​The Transformative Learning Centre (TLC) gatherings have shown me that people can come together in ways more co-creative, more whole, more emergent, and more expansive than what my time in academia and government would have given me to believe was possible. These times are calling for wide participation: the kind of authentic inquiry, collective meaning-making, and co-creativity that only a flattening of hierarchy can allow. When power is distributed and emergent, every moment of speech and of listening can become an act of leadership. In this spirit, each TLC gathering has the flavour of a stone soup: each participant adds their ingredient into a single pot until a delicious and nourishing meal materializes, seemingly out of nothing. Unlike in the traditional conference, there is nothing canned about it.

This global crossroads is also asking for deep participation. The assumption that we are separate and can dominate and use other people and the planet for the benefit of a few has led us to a precarious brink of time. To break free from it, we need to reconnect with the knowing that resides not just in the mind, but deep in the body, the heart, and the spirit. TLC events, though academic, invite not just our cognitive, but also our embodied knowing—whether through acoustic improvisation, circle dancing, shamanic ceremony and invocation, participatory art-making, theatre performance, journaling, open mic nights and dance parties, or graphic recording. This kind of multi-modal embrace of our broadest humanity is vital for us to bring about a just, thriving, sustainable world.

The TLC conferences have shown me the creative power and importance of carefully held containers for genuine dialogue. They become gateways for emergence and evolutionary portals into higher levels of humanity. Since my first encounter with TLC in 2007, holding these kinds of spaces has turned into a calling. I’ve become a host, facilitator and trainer. I’ve studied and worked with numerous frameworks and tools for holding conversations that matter, from Open Space Technology, the Work that Reconnects and Theory U, to circle process, Participatory Learning and Action, Deep Democracy, and Questions for Inner Guidance. I’ve deepened my sound and movement improvisation practice so that I can regularly feel the future come through my own body-heart-mind-spirit—and help others do the same.  Ultimately, all of my work now is about helping people listen together for possibility – and feel more wholly alive while doing it. 

​I first encountered the Transformative Learning Centre (TLC) when I attended the “One Earth Community” Spirit Matters Conference in April of 2007. It seems a miracle that I attended at all, for that weekend I was slated to be in Ottawa for the third of four retreats in an extended Nonviolent Communication leadership program. For me to pull out of such a commitment was quite out of character, but somehow I had a strong feeling that I had to be at Spirit Matters. What I felt was: I need to see how it can be done. What? A different kind of conference. I sensed that this event, by virtue of its process and structure—not even to mention its content—would redefine my understanding of what a gathering of people could be, and that somehow the experience would change my life. And it did.
 
In me were inchoate yearnings for gatherings more widely and deeply participatory, that is, more co-creative, more whole, more emergent, and more expansive than what my time in academia and government would have given me to believe was possible. And that is what I experienced at One Earth Community, and even more deeply at each subsequent TLC event. At the time I surely couldn’t fully have named my longings, but something in me heard the call. These years later the call has turned into a calling.
​

Click heLet me explain. We are in an unprecedented planet-time. Humanity has never before faced such uncertainty about the continuity of complex life on Earth. The nuclear age, climate change, and mass species extinction, not to mention peak oil and global economic crisis, have in a geological instant brought us to levels of complexity for which our hundreds of millennia of existence on this earth have not prepared us. We are in uncharted territory. We simply have never been here before, and the ways of being, thinking and doing that have brought us to this brink may not keep us afloat in these choppy waters. These times are asking us to do millennia of evolving in a few short years. Luckily, as futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard points out, “quantum transformations are in nature’s tradition,” and “crisis precedes transformation.” (1998:103)
 
As Einstein famously said, “a new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.”[i] (1946) And I would add that it is not merely an up-leveling of our consciousness as individuals that is needed. Our collective survival requires collective intelligence. Together we can--at our best—vehicle more wisdom than any one of us can alone. This is an age that asks for, not one strong visionary leader or ideology to steer our course, but a continual accessing of wisdom that is more than the sum of us.  It requires a kind of collective learning that “dramatically and irreversibly alters our way of being in the world.” (O’Sullivan, 2002) Tom Atlee calls this co-intelligence, “the ability to wisely organize our lives together…in tune with each other and nature.” If we are to embrace and transform the challenges of this time, we need to access the fullness of our collective potential.

            Yet our current mainstream institutions and systems for organizing our lives together often end up producing less than the sum of the parts. Our collective conversations are frequently exercises in competition and compromise that result in win-lose outcomes. Seen from a wider lens, win-lose is in truth lose-lose.  As Otto Scharmer of MIT writes, “we collectively create outcomes (and side effects) that nobody wants.” (2007: 7) And we seldom get beyond what he typologizes as the first two (of four) fields of conversation, which he calls “blaming and non-reflective.” (in Isaacs, 1999)

​In the first field, “politeness,” or “shared monologues,” individuals download one after the other what they already know. This aptly describes much of what I have witnessed during the scores of academic, government and civil society conferences I attended during my graduate studies and later in my decade of work with the Canadian government’s international aid agency. Thinkers and doers come together to present research findings one after the other, or to make policy pronouncements or recommendations. In the best cases, the findings are revelatory and the recommendations are inspiring and grounded calls to action. But the conversation is in some essential way stale. The coffee breaks are the moments of greatest creativity and innovation. These are the kinds of gatherings that prompted Harrison Owen (2008) to invent Open Space Technology—a way of holding a meeting that is all coffee break.
 
If there is enough safety in the container for people to open their minds and express and respond to opposing views, a gathering might enter the second field that Scharmer (in Isaacs, 1999) calls “breakdown,” or in later writings (2007), “debate.” Here, divergent views compete with each other to determine the collective course of action. This is the prevalent mode of interaction in our parliaments and courtrooms. These two fields of conversation are important and even necessary, but when we loop between these two we stop short of the full potential of the collective that is so needed in this time.
 
Fortunately, as Scharmer has so helpfully charted, there is a territory beyond conversation as usual—what William Isaacs calls “dialogue” or “the art of thinking together.” (1999) Isaacs (in Burkhardt, 2010) calls this “a new frontier for human beings – perhaps the true final frontier.” “In it,” he says, “we come to know ourselves and our relatedness to the whole of Life.” This is the kind of conversation that leaves its participants expanded, deepened, and lifted into higher possibility. People surprise themselves when they express what they’ve never heard or thought before, as if their words are being drawn forth by the moment itself.
 
When someone slows down and begins to reflect on his or her positions, a conversation might enter the third field, which Scharmer (in Isaacs, 1999) calls “inquiry” or “reflective dialogue.” Here, people suspend their habitual judgements, assumptions and concepts. No longer fully identified with who they think they are and what they think they know, they are able to stand in another’s shoes and open their hearts to another’s experience. Room for multiple perspectives opens up and genuine inquiry becomes possible. New ways of seeing and doing begin to emerge.
 
