Sensing into our future: Strands in the collective ether

by Emma philbin Bowman

You are always changing into something else. Always. Incessantly. Shunryu Suzuki Roshi (1966)

It doesn’t do any good to blame people or the time - one is oneself all those people. We are the time. James Baldwin (1962: 344)

Driving west this past summer, I found myself listening to James Hillman’s Blue Fire lectures (Hillman, 2012) and to Esther Perel on How’s Work? (Perel, 2021).Perel, wrestling with a Zoom room of burned-out journalists, spoke of how so many of the problems that appear to assail us individually are collective in nature. Decades ago, Hillman was drawing our attention to things that now clamour for attention: our cultural intoxication with the myth of the individual; the subtle corrosion to the soul of craftsmanship giving way to concrete jungles; our failure to adequately grieve as species disappear from the earth.

These themes are in the ether now and looming ever larger. In the liminal space of this mid-pandemic moment, I want to draw on the varied reckonings each of us has been living through. I want to invite us to imagine psychotherapy afresh and to turn our focus toward whatever processes are underway in us that may birth new possibilities in how our discipline unfolds in the coming decades. I am thinking both about our vocation as therapists and about the state of the species and our common planet. I am concerned with how we will evolve in response to what we are up against; I am wondering what therapeutic and integrative modalities will best serve the times we are living through, and curious about how we may evolve coherent, collectively intelligent responses to the psychological and existential variables in which we are now immersed.

This territory is expansive, and I write here to weave some strands that have been percolating in me over these months we have been living through. Some of these, I hope, may have value for others. Most fundamentally, I find myself questioning the sustainability of individual therapy as our go-to healing modality, and reflective about the role group spaces of various kinds may occupy in unfolding our future. I have some ideas, but do not presume to have answers; my intention here is to open room for each of us to consider what feels most pertinent for us, and then to share my own experience of some emerging forms of collective work in ‘We-Space’ contexts.

Where have you been; what have you seen?
This is a potent moment. Over these past eighteen months, we have all been catapulted into reckonings. Before we resettle into familiar forms, we have an opportunity to notice what might be coming into view: to clarify any strands we may have been sensing on the edge of consciousness, any hunches or new ways of seeing that have been surfacing. Each of our perceptions and affinities are unique and valuable. I want to invite you as a reader here into paying attention to your unique sense of what is coming to the fore.

The simple diagram below will be helpful to some. This map of two curves asks us to clarify with more precision any elements we sense gathering power, what their features might be, and how we might act to support them. The value of this curve lies in explicitly naming where we have been standing, what values we wish to retain, what is emerging freshly, and how we might lean into a process of unfolding the future.

• What shifts are coming to prominence in my work/way of seeing?

• Is there a direction I feel called toward, a circumstance that calls for my response, a fresh image of tomorrow?

• What do I retain from the old way as a precious foundation?

What does this moment call for?
Before going further, I want to invite each of us to consider for ourselves, were we to arrive freshly on earth in 2021, what healing forms and transformational modalities we might dream into being; what creative responses we would have to all we sensed to be in play?

I ask this question because given the scale of all we are facing, it strikes me that while individual psychotherapy might well be among the varied forms we would come up with, I doubt it would be primary. I wonder if, let loose from our traditional moorings, we might seek forms that drew on the insights of our field, and on our capacities as practitioners, but be keen to make these scalable beyond one-to-one work. We might hope for forms that could hold intimate, receptive space that enabled participants to bring forth their experience into the collective - for salving, for contribution, for mirroring. Given what we know of the value of co-regulation and empathic resonance, we might be ensuring these forms were characterised by deeply embodied presence; we might hope that they found ways to evoke, nurture and embed our ongoing adult development - that they cultivated our becoming and belonging in equal measure. And we might be doing our very best not to monetise them in prohibitive ways. Finally, we might be trying to envisage spaces where participants could relax their primary identity as discrete individuals burdened with holding individual lives together. We might hope instead for a form that enabled them to recognise that neither their wounds or gifts were theirs alone, but elements of something larger, of which they were an intrinsic part.

I say all of the above because when I attend to what has struck me most vividly these past eighteen months, I would say that culturally it is the collapse of the myth of autonomy and a tangibly amplified exposure to our collective fate. Personally, professionally and spiritually, it is a deepening conviction that innovative and emerging forms of collective work will serve an important, evolving role in our responses to all we are up against.

