, a reality neither of us, individually nor collectively, are willing to set aside. I ask

So what keeps people coming? What’s the palpable value that makes them put their time and energy here?

Tom: You literally just nailed it with those last few words. It’s energy.

People seek out these communities because they feel less alive than they want to be. They realize they can be connected to community, content, and practices that bring them more alive.

It’s that simple. That’s why people come and that’s why people stay.

There have been beautiful things — synchronicities, partnerships, people developing intuitive gifts. But ultimately, it’s been love that people have stayed for. Even across a digital platform, that seems to be working on a scale that is genuinely positively incremental to whatever these people were finding in their existing lives.

Simon: That totally resonates. When you step into a peak experience, into a cosmic experience, into what gets translated as flow states in more acceptable circles — it’s an aliveness like nothing else.

The loneliness of the threshold

Tom: One of my best friends in the community is a highly mystical person. He knows more about mysticism than almost anyone I’ve met. He’s read all the books and, just recently, he had to leave a highly predatory US incentive system to strike out in an unknown direction that would lean more into the mysticism.

Even he was really tortured by this decision. You can have a conceptual understanding of all these ideas. But when it comes to leaving your job and putting you and your family into financial insecurity — will you actually do it?

His example lands what people are looking for:

• I make the first step, but then I need a confirming synchronicity.

• I need feedback.

• I need the sense that there is a call and response with reality.

I believe that is possible, I’ve witnessed it a lot. But that’s what people need in order to make these decisions that aren’t purely in a vacuum.

Simon: I very much relate to this. I can have as much conceptual understanding as I like of oneness, of quantum social science and all the rest.

It’s not until I step into a felt sense of that — which can extend to hosting and feeling the entire universe rushing through me in a very visceral way — that it lands in a way that’s usable. In a way that I will trust.

Moreover, I need mirrors around me. People to check this with, people who can help me with what I’m overlooking — a clear sense of contribution to what’s mine to do helping me to stop second-guessing. More reliable access too, to run this through my work, life, and loves.

The container matters

Tom: I’ve now been doing this community, Leading Edge, for two years.

One of the defining features, by definition, is people get into very wonky ideas and these ultimately reflect where they’re going in terms of their own niche.

That’s why you need to provide a container for the exploration of those ideas rather than necessarily the ideas themselves.

My own bias is towards people who can hold both science and spirituality in some degree. My intellect needs some degree of either empirical provability or rational framework in order to accept the more mystical side.

I think the addressable market for that content is larger than either the purely dead physicalism (which is deeply toxic) or the completely untethered mysticism (that isn’t deeply practical).

Consequently, when I encounter someone like Tim Freke — there’s enough newness to really bring me alive, because he’s looking forwards.6

What we find is:

The old technology, finance, and news channels don’t have any answers that don’t include more of the same.

It’s actually very rare to find people with practical solutions based around consciousness. The relative rarity makes it even more exciting when you find someone with a novel perspective.

Simon: It’s a space where we can sense and act from the future rather than constructing from the past. We can be liberated to some extent from that.

I’m reminded we’re standing on the shoulders of giants here too, for example those who’ve highlighted how entangled we are. Not only with those around us and other entities but with changing our past and futures too.7

It leads us right into the Network of Networks and a:

conscious choice to connect yourself to a more energising kind of person, practice or purpose8

See the invitation below and join Soulsentient / explore further into the network of networks too.

What we’re sensing

Tom and Simon: This conversation isn’t about escaping the world. It’s about the integration problem:

• People have touched something real.

• They’ve had the peak experiences. They know there’s more.

• The question is: Can this become integrated with the system? Can I follow bliss without betraying everything? Can I trust that things will work out?

That’s the bar. Increasingly, we believe it’s possible to clear such hurdles. Simultaneously, we’re not 100% sure yet — we’re all co-evolving this so that these realities shift.

The invitation

Watch the full conversation below. Let it land not just intellectually, but in your felt sense.

Notice your experience, when your are questioning or asking: Will things work out? What will I have to give up? Can I trust this?

Those questions are valid and the risks are real.

And the evidence suggests that we should honour our curiosity. Trust the call and response, support it by finding your containers. Treating what you experience as true while taking that lightly: being open and inquiring into the other ways of looking at this too.

The aliveness that we seek isn’t betrayal, it’s integration.

Subscribe now

Tom Morgan runs Leading Edge, a community for exploring consciousness, business, and what comes next. His work bridges science and spirituality for people navigating the threshold between success and aliveness.

Join Soulsentient which is forming as a leading edge network: integrating peak experiences into life, work and love, finding credible community, developing discernment.

Pictures: Festina Lentívaldi, (be) Benevolution. Reuse: Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0 US.

Home isn’t something to analyze, but to experience as a felt sense of being here now.

Claudia says this quietly, midway through our conversation about her book.

I, Simon, had been trying to locate home in my body—scanning, searching for a place to land.

She catches me thinking when I could have been feeling.

This is the work: noticing when we’re analyzing belonging instead of exhaling as it.

The quiet sense that something isn’t quite right

Claudia’s been sitting with people for decades as a psychotherapist — on the inside of their lives — and there’s a strong resonance with what I (Simon) been hearing in my Soulsentient interviews: Something isn’t quite right.

Not catastrophically wrong. Not crisis-level urgent. Just... off.

Claudia: We are experiencing a sense that we don’t really inhabit the world the way we used too

There’s a knowing in our bodies, filtering into our consciousness too, that the old measures — achievement, success, optimization — aren’t enough anymore.

What we’re truly seeking is belonging. Not belonging as sameness. Not belonging as institutional identity. Belonging as a relational state: connection within ourselves, between people, and in community.

Simon: We’re not merely becoming. We’re interbecoming.1 Leaning into the wildness around us as it winds through us — as us and in us.

When home became a foreign word

Claudia grew up bilingual in the San Francisco Bay Area, speaking German at home and English elsewhere. In kindergarten, her teacher knew she had immigrant parents and tested her vocabulary by showing a picture of slippers. All Claudia could think of was the German word, Hausschuhe.

The teacher looked at her as if she were from Mars.

Claudia: I think we all know what it feels like to be different. That feeling of being different has stayed with me and become central to everything I do, from raising my children to conducting marital therapy to facilitating community groups.

I love helping people learn to bridge differences by seeing them as a source of nourishment and an opportunity for growth.

Three realms, one breath

Simon: Claudia’s upcoming book, “The Communal Heart: A Return to Belonging in a World Pulling Us Apart,”2 unfolds through three interconnected realms of experience:

• Within us — coming home to ourselves

• Between us — learning to stay with one another

• Among us — finding coherence in community

All three realms are held by the Earth, on which we all depend.

And it all starts by cultivating embodied awareness or presence: coming into contact with our sensations, our feelings, and even our thoughts, without turning away or being distracted.

From there, turning outward by connecting with the world through our five senses to form a sense of being here. Then, learning how to respond to what this moment is asking of us.

The problem with trying to find home

When I try to locate home mentally, I scan my body for a place. My mind never settles. Even if it does, it moves. There’s also a bodily pushback: home isn’t just this person in my skin. It’s much more.
Simon

Claudia: I resonate, home isn’t something that can be analyzed. It’s a felt sense of being here now. It’s a form of being received by something, someone, someplace — something greater than ourselves that accepts everything as it is without rejection.

Many of us cut off that experience early. We needed to adapt to imperfect parenting, making it harder to imagine and inhabit a place within that can receive all of who we are—and who we were meant to be.

But that is the journey each of us takes on the path home.

We get socialized against feeling at home.

Simon: Michael Beckwith asks people to step into a place where all their needs are met.3 As soon as we do, most of us also go:

Oh, but that’s fleeting. That was momentary.

We find conditionalities and justifications that take us out of the sensation.

In reality, we’re socialized against sitting with that feeling. Against letting it be true and allowing the paradox of other, even incompatible, feelings to be true too.

This is a home concept readers will meet in Claudia’s work: presence without rejection.

The first three chapters of Claudia’s book address what gets in the way of really landing, exhaling into ourselves more completely. Because we’ve all been socialised in ways where we’ve had to protect ourselves from really relaxing into ourselves.

Claudia: Yes, home, presence, and trust are not fixed places but an ongoing relational dynamic. Rather than moving from one place to another, it’s about how presence fosters trust and forms the foundation of home.

Together, home, presence, and trust intertwine, welcoming us into continual, mutual becoming—a process that requires belonging to ourselves, others, and the world we share.

The world receiving me

Simon: I ask Claudia, how do you experience belonging to the world — the sentient world, the natural world?

Claudia: Belonging is a feeling of the world receiving me, becoming one with how the world is already functioning. I experience belonging when walking in sunshine, watching birds fly, and listening to water bubble in a creek. There’s a sense of everything working well together. And I become part of this.

This differs from other life areas, where it feels we must perform to belong.

In nature, the pressure lifts, bringing relief from daily life. I experience it as an exhale—breathing out into something greater. Beingness replaces the doingness that our modern society values.

When I’m in nature, I get to let go of all of that. And what happens is I open up to a felt sense that’s more difficult to access when walking in a city.

Simon: This is a shift I hear from many, through my Soulsentient interviews. We touch our highest selves in nature and many other circumstances.4 We’re looking for ways to integrate this into daily life, work, and love.

Long-distance running as moving meditation

Claudia has run daily long distances for over 45 years. She doesn’t run just for exercise; she runs to be moved by life:

There’s a sense of everything letting go—being part of, merging with, relaxing into.

she says. Insights that she could never think her way through come to her. Ian McGilchrist’s work on the divided brain is a powerful frame for understanding this phenomenon.5

But more importantly, she knows what I’m describing. Intuition and spaces ‘inside’ that resonate with this boundlessness.

Between us: Learning to repair

We can’t do the work of presence, trust, and at-homeness on our own. We need others to help us know ourselves more deeply.

And inevitably, that journey to meeting the other — even with the best intentions — is marked by tripping over our assumptions. How the other person ought to be; how they should be. As Claudia points out:

We can judge, we dismiss, we often ignore others, and that can cause tiny ruptures. And so the work in this second realm, “between us,” is to learn how to heal those ruptures. Which then builds trust. Trust in ourselves that we can do that, but also trust in the other, that we can bridge those differences, by finding a way to repair them.

Among us: How change coordinates

This brings us to the third realm: among us. Finding a way to agree on our shared values in groups, communities, and culture.

Claudia: What’s amazing about feeling a sense of coherence amongst others is that this kind of belonging is how change is actually coordinated. When we resonate with others, we inevitably leave these conversations better off for having engaged in them. We then bring these changes out into our personal lives and the communities we are a part of. That’s the real crux. Nationally and internationally.

What we are sensing

Claudia and Simon: As we see, these conversations are more than cognitive understanding—they land in the body, in the exhale. The central argument: home is not found analytically, but as a breath we take—a felt sense of being received.

This is by ourselves and with each other. By the world that’s already functioning, we get to become part of rather than prove ourselves worthy of.

The invitation

Watch the full conversation. Let it land in your body, not your head. Notice when you’re analyzing and tune into the feelings too.

Notice when you’re searching for home, instead From today. Vivonne bay, southern ocean and Ligurian bees ❣️ exhaling into it. And if you catch yourself trying to think your way there, remember Claudia’s gentle redirect:

Home isn’t something you find. It’s a breath you take.

Soulsentient

These themes are what I (Simon) hear running through the thirty Soulsentient6 interviews I’ve done:

• We seek reliable ways to integrate what we touch—not only peak moments, but steady access to aliveness and deep connection.

• Embodied and steadied.

• Not fleeting.

Claudia’s wonderful being and work offers handrails: coming home to ourselves first. Then turning outward to meet the other. Learning to repair ruptures. Finding coherence in community.

All is held by the natural world that receives us.

Without us having to earn it.

Subscribe now

Claudia Dommaschk is a psychotherapist, community facilitator, and author exploring belonging as a relational state. Her book (preorder) addresses the quiet sense that something isn’t quite right — and offers a path back to being at home with ourselves, each other, and the world.

These conversations touch on themes central to Soulsentient: integrating our highest states into lived life, at home, at work, in love. For more on Soulsentient: https://unfoldingrealities.com/soulsentient/

Photos: Westfjörds, Iceland; Queenstown, NZ; Waterfall Gully ponds, Sth Australia; bird-feeder Pony, MT; and, Sth Coast Australia by Festina Lentívaldi, (be) Benevolution. Reuse: Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0 US except Tippet Rise, MT (home-tree-entanglements) by Kris King.

We are so nearly there with the Mindsets of Transformation publication. And update, 26 March, we’re now fully published!1

It’s fundamental finding — our attention changes the world

• Doing strategy for change misses half the picture

• It’s our inner worlds

• Determining outer conditions

This is around integrating our highest selves, embracing our biggest ranges of contact with reality, and doing this with ease. A podcast, and invitation to transform, follows below.