The fourth field is the most rare. Sharmer (in Isaacs, 1999) calls it “flow,” or “generative dialogue.” It comes about when there is reflection on the process as a whole, intention toward the highest end the group or conversation might serve, and attention to the future that is wanting to emerge. As Kate Sutherland articulates it, here there is a “sense of oneness, as though whoever speaks voices the collective intelligence of the group.” (2012: 72) This is truly the realm of thinking together, of co-creating. As Tom Atlee so poetically puts it, in this space individuals access “the wisdom of the whole on behalf of the whole.” (n.d.) This is where the group gains direct access to what David Bohm called the “implicate order,” the unmanifest field of infinite potential. (1996)
 
And this is where I come back to Spirit Matters. I intuited that this event would show me possibilities of conversation more alive, more transformative, more co-creative, than what I’d previously experienced in any traditional conference. I didn’t have the maps for this territory then, but in my depths I knew we were crossing that final frontier into reflective and generative dialogue, and that we—and the world—would be changed for the better.
​

One series of moments exemplifies the alchemical fields of dialogue we entered during that and subsequent TLC events. These dialogues didn’t even involve words, yet they gave participants an embodied experience of collective generativity that rippled out into our spoken exchanges. At the outset of plenary sessions, physician, therapist and musician Larry Nusbaum would offer up his treasure chest of “weapons of mass percussion” to the participants, inviting each of the several hundred gathered to choose an instrument if they wished. He would then invite us to remember a place in nature we loved and notice the sounds there.  He would tell us:

And that is exactly what would happen: out of the pregnant silence, would emerge a magical tapestry of sound, whole and harmonious even in moments of dissonance or syncopation. With no score, no composer, no conductor, and no metronome, music would issue out of stillness. Tone and notes, rhythm and pace, would find their way into the sonic space. And then, just as magically as it had emerged from the silence, somehow the soundscape would settle into a new silence. Each participant, at once performer and audience, would become creator and witness of something beautiful never before manifest in the visible (audible) realm. This collective improvisational music-making became a living metaphor as well as a “critical yeast” (Lederach, 2005) for the co-creativity that emerged in our plenary councils and dialogue circles.
 
What enabled us to break through into the realm of authentic inquiry and co-creativity was, first and foremost, a flattening of hierarchy. In the music-making, as in our dialogue circles, there was no specified leader or even facilitator, but rather an “animator.” Just as Larry created a sense of freedom for everybody to follow inner impulses and promptings, the animators’ role was to “hold the safety of the space for a diversity of opinions and viewpoints to be expressed in an atmosphere of mutual interest and respect.” (TLC, 2007a) This allowed the leadership to be distributed and emergent. Every act of speech and of listening could become an act of leadership.
 
The very architecture of our dialogues, the circle, sent quite a different message from the traditional arrangement of podium and chairs in rows. We are not here to passively receive someone’s expertise, it instantly conveyed: everyone here is a leader. As someone in the gathering said, “experts are on tap, not on top.”[i] Indeed, the “Councils” that preceded each dialogue circle consisted of “a conversation among four or more featured animators in front of a full assembly of participants, […] a coming together of wisdom leaders from a diversity of peoples, ways of knowing and experience.” (TLC, 2007b) The Councils were intended to “water and seed the dialogue circles with in-depth discussion themes and questions,” rather than, as in a traditional conference, to be forums for invited experts and leaders to impart their knowledge in a one-way flow. 
 
The music-making, the dialogues, and indeed each TLC gathering as a whole, thus has the flavour of a stone soup: each participant adds their ingredient into a single pot until a delicious and nourishing meal materializes, seemingly out of nothing. Unlike in the traditional conference, there is nothing canned about it. In this way, participation in collective meaning-making is wide, inviting and involving the voice of each of the people in attendance.
​

Participation was not only wide, it was also deep, and this was another vital condition that brought us into a field of collective intelligence. We were invited to participate not, as eco-philosopher Joanna Macy is fond of saying, merely as “brains on a stick,” but as whole human beings: body-heart-mind-spirits (1998). In traditional conferences as in mainstream society, the cerebral is given primacy of place, along with the verbal and the visual. And in this privileging of mind over body, reason over emotion, knowledge over intuition, visible over invisible, masculine over feminine, heaven over earth, we lose access to so much wisdom and guidance. In fact, we lose our way. Cut off from the deeper knowing that resides in the body, the heart, and the spirit, it is easier to remain caught up in the mistaken assumption that we are separate and can dominate and use other people and the planet for the benefit of a few.
 
But in this gathering, as in the subsequent TLC events, we were invited to bring the whole of ourselves. There was not just the acoustic improvising, but also circle dancing, shamanic ceremony and invocation, participatory art-making, theatre performance, journaling, open mic nights and dance parties, and graphic recording. All these elements modeled a broader tapping into all that is available to us, and thus called forth a fuller sweep of our human capacity. They invited not just our cognitive, but our embodied knowing.
 
In a global conjuncture we’ve never before faced, this kind of multi-modal embrace of our broadest humanity comes to be much more than a fun triviality. It is a necessity, if we are to emerge from the chrysalis into a thriving, sustainable human presence on this planet. As cosmologist Brian Swimme notes (cited in Hart), without a cultural precedent to face the ecological loss before us, we are not even able to fathom many of the facts of our current predicament. (2005: 8) Ecologist and evolutionary biologist Guy McPherson points out that the human brain is unable to compute the implications for climate change—and human survival—of exponential growth and amplifying feedback loops. (2013) Yet, in eco-psychologist Rebekah Hart’s words, “the intelligent body has within it the ability to adapt to new situations. […] Only the body can feel the complex implications of our reality.” She cites philosopher and therapist Eugene Gendlin (1992): “The body senses the whole situation, and it urges, it implicitly shapes our next action.” (2005: 8)
 
It is not just the body that knows, but our hearts too are vital to our survival and our ability to nurture the continuity of life. As Joanna Macy writes, when we deny or repress the pain in our hearts—the grief, fear, anger, and sadness that naturally occur in the face of the unprecedented threats to life on Earth, “our power to take part in the healing of our world is diminished.” “Our experience of pain for the world,” she says, “springs from our inter-connectedness with all beings, from which also arises our powers to act on their behalf.” It is not enough to have a cognitive understanding of the crises we face, we need to actually experience our painful feelings. “Only then,” writes Macy, “can they reveal on a visceral level our mutual belonging to the web of life.” (n.d.a)

The 2007 gathering explicitly wove into the fabric of its schedule both time and space for “willingly enduring our pain” for the earth (Macy, n.d.b), in effect taking us through a natural process of transformation that Macy calls “the spiral of the Work that Reconnects.” The second council and the dialogue circles that followed centred on “facing our challenges: what disrupts, fragments and keeps us numb from the realities of our interconnection in One Earth Community, e.g. […] war, ecological devastation, abuses and injustice, […] all of which must be confronted creatively.” (TLC, 2007a) As in life, “honouring our pain,” (in Macy’s words) naturally brought us to into “seeing with new eyes” and “going forth” in an empowered and enlivened way. In the next council, “From Grief into Vision,” our pain, as evidence of our interconnectedness, was what steered us toward “bigger, more complex and participatory worldviews within a framework of emancipatory and grounded hope.” (TLC, 2007a)

Even beyond the deep knowing of body and heart, the Spirit Matters events, as the very name indicates, have opened space for the wisdom and guidance of spirit. In the dominant Western paradigm, only what the five senses can apprehend is real—and in living from that assumption we block out vast fields of knowing. To touch the full extent of what is available to us, we need collective spaces where access to the invisible is socially acceptable. The TLC has created just that—gatherings where, as one 2007 participant said, people are safe to “come out of the closet as spiritual beings.” In safe containers such as this, like radio antennae or wifi routers we can open to realms unseen and channel the riches that lie therein. Within what Jung called the personal and collective unconscious—territory of ancestors, future beings, archetypes—lie crucial keys to navigating the uncharted waters of these times. 