As we know, the Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted many of the ways in which the structures of modern life do not serve our wellbeing. We have designed a world that is neither sustainable nor holistically nourishing, and find ourselves exposed to both our fragility and interdependence from myriad angles. But we also have new resources: a deeper and more integrated understanding of trauma and the nervous system, innovative forms of technology and communication, widespread access to spiritual and psychological modalities that may – if we are able to draw on them - enable us to create innovative forms by which we may traverse some of these thresholds.

We find ourselves at an inflection point, in need of what Joanna Macy (2009) has termed a “Great Turning… a shift from the Industrial Growth Society to a life-sustaining civilisation”.

Steinenger and Debold conceptualise the moment we are in as reflective of the elevation of the individual during what some historians call the ‘Axial Age’, a stage in human development that began about three thousand years ago, but which now seems ripe for transformation: “What began to emerge then is something that we take so for granted today, a sense of individual identity, as distinct from the tribe and from nature...[marked by] the achievement of the self-reflective, self-contained, separate rational ‘I’”. Quoting theologian Ewert Cousins, they suggest that today “we are at the beginning of another, equally significant time of transition” which “will incorporate the ground of unity that preAxial tribal cultures had access to, but on a deeper and larger scale”. Following Cousins, Steinenger and Debold urge that, “having developed self-reflective, analytic critical consciousness.... we must now, while retaining these values, re-appropriate and integrate into that consciousness the collective and cosmic dimensions of consciousness” (Steinenger & Debold, 2016: 270).

Steinenger and Debold’s observations above are central to where I want to dwell here. If we are to evolve and endure as a species, we are tasked with integrating the achievement of our sensitised postmodern subjectivity, alongside an ability to think and move as ‘we’ again in ways that reach and serve us as a whole. This is a matter of enabling us to feel into our identity as one-among-many, but to source this not from some generic tribal norm, but from more expansive, hard-won origins. In other words, we need to learn to function on behalf of our wider well-being in ways that are authentic expressions of whatever integration, maturity and insight we are capable.

The cost of our over-emphasis on the individual Our emphasis on, and reverence for individuality has been under fire for some time. Over several decades now, we have seen profound shifts in our field from the disciplines of attachment theory, neuroscience, polyvagal theory and interpersonal neurobiology, all of which have amplified our recognition of mutual interdependence and somatic and relational interwovenness. From another angle, Buddhist and mystic practice has been revealing, for eons, that our identification as separate selves is a conceptual veil, and that more unitive perspectives lie within human reach. More recently, drawing from his research into Yoruba indigenous knowledge as well as the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, poetic Nigerian-born philosopher Bayo Akomolafe has argued beautifully – from outside our western paradigms - that we humans, like all other entities, are volatile ‘assemblages’ rather than stable individuals, continually subject to each other’s influence (Akomolafe, 2017: 39). In other words, the individual human subject has had its heyday; the myth is coming apart. While contemporary psychotherapy has been profoundly influenced by this more relational emphasis, in our forms we continue to orient around the individual. This is not without deep value: as we know, individual work tends to the unique experiences and history of the self in a manner no other form can replicate; it does so in subtle, relational and intersubjectively evocative ways that are often hugely beneficial. When it works well, it enables us to become more flexible, spontaneous, and genuinely available to self and other in fresh iterations whose benefits extend far beyond the individual subject. All of us know how precious and life-changing this can be. But, individual psychotherapy does all this while partaking of the culturally dominant presumption that we are, fundamentally, individuals, wrestling with individual difficulties. As such, psychotherapy is both a balm (for some) and a symptom of our imbalance. Paradoxically, this over-emphasis on our separateness is central to many of the most chronic problems that come our way: epidemics of loneliness, narcissism, depression, anxiety, all of which are pervasive symptoms of our contemporary cultures. By affirming our identity as discrete entities who tend the most troubling aspects of our lives in (costly) private space, psychotherapy risks being yet another cultural form unwittingly reproducing much of what is wrong, even while we work to alleviate it. This is hardly a new insight, but we are in a different kind of moment: one both more receptive to and more acutely in need of innovative recalibrations to the crises in which we find ourselves. As Stephan Martineau observed in his personal process: what became apparent to me... was the possibility of our journey as human beings shifting more fundamentally from an ‘I’ to a ‘We’: building upon and nurturing individual awakened awareness to co-create a new level of togetherness. As I integrated this.... a new sense-making arose of the potential of coming together at a higher octave beyond the confines of the separate self, with this profound reverence toward the mystery of creation and becoming fully who we are... (Martineau & Martineau, 2016: 157) I am not trying to undermine the irreplaceable role of individual work; I am asking whether it is the form sufficient and best suited to the needs of the moment, or whether it cries out to be accompanied by a stronger emphasis on a range of skilful, attuned contemporary forms of collective practice. I want to say a little about my own sense of why the future requires a shift toward what I will call collective intelligences. Most fundamentally, we are under enormous pressure: a huge proportion of humans now explicitly struggle with mental health, while local and global crises continue to launch both prolonged and specific collective trauma events, such as climate collapse, catastrophic oppressions and occupations, and the pandemic and all of its fallouts. As individuals and as a species, we desperately need to come into more loving, generative and sustainable relation to the whole.