Context and action

Let’s accept we are at the end of privileging strategy, systems and structures for change — these approaches to transformation are missing half the picture. Our inner worlds, including how we hold ourselves, joys and values, determine outer conditions.

However, what do we do to activate and honour the reality that our Attention changes the world.

Can we step up further to this?

Mindsets of Transformation sees multiple authors, across six papers and an editorial, do exactly that. Offer handrails and help to apply ourselves, to catalyse more powerful positive outcomes, to host and presence conditions conducive to emerging-flourishing shifts.

Activate

The issue and articles are practice as you read to support:

Systematic curiosity through which you can invite in profound integrity resonances, wholeness and creating from all of your experience.

While offering practical real-world examples of how we shift and how this changes the world around us — within groups, business and our world-kosmos.

Try it here too by feeling into the resonances of a poem from this issue.

Triveni Sangam

Now that my hair is longer,

I part it into three strands—

wasta, mythos, and logos.

With every knot I braid,

I leave a dim silhouette,

of three rivers flowing from

France, Wales and India

reincarnating at every trijunction,

on a moulting map, uncolonial.

Its contours, poetic.

Its colour, the colour of our heart.

Parneet, in her article,2 explores and feels into a part of what emerges. She describes the emergence of a collective entity. It arrives — transcending continents and time — becoming more than the sum of three-researcher parts.

Transformation

I invite you to explore, to breathe with all that is useful for you and your work/life. As:

Transformation is the moment we stop treating knowledge as a possession of the mind and begin recognising it as an event in the field — co-generated with Earth, time, and sentient species...

They ripple because the field ripples — reflected in ourselves as sensing, feeling and intuiting into entireness, meta-trust and ourselves as parts-wholes-source of a living, responsive field.3

Most of the papers have blogs and interviews4. The podcast with Hilary and myself

is on soundcloud.

Most of all I invite you into the ease of this.

No paraphernalia or ritual needed, this is practiced in our daily lives.5

It’s letting ourselves be open to rapidly awakening awareness, letting the themes from Mindsets of Transformation deepen our experiences with our hidden resources.

That’s to say there a softness here and one of the handrails that’s emerging from this work is Soulsentient — a group experience and curated container to help us all integrate coherence.6

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Credits: Images and video illustration from the Mindsets of Transformation Frontispiece by myself and NotebookLM. Podcast video extract Hilary Bradbury and myself.

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The bound issue, with all the articles, is now published. Online and/or dm me. The editorial here> It’s a Special Issue, the first of the year, from the Action Research Journal.

Mindsets of transformation: Consciously entangled action and research with a responsive world
Simon Divecha, Hilary Bradbury, Bennet Zelner, Áine Watkins, Jacqueline van Paassen, Bruno Pešec, Terence Sexton, Parneet Kaur and Jonathan Reams

Shamefully stuck to joyfully jammed? Reflexivity in researching stuckness
Julia Kukard

Embodied collaborative developmental action inquiry to become more reflexive research-practitioners in action
Jacqueline van Paassen and Bruno Pešec

Subtle leadership: How individual and collective consciousness intertwine to create change
Terence Sexton and Joan Walton

Culturing developmental friendship for a politics of love
Hilary Bradbury

Shared journals and fourth person knowing across cultures and between generations. A guide for movement building with joy, mutual respect and lasting impact
Adam Cairns, Parneet Kaur and Lynette Thorstensen

Journeying into right relations: Scientists turn to psilocybin to shift psychological burdens of global environmental change and find transformational pathways forward
David J. Wrathall, Hannah Gosnell, Fern Wickson, Erika Spanger and Associates

It’s 2019 in Santiago and the city is exploding. Millions of citizens are marching, for days. The subways are being torched, water cannons now rumbling down all the main avenues, pepper-chilli added to the water (incase the blast doesn’t do enough) and tear gas is descending across the city.2

Unsurprisingly, you can’t get a plane out, I’m stuck.

Surprisingly, a 7 year adventure is beginning.

While I don’t recommend tear gas and capsicum for inspiration, what it does do, very viscerally, is tell me to pay attention to my body!3 That is gloriously reflected seven years later as our Mindsets of Transformation journal issue — born in that eyes burning, breath clogging, air-is-fire haze — is about to publish.

For transformation

The embodiment and action, from that time in 2019, is emblematic. It reminds me to stop treating knowledge as a possession of my mind and embrace it as events in the field — we are co-generating with Earth, time, and sentient species as we engage in any intervention.4

This post, and the Mindsets issue, takes that into sensing, intuiting and feeling across wide territories of experience. It brings our underprivileged, intelligent 75% — these three modes of contact with reality — to prominence alongside our rationality.5

All of your needs met

That’s supported by audio: handrails helping us step beyond limiting conventions. Hence this post. The voiceover’s first meditation-integration practice is at the 2 minute mark — an invite into experiencing flourishing futures right now. This is an invitation to engage with life as a characteristically non-linear journey — a catalytic thread of realising flourishing futures in the now — by holding for yourself.

Cultivating our own gentleness

The voiceover’s second practice is at the 5.15 minute mark — to reengage again with a sensory journey, enhancing the awareness of our experiences. Our times call for us to go beyond our acceptable frames and come into relationship with our mindsets. To stretch our readiness for what may be. Do we desire control and/or spaciousness? Can we cultivate our own gentleness and not knowing; love, devotion and peace?

Please experiment for yourself with the integration-meditation at the 5.15 mark of this article’s VoiceOver.

Ripples

I can tease a little more on the Mindsets issue right now: nutrients and nourishment; ripples amplifying an embodied call; practically engaging with ourselves, others and a coherent, responsive world. This follows when it’s published.

In the meantime, please go with any calls you notice: twinges of awe and wonder; resonances, joy. Take such contact points with reality as true, alongside the rational. The Mindsets of Transformation issue will support you for more of that.

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Pictures: Santiago and leaving Santiago 2019 by Festina Lentívaldi, (be) Benevolution. Reuse: Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0 US.

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A summary is here, Our attention changes the world>

3

Ok, maybe some inspiration in the pepper gas: This is brilliant, from Minneapolis:

Post: https://substack.com/home/post/p-185783071

She’ll let you in her house
If you come knockin’ late at night
She’ll let you … deep inside
But there’s a secret garden she hides
Secret garden, Bruce Springsteen

This series is tracking nature: As it runs through us from childhood — while we are identified with everything around us; To setting it aside — just something to enjoy, occasionally breathless, being in the connections and vistas into awe. Maybe that amazement tips into our awareness, cognisance of our altered state, noticing the interpenetrating-melting of ourselves with the entireness around; And now, given what we are intimately part of, there’s a co-evolving too.1

Nature is a consciously co-creating partner. That’s highlighted by a catalyst for this series, 147 governments and the UN endorsing “spiritually reconnecting humans and nature”.

This extraordinary outcome is from a profound depth of science as well as the reality of our shared connections: sensing at some level, wonderment. We feel this in an old-growth forest, or watching big cats perambulating over the savanna, or a sunset lighting us into inner and outer translucence: rays of amber, amaranth and gold over the sky, through us and all around as it sets into the sea.

As well as trust: those representatives need confidence. They’ll be held to account by their colleagues and managers.2

So what helps us evolve, hold space for this trust and open into meta-trust?

New-creating

It’s New Year’s Eve and I’ve learnt to walk again. Quite literally, a part of my path to recovery, most of the year’s been spent on the floor, is re-learning what was previously easy.3

The first time I try something that’s been lost it wipes me out, full crash into raging symptoms. Second time a little easier, far more normalised. Third time nearly full capacity.

This pattern holds for everything — writing, talking and yes, walking. Knowing this I’ve left my house heading for the pass, made it 100 metres cross-country before turning around and shambling back. Second time, a few days later, it is a kilometre. Then suddenly it’s snowing, it’s New Year’s Eve, 7 pm at night, and totally dark in these far north latitudes.

I figure:

• Pack a tent

• See how far I get

• Worst case I’ll stop, pitch it early and work out where I am when it gets light

It’s crystal dark-soft. Enough snow to gentle the landscape underfoot. Clouded, still snowing lightly, light-less. Enough definition to discern the next hill, circumnavigate the lochins and bogs. Little enough distinctness so I’m navigating by touch, sensing into the place as guided by the curving landscape. Once, momentarily needing a compass for re-assurance.

For the innermost decision,
That we cannot but obey…
May the lights in the land of plenty
Shine on the truth some day.
The Land of Plenty, Leonard Cohen

It smooths into a million-like, inner-most decision space: each step, each curve to the hill scarp. Along and up the old — familiar from what feels now like an æons-ancient memory — across to the escarpment, waterfall line. That’s a defining threshold, surge of pride: I’m kilometres from my house, climbing seriously to reach the saddle, landforms on both sides cradling me there, snow to mid-thigh height, softness abounds.

There’s an absolute gentleness to our landscape and world under new snow. Softens our touch, being with and as a view and place that’s been timeless like this. A slownesss that expands, amplified across the far north-solstice time too. It’s blanketing my being, letting love suffuse, like a diffusion into and as the particles across the land. A visceral sense of peace, it’s all done, with the interpenetrating sense of these particulates and more through me. As they have been, with all here, across time.

Realities 1

As you’ve been moving surely toward me
My soul has comforted and assured me…
So I’ve sat and I’ve watched an ice-age thaw
Are you the one that I’ve been waiting for?
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Sensing our connectedness, stepping into our multiple intelligence and the normalising of this — from woo to wow — is the zeitgeist of our year. For me, 3 years ago, walking up to the Roineàbhal saddle in the snowy night, is very much a part of making these connections.

These handrails run across time, embodiment and reclaiming our trust in sensing, intuiting and feeling. We’re far more than just cognitive beings and this year there’ve been many standouts to amplify that greater awareness:

• Non-local consciousness becoming a New York Times bestselling thriller.

• Personal conversations where we’re wanting more, rejecting the old metrics of success.

• The extraordinary evidence for forest collective sentience.

They are shifting us, touch-points to measure ourselves against, check our realities, be assured into exploring more.4

Realities 2

The [I/we] perspective is set in brackets because we seem to lack the exact words to communicate the essence of our connection.
Karen O’Brien5

I hear about connection and oneness, we are all one, in many pieces around me.

When I talk about it and ask people about it — experiences of flow and awe, being in our highest selfs, all-one, connected — it is super common to hear:

• I can’t really describe what this feels like

• It’s difficult to put into words

• I engage and don’t name

Yet that willingness is already creating steps past old limiting frames. Those include our society’s privileging of mechanical science at the expense of beauty and goodness. We’ve developed language to talk in those constituent science micro-components. Simultaneously, similar evolutions of our collective expression and subtle languages have lagged behind.

Realities 3

The last great shift in our understanding of existence was the scientific revolution, which saw the rejection of mythic religion leaving us in a meaningless universe.

The next big shift will see a return of spirituality, but in a radically new way that could only exist after the discovery that existence is a process of evolution.

Tim Freke

As a child my magical worlds were subsumed by modern-day science. For others it is by organised major-modern faiths. Both dimmish, labelling perception as superstition: the dogma of rejection killing curiosity and inquiry. Easy to ignore what we don’t want — for me spirituality, others science.

Yet it’s obvious more is going on. This is subjectively present for all of us, all who’ve had experiences of awe, wonder and including into bliss and oneness. Which automatically gets me asking about what’s changed, why can we get past those limitations more easily now?

Our collective psyche is evolving too!

We’ve great evidence the universe is a probability enhancing machine, not the least the continuous evolution of more complex life. However, if that’s the case, it’s totally reasonable that our collective understanding and connectedness is evolving too — embracing nourishment, illumination and integration — in a process of evolutionary emergence. Into and beyond, far more than the sum of the old damnation and paradise parts.6

2026 openings

And really? This is a love song

As constant as the pendulum,
Her heart beat always glad…
Joy is free to a’ where scented clover grows,
Whaur the echo mocks the corncrake amang the whinnie knowes.
The Corncrake, Janice Burns & Jon Doran

You’ll already see this in the land and all relationships around us.

May 2026 be a time of co-creating and remembering far more of them and our wholeness.

Please set off with your actual and metaphorical tents. See how far you get. You can always stop and camp when needed.

I’ll join you.

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Pictures: Cairngorms, Highlands Scotland. 26 Dec 2025; Roineàbhal saddle, Harris, Western Isles. Morning after 31 Dec 2022. Festina Lentívaldi, (be) Benevolution. Reuse: Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0 US.

Wish I knew what you were looking for
Might have known what you would find
And it's something quite peculiar
Something shimmering and white
Under the Milky Way, The Church

For decades sensing the depth of nature’s support was limited by my logic. Intuitively I knew there was power here — the connections were incredibly psychoactive, simply foundational for me. Yet science, seeing the world as mechanistic rather than also participatory, got in the way.