At bottom, deep participation is a movement of progressive opening and ever-deeper listening. As we open our minds, our hearts and our wills, we tap into what Joseph Jaworski calls “the creative Source of infinite potential enfolded in the universe.” Connected to this Source, we become vessels for creation, “partners in the unfolding of the universe.” (2012: viii) As Scharmer describes in his ground-breaking work, Theory U, rather than only “learning from the experiences of the past,” we begin to “learn from the future as it emerges.” We “sense, tune in, and act from [our] highest future potential—the future that depends on us to bring it into being.” (2012: 7)

​At the 2007 gathering, Six Nations elder Diane Longboat remarked, “I stopped going to conferences because they always had an agenda. Because they were not guided by spirit they never reached their outcomes.”[i] If despite this, she has come to the TLC events, I imagine it is because unlike traditional conferences, they have not stifled creativity and innovation with rigid mind-made agendas and pre-determined goals. On the contrary, they have offered carefully held containers that have become gateways for emergence, portals into the “higher levels” of humanity Einstein presaged. Scharmer’s description of the shift of a social field aptly conveys what the TLC is offering the world in this time of unparalleled metamorphosis:         

​Since that fateful TLC gathering in 2007, helping this shift to happen has become my calling. I’ve become a host, facilitator, trainer and improvisation enthusiast. I’ve studied and worked with numerous frameworks and tools for hosting conversations that matter, from Open Space Technology, the Work that Reconnects and Theory U, to circle process, Participatory Learning and Action, Deep Democracy, and Questions for Inner Guidance. I’ve deepened my sound and movement improvisation practice so that I can regularly feel the future come through my own body-heart-mind-spirit—and help others do the same.  Ultimately, all of my work now is about helping people listen together for possibility – and feel more wholly alive while doing it. Just as the TLC has been doing since its inception. Because there’s a new world emerging, and we are the ones who get to create it.

Atlee, Tom. (n.d.) Home page of The Co-Intelligence Institute. Retrieved July 20, 2014, from http://www.co-intelligence.org.
 
Bohm, David (1996). On Dialogue. London and New York: Routledge Classics.
 
Burkhardt, Vern (2010). Thinking Together, Part 1, IdeaConnection Interview with William Isaacs, Author of Dialogue: The Art of Thinking Together. Retrieved July 20, 2014 from http://www.ideaconnection.com/open-innovation-articles/00172-Thinking-Together-Part-1.html.
 
Einstein, Albert (1946, May 25).  Atomic Education Urged by Einstein. The New York Times.
 
Gendlin, Eugene T (1992). The Primacy of the Body, Not the Primacy of Perception: How the Body Knows the Situation and Philosophy. Man and World 25.3-4, 341-353.
 
Hart, Rebekah (2005). Earth Knows, Body Knows: Explorations in the Felt Ecology of an Animate World. Unpublished paper for the McGill School of Environment.
 
Hubbard, Barbara Marx (1998). Conscious Evolution: Awakening the Power of our Social Potential. San Francisco: New World Library.
 
Isaacs, William (1999) Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together. New York: Crown Business.
 
Jaworski, Joseph (2012). Source: The Inner Path of Knowledge Creation. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
 
Lederach, John Paul (2005). The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace. Oxford, MA: Oxford University Press.
 
Macy, Joanna and Young Brown, M (1998). Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World. Gabriola Island, B.C.: New Society Publishers.
 
Macy, Joanna (n.d.a). Theoretical Foundations, Joanna Macy and Her Work website. Retrieved July 23 2014 from www.joannamacy.net/theworkthatreconnects/theoretical-foundations.html.
 
Macy, Joanna (n.d.b) Drawing by Dori Midnight, in The Spiral of the Work That Reconnects, Joanna Macy and Her Work website. Retrieved July 23 2014 from http://www.joannamacy.net/theworkthatreconnects/the-wtr-spiral.html. Reproduced with permission.
 
McPherson, Guy (2013, January 6). Climate-Change Summary and Update. Retrieved July 22 2014 from http://guymcpherson.com/2013/01/climate-change-summary-and-update/.

Owen, Harrison (2008). Open Space Technology: A User’s Guide, 3rd Edition. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.
 
Scharmer, Otto (2007). Theory U: Leading from the Future as it Emerges—The Social Technology of Presencing. Cambridge, MA: The Society for Organizational Learning.
 
Sutherland, Kate (2012). Make Light Work in Groups: 10 Tools to Transform Meetings, Companies and Communities. Vancouver: Incite Press.
 
Transformative Learning Centre/TLC (2007a) What are dialogue circles? in Schedule, Spirit Matters One Earth Community Gathering website. Retrieved July 22, 2014 from www.legacy.oise.utoronto.ca/research/tlcentre/gathering2007/schedule.html
 
Transformative Learning Centre/TLC (2007b) in Process, Spirit Matters One Earth Community Gathering website. Retrieved July 22, 2014 from http://legacy.oise.utoronto.ca/research/tlcentre/gathering2007/media.html 

​[1] This is often paraphrased as: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
[1] Personal notes taken during the gathering.
[1] Personal notes taken during the gathering.

With small but radical gestures—a quiet room for meditation and prayer and guided moments of personal reflection—the Transformative Learning Centre (TLC) has offered socially-sanctioned public spaces to slow down and listen to silence. This is rare in a world so speeded up by the imperatives of technology and the marketplace. That is even more the case among groups dedicated to social change, where the urgency of the issues tends to dictate a frenetic pace. And yet, respect for rest and receptivity is an essential condition for creating a life-sustaining society.

If what we want to achieve is nothing less than a transformation in our societal systems and structures, we need to go slow to go fast. Trying to effect change from the same place of disconnection from the rhythms of life as the system we are trying to change simply will not bring the transformation we seek. Slowing down, being quiet, reflecting and receiving are not just helpful, they are essential for deep change work. This is required for our actions to have integrity and coherence and therefore effectiveness. It is what we need, to keep doing the work. And it is a crucial element in the innovation and creativity necessary to bring about a new kind of human presence on the planet.

Returning to nature’s rhythms and allowing ourselves regular rest and quiet is not an easy shift for most of us agents of change to make. There is just so much to do, if we are to preserve Earth’s life support systems and midwife a new society into being. Everything seems to scream at us, “Don't just sit there, do something!" And with so little time left to turn the tide, it seems that we need to do that something as quickly and relentlessly as possible. Yet the very survival of complex life on Earth depends on our capacity to slow down and listen. Even when we discover this and become convinced of it, changing our inner conditioning is no small challenge. We all need permission to pause. What the TLC has done—creating new social norms that sanction quiet rest and reflection—is ground breaking and important. A new world is on its way, and, like all great music, it will come from silence.

​My first encounter with The Transformative Learning Centre (TLC) in 2007 was nothing less than a watershed in my life and work (see “Dialogue—The Final Frontier”). Subsequent Spirit Matters gatherings offered a further life-saving gift. They gave social validation and space for something rarely honoured in our modern world, especially among change-makers: rest and quiet. The 2010 gathering offered a quiet room for meditation and prayer as an intrinsic part of the event—the first such room I’d ever seen at a conference. And halfway through the 2012 gathering, animators guided us in taking some moments for personal reflection during the conversation cafés.
 
It would be hard to overstate what these small but radical gestures meant to me. In a world so speeded up by the imperatives of technology and the marketplace—where time is money, and space is money too—socially-sanctioned public spaces to slow down and listen to silence are rare. This is, if anything, even more the case among groups dedicated to social change, where the urgency of the issues tends to dictate a frenetic pace.      
 
The Quiet Room and the facilitated moments of reflection were like finally seeing my deepest longings take shape. In a public, social space, in a gathering of change-makers, and within an academic setting, we were actually being encouraged to pause, to rest, to digest, to enjoy silence and to listen inside. At last I had found a socially-aware, action-oriented community that understood the value of quiet. It didn’t just pay lip service to it. Instead, the TLC has actively created social norms that allow change agents to return to the natural rhythms that keep life going. In so doing, it is adopting an essential condition for creating the just, thriving, sustainable society that is waiting to be born: respect for rest and receptivity.
​

​In nature, there is a rhythm to everything. Our bodies have rhythms. When we breathe, we exhale, contracting our lungs and sending air out into the world. But were we only to exhale, we would soon expire! Before and after every exhalation, we need to inhale, expanding our lungs and allowing them to take in air from outside our bodies. When our hearts beat, they pump blood through our arteries to the rest of our bodies. But were they only to send the blood out, they would soon fail. Each contraction, or systole, is preceded and succeeded, by a dilatation—the diastole—during which the heart refills with blood. The earth too has rhythms: night follows day, spring and summer give way to fall and winter. 
 
