2020 best-of: highlights of my learning journey

Emergence, Embodiment, Power, and Transformation

This is my last post of the year; my third annual compilation of my favorite learnings, listenings, readings, and watchings from 2020.

I consume a lot of content from some of the best thinkers and practitioners in the world. I do my best to choose who and what I consume with intentionality; as James Clear reminds us, “Choose better inputs. Get better outputs.” According to Pocket, this year I read the equivalent of over 25 books’ worth of articles; according to PlayerFM I listened to about 150 hours of podcasts.

I’m also privileged to enjoy the fruits of dialogue with incredible humans, both inside Building Belonging and in many like-hearted spaces. This annual post is my effort to make retrospective sense of the year, to synthesize and curate the key voices that have been most helpful to me… in the hope that others may also find some value here.

Key learnings

1) Lead from your own deepest yearnings. My last trip pre-COVID was to the Strozzi Embodied Leadership course at a dojo in the hills of Sonoma County, where I formulated this commitment:

I am a commitment to sharing my longings, from a place of invitation and noncoercion.

It’s been a powerful intention to hold this year. The notion I’m carrying into 2021 is to attune ever-more-deeply to what my longings actually are, and to give them as much of my energy and attention as I can. The lesson is this: the more specific I am about my particular need/desire, the more authentic the invitation to co-creation. As Parker Palmer said:

When speaking with the truest most intimate voice, we are speaking with the universal voice.

2) We build power not in opposition, but in shared desire: understanding the use of power as an act of creation, not control. Deb Frieze put this idea well in an online gathering recently, which I transcribed roughly as follows:

Don’t waste time trying to convince people to do something they don’t want to do; work with people who already want to do what you want but don’t know how.

This was also the core insight in one of my favorite essays this year (from Tim Hollo, linked below).

3) We need to reconnect with our own bodies, and learn to listen to that deeper source of pre-cognitive wisdom; there is no path forward that doesn’t invite deeper embodiment. Oh man this one is so hard for those of us (all of us!) raised in a dominant culture that privileges logos over eros, that is predicated on disconnecting us from our bodies. And it’s central to our healing, to our return to ourselves and each other. To reclaiming pleasure and belonging as our birthright. Much of my own writing this year explored this theme; this was a core insight to the final post in my series exploring the question why does patriarchy persist?

4) Transformation at any level causes transformation at every level: there is something uniquely powerful about small groups as the site of practice. I continue to be profoundly influenced by the work of adrienne maree brown, who first introduced me to the concept of the fractal (a microcosm of the whole). I’ve elaborated this in the context of Building Belonging as “I, We, World”: change at any level catalyzes change at every level… though not all change is transformative, nor every intervention equally catalytic. The implications are profound for me personally and have influenced virtually everything I do: transformation is in the patterns of our interactions. That is, we are engaged in it constantly: it’s not something we do “out there” but something we do right here, right now. And small groups are the best place to practice.

My favorite new intellectual crushes (humans who I engaged deeply for the first time this year and have rapidly risen to the top of my “consume everything they put out” list): Tyson Yunkaporta, Cyndi Suarez, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Heather Plett, and Kazu Haga. You’ll find a sampling of their work interspersed below.

Best of the Best

Each of what I highlight here managed to weave multiple elements of this year’s key learnings in some powerful way. If you do nothing else… I recommend these. As with everything on this list, “new” means “new to me,” not necessarily published in 2020.

Book: Peter Block — Community: the Structure of Belonging (Berrett-Koehler: 2008)

I’m sad it took me until this year to find this book (thanks to Jordan Lyon for introducing me to it!) Full of aphoristic wisdom and carefully distilled actionable insight; I think I harvested a quote from almost every page. A taste:

Community is the container within which our longing to be is fulfilled. (pg xviii)

Our work is to shift the narrative by designing ways of coming together that become an example of the future we desire. (pg 3)

The shift we seek needs to be embodied in each invitation we make, each relationship we encounter, and each meeting we attend. (pg 10)

It is your way of doing the practice itself that is the breakthrough, not some future moment in which a better state of being has been achieved. This way there is nothing to wait for, no future or objective measure of accomplishment to be attained. (pg 106)

Article: Eva Schonveld & Justin Kenrick — Politics, Trauma and Empathy: Breakthrough to a Politics of the Heart? (Medium: 2020)

It’s a long read, but on the metric of “number of highlights in my Pocket app,” it was the clear winner (29; the closest runner-up had 18). It also managed to bring together in one place all my core learnings from 2020: around the importance of acknowledging historical trauma, around the transformative potential of embodiment, around learning from nature and ecological practices of emergence, around the potential for transformation at scale starting at the small group… and all in the context of belonging! If you want to condense a year’s learning into one long article… here you go. A taste:

This system is the root cause of our current social and environmental emergencies. It is inherently incapable of getting us out of them. We need to create a different system…

Whenever you hear the refrain “There is no alternative,” you are hearing the desperate cry of those who know that if they admit that there is, and always has been, an alternative of real relationship, then they will have to feel the depth of pain they have had inflicted on them.

