Body-based disobedience in service to life on earth.

Creating spaces to prototype other ways of being in this world and practicing disobedience by taking decisions from our heart, our gut, our bodies.

Our lives are so meshed in the extractive socio-economic system that a transition to an equitable, more beautiful future can feel like a mountain to move.  When so little of our ‘rational’ world makes sense anymore how can we keep moving towards more beautiful futures? 

We can create spaces to prototype other ways of being in this world. 

Ways that respond to the call of what’s in our hearts during these times but feel edgy or hard to imagine at work/home/with friends. Ways to be in community with ourselves, others, and the more-than-human world. Ways to practice disobedience by taking decisions from our heart, our gut, and our bodies instead of attempting to know the world through our minds only. 

Because for me, it’s the embodied knowledge that emerges most loudly as a guide for these times. Feelings, and emotions are data; vital responses to the crises we are living through. What starts off as a feeling; a pinch in the heart, a tensing of the body; a clenched jaw, a lump in the throat. A niggling little feeling, pursued, made space for and incited can become a compass for navigating mysterious times and for guiding us towards service to life on earth. 

To ignore feelings is to attempt to colonise life itself, to deny its complexity and messiness. And to create spaces to hold our plurality, our discomfort, grief, and not-knowing, to suspend the rules of the game for a little while is to loosen our familiarity with the current system we want to see transformed.

Because if we can rehearse our freedoms (a beautiful phrase I first heard from Farzana Khana in the context of re-imagining the public health system), if we can experience them in our bodies; to feel, speak, learn or collaborate differently, we allow the necessary shifts of our mind and soma to take shape.

And while integration after such experiences can be a bumpy landing back into our jobs or home lives, as they may be at a different place in the process of transition, our bodies carry the remembering of other ways of being. Often unbeknown to our rational minds.

We come back to ‘our village’ transformed. And though things may look the same, we are not the same. The somatic and mindset shifts seep their way into every facet of our lives. We return with a deep knowing that there’s a community around us, human & more-than-human, which we are interconnected with. We feel braver to show up differently in the places that used to feel unchangeable because we’ve rehearsed these moves, we know how they feel and we know we are not alone. 

Transition can feel like a mountain to move, but by now we know rain moves mountains too. Tiny, consistent drops of water, shaping the earth’s crust of millions of years old. I like to think rain doesn’t know how to move a mountain, it just practices falling. 

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becoming crew is an invitation to evolve ourselves, in community, in service to life on earth.

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Space for Not Knowing is our monthly online gathering for collective wayfinding through mystery & not-knowing.