But modern society has learned how to ignore and override these cycles. Time is mechanized and counted by the clock, and therefore experienced as separate from our bodies and from the earth. Time is a liability: you have to pay people for it. Productivity and outputs are the measures of success, and success is measured in very short periods—an economic quarter, a political term, an academic session. From within this worldview, conquering nature’s rhythms is desirable: it helps us do more, faster. With electrical light, we have defeated the night. We no longer need to stop and rest for the dark part of each twenty four-hour cycle. With heating, we have conquered winter: no need for dormancy or hibernation.
 
As a citizen of this planet-time I feel this pressure to be constantly producing and growing. It operates from patterns planted deep within me by my ancestors, my education, the modeling of peers and the ambient culture. A few years ago I came across a letter that my father wrote to his sister-in-law in 1969. In it, he writes of a series of unprecedented successes in his career, and concludes:

​He wanted forever to stay on the crest of the wave, and avoid the trough. Don’t we all? This is my inheritance. But this is like wanting only ever to exhale—because the world needs what we have to give! Or wanting the heart only ever to pump blood out—because the body needs more oxygen! Four years after writing that letter, my dad had the first of three heart attacks, culminating in an early death.
 
Because nature simply doesn’t work that way. Without the trough there is no peak. Without the inhalation, there is no exhalation: receiving the air is as necessary as giving it out. There is no systole without diastole: receiving the blood is as important as pumping it out. Sleep is not merely lost time. It is a period of active restoration during which we synthesize proteins, grow muscle, and repair tissues. Plants in temperate zones use winter dormancy to maintain their cell membranes and rebuild their proteins. Many trees and flowers actually need the winter chill to blossom in the spring. 
​

​Why does any of this matter? As humans, don’t we have the privilege of being able to rise above nature? Haven’t we learned to harness nature’s resources toward the development of human culture, civilization and consciousness? Hasn’t our mastery of the elements afforded us incredible advances in science, technology, and human health and well being? These questions all point to a central assumption that underlies our global industrial growth society: that we are separate and can dominate and use our own bodies, other people and the earth. With that assumption we have privileged doing over being, giving over receiving, speaking over listening, outer over inner, mind over matter, masculine over feminine. 
 
But at this epochal turning point, that assumption is being proven wrong, even pathological. The intersecting crises of climate change, mass species extinction, and peak oil, in the context of exponential growth in the human population, have brought us to a brink of time. Since the seventies we have been using more of the planet’s body than what nature can regenerate. As Susan Burns, CEO of the Global Footprint Network, says, “humanity is living off of its ecological credit card. If we use more than nature can keep up with, we start to erode the natural capital that our life depends on.” (Generation Waking Up, 2013: 43) As a result, our current growth-based civilization is not sustainable, and so it will not last. But beyond that, what hangs in the balance is nothing less than the continuation of complex life on Earth.
 
Now is the moment to rewrite the script that has brought us to this precipice, to flip the assumption that runs through our narrative. The time has come to reclaim the innate wisdom that resides in our bodies. Our lungs know that inhale and exhale are equally important. Our hearts know that diastole and systole are inseparable. Our gonads know that both feminine and masculine are needed for creation. They tell us that being and doing, receiving and giving, listening and speaking, wakefulness and sleep, are also alternating moments that allow life to flow through us. Walking is easier when the right and left foot follow one another. In the same way, each of these dualities is interdependent and complementary, and together forms an indivisible whole. Taoism expresses this principle as the dynamic interconnectedness of yin, the female, receptive principle, and yang, the male, active principle, that together form the tao—literally,  “the way the universe works.” As the Chinese saying goes, “the circle of wholeness is made up of action and stillness.” (quoted in Berkana, 2012)

​As agents of change wanting to co-create a more peaceful, equitable, and sustainable way of life, it is especially vital that we come to have faith in the natural alternation of these dualities. Even more than that, we need to counteract centuries of exclusive valuing of production and growth and actually focus our attention on stopping, resting and receiving. If we do, experience will show us that life-giving action naturally follows. We make less effort, but achieve more, because we are engaging with the flow of life rather than pushing the river.
 
This isn’t easy. As eco-philosopher Joanna Macy says, “to intervene in the political and legislative decisions of the Industrial Growth Society, we fall by necessity into its tempo. We race to find and pull the levers before it is too late to save this forest, or stop that weapons program.” (Macy and Brown, 1998: 136) In my work with human rights and social justice organizations, time and again I have seen how strong is the drive to do more, faster, better. Working relentless long hours and sleeping little has become a kind of badge of honour in many organizational cultures. Setting one’s own needs aside for the benefit of the group or community is seen as a sought-after skill, because the world is in crisis and we need to save it. Diminishing financial resources and reduced staff only heighten the pressure to constantly move, act and do.
 
But if what we want to achieve is nothing less than a sea-change in our societal systems and structures, we need to go slow to go fast. Trying to effect change from the same place of disconnection from the rhythms of life as the system we are trying to change simply will not bring the transformation we seek. Slowing down, being quiet, reflecting and receiving are not just helpful, they are essential for deep change work. This is required for our actions to have integrity and coherence and therefore effectiveness. It is what we need to keep doing the work. And it is a crucial element in the innovation and creativity necessary to bring about a new kind of human presence on the planet.
​

​If we want to create a sustainable world, we need to work in a sustainable way. To paraphrase engaged Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, to give something, first you have to have it. How can you give something you do not have? We want to create sustainability, and in the seeming urgency of the crisis we are constantly acting and moving, rushing to make the world a better place. In so doing, we end up using more of our body’s resources than it can replenish, living off of our biological credit card, and in too many cases, burning out. In the very effort to change what we are collectively doing to the body of the planet, we are treating our own bodies in just the same way. If we want to bring sustainability into the world, we need to really know what it is, from the inside out. We need to do it in a deep way, all the way through.
 
Likewise, if we want to bring about justice, we need to be just in the way we work. In one human rights organization with which I worked, a colleague once commented to me, “This is the one job I’ve had where my rights as a worker have been least respected.” We were working fifteen-hour days for what amounted to about $12 an hour. But this was more a self-compliment than a complaint: the internal culture was to see the non-profit’s mission as a worthy cause for personal sacrifice. In the end, such paradoxical norms model and promote injustice, creating an arguably exploitative dynamic. Funders and the organization produced impressive results at very low cost thanks to the martyr-like devotion of many volunteers and underpaid workers. In its way of working, the organization was ultimately conceding to and reinforcing an unfair distribution of wealth, where work with little social value (such as manufacturing weapons or distributing pornography) is vastly more rewarded than work that makes a genuine contribution to well-being.
 
What we are and what we do are our greatest teachings and contributions; what we say a very distant second. How can we truly spread justice and sustainability unless we are embodying those qualities and becoming vehicles for their realization in the world? The saviour complex so prevalent among change-makers may at first blush seem like great fuel for our work. But in the end, self-sacrifice can do more to inflate our egos than to actually manifest the values we stand for.
​

At a more prosaic level, to quote Dr. Larry Nusbaum, M.D. in a conversation we had in 2009, self-care is simple physics. If we want to keep doing this work, we need to meet our own needs first. In an airplane, the safety instructions always say that if you are traveling with someone who requires assistance, put on your own oxygen mask first. Then assist the other person. If you can’t breathe, what good are you to anyone else? The first port of call is necessarily yourself. And from an organizational perspective, it is simply good management to fuel the mule.
 
Our relentless focus on productivity is like constantly drawing as much water as possible from a well. An overdrawn well can become cut off from its source, the underground stream that feeds it. Its water can turn stagnant and toxic. Ultimately the well might become depleted and dry up. In the same way, if we focus only on drawing from the well of our energy and creativity, without stopping and opening to the source, what we produce can be a needlessly diminished version of its full potential. As twelfth century philosopher and mystic Hildegard of Bingen wrote, “the greatest sin in life is to dry up.” (in Robertson, 2013: 27)
 
In over-emphasizing doing, we are like a tree that focuses exclusively on producing large and numerous fruit, but neglects to grow its roots deep into the ground. Such a tree will be precarious and easily toppled. Ultimately, it will lack the nourishment needed to produce the fruit. In the literal sense of the word “radical,” pertaining to the root, rest is therefore radical: it takes us to the source. In times of crisis, the best way we can serve is perhaps to be, as leadership educator Michael Jones puts it, “deeply rooted to the subtle forces within ourselves.” (2014: 137)
 
During Israel’s recent third intifada, I witnessed a conversation with Israeli psychologist and peacemaker Dr. Yitzhak Mendelsohn. When asked what his next steps would be, he answered, “I don’t know. I simply stay in the practices that help me stay in the heart.” In times of turmoil and collapse, perhaps the greatest contribution is to bring love and not fear to the world—as he put it, “to manage fear so fear doesn’t manage our lives.” To be of true service, we need to be present to what’’s happening, and for that, regular rest and quiet are essential.
 
When we realize this, every conference and workplace dedicated to social change will have a quiet room: inclusive, full of beauty, and tended with care. Moments of silence or quiet personal reflection will be built into every class and staff meeting. Nap rooms will be the rage not only among leading companies, but among social enterprises, non-profits, grassroots groups, and educational institutions. We will reclaim rest and quiet, and because that is the natural order, we will be sustained.

​In overriding the natural rhythms of life and their phases of rest and receptivity, we lose connection not only to the basic mechanisms that keep us going. We also lose access to the wisdom and creativity that we need to innovate new social structures, systems and processes that will allow us to sustain and regenerate life on Earth. Most learning methods are based on the experiential learning cycle elaborated by Kurt Lewin, David Kolb and Edgar Schein: experience, reflection, generalization and application. They help us learn from the past. But an even more vital type of learning in this precarious planet-time is what MIT’s Otto Scharmer calls “learning from the future as it emerges.” (2009)
 
This is the kind of learning we see among innovators, inventors, artists and creative people of all kinds. It is learning that accesses what physicist and philosopher David Bohm called the “implicate order,” a creative source of infinite potential. From that source, it unfolds the “explicate order,” or manifest universe. (1996) Scharmer and his colleagues have interviewed hundreds of practitioners and thought leaders on innovation, and developed the U Theory to show how this type of learning happens. The bottom of the U is where source, or the implicate order, is accessed, and a deeper level of knowing is allowed to emerge. This is the kind of knowing that comes not from what we have learned from experience—our own or that of our parents, teachers, or the experts. It is the kind of knowing that comes when we master not knowing. It comes when we tap into the as-yet unmanifest realm, the field of all potential. It comes not through our brains, but through our hearts, our guts, our bodies. If there’s any method for us to innovate alternatives to the systems and structures that have brought us to the edge of catastrophe at which our civilization now teeters, this is it. 

And for this type of learning, quiet and rest are a necessity. Going down the left side of the U requires us to slow down. At the bottom of the U, says complexity scientist Brian Arthur, “the insight arrives not in the midst of activities or frenzied thought, but in moments of stillness.” (quoted in Jaworski, 2012: 150). To receive such inspiration requires one to “retreat and reflect.” (Scharmer: 33, see image to the left) As Thomas Edison’s wife said of her husband, the man who invented the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and the electric light bulb, “he believes that his inventions come through him from the infinite forces of the Universe—and never so well as when he is relaxed.” (quoted in Jaworski: 150)
 
As Dr. Mendelsohn underlines, out of fear, anxiety and tension we run too fast to act, rushing to respond to a sense of crisis without really knowing what is appropriate to do. This type of learning is a process not of seeking for solutions and driving toward the future, but of stopping, acknowledging that we don’t know, opening, listening, and allowing the knowing to emerge. And such stillness and relaxation require  “places and cocoons of deep reflection and silence,” as Scharmer puts it. They ask that organizations establish infrastructures “that facilitate deep listening and connection to the source of authentic presence and creativity, both individually and collectively.” (44) We may fear that slowing down in this way will waste time and money and slow us down in our change efforts. But just the opposite is true: the clarity that emerges at the bottom of the U allows an acceleration as we “act in an instant,” moving into swift action that follows nature’s momentum and acts on nature’s behalf.

Returning to nature’s rhythms and allowing ourselves regular rest and quiet is not an easy shift for most of us agents of change to make. There is just so much to do, if we are to preserve Earth’s life support systems and midwife a new society into being. Everything seems to scream at us, “Don't just sit there, do something!" And with so little time left to turn the tide, it seems that we need to do that something as quickly and relentlessly as possible.
 
I’ve posited here that sometimes the opposite is more helpful. As Thich Nhat Hanh says, “Don’t just do something, sit there!” (1991) The very survival of complex life on Earth depends on it. Yet even when we discover this and become convinced of it, changing our inner conditioning is no small challenge. After years of retraining myself to regularly stop, sit, breathe, listen, and allow, I still catch myself pushing through and overriding the need for rest. Sometimes I glimpse the deep unconscious messages that drive me—beliefs like, “the more you do, the more you matter,” and “the busier you are, the more you’re worth.” I know I’m not alone in this: we all need permission to pause. What the TLC has done—creating new social norms that sanction quiet rest and reflection—is ground-breaking and important. A new world is on its way, and, like all great music, it will come from silence.

Bohm, David (1996). On Dialogue. London and New York: Routledge Classics.
 
Dunford, Aerin (2012). “Berkana Steps into a Bold Experiment in Living Systems,” The Berkana Institute Blog, retrieved October 10 2014 from http://berkana.org/2012/03/berkana-steps-into-a-bold-experiment-in-living-systems/
 
Generation Waking Up (2013, July). The Generation Waking Up Toolkit, Version 2.1. Retreived October 10 2014 from http://generationwakingup.org/programs/wakeup/resources
 
Jaworski, Joseph (2012). Source: The Inner Path of Knowledge Creation. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Jones, Michael (2014). The Soul of Place: Re-imagining Leadership Through Nature, Art and Community. Victoria, B.C.: Friesen Press.
 
Nhat Hanh, Thich (1991). Peace is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life. New York: Bantam Books. Quote retrieved on October 10, 2014 from http://www.livinglifefully.com/flo/floaimlessness.htm
 
Robertson, Randall (2013, January). “Lead an Awe-Inspired Life: Matthew Fox Shares Insights on Creativity and the Divine,” Natural Awakenings Magazine. Retrieved October 11 2014 from http://issuu.com/gonaturalawakenings/docs/january2013naturalawakeningsonline/27
 
Scharmer, Otto (2007). Theory U: Leading from the Future as it Emerges—The Social Technology of Presencing. Cambridge, MA: The Society for Organizational Learning.
 
Sherman, Paul (n.d.). Yin Yang Tree. For WPClipart, Public Domain. Retrieved October 20 2014 from http://narutofanon.wikia.com/wiki/File:Yin_yang_tree.png

I present here a reframing of the field of international development in which I work. I examine what it is that “international development” has been developing, and how that differs from what these times are calling for—something I call “reverse development.” 

In essence, international development has been developing a globalized and monetized economy. It has been converting people, other living beings and the planet into commodities that can be bought, used and discarded across large distances. This kind of development is cannibalistic and ultimately suicidal, as we eat and spit out the foundations for life until there is not enough left to sustain us. The basic premise of international development—that “developing” countries need to develop what the “developed” countries have—seems fatally misguided. Instead, we need to reverse our understanding of development so that it aims not to convert nature into money, but to sustain and regenerate life.

We also need to reverse the flow of learning and support, acknowledging that on a number of levels the “developed” world actually needs what the “developing” world has at least as much as the other way around. A number of emerging social movements are inviting those of us in industrialized parts of the world to live better while using less of the Earth’s material and energy. Meanwhile, those in “less developed” parts of the world already have many of the attributes that these movements aim to cultivate among those of us in the “developed” world. For example, indigenous peoples are recovering and lifting their principles and practices up onto the world stage, in so doing offering values and possibilities that all of humanity needs at this time.

Ultimately, “reverse development” is about humility and courage in the face of an uncertain future. It is about calling upon the widest, wildest and wisest humanity in people in both the “developing” and “developed” parts of the planet. Everyone brings a vital element; nobody has the solutions. It is also about humility in the face of another. It is about dropping our notions of teacher and taught, “developer” and “developing,” and coming together as partners and collaborators. The Transformative Learning Centre (TLC) has done a remarkable job of elevating the knowledge and wisdom of those whom the mainstream development paradigm would assume to be in need of development and learning. It gathers us in from all directions as friends and colleagues to learn alongside one another. 

​My first encounter with the Transformative Learning Centre (TLC) was at the “One Earth Community” conference in 2007. My focus there was on the event’s process more than its substance.  So much so that it literally took me years to understand just how seminal the content was in its own right. That gathering marked the beginning of a shift not only in the role I play through my work (see “Dialogue—The Final Frontier”), and in the way I work (see “Quiet Space and the Importance of Slowing Down”). It also sowed the seeds of a sea change in my understanding of the international development field in which I’ve been employed since 1997.
 
It is only now, over seven years later, that I am realizing that my current take on international development—a paradigm I have been calling “reverse development”—was set forth in its bare bones in the TLC’s 2007 gathering call. That Spirit Matters conference focused on “developing a new vision and set of practices for an Earth Community.” Its theme statement said:

​After ten years in the world of mainstream development, working with Canada’s international aid agency, this invitation was perhaps more than I could fully absorb on a conscious level. It would take a fateful evening almost a year later for me even to begin to wake up to a new view of the waters in which I had been swimming for so long. And years of further exploration and reflection would pass before I would be able fully to seize the vast and very real possibility laid out by that TLC call. Only now do I realize that that call, and the calling it has become for me, is not just about process, but also about ultimate purpose. 
​

​One evening in 2008 I was taking a stroll down a village road in India. As I walked, I first saw a woman stirring a potful of dinner with a smile on her face. Her teenaged son and daughter were close by, playfully chasing and tagging each other and breaking out in peals of laughter.
 
I continued walking along the riverside path. Suddenly, a man on a bicycle veered around a corner toward me. As he pedaled past me, I heard him singing gleefully at full volume.
 
I kept on ambling along. And there, by the side of the road, I saw a sadhu in orange robes, sitting quietly in meditation.
 
I continued to walk for a few minutes. Then a wave of emotion washed over me, the force of it compelling me to sit down. It was then that I realized that these villagers had shown me, one after the other: connection, joy, and peace.
 
I knew that my decade of work in international development was rooted in intentions to contribute to good, share the wealth, and save the world. But in that moment I realized that perhaps an even deeper truth was that I went to “underdeveloped” and “impoverished” parts of the world because I needed what they had—and not the other way around. True, this was India and I was not here for work. But I recognized these feelings of aliveness and belonging from communities in South America and Africa where I had traveled for work. 
​

That fateful night flipped my conception of international development on its head. What exactly was it that I was helping to develop in other parts of the world? Connection? Joy? Peace? Aliveness? Belonging in the community of life? No. That is what my time in those “developing” places were helping me to develop.  So what was being developed? The broad agenda of international development, and the larger enterprise within which even the most progressive and human rights-based development efforts take place, is what Charles Eisenstein calls the “conversion of life and the world into money, the progressive commodification of everything.” (2011: 30)  
 
You may recognize that well-worn plea for charity: “these people are living on just one dollar a day!”  But that often simply means that they are still largely meeting their needs outside of the global money economy. They do that by stewarding land, plants and animals to create clothing, food and shelter, and engaging in mutual exchanges with others. Development, as Eisenstein puts it, is about “bringing [such] nonmonetary economic activity into the realm of goods and services.” Once they’ve been integrated into the globalized industrial cash economy, these same people may have well over a dollar a day but now can scarcely clothe, house or feed themselves.  What they do have, on the other hand, is the “mentality of scarcity, competition, and anxiety so familiar to us in the West, yet so alien to the moneyless hunter-gatherer or subsistence peasant.” (Eisenstein, 2011: 30)

In short, international development develops a globalized and monetized economy. It converts people, other living beings and the planet into commodities that can be bought, used and discarded across large distances.  Former “economic hit man” John Perkins describes how development loans have been used as instruments for progressively expanding the reach of industrial growth civilization. International financial institutions provide countries with loans to develop infrastructure—on the condition that companies from the “developed” world are the ones to build it. The creditors also require changes in economic policy that increase the debtor countries’ reliance on the rest of the world to meet the needs of their people. Then they make them pay it all back with interest. If these countries default on those payments, the “developed” world demands other forms of payback that further integrate them into the global industrial complex—such as the installation of military bases or access to resources like oil or the Panama Canal. (2004: 1)
 
This is the endgame in a journey that began with the agricultural revolution over ten thousand years ago, a story that Daniel Quinn engagingly tells in the Ishmael trilogy. (1992, 1996, 1997) Its plotline is that civilized societies continually take over the habitat of other peoples and species, progressively annihilating or assimilating them in the process. Before that—for 99.5 per cent of the three million years of human existence—we were all members of tribal cultures. Like other species, we lived within a self-sustaining balance in which no one organism monopolized the means to sustain life. (Wright, 2004: 14) Now fewer than 5% of humans continue to live in that way. (Hall and Patrinos, 2012: 10) The majority of us are part of an ever-growing monoculture in which food and other life necessities are kept under lock and key, controlled through hierarchical structures, and concentrated in the hands of a few.  
 
Development aid makes it look like rich countries are generously offering charity to their poor neighbours. The bigger picture, however, is actually that developing countries as a group provide a net transfer of financial resources to developed countries (United Nations, 2011: 69). Yes, you read that right. For every $1 developing countries gain, they lose more than $2 (see figure 1). This is perhaps less surprising when you consider that, by definition, “developing” countries are the ones that have more people and more planet yet to convert into monetized goods and services, and the new money thereby created mainly flows to the “developed” countries. 

​This kind of development is cannibalistic and ultimately suicidal, as we eat and spit out the foundations for life until there is not enough left to sustain us. Humanity as a whole, living as we do now, needs one and a half Earths to carry us into the future. (Global Footprint Network, 2014) That means that (based on 2007 data), it takes Earth a year and six months to absorb the waste and regenerate the energy, land, trees, and food that humans use in a year. We have been in ecological overshoot since the early 1970s, and we continue to develop our techno-industrial society by—to put it bluntly—liquidating the Earth. In those forty-odd years, for example, the number of individual vertebrates (mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish) with whom we share our planet has fallen by half. (WWF, 2014: 16)
 
Beyond the Limits, the 20-year update to the renowned 1972 book Limits to Growth, concluded: 

​Were such a scenario to play out, it would by no means be the first time in the ten thousand year history of human civilization that overshoot led to collapse.
 
In fact, one after another—Sumer, Rome, Classic Period Maya, Easter Island—civilizations have “robb[ed] the future to pay the present, spending the last reserves of natural capital on a reckless binge of excessive wealth and glory.” (Wright, 2004: 79) The main difference now is that while their populations were geographically confined and never surpassed a hundred million, modern civilization spans the entire globe and we number seven billion. The Easter Islanders made a barren desert of their island. We are following their example. But this time the whole planet is our island, and what’s at stake is nothing less than the very survival of complex life on Earth.
​

​Given this reality, the basic premise of international development—that “developing” countries need to develop what the “developed” countries have—seems fatally misguided. One earth would suffice if we all lived as people did in China in 2010. But if everyone on the planet were to live as people do in Canada, we would need 3.7 planets (see figure 2). (WWF, 2014: 59) If poor countries’ economies were to catch up with those of the rich by 2080, the global economy could be more than forty times larger than it is now. (Alexander, 2014: comment) Yet the current economy already far outstrips what Earth can sustain

We can continue the current model of international development, accelerating the monetization of nature until the very basis for our survival is exhausted and our civilization sees a sudden and catastrophic collapse. In this scenario—and that is what we appear to be heading toward if we continue with business as usual—average global living conditions post-collapse might be akin to what they were in the early 20th century. (Turner, 2014: 4) An alternative is to ease away from the edge of the precipice through proactive economic “degrowth.” This means finding ways to meet our needs that require much less throughput of Earth’s material and energy.
 
Whichever path we take, we will need to turn our understanding of international development around 180 degrees. These times are calling for a radical redefinition of what it is that humanity wants to develop, and who should be helping to develop whom. We might name such a reframing “reverse development.” It is about reversing our understanding of development so that it aims not to convert nature into money, but to sustain and regenerate life. It is also about reversing the flow of learning and support, acknowledging that on a number of levels the “developed” world actually needs what the “developing” world has at least as much as the other way around.
​

​Whether we do it sooner or later, we in the so-called “developed” parts of the world will need to find ways of living well while consuming and throwing away much less. And those in the “developing” parts of the world will need to recover, preserve and cherish what they have already developed, rather than leaving it behind in pursuit of the promise of growth-based development. Together, we all face the deep challenge of finding ways to survive and thrive in an already very depleted world, much in need of restoration.  
 
In modern industrial growth society—indeed in all civilizations since the agricultural revolution—people have “used the creativity of the mind and scientific insight to harness the wonders of technology and increase material wealth.” (Pachamama Alliance, 2010: 11) They have done so with the assumption that they are separate and have dominion over living systems—their bodies, other people, other beings, and the planet itself. Much has been gained, but what has been lost is a basic connection to life, and the ability to sustain it.  The more “developed” we are—the more embedded within the globalized, urban, techno-industrial growth society—by definition the less connected to life we tend to be. We know how to manipulate matter on a molecular level and how to modify the very structures of life. But we’ve forgotten how to listen and respect natural rhythms, how to band together at a local community level and meet our own and each other’s needs, how to freely inhabit and enjoy our bodies, how to artistically express the life force that animates us, and most critically, how to live in harmony with creation.
 
Modern civilization has led us to a precarious brink of time. Recognizing this, a number of emerging social movements are inviting those of us in industrialized parts of the world to live better while using less of the Earth’s material and energy. The Transition movement builds self-reliance at a community level, pro-actively moving away from fossil fuels and re-localizing currencies and food and energy production. The Sufficiency movement stands for the belief that “we are already enough, and already have enough, to create a new world that works for everyone.” (Global Sufficiency Network) The “degrowth” movement encourages us to spend less time producing and consuming and more time enjoying friends, family, culture, creativity and community. And the Slow Movement invites us to slow down and do things as well as possible, instead of as fast as possible.
 
Those in “less developed” parts of the world are, by definition, less integrated with the globalized techno-industrial economy. They are less dependent on goods and services from around the world to meet their basic needs, and more localized and self-reliant. They use less of the Earth’s fuel and matter to live. They tend to have more time for family, community and creative expression. They move at a slower pace. Because their dependence on the Earth is less mediated by technology, industry, and work done by people in far-off lands, they tend to be more connected to nature. In other words, they have many of the attributes that the social movements mentioned above aim to cultivate among those of us in the “developed” world. 
​

The Anishinaabe Seven Fires Prophecy is one of a number of indigenous prophecies related to this time. It says that their people would be visited by a light-skinned race, and that if these people did not come in friendship, great calamities would befall them. When the water was unfit to drink and the fish unfit to eat, they would know the time had come for a great purification. At that point, the creator would give the light-skinned people a chance to make up for the damage that had been done. In this time of the seventh fire, amidst great confusion and pain, the red and the white people would meet again at a fork in the road. They would have the chance to come together to form a mighty nation, together with the black and yellow peoples, and to walk the red road of earth knowledge and heal the earth. The eighth fire that would follow would be either a fire of light to blow away the darkness and the pains, or a fire to consume and destroy. The choice is ours. (Dostou, in Nalls, 2013)
 
The red peoples, and indigenous tribal people around the world, have skills and knowledge that the whole world needs in this unprecedented planet-time. Their territories also hold around 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity. (Perkasa and Evanty, 2014) To quote the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “indigenous, local, and traditional knowledge systems and practices, including indigenous peoples’ holistic view of community and environment, are a major resource for adapting to climate change.” (2014, 26)  I’m struck by the case of Bolivia, a country to which I have been travelling since 1998 in the context of my work. One of the “poorest” countries in the hemisphere, Bolivia has the highest proportion of indigenous people in the world (over 60%). After centuries of undeclared apartheid, Bolivia elected its first indigenous president in 2006. It is perhaps no coincidence then that in recent years Bolivia has been a global leader and pioneer in reframing humanity’s relationship with the rest of the Earth community.

​In 2009, Bolivia proposed a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth to the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). In 2010 Bolivia hosted the World Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change and on that occasion adopted the Declaration. That remarkable document, based in the Andean indigenous worldview, recognizes Pachamama (the Quechua word for Mother Earth) as a living being. It declares, among other things, her rights to a clean life and to regenerate her biocapacity, and human beings’ obligations to live in harmony with her. Bolivia’s thought leadership has led to a remarkable array of UNGA initiatives promoting “Harmony with Nature.” These include five UN resolutions, five reports of the UN Secretary General, a dedicated UN website, a study, four interactive dialogues, and the designation of April 22 as International Mother Earth Day.
 
Domestically, Bolivia, like Ecuador, is creating a global precedent for a new Earth system governance paradigm based in indigenous understandings of humanity’s radical interdependence with nature. It has adopted the indigenous principle and practices of vivir bien (living well) as a foundation for its constitution, legal framework and national planning.  The worldview encapsulated in vivir bien—a concept still very much under construction—offers a guide for living in these times. It refers to living in harmony with all other humans and all other beings, including future generations. It includes the notions of relatedness, complementarity, reciprocity, wholeness and equilibrium. These bring vital counterpoints to the underpinnings of modern civilization: separation, domination, competition, specialization, and growth. It sees humans not as separate from nature, but as one component of the larger Earth community, in which everything is life.
​

​In practice, Bolivia has not in fact broken away from an extractivist, growth-based economic model. But by bringing Andean understandings of Pachamama and vivir bien into the official discourse of domestic and international governance, it is one of many examples of indigenous peoples recovering and lifting their principles, and practices up onto the world stage. These acts of decolonization liberate not only the colonized but also the colonizers. They offer values and possibilities that all of humanity needs at this time—whether “developed” or “developing,” “modern” or “primitive.” They point toward a path of respect, wisdom and harmony that could just save us—if we choose, together, to form the mighty nation foretold by the Anishinaabe.
 
