Life keeps showing me that it’s hard for many people to hold more than one perspective, to feel care for all needs across lines of separation.

A few recent examples…
– A taxi driver who couldn’t see beyond the assumption that being pro Palestine means hating Jewish people.
– Showing care for trans people and the assumption that then there isn’t care for women’s safety.
– Reactions to talking about care for more than one side and the assumption that it is making them equivalent.

How can we bring more light to this shift? How do we bring more fully into our culture the possibility of caring for many needs, of going beyond being on one side only without thinking the differences don’t matter?

I guess we keep modelling it, keep writing, making art, having conversations, praying, whatever it is we can do.

And I look for it in me too. When it’s part of the culture we swim in, it will have made its way in to my own patterns and beliefs.

Without that capacity developing in more of us, I can’t see us finding a way to a world that works for all, where all of us can be safe, free, and living our full wild life. It feels like it really matters, especially now.

At its core, ‘Nonviolence’ means minimising harm. It’s a moment by moment commitment, to tune into what’s here, to act from integrity, to live from love.

And yet it’s not as simple as it sounds. We have strong examples of nonviolent resistance, and there’s a wealth of insights and tools from nonviolent communication, and yet something about this way of life is hard to put into words.

There’s no rule book, no formula to follow. It’s not pacifism, it’s not sitting by, and it’s not doing what people want you to do. Often there will still be harm, and even our conscious choices will bring up pain. This too is part of the journey.

We all carry so many layers from our life so far and our social training – our hurts and sensitivities, our patterns and habitual strategies, our identity and core beliefs. To find what’s true, beyond fear, hatred and delusion is the deepest dive you’ll take, and it’s a moment by moment choice.

It’s a rich, raw and alive way to live. Sometimes we need to take more time to process than a situation demands. Sometimes it’s not clear what’s from love and what’s from fear. Sometimes our habits and beliefs are so strong, it’s hard to see other possibilities. Often I need others to bounce off, to process with, to tell me what they see, and help me find clarity.

If you feel the call to nonviolence, if you are committed and finding it a stretch, if you could do with some support from others on this path, who do you have alongside that you could reach out to?

If you would like some support from me, I offer one to one sessions on a donation basis. Feel free to get in touch.

A year or so ago i had a strong vision during a drum journey. There was an old white man lying down who was dying. He was full of tension that i knew intuitively was a result of his own ‘meanness’, how his ego and stories had driven him to hold on tightly even to his own body. I looked up and there were some indigenous medicine people that gave me some liquid to give him, not to cure him but to soothe the dying process. I understood this is what i am here to do.

The vision has puzzled me ever since. I am drawn to supporting groups and communities to create new systems, to move from hierarchy to collaborative ways of working together. I have been part of protests and campaigns, naming injustice and calling in what i see, but it doesn’t feel core to my work. Finally today, the pieces have slotted into place and this mission is clear.

I want to be part of dismantling white supremacy, patriarchy and the binary gender system. And i want to do it in a way that soothes the dying process, makes letting go easier and less painful. I want to find a way that is from love and not from more self criticism.

Dismantling injustice with love

I am totally committed to seeing through social constructs of race and the illusion of white supremacy, and dismantling systems of oppression. I want to live in a post racist world, where we see each other for our potential, where we welcome people who have been forcibly displaced, and where people who are gender nonconforming interact with systems that are designed for their reality too*. I want us to see through our unconscious bias and co-create conditions and systems where we can all thrive and fulfil our potential.

I identify as white and female, and I see that often in spaces i am in, our attempts to do this often look like more self monitoring, more self criticism, more right and wrong, more effort and tension. We try to keep track of not being racist, not playing out white fragility, not using the wrong pronouns, not asking when we should be doing the work, not taking up too much space. I feel in myself and see in others how trying to live from a place of constantly falling short of some ideal cuts us off from flow, from who we really are, from our life force, and from the self love and wholeness that we all long to feel deep down.

Finding another way

I want us to find a way where we can undo the violent separation of these systems, see what is really true, and do it in a way that is kinder, more forgiving and connected to our hearts.

