Taking Your Inner Work Outward

I enjoy books and webinars immensely, and I find that sometimes there are ‘coincidences’ in themes across disparate sources. It’s how my paper Resonances?came about. In recent weeks, I’ve noticed that it seems to be happening again. I’m choosing content seemingly at random, but ringing through all of them is this deep insight of interbeing: it is relationship which gives rise to a being, not the other way around. This has had me holding the question: What would that change about how we practice our work in the built environment if we operated from this co-arising, entangled, interrelated perspective?

I’m not going to attempt to weave it all together in this post (That feels like the work of my next paper…??). I’m going to focus on one of the sources, Sophie Strand. ?

Boundary as Threshold rather than Barrier

Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley in North America. She speaks in a way which is hypnotic, lyrical, and deeply authentic. In a recent podcast as a presenter for the Collective Healing Conference 2024, she talked about human bodies as intermediaries between larger and smaller systems. Each of us is a co-arising across many scales and many connections, and that our bodies are ‘doorways’ through which these processes ebb and flow. She offered the idea that humans are ecotones: ‘In ecology, a place that comes into being only when two other places meet, is called the ecotone. It’s the biological convergence zone that occurs when one distinct ecosystem abruptly transitions into another, creating, briefly, an intermediate and novel ecology.’ This seemed to me like an important making of space for the idea of a boundary as a zone, rather than a line. What happens in these places of intersection, overlap and rubbing-up-against? What is this ‘thirdness’ generated from these meetings and mixings? It got me to thinking that permeability may be the critical characteristic of most boundaries.

In Living Systems thinking, we understand is that everything is connected, and what happens in one system, affects all the others. This idea of nested, reciprocal, dynamic interrelationship is essential to regenerative practice. Here’s a definition from Carol Sanford:

‘Regeneration is a paradigm and accompanying set of capabilities based on the awareness that every life form is unique and nested within other, larger living systems. Every life form grows and expresses itself in order to benefit the living wholes within which it is embedded and receives benefits from these wholes in return. It is capable of regeneration only to the extent that it is part of a larger, value-adding process.’

Being a contributing participant in the regeneration of these larger systems depends upon us engaging in intentional relationship with those systems.

Wholes

One of the ways we do this is to consider ourselves and the specific whole(s) within which we are nested. A whole is distinctive; it has organised itself as a whole and committed to being so. It can change its own structure, has systems that work to keep it alive and working, and can change the processes each time it engages in them. As an example, your body is a whole. It can change its structure - your muscles and bones develop according to the patterns of use, so if you are a cyclist, your body builds large quadriceps and calves. Your body has numerous interconnected systems - circulatory, pulmonary, nervous, digestive - that feed it and keep it working. The body can change its processes according to each set of circumstances it encounters - at the start of a cycling race, it will release adrenalin to ramp up the heart rate and direct blood flow to large muscle groups. When the race is over, it can re-adjust to allow rest and recovery.

We work with wholes because we are interested in understanding the uniqueness of a system, because it has a particular essence which is different from any other. Again, it is useful to think about a person as an example. You are not the same as your mother or father, even though you share similar structures and some specific DNA. If someone wanted to understand what you needed to thrive, it would be unique to you. It is only from here that we can start to ask about potential within the system.

Working this way is then not just random riffing or projection. It is grounded in the specific, seeking to understand more deeply, to find this resonant alignment before choosing a course of action or a location of intervention.

Considering Nested Wholes

To get a better idea of how this works, try an application. Start with a system you probably know pretty well: yourself. Begin considering these levels of interrelationship:

• Locate yourself within your place/ecosystem. If you are fortunate enough to have access to a garden, you might start your considering here, and then go for a walk through your neighbourhood, so that it’s based in an experience of immersion.
• Starting with your body as a whole: consider all the processes and exchanges that your body is participating in every day. What are all the relationships you depend on? What depends on you? Really take the time to be with the complexity of this and note the character of these relationships.
• Then move out to the next level and do the same thing. Keep going for at least one more level. Then reflect: How would you describe these relationships?
• Now – focusing on that next level out from your body (so maybe it’s that garden), what would this system level look like if it was thriving? If that level were thriving, what would that enable for the next level out? What would that enable for you?
• If that one level out from you is not thriving, what is the unrealised potential that emerges from this considering? What can you see that wasn’t previously apparent? What if you were to place yourself in service of that thriving? What would be made possible for you? What increased level of complexity and/or system expression would be enabled in the larger systems?

How did you go? What insights did you glean? I’d encourage you to try the same exercise in other contexts – for your family, for a project. What would change about how you show up in your human relationships and your work, if you could see that bright line connecting all the way from you out to the thriving of your team, company, clients and the ecosystems your work touches? What would become possible that had been previously hidden?

For more on wholes, have a listen (or read) to Carol Sanford on the Seven First Principles of Regeneration: 116: First Principles of Regeneration | Carol Sanford

I look forward to your reflections in the comments below.

#regenerativepractice #sustainability #ecotone #wholes