Recognising wholeness of people and the interconnection of things,.

We all have a unique essence that brings, mind, body and heart together – our whole self, which offers us a larger field of possibilities to choose from. Seeing wholes is important because it stops us just focusing on a few parts or characteristics that do not explain fully the essence of something or somebody. Every living thing “senses” events in its environment which the nervous system adapts to. This produces our “Way of Being”, a whole self, viable in the wholeness of its environment.

We come to be what and who we are from many diverse experiences of being and doing, as a person, living in a whole community and a whole planet, where everything interconnects to place us in a particular space in time. Yes, we are composed of systems within systems, but we don’t say “nice to see your heart, head and hands today”. We see a whole person when we experience and connect with their essence.

The next step is to find harmony and unity in our humanity.

 It easy to get stuck in a mood of resentment and resignation.

To grow as a person, in a challenging environment, we must develop a mood, an attitude of acceptance, to realise our potential and seek growth by remaining ambitious and hopeful for a better future.  It’s about having the capacity to be calm, resilient and centred when under pressure. We then remain open to learning and can act without fear or regret.

Much depends on our ability to observe and shift our Way of Being in a context that is constantly changing. It does not change the essence of who we are it just enhances our capacities to realise our potential. Here is a dynamic relationship between what is enduring and what is changing.

When we focus on problems we use the same unconscious mindset. When we pay attention to our intentions, we bring more creative thoughts into play, instead of trying to impose our will on a concerns or objective. When we  see the importance of connecting our thoughts to what we care about our perspective changes and our potential opens up to guide our choices based on what we are sensing and feeling. We feel more rooted to who we are and can think more clearly about what really matters to us.

Every aspect of our lives and how we interact with our environment is full of potential to be regenerated and realised in the world out there. The secret of expanding our potential lies in how much we care and stay aware of the infinite possibilities.

Always search for the potential to grow in every situation.

We need to know who and what we care about. 

In life we go through many transitions and undertake many roles where we want to live a life that celebrates our unique talents and retains our sense of self.  What type of tree emerges from a seed is predetermined by its genetic structure. So it is with human beings. What is, is. We are who we are meant to be – present and available to connect with others. Feeling and empathy are essential elements of our essence, but not always sufficient. It demands inner work to uncover our innate wisdom. and resolve emotional wounds that have remained unaddressed.

We see this essence or spirit in young children, their non-conformity that endures throughout life. Our essence, is the capacity we have as a human beings to be empathetic, resilient, brave, resourceful, honest and trusting. We can also feel the essensce of environments and often inducea mood state as soon as we walk through the door. We find it in the way we connect with artwork, music and the ornaments that symbolize what we care about. Essence is the irreducible core of something that makes it what it is and a person who they are.

We can get lost in the transactional nature of relationships. It causes us to hear without truly listening. We get consumed by acting without a clear purpose and get categorised by the work we do, and separated from who we we are,  detached just living a default lifestyle.  We live in our essence when we know the type of future we want to create for ourselves to serve the world.

It’s not our personality as such, as this is just a behaviour trait that we acquire to help us get through life. Seeing the essence of people in places and things is fundamental for our sense of deep connection, to the wholeness and potential of people that teachers sense about their pupils and coaches sense about their clients.

We build our capacity for consciousness every time we care about the people and environment around us, recognising the wholeness and potential – the essence within them. As an ontological coach, I would help my clients see a bigger wholeness in them as individuals and in teams.

It is perhaps helping them see themselves in a different or ideal situation, performing calmly, without fear or judgement from others when under pressure. In a space of psychological safety, these issues can be addressed to discover similarities and differences.

We cannot not be who we are.

  Grow our ability to thrive and be self-determining

I brought my sons up to be independent thinkers and see the world without sentiment, but with a better understanding of the true nature of life. I saw myself as the cultivator of human beings.

I had the archetype of a teacher and coach, and my youngest son adopted the lifestyle of a Livestock Farmer that he loves. My eldest son was more of a rebellious team player and found himself in the armed forces. His potential was revealed in his career as a Mechanical Construction Engineer building Data Centres around the world. Realising their essence, they have grown their ability to be self-determining in different ways.

Our nature develops over time and our essence expresses itself as potential. The emergent nature of life means we are all work in progress. It starts with knowing who you are, what you value as important and what you want to do to contribute to the world.

In my work as an Ontological Coach I have realised that personal development has to be intentional. We have to plan and design for it or we just survive in a default lifestyle. Looking back, it follows a recurring pattern. The process outlined above never stops, as we seek to regenerate ourselves, by transforming our relationship with our environment.

Development requires us to practice the skill of attention and our capacity to accept new challenges

  We forget to see ourselves being part of something larger than ourselves.

When we generalise, we see the wholeness of things and forget that they are an integral part of something larger. For example, aligning ourselves to an organisation’s culture or natures ecosystems. This is because we composed of parts of things that are part of something elss that is part of something else, etc. Like a flock of birds, we see the parts but not the intricacies of their interconnections when they form a complex adaptive system. 

As connections become more dynamic and complex, we can lose sight of the fact that we are in relationship with things and people that are not immediately apparent. Awareness of how parts and systems are nested in other systems, can give us a depth of perception, but can produce ambiguity and confusion as well. What’s more the parts can have a negative influence and cause breakdowns in other systems. It’s like intervening to help a child when the problem is in the family.

 Children are nested in families, nested in communities, nested in countries, etc.

  Nodes are like keys to a system, with the potential to transform the whole of a system. 

