What if we must learn to feel our way into the future?

(Un)Learning Adventures for Navigating Mysterious Times

dan burgess

Oct 26, 2022

What times we’re in.

Troubled times.

Unravelling times.

There are no answers where we used to find them.

No wisdom from our governing institutions.

Little truth from a corporatised media about the dangers we face as a species.

No meaningful participation in the decision-making that impacts us all .

Scant responsibility for future life in our societal narratives.

Collectively, we find ourselves living in increasingly mysterious times.

Many of us are feeling a call to step more fully into service.

To let go of old, tired, destructive stories, beliefs, ways of being that no longer serve our lives today,

Or the futures we dream of for our children and all sentient life on Earth.

We’re being called to transform at every level of society, to evolve ourselves.

So here’s a question for you.

Do you believe we can collectively think our way out of this mess ?

Do you believe we can talk our way out of these crises ?

Discuss, debate and argue our way into the future ?

To create a more beautiful world ?

I don’t.

I believe that our current ways of thinking and talking are part of the crises.

These two dominant modes used to design, organise and maintain this civilisational story will never be enough to meet the complexity of the challenges coming our way.

And for the transformations that we are being invited to step into.

We are stuck in a relational crisis.

Because how we relate to ourselves, to each other and to the living world around us informs how we think, talk, behave and act.

And it is these deeply ingrained and now dangerous ways of thinking that are causing so much of the destruction and divisiveness that we are witnessing all around.

It is narrow patterns of thinking that are limiting our abilities to respond to these crises in meaningful ways.

It is a lack of depth and diversity in our thinking which is limiting our collective capacities to re-imagine how we might organise ourselves on this Earth with new possibility.

In life-sustaining ways and with an expanded sense of what it could mean to be human in these times.

As we continue to relate to nature, our more than human family as separate from ourselves, so we continue to exploit, pollute and destroy our Earth’s System, as climate and ecosystems breakdown.

This is the operating system for all life on our planet, a system that humans (and Economies) cannot survive without, regardless of financial status and economic growth plans.

As we continue to relate to ourselves as separate individuals, born to compete, to be productive and to get ahead of each other,

So we continue to create the conditions where the essential qualities for thriving humans, such as care, co-operation, connection, trust, community, diversity, health and wellbeing - become more and more difficult to cultivate.

In order to let go of these now destructive ways of thinking, to evolve the ways we think - we will have to evolve the ways we relate to the world around us, how we relate to life itself.

And that means unlearning and learning new and different ways of knowing and relating to the world - to ourselves, to each other and to nature - our more than human family.

Because if we are to truly learn to think in new and different ways, we must begin with feeling.

So here’s a thought…

What if we must learn to feel our way through these crises ?

To expand our ways of knowing and relating to the world around us beyond the intellect alone.

To open our hearts, to deepen and expand our relationship to ourselves, to each other and to nature - our more than human family.

And through these new relationships - we begin to think in new ways.

Thinking that puts love, care, connection, community, co-operation, participation, diversity and responsibility at the centre.

Thinking that puts life at the centre.

What if we must learn to become the changes we talk of ?

To be the stories we want to tell,

To embody the regenerative visions we dream of.

(And that our hearts know is possible)

And to bring them into the world around us.

Becoming, through our own unique ways of showing up, in our lives and through our work.

Individually and collectively.

And what if we were not alone in stepping into this courageous and vulnerable challenge.

But participating with others, supported by each other, together in community.

As crew.

Evolving ourselves together.

And what if alongside this,

We were supported to deepen our relationship with nature - with our more than human family.

And we saw that, not as a nice to have, but as a fundamental and essential practice to develop in these times.

A practice that could help us build the personal resilience, courage, collective unity and imaginative capacities required to co-create life-sustaining cultures and communities.

Sounds interesting right?

We think so.

And that’s what we’re now beginning to offer through Becoming Crew