This series emerged from those insufficiencies: Over the years, with ever more metacognition, nature’s stretched me into awe and wonder, scaffolded realisations and life revelations, while all the time shifting my inner being.

The significance of this winds through time and, from today’s perspectives, become jaw dropping moments with clear potency. Moreover, this is profoundly liminal. The intervening decades are immaterial. These are full felt spaces: wild, exotic and viscerally rushing sensual scenes. Time bends — wormholes if you like — to hold and coach the younger me from today.

Hence this series — handrails for all of us, with nature as an easy entry for most of us. The more we consciously embrace our biggest selves, times of bliss, profound at-one-ment or at-once-ment, the more we wire access to such states. Those are the pieces we tend to set aside; view as altered states rather than simply think of this as our enhanced awareness.

This journey is done as a story and playlist as we feel, sense and intuit such awareness before adding rationality to it.1

Part 1, The descent, is here>

Part II: The Nadir—simultaneity states

Autonomous self—my 20s

Mountain in the shadow of light…
Out further than the bush, I will follow you
King of the Mountain, Midnight Oil

Sydney, Australia. Suddenly the grey goes technicolor. I’ve walked into a world of wonder, palms and rainforest less than an hour from the airport. It’s the Royal National Park, the second oldest national park in the world, and I had no idea—lushness, greens running deep, aromas of heating vegetation as the sun lifts in the sky. Can this really be at the edge of a city?

By the end of the week I’m on a boat sailing out of the Sydney heads. We’re charting a course for the reef at Lord Howe island. It’s a classic, Pacific crescent shield-volcano, island: beaches, cloud-forest, full-on giant spider webs! And reef. Within hours I’m snorkelling, surrounded by shoals of tropical fish. They move in multicoloured reflecting rainbows, skins catching the sun, synchronising waves flowing away from my hands as I stroke underwater. Gliding over the reef, murmurating in front of me, contouring back and around as I pass.

It blows my mind. I’m surrounded by the seemed make-believe world of Jacques Cousteau. I’m swimming in this, the vibrancy, abundance and aliveness of it all. Thrilled, entranced, wide eyed in wonder. It’s like a whole new universe. I don’t realise that this new universe goes beyond physical and emotional, that this runs a lot deeper than just metaphorical.

Realities:

• 20s and my younger self has, more than a few, unconscious tethers. Physically, I’m escaping a grey enclosed world and the same is true internally. There’s a vibrancy that’s coming to life here, a shedding of unconscious patterns I’ve taken on and internalised from many sources including my physical environments such Glasgow and London. It’s mixed: while for many internal shadows ‘escaping’ the grip of these unconscious patterns is true there’s a conscious realisation going on too. Mostly, I’m not consciously observing the explicit internal emotions, such as don’t be seen, but rather translating this, understanding it as concrete physical experiences. I’m noticing shift such as being in nature and sharing the awe with others.2

• These experiences in nature are a gestalt too. At the time I don’t know it. I’n in: A simple yet radical act, being in bare awareness. … with my breath, sensations, thoughts and relationships. I’m opening into growth, wholeness, and sensing aliveness like nothing else. I don’t realise my body is breathing and resonating with the reef, the flows of fish, the oxygen spiralling from the cloud forest. Yet, how could it not be? It’s so alive, stark, with such wildly clean fresh air too, as I breath in it’s warming, slightly salted and coursing-cleaning, gently cleaving clearing. I sense this clarity, feel it simultaneously through the felt sense of the air in my nasal passages. I’m emotionally moved: Unconsciously, that’s re-patterning my system, learnt behaviours, challenging my limited mindsets.3

• Those mindset worldviews include a significant separation blindness. As a science nerd I’ve very much adopted modern views: ultimate truth is simply a factor of finding the smallest possible entity that explains the phenomenon all around us. If we can’t find a way to disprove a theory it is pseudoscience. Consequently I’m a sceptic. Ideas such as non-local consciousness, emergent intelligence shaping our climate, our cultural co-evolutions with nature don’t make the cut. That evidence simply gets set aside: I see the world the way that I am, not the way it is.4

From across time now:
I feel shoaling of multicolour tropical fish in synchrony with my cells, as part of this collective.

Nature meets stark modernity

Der Lorbeerkranz, ein neuer Tanz [ The laurel wreath, a new dance ]
Schwingt Rhythmus in die Hüften der Stadt [ Swings rhythm in the hips of the city ] …
Was diese Nacht zu sagen hat [ What this night has to say ]
Fragt nicht nach neuen alten Werten [ Don't ask for new old values ]
Seht weißes Licht [ See white light ]
Junge Roemer, Falco

But still, just like many, the joy, awe and wonder seem separate from daily life, not something to expect from work. That’s for making a living and my friends tell me to come and door knock for Greenpeace. Good money they say.

It’s soon obvious the money part is spurious but I’m curious. The Clean Water, Clean Seas tour is running. I feel the pull of the sea, not realising how much this is shaped by my imaginal and real journeys into the oceans, sailing and aquatic life. I explore bringing the Redbill, a beautiful old pearling lugger, to Melbourne. I’m drawn by the romance, open seas and sun while thinking:

Australia, it’s a big country, not many people live here, there can’t be many problems.

Science takes over. What I find is a watershed moment. A pesticide plant with years of illegal pollution and artificial chemicals, thousands of times above the only standards we can find, are going straight into sewage which then fertilises cow pasture.

What follows is a mix of limits of science, naivety and the emotional power of imagery:

• Science, the chemical levels of dioxin in the waste are way past what’s acceptable.

• Imagery, we put a garage sized cage around the waste outlet, four of us inside in hazmat suits. We add plumbing, a giant tap making the discharge visible for all the assembled news cameras and reporters. I ceremonially turn off the tap.5

• Naivety: Fear and numbers are fine for our media, for a nightly news story. Rather more limited for systems change.

You can see the links, so could the government and they promptly shut down the company, Nufarm. However, power comes in many forms and those numbers are not inspiration for all the aliveness and shifts that is possible from this.

I thought it was obvious. Surely everyone would simply change, from products, through farming systems, knowledge and legislation. We didn’t need Nufarm’s products. Agriculture could be just as productive with integrated systems removing the pesticides.

That’s true but I mostly engaged with the media, government and my colleagues from the numbers, parts per trillion of dioxin, artificial forever chemicals contaminating our worlds. Intuitively, I was feeling we — our society, government, industry, farmers — would make decisions sensing into what’s good for all life. Without full awareness that both the science and those empathetic connections were necessary for change.

Realities

• The aliveness and vibrancy of Australia’s environment was running through me yet, without more conscious awareness of that, I set it aside for technical chemical, profit and legislation arguments. I took it for granted that we’d all connect with the wholeness that is here, that: 1) our right brain intuition — seeing wholes, contexts, and connected through lived, embodied meaning, plus 2) our left brain privileging of the abstract — rating, controlling, all about maps over terrain, formulas over forms where both actively contributing to society’s decision making. I wasn’t really aware of the differences, or that I’d put this case together from my sense of the whole, intuitively right brained. Finding the dioxin and pollution legacy numbers took over. This accentuated socialised views, our predominant society left brain lock, absent of enough context and more right-brained, holistic big-picture, practice.6

• Science and communicating within a complex system can become dogmatic. That’s the shadow side of mastery — arguing an external absolute position I thought that was adequate, more than reasonable enough for everyone to understand and act for systematic change. Why would we want to impose extra costs, e.g. use pesticides, when we could substitute systems that did not need this? Why wouldn’t we eliminate the sources of forever chemicals (there’s no such thing as away once these chemicals are created)? I didn’t see the shadows of my cognitive logic, such as the hubris, pretension and patronising overtones.7

• There are actual and metaphorical heartbeats here: an accessible, supportive and wondrous the world around us. Being more conscious of this would honour both the sources of my understanding as well as inspiring others. Pain points are fine, chemical and systems arguments go as far as they go, but they miss the pulse. Without articulating the vibrancy and interconnections we all feel around us, helping all of us be in our biggest selves, the brightest visions of what we can enable for ourselves remain shrouded in the mists.8

From across time now:
I’m awed at how foundational this was, shifting entire legislative cultures and setting ground work for systemic change. That vibrancy runs across the decades.

Part III: The Ascent

She’ll let you in her house
If you come knockin’ late at night
She’ll let you … deep inside
But there’s a secret garden she hides
Secret garden, Bruce Springsteen

What does it take to integrate all of these pieces? To shift and consciously entwine peak states, love, connection with nature, maps and terrain, abstraction and wholeness? Being simultaneously in liminal spaces, supported holistically, fully in our bodies and individual too is Part 3. Coming soon.

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Pictures are sailing to, on, and from Lord Howe island by Festina Lentívaldi, (be) Benevolution. Reuse: Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0 US.

So let go. Jump in…
Whatcha waiting for? It's alright
Cause there's beauty in the breakdown
Let go, Frou Frou

My connection with nature has gone through wild life stages, from magical youth, through mechanical science and out into universal entireness, alignment. Undoubtedly, yours has too: times when a quantum state of ‘I am time and all is no time’ defines your presence. No matter how momentary that may or may not have been.

I find my journey with this both deeply congruent and profoundly bizarre. Reality frameworks, to make sense of this, are a foundational help. When we know what we are doing and why, the how and having this consciously becomes easier. That’s potent as this descent out of connection mirrors a predominant disharmony of our modern day world.

That’s to say we’re all one and unique individuals too. Yet individual identity is our society norm. We privilege ourselves as dispassionate observers: categorising and understanding through reducing everything to its constituent elements. Which is a modern day success story, a mirage of half sight, and a sticky glue pond of modern narratives limiting us from wholeness.

At the same time that pond is drying and cracking; it is more fragile than ever.

We feel, sense and intuit this opening as much as look to conceptually understand it. Thus, this is the journey as a story and a playlist with theory relegated to the footnotes.1

Part I: The descent—a great unraveling

Unconscious unity—3 year old

A' ghrian 's i 'g èirigh [ The sun she is rising ] O na-lyi vo he
S i gun smal oirre [ She is without blemish ] O na-lyi vo ho
S i gun smal oirre O na-lyi vo ho
Na air na reultan [ Amongst the stars ] O na-lyi vo ho
O na-lyi vo he
Tàladh Dhòmhnaill Ghuirm, Kim Carnie

I’m in a vividly alive world. Not bound by the conventional, the expected. Wild entities appear regularly:

• sometimes as felt sense—the presences of others around me;

• sometimes as total absences—everyone else who was just here are gone; and,

• sometimes as full visual part beings—talking and responding.

A leg extends from the ceiling. Not just any leg: female, full fishnet stockings, high red stiletto heeled shoe framing the arch of her foot, poising her calf and lower thigh before me. I can see no further she’s extending above the ceiling. Her second leg steps in too. Matching stiletto and fishnets, alluring grounded pose.

Sultrily, she invites me in, climb up, undeniably sensual and carnal, I’m as much feeling as her as I’m feeling myself, drawn in with perineum pull.

She encourages me further, come on, climb up. a long graceful index finger now gesturing me in, hand and wrist motioning me forward too, promising a seductively warm touch, or rather more touch, there’s a full sense of suggestive.

My encounter mirrors our enchanted world. One-ness has a pulsation, so much of what is around is sensual, a penetration, an inter-tangling, liminal incarnate realities, naive ease, perceptions flow in and as nature: at this age we are only just separated from the world around and the closeness, voluptuous embrace in and as all of it.

Realities:

• The magical is adjacent, populated with imaginary friends, while feeling and sensing the world and other beings. There’s a conventional explanation, a.k.a. it’s not ‘real’.

• The experience and existence is real. She is para-physical and intra-pshycic: It’s Scotland and there is a rich cultural story here including sídhe. And maybe she’s emerged from my mind too, including Indian sub-continental heritage, and gained independence like a Tulpa.2

• She is an autonomous being. She’s real and in service of me finding and experiencing something individually separate from my earlier childhood, my developmental state when I was everything. I’m exploring with dialogue, intimacy & companionship what was previously just a universal bliss-allness baby state. 3

From across time now:
This feels like stars sparkling in me, effervescence, and me sparkling, embodied on the world.

First wound—5 year old

Tha rud shìos anns a charaidh [ There's something in the fish-trap ]
Da thàbh air an fharaidh [ Two spoon-nets in the loft ]
Tha rud aig an fhaoileig [ The seagull has a catch ]
Hùg Air A' Bhonaid Mhòir, Julie Fowlis

I’m five and I run around the house collecting all the aerosol cans. I’m responding to pain, energised by feeling multitudinous beings, the difficulties spray from the cans will embed, and their infinity of gratefulness as I act.

Except I don’t say this.

