Being Transformation  
 

“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. 
You can steer yourself any direction you choose.” 
— Dr. Seuss

Things are changing. They always have. Human history is an unstoppable motion, continuously striving towards transforming itself. All kinds of change processes have been happening to humanity since day one. Our self- and world-view, our habits, and ways to organise life changed quite a few times during our existence on Earth. In this context Foresta Collective engages into long-term research around intentional cultural change — we are interested in a shift of paradigm towards more integrity and care on individual and collective levels and the interconnection between them. Entering into the 3d decade of this century, there is an increasing sense that basic ideas we are guided by and those that shape structures we’ve built to make sense of the world are becoming outdated: the “factory model” of education, mindless overconsumption of planetary resources, intolerance to cultural pluralism, ways of production that lead to environmental degradation, superficial short-term-economics-driven politics, neoliberal mindset, cultural integrities challenged by the rapid digitalisation and slow catching up of social and emotional development, and so on. There are quite a few issues that demand change and involve a conscious collaborative and transdisciplinary effort for co-creation of new narratives, and a different cultural paradigm. What is this new story about? What are the common denominators of it across and beyond different “departments” of society? How are various ecologies that we inhabit connected? And is there possibly a link between one’s personal and a bigger cultural transformation?

This text is an on-going inquiry. Ecosystems thinking is at the heart of our work. Humans are ecosystems within larger ecosystems. Ecosystems thinking acknowledges interconnectedness between the personal and the relational, local and global. It is at the root of the emerging cultural paradigm, voicing interconnectedness of personal and societal transformation within a multi-layered understanding of sustainability. Here, philosophical reflection, lived embodied experience, empirical information, and intuitive creativity, are all integrated and thoroughly entwined. Regeneration towards sustainability is not only a set of how-to’s aimed at reducing the footprint of human existence on the planet, but on a deeper level a mindset and a way of taking care of direct and metaphorical ecologies we inhabit, realising their interconnectedness. Sustainability can thus be described as a holistic wellbeing. Physical wellbeing cannot be separated from the emotional, mental, social, and environmental. Human wellbeing is inevitably connected to that of the world around — the quality of water, air, food, as well as the quality of our manyfold relationships and entanglements with other humans, other-than-humans and the natural environments. This research involves conversations with people from different fields involved in transforming their worlds. Although everyone we talk with comes from a different background, common insights emerge that cross disciplinary boundaries and fixed identities. What follows is a personal reflection on change of values, enriched by cross-pollinated viewpoints. It’s not a settled account of things, but rather a current crystallisation of what could be described as catalyst elements for transformative processes taking place in the world, or let us rather say in our world, in the world that we experience. 

 
PERSONAL ENLIVENING  

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud
was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
― Anaïs Nin

Thinking about transformation within the context of ecosystemic integrity, we could look at it on these three levels: individual, relational and systemic. Think of those as various levels of magnitude of ecologies we inhabit, each closely linked to the other. Our personal ecologies are fundamental to the larger systems we are part of, to relations we form with other humans and other-than-humans, projects or organisations we build and lead, and other societal structures and systems that are consequent fractals of the micro ecosystems that we are as individuals. All that is not revolutionary knowledge. Most organisations are aware that their company’s culture is a combination of their founder’s values and shadows. Countries led by dictators often manifest violence in their day-to-day cultures and behaviours around the dining table. But this is somehow neglected as we shift our focus on trying to solve global issues, more often than not without looking at their ‘younger siblings’ in our individual selves.

When I shift my attention towards the personal scale, I become aware of the living diversity that I am, not too different from the biodiversity of the natural environment I am part of. Acknowledging various intelligences that make up my being, and offering my emotions, sensuous experiences and intellectual world equal significance naturally undermines the story of the almighty brain governing the body. Questioning this paradigm of central control and hierarchical power structures out of our personal experience lets us transpose these insights into larger structures. Bringing gentle attentiveness to your personal self invariably enlivens your being. Such personal enlivening is an enabler for personal change. We could think of it as a kind of compilation of trust, empowerment, wellbeing and a sense of wonder. It also has to do with personal maturity, with ability to make decisions and take responsibility for your life, being attentive to the world around and within. This is when you become more conscious of your own values and more courageous to stand up for them. That’s when you become a leader of your own change. Indeed, nobody else can change your life except you.

