5
Leading the Personal Inversion:
From Me to We

Stepping into the field of the future starts with attending to the opening of an inner crack. Following that crack requires us to let go of the old and “let grow” something that we can sense, but that we cannot fully know before we see it emerge. This moment, which requires us to move although we cannot yet fully see the new, feels like jumping across an abyss. At the moment we leap, we have no idea whether we will make it across.

As human beings, we are on a journey of becoming who we really are. This journey to ourselves—to our Selves—is open-ended and full of disruptions, confusion, and breakdowns, but also breakthroughs. It is a journey that essentially is about accessing the deep sources of the Self.

Man Is a Rope

The nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche saw the tension between current reality and the possible future state of the human being.¹ In 1883, he wrote in Thus Spake Zarathustra:

Man is a rope, tied between beast and Superman [Übermensch]—a rope over an abyss.

A dangerous crossing, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking-back,

a dangerous shuddering and stopping.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved

in man is that he is an overture and a going under.

I love those who do not know how to live, for they are those who cross over.²

We are a rope over an abyss. A bridge, not an end—a living embodiment of crossing over. When Nietzsche wrote these lines, none of his readers, colleagues, or even his friends understood the deeper existential crisis that he was talking about. Nobody got what he was trying to say. Certainly the Nazis didn’t get it when they started misusing his writings more than thirty years after his passing. Nietzsche’s writings mark the beginning of a significant disruption or opening in human consciousness. He saw the abyss, and in his journey he failed to reach across it.

Today the presence of the abyss is no longer a singular experience of an individual philosopher who 130 years ago anticipated and seeded the great turns of twentieth-century philosophy by taking human thought to the edge of death and rebirth. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, probably for the first time in human history, the living presence of the abyss—that is, the simultaneous existence of one world that is dying and another one that is being born—is a widely shared experience for millions of people across cultures, sectors, and generations. It is experienced in communities as well as in ministries, global companies, NGOs, and UN organizations—wherever people are looking at the real picture.

It’s a felt sense that applies to relationships, institutions, and systems, but even more to the personal level of our journey from self to Self.

Cracking through the Wall

The other day we saw, at the edge of a parking space, a young sprout of a tree that had just pierced the layer of asphalt above it. When you see something so improbable, you can’t help but wonder how it happened.

This image captures the essence of what we see so many people doing today. Everywhere you look, you see remarkable individuals and communities that have managed to break through the walls of trauma and tyranny in order to connect to their deep sources of humanity. What are the conditions that make these breakthroughs possible and allow “miracles” to happen time and again?

Conditions of Possibility

Knowing who we are is impossible as long as we direct the beam of observation away from ourselves and onto the exterior world around us. In order to discover true self-knowledge, we have to bend the beam of scientific observation back onto the observing self—that is, back onto its source. Francisco Varela described this as the “core process of becoming aware”: his three gestures of suspending, redirecting, and letting go that mark the downward slope of the U process.

We follow the movement of bending the beam of observation in the remaining chapters of this book: for transformation of the individual (this chapter), of relationships (chapter 6), of institutions (chapter 7), and of society (chapter 8). We will describe a new meta-pattern of transformation that we call inversion (Umstülpung in German), a deep opening process of turning a social field completely inside-out and outside-in, of upending things.

In our discussion of the Matrix of Social Evolution in chapter 4, we differentiated among four types of listening:

Listening 1 (habitual): projecting old judgments

Listening 2 (factual): directing the beam of observation onto the world around us

Listening 3 (empathic): adopting the other person’s perspective and therefore seeing ourselves through the eyes of the other (bending the beam)

Listening 4 (generative): listening from the whole and the emerging new, which further turns the beam of observation onto the deep sources of Self

BENDING THE BEAM OF ATTENTION IN BERLIN

One example of these qualities of listening occurred in our advanced practitioner program at the Presencing Institute. In the last module of a two-year program, seventy-two participants from nineteen countries met in Berlin in June 2012. Our colleague Dayna Cunningham remembers one particularly affecting experience that demonstrates the power of bending the beam of attention:

Several of our group with a Jewish background had lost family during the Holocaust, while other members of our group came from a German background. Spending a week together in Berlin, visiting, among other places, the Holocaust Memorial, brought back painful and yet important memories to many. A group of us—Germans, American Jews, and an African American (me), all women—sat at dinner one evening talking about what it meant to be in Berlin. One of my very dear German friends began to describe the pain they have experienced as Germans, a sense that the whole world sees you in a very negative way. She talked about German society’s determination to address the past head-on. Based on her own horror as a child when exposed to the graphic history lessons, my friend questioned whether some of the exposure was too early for some German children who perhaps are not ready to encounter the horror of that history.