I present the spray cans to my parents. I tell them they can’t use them as CFCs are making holes in the sky.4

Yes, I’m a science nerd even at an early age. However, I’m drawn to the science that connects, that helps me make sense of how parts work in a whole: Species in our world. Ourselves in the universe.

Which is the wound.

My response to the cans is intuitive and from wholeness.

My capacity to express that is only in a way I will be admired, rational science. Intuition, Fact and Emotion is flattened into a rigour of orderly thinking.

Paradoxically, intuition got me here and I’m rewarded for hiding this—my parents respond to the rational. They stop using aerosols, substituting in other products.

Sadly, I intuitively know not to try this at my friend’s house across the street. Logic wasn’t going to work there.

There is a flattening of inner colour, more grey alongside a sharpness to the lines, clarity and definition albeit in black and white.

Realities:

• I’m not far, as a five year old, from magical developmental awareness, from making sense of myself and the world around me in terms of everything is ‘real’. Albeit, I’ve distinguished species, entities and myself as independent beings. Yet, the resonance of everything is one, we’re all one, is very present.
  
  This is our essential human superpower. We learn through mimicry, empathic identification with the other. Paradoxically, as we’re doing this through our imagination we’re enabling our individuality too. This is inherently activating different ideas, diffractions of alignment and dissonance in us from how other’s are experiencing themselves/itselves.5

• If analysing everything into its constituent components delivered change we’d have long ago addressed biodiversity priorities, climate, wealth inequality and so much more. Intuitively I knew this wouldn’t work with, for example, my friends parents. I didn’t try it in his home. I privileged left brain analytical outcomes in my home and was rewarded for it. The more holistic view, incorporating at least our inner worlds and resonance of emotional resources, misses out along with the potential for deeper and wider impact in other’s homes.6

From across time now:
This feels like power and pride, five year old chest puffed up leading forward.

Newtonian Dissonance

all that’s golden
is never real
and I won’t play fair…
you go too far
By the throat, Chvrches

There’s a hardness to my world. I’m 14 and my family and I are now in Glasgow, We’ve left the far north of Scotland, days lived outside, winding through gentle streets to hidden meadows, backyards that swallow me around corners into fantastic castles of insects and bumble bees.

Glasgow, on the other hand, is grey. Black soot coats all the buildings, absorbs all the light.7 It was an industrial town except the coal mines, shipbuilding and steelmaking are all shutting down. That’s stress, difficulty and hardship for many families.

Sadly, nobody finds a way of talking about that to children, to me. The violence all around is kids reflecting their home-lives, modelling parents and stress, bringing that into school and onto the streets to perpetrate it on others. Compassion seemingly doesn’t coexist with the prevailing rationality ‘there is no alternative’.8

The safest route is to shut down, go grey, be largely unseen. If other’s are not talking about emotions then don’t show them either. I don’t see empathy for others. I don't meet people joyfully exploring woods and nature. Rather the woods become a place to escape. The aliveness, all species-experiencing-sensing, is backgrounded, squashed into the mud of the trails: it rains a lot in Western Scotland!

Yet, reduce one thing and others grow to compensate. For me it is cognitive intelligence and vibrant imaginary worlds. Science can be a saviour. Externally I’m steering myself towards this at school. Internally, avidly in science fiction relationships, who needs to be in Glasgow when there are nebula to explore, ring-world ecologies and we can found new civilisations!

Realities:

• I and we take on the mindsets of the world around us. That is the full expanse of these:
  → What I feel from the world around me—empathy with it, where values resonate and connectedness-relatedness;
  → What I sense—directly through physical senses and in embodiment-perceptual shifts aligning & reacting to people and things around me;
  → What I intuit—from the patterns, possibility and unseen connections all around e.g. intuitively walking an alternative route that feels safer; and,
  → Through thinking—reflecting, taking stock of physical and relationship structures and analysing this.
  And the thinking is very mechanical: Here’s the rules. E.g. formally as they are at school and informally as I’m expected to be by my school class. It feels like an emotional dessert. Unsurprisingly I reinforce that and retreat to thinking.9

• Our modern world privileges the thinking framework. Logic, objective analysis, and cause-and-effect relationships. In Glasgow, at this time, economic-rationalism and the pain it’s causing is justified otherwise anarchism, communism and socialism will take over.10

• We are mimicking the behaviour of those around us, fictional or physical. That’s foundational for us to form intentions and aspiration, to motivate attraction and empathy. Even when that empathy is to feel danger and organise safer ways of being such as hide in the woods. Paradoxically, however, that intuition through imitation is opening our options to be different.11

From across time now:
This feels like growth, internally far more vibrant and alive than the physical muddy city and woods seemed.

Coming soon: Part II, The Nadir—simultaneity states & Part III, Ascent

Technicolor 20s! I’ve walked into a world of wonder, palms and rainforest, second day out, less than an hour from the airport. Can this really be a city? By the end of the week, sailing from Sydney, I’ve reached the reef; Lord Howe island. I’m surrounded by shoals of tropical fish, synchronising waves as helios rainbow murmurations. They’re flowing away, from, and with my hands as I stroke underwater following the reef.

It blows my mind. I’m enclosed by make-believe, or so the world of Jacques Cousteau had seemed. Now I’m swimming in it, the vibrancy, abundance and aliveness of it all. Thrilled, entranced, wide eyed in wonder.

It’s like a whole new universe and a viewquake.

Oh, if this joy and awe had been held more consciously…

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Pictures: Festina Lentívaldi, (be) Benevolution. Reuse: Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0 US.

Florence Nightingale

People say the effect is only on the mind. It is no such thing. The effect is on the body, too. Little as we know about the way in which we are affected by form, by colour and light, we do know this, that they have an actual physical effect.
Florence Nightingale1

In 1859 Florence Nightingale initiates a revolution: natural beauty—whether through windows, cut flowers or gardens—has tangible healing effects, reducing stress and promoting recovery.

She witnessed euphoria in patient after patient:

“I shall never forget the rapture of fever patients over a bunch of bright-coloured flowers. I remember (in my own case) a nosegay of wild flowers being sent me, and from that moment recovery becoming more rapid.”2

Fast forward a century—write it up in the premier academic journal Science—and patients with views of trees outside their windows have:

• 8.5% shorter hospital stays

• less pain medication

• fewer post-surgical complications3

More rapture

The same is true across all of our lives. A walk on the wild side delivers:

• improved memory performance

• better attention span

• by a 20% margin4

This is staggering and potent even when we don’t walk:

Exposure to pictures of nature led to more improved executive attention performance than did exposure to urban pictures.5

Waking up

It goes well beyond pictures. The sense we make from our own, others and environment experiences changes us as well as those around us. It is a powerful element for transformative change.

That is both physical and through creative and curated experiences:

Storytelling, visioning, audiovisual arts, festivals and participatory creative practices play a critical role by offering new perspectives on humans’ relationship with nature and by fostering imagination, sense-making and emotional engagement with environmental issues.6

And we do this through feeling & sharing in:

practices reflecting interdependencies with nature or ways of ‘living as nature’

revealing a radically expanded perception of the world and realizing the unitive nature of reality7

Try it 1

Spend 21 seconds in the Highlands by Beinn Dearg, Torridon, Northwest Scotland.

Try it 2

We humans are collective beings as well as individuals. Nature is powerful when we meet, experience together and make sense of our feelings—the states, patterns and levels of connection with each other and nature, bliss and sensualities of what we encounter.

Peak nature, second Saturday every month, lets you step into that online. More here>

We explore how are extended states of consciousness are supportive for the difficulties we and humanity face. We help ourselves wire our enhanced awarenesses and bring this into situations it would have previously felt more remote: help the circles of people around us, our organisations and more. To treat what emerges (4th person type sensed entities8) as having their own life, enhance our capacity to be in shared awareness, and simultaneously take this lightly: Open to the other realities that are true too.

This is a psychedelic for our individual and collective consciousness without a psychedelic.9

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Photos & video: Festina Lentívaldi, (be) Benevolution. Reuse: Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0 US. Except #1 Florence Irisdragon

The highest vibration always wins.
Michael Beckwith1

I can totally make the case that big tech and AI is a race towards oligarchs. Some say we’re already there and that emerging consciousness—awakening and awareness all around—is inadequate.2

I am not going to make that case.

Instead four real world vignettes, of being sucked into this wealth-concentration gravity hole and then through the generated wormhole, into a new universe.

1. Awe

for other people, even people different from oneself, for nature and all her manifestations, and for whatever brings ‘awe’ into life, including reverence for a higher power or simply the majesty of the universe
Sandra Waddock3

My friend Deimantas prompts me, have I looked at what aistudio can do? I’ve not. I greatly appreciate his follow-up alongside the dissonance I feel: how can ai can be pro-human?

That leads me to build an ai bot for the Soulprint platform. It is to connect users with human interaction—real world inner practices and outer actions: programs, rewilding and nature experiences that amplify human interaction and grow our less foolish, wiser capabilities.4

The awe is from building the ai bot so quickly. I’m not a coder. When I ran a startup my team would need >2 weeks for this. In less than 2.5 hours I’ve instructed, debugged and sent Soul-Scriber live.

Beautiful and I’m quickly questioning my awe for this, what am I missing? My friend Anastasia asks about real world impact. I say this is about more and more resources into the hands of people who really really care about the planet.5

But is it?

2. Integrity

Can we construct societies that tend to enhance dignity and well-being with integrity?
Gregg Henriques6

The gravity suck is calling: aistudio is big tech (google) and, as a result, while Soul-Scriber helps people to find relevant human connections it also supports the concentration of wealth and power. Those connections are:

• This is so super efficient—fast, instant feedback is a competitive advantage.

• By using this Soulprint is supporting ai’s business model.

• That business model is centralised—ai is cash and energy intensive sucking wealth towards its providers.

Concentrating more power and wealth is bad, there is plenty of data for that.7 Consequently, Soulprint needs a business model that rewards its founders, participants and collaborators directly as well as from the personal and partner value it generates.

This is a dilemma faced and addressed throughout modernity by mutual societies, cooperatives and charities. For a variety of reasons those are unappealing as a primary enabling structure for Soulprint. However, DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) are emerging and for Soulprint it is an ideal fit. DAOs offer a transparent, opt-in and low barrier pathway for profits, sharing and further incentivising human caring.8  

Whoop—I’m enjoying the great irony as ai makes finding out about and setting up a DAO far more practical. And I’m out of the gravity well…

Maybe?

3. Conventional imperatives

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them9

My friend Liesbet graciously helps me stress test the DAO. There are powerful structural reasons around corporate success including the limited liability company. A shareholder in a Pty. Ltd. company has exactly that, limited liability.

Can a participant or partner, opting in to Soulprint’s DAO direct rewards, have the same?

I get stuck trying to answer that and sucked back to the bottom of the gravity pit:

• Do we have to give up the idea of incentivising engagement, profit sharing and direct rewards? They are powerful additions that further amplify Soulprint’s origins by increasing engagement and co-created action. This mirrors Soulprint’s inner awareness with outer action approach delivering more than the sum of those two parts.

• Alternatively, do we inhibit aliveness and success through more cumbersome systems such as shareholder allocation? Alongside the corporate embedding of fiduciary duty to maximise financial gain. In turn this incentivises using ai to minimise human to human interaction rather than maximising it.10

There’s got to be a better way?

4. Distributed trust

And suddenly you know: It's time to start something new and trust the magic of beginnings.
Meister Eckhart

I’m totally aware many others are wrestling with the same steps. Plus, we have a history of success: evolving to new levels, paradigm shifts out of centralised wealth.11

I ask my friend Kevin on today’s dilemma. He’s actively engaged in creating systems that enable distributed trust, helping individuals and groups into responsibility.

I resolve my DAO limited liability dilemma. Hilariously (thank you Deimantas, Anastasia, Liesbet and Kevin) it’s now only seconds more work with ai.

It just means asking ai for transgressive help (in this case to highlight non-ownership partner-crypto-tokens)12 …

Into a new universe

It is possible to come into such profound alignment with the moral and spiritual axis of the universe that every moment of your life is a walk in grace, and that you know without any doubt that you are in the right place at the right time.
Craig Hamilton13

The difficulties are the very things helping us shift and the answers take me through the wormhole into a new universe. The very nature of ai—centralising power and wealth—also enables the new paradigm, in this case a workable DAO. ai lets me:

• innovate outside of the structures that hold us back,

• prototype solutions with crazy-fast feedback,

• massively reduces traditional startup costs.

All of this means more and more life affirming enterprise can proliferate, beyond just this use case.

For Soulprint here’s where we’re at, the other side of the ai gravity-well-induced wormhole:

The DAO structure unlocks human collaborative power privileging equitable and revitalized futures… assisting collective action with better tools for coordination and trust than would otherwise be available… taking the best from conventional corporate systems without incentivising the types of decision making that is central to some of the difficulties these systems create—such as nature is an externality and consequently inherently discounted by company fiduciary responsibility.

