Systemic Evolution Starts With Shifts in Consciousness

Shifting our internal state to create ripple effects of love, joy, and prosperity as our external world transforms

This piece is heavily influenced by the field of Regenerative Design and Development, the modern expression pioneered by amazing people like Carol Sanford, Ben Haggard, Pamela Mang, Bill Reed, and the rest of the Regenesis group.I want to acknowledge the many indigenous cultures who naturally operate at this state of consciousness — of caring for the earth and each other as fami ly.

A Better Future Feels Out Of Reach

Are you one of those people who stays up at night imagining a better world and gets frustrated because you don’t see our systems and the habits that shape them evolving quickly enough?

Someone who pictures a world where human systems are in harmony with the workings of nature, producing abundant resources, thriving habitats, and a global field of love for life to play in?

I’m that person too. I’ve spent my whole career searching for the thing that will shift systems on a global scale to bring this future into being. I believe I’ve discovered this thing through my own spiritual exploration and now in the field of Regenerative Development and Design. It’s not a framework. It’s not an invention or program. It’s not a policy. It’s deeper than all those things.

It’s a state of consciousness.

Most of the human systems you see today were built through collective states of stress, fear, urgency, selfishness, and anger. Just look at the state of workplace stress in corporations. The workplaces where the financial flows, structures, regulations, and products that determine how our systems get created have been cesspools of negative emotion.

These negative emotions lead to the habits, investments, interactions, and states of being that have built financial and political systems that exclude most of the world from the natural abundance of our planet. They’ve built political and religious systems that polarize and produce more hate than cooperation on a large scale. It doesn’t really matter if you pray to Jesus or espouse progressive values. If inside, your energetic state is one of anger, selfishness, or chaos, you will leave that energetic imprint on the world. We can see the systemic impact of these energetic imprints if we simply assess the state of Mother Earth and how key human systems have destroyed her and the living beings that are her residents and children.

Many well intentioned people work to rehab these systems and solve the problems they’ve caused. This work is wonderful and I want to underscore how important it is that people care. We NEED that. However, most people attempting to heal our systems do so in a negative emotional state. They’re fighting the status quo. Fighting leads to separation, resistance, and frustration. Frustration leads to the same states of consciousness that created this whole mess. We get some policies, sustainability pledges, niche movements, electric cars, and a bit more renewable energy. But it doesn’t feel like we’re taking big enough steps to make a dent in the downward spiral we’re on course for. And it feels like we have to fight for every inch.

One thing I want to emphasize — It’s totally human to get angry and frustrated at the genocide of life on our planet. Having periods where you’re frustrated, sad, grieving , or in any other unpleasant emotional state is OK! But we can’t let these emotions bleed reactionary into our work and constant state of being, or we’ll just perpetuate them in the world.

Here’s the thing — we can create the harmonious, abundant, and mutually beneficial human systems we envision. People are doing it right now. It just takes a shift in how we see the world.

Start With Creating a Field of Care + Possibility

So how can we start shifting consciousness in a way that can be leveraged into positive systemic evolution? We have to begin with de-centering problems and re-centering shared potential in our approach.

The Problem with Problems

Most well-intentioned systems fixers start with a problem to solve. This makes rational sense given our current paradigm. Find a problem, solve it, make progress towards fixing the system. Here’s the thing with problems — the problems usually have people behind them. Most people don’t want to be approached by others who are trying to solve them and their work.

Not everyone agrees that problems are problems. So approaching systems evolution from the level of a problem may alienate people that are key to helping you evolve the system. A big example lies in global warming/climate change. We’ve been focusing our narratives on the problems caused by our broken systems, and the response from many has been denial, resistance, or solutions that also broken (like carbon offsets).

Problems can get frustrating, especially when they’re complex and difficult to solve. If your attention is always focused on something that’s broken, and the negative consequences of it being broken, you’re likely to start to get stressed, sad, or anxious about solving the problem more quickly. You might think that you’re not doing enough and start to doubt yourself. Even when you solve a problem, there are always more to fill it’s place. This can feel like an uphill battle, with nothing but problems in sight.

We find the flip side of problems when we imagine potential.

The Promise of Place + Potential

Starting with imaging the potential for a specific place, system, or situation creates opportunity for co-creation and new possibilities. It provides opportunity for people to envision a better future in a specific context that’s relevant to them. Imagine a climate movement centered on inviting people to co-create systems that are in harmony with life instead of reducing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. How many more people might be open to that? How many bridges could we build with energy that has been spent trying to convince and people that a problem even exists? And fighting them if they disagree?

Envisioning potential with a group provides a positive space of caring from which we can experience joy, belonging, shared purpose, and collaboration. Once we’re in that state, we’re much more equipped to approach problems in a way that fosters new possibility among a diversity of interests. Focusing on elements of potential that connect across diverse interests facilitates relationships across those people, increasing trust and the capacity for collaborative systemic evolution.

When we start with problems, we create a space that fosters more disagreement, challenging discussion, and separation. All of these aspects can be useful to work through, but can only be fully leveraged once a space of potential and mutual caring has been opened.

The Magic of Shared Potential At Work

Let’s look at some examples where there were a lot of problems that could’ve been focused on, but starting with potential enabled trust-sbuilding and systemic evolution.

Stewarding the Santa Cruz Mountains

This example comes from the wonderful work of Converge. One of their first projects took place in the Santa Cruz Mountains. There were many different types of stakeholders that managed land in these mountains. On the surface, they had different interests and incentives. There were local conservation groups, family owned logging businesses, policy makers, tribal bands, and land trusts. Many of them had previously experienced conflict between each other, and were worried about how others might exploit the network.

