Our attention changes the world
Hosting our mindsets of transformation. There's a softness to this work making it practical in our daily lives. On rapidly awakening awareness with our hidden resources.
7 years of action, 7 articles, 21 authors, more than 49 years of insight, action and research.
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
Credits: Images and video illustration from the Mindsets of Transformation Frontispiece by myself and NotebookLM. Podcast video extract Hilary Bradbury and myself.
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
Adam Cairns, Parneet Kaur & Lynette Thorstensen (2025) and part of the Mindsets of Transformation Special Issue.
Progressively being posted on the Action Research Plus website.
The secret of the golden flower is a classic Chinese, Tao book of life. It’s an inspiration Carl Jung credits for his global impact around consciousness. This version, translated and introduced by Thomas Cleary, updates older translations. Recommended, pdf
This substack is changing it’s name too, to mirror this Benevolution > Soulsentient. Soulsentient, see the webpage here for more, focuses on action: assisting ourselves so our highest states are practical and useful in lived life. At home, at work, in love, in service of your-our highest aspirations and the collective good.