Everything Gardens and Other Stories. UNIV PLYMOUTH
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spiritual inspiration were already implicit in the very arising of the transition movement? To me, that was clearly the case.
There was, for example, a moving beyond our collective denial that fossil fuels will peak and decline, that climate change results from our use of them and must urgently be addressed, and that economic growth can be infinite on a finite planet. Facing difficult truths and rising to meet them with a positive vision is perhaps one hallmark of inner work. There was a strong emphasis on the positive, on coming together as a community, and on dreaming out a vision for the future that would support human and other than human life, based not on greed, inequality, power-over or increasing material wealth, but on practicality, sharing, creativity, and celebration. The implicit values, in short, were not other than those embraced by spiritual teachings throughout the world.1
Prentice completes her account thus:
[M]uch of how business was conducted had clearly been influenced by various ways ‘inner work’ has come into culture. Meetings were often begun with sharing ‘go-rounds’, for example, or silence. Creative, open formats for events such as ‘world café’ [...] or ‘open space technology’ [...] were often used.2
It seems, from Prentice’s words, that certain practices and discourses that gave form to the incipient moving of Transition resonated with a group of individuals who were acquainted with them from within the wider milieu of ‘inner work’. To reiterate my initial point, therefore, the spiralling of Transition from a focus on ‘outer’ strategies for change to one also on ‘inner’ work need not so much be looked at as an addition, but rather as the bringing forth and explicit naming of a quality that had been brewing all along.
At this point, an analytic orientation towards Transition might then demand a definition of what ‘inner work’ or ‘inner change’ means. What is, in other words, the ‘inner’ in Inner Transition? (‘Inner Transition’ being the designation that accompanies the appearance of Transition into this yet-to-be-defined domain of experience.) My suggestion here is to sidestep the urge to cling to something as hard as a definition. In my own meandering through Inner Transition I have found that questions of definition mattered little to my ability to engage effectively with it. Instead, I find it easier to begin with a foray into the uses of the word ‘Inner Transition’ that I came across. This is because my conversations with various interviewees disclosed an interesting flexibility. ‘Inner Transition’ was widely understood to be more than just the name of a dedicated workgroup within the Transition initiative. Instead, it is also the quality displayed by a person – an ‘Inner Transition-type’ of person – or by an activity, as an ‘Inner Transition-type’ activity. The flexible and metaphorical character of this term demands therefore a different approach if we want to get a sense of what sets of experiences and possibilities for engagement ‘Inner Transition’ directs our attention to.
A sample of the inclinations that seem to matter for the purpose of denoting an ‘Inner Transition-type’ person are offered once again by Prentice, who describes the audience of Inner Transition initiatives as comprising of:
Counsellors, Buddhists, ecopsychologists, dance and movement teachers, people who have dealt with trauma and difficulty in their lives and in one way or another found resource in inner work and inner growth, Christians, atheists, psychotherapists, pagans, meditators and teachers of meditation, addiction workers, Quakers, coaches, psychoanalysts, social workers, teachers, poets, facilitators, mediators, people learning about nonviolent communication, a teacher of native American spirituality, teachers and practitioners of ‘mindfulness’, practitioners of T’ai Chi, Chi Gong, and Yoga, women who’ve been part of consciousness raising groups in the womens [sic] movement, people who run workshops on healing difficulties between men and women, interfaith ministers, someone from an alternative to violence project working in prisons – and even our very own Professor of Consciousness!3
Equally interesting is the final disclaimer, whereby ‘of course this is not really about what job you may do, and everyone who is interested is welcome’.4 What this shows is that the list serves purely to give an orienting sense of people’s inclinations that may make them receptive and capable of resonating with the thrust of Inner Transition, without wanting to close that list down to a definition.5 Ironically, this list also embraces a number of attachments I hold, which I would describe as relevant to developing my own curiosity for Inner Transition: a vivid interest in ecopsychology, and in embodied practices to connect experientially with the environment, as well as an incipient engagement as a poet inspired by the Dark Mountain project6 are the ones that most readily come to mind.
An open-ended collection of the sort proposed by Prentice is enough to provide readers with an idea of what types of affiliations ‘Inner Transition’ may hint towards as embodiments of ‘inner work’. I do concede that this will appear vague. However, the very tentativeness of the orientation through which it becomes possible to navigate Inner Transition should perhaps be viewed less as a shortcoming (of academic analysis) and more as a necessary quality of the process of negotiating an emerging field of experience, without rushing too soon to wedge one’s own definitional cuts.
What does Inner Transition do?
The unfolding of Transition in the realm of ‘inner work’ or ‘inner change’ is one of the most under-described aspects of the moving of Transition,7 yet one of the most telling in order to grasp its shape shifting character. As it was anticipated earlier, Inner Transition denotes, in a stricter sense, the name of a dedicated steering group inside Transition initiatives (other names that have been adopted are ‘Heart and Soul’ or ‘Spirit of Transition’).8 In a wider sense of the expression, however, it points to a wide sea of practices and attachments – ‘Inner Transition-type’ things – and it entrenches an openness and inclination, in the moving of Transition, to draw on these cultural resources.
In so doing, Inner Transition – by drawing a richer gamut of experiences into the emerging culture of Transition – occasions a significant difference in its appearing. This difference comes with the challenge of unearthing its kinship to the moving of Transition as a whole, so as to make Inner Transition an opening through which Transition becomes accessible and navigable across its many folds, as opposed to engendering fragmentation and disconnection. To this end, Prentice’s statements quoted above reveal how Inner Transition was borne out of an aspiration to make explicit particular dispositions and potentialities that could be implicitly seen at work in the incipient moving of Transition. Hence, Inner Transition can be viewed as a response to the need for developing dedicated cultural resources through which to give a standing to a variety of practical pursuits within Transition. At the same time, it faces the challenge of finding a fit with the other streams of activity that give shape to the phenomenon of Transition. This challenge is expressed lucidly by Prentice, who suggests that ‘probably because there has been a division in Western culture between inner and outer, and therefore inner- and outer-focused people, there has been on occasion some confusion about what a group such as Heart and Soul can contribute to Transition’.9
This problem is easier to grasp, once we understand how Inner Transition, by its very name, demarcates an ‘outer’ Transition, setting up an opposition that can divide as much as it can relate. When we focus on its oppositional quality vis-à-vis an ‘outer’ Transition, we can tease out the latter’s meaning – in common parlance – as entailing a change in material attachments (for example, in terms of the food one eats or the currency one spends) by some objective measure of achievement with a view to obtaining tangible results towards the goal of managing peak oil and climate change.10 The ‘outer’, in this sense, is distant from the ‘inner’. In Prentice’s words, however, this dichotomy seems to become less of a border and more of an inextricable, co-created fractal edge: ‘the outer creates the inner, and the inner creates the outer’.11 Inner Transition holds the promise of inextricably blending the two poles: ‘in coming together, we [work] to heal divisions and “splits” that may well be at the root of the mess we are in’.12 In other words, the language of inner and outer references a tradition of reasoning about experience – partitioning between a material and an immaterial, or a collective/political and a personal/spiritual – that Inner Transition seeks to blur by revealing, alongside its own specific difference, also the intrinsic relatedness to all other streams