These indigenous perspectives, rooted in an understanding of the profound interconnectedness of all things, are pointing the modern world to our own emerging scientific discoveries. The structures and processes of our civilization are based in outdated Newtonian and Cartesian views that are dualistic, anthropocentric and mechanistic. But in the last century, sciences from quantum physics to living systems to cosmology have been revealing a world that is whole, alive and deeply inter-related from the quantum to the cosmic. They are showing us that everything is connected in ways that are hard for us to perceive and fully fathom through the intellect. It is time that our ways of living returned to—and caught up with—deeper understandings of how life works. It is time we restored our connection to life, in service of its continuation on this planet.
 
This moment asks us to move beyond last century’s contest between capitalist and communist models of development. Seen from a life-oriented perspective, those two ideologies are more similar than different. They both assume separation between the human and more-than-human world and promote monetization and commoditization of one by the other. Both end up destroying the very foundations necessary for life on Earth. What is needed is nothing less than an evolutionary leap into the unknown—unprecedented approaches to match unprecedented conditions. This is a time to feel our way forward into patterns of being that allow life to flourish. For this, we need to root ourselves in both ancient knowing and emerging knowledge.
 
Ultimately, “reverse development” is about humility and courage in the face of an uncertain future. It is about calling upon the widest, wildest and wisest humanity in people in both the “developing” and “developed” parts of the planet. Everyone brings a vital element; nobody has the solutions. Because the “developed” have spent so long teaching the “developing” how to emulate their ways, there is a time and place for reversing that flow and focusing on what can be learned from traditional, local and indigenous peoples. They have ways of entering into active relationship and two-way communication with the beings of all species and of all times—ways that life wants us all to value and grow. But in the long run, people from all parts of the world are being called to come together in a spirit of not-knowing. We have just one Earth to sustain all members of the community of life. As humans, our task now is to learn how to thrive as an inseparable part of a single Earth community. To do so, as individuals and as peoples we must draw upon the deepest groundwaters, each from our own well.
 
“Reverse development” is also about humility in the face of another. It is about dropping our notions of teacher and taught, “developer” and “developing,” and coming together as partners. We gather across culture and place as friends, to work and learn together. An example of this is the translocal model of the Berkana Exchange, in which communities in “developed” and “developing” countries alike find what they need “in themselves—in everyday people, their cultural traditions and their environment.” They use “this wisdom and wealth to conduct bold experiments in how to create healthy and resilient communities where all people matter, all people can contribute.” And, coming from places around the globe, they support each other through the process, weaving through each other’s lives, visiting one another’s communities, and gathering together to share their discoveries and dilemmas. (Wheatley and Frieze, 2011: 5)

And this brings me back to the TLC. In each of the gatherings I’ve attended, the TLC has done a remarkable job of lifting up the knowledge and wisdom of those whom the mainstream development paradigm would assume to be in need of development and learning. Instead, the TLC invites in people from the “developing” world and from indigenous cultures on all continents, not as “beneficiaries” or even merely as participants, but as respected wisdom leaders. At each TLC event, I have seen such leaders take their rightful and proportionate place as conference speakers and as stewards of TLC-associated research projects around the world.
 
The TLC does more than just pay lip service to the notion of “honouring diversities of knowledge from all four directions.” It recognizes the initiatory leadership of indigenous people in honouring “the more-than-human world as all our relations,” and tends the indigenous spark waiting to be rekindled in the rest of us. (TLC) It gathers us in from all directions as friends, partners, and colleagues to learn alongside one another. It creates a sacred playground in which we can share our hearts, listen together for what wants to be known, and feel our way forward into the unprecedented future that beckons. This is what “reverse development” looks like. We ignite each others’ life-light until the whole Indra’s net is gleaming—the new One Earth society that is waiting to be born.

Alexander, Samuel (October 1 2014). “Life in a ‘degrowth’ economy, and why you might actually enjoy it.” “The Conversation” website. Retrieved December 19, 2014 from http://theconversation.com/life-in-a-degrowth-economy-and-why-you-might-actually-enjoy-it-32224
 
Carpenter, Duane. “Part 6: Indra’s Net and the Worldwide Web.” Dynamic Symbols II: The Vortex and the Path to Liberation. Retrieved December 30, 2014 from http://www.light-weaver.com/vortex/6indra.html
 
Global Footprint Network (2014). “Footprint Basics—Overview,” in Global Footprint Network website. Retrieved December 19, 2014 from http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/footprint_basics_overview/
 
Global Sufficiency Network (n.d.). “Global Sufficiency Network—About Us.” Retrieved December 26, 2014 from http://www.sevenstonesleadership.com/global-sufficiency-network-about-us/
 
Griffiths, Jesse (2014). The State of Finance for Developing Countries, 2014: An assessment of the scale of all sources of finance available to developing countries. Brussels: European Network on Debt and Development. Retrieved December 18 2014 from http://www.eurodad.org/files/pdf/5492f601aeb65.pdf
 
Hall, Gillette H and Patrinos, Harry Anthony, Eds. (2012). Indigenous Peoples, Poverty, and Development. New York: Cambridge University Press.
 
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (2014). Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability: Summary for Policymakers. Retrieved on December 27, 2014 from https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg3/WGIIIAR5_SPM_TS_Volume.pdf 
 
Meadows, Donella H, Meadows, Dennis L. and Randers, Jorgen (1992). Beyond the Limits: Confronting Global Collapse, Envisioning a Sustainable Future. White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing Company.


Nalls, Gayil (Creator and Poster) (2013). Tom Dostou: The Seven Fires Prophecy [Video] Retrieved on December 31 2014 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STVfqA0KUM0
 
The Pachamama Alliance (2010). Awakening the Dreamer, Changing the Dream Symposium V-2 Presenter’s Manual. San Francisco: The Pachamama Alliance.

Perkasa, Vidhyandika and Evanty, Nukila (2014). “The World Conference on Indigenous Peoples: A View From Indonesia.” Retrieved December 27, 2014 from http://www.cfr.org/councilofcouncils/global_memos/p33476
 
Perkins, John (2004). Excerpt from prologue, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Retrieved December 18, 2014 from https://www.bkconnection.com/books/title/the-new-confessions-of-an-economic-hit-man​ 
 
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Quinn, Daniel (1997). My Ishmael. New York: Bantam Books.
 
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Turner, Graham (2014). “Is Global Collapse Imminent? An Updated comparison of The Limits to Growth with Historical Data,” MSSI Research Paper No. 4, Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, The University of Melbourne.
  
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Wheatley, Margaret and Frieze, Deborah (2011). Walk Out Walk On: A Learning Journey into Communities Daring to Live the Future Now. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
 
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​Well applied, Results-Based Management (RBM) can be a powerful approach for improving programming. At its best, it makes monitoring and evaluation exponentially easier and more meaningful, because it allows for measuring and evaluating outcomes (not just implementation), and then feeds that information back into decision-making.

​Yet in application, RBM seldom reaches its full potential. It can easily become a mechanical box-ticking exercise. How often have you seen organizations pay lip service to RBM while in effect taking an activity-based approach?
​
This article, published in OCIC's e-Magazine iAM (Ideas, Actions, Movements) Volume 8: Measure What Matters, presents three challenges or areas of tension that lie in the way of meaningful RBM, along with ways to address them.