This kind of personal autonomy mindset is being fostered, cultivated and cherished through supporting structures and practices like self-directed learning in educational settings, Teal and Agile practices in work environments, initiatives encouraging people to do more things with their own hands, such as makers movement or urban gardening, and other pursuits where people learn to take initiative and responsibility, to grow personally, to wake up to themselves, to trust that they know best what they need, what they want and how to get there. Even though the latter often emerges through encounters and shared insights. But about this in the next chapters. There are multitudes of ways to enliven our being. Some could be described as external: from congenial conversations, good music, or a cup of delicious tea to strong emotional impulses, such as the birth of a child or a loss of a dear one, from refreshing to life-changing. Some are more self-generated and come from the body. Re-inhabiting our bodies we can find a more holistic sense of who we are, what we resonate with, what is good for us and what isn’t, where our truth is and where we may be guided by ideas foreign to our inner being. It’s by bringing the body into daily awareness, tuning in to its communication through sensations, feelings, inner flow, and felt sense, that we regain inner integrity. Personal enlivening comes from inner integrity. We can survive but we cannot live without integrity. Without it we turn life into a continuous struggle — with this or that aspect of ourselves, with the not accepted, the hidden, the turned-into-shadows.

Integrity means that when our internal truth radar catches something that doesn’t feel right we do not try to shut it down, we do not rationalise our way out of feeling it, and we also don’t follow it blindly. We rather engage into a gentle investigation of its roots and fruits. All parts of ourselves being integrated means that what we think, feel, want, sense — all go in one direction, without one dominating or excluding the other. Each part is heard. Respected. Taken into account. Feelings are often misunderstood, but it is actually through feelings that we learn about what’s important to us, what we value, how we are tuned-in with different aspects of reality. Stanley Kubrick mentioned that “the truth of a thing is the feel of it, not the think of it”. It might be a combination of both. The trouble with feeling is that it’s full of unprocessed stories from our personal histories. And the courage to let go of what is old and outdated and to follow what is now being perceived and lived by each one of us is a giant leap of personal emancipation, an act of enlivenment. Love is the practice of enlivenment.

SENSE OF MEANING

“I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. 
I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process – 
an integral function of the universe.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller

With personal enlivening comes a wish or even a need to live more meaningfully. Finding of one’s own meaningfulness takes quite a bit of attention, presence and tuning-in to your inner and outer worlds. Love drives it. To find your love, what you really care about and focus your action towards it is a big task, especially if you are a curious one and the whole world interests you. Curiosity and resonance lead the way of an inquiry towards a personal sense of meaning. Yet there is a pitfall. Currently a rather mainstream approach with plentiful offerings out there are spreading a myth of an easy access to The Purpose. If you just follow those “7 steps to a meaningful life”, or if you just listen to that person who knows better than you “how to uncover your purpose”. There is a dominating impression, especially in achievement-driven cultures, that there is The Mission each of us is born to uncover and once that’s done, this will bring a happy and prosperous life.

While those concepts are complex and intangible, a sense of inner truth or meaning is part of human experience. Yet finding that source requires a different attitude than that an achiever-mindset is promoting. We are multitudes in motion, and a purpose for an individual or an organisation is an alive organism that is constantly evolving, so to keep holding its hand one better be an attentive listener and a sensitive dancer. Discovering this inner meaning brings long-term value. It often lives far from surfaces and marketable strategies. Let’s look at it from a few different perspectives: within an organisation, a learning institution, and on a personal level.

Several transformation consulting companies we spoke with while writing this shared that in their processes of trying to support companies to find their purpose they ask clients two questions — why and what for: “why” comes from the past, “what for” is for the future. “What for” aims to reach all the way into the core values that move people. There has to be a real intention for change, not just general clichés, like for example “technology will change the world”. It’s not technology, it’s the people — our deeper drives will determine what technology we create and what we do with it. Sense of meaning for organisations is expressed through shared purpose. Connecting with people (employees, partners, customers) through naming and embodying values, those organisations have a potential to create shared purpose with their stakeholders. People are more and more conscious about how brands and their products have an effect on things and increasingly choose value-driven brands over others. “The most important brands make you feel something. They do that because they have something they want to change,” — David Hieatt, co-founder of HiutDenim and TheDoLectures, writes in his book Do Purpose. Such brands feel human. David writes that purpose can come from defining your enemy, whether it is bad design, pollution, ugliness, or other things that bug you. From there you understand what you want to change. As well as remembering that you have limited time, as everyone living on this planet. Time is our biggest gift, and the tough questions at the end might be “Did I use my time well?”, “Did I do what mattered most to me?” “Did I find my love?” “Did I pursue it like a wild hungry dog?”.