To know about something, we must care about it enough that it is important to us. One of my sons did not take memorising “meaningless “facts in classroom teaching situations very well.  It was too  abstract to him. He preferred a more concrete way of thinking. But when given an opportunity to work with animals, learning had a purpose, to take care of what he cared about. He went on to get an honours degree in Business Management.

It transformed my son’s perspective of farming systems by seeing the sustainable nature of regenerative farming. He could anticipate what was emerging and see nested relationships more clearly when nature, farming and animal health are seen together and sequential,

A relationship with animals became the focus for an intentional shift to learn for a deeply felt purpose. He had found his essence. It required thinking in a nodal way allowing something new to turn up to change the whole system and bring a better future into existence.

  Care shapes a person’s desires, their creativity and focus on living systems.

  Ground every action in ways that are deeply intentional and coherent..

We learn best from what happens to us in the moment. It’s powerful when it’s immediate, concrete, real and personally relevant. We are observing what is going on inside us and in our relationship with others and our shared environment. For example, our system in focus is our whole Way of Being which combine three interlocking fields – Language, Body and Mood.

By using our imagination, we can live in a different world by regenerating pattens of energy and activity within our system in focus. To change a system, we must work on the whole energy field by allowing something new to happen that disturbs the patterns of interaction in the system to remove the obstacles to regeneration.

We all live in different “fields of consciousness” which we often refer to as a “worldview”. It is an expansive feeling pervades our whole essence and shapes the way we sense and respond to changes within us and around us. We make sense of this field when we meditate and become aware of how our intuition combines with our rational, emotional and somatic sense of self.. 

Carl Jung extended this concept to describe a “collective consciousness” that reflects a deeper nature or shared mind. Candice Pert referred to this field as  the `’bodymind”. We observe ourselves as if we are looking from the outside-in, yet we make sense of ourselves from the inside-out.

Rather than working on each part separately, we bring all the parts/agents of the system together within a contained space to reflect on and reshape the whole energy field. For example, a Future Search event can reduce wasted time and self-centredness of our head voices to enhance collaborative action when we attend to our deeper nature.  

  We can use the energy of the whole system to stop one preferred solution creating more problems.

Having a mind gives you the energy and intelligence to process what you are observing. It’s like a movie maker, creating scenes with a script, feelings and meaning. The mind uses the body’s nervous system to make sense of your experiences. It is you that decides whether to be open or closed to them. You also have a soul, a nature, which makes you yearn for peace, security, respect, fairness, belonging, etc. Sydney Banks takes the view that the mind is vitally influenced, rooted-in and dependent on, the greater whole of which it is part – a field of interconnected systems.

CLARITY

Where a mind absent of thought is fully aware of what’s happening, moment-to-moment that’s creating the ideal conditions for fresh, clear thinking and fast learning. This state leads to a richer experience of how life happens and how you relate to it. You realise that experience is thought-created. Reality is how you choose to see it.

RESILIENCE

When you were a child you had a natural tendency to bounce back from adversity. As an adult, you can easily get bogged down in negative feelings and lose sight of your innate capacity to recover when thrown off balance. It requires an agile mind, open to new sources of energy, insights and creative thinking. This way you stay alert to new solutions, opportunities and possibilities. Otherwise, you disrupt the flow of positive thoughts, leaving you stuck in dilemmas and seemingly insolvable problems.

RESOURCEFULNESS

If you cannot accept facts you cannot be changed, you remain stuck in a life of setting goals and problem-solving. You just repeat the same mistakes, dealing with the unintended consequences of poor choices. When you realise that the barrier is your own thinking and the way you create your experience, you have the innate wisdom to generate a better reality by exploring possibilities and embracing uncertainty.

WELLBEING

The mind is naturally disposed to be in a positive and optimistic mood. You perform better, and feel healthier and happier when free of negative feelings and concerns. Sadness and frustration produce low levels of energy that leave us stuck. Your energy inevitably rises when you smile, adopt a bright and open disposition, use positive language and take time out to rest and meditate. This helps to calm the mind and relax the body.

You need to be conscious to be aware and experience life. It’s your level of consciousness in any given moment and context that generates the quality of your experience. It’s the way thoughts arise from insights to create a new reality from distinctions and interpretations. Such transformations emerge from a shift in awareness

Carol Sanford reminds us that “to make a profound and lasting difference in our life, start with understanding regenerative change. It requires an indirect approach.”

1. Wake ourselves up to notice more of what our senses are telling us. This is because we only tend to “see” what we seek. How do we make ourselves aware of this limitation? When we listen, are we aware of what we are listening for, because that’s all we will hear.

2. Remain open and connected to the whole experience by using all our senses, intuition, and any insights. This is the “nestedness” of our reality that is multi-faceted and interconnected.

3. Climb up the levels of mind from just noticing things, to observing the patterns of interconnection and seeing the unique essence of the whole system.

The way to work on these three practices is to practice Carol Sanford’s Seven First Principles of Regeneration and Sydney Banks’s Three Principles. Both are ways of awakening and maintaining consciousness by stepping outside of our default, machine thinking paradigm to look at people and organisations as whole living systems, not fragmented parts of a machine.

It’s not what you think that matters, its how you think. This is because thoughts are revealed in actions, words, feelings and moods. If you think you cannot deal with something it’s because you cannot see, feel or imagine yourself doing it. The thinking is invisible and so fast-moving you can only observe the result of thought. Consequently, it doesn’t make sense to look for causes or guaranteed outcomes. Only the right feelings and actions will get the result you want.