Everything Gardens and Other Stories. UNIV PLYMOUTH
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– and usually blocked by the pressures of daily life and fear of being overwhelmed by despair. Now, in this first stage of the Work that Reconnects, they are allowed to surface without shame or apology’.28
Facilitating an environment where certain noticings can be articulated in a supportive setting enables the development of a shared language to discuss these, to develop familiarity with them, and ultimately to begin engaging these presences in terms of their implication for action. In a way, this is precisely the task that Joanna Macy envisages for the practices she devised, namely to nurture sensitivities that help to recognise, articulate and respond to issues that may not be able to find expression in the settings and the conversations that people may be accustomed to, outside of the sharing group.
On the other hand, however, this particular setup for ‘Inner Transition-type’ explorations does not necessarily sit well with everyone. Among the criticism I have gathered is the therapy-like focus that seems to arise in the group, when undertaking Work That Reconnects exercises of the sort I have just described. Not everyone, in fact, is a fan of exercises that stress linguistic engagement, which may be reminiscent to him/her of collective psychotherapy.29 At times, this particular focus may equally play a role in restricting the audience to an older demographic, so that younger participants may drift towards different offerings. On another front, the Work That Reconnects is just one type of embodied and ritual practice. There are many others that one can think of, from direct experiential participation in the outdoors to yoga and dance to a maze of healing practices. In this sense, it is also the case that, to participants invested in one or the other of these different forms of practice, Inner Transition meetings that are facilitated using the Work that Reconnects may not feel very engaging, and they may drift instead towards the myriad of other offerings constellating beyond the Inner Transition group. In fact, ‘Inner Transition-type’ practices are cultivated explicitly also outside of Inner Transition groups. So it is the case, for instance, that in Totnes a number of individuals – while active as ‘Inner Transition-type’ people – would not necessarily partake in the group meetings I just described. As I mentioned, these can sometimes be limited by demographics they tend to appeal to (with attendees being older) or by the type of engagement being confined to a discursive, therapy-like atmosphere, or by leaning more towards a particular ritual practice. For this reason, ‘Inner Transition-type’ explorations equally live in a variety of other settings and gatherings that constellate the hinterland of the Inner Transition group, in the related milieu of ‘inner work’. A case in point is the weekly 5Rhythms dancing class in Totnes. 5Rhythms is a style of free form dancing, where participants discover movement and improvisation as they are taken through five different types of rhythm. In 5Rhythms, as I was able to experience, there is no real connection with words, but – as one interviewee mentioned to me – the common engagement in this collective practice is enough to build a sense of together-ness, to conjure a ‘holding space’. And in that space, at the end of one such session, participants gathered in a circle can share both impressions from the bodily journey they have undertaken together, and events that may be of interest to what quite intuitively appears as a community of like-minded people.
For others, like myself, the structure imposed by timed speaking and listening exercises in the Inner Transition meeting felt somewhat counterproductive to authentic interpersonal connection. Although this impression might have to do with the fact that I had already stumbled upon the same exercises in a number of different settings, hence it might disclose a measure of weariness from my own repeated exposure: the first few times, on the contrary, there can be a sense of something deeply liberating. Finally, not everyone may resonate with a group setting, or be comfortable engaging in practices that are explicitly designed to shift people’s sensibilities by nurturing an alternative embodied and linguistic apparatus for relating to the others (and nonhuman othernesses) we encounter and depend upon.
In sum, an explicit focus on change through conscious group practice may put some people off, by virtue of being too close to a ‘spiritual’ practice, which I mean in the sense eloquently offered to me by one interviewee, as a ‘a conscious and regular attempt to make meaning of your life and take responsibility for your emotions in the way you experience them’. To individuals that are, willingly or unwillingly, more invested in the split between ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ (sometimes accompanied by the prejudice that the latter only is worth of concern), a space constituted precisely to make room for the conscious cultivation of an alternative embodied and emotional literacy of the sort just described may be too ‘airy-fairy’ for comfort, and for letting go into the ways of this collective practice.
It would be a mistake, however, to identify ‘Inner Transition’ solely with offerings of this sort, namely with the conscious cultivation of embodied and discursive orientations, in gatherings convened explicitly for this purpose. Much as was the case with permaculture, where the relational qualities and attitudes it articulated explicitly got a new lease on life inside Transition in a Trojan horse-like way after lowering the threshold of engagement, so, perhaps the same happens with practices of ‘inner work’, of which the Work That Reconnects is but the tip of the iceberg.
Indeed, it is the case that some experiments with ‘inner work’ have a life within Transition, without being explicitly framed as such. This different form of engagement is expressed in the activity of curating ‘process input’ to Transition events, seeking to establish a ‘highly participatory style’30 in the way these are run and facilitated. Alternatively, Inner Transition practices have also tended to be woven in what is called ‘Transition Training’, namely an introduction to Transition for activists who are either engaged or willing to start a Transition initiative. In an interview with Sophy Banks, one of the original contributors to the articulation of Inner Transition and to the development of the Transition Training programme, she explained that what Transition training days seek to achieve is to give a sense of Transition as a change process. As such, there is a focus on bringing together the ‘outer’ aspects (e.g. the re-visioning and transforming of ‘physical systems for living’),31 with the psychological, ‘inner’ aspects of that change. The weaving together of this multi-directional awareness yields an attunement to the dynamics of ‘parallel process’,32 in the sense that the patterns of resistance observable outside of oneself or one’s group can often replicate themselves within the group or the individual, and therefore demand a response, lest causing a loss of consistency and fittingness between the practical goals of the group, and the ‘process’ whereby those goals are to be achieved. This explicit formulation of the problem of ‘fit’ between ends and means,33 which in turn prompts a search for appropriate ways of addressing it in the everyday of Transition, appears to be another very significant – if ‘implicit’ – manifestation of Inner Transition inside the moving of Transition as a whole.
It is in close connection with these concerns, for instance, that Inner Transition is a designation that can therefore apply to the adoption of ‘effective meeting’ techniques. These can involve having a check-in at the start of each meeting, to make sure that everyone in the room is feeling willing and able to engage on the topic, and are not overly absorbed by something else they may need to attend to instead. Another example is the scheduling of ‘doing’, agenda-led meetings, as well as ‘being’ meetings. These are not about achieving a particular resolution or decision, but simply facilitated spaces where conversation and conscious examination of the ‘process’ of working together, of the life of the group as a group, becomes possible. Such spaces may be held in a variety of ways, from the use of a talking stick (whereby a stick goes around and whoever holds the stick is given a space to voice and share concerns and disquiets), or through appreciative inquiry (a practice of focusing on instances of previous successes for finding new ways of relating to a problem that surfaces to attention), or by experimenting with ways of dealing with conflict. One more innovation can be the practice of having, alongside a person in charge of sticking to the agenda, a ‘keeper of time’ (to ensure that the meeting is held in the stated timeframe) and a ‘keeper of the heart’ which – in my understanding of it – is someone in charge of ensuring that no one is feeling unfairly excluded from the conversation, and is given a chance to be heard and to feel a meaningful participant.
In this sense, Inner Transition, perched between its continuity (to the unfolding of Transition) and the specific difference of ‘inner work’ (as opposed