…The DAO lifts barriers to sharing including capabilities to distribute rewards back to participants and partners14

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Pictures: Festina Lentívaldi, (be) Benevolution. Reuse: Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0 US except Iguazu falls picture licensed from Shutterstock.

3 years, over 1,000 scientific articles, unlimited passion. With 147 governments and the UN it is a story of the IPBES.

IPBES is an acronym for the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystems Services. These global science processes often analyse what we need to address and, instead, IPBES asked how do we do it? How do we meet our vision for flourishing, how do we deliver thriving world systems supporting us all?1

IPBES is outstanding. It includes statements endorsing vital realities for transformation such as “spiritual reconnection between humans and nature” and:

culture and ecosystems are integrated and co-evolving

collective imagining of fundamental changes in human-nature relationships... are powerful and effective when incorporating clarity, inclusion, creativity, flexibility

humans are part of and fully interdependent with nature2

We transform through bridging physical and inner action. What’s needed now is to speed it up:

• To feel what it is like to create this future now.

• To embody the paradigm shift IPBES represents.

• To act from these up-levelled states of being.3

This is the genesis of Soulprint bringing together passion for nature, the new paradigm and our higher perceptivity. It’s for impact: our prosperity, flourishing futures and lives worth living for all species. It does this through 5 categories of action drawn from the science in the IPBES assessment:

1. Connectedness
   Humans and nature are co-evolving. We’re interdependent beings as well as individual people. Cultivating these connections re-vitalises our lives.

2. Get dirty
   Social standards can rapidly change with passionate action. Wealth is shifting to privilege enterprises re-generatating and re-wilding our world & ourselves.

3. Highest self
   Re-awakening. We all step into flow states and acheive the extraordinary. We can ‘wire’ these capacities, shifting this to be our ‘enhanced’ awarenesses.

4. Inclusive creativity
   Simultaneously creating profitable change for ourselves and our planet. Nature-inclusive thinking and acting is key to this re-harmonizing.

5. Integrating & co-creating
   Our diversity, between humans and across species, is a strength. We can weave this together re-storing and re-invigorating our power.

Soulprint showcases multiple practices, from deep and free to paid and supported, letting us choose aliveness and create real world prosperity—interventions and programs you can do to support yourself, collectives and business.4

Connectedness: re-vitalising our lifeforces

As humans, we are collective beings as well as individuals. A deep vitality emerges from recognising these life-forces and reconnecting to the intricate webs of life.

Nature connectedness is not passive—it’s an active, transformative state that awakens care, responsibility, and belonging. Living as nature—not apart from it—unlocks a profound reservoir of wisdom, abundance and synergy beyond the self.

This draws deeply from Indigenous and local knowledge, which has long incorporated the interdependencies between humans, plants, animals and the living world. By integrating this, we cultivate sensory and emotional connections, honour distributed agency, and rediscover our active role within Earth’s dynamic living systems. In doing so, we not only remember our natural capabilities but also contribute to the regeneration of our shared world.

Nature connectedness acts as a catalyst… fostering a deep sense of care and responsibility.

Drawing upon the relational philosophies associated with many Indigenous and local knowledge systems and providing opportunities to live ‘as nature’.

Supporting recognition of interdependencies, sensory and emotional connections, spiritualities and distributed agencies in entangled webs of life between humans, plants and animals.5

Get dirty: re-generating & re-wilding us

Getting dirty engages us directly in regeneration. Globally there are a plethora of transformational programs and projects showcasing not only repair but demonstrating how positively connected environmental and social systems deliver flourishing shifts.

Our passion drives us and there’s far more to it than this. We’re redefining values and business. As Tim Jarvis AM puts it:

habitat restoration, environmental education and safeguarding rare native species is not only a critical undertaking but a viable, repeatable, and scalable social enterprise.6

This impacts far more than immediate areas:

Social norms, which define acceptable behaviour, can shift rapidly

Research… suggests that anywhere from 3.5% to 25% of the population can drive significant societal shifts7

What is a social norm?
Our economy is a value exchange. We value what helps us to survive and to feel good. We will, within certain boundaries and our own mindsets, pay for a product or service based on this. Consequently, as we increasingly value our global systems, understand the interconnections and feel what this actually means, regenerative economies can rapidly become the norm. What I buy and support has a quantum impact on thriving.

Highest self: re-awakening our power

Our Highest Selves are states we experience feeling far greater than the boundaries of our physical body. We tend to think of this as altered awareness however it is rather common with 40 to 60% of us reporting senses and times of profound at-one-ness.

A common thread is connection with nature. For example, people experience timelessness, senses of intense interconnection while watching a sunrise from a mountain. Or step into a flow-like state walking through an old growth forest, bringing extraordinary clarity and insight to circumstances that felt stuck.

We can curate this, help ourselves to wire access to our highest selves. This is a key for our effectiveness in work and personal life.8 These are:

practices reflecting interdependencies with nature or ways of ‘living as nature’

revealing a radically expanded perception of the world and realizing the unitive nature of reality9

Inclusive creativity: re-harmonizing agency & action

The stories we tell ourselves are powerful. Where I place my attention is where I place my energy. As long as I believe I am separate from everyone and everything I play to the rules of the dominant culture around me.

Reharmonizing our agency and action with nature shifts ourselves into active witnessing and wisdom. Reconnecting, going from a narrow focus to a broad focus, changes us dramatically. We take our attention into more coherence: hold space for the realities of our world simultaneously with the thriving futures we are co-creating, now!

This is our:

ability to envision and create alternative futures

empowers individuals to shift deeply rooted perspectives and values

Learnings are harvested through reflective practices… integrated into strategic… impact10

Integrating and co-creating: re-storing intuition & diversity

The present moment invites us to step beyond the predictable future, and the familiar past, into the richness of now. Here, we enhance our intuition, draw on our multiple intelligences, letting vibrant diversity, the warm chaos all around, reinvigorate us.

By weaving diverse knowledge and reality systems, we integrate inner and outer dimensions of transformation into radically practical action. This means trusting our unique experiences and the wisdom of the more-than-human world, while treating this lightly and actively looking for other truths.

Techniques include:

Strategies that integrate inner and outer dimensions of transformation in culturally appropriate, scientifically robust and ecologically viable ways.

Intuitive interspecies communication to facilitate inclusion of more-than-human knowledge.

Readiness for collective, ongoing partnerships overcome relations of domination forged in colonial era and now pervasive in modern societies.11

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Photos: Festina Lentívaldi, (be) Benevolution. Reuse: Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0 US except #1 Scarlett Macaw, freestock & #2 Long billed black cockatoo, connected.

Update: we’re now meeting the second Saturday of every month! Join us>

Extraordinary

The extraordinary is in three pieces:

1. This December 147 nations plus the UN endorsed “spiritually reconnecting humans and nature”. That is significant, not so much from an expectation of radical fast government action—this was a scientific report on how we transform to meet global needs human, biodiversity and ecosystems.2 The out of the ordinary here is a paradigm shift.
   

   Benevolution ⚡️ is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

   Governments usually focus on safety, the order and rules: what to regulate; devolve to market processes; and/or, action that is politically potent. That’s useful for simple, linear issues.
   
   However, there are multiple connected global pressures. A rule creates diffractive, sometimes reactionary, impacts. We need more than a linear approach and, in this case through 5 days of line editing with the governments, representatives stepped into vulnerability, courage and inviting curiosity—how creating from a spirit of inquiry is vital to meet our complex, entangled challenges.
   
   In recognising ‘humans are fully integrated and co-evolving with nature’ at the December meeting government representatives are sensing the interface, deeper connection, a resonance and empathy, with a thriving-species-filled world.
   

2. Too far out? People acting from our higher selves, influenced by and experiencing our connection to everyone (and all things) is far more common than we think.3 When I ask people about their highest state experiences I commonly hear accounts of infinity and emptiness, entireness and bliss, profound at-one-ment.4
   
   These accounts run the full spread of human life. From love and profoundly intimate moments, through giving birth. While exercising and running marathons, in a peak flow state shifting everyone in a room through deeply sensing all that is present, music, psychedelics, breathwork, meditation and much more.
   
   There is a common thread too. Universally, people relate an experience while connected to nature. In an old growth forest, climbing a mountain and watching the sunset, sensing all around beyond our physical selves. It’s very resonant and alive. All feels vibrant here, expansive and fusing-like descriptions, as people recount these experiences.5
   

3. This extends to passion, for regeneration, rewinding and remembering who we are: unique individuals who’re all part of a one. In my three decades hosting consciousness and sustainability work those that are around any aspect of biodiversity and nature attracts the most joy.6

Full talk and practice is the video at the top of this post and/or on YouTube.

Invitation

There’s an invitation in the recording too. This is to try it in the world, ideally before the next live session on 22 March. A short guided video to assist you to do this is This is collaboration.

Wisdom

This is important. 40% of the population, by most estimates, has anomalous experiences, visionary experiences, mystical experiences. One of the problems of the meaning crisis is they don't have a framework to integrate those experiences.
John Vervaeke7

Frameworks are useful. Making sense of what we are experiencing, putting words to the feelings and ineffable connections, makes them more powerful. In community and through exchanging stories we help to enhance our awareness too.

Consequently please come along, if you can, on Saturday 22 March, to distill the wisdom. 18.00 UTC, 11am PT N America . Join here > whatsapp group for the zoom link and/or via Limicon.

We can activate this, wiring our inner ‘Peak Nature’ the high inner states of connection we experience. The shift is radical, validated from and by the science. And from what we all know!:

collective imagining of fundamental changes in human-nature relationships... is powerful and effective.

And the power of

the agency and sentience of non-human entities, such as plants, animals and rivers, affording them value, respect and reciprocal relations of care.

Intergovernmental Panel of Biodiversity and Ecosystems Services (IPBES).8

More action

If 147 governments can shift for 5 days we can do a lot more with this too. Let’s recognise and embody our highest self states, our fuller selves and this awareness: bring the power of that co-creation into the contexts, colleagues, collectives and circles around us: beyond nature.

A part of this is feeling ourselves more fully. It lets us be resilient, quickly re-centre and bring light, hold the space for clarity: business, personal and more.

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Pictures: Festina Lentívaldi, (be) Benevolution. Reuse: Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0 US.

Article warning PG18 sexual abuse is covered.

Knowing by loving assumes loving first, and coming to know something or someone fully, even in all of its “ugliness”, and then making an informed decision about how to relate to it
Mari

Simon 2025:
My friend Mari blows me out of the water. It’s late on a super challenging day: my 90 yo mum’s just broken her hip. Yet, the 24 hours of personal chaos and travel feels so aligned with our global upheaval and reality deconstruction I join the Kainos group meeting1. Mari is there too and her piece connects us to love, musk, back across Iraq and we embody our youth…

Mari 2005:
I’m deployed to Iraq, working night shift. Our offices purposely have no windows and breaks are vital to my mental well-being. But our team is so small, only one of us can go out at a time.

Standing alone, looking at the night sky, I think of my mom and how worried she is for me. I look at a star, pretend it is her, and send some love to it. I extend that to my brothers… to my close friends… and then it grows and grows. After some time I try to imagine everyone as a star, even people I don’t “like.”

Simon 2025:
What’s next? Rather than rehash everything that’s upending today—post-truth globally, hip fracture endings locally—what would happen if I simply embrace knowing by loving?

That’s the provocation Mari so delicately, caressingly entwines us in. What does it feel like in my body to trust with full courage, just to be completely cracked open:

• I f***ing love you and the circumstances.

• I don’t know how this will all land.

• Except it is light.

In the Kainos group we’re talking Elon Musk. One of the people I find myself distressed by every day, a hole in my body that can’t connect his abject destructive actions, hurting the majority of humans and species, with an obvious internal outlook he truely believes this is service.

Spark

Mari raises Tonglen.

Mari 2005:
I mix it up, breathe in deeply, imagining I am breathing in the pain of the world like smog, and holding this in my heart in love, then breathing out and wrapping the earth, in growing concentric circles from me, trying to cover the globe: A ‘Heart Spark’ like I spark-transmute the pain.

My practice is already informed from reading: the hardest thing anyone can do in their life is to perfect the Buddha smile. I accept the implicit challenge, and move through the world trying to accept everything as it is, and even love it because of it, not despite it.2

Simon 33 year old:
I eventually focus my tonglen practice on my abuser. It is very personal.

Experience

Simon 13 year old:
To be sexually abused, in sensual inception, is earth shatteringly perverted. For me it is a mortifying long journey.

• Act 1 is 9 months, John Martin is the principal of the school. It is an ever increasing, ever more degrading, sensual cycle.

• Act 2 is an escape. I turn around, disentangling myself from the corpulent hypnotic spell. All 13 years of me tells him this is not right, out of order, not going to happen again. I storm from the room never to return.

