One of the most valuable things I have learned in my adult life is systems thinking. Basically looking at our life with a huuuggee zoomed out lens. This is actually one of the concepts I teach to philly teens in high school as a part of their mindfulness course. The meditation training I did with The Inner Strength Foundation drew out this concept for me and it has honestly changed my life.
I have lived so much of my life so close up that I wasn’t able to see the bigger picture. Every injustice felt personal and unmanageable. Re-framing how I can view the people inside those unjust situations can help us find that aligned action. So much of the narrative I was used to was “us” and “them.” There is no opportunity to see the collective experience.
For a long time I thought there was no collective experience or commonality. Sometimes it can seem like different people live in totally different universes.
Which can be true on a small, zoomed in, view. However people as an entire population from the time we were mere bacteria to become a cell, to thousands of years of innovation have grown as a whole. This concept is closer to home than it has ever been since the COVID pandemic. We are maybe seeing for the first time that there is a sense of collective experience, and it can demonstrate the areas in our society that desperately need improvement.
If we are one collective, how are we taking care of the whole? How are we growing a better future?
This has been on my mind a lot lately. As a practitioner of Ayurveda I am truly excited and curious to see how our world embraces change - in the ways we think of medicine, in new (non capitalist) societies, in community care…
I am excited to dream with you a world that thrives!
One of my biggest inspirational systems thinkers is Lynn Margulis, a biologist. She discovered (in crude terms) how independent bacteria evolved to work together to create the eukaryotic cells by using all their best functionings to work cooperatively. However, this only happened when they were at the borderland of extinction.
Hard times can push us into futures we could have never dreamed of.
I am dreaming today of a future where people embrace their incredible capacity to heal, find unison with nature, and learn about the medicines right at their fingertips.
I hope you can dream with me to move our collective world into an incredible new possibility.
