Women Moving the Edge - 4th Iteration - Harvest

This is the harvest of the fourth gathering of women moving the edge, which took place at Angel's Rest in November 2008.

Although there were only five women present – three participants and Judy and Ria – it was the right mix, and the right people.

This harvest was spoken by Ria on the day after the gathering ended.

In our preparation, we spoke about intentional evolution. Intentional evolution was more present in the gathering, probably because Ria named it more. The purpose of moving the edge is to build or deepen these grooves of collective presencing. Meaning ‘presencing’ as Otto Scharmer uses the term, but then with a collective, group or circle. We saw that this collective presencing builds on the model of Scharmer as it starts with an open mind, goes on with opening the hearts and then an opening of the will, or making connections with source, or the soul. Basically, this is a process of getting the open mind, open heart and open will into coherence, or resonance.

That’s an individual story that we all have to do. The collective bit is, from this place of coherence and resonance in ourselves - our human energy, as Beatrice Bruteau named it (she talks about thinking and loving, which relates again to this open mind and open heart) - and it is also sharing from this soul place, or this source place. When we all have this coherence in ourselves and we start sharing from there, we create this circle being, or this field.

What was new for us in this iteration of Women Moving the Edge was that we could move out of the sourcing place into more of an action place. This was already the intention we had set a few months previously: How do we keep ourselves and the collective aligned while going into action? We discovered that we could do that. The difference was, as you know, in Women Moving the Edge, we go to this deep place, this stillness, which has a kind of serious flavour in it, sometimes, this sourcing place. I noticed that now in this there was lightness, there was more sparkling, there were more different kinds of things.

So this relates to what we have been naming already as the Wholeness of Knowing, where we use the drawings, the dancing, the walking in nature, the constellations, all this, a kind of knowing in the experience that is beyond the language of the conversation, that has this non-verbal quality and brings in the subtle knowing in different ways. Judy said “The knowing arises in the experience of the field itself”.

What emerged in this action, you could say, was that Mary brought in a map, or a model, around leadership and we saw that it was a map that is important to make the transition from where we are to what I would call a fully turquoise society, where everyone can live in emergence. 

A big, important piece in this is – to understand how we need to weave together the younger and older generation – the younger and older pioneers. And I came to an understanding of this intergenerational phenomenon in a much deeper way than in the gathering in the summer in Axladitsa. It was named that the older generation would need to bring in the grounding, the compassion, the holding of the field, reflection, stillness – all these ‘wisdom qualities’ – and it would need to weave together with what this young generation does, this flow, this being in the field, just doing things, not being afraid… I would say, just living in the field rather than being stuck in a personality. It became really clear how we have to weave that together. It was Mary, who was in the pioneers of change, who noticed that lots of these young generation – they know hosting and they do it easily, and they set up these new projects, social entrepreneurship, and she saw how they miss something, sometimes, to bring it into the world or let it happen or speak about it. So that was her background, of bringing what she had already seen by herself. So this weaving together of these different energies was something which became really clear as what is needed as a next step in evolution.

One last aspect that is important to speak: what we ask of the people who engage in this collective presencing. Basically we require them to

• be participants in the process,
• to be an observer of what is going on in themselves and in the field, in the circle, and
• to be a leader, to step forward with whatever they see or need or want to bring in

So all these levels are needed from participants, and we as hosts, probably we host by modelling that with a greater mastery in doing it - combining these three or four different levels of awareness: being participant, being observer/witness of your own process, being observer of the whole of the circle and stepping in if need be, if it’s right and appropriate.

So, that’s the whole thing that we could see from here.