Visionary Practices for Regenerative Leaders, Ann Filemyr, PhD
At Southwestern College in Santa Fe, we co-designed a unique transdisciplinary doctoral program, the PhD in Visionary Practice & Regenerative Leadership, and launched it in 2022. The purpose is to prepare regenerative visionary leaders who are inspired to articulate the emergent story of cooperation, compassion, connection, and capacity. We bring together faculty and doctoral students to explore the ways humankind is changing the worn-out paradigm of separation, domination, competition, and control. This old story has led to a fundamental failure to sustain life on earth. As we shift into the emergent story, we need leaders and practitioners who are prepared to navigate complexities and participate in change processes both within themselves and in the world.
Southwestern doctoral students expand their self-awareness, and by doing so they enlarge their capacity to serve as change-makers grounding their visions into service to re-enliven our world.
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Through engaging in visionary practices, we grow closer to understanding the interlinkage between self and world. We lean into new inquiries. For example, if we seek to change the world, what must we deconstruct in ourselves? Through courageous imaginal acts, doctoral students begin to break out of conventional thinking and ways of being. To accomplish the level of regeneration required, we must bring into being what has been lost or does not yet exist within ourselves. Doctoral students expand their self-awareness, and by doing so they enlarge their capacity to serve as change-makers grounding their visions into service to re-enliven our world.
The PhD in Visionary Practice and Regenerative Leadership is a transdisciplinary degree. Students may enter this program from any area of study or profession. We seek to bring together and create dialogue and engagement between Education, Healthcare, Science, Business, and the Arts. The purpose is to enrich and enhance the student’s ability to bring forth their unique gift. Regenerative leadership is developed through visionary practices that bring greater self-knowledge and self-awareness.
adrienne maree brown captures the spirit of our intentions when she writes in Emergent Strategy:
“I would call our work to change the world science fictional behavior – being concerned with the way our actions and beliefs, now, today, will shape the future, tomorrow, the next generations. We are excited by what we can create, we believe it is possible to create the next world. We believe.” (2017, p. 16)
As part of the curriculum, we invite doctoral students to explore and experience visionary practices. We define this broadly and root it in an understanding that across cultures and throughout history, human beings have engaged in strategies and practices to change their perspective and gain an eagle-eye view beyond the mundane level of daily demands so they may experience a heightened sense of purpose and possibility. We need this level of engagement with our own potential to create the kinds of change needed now.
The benefits of moving out of ordinary reality into expanded consciousness and ways of being is well-documented. Research demonstrates that mindfulness and meditation promote metacognitive awareness, decreases rumination, and enhances attentional capacities through gains in memory. These cognitive gains, in turn, contribute to more effective emotion-regulation strategies. Visionary practices, like an arrow in a bow, aim at increasing our capacity for resilience and balance. There are many pathways to help us develop these skills.
Ecotherapy research indicates quiet, slow, contemplative time outdoors in nature lowers cortisol levels, increases cognition, alleviates depression and anxiety, and protects and promotes the immune system. The Japanese research on shinrin-roku, or forest bathing, has inspired a global movement of protecting forests to benefit human health. There is also a body of research on the benefits to the brain of trance states arrived at through dancing, drumming, holotropic breathwork, and/or engaging in other sustained rhythmic patterns.
Old and new practices such as distance reiki, ceremonial dance, and the laying on of hands are based on the understanding that through intentional energetic activities in which participants employ one or more visionary practices, we can and do affect the well-being of others (including other-than-human beings), even at a distance. Medical researcher Larry Dossey (with Laszlo and Houston, 2016) has documented the healing power of prayer on those recovering from surgery. Masaru Emoto (2011) documented changing the crystalline structure of polluted water through directed prayer and meditation.
In addition to intrapersonal and interpersonal benefits, our world is literally shaped by the impact of visionaries on our ideas of reality. Certainly, the insights gleaned from Albert Einstein about energy and matter gave rise to new theories about the nature of existence. For example, the observer effect tells us that the observer impacts what is observed. The theory of the morphogenetic field offers insight that we are dynamic processes of engagement and entanglement with everything and everyone else. Traditional Knowledge Systems (TKS) carried by Indigenous cultures enact these theories as beliefs expressed in story, ceremony, ritual, and song. As Sherri Mitchell expresses in her book, Sacred Instructions: Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit-Based Change, Penawahpskek core cultural values “teach us…how to breathe into the dreams that life reveals to us” (2018, p. 163).
Despite evidence to the contrary, the dominant culture still insists on individuality, independence, competition, and concepts that emphasize separation, domination, and false hierarchies. These ideas form the building block for capitalist accumulation of privatized wealth. However, the reality of our interdependence and interrelationship within multiple interwoven life systems is available to us. We may best access this reality in awakened or enlightened states of being when we transcend ordinary knowing into expanded understanding. Visionary practices can serve to open us to these perspectives and help us experience the truth that we are each part of a greater whole.
“The perception of radical interconnectedness,” writes Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone in Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in with Unexpected Resilience and Creative Power, “found in both Buddhism and systems thinking supports a reframing of our distress about world conditions. It helps us recognize how healthy a reaction this distress is and how necessary it is for our survival” (2022, p. 64). Visionary practitioners and regenerative leaders live with one foot solidly on the ground of the reality we are now facing, but the other foot is lifted high into the air mid-step, mid-dance, as we imagine the way it could be, might be, should be, if we are to create a vital future for humanity and all living systems that create and sustain Life on Earth. And when the lifted foot finds its rightful spot on the Earth, it is taking one step closer to actualizing the dream, a glimmering of what is possible.
There is not a limit or finite list of visionary practices. Visionary practices include but are not limited to: extended periods of silence, prayer, meditation, contemplation, solitary time in nature, fasting, pilgrimage, gardening, gathering, gratitude, journaling, artmaking, dreaming, shamanic journeying, consulting an inner council, consulting an oracular system (I Ching; runes, tarot, astrology, throwing the bones, etc.); dancing, singing, chanting, drumming, rattling, swaying, walking, as well as various ceremonial and ritual practices that support and deepen our ability to contact and connect with the sacred in some way.
We believe in the power each one carries within to contribute to the collective. We believe the seeds of change are carried in consciousness and can be expressed with the support and recognition of others. We believe our doctoral program can provide vital transformational learning for visionary practitioners and regenerative leaders. We invite you to join us.
References
brown, a. m. (2017). Emergent strategy: Shaping change, changing worlds. AK Press.
Emoto, M. (2011). The miracle of water. Atria Books.
Laszlo, E., Houston, J., & Dossey, L. (2016). What is consciousness? Select Books.
Macy, J., & Johnstone, C. (2022). Active hope: How to face the mess we’re in with unexpected resilience and creative power (Rev. ed.). New World Library.