The times we live in are so tumultuous and overwhelming that most of us are in various states of grief, shock, trauma, numbness, distraction or avoidance, much of the time.

We cannot choose what is happening all around us but we can choose who we are in relation to whatever is happening. We can choose to stand firm in our authentic truth; to listen deeply to others, to practice gratitude and compassion and to align with our true values.  We can choose to stay open to life’s energetic flow as a daily practice so that we are free to make our best creative contribution. This is simple but not easy. Being part of an intentional group can make it so much easier.

Deep Discovery Conversations offer a way to join together in intentional co-creative community, to explore our experience from a state of presence and connect with our individual and collective wisdom. They provide the perfect environment in which to focus our creativity, expand consciousness, develop more inclusive perspectives, and to practice many skills essential for making the shift to a life affirming collaborative culture a reality in our daily lives. As we open to creative inspiration, and connect with our own wisdom we may also contact collective and universal inspiration. This expansion of consciousness supports us to be part of the solution to our many collective crises.

Do you feel called to the co-creative adventure of telling a new story for humanity and building a new culture based on the knowledge of the essential interconnectedness of all life?

If so, the adventure of Deep Discovery Conversations may be your next step.

Join me in a group of no more than 12 people for a pilot course to

Practice Deep Discovery Conversations

Awaken Community Wisdom for a New Era

and

 Transform Grief for Our World  

To express your interest please contact me in the box below.

Are you feeling the call to co-create a new life affirming culture?

As many of the structures that have held our daily lives are failing there is an evolutionary necessity to foster the emergence of a new story for humanity. We need a new culture now. A culture that expresses and allows the best of our humanity – our creativity, our wisdom, our compassion, our love, our courage. None of us knows how to create this and it can only emerge among and between us. The big, exciting and daunting challenge of co-creating a new culture stretches and challenges us in every way.

When we meet in groups with the intention to align with the good of the whole, and with the abundant, generous energy of life itself, we occupy a bigger energy and spaciousness.  We connect with new inspiration and possibility. Together we become a  healthier, more open, fluent organism which inspires, uplifts, challenges and awakens consciousness, sending ripples out into all our relationships.

Our ability to learn together, to share our gifts and to consciously co-create, is essential for the optimum unfolding of humanity’s next stage of evolution. A new culture grows cell by cell. Forums in which everyone is encouraged to speak from authentic truth, and to explore the meaning of our experience of living together at this crucial turning point in our planetary existence, can transform despair  into excitement and frustration into inspired action. Together we can enlighten our way forward.

The Practice of Deep Discovery Conversations

Deep Discovery Conversations were named by my co-creative partner, Woods Elliott, back in the 1990’s. Later, we developed the art of deep discovery together and used it to explore whatever was emerging at the growing edge of our conscious awareness, including insights into the nature of consciousness itself; the inner and relationship conflicts blocking our creative process; our responses to global events or new cultural ideas; and creative possibilities in our transformational work of co-creating a whole new world.

When Woods died in 2015 I wrote, Deep Discovery Conversations, Awakening Community Wisdom for a New Era, and this will form the basis for the group experience I am offering now. Essential attitudes and skills enable deep, exploratory, creatively inspired conversations and provide the foundation for building a new whole-person, whole-system culture.

Deep Discovery Conversations are one of many similar practices emerging over the last two or three decades invented by thought leaders such as David Bohm (dialogue); Peter Senge, Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski and Betty Sue Flowers (presencing and Theory U); Arnold Mindell (deep democracy); Craig Hamilton (the “we space”); Tom Atlee (co-intelligence); John Heron (co-operative inquiry), David Cooperrider and Diana Whitney (appreciative inquiry), Juanita Brown and David Isaacs (World café), Sandra Janoff and Marvin Weisbord (Future Search) Patricia Albere (mutual awakening), Jeff Careira, (collective emergence) Thomas Hubl (transparent communication), and many more.

All of these slightly different methods of inquiry and dialogue have grown from the dawning awareness that:

• The challenges we face cannot be solved by individuals or even by select groups coming up with answers for the rest of us – this is the old paradigm approach of top-down, “power-over” which has produced the current devastation of the natural world and maintained social injustices within civic life.

• As a conscious, choice-making species, we need intentional spaces where we can access our deepest collective wisdom and co-creative possibilities.

• A practice which aligns individual desires, values and actions with the well-being of the greater wholes of which we are part, is essential for the next stage of our species evolution and for our survival on planet Earth.

• In the emerging new paradigm culture, individual expertise and skill have their parts to play and are applied within a shared understanding that each of us is potentially part of our collective problems and of the solutions we so urgently need.

• We all carry within us sparks of creative genius which can transcend and transform our problems.

• We can find ways to engage in discovering – together – some of the solutions that are needed.

• This is not so much about creating practical solutions – although those will come – but about realising and establishing ourselves in the new whole person-whole system consciousness so that whatever emerges through us will be aligned with the higher values of inspiration, the flow of creative life-force, wisdom and compassion.