As she told these stories, I could feel a sense of rage rising in me. All I could think about was that the Jewish children I know must confront the horror of the Holocaust from the earliest age because it is their own family history. It made me think of the many conversations I’d had with my white American friends who felt they needed to shield their children from the harsh truth about racism in the US until they were ready to hear it, while I was forced to talk to my own very young children about “driving while black,” for instance, so they would not think that their father, who was regularly stopped by cops, was a criminal. From my earliest encounters with the random hatred of racism, I’d learned to cultivate anger as a form of self-protection.

So I could not listen quietly any longer to my friend’s experience. “Really?” I said aloud, my rage right on the surface. “How old do you think Jewish children are before they are exposed to the horrible truth? Maybe from birth?” I then unloaded my stories of painful experiences with talking to my children about racism. I talked for a while before bothering to look at her to see the impact my words were having. When I did, I found her sitting so quietly and looking so sad that it brought me up short. As I understood it then, my lack of curiosity had visibly hurt her. I felt very bad, regretted that I had not listened with an open mind, and apologized for my insensitivity. I asked her what she would propose as a better way to address the dilemma of facing the pain of this history. Her answer was smart and humane: create a mode of dialogue that enabled everyone to heal.

Through that exchange, our conversation moved rapidly from level 1 (polite and conforming) to level 2 (blaming and confronting) and then to level 3 (reflecting and connecting) as my friend and I got beyond knee-jerk blame and shutting down. But we were not finished. I came home that night and called my son back in the US to describe what had happened. I still did not feel right about the exchange. I could not forget the image of sadness in my friend’s face; something had begun to move in me, but I did not yet know what.

It all became clear the next day. Our whole group of seventy-two change-makers experienced a profound shift of the field that allowed Jews, Germans, Americans, Asians, Africans, Latin Americans, and Australians to connect to each other and themselves on a much deeper, more raw, and more vulnerable and essential level than any of us had experienced in such a group before.

Otto opened the conversation by bringing us back to the experience of being in Berlin. It was emotional for him, and his willingness to be raw and vulnerable opened a crack. Suddenly many people were sharing their own personal stories. One story shared by Gail Jacob, an American Jewish woman, deeply touched me. Her mother, a death camp survivor, had faced unspeakable horrors in the camp, but the only memory she had shared with her children was of seeing Germans weeping as they lined the streets outside the camp when it was liberated. For me, it was breathtaking that she chose only to highlight the humanity of a people whose country had committed such atrocities against her.

As the stories unfolded, the listening in the room dropped deeper and an incredible conversation started to take its course—a shift of the field that allowed each of us to see our life’s journey from a different and more collective angle. There was a flow experience of speaking from the core, speaking from my not-knowing, speaking from what is moving through me and through us. Many of the stories were about intense personal suffering, but in the room, held by the collective listening, they were transformed into moments of powerful healing.

Another participant, Yishai Yuval, from Israel, remembers:

On the preceding day, we had visited the Holocaust Museum and had shared emotional experiences within our subgroup. Then in the evening our small coaching group met for dinner. Each of us shared our feelings with the others. This was the last opportunity for us to be together, face to face, in that week. We were very open to each other.

The next morning at some point, Otto stood up to suggest that we reopen ourselves to the meaning of convening in Berlin, [of] having Jewish colleagues, even Holocaust survivors, among us. People stood up and talked for more than an hour on suffering, cruelty, and the need to remember. I looked around at my fellow Jews in the room, expecting them to join the conversation. At the beginning, none did. It hit me that this type of discussion can’t go on while the victims’ voice is missing. So, contrary to my habit, I raised my hand to ask for the microphone. The ten steps from the corner where I was sitting into the group’s circle were a very long journey. …

