All I know for sure is that dreams are the pictures of states wanting to turn into processes. Dreams are maps of the beginning of an otherwise unchartered trip into the unknown.
Arnold Mindell
I am writing this whilst preparing to teach a five day intensive facilitation training in London in February 2025. It’s called Collective Dreaming: Embodying new patterns for facilitation, relationships, communities and the world. It’s also marks the start of an exciting two year training called Facilitating the Future.
See below for links and more information.
The inspiration to create this comes for realising that we are all part of a field that is dreaming us into being. It is part of a series of short pieces exploring the connections between individual experiences and the collective field. Specifically I am exploring the collective dreaming process in illness in this piece.
Six minute read
Long Covid and Ecological Crisis
There are many forms and a number of different mechanisms at play when it comes to Long Covid. For me, learning about the a condition called dysautonomia was very useful. Dysautonomia refers to a group of experiences where some or many of the automatic body processes that keeps us alive and level are dangerously out of balance. This can affect the heart, gut and vascular systems and more. It seems to be this mechanism that is affecting me the most. Leading to paralysing levels of fatigue and low energy.
The exact story and all its detail is still unknown and is being researched. There may be many correspondences to ME/CFS too. It’s possible that the spike protein in covid 19 viruses has somehow damaged nerves in the system. The vagus nerve for example is in fact a system itself, bundling thousands of fibres together.
Photo by Andy Smith
In polyvagal theory it is associated with ‘flight and flight’ and ‘rest and digest’ systems. I won’t go into all the physiology here but although it sometimes feels like a very individual and personal process I also see parallels with the ecological crisis. How ecosystems are in many places collapsing, going out of balance, becoming more unpredictable as feedback processes are disturbed or crash completely.
Perhaps in a similar way to how my internal battery levels plummet as a result of these chaotic feedback processes and how this mis-functioning leads to heart, vascular and energy issues so also, the destructive, extractive and exploitative hubris inflicted on the earth is having such catastrophic impacts. Working on one feels to me like working on the other.
Different dimensions of reality! Metaphors and images are real too.
Processwork is essentially a systemic approach that works not only with ‘consensus reality’, measurable systems and information but it also highlights two further levels of our experience and perception, which together make up our experience of reality. “We have found that these three levels of focus incorporate just about every possible experience of reality” (1). The other dimensions, MIndell called ‘the dreaming’ and ‘essence’.
For example, the connection I have made between my Long Covid experience and the ecological crisis is not a measurable fact (consensus reality level) but it is helpful to me all the same. Images and metaphors are effectively real (2) because we can interact with them in ways that change us measurably. So the fact of making the connection between what seems like a very individual process and one that is happening in the world can help me. It shifts my identity from being a victim of a virus, unable to do what I could do before (and the societal role that puts me in) to being more of a ‘cause’, something that needs protection and is worth fighting for.
This systemic change happens on the dreaming first of all. We can’t measure it a typical mainstream scientific way but as a dream or mythical realisation it has a definite effect. As my identity shifts I am able to write this for example. Something more creative emerges through me , I’m reminded of creative force of life itself.
And what abut the third of these dimensions, the essence? Beyond binaries and polarities, this dimension of reality helps explain unitary or singular experiences, You can learn to access this experience using Innerwork methods developed by Arnold Mindell and others. Although it’s also an older wisdom found in many practices and lineages across the world.
Transforming Brain Fog?
Here is an example where I explored my brain fog shortly before writing this piece. Brain fog is a linked symptom to dysautonomia and Long Covid and I often feel that is comes unbidden. But, this time, rather than trying to push it aside and become more focussed, I make space to experience this thing called ‘brain fog’ even more. To explore it, to enter its world.
‘Fog’ is a good metaphor to describe this experience. I live on the east coast of southern Scotland and we have a phenomenal here called ‘haar’. It is a mist that rolls in off the sea and it can be thick and impenetrable.
Have you ever tried to push a sea fog away? The futility of that image stays with me as I begin the innerwork. I become the thing disturbing me by inviting an even more fog like experience, Entering deeper into the midst of the mist. My perception becomes slow, muted and still, space and time alter and other senses amplify. I enter a sate of deep slow sensing, becoming dispersed and non-local like the mist itself.
I had that experience in my whole mind/body. From here, form this new experience, things feel easier. I imagine a meeting I am to attend next week to help facilitate a team preparing a ‘people’s assembly’ I can see how the misty-self can be a facilitative method of itself. Something really needed. It supports a detachment, that is less sure, less certain, less interested in control but/yet more interested in presence. Something relaxes in me. The brain fog is no longer a problem to be overcome but instead a doorway to a different way of being.
————————————————
Awareness of how all the parts are interacting is key to the Worldwork paradigm and if you are interested in how to utilise the shared wisdom of our dreams, and difficulties to transform projects or help facilitate groups then the upcoming intensive training workshop in February 2025 might be for you. We will explore what is trying to emerge in our lives in our projects as new patterns that are shared with others. This intensive can also be taken as part of a longer two years Facilitation Training: Facilitating Our Future created with CFOR and which is now accepting applications.
Andy Smith (he/him) is a member of Processwork UK faculty. He is also a UKCP registered psychotherapist, supervisor, training supervisor and founding faculty member of the Spanish Processwork training programme. He centres his work on transformational change in communities, organisations and participative democracy, inclusion and diversity. This has resulted in international awards for educational design at both university and grassroots levels, with awards for inclusivity, diversity, changing workplace practice, lifelong learning. A GENE award for global innovation in education was recently given to the Go Deep Project.
———————————-
(1) see Arny and Amy Mindell http://www.aamindell.net/process-work
(2) see Tim Morton’s book Humankind, and their other books for the ideas in OOO – Object Oriented Ontology.