When values change on the individual level, they spread further into larger structures: families, organisations, institutions, societies. The work of universities has traditionally been about doing research and educating students. According to recent research conducted by Kennisland, a non-profit dedicated to research and design in the social innovation sphere and working on sustainable societal renewal, this is also changing. More and more universities embrace a wish of “generating social impact”. They write about how some universities aim “to move from understanding society towards advancing society”, and emphasise that “working in a more multidisciplinary way within the academy” is a crucial moment if these intentions were to generate impact. This movement towards advancing society is not only about dissolving the strict boundaries within academia, but also between universities and the outside world. The question of how educational institutions could open their doors for the outside world in meaningful ways is also present for Amsterdam University of the Arts (AHK). Bridget Kievits, a vice-president of the AHK executive board, with her team are inviting back to the university those who have already graduated but who may want to come and learn further, to update their compass to better navigate in the ever-changing world, or even to come in another role and share their knowledge and experiences with the current students.

Finding a way towards a more meaningful life is professional and personal at the same time. In fact the two are becoming increasingly connected. Our time is not divided into departments, unlike a mall or a university building. So whether at home or at work, whatever field we are working in, we want to spend our time more meaningfully. One should be careful with a single-sided definition of meaning or purpose, to avoid the trap of assigning just one purpose to an individual or an organisation. In the fluid and complex systems that humans, organisations and ecologies are, purpose is an emergent phenomenon that may evolve continuously. Staying aligned with an own sense of meaning is largely influenced by ways one pays attention and co-evolves with other beings. Let’s look at human bonds.

 
HOW TOGETHER*

“…to the extent that people dwell in the same world, and are caught up together in the same currents of activity, they can share in the same meanings. Such communion of experience, the awareness of living in a common world of meaningful relations, establishes a foundational level of sociality.” 
— Tim Ingold

The emergence of a collaborative mindset is one way of calling the change in relationships between humans. This word differs in different sectors. For some, a more fitting one would be co-creation, participation, engagement, or a mindset of inclusion. The core however stays the same — kinds of engagement are changing: who we are is indeed always in relation to others, and a more respectful, attentive, inclusive, and less hierarchical relationship to fellow humans is a key for changing things, both individually and collectively. This text is about ideas that go beyond disciplinary boundaries. When a society is faced with challenges, it’s especially important that we look across fields to find new ideas and adapt to new circumstances. Here I’m asking questions around how together, how does movement towards more regeneration, resilience and prosperity in the long-run happen.

Based on their values people create networks, fostering more connected, more real and deeper relationships. Sharing stories over a cup of tea with Wieteke Vrouwe I got an insight into her affluent experiences with projects for social innovation at Kennisland. “When I was working as a researcher in social psychology experiments, I would have to assess social situations in a laboratory settings, which in my opinion is not representing reality. I was the one who had the power to make interpretations and decisions as to what my research results meant. This power to interpret reality in such a way can be problematic. That’s not the way I wanted to do things.”

To solve this problem together with like-minded practitioners they created social labs at Kennisland — a format that allows doing social research work in real life setting. Focused on one specific social challenge (for example, youth unemployment, loneliness, education challenges), they bring together all stakeholders involved with the issue. Encouraging people to listen to each other, to be human. They ask questions that are real for people, like “How do you feel?” “How do you want to live your life?” “What is valuable to you?” “How can we help?” In such practices you can create a policy together with people for whom this policy is actually being designed. It’s incredible what can be accomplished by a seemingly simple act of bringing people together and creating a context for genuinely listening and talking to each other.

The rise of “cultures of co-” (co-working, co-living, co-designing, co-creation) signs the end of traditional hierarchical structures that rely on territorial thinking, sealed divisions, reporting systems, job titles, and academic degrees. In the settings of cooperating with people it becomes more about who you are in reality, what you care about and how you act upon it, how engaged you are, who you are in relationships with others, how well you understand and express yourself and let others do the same.