What happened was a personal defining moment. Everything slowed down around me. There was no need to struggle with words and sentences. They just came one by one in the right order. I felt the faces around me listening, radiating profound empathy, deep understanding, and love. It became easy to share with the group the notion that, prior to being exterminated, Holocaust victims struggled day after day to maintain their dignity as human beings in the midst of the surrounding horrors. Many of them realized that humanity and love didn’t save them, concluding that anger, aggressiveness, even hatred might do better in that daily struggle for survival. As an Israeli, this is the heritage I was born into. One can count only on oneself to be strong and suspicious. I was proud as a soldier, trained to kill if necessary, blessed for protecting my own family and people; blessed for not being helpless; blessed for not being in the mercy of brutal killers like my mother’s parents and sister [had been]. But time moved on and suddenly we, Israelis, have the power over other people, forced to face annoying questions: Are we strong enough not to exercise power and still remain safe? Had the time arrived to put aside suspicions and hatred, open our hearts, and offer real peace with our enemy? Or is it naïve, even dangerous, to expose humanity in the face of an opponent?

As I talked, looking around the circle, I felt I belonged and was connected to the whole. The deep listening and empathy radiated around me well after I stepped out of the circle. A little while later a young Jewish American woman stood up at the opposite corner of the big hall, asking just to sing a piece written by a young, brave Jewish woman who left Palestine in 1944, parachuted into Hungary on a rescue mission, but was caught by the Nazis, tortured, and killed:

Oh my God, my God
Let it never be stopped
The sand and the sea
Rustle of the water
Flash of the sky
Prayer of Man. …³

Yishai continued:

Hearing her gentle voice singing so emotionally, I couldn’t resist standing up, at the other side of the hall, and joining her. Since then, whenever I hear that song I tremble inside. It touches me in an unknown land, in a way unrecognized to me before. I’ll never forget that precious moment of connection with that wonderful young woman as well as with the whole group.⁴

Antoinette Klatzky of New York, the young woman who sang the song, remembers how that situation unfolded from her perspective:

At twelve years old, I attended Jewish day school and learned of Hannah Senesh, a young woman who was killed by the Nazis at age twenty-three while rescuing Jews from Nazi-occupied Hungary. At age twenty-six, sitting in the space with seventy-two change-makers, I listened deeply as each voice shared a personal story, and I felt a crack within myself open. Each time someone spoke, I could feel the crack widen, my heart beating harder, thumping in my chest for each drop of pain or ray of hopeful healing. I could feel the hymn, Hannah’s prayer, rising from roots that I didn’t know I had. I felt the words jump into my heart, the melody beat through my veins, and like an earthquake my body lifted me to a standing position. The world was in this room—the past, the present, the future—and it was as if I had lived every moment of my life to sing this song. The lyrics, in a language I hadn’t spoken in years, began to flow with my tears as each word was a crescendo of its own. Voices seemed to fly in to join us through the windows, the room was filling with rays of light and sound, and I could feel Hannah there with us in Berlin. The song finished. The song ran its way through me like electric current in the wires above. I melted back into the chair, feeling completely held.⁵

Shortly after that, Tho Ha Vinh of Vietnam and Bhutan stood up and shared a poem by Thich Nhat Hanh. “The name of the poem is “Please Call Me by My True Names,’” said Tho and reached into his pocket to pull out a small journal that helped him to keep this poem close to his heart. Tho started reading:

Don’t say that I will depart tomorrow—
even today I am still arriving.

Look deeply: every second I am arriving
to be a bud on a Spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with still-fragile wings,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
to fear and to hope.
The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death
of all that is alive.

I am a mayfly metamorphosing
on the surface of the river.
And I am the bird
that swoops down to swallow the mayfly.

I am a frog swimming happily
in the clear water of a pond.
And I am the grass-snake
that silently feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks.
And I am the arms merchant,
selling deadly weapons to Uganda.

I am the twelve-year old girl,
refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean
after being raped by a sea pirate.
And I am the pirate,
my heart not yet capable
of seeing and loving.

I am a member of the politburo,
with plenty of power in my hands.
And I am the man who has to pay
his “debt of blood” to my people
dying slowly in a forced-labor camp.

