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Reflection: The Ladder and the Palm Yesterday, a photograph stopped me. An old wooden ladder leaned gently against a palm tree in Jamaica. No one climbing. No visible task. No urgency. Just… there. It brought back another image I kept in my New York office years ago— a yellow ladder floating in a wide blue sky from the Santa Fe Opera. Two ladders. Both unclaimed by purpose. And something in me softened. Because I know this other ladder too— the one we climb without questioning: achievement, recognition, progress, getting somewhere. The one that quietly turns presence into performance. In yoga, we’re given a simple invitation: nowhere to go, nothing to do. I’ve said those words countless times guiding others. But lately, I’m feeling them differently. Not as instruction— but as orientation. What if the ladder is still here… but we’re not required to climb it? What if it can simply lean— part of the landscape, not a demand? In a world of constant becoming, there is something quietly radical about remembering: to be here right here right now.

This reflection feels very real to me—the quiet way we can exchange an “absolute” orientation for a “relative” one without noticing. In my case, it didn’t show up in physics, but in a much more intimate terrain. Years ago, after nearly two decades of deep healing, my husband suddenly became seriously ill again. In an instant, something old and visceral was activated in me—a root-level fear I recognized from my own near-death experiences in my twenties. On the surface, I was doing what was needed—caring, organizing, holding things together. But underneath, I could feel a shift: from simply being present… to subtly measuring myself. Am I doing this well enough? Am I holding this together the “right” way? That was the moment I recognized the ladder. And that it wasn’t leaning where my heart actually was. What helped wasn’t leaving, but returning. Returning to simple reference points: • feeling my feet when fear surged • allowing emotion without trying to resolve it • sitting beside him, not as a role, but as a human being I also leaned into practices that have shaped my life—dialogue, movement, and what I now call conscious composting. Letting what was arising move through, rather than organizing myself around it. These became my way out of the quiet hierarchy of “doing it right.” Nothing external immediately changed. But something in me softened. I was no longer performing care—I was participating in it. So I resonate deeply with the mimetic trap. We do inherit pace, values, even identity from the fields we inhabit. And… there are quieter reference points available. For me: the body, relational presence, creative and contemplative practice— places where I can sense what is actually alive. When I lose that, I drift. When I return, even briefly, something reorients. And the question “Why does this matter?” stops being something to answer— and becomes somethi... [View Full Comment] This reflection feels very real to me—the quiet way we can exchange an “absolute” orientation for a “relative” one without noticing. In my case, it didn’t show up in physics, but in a much more intimate terrain. Years ago, after nearly two decades of deep healing, my husband suddenly became seriously ill again. In an instant, something old and visceral was activated in me—a root-level fear I recognized from my own near-death experiences in my twenties. On the surface, I was doing what was needed—caring, organizing, holding things together. But underneath, I could feel a shift: from simply being present… to subtly measuring myself. Am I doing this well enough? Am I holding this together the “right” way? That was the moment I recognized the ladder. And that it wasn’t leaning where my heart actually was. What helped wasn’t leaving, but returning. Returning to simple reference points: • feeling my feet when fear surged • allowing emotion without trying to resolve it • sitting beside him, not as a role, but as a human being I also leaned into practices that have shaped my life—dialogue, movement, and what I now call conscious composting. Letting what was arising move through, rather than organizing myself around it. These became my way out of the quiet hierarchy of “doing it right.” Nothing external immediately changed. But something in me softened. I was no longer performing care—I was participating in it. So I resonate deeply with the mimetic trap. We do inherit pace, values, even identity from the fields we inhabit. And… there are quieter reference points available. For me: the body, relational presence, creative and contemplative practice— places where I can sense what is actually alive. When I lose that, I drift. When I return, even briefly, something reorients. And the question “Why does this matter?” stops being something to answer— and becomes something to live inside. Like a tone I keep tuning toward, again and again, until the ladder dissolves and I find myself not climbing— but standing in the field that was here all along.[Hide Full Comment]

I’ve spent decades in practices that meet this directly—through body, breath, dialogue, and awareness. What I’ve come to trust is not that difficult energy disappears, but that it knows how to move when I don’t grip it. I’ve felt fear rise that was older than the moment. Heat, contraction, a kind of ancient remembering. When I resisted, it stayed and shaped my thinking. When I allowed it—without collapsing into it, without pushing it away—something shifted. Not immediately into love, but into space. And in that space, the energy reorganized. What I might call now—not just transmutation—but integration. These days, what helps me “keep my hands off” is simple, but not easy: feeling my feet, softening my breath, and trusting that the body and heart are not problems to solve, but processes already underway. And yes… like the seasons, something in me is always moving— not pushing winter away, but letting spring arrive.

