Balancing uncertainty, well-being and bold visions.

To be able to realize bold visions and create regenerative external impact over longer periods of time it's vital to regenerate your inner wellbeing and the health of your organization.

“A fully regenerative system would be both internally and externally regenerative. For a person, internal regeneration might involve supporting one’s individual needs while external regeneration could be positively supporting the social and ecological conditions of one’s home community, which in turn supports one’s internal regeneration.”

External and internal regeneration are deeply connected and symbiotic in their relationship. Regenerative outcomes are always interdependent. This boils, in a nutshell down to what’s good for humans, is good for wider nature, and the other way around. To realize regenerative interdependent outcomes it's vital we as individuals and humanity rediscover what’s truly good for us. Not as a consumer, politician, mechanic or career tiger, but as interconnected living beings.

How would you describe the dynamic in your life between internal and external regeneration? Where would you place yourself right now? Are you fully regenerative, taking care of your own well-being, happiness and inner peace whilst realizing external regeneration? Don’t limit external regeneration only to what you DO as in what is your job title. These positive dynamics also, or perhaps even mostly, exist outside of this limited space. The way you rewild your garden, smile to ‘strangers’, bring food to your struggling neighbours, start a community-led impact project, help birds survive the winter, create new stories around love and mutualism, teach people all you know about soil, the list goes on. There are so many ways we can choose mutualism over individualism. Mutualistic interactions require care for others as well as care to meet one’s own needs. Encouraging mutualism therefore means encouraging care.

Balancing internal and External Regeneration

Balancing internal and external regeneration in a world that is constantly in all directions is by no means an easy task. We are seeking to create radical impact in the world whilst being part of a financial and social system that does everything in its power to stiffle change and keep up the status quo. Regenerators and impactors are juggling radical change, uncomprised work, with financial burdens and modern life responsibilities. Modern society is like we all know a constant ratrace of tasks, activities, responsibilities, admin management and expectations. Fitting in internal regeneration meaning the restoration and healing of your own well-being, physical and mental health, creativity, agency and silence is hard enough. Equally as hard or even harder is realizing external regenerative transformations. It is no wonder that so many people in the environment and sustainability space are struggling with how Kimberly Nicholas describes it beautifully “ALL THE FEELS” and unfortunately too often burn out, disconnect, neglect their own well-being or give up their impact journey.

So the big question is, how do we juggle external and internal regeneration? How do we truly take care of our own well-being whilst empowering radical transformations? Without regenerating your personal wellbeing you will have very limited energy to keep pursuing external regeneration. So first things first.

Internal Regeneration

Just as external regeneration is place and context-dependent. Regenerating our own well-being, health, creativity, motivation, happiness, and inner peace… looks different for all of us. One of my favourite ways to disconnect from Modern life and reconnect with my essence, calmness and creativity is big canvas painting. For others, it might be drawing comics, writing poems, playing the violin, meditating in silence or cleaning the kitchen. The journey of inner personal regeneration starts with exploring who you are when the noise of modern life falls away. In other words, healing yourself starts with understanding your true needs, not the needs orchestrated by consumerism, individualism, capitalism and all the other isms.

All the kinds of silence.

On a day we go through literally all the feels because we are bombarded with external noise 24/7. Allow yourself peace of mind and the time to hear your own thoughts and feel your own feelings by being careful with all the noise you consume on a daily basis. Try to on a daily basis build in different types of silence into your day. Not just the audio kind of silence.

News & Social Media Silence

You don’t have to be aware and up to date all the time. It’s okay to not know. It’s okay to not respond. It’s okay to not be aware of a major tragic world event. By being aware of everything, everywhere, all the time and all at once we are constantly overwhelmed. This too often leads to a feeling of paralisation. We can’t solve all the problems in the world, but we can regenerate on a local and meaningful level and for this, you don’t need to be aware of everything all the time. So choose some time blocks per day to cut the noise away. My approach? I switch off the noise between 6 in the evening and 8 in the morning. No news, no social media, no podcasts, no heavy climate reports and no email. Once I started doing this my sleep improved rapidly and I was better able to cope with my emotionally heavy activities during the day.

