Contemplative Governanace
Throughout our noble experiment, we rely on living our practice-in-action and living our core questions, while aspiring to live the answers. Our nonprofit is our petri dish, the experimental arena where we explore how to foster a cultural shift in how We-see, how We-work, how We-play, and how We-live together. Our learning journey is grounded in the core intention to catalyze our collective capacity to foster awareness-based social change, and this journey is far from over.
Live the Questions
How Do We
- Determine the types of transformative introspection needed to transcend our cultural trance in order to foster the movement from me-to-We?
- Leverage our inner knowledge to move beyond outmoded ways of operating toward more holistic, interconnected functioning, in order to form more just structures, and center collective wellbeing?
- Develop the transformation literacy needed to meet our urgent intra- and interdependent societal challenges?
We hold these questions at the heart of our co-creative journey, aligned with Rilke’s reminder to live the questions in order to someday live the answers.
Collective Intentions
We co-created agreements for how we would support our transformative intentions and ground organizational culture. Drawing on our inner knowing, and the catalytic energy in our collective space, we generated a list of intentions focused on the values we would honor and acknowledge in the collective space, including everyone’s gifts, diverse spirituality, and the inherent tension in the process of collaborating. Other tenets were awareness-based qualities and capacities, such as self-awareness, vulnerability, acceptance, non-judgment, kindness, and compassion.
Founding Agreements
- Cultivate an atmosphere of safety
- Build trust with one another
- Learn to hear one another’s stories
- Honor everyone’s gifts
- Foster and honor flow
- Recognize and honor diverse spirituality (inclusivity)
- Foster collective leadership
- Speak in terms of possibilities instead of problems
- Support the ‘ouch’ process
- Trust the process
- Acknowledge the inherent tension in this process
- Actively engage self-awareness; sustain and support Presence; awareness of the ‘inner’
- Hold ourselves accountable to the agreements
Awareness-based Qualities
We also explored what impedes the expression of awareness-based qualities. We generated a list of what we refer to as our “defaults, arisings, or contractions,” forms of expression that could be counterproductive and distractive. Familiar companions like criticism, defensiveness, impatience, personalization, judgment, and righteousness arose.
To work with our lists of intentions and contractions, we refer to them as the Green Lens (cultivating) and Red Lens (letting go) qualities, respectively.
Cultivating Qualities (Green Lens)
Nonjudgment
Kindness, Compassion
Presence
Balance
Ground/Stability
Honesty
Respect
Speak Your Truth
Self-Care
Acceptance
Vulnerability
Openness (Curiosity,
Possibility)
Joy
Gratitude
Integrity
Transparency
Stillness, Silence
Dispassion
Letting Go (Red Lens)
Worry, Anxiety, Fear
Defensiveness
Self-suppression
Impatience (Anger)
Exhaustion, Distraction
Seriousness
Judgment
Dismissiveness
Attachment, Clinging
Perfectionism/The Ideal
Need to Be Right
Criticism–Of Others and Self
Over-Excitement–Push
Over-extension
Expectation–Should, Must, Have to
Passion and Use of Force
Either/Or–Black and White Thinking
Personalization, Personal Attacks
Over Concern with Productivity, Activity, and Strategy
Excessive Time Consciousness
Superiority, Condescension
Righteousness, One Right Way
Practice in Action
We begin each meeting reciting the Founding Agreements aloud, to move them from the domain of abstraction into application, and make them into a living practice that supports and maintains the intentions behind their creation. This ritualized process involves each Founding Member taking turns reading each agreement aloud, in order, including the green lens cultivating qualities. The red lens items are unspoken, but remain visible as a reminder of what we do not want to create.
The recitation of our Founding Agreements is an anchor for our We-work, a meaningful ritual that recommits us to the principles that bind us to our work and to each other. The Agreements remind us to check ourselves, be aware of how we are interacting in the moment, and to hold our focus on how we relate. They serve as a container in which we hold ourselves accountable to one another, creating the environment and space in which we can engage at our best and most collaboratively. They position relationality and wellbeing at the center of organizational governance.
The gathering of inner resources as reflected in our Founding Agreements, and recitation process, reaffirms the individual power we each have to choose how to be in just relationship with ourselves and with others. In other words, how We-work requires the me-work.
For awareness-based social change facilitators, first-person research becomes a life practice, focused on investigating the dynamics of social change by making a daily commitment to attend to the living dynamics within. -Jessica Bockler
The “Ouch” Process
Our “ouch” process is designed to support our commitment to our Founding Agreements. It allows us to consider the intent versus the impact of our communication in the moment. The following initial ideas serve as the ground:
- If an Agreement is broken, or someone has defaulted into a red lens mode, “ouch” can be stated.
- “Ouch” can be stated by the person feeling the ouch, or by someone else who is feeling a tension in the room.
- Group agrees to pause, breathe, and hold space for an “ouch” discussion.
- Best if the “ouch” is processed in that moment.
- Purpose is to clarify intention/impact, and support reestablishing group stability, cohesion, and flow.
The “ouch” process embeds an intentional pause into the collective space, which provides the opportunity to join in a healing process. A pause process can help to deepen clarity and stability around the harm. Any inadvertent negative impact from misaligned comments or actions are addressed directly, in the moment, lest we continue to unwittingly perpetuate harm.