Women Moving the Edge

Ten days ago I spent almost four days with eight other women engaging in a bizarre evolutionary passtime called moving the edge. To the extent that we knew what we were letting ourselves in for, we were prepared for anything. That’s what being on the edge is about. We soon learned that our edges were very different.

So what is "The" edge? Judy and Ria blogged about our process at the time, as they perceived it. I was too busy being in the process, witnessing, engaging in my own form of visual harvesting, and being flat out exhausted at the end of the day to write anything much at the time. But a number of things happened, as far as I could see.

Firstly, I realised almost as it was happening that we were going through the different stages of community building described by Scott Peck in his book "A different drum". This process, it seems to me, cannot be faked or staged. It can only be gone through. I wonder whether it is true to say that if it hasn’t been gone through, there can be no "true community". All I can say is that once we got through it, the quailty of our being together was totally different. The photo you see above was taken at the end of our time together. I think that shows.

Secondly, I was suprised at how much time I spent in my "wrathful" manifestation. Particularly in calling out the "shadow of feminine green". This is what I journalled at the time:

"There’s fire and rebellion in me. Wrathful Dakini. I can’t believe how stifled I feel by the group’s norms. The monster political correctness in feminine guise. It’s all too nice, it’s all too respectful - paying lipservice to depth. And all the while, consensus prevents anyone from being authentic.

"What would a group be like in which each person could be fully who we are and free to express ourselves in our own way? I’m very aware of the shortcomings of language to express what has been happening here. Fire hits the green swamp. What is the world asking us to do? The question might be too big for Action Learning (that attempt fizzled out mid-process, usurped by the abdicated leadership and not defended by the others). But it’s not to big to respond to: it’s asking us to evolve. Because from our current level we can’t help. We can only continue to contribute to the problem."

Thirdly, what happened - in terms of Theory U - was that half way through the third day we finally slipped "through the eye of the needle" at the bottom of the U curve, and entered a collective space which I can only describe as mysterious, enlightened grace. We all felt it. The best explanation I have found so far of this phenomenon comes from Otto Scharmer himself: " Going through the eye of the needle is a threshold experience that happens at the bottom of the U at "point zero" between the downward and the upward path. The eye-of-the-needle experience has been described as "birth" or "breaking through a membrane." Going through the eye of the needle is better understood in terms of what it does to the nature of the individual-collective relationship. The essence and, to some extent the mystery, of the eye-of-the-needle experience is a very subtle switch in how individuals relate to the collective whole of the community (or team or organization) they are part of."

As this happened, we more or less spontaneously organised ourselves into a systemic constellation around a question which had been snagging our attention the whole time: What is it that the world’s leaders need in order to take the next step in opening doors for planetary healing? You can read some of the story of the constellation here. I’ll be posting up more insights elsewhere when I’ve finished harvesting them. The long and short of it, after the constellation we spent the last 24 hours of our time together as a "circle being". 

Lastly, something about leadership. I just by chance came across a small piece on leadership by Martin Ludvigsen which sums up perfectly what we experienced. In answer to the question "What is a leader?":

"A leader engages leadership.

"Leadership should be seen as an occurrence that is not necessarily tied to a person. The best groups work where leadership is shared. The person taking leadership at any given time is the one with a strong intention towards moving forward or any other image of the future.

"All this demands some kind of collective intelligence or respect for the dynamic of a group. When this is misunderstood leadership becomes someone’s and then the doors are open for power struggles and ego-battles.

"The leader is the person IN leadership. This requires that he or she is speaking for the community that is led.

"If you want to be a leader for the sake of being on top of someone else, then this will probably lead to sickness in your organization since you act from personal ego, insecurity and the lust for power for power sake.

"If you want to be a leader because you want to move the world - the only thing you must do, as i see it, is to be constantly awake and stay on the edge of your own existence and the world.

"If you are not at the edge why should you be a leader?"

In our case, the first step was when the two original conveners of the group relinquished leadership to the group. The ensuing chaos was then held by these two women (an act of leadership nonetheless) until the voice of leadership recognisably spoke through one of the other women. From then on, the voice moved from throat to throat most organically. It made me think of a small furry creature that crept from lap to lap around the circle as the energy drew it.

The hardest thing, now that our Circle Being has moved into the past, is to know what to do with what happened. My sense is that every time a group comes together and moves beyond being a collection of disparate egos to speak from the middle, in that space beyond individuality (which won’t happen just because we want it to - there seems to be a mysterious movement of grace involved), we are making it easier for it to happen next time. Laying down the groove that will become the next stage in the evolution of human consciousness. Which - it is becoming clear to those that inquire into this question - will be a collective one. So in that sense, we don’t have to do anything. We did it while we were together. The Circle Being fulfilled its Circle Task.

The content of our inquiry and insights are also important, however. And they won’t survive unless we move with them out into the world. That is part of my commitment now. To chronicle what we spoke about. It’s feels hard, sometimes, being a working mum with school-aged kids and a full-time day job, when my larger life is calling me to evolutionary agency that I have no choice but to say "YES" to. I spent all of last week popping in and out of overwhelm - feeling the urgency of getting down my insights before they fade, while being continually yanked back into "now and next week" by said day job. And all the while, the newly acquired commitments of ongoing life keep on piling up. It would be good to be able to go off-line sometimes, to step off the timeline to recount what is happening at the speed of life all around.

We all came to the gathering with different expectations of what would happen. Mine had to do with moving beyond the tension between our individual selves, lives, pain, journeys, stories and agendas to become the collective organism that we could be, together, for a short while, to pool our separate sensory strengths in service to a collective inquiry that would be timely and to the benefit of the greater whole. At the time, I wrote "We women can get caught up in the particular, so letting go into the general might also be a challenge to us. In this global inquiry, we shall be using our bodies as sensory organs of a single organism. We can succeed in this only to the extent that our own bodies don’t also have to process our own personal, individual, ego stuff. Can we leave that outside the circle for an hour or two?" In the end we managed a whole 24 hours. There was clarity, energy, humour, spaciousness, fluency, humility, boldness, lightness, courage, inspiration and grace. If this is what happens when people make it through the eye of the needle, then there is hope for the human race.