Once traditional hierarchies leave the stage, the importance of meaningful work comes in. You do something not because someone in charge tells you to, but because you choose to do it. You find your meaning in it. And therefore you also feel personal ownership over the work. It brings the idea of the ‘commons’ closer, it changes ownership towards co-ownership. ‘Commons’ can be resources, things or projects managed by people who are co-responsible users and co-creators. Working with one another becomes a choice. Choosing to engage with each other people join forces based on shared purpose and trust.

Trust goes both ways: trusting and being trustworthy. Transparency, network thinking, empathy and eye-level open communication become essential. Empathy understood as an interpersonal sense of being able to see, feel and recognise the other person and not my assumptions or interpretations of them.

“Vision always needs practice”, — says Diana Krabbendam — “we develop by doing.” Diana is leading The Beach, a community-driven project hub in Amsterdam, where they bring together people who live in the neighbourhood, the locals, the newcomers, and create connections between them by creating meaningful places, where people can develop on their own terms, while doing personal or common projects. “We are guiding people to find their own ways to do things. And even before that, to start defining their own challenges.”

Working towards contributing to creation of a more shared neighbourhood, an ecosystem within a larger ecosystem of the city, The Beach as an organisation fosters shared decision-making processes. “We need new processes of decision-making. We need to be taking into account more intangible things, emotions and emotion networks, and not only formalistic or rational factors like risks, benefits and so on.” says Michiel Schwarz, who is also one of the co-founders of The Beach, and a cultural change thinker. — “We are in a new territory. We need to find new ways of relating to each other, so that everyone is heard. This is why the idea of ‘commons’, which is seeing a revival in social change movements, becomes so important.”

Elements of such practices are already here, offering glimpses of what is possible, and waiting to be brought into a more cohesive system through further collaborative discoveries in the “everyday living laboratories of our communities, our friendships, and our minds”, to quote On Being Project.

The trend for cultural institutions too is to become more empathetic and connected with their local communities, aware of people’s values, needs, and challenges, in their diversity. “Modern cultural institutions need to embrace intercultural community-driven development to make sense of themselves. Otherwise you end up with the wonderful infrastructures we created in order to share the ideas and the wealth of world heritage, that are serving only a very small part of the population, and are therefore not fulfilling their full potential.” — says Jasper Visser, a cultural innovator and change-agent.

There are certain things that need to be done to keep society prosperous and sustainable, so cultural institutions can take responsibility for some of these challenging tasks and address them. Jasper believes that these institutions need to engage and respond to local circumstances of their communities, aligned with the local sociocultural, environmental and political contexts.

Being storages of great art, facilitating individual experiences of reflection and aesthetic experiences is wonderful, but often not enough in today’s world. So the museum has an opportunity to become a multidimensional space. A community then transforms from being an audience towards becoming stakeholders and participants. Not only museums, actually any kind of institution, can take care for the communities they are part of, and invest into building and supporting these relationships. That’s where the real value comes from.

ATTENTIVENESS 

“The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, 
joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.”
― Henry Miller

Developments described above are largely based on unraveling of genuine attentiveness. It can also be called presence, referring to a state of being and perceiving grounded in the present moment rather than operating within some preconceived categories or mental representations. To be there when we are there. This outlook has emergent qualities rather than fixated ones. For example, viewing a person as a being in becoming, whose fluid identity emerges from the synergy of their interests and interactions, rather than from a title or another fixed definition slapped onto them. Out of such a state of attention a different kind of action can take place, one that makes meaningful change possible, that is based on care, on seeing what is happening and discerning how we can contribute.

Usually we are taught to control reality rather than to pay attention and experience it. We certainly do need a certain degree of control, but the excessive control that has become a norm is hurting us. It often has to do with the habit to dominate our own minds and bodies, or those of others, in order to achieve some set goals. Habits of domination come from obsession with productivity, and therefore specialisation, competitive comparison, and “knowing” how things should be. In her TED talk Amanda Palmer says that we’ve been obsessed with wrong kinds of questions of how we “make” people do something (pay for music, in her example), when in fact it’s about connection, about really seeing each other, from where a genuine wish to do something can emerge. Being attentive to someone, you perceive who they are and what they want, from there you can see if you’re walking in one direction and whether you want to walk together.

Change towards genuine attentiveness is connected to the dignity, beauty and fear of being in the present moment. To really encounter the moment, ourselves and others for what they are involves courage. We often stay at what seems a safe place of looking at the world through the glasses of our education, experiences, beliefs, and other historical heritage. Even if often doing so prevents us from more sincere and spontaneous interactions with the world. It’s like having a huge overloaded suitcase, full of old frames of references, ideas and feelings, that we’ve been carrying for far too long. To unclench our hands and let go of that suitcase is an act of courage, it catapults us into the now.