I want us to find a way that is easier on our nervous systems. I want us to feel more love not less.

I want us to become anti racism without more guilt, blame and shame. I want us to take responsibility and at the same time not believe it is ‘our fault’, to know we were socialised into a racist society and make different conscious choices naturally because at a fundamental level we are interconnected, one.

There is fear that in hearing this people might have a story that i am not committed, that i am not willing to see, not willing to go into the pain, not willing to change, that i will fall back to the dominant paradigm, that i don’t really care. It is a story i have told myself too.

There is fear that people might have a story that i think i am the only one saying this, when there are many amazing people doing amazing anti racist work with love. I have also experienced great love and wisdom in spaces led by black people, and i wonder if this is another idea of whiteness we are unconsciously playing out? (Spending time with brap and others doing this work for 3 days recently inspired this thinking.)

So often it feels as though a critical mind is the sharp knife many of us are trying to use to do this healing work. It can also make this work less accessible to some of us who find lots of concepts hard to process, especially when also dealing with trauma, marginalisation or lack of access to resources.

What now?

I want to find ways to do the work with more empathy, understanding, self acceptance and compassion that i know can heal separation, alongside the strength and courage and willingness to sit in the fire that it takes to do this work.

I want people alongside that can both challenge and support me, call in what i don’t see and meet me with love and gentleness, and i want to do that for and with others too.

I want to learn from people who are finding ways to do this work that is simple and accessible enough for people with a less conceptual kind of wisdom to understand and embrace.

I want to integrate this wisdom and these practices throughout my life and work, and share it with others.

For us to have a chance at co-creating a more just, equitable, caring and sustainable world, it feels vital.

I am more committed than ever, as many of us are. I would love to know your experiences and where you see this happening, to receive your support and challenge with equal gratitude.

In solidarity and humility x

Resources

I intend to start a list of relevant resources/links here as i find them or people share with me – i hope that is useful…

• Brap
• Race resilience training
• Black joy in pursuit of racial justice
• Decolonising nvc

*NB: I acknowledge many other forms of systemic oppression and marginalisation, and this is where my heart and attention is drawn at this time in my life for various reasons (circumstantial and unknown).

This post is inspired by and offers a brief overview of Miki Kashtan’s blog on ‘Nonviolent Communication for Liberation – flow, mobilisation and emergency.’

Key themes:

• Liberation and healing are related and distinct
• Empathic support is needed and not sufficient for liberation
• Patriarchal conditioning affects all of us, creating a foundation of scarcity in which we live and function in separation and experience persistent powerlessness
• Liberation is both internal and external, it needs to include liberation from all forms of social oppression, including in particular the core patriarchal structures
• Every person can reach toward personal liberation and every person can have a role in moving the world toward collective liberation
• Fully integrating NVC and adopting it as a way of living is inconsistent with capitalism, with either/or thinking, and with scarcity, separation, and powerlessness, all of which are at the root of all patriarchal societies
• It is exceedingly difficult to integrate NVC all the way into our being as an individual living in such societies
• To counter the immense societal and inner pressure we can create communities that co-hold the move towards liberation
• One way of understanding what liberation means is that we reach the capacity to choose how to respond to life instead of reacting to it, more and more of the time

Flow, emergency and mobilisation

• Flow is the natural state of any living organism
• Emergency is what happens when we perceive a threat to our survival, which then activates the fight, flight, freeze system in order to rapidly react to what’s happened
• Mobilisation is any state in which we pull together resources to attend to the purpose at hand
• When we are in trust in the flow of life, and emergencies happen at a rate that we can bounce back from, we can thrive
• When we are within the flow of life, we mobilise and make complex decisions by connecting to needs
• We learn to apply rules and norms without engaging in relationship, without attending to anyone’s needs or preferences, and without complex considerations
• Under conditions of chronic multigenerational trauma and living within separation, we are more likely to interpret situations as a threat to survival than I imagine we were before patriarchy