The team at Converge bypassed these historical conflicts by creating a safe convenings for dialogue where network participants could share their stories, deepen relationships, and uncover the common threads of loving and caring for the land that ran through all of their values and stories. Establishing trusting relationship and uncovering the shared love and care for the land enabled participants to envision ways to co-steward the land with minimal conflict, even though they entered the process with widely varying conceptions of what successful stewardship looks like.

Bringing A City to Life in Chile

The next example comes from the work of Regenesis. They were brought into a project in Vina del Mar, a city on the Pacific Coast of Chile. It had historically been a thriving city, but in the late 1900’s was plagued by disinvestment and decline.

A real estate company called Las Salinas had been planning a development on a 40 acre lot. However this company was a part of a large conglomerate, and was strongly disliked by grassroots community groups and activists. These community groups were prepared to sue the life out of the real estate company before they could break ground on their development.

Regenesis approached this stalemate by helping the real estate company realize their true purpose in this project — to bring a gift to the town of Vina del Mar. From there, they approached the various community groups to understand their images of the city’s full potential. These community groups were at first reluctant to speak with Regensis team members because they saw them as “with the enemy (the real estate company)”. The Regenesis team used the frame of potential to have these conversations in the first place. From that point, the space was opened up once the real estate developers and activists realized that they shared a vision for the project, and became willing collaborators in manifesting this vision, as opposed to the “enemies” they had been before.

A Small Scale Example — Using Potential to Regenerate a team

Here’s an example of potential helping to elevate us above a problem gridlock in one of the projects I’m a part of that’s focused on creating decentralized systems that enable recognition and compensation of regenerative action:

There has been a problem around the way we make decisions for a while. No cohesive process exists, and it resulted in people getting blindsided by proposals, feeling disrespected, and unheard. Recently, one of the core leaders proposed increasing incentives towards his circles’ (a circle is similar to a department) efforts while removing another core steward from the leadership team. It lead to an exhausting discussion that took our meeting 45 minutes over and left everyone feeling tired. I immediately went into problem solving anxiety mode, thinking we’d need conflict resolution to address the problem head on.

The next day after I was able to sleep on it, I realized that the specific problem that had manifested before us was just a symptom of us taking our collective eyes off the potential we were creating together.

We had a workshop planned on Friday, and where I had previously planned to do conflict resolution in my reactive state. After some reflection, I instead planned a session where we’d review the higher purpose of the organization, the type of energetic field we wanted to maintain, and from that space of alignment co-create the first official decision making process that would take us close to our shared imagined potential of distributed and inclusive governance.

During the workshop, we started with a discussion around the core purpose and saw the magic of potential at work. The differing perspectives of the core stewards that previously lead to arguments were instead layered in service of the larger purpose to show that there was value in having different approaches in the same space. There was a newfound feeling of care in that discussion, where we focused on the value we wanted to create in the world. This generated the energetic momentum with which we took big steps to finalize a collaborative and inclusive decision making process that would help us avoid the arguments that had been happening.

Hopefully this example gives you a more ground-level view of the magic of potential.

Hopefully you see the pattern here. Actors who had great intentions to evolve their system were “at war” in some form with each other. This battle stemmed from and perpetuated a combative state of consciousness that prevented progress from happening. The introduction of imagining potential helped people shift into a more open and inspired state of being, which greased the wheels for cross-sector relationships to form and eventually, collaborative and intentional system evolution.

Without the shift in consciousness created by a space to image potential, that evolution doesn’t happen or only happens after some cataclysmic event and more fighting.

Approaching the Evolution of Consciousness

The complexity of our world demands an evolved approach to building systems that foster life and connection instead of degradation and separation. The source of this approach lies in evolving our consciousness, cultivating an elevated energetic state that enables the formation of relationships across the current lines of separation.

However, I’m not under any illusions of a “quick fix”. Or everything to magically become better because we’re all in a state of joy and mutual respect. The evolution of consciousness is just the beginning. From this evolved internal state, we can develop the capacity to develop the frameworks, policies, technical instruments, and economic-political systems that support the thriving and harmonious state of life on earth that we desire.

So this begs the question — “How might we approach evolving our consciousness?”

This is a huge question that I can’t answer in a checklist. But I can provide some potential starting points for you to test out in your own experience.

• Learn and apply regenerative frameworks in your life and work. These frameworks have helped me immensely on a personal and professional level, and I’m still a student. Here are some places you can do this:

• The Regenerative Practitioner

• nRyhthm Regenerative Fellowship

• Carol Sanford’s Regenerative Change Agent Community

• Explore and practice habits that make you feel joyful. Here are some starting points.

• When you get caught in a problem spiral, try to reframe your perspective around the potential that lies on the other side of the problem(s). Image that potential and start to think about who could help bring it into being.

• Try to see the people you have previously seen as your enemy as unique living beings with their own essence, who are doing their best in a broken world.

One thing that I want to leave you with is the concept of Agape. Martin Luther King Jr wrote eloquently on this concept of embodied and unconditional love in an excerpt for the Awakened Warrior.

Agape means understanding, redeeming good will for all. It’s an overflowing love which is purely spontaneous, unmotivated, groundless, and creative… It’s the love of God operating in the human heart… It begins by loving others for their sakes… discover[ing] the neighbor in everone it meets. Therefore, agape makes no distinction between friend and enemy, it’s directed toward both.

How might we apply this concept of Agape in our work to evolve the living systems we’re a part of? How might we apply the frame of potential to shift our consciousness and open ourselves and our teams to new relationships with people and organizations who are key to creating systemic shifts?