Reading this, I don’t meet it as an idea. I meet it as a moment that opened me. After nearly twenty years of my husband’s steady heart healing, there was a sudden turn. Serious. Uncertain. And what rose in me was not the calm of a seasoned practitioner—but a deep, sacred fear. Ancient. Immediate. It carried echoes of my own early near-death experiences in my twenties—those thresholds where the body knows something the mind cannot yet hold. For a moment, everything in me wanted to organize it, to be the steady one, to move quickly into action. Yet something quieter whispered: stay. So alongside caring for him, I practiced a different kind of devotion. Hand on heart. Breath meeting the surge. Letting the fear rise without pushing it back down. Not collapsing into it. Not transcending it. But allowing. I’ve seen this terrain before—in the 36 voices of Yoga Radicals, where what begins as rupture becomes, over time, a doorway into service… into social impact… into lives re-authored from the inside out. And I’ve written through it myself—in those wandering lines that came during my own healing: almost breaking almost opening the same door What I felt beneath the fear, when I stopped interrupting it, was not relief—not at first. It was heat. Then space. Then a fierce, steady aliveness. A love that was not soft, but elemental. Not sentimental, but structuring. Over years of dialogue, movement, and meditation, I’ve come to trust this: what rises is not the enemy. It is the body, the heart, the field— pushing toward coherence. What helps me “keep my hands off” is relationship— to breath, to ground, to the wider web holding us when we cannot hold ourselves. And slowly, what felt like fear begins to reorganize… not because I fixed it, but because I allowed it to complete its arc. For me, this is the path of embodying emergence: awareness… opening into a creativ... [View Full Comment] Reading this, I don’t meet it as an idea. I meet it as a moment that opened me. After nearly twenty years of my husband’s steady heart healing, there was a sudden turn. Serious. Uncertain. And what rose in me was not the calm of a seasoned practitioner—but a deep, sacred fear. Ancient. Immediate. It carried echoes of my own early near-death experiences in my twenties—those thresholds where the body knows something the mind cannot yet hold. For a moment, everything in me wanted to organize it, to be the steady one, to move quickly into action. Yet something quieter whispered: stay. So alongside caring for him, I practiced a different kind of devotion. Hand on heart. Breath meeting the surge. Letting the fear rise without pushing it back down. Not collapsing into it. Not transcending it. But allowing. I’ve seen this terrain before—in the 36 voices of Yoga Radicals, where what begins as rupture becomes, over time, a doorway into service… into social impact… into lives re-authored from the inside out. And I’ve written through it myself—in those wandering lines that came during my own healing: almost breaking almost opening the same door What I felt beneath the fear, when I stopped interrupting it, was not relief—not at first. It was heat. Then space. Then a fierce, steady aliveness. A love that was not soft, but elemental. Not sentimental, but structuring. Over years of dialogue, movement, and meditation, I’ve come to trust this: what rises is not the enemy. It is the body, the heart, the field— pushing toward coherence. What helps me “keep my hands off” is relationship— to breath, to ground, to the wider web holding us when we cannot hold ourselves. And slowly, what felt like fear begins to reorganize… not because I fixed it, but because I allowed it to complete its arc. For me, this is the path of embodying emergence: awareness… opening into a creative field… and, in its own time, into action. Not forced. Not avoided. But lived. [Hide Full Comment]