My joy is like Spring, so warm
it makes flowers bloom all over the Earth.
My pain is like a river of tears,
so vast it fills the four oceans.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and laughter at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up
and the door of my heart
could be left open,
the door of compassion.⁶

Stillness. Tho sat down. We all felt that the walls between us had been melting away. Time had been slowing down and elevating our own experience of that moment. We started experiencing the situation from multiple angles. I am the girl. The pirate. The child. The weapon seller. I am the victim and the perpetrator of the Holocaust. I am in you. You are in me. I begin to feel the we. The we is something in me that isn’t me. What brings us together here on this earth? Why are we here? “What struck me most deeply,” remembers Dayna,

was the level of connection and compassion people expressed toward others who had been life-and-death adversaries or who had done violence to them: the soldiers, survivors of assault and neglect, the Jewish descendants of Holocaust survivors, and, yes, the young Germans facing a world that blamed them. I now could see that the night before I had been unable to open my heart, not just my mind. Gail captured precisely what was moving through me at this time: “I am sixty-three years old. I’ve spent my whole life as a Jew thinking I was alone in this world, thinking that if anything happened to me or my people, no one would help. Now, in this room in Berlin, I understand that I am not alone.”⁷

Condition 1: Bending the Beam of Observation

What are the conditions of possibility that allow a profound collective shift like the one in Berlin to happen? What allows a seedling to pierce a ceiling of asphalt, or a movement to bring down the Berlin Wall?

Probably the first and most important condition has to do with bending the beam of observation. It happened to Dayna when she saw the sad face of her friend and realized that she had caused it by reacting in a way that was habitual. It happened to Yishai when he joined the conversation and words flowed in unexpected ways. And it happened to Antoinette, who was moved to stand up and sing a song she hadn’t heard or thought about in years.

Each of them described the same social grammar of opening, of cracking the wall of asphalt that separated them from one another and from the deep levels of their humanity. They each tell the story of bending the beam of attention back onto its source. The beam first radiated into the outside world (level 2), then bent back onto the self (level 3), and then found the sources of self, of becoming present in the moment, in the now (level 4). That is the first condition of shifting the field: bending the beam of attention back onto its source.

Condition 2: A Holding Space for Embracing the Shadow

The second condition of possibility concerns the holding space. The bending of the beam happens in a social holding space formed by true listening from the heart. Dayna turned the beam of attention back onto herself at the moment she felt the pain of her friend. When Yishai, in his words, “felt the faces around me listening, radiating profound empathy, deep understanding, and love,” he was empowered to make his courageous move. At that point Antoinette remembered “feeling the true presence of what each heart is holding.”

The cultivation of a holding space allows a shift of the social field to happen—the mind and the heart begin to open. The holding space that was created in Berlin had started to form six months earlier in a small gathering; each participant in the seventy-two-member master class had met monthly in this small-group coaching circle for two years. The purpose of the coaching circle was to provide a level 4 listening environment for each person’s personal and professional journey. Gail remembers:

When we met in our coaching group six months earlier, I shared my trepidation about going [to Berlin] and using that as an opportunity to visit where I was born—the displaced persons’ camp near Dachau, from where both my parents were liberated.

Before I knew what I was going to say, I was talking about going to Berlin and taking my family to where I was born for the first time. I started crying and then the group wept together for a long time and there was this amazing knowing in the group about healing—not only me, but knowing also how the world needs to heal from our collective trauma of war and genocide.

There I was sitting next to Otto, a German, and two Buddhists: Tho, a Vietnamese; Julia, of Korean descent; also Yishai, an Orthodox Israeli Jew; Jim, a former military person; and Antoinette, the next generation. … They were able to be my holding space. … I felt the earth shift. I’ve carried the wounds of the Holocaust in my DNA and in my being every day of my life. Somehow for the first time I began to see the possibility of transforming that energy into something else.⁸

After that experience in our coaching group, we all carried that moment of transcending connection with us when we arrived in Berlin six months later. When I (Otto) sensed that something wanted to happen, it was because of that coaching circle. When I stood to open up and hold the space on that morning, it was because of the presence of our circle in the room—of directly feeling the connection to Gail, Yishai, and the others.

“The field shifted during that morning with the class,” remembers Gail, referring to the quality of the holding space. “We were open to each other and we were one. It was as though collectively we needed to embrace the shadow in order to glimpse what is needed to heal the world. And for me, the fear was gone.”⁹

Healing, health, and holy all share the same word root, hal, which means to “make whole.” The Berlin experience provided a holding space for making whole at a collective level unknown to us before. As Gail put it: Collectively we needed to embrace the shadow in order to glimpse what is needed to heal the world.

Condition 3: Going to the Edge of Letting Go

The third condition of possibility concerns the willingness to go to the edge of the abyss, to let go, to lean into the unknown—and take the leap. When Yishai, against his nature, took the microphone, he took that leap. So did Antoinette and Gail, and many others. The holding space enabled us to go to the edge without pulling back.

