Wind: Power of the invisible
Some podcast themes
Connecting the dots: Making patterns and possibilities visible
Listening to the field: Noticing what resonates and what doesn’t, what is and isn’t said, and what is below the surface and not yet named
Invisible forces that hold us back: Recognizing inter-generational wounds at the root of many social issues
Support from the ancestors, responsibility to all our relations: Returning to a worldview of interdependence
Daring to dream: Naming the world we wish for, for ourselves and our children
Closing well: Acknowledging gifts, letting go, giving our thanks
Acknowledgement
Teaching and song. Thank you to Elder Opolahsomuwehs (Imelda Perley) for sharing this teaching and Friendship Song in this episode, originally from the podcast Tales, Trails and Spruce Tea hosted by Shalan Joudry and Frank Meuse.
“We share the voice we were gifted with, that ancestral breath, with each other. It's our duty to leave behind our gift of harmony, through voice, within Creation. A gift from our two-leggeds to all of Creation is good medicine.”
Related resources
Journal of Awareness-Based Systems Change
Excerpt. Introduction to the Journal of Awareness-Based Systems Change
The social field can be defined as the source conditions that give rise to patterns of thinking, conversing, and organizing in systems, which in turn produce practical results. In this way, the social field is the social system seen not only from the outside (the third-person view) but also from within (the first- and second- person views). A social field perspective addresses the less visible levels of individual, social and relational reality creation: the dynamics, processes and particularly the levels of awareness that underlie and shape the behavior we see more readily. It is a theoretical and practical innovation with significant implications for changing practice and taking a fresh look at what is needed to shift social systems.
Awareness-based systems change, therefore, is a process of co-inquiry into the deeper structures of the social systems—the source conditions—in order to see, sense and shift them.
Vanessa Reid
Excerpt. The Invisible Networks (2020)
Working as a field cultivates a collective resonance which is described as the “magic’ that transforms individuals and whole groups through access to greater sources of wisdom. The word resonance means “re-sound” so when there is a flow of vibration between two things, in this case two or more people, then collectively a new vibration emerges. Collective resonance is “a felt sense of energy, rhythm, or intuitive knowing that occurs in a group of human beings and positively affects the way they interact toward a common purpose,” writes Renee Levi. It arises from the field between and beyond the individuals.
There are many ways that the “enlarged life” as the poet John O’Donohue says, comes to be with us, comes to join us to create a field with the invisible. Synchronicity, as coined by Jung, is also an example of fieldwork, as it results from becoming linked with the environment in a special way, anticipating events or sensing some underlying pattern to the world. There are many examples in different spiritual practices where we access our inner intuition or “knowing”, we open to messages or connection to the beyond. Therapeutic approaches such as in systemic or family constellations founded by Bert Hellinger access the invisible web of ancestral relations that are acting on and through a family system in the present. There is being in “the flow” whereby the connection between people, place and “the invisible” create conditions for us to be more attuned, intelligent and wise.
Jungian psychology describes a collective unconscious that lives alongside and within us. It is available when we accept our whole selves through our shadows, our dreams, our inter-connectivity with our lineage, and the inter-generational transmission of consciousness. Indigenous peoples and traditions live with the invisible in many ways, being in relations with all relations - ancestors, plant-spirits, and the cycles of life and death such as in Ceremony, where all life and time is present at all times. This information – this community – is accessible to us if we invite it in and work with it, if we see it as real and tangible.
Nora Bateson
Excerpts. “What Is Submerging?” (2021)
Before something emerges, the ingredients for it to arise have been simmering for a long time. Today’s issues did not begin last week, or in 2016, they were possibilities fermenting through time. The need to partake in day-to-day life that knits us all into the horrors of industry, warfare, and exploitation — is grown in deep transcontextual processes that have been soaking for generations. The consequences are readily visible in our failing systems and the relationships between them, education, health, economic, political, technological, cultural, and familial.
Out of old scripts and assumptions, entrenched linear thinking habits will seek cause and effect both backward and forward in time. Who is to blame? What is the goal? These questions push the possible actions back into the patterns that birthed the problems in the first place. Fixing the symptoms begets more consequences — and around we go. Both questions miss the slow cooking transcontextual submergence….
From racism to gender inequality to poverty, to soil and ocean degradation and political violence, we cannot fix the systemic issues with explicit, direct correctives — that is not where they live…They inhabit the inflamed scars of previous generations, they grow in the wounds that never healed, they have submerged, and now it hurts everywhere.
In his essay entitled, “From Versailles to Cybernetics,” my father, Gregory Bateson, writes, “The fathers have eaten bitter fruit and the children’s teeth are set on edge. It’s all very well for the fathers, they know what they ate. The children don’t know what was eaten.”
Not knowing what has submerged over time becomes unquestioned attitudes in responding to whatever may happen later. The combining becomes ever more invisible, even though the grooves of the sentiment continue.
Thomas Hübl
“The intelligence in what is hidden” (2021)
As human beings we want to grow, we want to expand our radius of consciousness, we want to be more aware of the world. So why should I appreciate that which I don't see? When we do inner work, we quickly discover the intelligence in what is hidden.
That which is split off, dissociated and hidden is so because at some point is was more intelligent to hide it than to keep it visible. In the hiddenness of life lives much information. There is individual hiddenness and there is collective hiddenness.
The collective absence is the playground of everything that causes crises and disruptions in our society, up to the deepest atrocities. They happen in the unseen part. Unseen by us as the collective, which is all of us.
Vanessa Reid
Video (TEDx). “Conscious Closure”
Personal practice
Margaret Drescher shares a practice that includes “just being with whatever is” and tuning in to the breath.
Ryan Veltmeyer shares a breath practice that he learned as a saxaphone player, and which he finds especially helpful in transitions (e.g., getting ready to host).