Love, life, aliveness

We know transformation emerges from new ways of thinking and being. However, the how is less clear. Three calls for this: to love, to aliveness, to life. Two practices. One love!

My bigger self

It’s a stunning Sydney summer’s day and I step out onto the street, down 42 floors from the corporate board room. I’m pulsating with excitement. I’m thrilled by what I’ve found, joyful about the potential for change.

I’ve just finished my first day of interviews. I’ve been advising a multi-national company’s executives on sustainability and, while the business cases are powerfully profitable, we all know the company can do a lot more.

On the street I’m hooked: this is an aliveness like nothing else and, for the next two decades, it entangles through my life and loves continuously opening more deeply for purpose and intimacy.

I immediately want more and I take on a sustainability action PhD! My research interviews unfold from my corporate connections, probing for inner sustainability. The success patterns I find, and use, relate to discreetly different worldviews, meeting people where they are at and shifting to understand and embrace much more.¹

These new ways of thinking and being are known as adult development. Using this to communicate sustainability overcomes multiple barriers.

It goes beyond purpose, I fell in love with the framework and that was not all. People are attracted by passion and agency, my wife fell in love with me.

The calls

Love, life and aliveness: Feeling connected, all the more so with awareness of these connections, is a passionate place. We care about the people we love and all the things that we love. In extending circles:

• I experience this as myself, entangled with all the people I’m close with.

• I feel this as our common humanity: ouch that currently hurts as well as enlivens, I don’t want to hide from it.

• I know this in my bones, the felt sense of my creatureliness, my connections with all living things and this planet.

Thus the three calls:

1. Love: What do you experience when you let your realities unfold, embrace your enduring love with all the people you’ve been intimately close to? And do that actively as a connection into oneness?

2. Aliveness: What do you feel acknowledging all the difficulties of our times? Being with that grief yet not allowing it to diminish the vitality and joy you continually encounter in connections around you?

3. Life: And in your bones, creatureliness? How does this appear for you?

3. Life

I’m in a hurry: let’s change right now and simultaneously build the confirmation that validates our new action. As I’m standing in the sun on the street I’m awed. I’d expected to discover tenuous evidence that sense-making-stages are correlated with sustainability capacities for action. In a day of interviews I’ve heard this is fundamentally powerful and important.

Passion for life, for all to have lives that are worth living, means that we have to change our system. That’s why I feel so much aliveness on the street, these unfolding adult-development realities let everyone work with what’s unconscious and has been holding us back.

Try it
Let yourself sit quietly where you are. Observe your surroundings. Close your eyes, as needed, to settle into the peace and quiet … Whenever your eyes light on something, focus your full attention on it. Tell yourself “This is consciousness.”

• As you notice what your eyes focus on don’t judge yourself, or what you are looking at. Say to yourself “This is consciousness”.

• What are the sensations in your body as you say that?

• As your eyes alight on something else and/or the same thing again, say to yourself “This is consciousness” again and notice what you feel in your body now.

• When you feel you need to move, go for a walk and, when your eyes focus on something, keep saying to yourself “This is consciousness”.

• Keep walking and have fun with this: windows, clouds, animals, grass, sun. Feel into everything you see.

Finish your walk. What are you feeling in your body now?²

Life calling

Noticing our connections unfolds us. We experience conscious states, bigger realities aligned with adult development.

However “is this real”? Researching that question involves recognising what’s changing within us as a part of the inquiry.

For me this goes straight into a life with aliveness. I discovered action research through my PhD, helping to create significant growth and step-like changes within myself, for organisations and groups I work with and for our society. You may be interested too, it does not need to be a doctorate! See The inner journey: Mindset shifts of transformation and/or let’s talk.³

2. Aliveness

The aliveness honours what I feel: being fully present with what is, not pretending I am a dispassionate observer and including these realities for a fuller understanding of change.

Allowing ourselves to feel connections, to incorporate emotional and subtle feelings and step past our modern-day cognitive barriers is a paradigm shift. Paradoxically, our interconnections are widely acknowledged. For example in 1949 Albert Einstein wrote:

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe’, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of Nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security⁴

Try it.
Watch Joanna Macy:

As you’re listening feel into yourself.

Everything you've ever known and loved, pursued and delighted in, is from this Earth.

As you feel this is there:

• A greater capacity?

• A sense of commitment?

• Aliveness as a felt sense?

Let your eyes go back to Joanna’s quote. Rest there a little. Feel all that is in you from this Earth. Feel it filling you up.

Describe what you are feeling in your body and around yourself.⁵

1. Love

I fell in love with my wife and she fell in love with me.

And, simultaneously, my wife and I fell in love with co-created purpose: To jointly meet the needs of our planet in these times. To be a collective intelligence. To be more than the sum of our parts.

And we did live this.

And we fell out of romantic love.

And I managed (ok, there were some awful times) to connect with love, loving her, through the trouble and for the gifts all of this experience brings.

That’s our planet too. Consciously and unconsciously we are all aware of the pain that is here for so many people, species and life. We have been passionate about engaging. We’re noticing overwhelm too. We can listen to and feel global grief and planetary anger alongside our fulsome abilities, being alive with our agency to meet this, to regenerate life and aliveness.

That’s the third call, to open into love, to choose love along with the vulnerability it brings. It is a spiral:

• The more we love the more we are vulnerable.

• The more we are vulnerable the more we love.

With love! For aliveness and life.

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

1. My work and I were awarded the University’s Doctoral Medal for outstanding research. A Climate for Change, the summary and full thesis, is here>

2. The multidimensional human. Kurt Leland

3. The inner journey: Mindset shifts of transformation. Call for papers July 2024. Action Research Plus here>
Contact me: simon@unfoldingrealities.com

4. Translation by the New York Times published 29 March 1972. And see Terence Sexton, Consciousness Beyond Consumerism

5. Feeling that I am part of a whole, embracing the universe as the whole of it rushed through me, me as that universe is a part of my story. Currently written:
Act 1, Scene 1 is The rascals immunity
Act 1, Scene 2 is Rascal visions
Act 1, Scene 3 is Rascal’s descent
Act 1, Scene 4 is Boom, crash, bounce?
Act 2, Scene 1 is The Rascal and the Mongrel
Act 2, Scene 2 is Western logic
Act 2, Scene 3 is Unfolding realities

And one interlude That rascal. Got me