When the Light Changes

On the clarity that arrives when we step away.

There are things you only notice when you’re somewhere new.

It’s spring in New England, and if you’re here now, you know it. If the cherry blossoms and warm afternoons don’t tell you, every person you encounter will. After months of icy darkness, people are emerging into seventy-degree weather like it’s a miracle. And in a world of climate chaos, or as

Katharine Hayhoe

calls it, “global weirding,“ anything going right, anything unfolding pleasantly, everything that feels good in this world, does feel like a miracle.

I live in Florida, where the seventies stretch across the whole winter like a gentle arm welcoming the affluent snowbirds who fly down for winter, and offering sweet relief from the heat of the rest of the year for those of us who call Florida home. After five months hovering in this temperature range, I take it for granted. The people of Boston, shedding their layers, do not. The same temperature in a different place hits, well, differently.

That’s what new contexts do. They help us see what we’ve stopped noticing. They let us feel things more deeply.

This whole trip, attending the Transformation in the Meta-Crisis: Education for Flourishing conference at Harvard, has been an immersion in that kind of noticing. I’ve been in a bioregion, an institution, and a solo-adventure that are all new for me. For the first time in two and a half years, I woke in a bed by myself.

No small body pressed to mine. No morning creative practice punctuated by a bleary eyed toddler tugging me into the kitchen first thing to make “hheggs“ together for breakfast. These are things I love, and they can be wearying when I’m in the middle of working through something.

This morning, it’s just me.

Just my breath, my body, my mind, my time, my self.

And in that spaciousness, I am feeling a refreshing clarity as I integrate the last few days at this conference.

I can see my life more fully. The layers of it. The work. The mothering. The importance of the work I do, and the radical and unusual and deeply powerful nature of it which I often take for granted.

This conference deeply affirmed the kind of inner-outer work I’ve focused on for my entire academic and professional career is rare. And it is needed.

Keynotes from Rebecca Henderson and Jon Kabat-Zinn underscored that planetary transformation is not possible without inner transformation. And they are continuously making the case that inner work is not about retreating from the world. It is rootwork. It enables us to meet reality more wholly.

I’ve never seen inner work as separate from outer change, and I’ve never been able to conceive of real, omnibeneficial structural change that doesn’t come from leaders who are engaging in deep and continuous inner development.

Maybe I see inner and outer transformation as something like the water and the soil that every plant in the garden needs to grow. Each plant both takes in and Each individual may require a unique combination to thrive, to share their gifts with the world, but there’s no question that both are a necessary recipe for thriving. Maybe that metaphor needs some work, but I’ll sit with it for a while and see what emerges.

I remember having a debate with my dad via email exchanges when I was in college. He argued that the inner work of cultivating love was the single most important thing. I argued that the approaches we take to the inner work must be designed to help us deconstruct the externally imposed structures of our profoundly sick world, so that the fruit that is born from that labor carries the seeds of new ways of doing things within our families, our organizations, and our institutions.

That email exchange helped shape how I think about systems. Causality is always mutual. In ontological design, there’s a principle: what we design designs us back. When we shape external systems, we shape ourselves. That feedback loop matters. When we’re conscious of it, our choices shift. Inner work shapes institutional work. Because institutions are built and maintained by people. And people change from within.

When we integrate new ways of seeing—and I mean really integrate them, into our bodies, our interactions, and our choices—those shifts ripple outward.

Also in college, Barbara Risman’s article Gender as a Social Structure impacted me deeply. She broke down social life into three dimensions: individual, interactional, and institutional. This framing created a simple pulse of three angles from which I could clearly analyze what is often such an overwhelmingly massive hyperobject that it’s hard to see clearly. I carried that clarity into my thesis and allowed it to shape the way I see the world.

Now this framework has been with me for over a decade, and a few years ago Seth and I adapted it to give a meta-framework to the educational frameworks we teach within EMUNAH. Everything we design, we shape with the internal, interpersonal, and intergenerational dimensions in mind. That triad shapes everything we do.

Other patterns of three have followed, almost instinctively:

Our courses balance education, embodiment, and empowerment.

My developmental work moves through remembrance, reconnection, and regeneration.

Last fall we realized that everything we do supports our clients in developing somatic, spiritual, and systemic resilience.

These framings are second nature to me, but so much of what I’ve seen the last few days has reminded me both that simple and clear frameworks and practical tools to help us be the kind of people we need to be to address the metacrisis with clarity, efficacy, and love are sorely needed.

I’m seeing all of this in a new way today, and feeling a renewed passion for the work I do, excitement for the field of potential I’m sensing in many of the new relationships I’ve cultivated over the last few days, and something I didn’t really expect: that having a wildly fulfilling, stimulating, and inspiring experience in the peak institution of academia, would affirm to me that what I need to focus on is less academic, and more entrepreneurial. If I want this work to really reach the people who are ready for it, we need to grow our business without shame or hesitation.

Product-market-fit has not been a thing that has felt energizing or engaging to me at all, but I feel a passion for it rising in me right now that I know is essential to listen to.

We need as many people in this world equipped with the self-knowledge and the practical wisdom and the tools for making conscious choice that are all essential for the navigation of the metacrisis that is shaping the trajectory of all of our lives. As Rebecca Henderson said on stage on Friday, there need to be a thousand different doors, a thousand different access points for this work. It’s never just one. But those of us stewarding access points would do well to help folks know what’s available.

So on that note, I invite you to join us this summer in Sex, G⟡d, & Money. a 12-week journey into the patterns and embodied beliefs you hold around these three essential currents that shape all of our lives, our relationships, and our futures.

We’ve designed this course to be low-intensity which means it’s not a lot of time on zoom or overly dense material, so you have a lot more time to actually spend with yourself, excavating the roots of your own stories, making meaningful connections in your own life, and ultimately choosing how you want to be with these three forces on your own terms. It’s methodical, it’s embodied, and we’re really passionate about it because we’ve seen the difference it’s made in our own lives.

Registration closes on May 7th, and we begin a week from today, Sunday the 11th. I hope you’ll join us.

More reflections to come, but for now I’m grateful, grounded, and heading to the house of my first ever supporter on Substack (shoutout to you Dani!) for brunch before I fly home to my loves.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash