Accessible, common and powerful: Our developmentally highest selfs. Simon Divecha writes…

Throughout this year’s Action Research Plus coLAB,  Leadership as Developmental Friendship, we’ve continued exploring other ways of knowing and being.

This is inspired by a core Action Research insight—when we investigate something it changes us as well as what we are investigating. A simple example is I love having my biases busted. One of these was to marginalise ‘awakening’, and congruent experiences of onenness and connection, rather than regard it as accessible, common and a powerful source helping us all to address needs.

Accessible

Bias part one is to think and feel that expanded awareness is hard. We readily scaffold and reach into being in our bigger selfs. For example:

Practices help us establish steps through which (new) insight may transform into creative action.  Practices, therefore, allow us to take first steps which – because we are embodied and not just brains on sticks – further help us move to Skillful Action

wrote Hilary Bradbury after our October coLAB. In that post she lists our brainstorm of practices. Those of us live on the call quickly and effortlessly found a couple each we regularly engage in.

Alexandra Stubbings similarly takes us deep into exploring this for the earlier May session with:

space for reflecting on our discoveries … By shifting our point of consciousness out of the human, to look back at our human selves sitting from the vantage point of a non-human other, is, it seems, to instantly expand our circle of empathy. Group members commented on how quickly and easily they were able to speak from these other perspectives, with a familiarity and certainty that surprised them, not unlike the experience of taking up representations in constellations.

I invite you to play with this too. Here’s the preparatory practice for the June session I hosted. Follow this link, for the practice, in which I welcome you as a multi dimensional human.

Busted part one is as soon as we start actively exploring this we tend to remember many more examples, other significant examples across our lives we’ve tended to set aside as amazing, anomalous and atypical.

What if they are not?

Common

Bias part two is the idea this is rarefied, accessible to relatively few, limited to those with years of ‘practice’. Rather as Dr John Vervaeke highlights, drawing on  Steve Taylor, Andrew Newberg & Mark Waldman, some 40% of people are experiencing awaking at various levels of intensity.

In interviews with me people commonly talk about their peak experiences. This is across multiple realms, physical and subtle. It includes in nature, with animals, forests, rivers and feeling as if they are part of the other, the whole of what’s around them extending through or as them, and expanding out limitlessly beyond the horizon, including across time. Psychedelics sometimes feature (less than you might think). People recount peaks too with their children, babies and birth. ‘Flow like’ states are described in work contexts, exercise, sport, over mountains and with groups. Limitless, boundless experiences in meditative states feature too as well as through satori presence.*

I’d invite you to feeling this, with nature, and the surprising parallels between a dragonflies life cycle and our own human metamorphosis to meet the needs of our world today. I liken this to a portal, we’re transforming, try it for yourself from the 1 minute mark of the audio VoiceOver here>  

Busted part two is the awareness about our depth of resources here. Four of every ten people are more than enough to deeply shift our world. Embracing this brings the change, and what’s underway from it, into our present day.

Powerful

Bias part three is it creates impact. We’ve all done this, been in a place when what could have been challenging or impossible comes together quickly and easily instead. A personal example from me is Solar Sunrise. It’s the story of pulling off a $75 million win, from a consortium including wildly different interests (multinational business and marginalised communities).

Up against the deadline we need to chop $15 million from a carefully crafted budget. Critically we do this in 90 minutes flat, creating even more passion and commitment across our diverse leaders and enabling them to convince their stakeholders: yes we really want to do this…

What’s present as we do this is empathy and connection. You can label it as a co-created outcome, a synergy. It is enabled by awareness of all that we nurture here, the gossamer threads of what’s birthed and sensuous juice it brings.

Practically, practices through Integral Leadership and Developmental Awareness let me hold space for this in the group.

Busted part three is the more this is recognised the more powerful it becomes. I’m greatly encouraged by our explicit prioritising of inner development. It goes far beyond the coLAB, across global UN backed institutions (e.g. IPBES), countries (e.g. Costa Rica adopting the Inner Development Goals) and, from a cultural perspective, a radically more open readiness to engage with this.

What are your peak experiences? Personal and/or where you’ve been involved in creating what you might have regarded as extraordinary? Please do reach out and/or comment below on them.


Dr Simon Divecha – pictured below – is a Consciousness Coach and Integral Leadership consultant. He is also an Editor for the Action Research Journal; author for IPBES’s Transformative Change Assessment (Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, only the UN could have come up with a name like this!); and, hosted the June Developmental Friendship coLAB. Contact>

References / Resources

This article draws on my substack post Love and Peace.

* Interviews:  I ask about this particularly when scoring people’s adult development—peaks, home bases and tethers (usually with The Core Teresa Zimmermann ‘s beautiful model). This gives us actionable clarity on our personal development at a depth nothing else I know of does. Please reach out email> for more.

The red pill describes a bit of how I experience such peaks.

Steve Taylor, Waking From Sleep: Why Awakening Experiences Occur and How to Make Them Permanent

Andrew Newberg, Mark Waldman, How Enlightenment Changes Your Brain: The New Science of Transformation

Picture: Festina Lentívaldi, (be) Benevolution. Reuse: Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0 US.