• Act 3 is shaking. I’m running to hide, into the abandoned quarter and derelict hidden halls of the school, straight to Hogwart’s room of requirement. Yep definitely exists, serves me well. I’m hiding the abuse. No one must know. I can’t take that. Neither parents. Definitely no friends. Absolutely not the school.

• Act 4 is tonglen. Two decades later it’s beautifully serving a difficult relationship and shifting love by hosting the space for discovery and polarity.

• Act 5 is awakening: Realising I’m still entangled with John I start practicing Tonglen on him, breathing in John’s pain, breathing out compassion to him, across the decades into that room I’d vowed never to set foot in again. Suddenly I’m right there in that room, alongside my young self, with him. Smelling, seeing and being it all, calling young Simon into awareness. Act 5 and Act 2 are now one. That’s where the power is co-created from, to shift 9 months of abuse, 13 and 33 years multiplying into rightness, correctness, extracting us both from that time. And, well forgiveness. I mercy myself. And forgive John.

Forgiveness is not condoning. The behaviour is outrageous and unacceptable, that does not change. What does change is hate, misery, blame. On myself, what’s it like to actually honour the reality that this inception is profound. That does not make it right. Nor him: he comes back to me wanting pardon. Screw you, you’ve multiple others, I know there must be, to go and rectify this with. Go Fix It.

He leaves to undertake it. Over the next months and years many more find some ease and integration.

Peace

Simon 2025
Elon. The actions and advocacy are hurting millions. There’s a critical reality:3 The policy, post-truth and naked destruction of most people’s safety is impermissible. You don’t get to cause deep pain to multitudes as a justifiable cost of change. It’s not.

the birds and the bees
feel the pain
shout about it
open hearts
everyone, sowing the seeds of love
Tears for fears

Can I bring Tonglen to Elon? I know its radically improved outcomes for many.

• All abused

• Myself

• John Martin

But can I actually drop into love, just completely love Elon in all that he is? Breathe in the suffering that this is, the actual reality of what all of this is creating?4

I think so. It’s 2.45 am now. Maybe I’m brave enough to try it soon. You? Guided audio Tonglen to try it:

Mari 2025:
I can feel the depth and pain of the situation Simon is in; tonglen (I call my practice Heart Spark) to be used as a practice to “cleanse” the wounding and dispiritedness of a place where violation and abuse took place *toward him* over significant time. This is no small task. I feel called to breathe into this space with Simon, even as I know the hurt isn’t mine. And I also know I’ve breathed into spaces of sexual violence, for acts committed against me, acts committed against loved one, and acts committed to unspeakable numbers of people. I know all of these spaces are all of our spaces.

And I know the hardest place to breathe into was my own heart.

I also have a deep metta-like practice; I call mine “Love Pushing” and that’s viscerally what it feels like I’m doing—pushing waves of love to [people, places, water, ideas…]. I’ve seen different variations of metta. The first one I stumbled upon, many years after developing my Love Pushing practice, involved the following phrases:

May you be happy.
May you be well.
May you be safe.
May you be peaceful and at ease.

In the first round, the “you” is someone you love; the second is someone who is neutral to you; the third is someone you dislike or have an active conflict with. This was similar to my practice, and I continued my version, feeling validated in a morphic resonance sort of way.

Then I saw a version that started with “I” and it stumped me. I’d get hung up on the phrases, I’d have a hard time pushing love to myself. Over the course of a couple of years, as I dug into it, I saw one area that needed attention was self-forgiveness. While I had forgiven those who had aggressed upon me, I hadn’t forgiven myself for “putting myself into those situations.”

But as with every previous situation in which I had done Love Pushing and Heart Spark, I knew: If not my heart, then whose? If I can’t do this, who can? Not that I’m some badass superhuman. Precisely the opposite. I’m exactly human, and I believe humans have immense capacity given the opportunity. And being human, I want to contribute to the morphic resonance field of the possibility for healing, renewal, forgiveness.

And I want to offload the weight I carry of condescension, of contempt, of guilt, of shame, of pain. That’s not exactly true. I want to do more than that. I don’t want to just offload it and leave it there for others to stumble upon. I want to bring those icky feelings into my heart and love them as what’s happening, what has happened, and transmute it into internal compassion, care, and grace.

Transmuting

Simon Mari 2025 Kainos+72 hours

Desire is a banquet on which we feed
Because the night belongs to lovers
With love we sleep
With doubt the vicious circle
Turns and burns
Because the night Patti Smith

Pain, grace, difficult and delicate fragrances are always with us. They’re our human condition, aliveness in our individual manifestations, part of our collective oneness.

However we get to drive the car, trusting we’ve forgiven ourselves sufficiently to have icky along for the ride as awareness and strength. Tonglen and love take us beyond:

• broken hips

• broken world

• broken power

Into being energised by this, radically embracing the not knowing. There is far more agency here than in hate, misery and blame.

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Pictures: Festina Lentívaldi, (be) Benevolution. Reuse: Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0 US. Most are in and around the Cheonggyecheon, Seoul. It was a natural stream that was paved over and became a freeway. It is now restored back to watercourse.

Act 3, Scene 1 of The Rascal, the Mongrel and the Seeker. My Bondi Bend

Now two rivers run their course
Separated for so long
I'm dreaming of a brighter day
When the waters will be one
Treaty, Yothu Yindi

Bondi Pavilion is a minute walk from Sydney’s famous beach and hundreds have made it into the open air performance space. Think small outdoor square, you’re only a few meters from the band. We’re all totally psyched for this benefit concert and something of a unique crowd here for indigenous justice as well as music, there is a lot of shared passion.

I know richness and anthems are coming. I’m not expecting the connections I feel to bend time, warp logic and zap clouds. I don’t know this is enabled with the help of my older self, from 30 years in the future, too.

We're runnin' from the heart o' darkness
And searchin' for the heart o' light…
They're livin' on borrowed time
And the winds of change
Were blowing cold that night
Solid Rock Goanna

Goanna’s up first. Of course they are going to play Solid Rock and we’re all going to feel it through the ground of our beings.

Mandawuy Yunupingu and Yothu Yindi. Yep, Tribal Voice will be on the way. And Midnight Oil is to close the show.

Kev Carmody now. We’re drawing in, guitar and voice, and as his set begins to build so do the clouds. Suddenly, a big storm is boiling up over the Pacific Ocean and threatening the outdoor stage, uncovered sound equipment and performers.

As Yothu Yindi get rolling so does the sky. Darker, greyer, coagulating and circling to enclose us fast: the first rain starts on the headlands to the north.

Beside the freeway in the darkness
Are the monuments to pain…
Where the wreaths of peace are lain
Outside in the rain
Rider in the Rain, Kev Carmody

Midnight Oil now and no way, water is not going to turn the lights off on this show, the sheets of rain around are not going to take us out.

I ‘push’, my understanding at the time, feeling like I’m becoming a part of the clear vortex above. My sense of being on purpose with others extends beyond social cause into visceral connection. I feel as the crowd, us in unison, up and into a cylindrical space all around us through to the top of the atmosphere, holding the clouds away. It’s pouring on the beach, overhead blue, encircled by rain around the pavilion and not a drop on the performance or crowd.

The Oils finish their full set and encore with Beds are Burning. As we depart into the early evening I set aside the weirdness and strangeness, bending the clouds, the portal of dryness that’s been above us. Really?

Life picked me up this morning and thrust me to the world
Like a child I'm hurtled forward
Dreaming things anew, sights I see sound true
All the places, open faces gracing everything I view
In the rain, Midnight Oil

Thirty years later and I’m on the first of a series of buses up the coast of Harris, a day trip to the airport.

I’m half a world away from Australia, on the Western Isles Scotland and watching rain roil up on Toe Head from the Atlantic ocean.

It’s often wet here, nothing usual about this except my context now is radically different. This is my first voluntarily travel, non-medical trip, after a year in time loops, being transported into and as different universes.2 I’ve radically reorientated to treating these experiences as simultaneously true, as if they are true, as enhanced awareness and integrating the wildness for my recovery.3

Suddenly I’m simultaneously on the bus and feeling myself at the Bondi Pavilion. It feels like being the walls and open space of this clear dry sky. Like a metaphoric wormhole from my present to The Pacific, a felt sense of the whole crowd and Midnight Oil. Sensually, I’m in a cohesion of space, in the now and then, sensing co-creating light, knowing it’s done and tendril like congruences emanating like fast growing vines, entangling and penetrating into/from me.

To stay with and lean into the strangeness—subtle with physical, re-membering our physical truths, love and what this feels like, the alienness and human-ness—is a deep sense of peace and power. It feels like blue sky clarity on what we’re creating, an island of cohesion.

I remember doing the Time Warp
Drinking those moments when
The blackness would hit me
And the void would be calling

Let's do the Time Warp again
Let's do the Time Warp again
Little Nell

There is power and good here. The “as if it is true” and “it is true” frame lets me feel it’s done—multilayered truth and justice realising—with grace and dignity. This allows human capacity, my and all of ours, to be broader and honoured.

Consciously holding the weird and unusual is important. We’re healing with this: I am and was healing with this. It lets me constantly uncover parts of myself including things that are difficult, sensations and tethers that may otherwise hold me back.

Moreover, we’re at a time of enlightenment. Our social technology, psycho-tech if you like, provides deep and validated frameworks for exploring this consciously, recognising meaning that we might otherwise conceal from ourselves.4 From a simple level it’s a shift. Go beyond this too and feel this across time, in unity consciousness too. Be viscerally present with your younger self, changing and supporting your past and now.

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I am deeply indebted to my dear, dear friend Teresa Zimmermann including inspiration for this series title, to write Act 3, to integrate the songs … and so much more.

Pictures: Festina Lentívaldi, (be) Benevolution. Reuse: Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0 US except #3 Mandawuy Yunupingu from Wikimedia commons; #5 halo effect ai prompt by @Berno; and, My Old Ass below from the film’s promotional picture.

1

This post is greatly supported by recent shifts the first of which is IPBES in which 147 nations now endorse “spiritual reconnection between humans and nature”: groundbreaking! See We are in a portal for why and an embodied exercise to explore some of this yourself.

Second is The Telepathy Tapes “certain nonverbal autistic children can communicate telepathically, with a rate of accuracy (~95%) that far surpasses anything seen in previous ESP research.” Recommended listening, decide on the evidence for yourself as well as see The year of magic .

Third, doesn’t have to be so serious :-) My Old Ass…

My Old Ass is a beautiful, heart embracing story of 18 year old Eliott meeting her 39 year old self. Thanks and shout out to here> for this recommendation.

Fourth “poles routinely show us 60% of people have unitative walking up experiences …abundant research makes it very clear that in many instances altered states reveal genuine realities, real realities that are dimensions of this world just rarely seen or felt” Ken Wilber Finding Radical Wholeness. See chapter 7 for a deeper expansion on treating these experience ‘as if they are true’ and as a ‘alternative reality, mystically literal’

Five is more time bending and try it too in Entanglements: Time folded forgiveness.

At the root of Conscious Climate Leadership is the idea that we make sense of the world around us and ourselves from discrete non-linear stages. And, when we know that, we can recognize them, how we are working and how others are working, and make a profound difference.

Conscious Climate Leadership enables successful sustainability. It is the fastest and most effective alchemy integrating:

• Our global context, sustainability emerging

• Our inner context, consciousness rising

• And catalysing this complexity for impact, action serving our future now

Tickets: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/conscious-climate-leadership-1-day-experiential-workshop-tickets-1150232740089

I changed around the entire room. I got them all on side… that shift in that room came from this type of conscious leadership framework. I could empathize with, I could feel the needs and the desires of everybody in the room as if they were mine, like they were mine. That's a flow state that's a state of being in a higher state of consciousness.

For participants this develops a more embodied understanding of ourselves, how we make meaning and the ways in which we are making sense of others. This allows us to better deliver sustainability in the circles we connect with for business, personal and society change.

For organisations it scales sustainability impact and leadership. You will hear about demonstrated successes. This includes across global supply chains, multinational business and large scale organisational climate transformations.

By the end of this workshop you will :

1. Know why developmental perspectives are distinct and the power this can bring for you.

2. Experience howConsciousness development can deliver outstanding sustainability outcomes for you.

3. Explore utilising your full capacities and what this delivers for you through combining multiple perspectives.

4. Practice bringing your multiple intelligences online to shift ’stuck’ problems

5. Gain deeper wisdom skills to deliver sustainability

These understandings have created extraordinary positive sustainable outcomes. This includes within business, project management contexts and across diverse sectors. Join us to deepen your capacities for impact.