find myself reflecting on a long thread in my life. Years ago, I was introduced to Bohm Dialogue—not as a method, but as a way of being together. Later, my husband and I began hosting small gatherings in our home. We shared food, and then, with the sound of a singing bowl, entered into what we called conscious conversation. What we noticed was simple: people didn’t always know what to say. Not because there was nothing there, but because something deeper was being asked. Over time, the “food” began to change. From meals to attention. From conversation to listening that could hold what is real. Now, in our Friends Practicing Together gatherings, I sense we are tending what I’ve come to call Sacred Roots—those quiet, unseen threads of connection that grow beneath our words. Reading Priya Basil’s reflection, I feel how easily “authenticity” can become something we try to claim or defend. And yet, the moments that stay with me are the ones where something softer happens—where a story is offered, received, and somehow becomes shared ground. A small bridge forms. What helps me extend those circles of hospitality is remembering that I don’t have to generate it alone. When I arrive, listen, and allow myself to be touched by what is here, something opens that feels larger than any one of us. Perhaps that is the practice. Not to get it right, but to stay. And to let something grow between us.

When my husband and I married twenty-five years ago, a small book quietly shaped our vows: On Love by A. R. Orage. What struck me then was the idea of conscious love—a form of relationship where partners are not only companions, but stewards of one another’s development. Love, in this sense, is not possession or projection. It is a shared commitment to awakening. At the time, those words felt aspirational. Beautiful, but somewhat mysterious. Life, of course, provided the curriculum. Across the years we navigated the very human passages many couples encounter: health challenges, career transitions, aging parents, and the subtle developmental shifts that come with later life. Alongside those outer changes, we both maintained a steady commitment to contemplative practice. Something slowly changed in the field between us. What began as two individuals learning how to love each other gradually matured into something quieter and more spacious—a sense of “new we-ness.” Not the loss of individuality, but the emergence of a shared center of gravity. Today we even find ourselves building work together, helping others navigate complexity and change. In that process I sometimes recognize what Orage hinted at long ago: when partners support each other’s conscious development, the relationship itself becomes creative. The polarity of me and you softens. A living we appears. And from that shared ground, something larger than either partner alone can begin to ripple outward into the world. 💗

a long-term meditator, yet at last December’s annual Embodying the Heart of Wisdom retreat at IMS, struggle was present; a difficult silent retreat than before. Normally I spend time outdoors to help regulate my body during long periods of silence, yet this time I couldn’t even bring myself to go outside. It was cold, yes—but something deeper asked me to stay. One morning in the large meditation hall, I dropped into a very absorbed state. Suddenly I experienced a lotus rising through my body—pink and white petals with a thick stem emerging from a muddy source deep below awareness. It felt ancient and familiar. Months earlier I had bought lotus seeds and shared them with friends beginning new projects. I’m in the midst of one myself. In that moment the small “I, me, mine” relaxed into a long, quiet recognition: Ahhh… we are already blooming something new together.

The Sacred is in all of us and we learn about it when we have a moment of intimacy. For me, it’s not only with a person, actually, I first learned about the Sacred when I was very very young, and felt the embrace of the universal life force surrounding me as if it could replace or at least enhance something that I was yearning for and not receiving in my human contact. It has stayed with me since and now I have learned that it also exists in other people and that when we deepen our connections with each other, just like in long-term contemplative practice that something lights up a new space of awareness and capacity for something more to be felt. It’s that profound connection, across time in space that creates the impression of something continuing that wants my attention and love. That’s why I write poetry and dance as a way to mirror what is in this extraordinary emergent space that we all are serving, consciously or unconsciously together or separately. I love to call it embodying emergence, and we are reaching toward something that we are collectively constellating for the sake of something not yet known, or maybe we have always known… That’s the fun part

What cultivates spaciousness in my life is creating time for practices that inspire harmony and happiness in mind heart and body … it’s how the yoga radicals book project was born … I needed to seed my gratitude for what I had been given … 🌠🎶🐝🌱🙏🏽

The ways in which thoughts from the past or qualities of engagement from current moment, awareness are able to combine and transform at a collective level, feels very much like the call to an expanded consciousness at a collective level. As we constellation the future through contemplative and continuous moments Resting and being, the quality of connection increases. It’s in this expanded space in place that I feel we all might feel truly held by the potential of conscious awareness, sharing where and how we are wandering Wayfinders… Together

Totally agree about the habit of self-referential thinking that seems to “compete” with the restful state that arises after long-term meditation and contemplative movement practices

My dear friend and colleague Izzy Gesell died last month, and we celebrated him in a memorial which was filled with laughter and like minded creatives. He was a long-term master of improv, and all of its applications to increase nervous system regulation as well as for personal development. He didn’t talk about the need for more laughter, per se, yet it was clear that the gentle switching toward a “yes and” approach would create a much more fluid relational field, as people told their stories from the perspective of other and the incredible capacity building that that laughter comes from the deep part of our being. Nothing like connecting with others in a humorous applied improv session, such that Izzy did for so many over so many years. We miss him greatly.. Izzy Gesell, rest in peace

I am a child of the Work—raised in the rhythm of Quaker silence, formed by the lineage of the Gurdjieff teachings, and deeply attuned to the laws of Three and Seven. These are not abstract principles to me; they are the living architecture of how I move, teach, love, and listen. They have guided me through decades of embodied inquiry, spiritual practice, and relational prototyping. In the 1980s, I was a wilderness-based adventure trainer working with corporate executives navigating high-stress events like hostile takeovers. My role was to bring them into the rawness of nature and the rigor of self-inquiry. But the rupture came, not in the workplace, but on a day off—windsurfing. My sail went down, I moved to right my board, and I subluxated my right hip. That injury ended my career in that form. What followed was not just physical rehabilitation—it was a total reweaving. I returned to my spiritual roots, and I walked (and re-walked) the long path of healing through several surgeries. I literally had to learn to walk again—twice. But beneath the surface of the physical work, something more subtle and profound was unfolding. I began to compost the myths of independence, of productivity, of perfection. My heart broke open. And in that brokenness, conscious love emerged. Later in life, I made peace with not becoming a mother in the biological sense. What opened instead was a deeper return to the embodiment practices rooted in preverbal, esoteric traditions—practices resonant across cultures and continents, from Indigenous ways of knowing to mystic streams within Sufism, Daoism, yoga, and the Gurdjieff Work. These traditions offered not a singular doctrine, but a vibrational field of remembrance—a way of inhabiting the body as portal, compass, and co-conspirator with life. One of the fruits of this journey was being commissioned to co-create Yoga Radicals: A Curated Set of Practices and Reflections for Moving from “Me” to “We.” That work c... [View Full Comment] I am a child of the Work—raised in the rhythm of Quaker silence, formed by the lineage of the Gurdjieff teachings, and deeply attuned to the laws of Three and Seven. These are not abstract principles to me; they are the living architecture of how I move, teach, love, and listen. They have guided me through decades of embodied inquiry, spiritual practice, and relational prototyping. In the 1980s, I was a wilderness-based adventure trainer working with corporate executives navigating high-stress events like hostile takeovers. My role was to bring them into the rawness of nature and the rigor of self-inquiry. But the rupture came, not in the workplace, but on a day off—windsurfing. My sail went down, I moved to right my board, and I subluxated my right hip. That injury ended my career in that form. What followed was not just physical rehabilitation—it was a total reweaving. I returned to my spiritual roots, and I walked (and re-walked) the long path of healing through several surgeries. I literally had to learn to walk again—twice. But beneath the surface of the physical work, something more subtle and profound was unfolding. I began to compost the myths of independence, of productivity, of perfection. My heart broke open. And in that brokenness, conscious love emerged. Later in life, I made peace with not becoming a mother in the biological sense. What opened instead was a deeper return to the embodiment practices rooted in preverbal, esoteric traditions—practices resonant across cultures and continents, from Indigenous ways of knowing to mystic streams within Sufism, Daoism, yoga, and the Gurdjieff Work. These traditions offered not a singular doctrine, but a vibrational field of remembrance—a way of inhabiting the body as portal, compass, and co-conspirator with life. One of the fruits of this journey was being commissioned to co-create Yoga Radicals: A Curated Set of Practices and Reflections for Moving from “Me” to “We.” That work called me to bridge decades of somatic knowledge, spiritual lineage, and relational intelligence into a practical offering for these times. Now, in this ripened chapter of life, I live from a place of conscious composting—honoring what must fall away, tending what wants to bloom, and gathering with others to share the harvest of this “now.” I no longer believe in heroes or gurus. What I trust is the rhythm of the cosmic heart—a vast, generous intelligence that pulses through all of us, blessing our species even in our fumbling. This is the Work now: To compost with awareness. To prototype in community. To practice love as a field, not a performance.[Hide Full Comment]

