Continuing the Moving from ME to WE to US journey
In August 2021, Singing Dragon Press published Yoga Radicals: Inspiring Stories from Pioneers in the Field by Allie Middleton – a curated collection of conversations with 36 global yoga leaders, gathered during the Covid lockdown of 2020. The original inquiry was simple: how does sustained personal contemplative practice inspire social innovation for the greater good? The answers that emerged were transformative. You can read the original introduction here.
What has happened since
Over the following two years, Allie’s Brazilian colleague Geisa Paganini De Mio, a generative scribe trained in the Visual Presencing practice of the Presencing Institute, listened to all 36 hour-long interview recordings and created an individual scribing image for each contributor. These images were not illustrations. They were acts of deep listening, each one emerging from Geisa’s embodied, responsive attention to what was most alive in each conversation. The 36 images together form something unexpected: a visual map of how embodied practice moves from personal awareness into collective transformation.
A framework taking shape
From this body of work, including the interviews, images and five years of continued practice and teaching, a specific approach has been developing: Embodying Emergence. At it’s centre is the Wayfinder’s Octave: a framework that draw on the Theory U and Social Presencing Theatre, somatic yoga therapy, and the social arts, including generative scribing, embodied movement and collective resonance practices. This deepens understanding of how awareness moves into creativity and action in individuals, communities and the larger systems we are all a part of.
The movement is:
ME – grounded in personal body awareness, interoceptive knowing, the practice that grounds us and lands us in our watersheds.
INTERVALS – generative pauses, where conscious composting and collective constellating can happen. Not a delay between what matters, rather the place where what matters actually forms. Predictable places and spaces where Awareness, Creativity and Action converge – where what has been learned individually begins to meet an emerging social field. These pauses are as essential to individual development as they are to collective development; nothing coherent grows by skipping over it.
WE to WORLD to a sense of ‘US’ – individuals and groups now shaping embodied responses; actions now brought into collective settings, contributing to a shared field with increasing heart coherence and generative capacity to nourish the soil of the emerging future.
This arc was present in every one of the 36 Yoga Radicals conversations. Geisa’s images made these individual and emerging collective transformations visible.
One set of questions, one arc
Each of the 36 Yoga Radicals answered the same eight questions. Rather than simple Q&A, the responses were curated into an arc – moving from initial insight through emerging new ideas toward a sense of service to the larger whole. The book’s table of contents traces that arc:
- I. The Journey Starts – arriving with deeper listening
- II. Grounding and Co-Initiating – planting seeds of potential
- III. Connecting to Source – awakening into the immanent, the emergent
- IV. State and Stage Shifts – acting with heart, mind and body as one
- V. Transforming Actions – practices that sustain co-creation, conscious co-evolution
- VI. Reflections on Participatory Action – returning to rediscover the deeper shared roots
- VII. Further Reflections – listening to the universe with others, listening again
- VIII. A New Day After a Long Night – landing in well-being, dreaming the world into being
The question that opens everything.
The first question Allie asked every Yoga Radical was this:
How did your inspiration arise? What did you think, feel and sense? Where did it come from?
That question is as alive now as it was in 2020.
A new series begins here.
In the posts ahead, Allie will share selected Yoga Radicals stories alongside Geisa’s scribing images – moving through the arc above, one section at a time – and consciously returning to that opening question:
What do we know today that we did not know then?
Allie Middleton, JD, MS, E-RYT, C-IAYT Commissioned author, Yoga Radicals | Singing Dragon Press 2021 alliemiddleton.com | https://ilp.world
Generative Scribing: Geisa Paganini De Mio – Visual Presencing