By this I mean the planet, the eco-system, our wildly unequal global economies, our ethical and psychological relationships with one another. It is no longer tenable to conceive of our mental health – or even our physical survival - as a private matter. Obviously, psychotherapy cannot solve these problems, but we do have a role to play in forming cultural responses to them. My sense is that because group practices – at their best - can invite and enable an experience of self-in-relation-to-whole, they are an especially potent form for a time of collective pressure. Group work deepens our attunement, sensitivity and capacity to live through things in ways that perceive, feel and respond inclusively to the whole. In this, they develop our ability to relate to world. Group spaces expose us to the reality of being one among many, and task us with learning to do so in ways that work. In part, this is about restoring the support and common ground of the village to lives that have become isolated, pressured, lonely, stressed, lacking in witnessing and belonging. Because even as individual therapy heals us, it also sequesters us; and in this sequestering, parts of us don’t get witnessed in social space; gifts fail to reveal themselves; commonalities fail to be deeply known; capacities to experience ourselves as part of a larger system are not cultivated in substantial or nuanced ways. Belonging and becoming: Leveraging the gravitational pull of the collective Development up to the culture’s (or family’s) center of gravity happens through effortless assimilation of the habit patterns one is surrounded with. Development beyond this requires personal motivation, unusual experiences, or life stressors that propel one to build higher level skills and capacities... (Murray, 2016: 211) One of the primary reasons I am so passionate about intentional group fields lies in their capacity to support us at our growing edges, to invite us further than we can go alone. As we know, we are wired to seek relational traction where we can find it. Without explicitly generative contexts, this makes us vulnerable to over-calibrating to where we already are, or where we sense others to be. On a small island like ours, this may be a particular vulnerability. Our willingness to risk or innovate – our becoming - is often set against the pull of the familiar and the allure of easy belonging. Development that might disrupt or renew the tribe can fail to blossom: we struggle to recognise or to support each other’s realisations and emerging capacities. As Michael Eigen observes in another context, when we fail to convey our most essential experiences, invisible losses occur, and these have consequences: We may fail to connect either with ourselves or with others, and what we are feeling slides away. We may pretend such slippage is unimportant or a normal part of living, and so nullify it or play it down. But somewhere we are left with frustration and perhaps loss, as feelings that carry our most intimate facts and selves remain unborn or undeveloped. (Eigen, 2005: 45) There are two elements of loss I am most concerned with in our context here: the profound integrative and healing value of skilful collective witnessing; and a more fertile encouragement of what Suzanne Cook Greuter terms ‘post-conventional’ growth (1999: 10). Conventional maps of mature adulthood fall far short of what we are capable: growth characterised by transcendent capacity to feel beyond

the boundaries of the self to the interplay of systems may be essential to enable the fundamental paradigm shifts our crises require. This calls out for forms in which we can invite each other forward - not forward to more of the same, but forward differently; in ways that invoke and support qualities we may not yet possess. Collective trauma processes and the ‘Higher We’ My personal experience of immersion in such forms has been deepening since an original training in Collective Trauma with Thomas Hubl in 2017-18. This training involved a combination of meditative spiritual work with trauma-integration-processes in a group of about 150 experienced healers and therapists. For me, the essential learning here lay in absorbing the power of bringing many apparently opposing experiences (e.g. of the Holocaust) into intimate relatedness within a group committed to feeling with whoever was speaking, without any attempt to resolve differences, or come to any common ground. This commitment and capacity to be with each speaker to the best of our ability, and to viscerally feel each individual contribution inform, expand and alter ‘the field’ of the group, was itself transformative and integrative. Since then, I have been drawn both as a participant and host to more intimate forms of work in small group fields, applying some of these same principles, but with a wider, more ontologically ambitious frame that is not specifically trauma focused. This emerging territory of practice – termed ‘We-Space Work’ – is becoming increasingly common in psychologically informed spiritual cultures. Its contours are well articulated by many divergent voices in Cohering the Integral We Space (Gunnlaugson & Brabant (Eds), 2016), and in practice spaces and groups curated by Hubl and Stephen Busby, among many others. In the We-Space – as opposed to the conventional therapeutic group –the process of coemergence is the predominant practice of the group. We are not there primarily to ‘work’ on individual trauma or object relations (though that work happens), but to learn to be and become together in ways that articulate elements of self-experience as aspects of the collective. 