Dr. Simon Divecha

Simon is a change maker passionate about helping people to come into wholeness and owning all of our experiences. This is to connect into our universal truth—the places where we all feel our bigger realities of awakening and love. Simon is motivated by the aliveness that’s here, the reality that we absolutely can have it all: passion, people, profit, purpose and planet. He does this as a Holistic Coach through Inner Development from the Core for clarity at a depth that nothing else can give us and with organisations and coalitions to meet our sustainability challenges through emergence—the spaces in which we are much more than the sum of our parts. He’s advised major companies, won multiple awards, directed international programs & research institutes, mentors, coaches and he’s run businesses and organisations as a CEO: all with a focus on consciousness and our inner capacities to be so much more

We are in a portal, a new reality where we are radically reimagining ourselves and reconnecting with the earth. I feel this viscerally and sensuously yet the frequency is hard to hold. So here are three handrails for some orientation as we transform:

1. Enhanced awareness—experiencing entangled deep love, amness, entireness—is common

2. As of 18 December, 2024 147 governments plus the UN agreed that I am nature and nature is me.

3. Physical systems show we are shifting.

In reverse order:

3. Power of Dragonflies, China and peak oil

Who here has had an experience where they felt something but it wasn’t there? Goosebumps, energy, felt like someone walked past you but no-one did.
Who’s heard something that just wasn’t there, but it was.
Who’s seen something that just wasn’t there but it was.
Regan Hillyer

As the world warms metamorphosis takes place. I invite you to feel this first. To do so you may like to close your outer eyes [audio from the 1 minute mark] and experience as if you are a dragonfly larva in a pond.

You can choose a pond near you, or the feature picture in this article. It is lit by the sun, golden reflections radiating, complex clouds and kaleidoscopic-deep coloured swirls, all around and through your larval body.

It’s an effortless place, suspended, weightless. And at the same time there’s a calling. That call is universal, a call to shift to embrace greater complexity, to see further, a desire to be in connection, to release yourself into so much more.

This is not an awareness, not yet. It is, however, a choice that is already made, a choice to expand, to be in and part of the world outside your world.

You feel yourself drawn towards the shallows as your body is preparing you, orienting for the new. There are urges to stretch and push, beyond the supportive watery confines, compelling you up nearby vegetation, away from your oxygen life support, fish out of water, into the air.

The dryness and unfamiliar movement, air-sharpnesses through you, trigger you out of impending asphyxiation, as you hang on, hold, and stay with the rushes, dizziness and nausea of all your internals redistributing. Body fluids whirl, the vortexes spin in you, your chest, head, legs and wings emerge. Your old larval skin shell starts to be pushed aside.

You harden, pull out by your belly, dry. You extend your wings, sense the multiple entities around you, set flight in a viscerally felt, quantum-ly different, vast space.

Expanding into all you can sense, you are grateful for that old skin shell, it kept you safe. And far more is here for you now, aliveness you feel, the fullness of all the space you are now: air, maturity, mating, territory. Connecting, penetrating, receiving and fusing.

You set wing into the air.

There’s a cognitive mirror of this too in our world: as humanity we are collectively preparing for metamorphosis, like larvae about to emerge from the water we are yet to be fully aware of it.1

The signs are all around. For example for a decade China has been a principle driver of oil consumption.2 This has now reversed. Peak oil for China is here and it is huge for our polycrises. So many facets of power, politics and inflicted pain globally revolve around oil. Reverse consumption, price falls, domination decentralises. That greatly assists us to re-pattern ourselves, redistributing wealth, resolving conflicts, distributing resources.3

2. Power of 147 governments and the UN

I can see clearly now the rain is gone
I can see all obstacles in my way
Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind
Jimmy Cliff

There are major inner subtle shifts too, hiding in plain sight just like a frog on the rock (above).

This month, December 2024, 147 governments and the UN did something extraordinary. The international group called IPBES, through a 3 year process, identified the science for transformation: what do we know, how and what are we already doing to reverse course, repair life support and let humans and nature thrive.

IPBES endorses spiritual reconnection between humans and nature as one of the major keys.4

This is radical. Some highlights include recognising:

• “collective imagining of fundamental changes in human-nature relationships... incorporating clarity, inclusion, creativity, flexibility are powerful and effective”

• “culture and ecosystems are integrated and co-evolving”

• “humans are part of and fully interdependent with nature”

This is legitimising a profoundly different space, preparing a metamorphosis of our modern day culture and its interdependent money / values systems.

Global government processes tend to prioritise order and rules. It’s safe, it is known. Just like the dragonfly larva is supported by the pond water leaving this environment is disorienting, takes courage, opens vulnerability and asks us to hold curiosity about co-created outcomes.5

Yet we did this.6 The governments and UNEP took themselves out of the current paradigm to recognise and honour the future we are creating.

1. Power of ultimate and linear truth

Being in unity, experiences of:

• feeling oneness,

• knowing it’s done (the choice is made, all has already decided),

• resting as pure awareness of awareness (I am, amness),

• awakening as love (all sensations),

• we are,

are states many people experience.7

That’s heady as a list. Consequently, I ground by feeling it. I invite you too as well. Feel as the dragonfly, newly able to fly, you’ve just metamorphosised. There is an entire new world around. You feel dimensionally liberated, take wing with me:

relaxing as openness, you can begin to feel that the appearance-realm in and around you is actually a world made of swirling, luminous consciousness, arising as a whole, including all selves, thoughts, emotions, objects, and the space between. As you practice, you can feel the pattern of the swirling currents moving you and others like leaves in the wind.
Waiting to Love, David Deida

These currents are profound. We can feel them through us, we commonly do. As we increasingly honour this, paying attention to our intuition alongside analysis, we can feel our multiple senses emerging:

when purpose dances with passion, and inner awakening meets collective transformation, 2024 revealed itself as a quantum leap – not just a year, but a portal where individual consciousness and systemic change became beautifully, irrevocably intertwined.
coauthor.studio, AI paraphrase of my, Simon Divecha, 2024 linkedin posts

This is an entangled space. Like the dragonfly that can now breath air and fly, it’s inviting us to feel all of what is around us, the many inputs from our multiple intelligences—felt, subtle, kinaesthetic, kosmic, cognitive, time, non-linear—while knowing deeply:

ultimate truth does not erase historical truth—they don’t cancel each other out. As with classical and quantum physics, both truths have their place. Nevertheless, it helps to know which truth a person is speaking from. Without being mindful that multiple views of reality exist, I get trapped in my limited perspective
Quantum Buddhas, Karen O’Brien

Wishing you all well with metamorphosis!

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Pictures: Festina Lentívaldi, (be) Benevolution. Reuse: Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0 US.

Awakening

40% of the population, by most estimates, has anomalous experiences, visionary experiences, mystical experiences. One of the problems of the meaning crisis is they don't have a framework to integrate those experiences.
John Vervaeke

Forty percent is extraordinary: we are responding to our times, remembering and feeling a truth that we are all part of a whole as well as unique individuals.2

We experience this as states of oneness: interpenetrating and pulsating. We may describe energy and vibrations, senses of entireness, bliss, radiance, as well as sensations, movement, visions and experiences of unique entities and/or presences.3

Which is mind-bending. However, there are other realities4 and when I treat these as if they are true a simple framework is love and peace.

The peace part is more conventional. We’ve traditionally sought out awakened states through various spiritual traditions: Nothingness, emptiness—it’s masculine in nature and becoming accepted in organisations and western society through mindfulness.5

Then there’s feminine energy of awakening, love, and as a starting point it can be challenging, not the least as we privilege masculine frameworks in our society.

Love

There's nothin' you can know that isn't known
Nothin' you can see that isn't shown
There's nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be
It's easy
All you need is love
The Beatles

We tried this recently at the Inner Development Goals (IDGs) summit in Stockholm.6 Our task: take one of two positions “I love the IDGs” or “I am sceptical about IDGs” and then inquire with a partner into the other’s perspective.

I took love. It’s our natural state, it’s what we are awakening to. Why would I not ‘love’ anything that is helping this transition?

I asked my partner about this, about helping us to shift, about loving frameworks and structures that help us to do this.

And… well she became more sceptical. By asking questions about love I was reinforcing scepticism. What a delightful gift she gave me!

Unexpected places

Wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving.
Kahlil Gibran

We debriefed the role play together. What would work and avoid reverse psychological polarisation? I could have asked:

1. what would make it safer to ‘love’ the IDGs? And next,

2. how could we be courageous with this ‘love’? Then,

3. what do you need to lead with this ‘love’?

This is developmental, feeling and connecting with the other person to sense what’s needed.7 We’re asking and allowing scepticism to come along for the ride. Not to bland it over or deny difficulty. However, to ensure it is not driving the car.

A developmental love story

You can feel the pulse
First there was star dust
And now there's us
All I ever was
All I'll ever be
Connected Luke Dick

There’s a meta move here. We’re letting both feminine and masculine awakening energy be part of our stories. It’s asking us to be there with our multiple intelligence so that we sense and feel:

• Because I am with you I am different, co-creative. Let each other in and let each other change us.

• The wholeness of all of our emotions enabling leaders as a force for good.

• What moves me from me to we and accelerates trust.8

In one way or another, at varying levels of intensity, so many of us are aware we are so much more, way more than transactional individuals.

Meaning

What’s meaning for you: Contributing to a kinder, sustainable and wiser world? One where all of your needs are fully met? All needs are met? Letting yourself fully embrace integration, feeling into all, one and entireness?!

The power here is to help us all step into our biggest selfs. We can practice this e.g. sense into the connections and consciousness all around us: Try this is collaboration here>

When I do practices like this it helps to wire my higher state experiences. In the love and scepticism role play, it makes it more likely for me to ask connecting questions and attune to other’s needs in the moment.

This is the call to have it all, there is so much more to us. We are wanting to be loved for who we are, wanting to contribute with all of our experiences. A framework for making sense of this, having more of it, is love and peace alongside the developmental, non-naive forms of that.

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Pictures: Festina Lentívaldi, (be) Benevolution. Reuse: Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0 US except #1 Hugo Klip photography (I am one of the two people in this photo).

Bonny calls me. She’s one of the most radiant beings I know: incredible light with deep, extraordinary insight into souls and a phenomenal presence. My friend Bonny is bonny-grádh embodied.1

Yet, this afternoon resilience has dropped and there’s a concomitant darkness as deep as the light. It’s Saturday and she is ‘so incredibly tired, no emotional space for anyone else but myself, so reactive. I do not want to be like this. Narcissistically miserable until I am able to admit how exhausted I am.’

She asks me if I’m okay to be on the phone with her.

I say it brings out The Protector in me. I feel a rush of powerful and primal sensations, from the ground, through my core, into my extremities. Plus an equal and opposite feeling of experiencing peace, as the universe, protecting everything.

The Protector is a Masculine energy and, in feeling it, I’m alive to stark simultaneities too. Misused it embraces centuries of patriarchy, oppression and abuse. My male birth enables institutional, cultural and structural privilege.

Simultaneously present, alongside these tensions, I feel a very deep rush of care and compassion, strength and love, responsibility and awe. I’m not being asked to tamp down or superficially fix desolation but rather ease-fully assist to transfigure anguish: trusted as a focus while wisdom crystallises for my friend.

Hence The Protector: Can we transmute and transcend its old limiting associations?

Polarities in relationship

The contour of your closing, the form of your suffering, is defined by what you won’t embrace, feel and open as.
David Deida, Blue Truth.

We have justifiably and happily reacted to masculine abuse with equality. Everything and everyone should be equal, yet this is a bland balance denying our embodied natures.2 It’s like we level up once, level one inequity to level two fairness, and forget to keep playing. Level 3 is far more rewarding.

In intimate relationships there are many re-conceptualising feminine calls for this:

The Sacred Role of the Masculine:
There is a primal, unspoken dance between the masculine and feminine energies, one that has existed for eons.

The masculine is the rock, the grounding force, the protector. When the masculine provides safety—emotionally, physically, spiritually, and yes, financially—it’s not because the feminine is incapable. It’s not because she cannot take care of herself. It’s because, in that sacred space of surrender, the feminine can fully open and expand into her true essence.

When the feminine feels safe, in ALL ways, she blooms. She softens, her energy becomes fluid, her creativity ignites, and her sensuality flows without resistance.

It’s not about dependency, but about freedom. Freedom to let go of the weight of protection, to release the armour that the world often demands of her.
Regan Hillyer3

Can we have it all and bring such dynamics into our friendships and society too?

Modern male malaise to aise

Feel into the heart of whoever you’re with. When you get good at that, feel into everyone's heart. When you get good at that, feel through everyone's heart, living and dead. And when you get good at that, feel the absolute, endless miracle of the moment.
David Deida, Blue Truth

Men can be stuck, challenged by what we could perceive as a threat, the loss of cultural and society privilege. On a society scale this translates to reactionary politics opposing balance and equity measures.

