This month we wrapped up the Two Year Program at Youth Alliance. It felt surreal to have been co-creating and participating in a long process like this. Completion feels like a celebration of resilient practice and showing up.
As a personal experience the journey brought several layers of discomfort and invited me to confront tough questions. It also equipped me with tools to be affectionate observer to my inner drama and slowly let it transform. I see all the following as a process of fuller experience of life - making perception of the world more precise and action more focussed.
Surfacing the shadows
The most important process that started for me was beginning to see all that I put in the shadows. These are suppressed or repressed parts of me that I haven’t paid attention to. They would together create patterns of reactivities, sometimes producing intense desires, sometimes misplaced anxieties, sometimes spirals of lows and sometimes self loathing.
Our facilitators as well as the group offered patience and held space to let them get surfaced and allowed for accepting them as parts of my whole being.
Misplaced Expectations of systems
A significant part of my life last decade has been about cultivating the space at Youth Alliance - a community especially among the members of the team but also with the alumni. Also being part of the larger social change ecosystem. That has meant practices of listening, inclusion, honouring all subjectivities of truth. And I would end up taking the role of a giver. However this practices and role of the giver, didn’t limit to the Youth Alliance and social change ecosystem - I attempted the same in other systems of my life - clan, networks, market interactions etc. When I couldn’t approach the interactions from the space of a giver/contributor, I wouldn’t feel meaningful. Imagine such pressure I had on myself to always show up as a contributor to variety of relationships in my life.
One of the great revelations while exploring existential universes was that I (like all people) exist in multiple systems simultaneously each having their own characteristics. While clan space offers biological belonging and safety, arenas of my life offered space for building my own power and expressing my desires. Arenas existed in my intimate relationships also with peers. I realised I struggled with clockwork systems like tradition, religion that seems to offer a higher truth given by an authority figure. I also found that I played down the network spaces where transactionality and utility driven collaboration is demanded. And I felt the most comfortable in ecology space which are about humanness, & wholesomeness but these also brought fatigue and lack of boundaries.
I also saw how the interplay of my self and the systemic domain produced the experience of life. I am learning to honour all kinds of systems in my life and practice the gifts of the same while being aware of their traps. For instance, I have released my expectation of my family members of be listeners like in Youth Alliance community. I am also learning to embrace networks and engage with give and take of transactions without residues.
Flowing between all rasas
Again living through life and work, I had come to pedestralise certain emotions like compassion (karuna) and love (shringaram) and demonise anger (raudram), disgust (bhibhatsam) and fear (bhayanakam). Based on this hierarchy I would allow myself to feel certain emotions and deny certain others. In the two years, I learnt the rasas as a primary sensation arising in the body and that each rasas has a role and the practice of staying anchored in shantam (peace) and stepping into any rasas as per the context. This opened a world for me - I have felt parts of myself I hadn’t felt.
Watching the garb of invisibility
Over the years I have resonated with the work of fungi working under the soil enabling roots of trees to coordinate with each other - playing their role in a thriving ecosystem. I loved working without visibility and the genre of work I chose also aligned with that. Yet another part of me would wait for the work to mature, for me to perfect my craft and then offer it to the world in broad day light.
While exploring the action propensities (Pandava Archetypes) I recognised the ‘veil of invisibility’ that Sahadeva archetype carries. I would manage the fear of offering half baked knowledge or tools by staying in my shell and limiting my interactions with the larger system. The processes allowed me to see these dynamics and I am learning to grow out of these patterns and learn to share my discoveries with the teams and people around me.
In all, the essential practice is of being a sakhi (inner friend) and a sakshi (witness) to my own self. This affectionate observation is path for greater understanding, connection with the whole and precise action. I am only learning to grow on this path.
-
Two years is a long enough time to work with a group - the beauty of this process was we were introduced to many tools of observing ourselves and perceiving reality around us. And most of them aligned with each other - creating a richer understanding. The tools were diverse inviting different faculties of ourselves. They were exploring rasas (primary emotions), archetypal voices within us, action propensities, social systems around us, energy centers (chakras), layers of reality and creation myths (sankhya), decolonisation tools, bahiranga and antaranga yoga practices. They ofcourse drew from the rich lineage of work on human transformation that has unfolded on this land over millenia and combined with discoveries of psychology about the human being. And grateful to our spectacular facilitators, Naveen and Apoorva and their teacher Raghu, Saras and Usha.
Given the context of collapsing human worlds, it is imperative that we search deep into our cultural wisdom and scientific understandings to prepare ourselves to respond to the meta crisis. We called this evolutionary leadership. To know more, write back to me. We are in the process of consolidating our learnings and preparing for the next cycle of the two year program.