The condition of going to the edge comes in two different forms. Sometimes it means that you have to take the leap, to jump off the cliff from the known into the unknown. Sometimes, when you feel that something is beginning to emerge, it can also mean to not jump away, but to stay with what wants to emerge. In both cases we deal with a deep trust in reality and self, in connecting to the deep levels of the field. Going to the edge means having the courage to not hold on to the old, to let go and lean into what wants to emerge through us. And then, as Martin Buber put it so beautifully, “to bring it [the new] into reality as it desires.”¹⁰

The story of the Berlin master class is just one example of people connecting in small coaching circles with the presence of letting go and letting come, of dying and rebirth. It’s a movement that is starting to happen all over the world and that has many different faces, forms, and practices. Let’s look at another inspiring example.

MINDFULNESS-BASED STRESS REDUCTION

Jon Kabat-Zinn is professor of medicine emeritus and founder of the Stress Reduction Clinic and of the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He is also the developer of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), the program upon which the Stress Reduction Clinic is based. Since its founding in 1979, the clinic has trained over twenty thousand medical patients. The MBSR program has been replicated and institutionalized in over 720 medical schools, hospitals, health-care systems, and stand-alone clinics worldwide and has given rise to a number of other mindfulness-based interventions closely modeled on it for particular medical, psychiatric, and social conditions. The success of MBSR is one of the principal drivers of the heightened interest in mindfulness in health and cognition sciences at the beginning of the twenty-first century (see figure 9).

So how did this success story of MBSR come into being? What are the origins of this movement that is touching the lives of hundreds of thousands today, and that thirty years ago no one had even heard of?

FIGURE 9. Research publications on mindfulness, 1980–2011. Figure prepared by David Black, MPH, PhD, Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology, Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, University of California, Los Angeles. Source: J. M. G. Williams and J. Kabat-Zinn, eds., Mindfulness: Diverse Perspectives on Its Meaning, Origins, and Applications (London: Routledge, 2013), 2.

The driving forces behind the rapidly growing interest in mindfulness include (1) the crisis of the old paradigm; (2) successful interventions like MBSR that have pioneered a new approach to medicine, blending medical science, clinical application, and mindfulness; (3) training programs in MBSR for health professionals that seeded the field over many years; and (4) the establishment of the Center for Mindfulness along with an ongoing research program that helped to turn this momentum into published scientific studies and nurture a new field in medical science and a vibrant new research community. Jon recalls:

In the year 2000, during a meeting in Dharamsala, India, organized by the Mind and Life Institute, in which the Dalai Lama and a group of psychologists, neuroscientists, scholars, and contemplatives explored together the subject of destructive emotions and what might be done to mitigate the enormous personal and societal harm that so often stems from them, the Dalai Lama, amazingly and yet characteristically, challenged the scientists to come up with non-Buddhist, secular methods for working with and transforming the energies of these said emotions. He acknowledged that Buddhism might have a lot to offer, in terms of its elaborate and detailed understanding of what he termed afflictive emotions, including a range of meditative practices that have been utilized for centuries and millennia in monastic settings to work with them in skillful ways. At the same time, he was saying that the real hope lay in a non-Buddhist, a truly universal and secular approach that would make use of whatever elements of Buddhist understanding and methods were found to be helpful, but only combined with and integrated into Western culture, its understanding of the psyche, and, in particular, its scientific understanding of emotions, emotional expression, and emotion regulation. …

It was also pointed out at that meeting that there already was an approach that had been doing much of what the Dalai Lama was calling for in clinical settings, primarily hospitals, for twenty-one years at that point, namely mindfulness-based stress reduction and the family of mindfulness-based interventions that have arisen around it. …

Of course, it was well known by many of the participants in that meeting that the curriculum of MBSR and other mindfulness-based interventions is deeply rooted in a universal expression of the Buddhadharma [the foundational teachings of Buddha], and that the curriculum features the cultivation of mindfulness of mind states and body states, including in particular awareness of reactive emotions, as well as how to deploy specific strategies to respond mindfully rather than react reflexively when they are triggered.¹¹

Jon recounts a part of his personal journey, beginning in his early student days: “Even as a graduate student at MIT, I had been pondering for years, ‘What is my job with a capital J?,’ my ‘karmic assignment’ on the planet, so to speak, without coming up with much of anything. It was a personal koan for me and became more and more a continuous thread in my life, day and night, as those years unfolded. ‘What am I supposed to be doing with my life?’ I kept asking myself. ‘What do I love so much I would pay to do it?’”