Individually we may be freer yet we step back from action. There’s a level of uncertainty, a wariness around engaging in fields that have been associated with perpetuating abuse. Mud sticks, we think. It is best not to not venture onto the metaphorical equivalent of a wet mountain trail.

As a result, we privilege just being. It is like ‘oh, there’s a mountain trail down there. That could be fun to explore and run but not today, too slippery.’ We are deprioritising the gifts that go with our awareness. Doing, from expansive awareness like this, can become doing as a focus of light and co-creation.4

How perverse! We’ve all experienced times when what we do far exceeds our wildest expectations. Pieces fall into place, what seemed impossible synthesises, beauty and collective power emerges. Who wouldn’t want more of that?

There’s an understandable shock and overwhelm with it too: What? You’re asking me to hold myself responsible for the actions of my ancestors? Most of us don’t have to go very far to find an abusive or patriarchal piece of masculinity, once or twice removed from us.

This manifests as the modern male malaise, subtle tendrils of inaction or unaccountability. I can feel the echos of this in myself, I feel it currently as a reticence to write this article, to speak about The Protector.

Transmute

Your heart always knows the truth of openness. In every moment of your life, your heart tacitly compares the closed suffering that you are doing to the bliss of your true openness. ‘This moment can be deeper.’ ‘Our love can be more full.’ ‘My life can be more fulfilling.’
David Deida, Blue Truth

So stuff it. I’m not having this. Let’s shift it and integrate the tethers, whatever difficulties there may be, when and as we find these.

It can be a glorious, in-depth process. This time, let’s choose fast and focused. You will invoke The Protector when you:

• Don’t try to fix the situation, empower her instead to find her own solutions. Ask ‘what do you need’? Being listened to deeply energises, surprises and delights her.

• When you feel a little shimmer, gentle whisper of wind, intuitive sense calling for connection, honour it. Notice that gossamer thread and act. Call her, unprompted, reach out.

• Then double down. Remember once is never enough. This is about presence and hosting the spaces.5 Contextually appropriate constant confirmations and affirmations of affection.

And ok, if you can’t do anything else send back an emoji 🤪❣️

What’s in it for me?

If you give her safety, she gives you everything. And I mean everything
Lorin Krenn

For men,6 when we recognise The Protector and let it flourish we feel a deep font of inner power: total trust in ourselves and everything around us. This is radiant, highly attractive and others feel our openness.

Synthesis and synergies multiply, timeliness shift, everything is far more possible. Practically, well you name it in the end:

• a back rub

• full support of your purpose

• an enduringly passionate relationship

For women,7 leaning into The Protector is full safety: a capacity to surrender and to let herself be there in all of her full life forces, warm chaos and love.

We all have feminine and masculine energies in ourselves. As a man, as I’m hosting The Protector, I’m opening into the feminine full life forces of love within myself too: being here, right in the now and fully committed.

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Pictures: Festina Lentívaldi, (be) Benevolution. Reuse: Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0 US.

For example, I’m leading a scientific journal special issue on Mindsets of Transformation.1 It’s about what our inner worlds create, what we are holding and framing and, beyond this, what we’re feeling is actually going to happen.

That’s to say, we create conditions that represent ourselves. Why not speak to what we can be in our natural abundant states of love and awakening.2 We need to connect with this and speed up realising such futures.

Consequently a good subtitle for Mindsets of Transformation is:

Our multiplying and interconnected eco-social crises are met through awakening and love: bigger realities, ways of thinking, being and doing.

Except, I was caught by my legacy, a socialised expectation that I critique the difficulties. The subtitle I used was:

Our multiplying and interconnected eco-social crises will not get solved with old ways of thinking, being and doing!

It was safe. It fails to honour your and my biggest self and positive exploration. I apologise. Mindsets of Transformation is about taking these opportunities and calling in what we are creating, bringing it into the present, right now.

This is common, spot the irony in my Balance is a dirty word video summary:

Argh, I’ve done it again: the content is about abundance, feeling a time when all of our needs are met and being in our bigger selves.3

I can summarise it from what’s manifesting:

Creating from responsibility and wholeness

There’s a bigger frame here too. When we’re doing this work we are shifting our realities, returning back to our natural state. This is our natural state of abundance, it includes living from authenticity. That’s a place so many people are shifting into, loving themselves for who they are and being loved for who they are. As opposed to being loved for what they do.4

I felt the gap when I saw my mindset messages above. I went small and safe rather than bold—brave enough to stand up and say:

This is my vision.
I am doing this for humanity and the aliveness I feel when I do this.
I know we can all feel this aliveness.

This makes it easier for the next person to shift and then the next person. It’s our heart awakening, living in our heart.

Heart awakening

Try it, if you like, for a moment (start the audio at 3’10” mark):

Take a moment and close your outer eyes.

Feel into your heart. Feel what it is like to have metaphorical eyes in your heart.

What do you see around you?

As you drop your eyes into your heart.

What do you feel and sense around you through your heart’s eyes?

You may have words for this. You may be able to name emotions of the felt resonances. It might feel like a vibrations or set of sensations beyond your skin and auraed around you.

It might just be a sense of peace or momentary pause, wholeness or nothingness.

Whatever it is, is just fine.

Be with these sensations for a moment. Sit with whatever is around you as you feel and see from your heart. Give it the sensations some names, for yourself, and notice the connections between your seeing, inner senses of your heart and what your heart is seeing and feeling around you.

When you are ready come back to the room or space around you and gently open your eyes.

Realities

What we feel is a reality. When I choose to call in a flourishing world through awakening and love: bigger realities, ways of thinking, being and doing (my subtitle) I’m evoking those feelings. When I chose to feel abundance, a time when all my needs were met, I’m strengthening those muscles, realities that are part of my highest self.5 When I feel the space in and around myself, from my heart, I’m letting myself be with my more multi-dimensional self and feel the reality that we are all one while simultaneously unique individuals.

The more I do this work, the more we all do this, the faster it shifts.

This is, additionally, a call to be in service of 30 to 40% of people around us who are experiencing awakening.

Waking From Sleep is about 150 interviews, first person narratives of these people and these experience… Newberg's book, How Enlightenment Changes Your Brain. He did an online survey of 1,500 people… there's larger general surveys of how often people have these kinds of experiences and they range in intensity but it's around 30 to 40% of the population.
John Vervaeke6 

I notice this shift particularly as a lot more questioning and curiosity, people actively exploring how to understand themselves and the world around them disoriented by the old frame which clearly does not work.

We really need these new frames now, those with the courage to go big, curiosity to wonder about bigger realities, the world needs you now.7

Consequently my apologies, I got caught by the old and I give myself this permission slip for saying yes and going deeper into these gifts and services.

Please take one too, a permission slip! Awakening and Love are wild rides.

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Pictures: Bansky graffiti photos, unknown photographers.

1. Who wants work-life balance as opposed to being immersed in aliveness?

2. Why would we balance economic activity against environmental damage? We know this is a path to destroying both.

3. Balance feminine and masculine instead of a far more healthy and sensual polarity? That seems flat.

Needs fully met

Someone challenges me to:

Take myself to a time where all my needs are fully met. What does it feel like they ask.

I immediately think, oh hell, that’s going to be hard. Then, quickly I have my first example. I’m a teenager volunteering in the Scottish Isles and the landowner is welcoming us into her croft with just-baked, hot scones, jam and cream!

I can still smell them and, after finding this one, many more abundant examples follow.

However, balance pushes us to think of scarcity:

1. Work-life balance argues us out of our world, one where there is enough for everyone and meaningful work wins: purposeful and life-giving work.1

2. Going beyond economic and environmental balance is a redesign and reconceptualisation struggle. Solutions to having both, alongside much better global qualities of life, have existed for decades.2

3. Feminine and masculine polarity: There are very logical aspirations to recover from abuses of power, centuries of patriarchy and often toxic masculinity. However, we don’t need to balance it out into blandness, a modern male malaise of inaction, nor through stifling feminine warm chaos energy, the creative life-force of all beings. Instead as a woman, you have become the all of his desire. As a man, you have become the spine of her surrender.3 Divine is alive in your smiles.

Try abundance

We don’t have a resource problem, we have a resource distribution problem.
Neale Donald Walsch

What does it take to feel abundant? To act in our world from this place?

This moment of meditation is an invitation to extract our attention out of our current conditions, considerations of balancing one need against another or pushing to do something.

If you would like to turn within. You can close your outer eyes and listen to the audio above starting at the 2:45 mark.4

Take a long breath in and, as you release it, as you release that inhalation, let yourself be in a moment. It does not matter what’s before or after this moment, just begin to contemplate a moment where you felt in your life that you had more than enough, that you were living in a full state of prosperity, emotionally buoyant, bodily supported, deeply connected, a place where all of your needs were met.

• Take your time.

It doesn't matter what your chronological age was at the time. It could have been where you were 5 years young or 13 or 15 or 35 but just come into a moment where you feel this.

Let yourself feel the cords of your memory, the resonances in you and surrounding you, a feeling tone of abundance, of all needs met.

Place your attention here. We're going to meditate on this feeling tone of all needs met.

• Be with yourself in that moment of abundance, the one where all of your needs are met.

• Gift yourself this moment, being with the feeling, that feeling when all of your needs were met, the feeling of living in abundance.

Now take a pure inhalation. Sustain it at the Apex. Take a little bit more air in. Sustain it right there

Abundance. All needs met. Sense into the feeling tone being amplified. Release with the sound of an ah. Ahhhh…

Now all I would invite you to do is pay attention to that feeling tone of abundance, harmonising prosperity in the tonal quality of all needs met.

If the mind tries to take over and paint pictures of worst case scenarios demanding less or, reminding you that you don't have enough in the visible world, bring your mind back, take your mind back, take your attention back, and come right now to the feeling: the feeling that all of your your needs are met.

The feeling will provide the healing, relieving. The feeling will provide the healing and then the revealing of the truth. You're being attentive to the feeling that all of your needs are met, that you are living in abundance. This is your heart-set. This is your mind-set.

Allow yourself to feel a deep sense of gratitude that all of your needs are met. Allow yourself to feel that expand in your self, a feeling becoming a new frequency in you, a frequency in your life, a frequency always with you.

Mentally say to yourself “my needs fully met. All the time I'm so grateful that I'm in alignment with the timeline of my life where I'm deeply fulfilled, all of my needs are met. I live in abundance and harmonizing prosperity, it's happening”

• Now feel into that

• And let it be

Feel that radiance of abundance, that feeling, extending your smile, as you gently open your eyes.

Be with this, extremely grateful that you have felt new into your life. And so it is. Make it so.

B**ger balance: inspiring outer worlds

Allow ourselves an aliveness that forsakes all efforts to limit… to change as rapidly as the swift winds that blow through us when we are free.
Holly Woods5

I like to think about these moves as three distinct levels. Level A where we were in the old structure, working to survive and for other people’s profit. Level B for balance such as ‘let’s moderate the impact of economic growth on environmental resources’. However, let’s not think too much about that and it’s failure to address fundamental imperatives, being beyond our planetary resource and waste boundaries and accelerating deep inequalities.

Level C for being in abundance. That’s like copying and pasting the feelings of having all of your needs met, such as from the moment of meditation above, into other areas of our life. It lets us more readily wire such states and fire similar experiences, bridging into our physical realities. For example:

1. We have all had times when we are entangled, alive with passion while working. I’ve done it walking into a full conference room and totally flipping the mood from hostile and angry to onside and cooperative.6 I’m sure you have created the extraordinary too. How did it go? What does it take to have more?

2. This is true around economics with environment too. Imagine into a time when you are totally involved with creating something. What’s it like when you bring the felt sense of abundance into that situation, feeling you can have everything? What changes?

3. In more feminine and masculine polarity (when it is responsible to have this) think what would be there if you add more by consciously breathing.
   
   Male (or person in masculine role): Be fully connected and create from your breath. “Your inhales should feel like they are drawing energy down the front of your body, filling your belly and genital region. Your exhales should feel like they are moving energy from your pelvic floor, up your spine, into your head.” Breathe with that circle, holding her with your breath and sensing her deeply, responsive to her desire.
   
   Female (or person in feminine role): When he looks into your eyes he feels your heart yearning, feels you opening so he may claim your heart, as you allow yourself to breathe together, gazing into his eyes… “loving the waves of emotional energy that move through both of you while opening your heart to feel his… open so you can breathe with him, breath as a one breathing two-bodied being of love”. 7

B**ger it, let’s not settle for the bland B. It always annoyed me. Work life balance?!  Balance the Economy and Environment? Really is that the best we can do! Hell, give me lust for life, not balance, particularly for relationships.

Here is to us all C-ing, seeing unbalanced joy abound. Give me a level C whenever I can and that aliveness shifting us, our days and what’s possible.

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Photos: Festina Lentívaldi, (be) Benevolution. Reuse: Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0 US. Music: Coniferous forest