Introducing the Embodied Permaculture Project

A ground-breaking 2-year research project exploring the relationship between permaculture, transpersonal psychology, embodiment and presence.

This January 2023 we received a grant from the Alef Trust’s Conscious Community Initiative to run a ground-breaking 2-year research project exploring the relationship between permaculture, transpersonal psychology, embodiment and presence. It’s an opportunity to take the work we have been engaged in personally over the years and with one-to-one clients and small groups for the past 2 years to a larger cohort and then hopefully, after that, opening it up to the wider world of changemakers.

As Charles Eisenstein said in a recent talk he gave, “we have reached an inflection point”. It’s clear that a wholly different order of response is needed to steer humanity through our tumultuous times and the next few years are crucial in that. We don’t just need to act differently, we need to Be differently.

This project seeks to support those working at the front lines of regeneration to deepen their work beyond the strategic realms of the mind and back into fuller relationship with the living world. To practice a more embodied way of being and showing up in the world and relating to others. We will be working with a cohort of 20 people comprising British Permaculture Association staff and diploma apprentices through a programme of teaching, group work and one-to-one coaching starting in June 2023.

We want to use this Substack as an open sharing and reflecting opportunity as we travel through the next 2 years of discovery. We’ll share the philosophy and practice, the successes and struggles in the hopes that this will be both of use to others interested in a similar holistic approach to changemaking, but also to start an ongoing conversation so that we might continue to learn from others as we all tread this path together.

So this is an invitation to you to reflect and share in the comments and to make this a rich space of learning for all of us!

As an introduction, here is an overview of the project including its aims, practices and orientation. Please let us know what comes to you as you read and reflect.

Embodied Permaculture: The transformative potential of being-centric ecological systems design.

Project Outline

Permaculture practitioners are changemakers at the cutting edge of two monumental challenges; facing the magnitude of what is happening now in the world in terms of degradation of ecosystems, climate instability and the breakdown in social cohesion, and also the magnitude of what needs to emerge in terms of radical regenerative design solutions to address the problems we face.

We often work at a frantic pace to bring about the change we know to be necessary, all the while bearing the psycho-emotional burden of the scale of the task in front of us. Consequently, so many changemakers end up overwhelmed, burnt-out and suffering from stress-related illness. This a problem within the permaculture community and the wider world of activism that seriously hinders long-term changemaking. 

We have all been raised, educated and cultured within the current industrial-growth worldview that teaches us that we are separate from each other and separate from nature. Even if we have learned intellectually that this is not the reality of Nature, we can often still operate unconsciously from this persistent and all-pervasive programming and conditioning. This means that if we attempt to solve the problems we face from the same “thinking” and the same states of consciousness that caused them in the first place (even if unconsciously), it is inevitable that our ability to create radically emergent, transformational designs will be limited.

We propose that to face the challenges of our work collectively as changemakers we need to learn to read, navigate and inhabit both our inner and outer landscapes with equal skill. By opening our bandwidth of intelligence to include not just the brain in our head, but our whole body intelligence, we begin to “listen to the world through the body”, as Philip Shepherd, a world-renowned embodiment expert describes. This is in stark contrast to our normal mode of “conceptualising and dissecting the world from the strategic mind”. Through a simple, useful practice of embodied presencing we go beyond the rational, linear, problem-solving mind and make ourselves open and available for the energy and intelligence of Life to run through us and for new emergent ideas and ways of being to be born. We believe this is a radically different approach to our work and our day-to-day lives that much better equips us for the chaotic times we live in. 

Earthbound, The Alef Trust and the Permaculture Association are partnering to deliver an 18-month practical research project, Embodied Permaculture: The transformative potential of being-centric ecological systems design. The project will support a cohort of permaculture designers and leaders to not only begin to transcend these challenges personally but start co-creating a practice and a culture in their work and relationships that enables them to thrive, create, change and lead in ways that have the potential to be truly transformational for themselves, their organisations, communities and eventually society at large.

The project has been generously funded by The Alef Trust as part of the Conscious Communities Initiative that supports research on holistic collective changemaking in communities throughout the world. The research programme aims to understand the barriers and opportunities for collective changemaking and asks specifically how the working methodology, working culture, designer and the design are affected by opening the bandwidth of our intelligence and operating not just with nature but as nature. The project will be delivered by Dan and Johanna McTiernan of www.earthbound.fi. 

This is an exciting opportunity to engage in a comprehensive and groundbreaking programme of transformation and to contribute to a research project that seeks to bridge the world of permaculture, transpersonal psychology, embodiment and non-dual spiritual practice into an integrative and highly beneficial approach to ecological systems design and leadership. 

Participants will be taught and coached throughout by an internationally certified transpersonal psychology coach and professional meditation and breathwork instructors who also have long-term experience as permaculture practitioners.

Through a blended programme of teaching and coached support (both group and one-to-one) we will learn the perspectives, practise the skills and normalise a culture of showing up in our lives, our work and our relationships from Embodied Presence. 

Through regular group and one-to-one sessions, we will explore:

Grounding in embodied presence: Landing back in our bodies and back on the Earth.

We will learn how to regulate our autonomic nervous system through breathwork, embodied meditation and other grounding practices to allow us to access natural states of being that feel safe, resourced and connected. This is essential for our recovery, our health and our ongoing wellbeing as changemakers.

Tuning in through the body to the wisdom of the World.

We will discover a relaxed, effortless approach to embodied meditation that allows us to tap into a much deeper well of “knowing” and wisdom than just our problem-solving mind. We will learn to “listen” with our whole system both internally and externally and to begin to design from that much fuller bandwidth of intelligence.

Holding Space and co-regulation: Awakened relating.

We will practise a form of relational “inquiry” that allows us to be with and to release held emotional and psychological energy in the body and to facilitate that for others. Showing up for others in Presence is one of the greatest gifts we can give another person and our aim is for this to become normalised within our daily lives and work culture.

Non-duality: the felt sense of interbeing.

Our group and personal practice will all be oriented towards ever greater experiences of connectivity, alignment and flow with the whole of Life. So we begin to feel that “we are nature” on a regular basis rather than just knowing it intellectually. This will be a shift from a cogni-centric approach to a life-centric approach. 

Creative Emergence:

As we begin to feel grounded, attuned and open we will then learn to design and lead from this greater sense of Self. Our hope is that this process will lead to novel, exciting and transformative systems designs that are embedded in the principles and practices of Embodied Permaculture.

The ultimate aim of this project is to practise and normalise a habit and felt experience of Embodied Presence in our everyday lives and in our permaculture practice. The purpose of this is not just to help us “cope” with the difficulties of modern industrial culture but to bring about a wholesale recalibration of what it feels like to be alive. 

When we discover our deeper Self, when we feel embedded in the very centre of Life, we discover a way to be in the world that doesn’t rely on force and willpower and limited personal energy. We discover that we can trust Life enough to begin to run on nature's “engine”. 

This embodied approach to life allows us to tap into a resource base that is beyond the personal self. It connects us to each other and to the whole of Life in ways that open up the true potential for healing, growth, creativity, and emergence and most importantly, opens up pathways to deep lasting transformation that our culture and the planet so desperately need.