He knew that it wasn’t his destiny to pursue a career in molecular biology, even though he loved science and knew he would disappoint his Nobel laureate thesis adviser at MIT, Salvador Luria, and his own father, also an accomplished scientist. In 1979, still searching for the right path to link his livelihood (his job) with his sense of essential purpose (his Job) in a way that felt aligned with the needs of the time, he went on a two-week meditation retreat. Jon recounts:

While sitting in my room one afternoon on about day ten of the retreat, I had a “vision” that lasted maybe ten seconds. I don’t really know what to call it, so I call it a vision. It was rich in detail and more like an instantaneous seeing of vivid, almost inevitable connections and their implications. It did not come as a reverie or a thought stream, but rather something quite different, which to this day I cannot fully explain and don’t feel the need to.

I saw in a flash not only a model that could be put in place, but also the long-term implications of what might happen if the basic idea was sound and could be implemented in one test environment—namely that it would spark new fields of scientific and clinical investigation and would spread to hospitals and medical centers and clinics across the country and around the world, and provide right livelihood for thousands of practitioners. Because it was so weird, I hardly ever mentioned this experience to others. But after that retreat, I did have a better sense of what my karmic assignment might be. It was so compelling that I decided to take it on wholeheartedly as best I could.

After his meditation retreat, Jon returned to the hospital and met individually with three physicians, the directors of the primary care, pain, and orthopedics clinics, to find out how they viewed their work, what their clinics’ successes were with their patients, and what might be missing in the hospital experience.

When I asked what percentage of their patients they felt they were able to help, the response was typically 10 to 20 percent. I was astonished, and asked what happened to the others. I was told that they either got better on their own or never got better.

I asked whether they would be open to referring their patients, when appropriate, to a program that would teach them to take better care of themselves as a complement to whatever the health-care system was or was not able to do for them. It would be based on relatively intensive training in Buddhist meditation without the Buddhism, as I liked to put it, and yoga. Their responses were very positive. On the basis of those meetings, I proposed that a program be set up under the auspices of ambulatory care in the hospital, which would take the form of an eight-week course to which physicians would refer patients they were seeing who they felt were not responding to their treatments and were, in some sense, falling through the cracks of the health-care system. And so MBSR came into being in the fall of 1979.¹²

For many years, Jon and his team worked with groups of patients in their windowless room in the basement of the hospital. At first little noticed, their work at the hospital turned into a holding space for birthing a different paradigm of medicine. “Although our patients all come with various problems, diagnoses, and ailments,” explains Jon, with the MBSR approach, “we make every effort to apprehend their intrinsic wholeness. We often say that from our perspective, as long as you are breathing, there is more ‘right’ with you than ‘wrong’ with you, no matter what is wrong. In this process, we make every effort to treat each participant as a whole human being rather than as a patient or a diagnosis or someone having a problem that needs fixing.”

Jon’s story is an amazing example of what a small group of committed citizens is able to do. It also exhibits some of the same enabling conditions that we witnessed in the Berlin story. Bending the beam of observation, of course, is what happens in all practices of mindfulness. But what was the holding space that allowed him to lean into the crack and to leap after returning from the meditation retreat? “My decision to leap,” remembers Jon, “was in part based on years of meditation practice and inquiry on the one hand, as well as training in science [on the other], so I was at home in the language and thinking of medicine and medical science.”¹³ So again, the seeds for this moment had been germinating over many years.

Turning Yourself into a Vehicle for the Future

Jon’s story exemplifies the presence of the abyss (what is my Job?), of letting go (of a career in science) and then crossing the abyss (following his heart). His experience in the retreat and his conversation with the three physicians helped him to see the opening or the crack and to follow that emerging path. His many years of practice in mindfulness and science gave him the confidence to sense and actualize the moment of opportunity. Working with his core team in a windowless basement for many years established the holding space for co-creating the seeds of a profound revolution that a few years later would spread around the world.

The Berlin experience and Jon’s story share a feature: the human spirit breaking through the asphalt-hard surface structure of habituated action and thought. In these moments of breaking through, the new starts coming into being. When you watch this process of coming into being, it’s interesting to see how the field enters the space through certain individuals first—as if the field of possibility chooses these individuals as gateways to come into being. Jon is one of them. He opened the gate—he became the vehicle. And that allowed the next circle of people to also connect. And so on. So we are learning here how to become a vehicle for what is emerging from the other side of the abyss.