What NVC can contribute

• NVC can bring flow by reducing the thoughts that interfere with being able to trust our preferences enough to follow them – increasing self-acceptance, releasing tension and judgements, and increasing willingness to listen inwards.
• Gaining fluency in translating judgements and in accessing needs can support us in reorienting to actual needs of all concerned
• NVC can help us move from either/or win/lose thinking to collaboration and trust
• NVC supports integration by giving us the capacity to be with our feelings without getting flooded, which increases the chances that we will respond to difficult situations using the tend-and-befriend pathway and without activating the fight-flight-freeze pathway
• NVC can increase our capacity to disentangle observations from interpretations and, in doing so, to reduce the frequency with which we will interpret what is happening as a threat
• If we enter conditions of emergency with an integrated capacity to see needs, we can more quickly get to the heart of the matter so resources can accurately flow to needs
• If we recognize that the primary reason why the range of our options is so small stems from living under conditions of patriarchy, then we can find deeper capacity to choose to liberate ourselves from them
• NVC supports liberation by helping us see how we have internalized them through patriarchal conditioning
• NVC gives us more options for how to respond to life

If any of this sparks your interest, i really recommend reading the article.

I would love to know what you think.

This is one of the most profound, resonant and deep teachings i have ever heard.

Exactly what i needed in this moment, a story of what is happening in my own experience and blowing me away, summed up in 1 hour 11 minutes.

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/rewilding-with-sabrina-lynn/id1151621599?i=1000539202101

And knowing for each of us what we need to hear in the moment is different, so this will speak to who it speaks to and not all. Trust yourself, trust what you sense you need next moment to moment, always.

Here is just one part, as a taster, transposed for those who it might speak to and might not otherwise click the link…

“The first step is to face the extremity of the crisis and stop having magical thinking about it, just to be brave enough to realise that we are now in the definitive crisis of our evolution region, and there is a global dark night, and it is exploding, and it does threaten our survival.

And you can’t not face that because, facing it I’ve found doesn’t necessarily drive you into paralysis and despair, it drives you into the deepest possible search for who you really are.

And that gets to the second point, believe the mystics – believe all of the mystics or all of the traditions who say with one voice – you are divine, and you’ve been given as an original blessing, divine consciousness, you’ve been blessed by that. And believe them and they said the whole point of being on the show is not just to read that and think oh, I’m divine, I’m divine, but to realise what that truly truly truly truly means.

Because if you do get anywhere near that realisation, you start dancing naked to Tina Turner around your place. I have done this, I’m afraid to say, because there are moments when you are so overwhelmed with gratitude and amazement at Being, through grace, the living Divine Child of the father, mother, that you can’t do anything else but take your clothes off and just say thank you, Lord! Whoever it is for you, be prepared for those moments of ecstasy!

The third thing is is that in order to realise this, you need to plunge into sacred practice, and the most powerful practice every evolutionary mistake, and this is true of all of the religion says is the simplest. I’m a great advocate of totally simple practice. And that is saying the name of God, by whatever name you worship the divine.

Whatever you believe in, adore the face that is turn to you of the Divine and say its name in the heart as often and wildly and temporally and rapturously as you can and you will discover what Kabir has when he says the name of God through age after age binds me directly to God. So by saying the name in the heart with reverence and passion, you discover over time that you’ll be taught directly the different stages of the mysterious unfolding of your true nature.

So that’s what needs to be done.

And there’s a fourth stage – realise something.

And I just tell a story here about the Dalai Lama. I was interviewing the Dalai Lama, on the day that he was going to win the Nobel Prize in Oslo. I was sent by Vogue or Elle I don’t remember which, a little pixie was sent to him to interview the Great Kahuna. You know, so I was sitting in this long oblong room in this hotel in Oslo, with the Dalai Lama alone, and I asked him absolutely everything on my mind, and he answers so beautifully and it was two hours, two hours with him. And at the end of this two hours, I couldn’t get out of the chair because I was so overwhelmed by his presence, because he’s the sweetest people but there’s this vast vast force of embodied love around him. And he came up to me and hoisted me up, and I was momentarily breast to breast with him. So I looked up at him and said, we’ll never be in this position again. What’s the meaning of life? And he roared with laughter. I mean, that Roar is still echoing in every cell of my being. And then he got very, very, very quiet and very strong. And he pointed at me. And he said…“The meaning of life is to EMBODY the transcendent.” And as he said it, this golden energy went up and down. So I was even more up by then, when he took my hand and he led me to the door and very tenderly said goodbye to me.