Empowered, creative action is the intended end result of our coming together for this adventure. It begins with the desire to express and share authentic truth and to do justice to the emerging creative process, with all its subtle insights and not yet fully formed intuitive hunches. The practice invites us to open to, receive, and flow with, sources of inspiration that are much bigger than the individual mind: collective intelligence, earth intelligence, universal intelligence, the evolutionary impulse. And then, it is our challenge to find and invent creative ways to ground this expanded intelligence into culture, in harmony with nature; to take inspired actions on behalf of the greater whole.

POTENTIAL USES FOR DEEP DISCOVERY CONVERSATIONS

Deep Discovery Conversations are a whole-person/whole-system approach to relationship, group, organisational and community empowerment. They  offer opportunities to engage with collaborative change processes, so that we may:

• Discover a common language to describe and express our experience of living on planet Earth at this time; to move beyond our current beliefs and assumptions about life and find higher, more inclusive, shared meanings for our existence;

• Express the wisdom within and between us and bring into being our highest visions of what is possible in our individual lives, our relationships, families, businesses, communities, country and global family;

• Encourage and support authentic forms of co-creative leadership and Earth stewardship in all contexts and at all levels of responsibility;

• Unlock our collective transformational capabilities and help midwife the birth of a new culture of peace on Earth.

I have practiced Deep Discovery in dyads and triads, in small groups of 6-12 people and I have participated in a similar method in a group as big as 40, in an inquiry that took place daily over 8 days – a process I found deeply thrilling.

These conversations can be used for:

CONSCIOUSNESS PRACTICE – exploring our experience of inner states; expanding into higher, more inclusive, more visionary states of consciousness; finding a common language and shared meanings for our understanding of consciousness, how it is evolving through us, and how we can bring it into form.

EXPLORING CREATIVE IDEAS AND PROJECTS – holding a free space of inquiry for one another in which each participant can suspend limitations and access their most creative, visionary ideas.

FINDING COMMON MEANINGS AND SOLUTIONS FOR SHARED DILEMMAS AND PROBLEMS WITHIN RELATIONSHIPS, ORGANISATIONS, COMMUNITIES AND BUSINESSES  – allowing differences and diversity to emerge in an open, non-judgmental environment; building community with shared values and intentions; arriving at a natural synthesis of ideas and organic solutions to shared problems.

BUILDING INCLUSIVE COMMUNITIES IN WHICH DIFFERENCES CAN BE HEARD AND ACCEPTED, DIVERSITY CELEBRATED AND THINKING ADVANCED – recognising the power of deep conversations to draw out our hunger for community and the intrinsic awareness of unity that dwells within the heart.

“…it is proposed that a form of free dialogue may well be one of the most effective ways of investigating the crisis which faces society, and indeed the whole of human nature and consciousness today. Moreover, it may turn out that such a form of free exchange of ideas and information is of fundamental relevance for transforming culture and freeing it of destructive misinformation, so that creativity can be liberated.”
        – David Bohm

Practicing Deep Discovery Conversations

Awakening Community Wisdom for a New Era

and Transforming Grief for Our World

is part of the Sitting with Death and Choosing Life Programme.

I am particularly interested in attracting people to this pilot course who may be interested in going on to become facilitators of Deep Discovery Conversations and joining the Choosing Life Team, but that is not an essential pre-requirement.

I propose running this as an intensive experience over 3 months. This would mean 3  sessions over 3 days each month plus one further session half way through each month.  In this first course we will meet online but in future, circumstances permitting, we will meet face to face in physical reality. The 3 day blocks will be used to practice and explore the skills of Deep Discovery while the single sessions will focus on conversations focused on themes exploring grief for our world and how we can move beyond grief into fully engaged creative connection and action.  Once a group is forming I will invite you to a meeting to answer any of your questions and to establish if this is a good fit for you.

Dates:  February 11th, 4-6.30; February 12th and 13th 10am-12.30, February 26th 10am-1

March 11th, 4-6.30; March 12 and 13, 10am – 12.30, March 19 10am – 1

April 8 4pm-6.30; April 9, 10am – 1

The 3 day intensives will quickly build the connection, momentum and expanded field of consciousness necessary for the work of awakening community wisdom and becoming a co-creative community aligned with a new story for humanity. The skills practice will be supported by The Deep Discovery Conversations e-book. The conversations exploring grief for our world will be supported by stimulus materials and recorded interviews with practitioners brought together in my ebook, The Sitting with Death and Choosing Life Conversations, Series Four, Grieving for Our World.

Commitment. In a group such as this your presence makes all the difference. I am looking for people who feel a resonance and call to this inquiry and who intend to show up for every session (unexpected urgent circumstances  excepted.) In addition to the group sessions there will be some reading/listening and personal contemplation and inquiry between sessions.

Financial contribution:

The fee for this pilot is on a scale /£300/£200/£100

We don’t want anyone to be excluded from participating in this programme due to financial constraints. What is affordable for some can be a stretch for others and we encourage you to feel into what is possible for you. Currently the programme is supported by a grant from the Emergence Foundation and this enables us to offer some bursaries.  Please let me know if you need this support.

Please register your interest now in the contact box below.