In this chapter we have described a different way of connecting to a deep source of creativity, humanity, and self. Although we have given only a very few concrete examples, we know that the deep conditions of possibility explored here—bending the beam of attention, cultivating a holding space, going to the edge of dying, and turning yourself into a vehicle for the future that is wanting to emerge—can be observed at work in many other places around the planet. It’s the social grammar of emergence. It’s what you feel when talking to change-makers like Jon. It’s what we experienced in Berlin, when, in Gail’s words, we collectively embraced the shadow in order to function as a vehicle through which healing may come into the world.

Conclusion and Practices: Twelve Principles

One interesting development over the past several decades has been a subtle shift in the balance of power between individuals and institutions in favor of individuals. As the entrepreneur Nick Hanauer puts it:

One of my favorite sayings, attributed to Margaret Mead, has always been “Never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” I totally believe it. You could do almost anything with just five people. With only one person, it’s hard—but when you put that one person with four or five more, you have a force to contend with. All of a sudden, you have enough momentum to make almost anything that’s immanent, or within reach, actually real. I think that’s what entrepreneur-ship is all about—creating that compelling vision and force.¹⁴

Hanauer names an important shift in the world that helps small groups of citizens to have a big impact on where the world is going. Think about the impact of Jon and his team—and the ripples keep coming. The good news is that the world has enormous unexploited potential in the form of inspired, intentional, and collective entrepreneurship. But we will need to be much more methodical about tapping this dormant force to bring about global movements for good.

We conclude this chapter with twelve principles and practices that can help advance our individual journey from self to Self, from me to We, as exemplified in the stories shared above. They reflect various pockets of our and our colleagues’ experiences over the past years.

1. Practice, don’t preach. Apply the U by practicing, not by preaching. Start by listening. Listen to others, to yourself, and to the whole. Listen to what life calls you to do. Connect with people where they are and then look for cracks or openings from these viewpoints; then be helpful.

2. Observe, observe, observe: Become a blackbelt observer and listener. The U process extends what is the core work of science—namely, “Let the data talk to you”—from the exterior realm (the third-person view) to the more subtle levels of human experience (the second-and first-person views). Thus the practice of letting data talk to you applies not only to objective, exterior data (through the open mind), but also to empathic, intersubjective data (through the open heart) and to the transsubjective realm of self-knowledge (through the open will). Attending to all three types of data requires refined observation and listening skills. The impact of the deeper levels of listening is profound: They function like a welding flame on the process of social reality creation. They can melt the walls of habitual interaction that keep us separate from the world, from one another, and from ourselves.

3. Connect to your intention as an instrument. Brian Arthur, an economist with the Santa Fe Institute, once said in one of our research interviews: “Intention is not a powerful force. It’s the only force.”¹⁵ Connecting to the intention of our life’s journey establishes a vertical alignment: “Who am I?” “What am I here for?” “How can I link my work with my Work, or my job with my Job?” The more we can connect to that deeper place—to what is essential for us—and the more we can clarify what we want to be in service of, the better we can act as instruments for bringing that emerging future into being.

4. When the crack opens up, stay with it—connect and act from the now. Applying the latter two principles (observe, observe; intention) connects you both horizontally and vertically with a higher level of presence and readiness. When opportunity presents itself, it often feels as if time is slowing down and a crack to a field of future possibility is opening up. These moments ask for some courage, but mainly for full attention. When such a moment occurs, stay with it, connect with it, and then act from the now—that is, from what wants to emerge. Put differently, when you find yourself beginning to connect with a significant future opportunity, first say yes, then do it, and only then ask whether it’s possible.

5. Follow your heart—do what you love, love what you do. As we’ve noted, Steve Jobs once said the only way to do our best work is to do what we love and to love what we do. It’s the only reliable way to connect to our emerging future path. Make sure that at least some of the projects and activities in your portfolio are things you love doing. When this element is missing, you are in danger of losing your way or living someone else’s life.

6. Always be in dialogue with the universe. As Alan Webber said, “The universe is a helpful place.” This is an important guiding principle. It means that the universe—in other words, the larger context that surrounds us—provides useful feedback. This feedback comes in different forms. Sometimes that feedback sucks. But we need to learn to listen and identify those elements of the feedback that are helpful to further evolve our idea.