This invites us to relate in a way that is culturally atypical, grounded in an unfolding experience of embodied presence rather than in our personal identity or narrative history. In this sense, we are drawing on the kind of capacities meditation and spiritual practices cultivate but bringing these alive relationally and inviting advances in perception. This enables us to experience ourselves as part of a living process, co-creating an unfolding field of mutual responsiveness and generativity:

“The Higher We is a decisive shift from individual consciousness; it creates a new identity of self-as-process within a larger cosmic process. “ (Steinenger & Debold, 2016: 272).

Such work allows for ongoing exposure to an experience-near recalibration of our identity-sense, allowing us to move outside the normative presumption that we are discrete entities, and into a process of mutually unfolding emergence. The experience of self as process is not one of merged confluence, but of being capable of ‘surrender without regression.’ This requires substantial individuation:

The higher We needs highly individuated autonomous individuals who freely choose to surrender to a process larger than themselves. It is a trans-individual We-space that transcends and includes individuality and responsibility, rather than a pre-individual tribal We based on custom and conformity...(Steininger & Debold, 2016: 278)

For a field to relate at this level, participants need both the capacity and willingness – at least some of the time - to relate within and as the palpable entity of the field itself. We bear in mind that individuals speak to temporarily represent aspects of experience with which they are in contact, thus “each thing said is taken to be one perspective of many, and it is not assumed that the speaker of an idea is attached to it” (Murray, 2016: 217).

I do not want to speak as if such radical shifts in capacity happen automatically, or in a readily manageable way. It is more that We-space work creates fertile conditions to enable an overall direction of (clumsy) movement that is integrative and consciousness-expanding in powerfully inclusive ways.

While our unique identities are the gifts we bring to the intersubjective space, we have to loosen our grip on our separate identity to make room in ourselves for deeper dimensions of who we are. To become a portal for the Higher-We, one works to shift one’s identity so that, before thought, one’s reference point is on the everchanging process that is unfolding within and around us within the larger process of cosmic evolution. It’s a tall order. Such a shift brings one in touch with a depth of non-separation that penetrates and holds all of life… (Steininger & Debold, 2016: 279)

Alongside an experience of being raised up, there can be a creaturely quality to participation in such fields: it can often feel as if we are re-membering an ancient and obvious way of being together, recovering a deeply familiar, now lost, capacity. My own experience of this work is that the more we can lean into the form and allow our voices to represent not only ourselves, the more fluid, spacious and creative the overall group process becomes.

Such fields carry many of the ordinary blessings we will recognise from other group work: fresh experiences of self-and-other; exposure to our particularity, projections and patterns of relation; the basic goodness of safe vulnerability. But because of their post-individualistic frame, they invoke us differently. Most fundamentally, they invite us to recalibrate to ways of being that arise from the perception and experience of being an intrinsic part of everything/everyone, earthing us in an embodied intersubjective experience of being world. 

We-space work is highly flexible and can be tailored to a wide variety of participants and context. Such practice spaces can meet us where we are: offering co-regulation, emotional resonance, the nourishment of slowing and being with, while also inviting us beyond our current moorings, enabling us to learn to function beyond the individual self and thus to integrate the insights of ‘private’ spiritual and psychological work into our relational and cultural lives. In this, they may be understood as a “cultural practice for developing a post-individualistic (i.e. post-personal) culture” (Steininger and Debold, 2016: 278).