Waiting for the right time to receive the gentle kisses of the path of deep and connected awareness is a blessing. When the boy shook the tree to ‘get’ a mango fruit, his action might be in sync what others have been doing, yet, as we are reminded by barefoot Vinoba, it might be sweet but doesn’t feel right. The force used to shake or rush a ripening in any way creates a dent or interruption in a natural order of being and becoming harmony.

If we are here as part of a grander scheme than our simplistic ideas of how things ought to unfold because of our desires, the story above opens a portal to include any event as a blessed event. Assuming that we need to find answers or solutions to things that take a different turn or become disruptive to our existing patterns of thinking feeling, and sensing, then how will we engage with this great unfolding with an open heart and mind? Where is awareness, creativity and action, operating as a dance of three? Inmy personal experience, I’ve seen much destruction and despair both at the personal level as well as at the collective level. As a first responder to the 911 disaster, I saw my hometown in an upheaval the rescue workers and all others on the ground were overwhelmed with a stench of burning human flesh. The story that emerged to help us stay, uplifted had everything to do with nourishment for the soul, as our spirits seem to have evaporated. When our house flooded seven years ago, I took it as an opportunity to declutter. We had to move out for 50 weeks while things were restored and “made new again“. And just three years ago, a hillside next to our summer retreat was hit by a tornado, taking down a swath of trees and leaving open bare lumber pile. Today it is my garden, filled with wildflowers and a place to sit and reflect. The birds come and tell the stories as time goes on. What are we not seeing yet?