You cannot just realise your divine nature, you have to embody it. Bring it down.

Rumi says love flows down, so your heart mind opens to the transcendent but then your job is to unite that realisation with your mind so your mind becomes a servant, united with your heart so your heart becomes an organ of universal love. And then do the difficult, the wonderful work of uniting it with the cells of your body, so your body becomes God’s body, like His holiness – His body is clearly present to what he’s doing is reaching out, loving, loving, loving all the time. And that means action.

So the last part is to put what you are being given by the Divine that loves you so much into action – sacredly inspired action and service on behalf of the creation, on behalf of animals, on behalf of the poor, on behalf of the rich that are lost in ignorance and greed, on behalf of every single sentient being, tirelessly, relentlessly, with humour, with joy, with passion.

If you can combine those four stages, you won’t be spared suffering, my friends, you will go through a lot of suffering, but you will know what the suffering is asking of you – to go deeper into surrender, to go deeper into love, to go deeper into service.

And you will realise whatever happens to the world, that you are the Divine Child of the Father Mother dancing with them both on that burning dance floor, and a great joy will be in your life arising from the source of Joy itself that is the Divine.

If you get into the direct connection, you will be given the Wisdom you need stage by stage. The people you need will appear, the book you need will fall open at the pages you need, you hear the podcast that will open you, you see on TV somebody who gives you the peace that you’ve been waiting for, because the whole universe wants you to be born into your Empowered Human Divine Self.

And if you align with that there is so much grace heading your way, including the grace of our appalling crisis which should wake you the hell up to the complete sterility of any other solutions but this one.That’s a grace.”

Wow. I am left speechless. To experience this and then hear it here spoken, sent to me from a friend who knows nothing of where i am in my life. I am so incredibly grateful, and so in awe!

Through a conversation with a good friend and collaborator reflecting on work we are doing in GM around homelessness, I realised a model had formed in my head around social change that turns out to be a mis-remembering / combination of two well known models! Yet somehow this seems to be supporting me to make sense of things I am seeing, and felt worth sharing.

Joanna Macy’s work includes the concept of ‘Three Dimensions of The Great Turning‘…

Alongside this, Saavedra and Paul Engler at the Ayni Institute developed ‘Social Movement Ecology‘…

In my imagined version, this had become what is shown below, with three types of external change, and in parallel supporting all of that is the personal ‘inner’ transformation happening within individuals and groups – not separate from but alongside and as an integral part of the systemic ‘external’ change…

Each of us will be working in support of one or more of these dimensions. I see in some of the tensions and conflicts experienced in social movements and partnerships, some of what is happening is that we are seeing what we are doing within a different part of this map.

For some of us, often outside of institutions, we are thinking about creating alternatives to our current system, rather than changing (in less radical ways) what is there. For others of us within institutions, constrained by our roles that exist within systems that can feel outside of our power to change, we might be looking at the work as changing dominant institutions lens, and focus on what is possible within our given power.

Many individuals and projects will cross these lines, perhaps some of us hold a vision of a different world that organises based on very different principles (such as organising based on needs rather than deserve, as with nonviolent communication), but in our work role put that aside for what is realistic within the structures that exist.

The dying of the old

I had a vision a few months back, of the dying of the old system (represented by a gnarly yet frail white man), linking with ancient wisdom (represented by ancestors from earth based cultures), and being given guidance to soothe the dying of the old system so that the new could emerge (represented by a medicine that soothed in the dying process rather than intending to heal).

I wonder about some of the work we do in changing existing systems, whether we are keeping them going, rather than supporting them to die and make space for the new to emerge. It is hard to imagine that, with care for those who would be most affected in this transition.

Taking one example i am involved in…It does matter what services are offered to people experiencing homelessness. It does matter if less people have to love on the streets or in substandard accommodation. And maybe some of what we are doing is keeping the ‘homelessness system’ alive, even if in a slightly better form than before. And what we really want is to create systems where resources flow to meet needs, where there is community and a support system that actually works, and no-one has to experience homelessness in the first place.

