The Movement of Movements

The Movement of Movements

Ben Roberts over at Movement Weavers used this phrase today, the movement of movements. It felt like “of course,” as if I both knew it and didn’t. I looked it up quickly and see that it refers to the Social Justice Movement – at least that’s where Wikipedia roots it. But movement of movements aptly describes what many of us are interested in, which includes but is broader than SJ movements.

The “movement of movements” brings a mental picture of many disparate attempts in the same direction. My visual is a million small creatures trying to find their  way out of a hole by all manner of different methods – ladders, climbing on each other, pole vaulting. I know! Crazy but a little like how I see my own labors and that of many of my friends. We’re continually reaching out for something bigger than us that we can’t quite grasp yet – that perhaps isn’t even graspable in the usual sense. Reaching into the unknown which maybe is reaching for us.

But what’s pushing us? What’s driving this? Among the many descriptions of this, all true in their own way, is that of an evolutionary impulse. That’s Andrew Cohen’s phrase, and perhaps others, for the intrinsic quality of spirit or evolution to move toward higher, more unified order of life and consciousness. It’s a way of saying that by whatever name, life itself has an innate drive. And one of the thing that that drive is continually doing is networking. The movement of movements is spontaneously networking.

A more embodied form of that spiritual evolutionary impulse is the mysterious “kundalini” famed in esoteric lore (and the practical experience of many). Kundalini is a name for the distilled and concentrated inner force of life and consciousness that flows and courses through the body as a result of an awakening experience. It’s beyond control and courses through the body like a little lamplighter turning everything on as it moves through the “streets” of the city. It seems to know just what to do. Of course, every part of our body system knows what to do: Cuts heal, food is digested, thoughts get thunk and our tongues and mouths know how to say things we never even imagined we were going to say.

In the social body there’s a force in operation that’s behind our social experiments, weaving together each one of us that’s part of them  in an emergingly  intelligent manner. Our multitudinous individual experiments cooperate with that force automatically. We don’t even have to think about it.

It’s good to jump in and do something in the service of that impulse, to risk making a mistake. The networking nature of it all will tend to correct us. It’s staying apart and isolated from the movement of movements that keeps us in a seeming dead end.

 

 

Celebrating the we-space ferment!

Celebrating the we-space ferment!

It’s so funny, so human. An army of people – a vast army of people like you – are working and dreaming and planning and creating on a new emergent – something as a way to understand and support what is struggling to emerge on the planet right now.

We don’t know what to call this aspiration or else it goes by a thousand names and we still don’t know what to call it. It’s a learning about learning, a discovery struggling into the unknown like so many explorers trying to find the north pole, or the inner pole of silence. Those explorers recognize each other in so many places, online and off. They’re a fraternity with a host of handshakes and passwords they’re making up as they go along, trying to see each other. The planet is rewiring itself as they rewire themselves into it and many others will use that circuitry. Beyond bionic body parts or wearable stuff, we’re becoming part of this emergent thing. A collective intelligence, a we-space by a thousand names is being born.

But like a baby being born it doesn’t – truly doesn’t – know what it’s getting itself into. It’s getting into the world with all its wonderful mess. It’s getting into the depths of family dysfunction as well as the heights of spiritual intelligence and luminosity. It’s getting into all the stuff in between too because all are parts of who we are. The good stuff comes out of the bad stuff like the yogis say, the flower of the lotus emerging out of the muck.

On clear days it’s clear that whatever it is we’re reaching for is equally reaching for us. We see that when we notice that it’s all part of us. The struggle to communicate all this is what we are doing with each other, though falling laughably short as we do and even though it hurts to laugh,. How brave and generous of us!

I like to think you’re brooding in the night as I am on all this. Just to mention a few of you I’ve been touched by (again) in the last few days:  Khuyen Bui, “I write, therefore I get surprised,” currently being not who you’d expect in a Thai monastery when just weeks ago he was headed for Colombia, a mixture of intellectual  brilliance and childlike wonder and a man already found in his willingness to encounter the present.

Ben and Alison over at Movement Weaver Community dreaming of a new weaving. Check’em out on Facebook, holding a generous space for you.

Bill Kauth, co-founder of the ManKind Project which has spawned a thousand groups of men, each of which are part of this pull to a next stage up, visioning what comes next for their movement and the movement of movements. Bill wrote a generous Forward to my book and helped me get sense of it’s place in the world. I’m looking forward to movement collaboration with Bill this year.

Will, Ryan, Vihra, Lori, Mila and many more over at Enlivening Edge Community Conversations where we host practice and learn the skills of upgrading communities and organizations.

My bi-weekly exploration of open we-space with Vihra Dincheva where we share something alive for us and invite others to see how that theme contributes to them. (It’s tomorrow at 7CET, 1PM Eastern by the way if you’d like to join in! Likely to be just a few of us . . . Click this link to join: https://zoom.us/j/199240841)

Anchal Jyoti at Zenergy School of Life in India and the work she and I are doing on using Systemic Constellations to look at national histories in multiple countries, and what prevents us from moving forward.

And you, wherever you are out there. Looking forward to seeing and connecting with you in 2018.