In May 2024 we participated in an event of the Inner Development Goals (IDGs) community in Stockholm called Moral Imagination: From Inner Change to Outer Transformation.
The IDGs community is focused on building the spaces and capacities for inner development – the muscles and skills needed for effectively shifting to a sustainable and life-affirming future. These inner capacities are needed next to actions in the external realm more familiar to us from political and economic life.
Moral imagination helps us access our interconnectedness with all of life- realising our moral place in the world, and using imagination to confront and disrupt deeply held beliefs about what is possible, how change happens, and the role we can play in shifting paradigms. Can we see nature as stakeholder rather than a resource? And what states help us build the necessary skills?
The imaginative muscle helps us go from ‘we can’t’ to ‘how can we not?’. Imagination activist Phoebe Tickell delivered an experiential group process based on pioneer and justice activist Johana Macy’s Work That Reconnects.
In a nutshell, the shifts necessary for transitioning from a model of the industrial growth society, which runs on a narrative of never-ending growth, to a Life-sustaining society, involve:
- the shift from ego to eco
- From more to core
- From I to We
The new activists of the “Great turning” are those able to hold together and work simultaneously with the 3 Stories of our Time, in all their complexity:
- the declining paradigm (business as usual),
- the alarm and despair of the great unravelling we are witnessing, and
- the embodied hope of the new that is emerging.
They are like ‘imaginal cells’ that are already there that are pointing the way. It is indeed important to remember the wisdom of imaginal cells — the spores of new life out of which the butterfly emerges. Remembering that in its transformation, the caterpillar consumes its weight many times, and that imaginal cells are the only ones that make it through. They are tiny in comparison to the bulk of the created waste as the caterpillar enters the chrysalis. And how important it is to indeed see the caterpillar as a developmental stage: what looks like “it’s killing itself, it’s dying” is part of the life cycle and is what it needs to go through.
The Gergina Foundation catalysed a practice circle during the event which focused on the topics of health and healing.
In the sphere of health, observable expressions of ‘business as usual’ include
- Placing overwhelming authority on medical expertise – the insufficient acknowledgement of the inner knowledge, lived experiences and preferences of the person
- The logic of exterminating the bad from the physical body, through the overemphasis on pharmacology- vs establishing a relation to it, and supporting what’s healthy or good
- The urgency and rushing to address the symptom-level- vs attending to the accompanying levels of healing: emotional, mental, spiritual
- The empirical as the prime or only way of knowing – vs the honoring of a broader array of sources of knowledge and healing that are not (yet or ever) knowable with the tools we have today; and not in the last place, the power and value of the unknowable.
In our group, we spoke of the three primary socio-cultural fears that underly these norms and behaviors:
- Catagelophobia – the fear of being ridiculed
- Algophobia – the fear of pain and suffering
- Thanatophobia – the fear of death and impermanence
And we asked, what is a new model of medicine that makes the shift from person-centered to life-centered health and healing? What would a medicine woven in the web of life be like?
We stimulated further this reflection during the practice circle, exploring how each of the 10 mindset shifts (picture below) applies to the sphere of health.
One insight we can highligh here is that a medicine woven in the web of life would transition from a hierarchical thinking and leadership which struggles with the recognition of patient experience and inner guidance to one that includes time and space (slow, rhythm of life, guided solutions) – from a place that protects or makes space for the sacred and animistic. Understanding it’s not even or only doctors or healers who heal – but that life itself has a healing program that we may allow and admit into our lives and practice.
Such medicine and new health paradigm would transition from hierarchical to heterarchical to synarchical relationships – that is, from a highly disbalanced (hierarchical) location of authority to a more balanced, equilibrated view of inner and outer authority, both of which have merit and complementarity – eg shared leadership and partnership in doctor-patient relationships, to synarchical relationships and healing spaces in which each has equal access to their own healing, and which create the conditions for relaxing into trust and accessing this guidance and healing.
Healing circles are one such space and practice. They provide a space for deep listening, speaking from the heart, witness one another, and honoring our diverse stories and life paths, even as we find commonality in many of the emotions. They are a space of cultivating presence and authenticity – and mirror the mythic path captured in J. Macy’s spiral – gratitude, honouring our pain, seeing with new eyes, and going forth.
A medicine and health model that fully honors and allows for such spaces and practices could deserve the name of life-based medicine.
And while this is connected to embracing the fundamental uncertainty of life, one thing we can be certain of is that the future is pluralistic, and the higher potentiality lies in the synthesis of approaches. The Gergina foundation is proud to be an active co-missioner of this vision and practice.