Everyone finds their own catalysts to arrive at a state of attention grounded in the present. One I especially like is adapting a kind of life poetry as a looking glass, a feeling of awe at being alive and its mysteries, poetic ways of noticing the world, thinking and doing things, as if it’s the first and potentially last time. Poiesis in ancient Greek means to create. We create by the ways we see. Artists of all kinds have a sense of heightened perception of life around. They could be our guides to rediscover this poetic vision, to spend more time in the wonder of the world we are living in, of each other, and of ourselves. This is one of the reasons why we started Visual Strolls and why the portrait of LaForesta is changing every season. So that every now and then we could look at the world through the eyes of a different artist, discover another way of seeing things, explore new perspectives.

Another slingshot into more presence I’d like to mention is the practice of unifying body and mind perception — a reciprocal recognition and a link between interoceptive awareness and cognitive reflection. In my experience it starts with a continuous conscious effort not to interpret, but to witness, to be alive in all senses, while inner experiences are responding to the outer on different levels of consciousness. It seems especially relevant in the world where we find ourselves increasingly in a situation where there is a screen between ourselves and the direct experience. When our bodies are hardly involved, and we trust the eye and brain of a machine to bring the world closer to us. (To dig deeper into the subject of one of our main lines of work — what we call embodied culture — check out Body Matters.)

BALANCE

“What you think, you become.
What you feel, you attract.
What you imagine, you create.”
― Buddha

The world is full of contradictions. Opposing forces are at play everywhere. They guide our life experiences, get us into and through situations and battles. Transformation is a continuous search for dynamic equilibrium between those forces. Balance is created by oppositions. When the pendulum goes too far in one direction, new ideas and practices emerge to restore the balance. Our perception of the world is balancing between the objective and the subjective, the rational and the irrational, intellectual and intuitive, inner and outer, directed and free, magical and ordinary, right brain and left brain. In fact, they cannot exist without one another. Our understanding of value comes from the equilibrium between them. 

One of the areas that has been critically out of balance with respect to articulation and recognition of value is a struggle between the quantitative and the qualitative. Globally, governments still continue to call GDP most valuable measurement of how well people in any given country are doing. They place value on a number that takes no account of human or environmental wellbeing, nor any other values that exist outside the markets and financial indicators. That’s also an example of an utterly outdated value indicator that is described by the recent Club of Rome Report. The creators of this report look at a few different factors that are out of balance in Western societies (including human/nature, men/women, individual/collective) and call a restoration of this balance, a shift in the worldview — “new Enlightenment”, described as a fundamental transformation of thinking towards a more holistic worldview that takes into account and respects the opposing forces: which is humanist but not anthropocentric, open towards development but sustainable and taking care of the future. Though instead of “new Enlightenment” we prefer the word ‘Enlivenment’, understood as an “upgrade of the deficient categories of Enlightenment thought – a way to move beyond our modern metaphysics of dead matter and acknowledge the deeply creative processes embodied in all living organisms”, quoting Andreas Weber. (For a deeper insight have a look at Enlivenment: Towards a fundamental shift in the concepts of nature, culture and politics) 

In our perception the ‘dictatorship of numbers’ is changing. In fact the quantitative and the qualitative need to balance each other, as they serve a larger equity and include economical, social, emotional, educational values, values of personal growth, or those that emphasise the impact people have made. Many schools are rethinking their ways of evaluating students, as traditional school tests fail to measure a myriad of important qualities, like empathy, humility, passion, leadership, integrity, persistence, compassion, endurance, work ethics, commitment, ability to inspire, collaboration, creativity, vision for the new. Kennisland research on co-creation of knowledge questions how scientists “translate ‘soft data’ like experiences, ideas and emotions into measurable indicators and classifications to enable generalisations and to make comparisons across different groups”. There is a growing understanding that some relevant data cannot and should not be made ‘measurable’. "In addition to it we need stories that can uncover the nuances and exceptions that make up complex social reality.” Indeed we cannot understand complexity of living systems by trying to measure, standardise and generalise. This way we reduce human experiences and undermine truth. As the noted educator Elliot Eisner put it, “not everything important is measurable and not everything measurable is important.” 

Dualistic cosmology is inherent to cultural mythologies worldwide. They often tell about the twin nature of reality in and around us. Opposites need each other. Yin needs Yang, just as much as Yang needs Yin. Gregory Bateson, anthropologist and holistic thinker, wrote in Mind and Nature: “Rigor alone is paralytic death, but imagination alone is insanity.” Whole picture includes no less than everything. But instead of trying to cancel each other out how do the opposing forces balance each other? How does it connect to releasing them from our judgment? With acknowledging the twin effect and integrating their opposing qualities into a more wholesome sense of self and worldview?

HOLISTIC MINDSET

“Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.”
― Leonardo da Vinci 

Children know that. Living systems theories too tell us that everything is connected. The world is comprised of systems nested within other systems that are nested within other systems that are all interconnected with each other. The relationship between them is where the meaning and power lies. Everything exists in a continuous unfolding relationship to each other.

At Sitra, the Finnish innovation fund, they are envisioning, researching and cultivating ideas and practices for the new Era of Well-being. Wellbeing is a holistic concept, if we look at people as holistic systems within their environments. Physical wellbeing cannot be separated from the emotional, mental, social, or environmental wellbeing. Our wellbeing is inevitably connected to the wellbeing of the world around — the quality of food we eat, water we drink, air we breathe, the qualities of what we perceive, sense and interact with, including our relationships with other people. This holistic perspective on well-being we call Multi-Layered Sustainability.

Circularity of living environment calls for designing our built environments as ecosystems. “Human beings, our ways of organising our lives are as much part of these ecologies as nature and the physical world,” — says Michiel Schwarz. We discussed with him how what we value, what we think we need, directly influences what and how we produce, how we design our world and everyday lives, from food to health, to business models and institutions, what is private and public, how we view ourselves and others. It also influences what we give power to both physically and in terms of our attention. Everything is in relationship with everything, so learning to see any issue not separate but in a web of other issues it’s related to, is crucial to a holistic mindset and outlook.

Also learning is circular. It never stops. Ideas that we are holding are seeds of other people’s ideas, constantly moving in relation to each other, in an ecology with each other.  The world is not made up of separable items of knowledge, in which one can be tested by a series of disconnected questions with true or false answers. We are living densely linked lives in a diverse non-linear interconnected world, where knowledge and narratives around it become socially constructed. Rethinking what education means, what needs to be taught, how, whom and when,  is on the agendas of many educational institutions. How education can support people in gaining a better sense of themselves, of multitudes of their capacities and talents, cultivating qualities really needed in life, helping to choose a direction to take and leaving it open and free to evolve at the same time. Holistic understanding of education is not only about the process of learning per se, it’s also about the whole context, the surroundings where you find yourself (how much of natural environment do you experience, what’s the built environment like, how much light there is, etc), how much do you move, who are the people you are learning with, what are your relationships, etc etc. 

We are multitudes. We too are versatile holistic systems. We are not one thing. And we need to be able to explore those different parts of ourselves, variety of our intelligences and abilities that involve our minds and bodies. We need to be able to travel to different parts of ourselves. Being exposed to different perspectives and ways of doing things is extremely important. It affects the way we think, feel, decisions we make, relationships we build. Liberal arts education is an example of educational philosophy that aims to teach people to see the whole landscape of any chosen subject, its diversity and continuous unfolding, instead of looking at divided contexts of disciplines in standardised and simplified manner. There are other examples, including the not-yet-born.

The need to reunite our worlds is clear. At the same time there is no one size fits all. At Foresta KIDS as well as at Foresta Academy the educational projects we engage in aim to support human multiple intelligence, and unfold within a search for balance between prepared impulses and self-directed learning, focusing on cross-disciplinary concepts and rooted in direct experiences. It’s a balance between people’s own self-chosen adventures and an invitation into the ones we have designed for them. Inner capacity of any particular human is striving to realize itself and therefore needs to be free to create own structures, and at times to be guided and supported. At the base of everything we do together with people is a search for a balance between encouraging self-awareness, individual inquiry, imagination and creativity (as the power to imagine and incrementally create things with your own hands) as well as social awareness and attitudes that lead to connection with others. What we see as crucial aspect to our formats is for contributors/impulse givers to embody the qualities they teach others, and to keep alive the process of their own learning and becoming. These are some of the meanings we put into our understanding of holistic learning. 