Evoking and relating from dormant capacities: Activating the field

I attend this way, therefore it emerges that way

(Scharmer, 2011: 4)

Somewhat by chance, I have had a concentrated and specific exposure to how we are inclined to relate below capacities that are near at hand. For the past six years or so, I have been ‘lecturing’ two days a year with students enrolled in the MSc in Mindfulness at UCD. Originally, I was hired to offer a theoretical critique of Mindfulness. Over the years I have watched the heart of these days morph from theory-based PowerPoint presentations, through to relational inquiries on shadow aspects, and now toward group processes inspired by my immersion in We-Space practice. (The intellectual content has become peripheral; the critique now arises as an experiential invitation beyond the confines of Mindfulness culture). I am interested in bringing the student’s selves into a more spacious and integrative relational field that draws deeply on the insights and gifts of their meditation practice yet invites them beyond conventional ways of experiencing and representing self. This is a matter of encouraging them to lean into the intimacy, rhythms and interiority they know from their meditation practice, and to speak and listen from there.

The conditions are potent: these students are already a group and already engaged in substantial meditation practice. Thus they have 1) a pre-existing bond; and 2) a capacity for presence and embodiment. Yet without knowledge or guidance as to how they might relationally inhabit these qualities, many of the hard-won gains of their practice largely evaporate when they speak. Social conventions and rhythms usually surge to the fore. Though capable of a sensitised interiority, mostly, they abandon or shift interior condition and adapt to what is most socially familiar. This generally involves a loss of subtlety, receptivity and capacity to dwell in open uncertainty. To borrow Keats’ term, they lose ‘negative capability’.

With a little guidance, the capacity to express themselves from deep interior space and to feel one another not just as individuals, but as a group-body is tangible and almost universal: time and again they find themselves relating at a far more emergent, subtle and mutually responsive level that deeply moves them.

My sense is that this is merely an intense version of something that occurs all the time: we function according to habitual, culturally absorbed relational patterns rather than drawing on our emerging capacities. We are shy to allow these to lead or even to surface. It can seem almost rude to do so, as if we are breaking a contract we have signed to remain reliably the same. And we are largely unaware of any betrayal or loss to self or tribe in doing so. Yet as Otto Scharmer suggests, “the way we attend” (2011:

4) creates utterly different trajectories of unfoldment, experiences of self-and-other, self-andworld, self-as-world. It matters immensely to who and how we are able to be together, and, ultimately to who we can become. 

Emma Philbin Bowman practices as a psychotherapist, writer and facilitator. She teaches online, and is immersed in the study and practice of We-Space Work and in writing a book: Befriending Our Future: Presence, Intimacy, Emergence.

References
Akomolafe, B. (2017). These wilds beyond our fences: Letters to my daughter on humanity’s search for home. North Atlantic Books.
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Cook-Greutener, S. (1999). Postautonomous ego development: A study of its nature and measurement.  Dissertation Abstracts International,  60/06B. (Pub. No. AAT 9933122). Full text retrieved from Proquest/UMI database on 11/08/03.

Eigen, M. (2005). Emotional storm. Wesleyan Press. Gunnlaugson, O. (2016). Cohering the integral we space: Engaging collective emergence, wisdom and healing in groups. Ed.

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Martineau, M.M. & Martineau S. (2016). Evolving the we: A journey and inquiry, in Gunnlaugson, O. & Brabant, M. (Eds.). Cohering the integral we space: Engaging collective emergence, wisdom and healing in groups (pp155-174). Integral Publishing House.

Murray, T. (2016). We-space practices: Emerging themes in embodied contemplative dialogue. In Gunnlaugson, O. & Brabant, M., (Eds.) Cohering the integral we space: Engaging collective emergence, wisdom and healing in groups, (pp 199-220). Integral Publishing House.

Perel, E. (2021). How’s work? S2, Episode 6: Breaking news has broken us. Retrieved from https:// howswork.estherperel.com/episodes/s2-episode-6-breaking-news-has-broken-us

Suzuki, Roshi S. (1966). retrieved from http://www.cuke.com/Cucumber%20Project/lectures/quotesredican-collection.html#gsc.tab=0, Sep 14, 2021

Scharmer, O. (2011). Leading from the emerging future (p 4). Retrieved from https://www.ottoscharmer. com/sites/default/files/2011_BMZ_Forum_Scharmer.pdf

Steininger, T. & Debold, E. (2016). Emerge dialogue process: The intersection of the higher we and dialogue practice. In Gunnlaugson, O & Brabant, M. (Eds.) Cohering the integral we space: Engaging collective emergence, wisdom and healing in groups (pp 269-291). Integral Publishing House.

IAHIP 2021 - INSIDE OUT 95 - Autumn 2021