Regenerative Media Project - The Harvest: Beyond the Map
I am launching a project to harvest the lived experience from the original contributors who helped construct the map for The Regenerative Life. It is time to move beyond the theory and provide a 'proof of life' for those who are entering the work in the dirt of their local ecologies.
An Invitation to the Original Contributors
Hello, fellow contributor to Carol Sanford's work.
A decade ago, Carol started writing The Regenerative Life and you shared your journal entries, your challenges, and your lived experience to help her articulate the value-adding roles she was exploring. You helped construct a map.
I have been using that exact map to resource Regenerative Practitioners, Change Agents, and Working Professionals who are cold or, in some cases, freezing to death in the grip of BAU and the mechanical trance of the extractive machine. I use the roles you helped define as the foundational architecture for my Introductory Campfires and Practice Intensives.
The Campfire Technology
In doing this work, I realised the modern professional workshop and training programmes have their thinking and design sourced in the expert-other epistemology, which is completely inadequate for this work. So, I have shifted my practice away from traditional workshop facilitation and returned to the oldest psycho-technology known to human beings: the campfire.
Around these online and in-person campfires, we gather to discover how to play these roles by burning the firewood collected from the messiness and friction we encounter in life and work. These campfires operate under four developmental principles:
- Our mess is our curriculum: The mess, struggle, and friction we encounter in life gives us plenty to work on. It provides the fuel for our evolution.
- Witness the struggle: There is no saving, advising, suggesting, or rescuing. To evolve capacity, the human ‘butterfly’ needs to build the necessary muscle to fly.
- Flow over force: We do not force anyone to do anything or be anyone. If someone chooses just to listen at a campfire and watch the sparks fly up into the night sky, that is their choice.
- Maximise hazard: There is a risk in burning, as it changes what you see and believe about yourself and the world around you. The beauty of doing this in a group is that others who also burn their mess both inspire and reveal new discoveries for everyone who is willing to witness.
A Signal Fire for the Field
The map is vital, but the map is not the territory. I am looking at the current landscape—where Regenerative Practitioners, Change Agents, and Working Professionals are overwhelmed by the reality of a global systemic collapse and the effects this is having on the places where we live and work—and I see a profound need for proof of life.
I am wondering what has happened to the seeds you planted all those years ago.
My intent with this new project is to capture the longitudinal reality of this work. I want to build a living archive that moves beyond the theory and documents your actualised potential over the last decade. By doing so, we can generate Regenerative Media that acts as a signal fire for the next wave of practitioners entering the work of regenerating life in their local ecologies and make hope possible.
- What new potential has been realised in your local ecology over the last several years?
- How has the physical reality of playing a value-adding role evolved beyond the pages of this book and what you originally contributed?
A Cuppa with Ākāśadāka
I am not here to mine you for content, and this is not a transactional interview. I am simply reaching out to come into relationship with fellow practitioners who have been engaging, perhaps silently, in the work in their own way for a long time.
The invitation is for you to pause, look into the mirror of your own evolution, and have a cuppa with me. There is no syllabus. At the end of our chat, if there is resonance, I will simply ask how you might like to contribute to this harvest.
thanks for your time and attention,
Ākāśadāka