Looking at the higher education, practices implemented at Fontys School of Fine and Performing Arts are inspiring to us when it comes to re-integration of the world being addressed by the academia, through such projects as an interdisciplinary week (when students from different faculties are creating a common project), or teachers working together to unify theory and practice of a subject (at a dance faculty, for instance). Another example we feel connected to is an interdisciplinary summer school of design Rihards Funts and his team are building together in Sigulda, Latvia. Inspired by Black Mountain College they are weaving together arts, crafts, science, design, embodied awareness, working, living and learning together between teachers and students. 

Also for a museum holistic experiences matter. Following our conversation with Jasper Visser, a more extensive impact a museum can have is when people’s lives are being affected on multiple levels. “It’s when you didn’t just organise a great exhibition, but you touched lives of people in your community. So that going out of a museum people have grown, learned new things, gained new perspectives, attitudes or relationships.”

INFINITY…

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.”
― T.S. Eliot

A more sustainable and holistic mindset is at our doorstep. Will we invite it into our living rooms,  working studios, learning spaces? The mental patterns and linear thinking of the industrial era have served their purpose well and are now ready to be let go of. Transitioning from one set of values to another we address limits of our ideas and convictions. The process of growth happens. We understand ourselves better. Personal enlivenment, meaningful work, honest partnerships, genuine attentiveness, search for balance and holistic vision drive us in this journey. 

The danger is that this whole ethos of transformation to the better world is easily marketable and can become shallow: unless truly meant and embodied, big words risk to burn out and become meaningless. Vision needs practice. Things that are embodied and real are done with care and reflection, thus making up a good foundation for any transformation that is not a hype, but a true and sincere wish for change.

Leadership starts with the ability to first lead ourselves. For this we need a well-tuned internal compass. To understand what drives us personally, which values give us meaning. Leadership of larger teams is grounded in this foundational self-leadership. When mindset changes, systems and structures follow. Individual and collective change are closely connected to each other, in fact they are inseparable. As much as physical, social and environmental wellbeing are inseparable. Individual impact sets the stage for global transformation, for a vision of that "new era of wellbeing and sustainable future" that is common and at the same time unique to each locality.

Inviting wonder and poetic vision back into our lives, becoming more landed in our bodies, grounding our values, and engaging in real and honest conversations with each other, we build different kinds of relationships. The de-standardised and self-organised ‘cultures of co-’ become possible. Everything can be described in terms of its relationships. Zoom in and see the details, zoom out and see the context. Institutional boundaries increasingly blur. Institutions are searching to become values-led, sustainable networks aiming to affect people on different levels — beginning with the inner life of the individual and radiating out to touch the world. Agents from different areas become more proactive, merging into one socio-cultural educational and business environment, based on things that matter rather than professional divisions. Changes are happening towards circular economy, purpose-driven companies, sustainable architecture and design, more inclusive institutions, and in many other areas, which we didn’t look at writing this text. 

David Hieatt in that same book Do Purpose we mentioned before, quotes Richard Beckhard and David Gleicher who wrote a formula for change. It’s quite simple: DxVxF>R — where D is Dissatisfaction with how things are, V is the Vision of how they could be, F are First concrete steps that can be taken towards the vision, and R is Resistance to change. So making a full circle and coming back to that one transformation we can really affect, which is our own individual one. What's your formula for change? What are your dissatisfactions, visions, resistances and first steps? What’s your intentional transformation about? 

____

*It’s a book title by ConstructLab

Thank you Wieteke Vrouwe, Ricard Ruiz de Querol, Jasper Visser, Diana Krabbendam, Michiel Schwarz, and Egor Sviridenko, for sharing your time, ideas and experiences in untangling this subject. 

If you, dear readers, want to discuss these questions in real life, come and join our next Woods in the City collective practice in Berlin or an upcoming meeting of our nomadic Seasonal Academy. 

“The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time,
but takes place every day.” 
— Samuel Beckett

BONUS

Roots of Transformation

lessons and leverage points for sustainable living
a report by Boundless Roots

“Maybe you are searching among the branches, for what only appears in the roots.” — Rumi

In 2020 we joined a vibrant community of change-makers Boundless Roots. It’s been an informative collective inquiry into mindset change towards regeneration and life-sustaining environments. The organising team (Leila, Mareyah, Louise, Theresa, Jenny and Daniel) have put together a report to share our learnings. Roots of Transformation: lessons and leverage points for sustainable living. You can download it here. Or directly from Boundless Roots.