Wisdom in the In-Between: Listening with the Body, Sensing with the Earth By Allie Middleton Founder, Integrative Leadership Practices | alliemiddleton.com | ILP.world ⸻ In times of great complexity, our thinking minds alone are not enough. The challenges of our world—ecological, social, and spiritual—require a new kind of attention. One that emerges not from control or certainty, but from attunement. Among the most transformative practices I’ve explored as part of Embodying Emergence is 4D Mapping, a social art form rooted in the work of the Presencing Institute, co-founded by Arawana Hayashi. This body-based method offers a way to sense into systems not just with intellect, but through relational space, gesture, posture, and presence. A recent article in The Journal of Awareness-Based Systems Change (JABSC), co-authored by Sebastian Jung, deepens this methodology, showing how 4D Mapping helps reveal the unseen dynamics and latent potential in social fields. Participants embody aspects of the system—people, land, institutions, or even more-than-human forces—allowing the wisdom of the whole to emerge through movement and stillness. We feel the system breathe. We move with it. And in doing so, something ancient wakes up. ⸻ The Wisdom of Rocks As I reflect on this practice, I’m drawn to the poetic insights of Vanessa Machado de Oliveira in Hospicing Modernity. She invites us to: “Linger on the wisdom of rocks—not as inert masses but as carriers of time, witnesses to cycles far beyond human comprehension…” Vanessa beautifully reframes wisdom as something emergent and entangled, not possessed. She reminds us that the intelligence of rocks is not metaphorical—it is relational. It lives in the resonance between things. Between beings. Between time scales. She quotes her friend Giovanna, who once said: “I still need to talk to the rocks.” This is not a search for data, but an act of deep listening—of t... [View Full Comment] Wisdom in the In-Between: Listening with the Body, Sensing with the Earth By Allie Middleton Founder, Integrative Leadership Practices | alliemiddleton.com | ILP.world ⸻ In times of great complexity, our thinking minds alone are not enough. The challenges of our world—ecological, social, and spiritual—require a new kind of attention. One that emerges not from control or certainty, but from attunement. Among the most transformative practices I’ve explored as part of Embodying Emergence is 4D Mapping, a social art form rooted in the work of the Presencing Institute, co-founded by Arawana Hayashi. This body-based method offers a way to sense into systems not just with intellect, but through relational space, gesture, posture, and presence. A recent article in The Journal of Awareness-Based Systems Change (JABSC), co-authored by Sebastian Jung, deepens this methodology, showing how 4D Mapping helps reveal the unseen dynamics and latent potential in social fields. Participants embody aspects of the system—people, land, institutions, or even more-than-human forces—allowing the wisdom of the whole to emerge through movement and stillness. We feel the system breathe. We move with it. And in doing so, something ancient wakes up. ⸻ The Wisdom of Rocks As I reflect on this practice, I’m drawn to the poetic insights of Vanessa Machado de Oliveira in Hospicing Modernity. She invites us to: “Linger on the wisdom of rocks—not as inert masses but as carriers of time, witnesses to cycles far beyond human comprehension…” Vanessa beautifully reframes wisdom as something emergent and entangled, not possessed. She reminds us that the intelligence of rocks is not metaphorical—it is relational. It lives in the resonance between things. Between beings. Between time scales. She quotes her friend Giovanna, who once said: “I still need to talk to the rocks.” This is not a search for data, but an act of deep listening—of tuning in to a field of meaning that modernity has forgotten. ⸻ Resonance, Not Possession In this same spirit, I often return to the work of Rupert Sheldrake, whose concept of morphic resonance helps ground these intuitions in a broader vision of connected intelligence. He proposes that form and memory exist not only in material structures, but in fields that inform and shape life across time and space. It is not difficult to see how morphic resonance and social field sensing converge: both point to a living, participatory universe where memory, form, and knowing travel through resonance, not just through genes, matter, or code. This lens helps affirm what we feel in practices like 4D Mapping: that the field itself holds memory and possibility—that when we enter it with care, we listen not only to each other, but to the system’s deeper story. ⸻ From Knowing to Becoming Modernity trains us to measure, predict, and control. But both 4D Mapping and Vanessa’s reflection challenge that paradigm. They suggest that wisdom is not about answers, but about becoming. Not about solutions, but sensing what wants to emerge. When we map a system with our bodies, we don’t explain it—we inhabit it. Insight arises not from outside the field, but within it. Through presence, posture, and felt sense, we allow something greater than us to move through us. This is what Rupert calls listening to the field. This is what Vanessa calls remembering the language of the Earth. This is what 4D Mapping helps us practice—together. ⸻ Listening Differently As leaders, facilitators, and fellow beings on Earth, we are invited into a new kind of conversation. To stop speaking about wisdom and instead enter the space between things, where relational intelligence already lives. This is the heart of Embodying Emergence: A return to living maps. A tuning to shared fields. A remembering of the slow wisdom beneath our feet. And perhaps, like Giovanna, we too need to talk to the rocks. [Hide Full Comment]

Emotions move oh so very fast, both anger and delight…and so for me, when I reflect, I wonder mostly about the past separations with sadness. Now, however, I’m still vulnerable yet much less Sade, more neutral. And so for the past, my inquiry is, “how could that have happened?“ And when I shift by direction from my present vulnerability to the future with a bit more humility and heart spaciousness, my inquiry is, “how might we make that happen”

Just like the rope and the holes in the fishnet, I have learned over and over again that what I had thought I was navigating was actually something quite different. And upon reflection, often ex postfacto, I realize that I was responding to something that was in the space between The knots in the net, that mystery that supports us all. Somehow, in this reflection of life force, I wonder what we are understanding really signifies or points us to! Yes, to me, there’s always something that we stand under that lifts our awareness over and over again, or it might simply be the opposite: that the mystery surrounds us, like the water, and it flows in and out, regardless of how many knots we put in the net of our conceptual frameworks. It’s a dance of perception and possibilities…

Love this approach of divine human intervention through praying without ceasing. It matters most in my prayers to remain in a state of calm remembrance of the many gifts of adoration and gratitude. My heart opens to the world and the souls who are listening too. I hear the supports loud and clear.and as g says, ‘remember ( yourself ) always and everywhere.’

“We ourselves are the raw chickpea, we ourselves are the fire of love, and we ourselves are the mystic chef/lover who pushes us back into the flame.” What beautiful sentiments of ordinary awareness of the flames of attention that awakened love nourishes. And the dance goes on and on… ♾️🌀💞