I’d love to hear any reflection and any other models making sense to you, as we make sense of all of this, in the midst of transformation, the way forward emerging as we take each step.

In gratitude to Joanna Macy and The Work That Reconnects, the Greater Manchester Homelessness Action Network and many others past, present and future for the work you are doing to co-create a more beautiful world.

So many of us are looking for ways to work together that are collaborative, moving away from hierarchy and power over and force and ‘should’ (the legacy of Patriarchy), and towards sharing our gifts, responding to needs, staying within capacity and flow.

In so many places where these experiments are happening, I see beautiful things happening, but sadly also conflict and burnout and struggle. Without the structure of authority which is all most of us know, we need some other form of structures in place to support the co-creation and flow that we want to find. Without any structure, we inevitably will fall back to informal and invisible structures will develop over time, recreating the systems that we have been trying to avoid. (I recommend reading the classic essay ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness‘ for more on this.)

It can be so tempting to skip over this step and focus on tasks that need to be done. I hear often ‘but we are all nice people, we will just keep talking’, and i love that, and also see often it is not enough. It is sad to see conflict, burnout, stress and tension coming in when the initial intentions of projects and energy people bring has felt so hopeful.

The way I support groups to organise is based on the work of several people/organisations whose work I value, most notably Miki Kashtan (Nonviolent Global Liberation) and Frédéric Laloux (Reinventing Organisations). The following is a brief overview of some of this learning, with links to follow if you want to know more. Please get in touch if you would like some support to work through this process with a group you are part of, or for support with existing conflict.

Foundations

For new or existing groups, a starting point can be to looking for shared clarity on the foundations of what the organisation is and why it exists. This from Miki is the most precise and clear description of the key elements I’ve found…

• Vision: where we’re heading – what we want to see in the world over time.
• Purpose: why we do what we do – what inspires us to get up in the morning and do the work.
• Mission: what we do – the nuts and bolts of action, including strategy, goals, objectives, and action steps.
• Values: how we do what we do – what we orient towards to operate with integrity in service to our purpose.
• Theory of Change: why we believe in what we do – the rationale for the mission as a way of accomplishing the purpose.

In addition to getting these clear, it is also super important that anyone involved has awareness and easy access to these principles, so that the framework can support everyone when confusion and conflicts arise. Within all of this we stay aware of willingness and capacity, our strengths and limitations, so that what we do is not asking anyone to stretch beyond what’s healthy for them.

Structures

From these shared foundations, we then look for the minimum organising structures to put in place so that we can get started. These can be lightweight and simple, or more complex, depending on the context. Again, Miki’s work and Reinventing Organisations guides us through finding the systems and structures we need to support us to align systems to purpose. Here are some of the key structures and questions to bring into the room…

• Decision making: Who will make which decisions and how?
• Information flow: How will we ensure information is accessible and transparent to everyone who might need it?
• Resource flow: How will we generate and distribute resources?
• Feedback system: How will we know what is and isn’t working for people?
• Support system: How will people get support in a way that is within our capacity?
• Conflict system: How will we respond when there is conflict?

There is often a mix in the group between people who want more structure and people who want less. This can be a cause of tension, but also a useful balance. A model i find helpful in thinking about this is ‘The Chaordic Path‘ – in the sweet spot between too much chaos and too much order is the chaordic, where there is flow and creativity, conditions for emergence.

“As we move between chaos and order, individually and collectively, we move through confusion and conflict toward clarity. We are all called to walk this path without judgement – some will feel more comfortable with chaos, others with order. Both are needed as, together, we walk the edge that is between these two toward something wholly new.”

Each group will need to find this place for themselves, creating just enough structure to support people to understand how they can contribute their creative ideas and energy in a way that supports the mission of the group.

Please get in touch if you have feedback, questions or are interested to find out more.

Recommended Resources

• Aligning systems with purpose and value (Miki Kashtan)
• Reinventing organisations (Frédéric Laloux)
• The chaordic path (Art of Hosting)