7. Create a holding space of deep listening that supports your journey. The most important leadership tool is your Self—your capacity to access your highest future possibility. Two of the most effective mechanisms to strengthen your capacity to access your emerging Self are cultivation practices and deep-listening-based circle work. A daily cultivation practice—a moment of stillness or contemplation in which you filter out all the noise from outside and focus on what’s essential for you—can be performed in many different ways, drawing on whatever works best for you. The point is that you do it every day. A circle practice usually involves a small group of up to seven participants who meet a few times a year to support one another through deep listening, by attending to the calling and journey of each of their personal lives and work.¹⁶

8. Iterate, iterate, iterate. What “observe, observe, observe” is for the left-hand side of the U, “iterate, iterate, iterate” is for the right-hand side of the U. It’s about practicing and adapting to what we see emerging. Where in your life is the windowless basement room that allows you to practice, practice, practice in order to explore the new by doing?

9. Notice the crack to the field of the future. All change takes place in a context. It can be personal, relational, institutional, or global. Attending to the opening of a crack requires exploring the edges of the system and the self. At these edges, when we are lucky, we can sense a field of future possibility that is wanting to emerge.

10. Use different language with different stakeholders. Innovation in complex systems requires us to be multilingual, to connect to the various stakeholders about the issues that matter to them. Complex problems require complex solutions. That means that single-focus approaches are almost certain to fail. Instead we need to master the art of broadening and deepening the definition of the problem to get all of the relevant parties—who need one another to change any system—committed to participate.

11. If you want to change others (other stakeholders), you need to be open to changing yourself first. If you need to change the system but you cannot use hierarchy to do it, then the main leverage you have is the quality of your relationship with the other stakeholders. That’s what you must build and strengthen. And that means being open to changing yourself first.

12. Never give up. Never give up. You are not alone. Every profound journey of innovation and renewal takes an enormous amount of perseverance. Important ideas often take many years of failed effort—or practice—before they produce something concrete in the real world. The key is never giving up. Always figure out what you can learn from failure, get back on your feet, and try again. Allowing yourself to be discouraged by failed efforts is a waste of energy. It leads to being trapped in your own (and other people’s) Voice of Judgment, Voice of Cynicism, and Voice of Fear. Leading change requires courage most of all: the courage to go to the edge and leap into the unknown. That courage is an important condition that connects us with the deep dimensions of our being—with who we really are. Courage resides in the trust that we are not alone. Or, as one experienced change-maker once put it: “The collective always delivers.”

JOURNALING QUESTIONS

Take a journal and some quiet time to answer these sixteen questions. Spend about one to two minutes per question.

1. What in your life and work is dying or ending, and what wants to be born?

2. Who have been your “guardian angels,” the people who have helped you to realize your highest potential?

3. Where, right now, do you feel the opening to a future possibility?

4. What about your current work and/or personal life frustrates you the most?

5. What are your most important sources of energy? What do you love?

6. Watch yourself from above, as if from a helicopter. What are you trying to do at this stage of your professional and personal journey?

7. Watch the journey of your community/organization/collective movement from above. What are you trying to do in the present stage of your collective journey?

8. Given the above answers, what questions do you now need to ask yourself?

9. Look at your current situation from the viewpoint of yourself as a young person at the beginning of your journey. What does that young person have to say to you?

10. Imagine you could fast-forward to the very last moments of your life, when it is time for you to move on. Now look back on your life’s journey as a whole. What would you want to see at that moment? What footprint do you want to leave behind on this planet?

11. From that future point of view, what advice would your future Self offer to your current self?

12. Now return to the present and crystallize what it is that you want to create: your vision and intention for the next three to five years. What vision and intention do you have for yourself and your work? What are the core elements of the future that you want to create in your personal, professional, and social life? Describe the images and elements that occur to you. The more concrete, the better.

13. What would you have to let go of in order to bring your vision into reality? What is the old stuff that must die? What “old skin” (behaviors, thought processes, etc.) do you need to shed?

14. Over the next three months, if you were to prototype a microcosm of the intended future in which you could discover “the new” by doing something, what would that prototype look like?

15. Who can help you make your highest future possibilities a reality? Who might be your core helpers and partners?

16. If you were to take on the project of bringing your highest intention into reality, what practical first steps would you take over the next three days?

CIRCLE CONVERSATION

Invite each person in your group to share the most meaningful things that surfaced through this sixteen-step journaling experience. Listen deeply and go with the flow of the conversation.