Activity silence

When was the last time you did nothing? Just nothing? The idea that we always have to do something is deeply intertwined with consumerism. And it’s absolutely nonsense. My parents when I was bored as a kid often told me to go play with my toes. I honestly think we should all play with our toes a bit more. We need idle time in our days, we can’t always be on on on.

Audio silence

Hit pause on the podcasts, turn off your phone, close your laptop, put away the book and create a physical and mental distance between yourself and the noise of modern life. If you have the possibility, try to spend time in silence outdoors. If wandering into the forest, park or mountains isn’t a possibility for you on a daily basis, then try to block in silence at home.

Sleep

Yes, this is an absolute open door. But if you are an environmentalist, humanitarian or impact creator it’s not always a given. Sleep is one of the most important and precious activities of your day. Don’t fall into the trap of waking up 30 minutes earlier to create some extra time to write or get a head start on those emails. If you need to sleep less to fit everything you want or ‘need’ to do in your day, it might be time to seriously reconsider your priorities.

Brain Juice

Our brains are constantly filled with a lot of emotionally heavy information. To stay balanced try to build positive, light-hearted and creative stories into your day. My favourite? Reading fairytales by Neil Gaiman. We humans are a storytelling, myth-loving, creative species. We aren’t wired to only focus on ‘real life matters’, we need to be amazed to spark our imagination.

Nature Connectedness

It’s predicted that by 2050, 66% of people will be living in cities. Being deprived of nature for most of our life it isn’t surprising that we are becoming increasingly nature-illiterate. This only makes it easier to get the feeling that we are individuals stand separate of wider nature and the complex web of life.

Forest bathing

One way to reconnect with wider nature is through forest bathing. Forest bathing emerged in Japan in the 1980s, in Japanese it's called Shinrin-Yoku which translates into ‘taking in the forest atmosphere”. The purpose was to counter tech burnouts and to reconnect citizens to the forest.

“It is simply being in nature, connecting with it through our senses of sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch.?Shinrin-yoku?is like a bridge. By opening our senses, it bridges the gap between us and the natural world.”

Walking

I am one of those people who always say “It’s not far, we can walk”.

Of all things in the world, hiking makes the most sense to me. Walking through meadows and over mountains is beyond powerful and pure in its simplicity. It’s one of the simplest, slowest and purest ways of connecting to yourself and wider nature. Walking allows you to wonder, wander & imagine.

Simply Amazed

We aren’t all able to explore forests, savannas and meadows on a daily basis. Today 56% of the population globally lives in cities. But cities aren’t deprived of all natural beings besides humans. There are mosses between the pavement, bushes, trees, grasses, squirrels, monkeys, pigeons, mice, foxes, bees, the list goes on…. I recently read through one of the bird spotting books of my late grandpa, and I was amazed by the diversity and beauty of pigeons. In short, we don’t need to wander far to reconnect with wider nature. Just look around you with the openness to be simply amazed.

Create

In the time of lives lived behind screens we sometimes forget the powerful feeling of creating with our hands. The simple act of creation nourishes us. Not creation with the purpose of usefulness or commercial gains, but simply creating for the sake of creating. Kelly Lambert, a neuroscientist at the University of Richmond playfully calls handcrafts behaviorceuticals. "I made up this term called 'behaviorceuticals,' instead of pharmaceuticals, in the sense that when we move and when we engage in activities, we change the neurochemistry of our brain in ways that a drug can change the neurochemistry of our brain,".

Play

We forgot how to play. Our inability to play sits at the core of our imagination crisis. Imagination requires playfulness, openness, creativity and brain flexibility. But we started to see play as something for children, and not an appropriate activity for adults. A HUGE LOSS!

“Play helps alleviate stress and generate joy as you allow yourself to get lost in an activity without stakes.”

Play is time spent without purpose. This is not lazy, you don’t need to feel guilty about it! The idea that we should spend all our time in a productive or useful way is a ridiculous idea driven by hyper-capitalism, individualism and consumerism. When playing time flies, self-consciousness fades away and you just don’t want the experience to end.

How are you regenerating your inner well-being? Play, hiking, creating, jumping rope, hide and seek, chess, reading....? Drop your thoughts in the comments and you might inspire someone to try out something new!