Awakening to the need for complete system change, though painful, can bring us home to ourselves, one another and our shared home in a way that nothing else could.

Podcast episode: Community and Belonging with Mia Birdsong (Finding Our Way podcast with Prentis Hemphill: 2020)

This is just a breathtakingly beautiful interview. Prentis is one of our best hosts and sense-makers in this moment, and they (preferred pronoun) bring an incredible embodied skillset that is just an absolute joy to listen to. Here Prentis is in dialogue with Mia Birdsong, a kindred practitioner of belonging, with such depth, nuance, heart, and beauty. The conversation is an example of the world I want to live in: this is how I want to relate. Do yourself a favor, and listen to these exquisite humans navigate the terrain of life together.

Video/Multimedia: For the sheer power of raw emotion, in the summer of protest set off by George Floyd’s murder, nothing beats this impromptu dropping of truth by Kimberly Jones (courtesy of David Jones Media). I can’t watch without getting chills.

Best Articles

In no particular order, a hard-chosen 18 of my favorites from the year.

• Bobbie Harro — The Cycle of Liberation (Routledge; in Readings for Diversity and Social Justice: 2000)

  • Just an exquisite piece of writing/thinking anchored in practice; almost criminal that this piece isn’t more widely available/discussed. I’ve adapted this as a core organizing framework for how I conceptualize Building Belonging. A taste:

  Liberation is the practice of love. It is developing a sense of self that we can love, and learning to love others with their differences from us.

• Robin Wall Kimmerer — The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance (Emergence Magazine: 2020)

  • Runner-up for most Pocket highlights: a profoundly hopeful and insightful essay, offering us ecologically derived lessons for a different way of living: from abundance, not scarcity. From reciprocity, not extraction.

  The currency in a gift economy is relationship, which is expressed as gratitude, as interdependence and the ongoing cycles of reciprocity. A gift economy nurtures the community bonds which enhance mutual well-being; the economic unit is “we” rather than “I,” as all flourishing is mutual.

• Boting Zhang — Healing Means Justice Means Healing (self-published: 2020)

  What sustains humanity in a crisis are the relationships that we nurture… Fractured social bonds played a role in growing this extractive economy, and healed relationships must be on the path to restoring a just economy…

  When we as individuals listen deeply to the parts of ourselves that are most hurt and unheard, we can become more whole.

• Heather Plett — What it Means to ‘Hold Space’ for People (self-published: 2015)

  What does it mean to hold space for someone else? It means that we are willing to walk alongside another person in whatever journey they’re on without judging them, making them feel inadequate, trying to fix them, or trying to impact the outcome. When we hold space for other people, we open our hearts, offer unconditional support, and let go of judgement and control.

• Kazu Haga — Why the Moral Argument for Nonviolence Matters (Waging Nonviolence: 2017)

  In a principled nonviolent approach, the goal is always reconciliation and steps toward beloved community. The goal is always to build and strengthen relationships and to bring people and communities together, not separate them. If we are not able to find ways to bring communities together, we will always have separation, violence and injustice.

• Maria Popova — The Science of How Our Minds and Our Bodies Converge in the Healing of Trauma (Brainpickings: 2016)

  Our capacity to destroy one another is matched by our capacity to heal one another. Restoring relationships and community is central to restoring well-being…

  In order to change, people need to become aware of their sensations and the way that their bodies interact with the world around them. Physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past.

• Michelle Alexander — America, This Is Your Chance (New York Times: 2020)

  If we do not learn the lessons of history and choose a radically different path forward, we may lose our last chance at creating a truly inclusive, egalitarian democracy… We must reimagine justice. The days of pretending that tinkering with our criminal injustice system will “fix it” are over. The system is not broken; it is functioning according to its design…

  Our only hope for our collective liberation is a politics of deep solidarity rooted in love. 

• Nadjeschda Taranczewski — Whose Idea Was it Anyway? The Role of Source in Organizations (Medium: 2015)

  The art of the Source lies in balancing Power (the force of actualization) and Love (the force of connection) in order to transform pure potential into something tangible. 

• The Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective — Preparing for the End of the World as We Know it (Open Democracy: 2020)

  Education would better serve students in particular and all humans in general if our teaching and research methods stop perpetuating the cultural paradigm that brought us to the brink of extinction and start encouraging students to imagine and create alternatives to it.

• Olúfémi O. Táíwò — Being-in-the-Room Privilege: Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference (The Philosopher: 2020)

  • This is the most nuanced and insightful exploration of the fraught terrain of “identity politics” that I found this year. Hugely important for understanding the rise of Trumpism, the successes and failures of the American “Left,” and the way forward from here. Dense, but vital.

  The constructive approach… is demanding. It asks that we swim upstream: to be accountable and responsive to people who aren’t yet in the room, to build the kinds of rooms we could sit in together, rather than merely judiciously navigating the rooms history has built for us.

• Micah Herskind — Some Reflections on Prison Abolition (Medium: 2020)

  “Abolition” is a verb: it is the dual-pronged project of tearing down and building up, the dismantling of life-sucking systems alongside the construction of life-giving ones.

• Mia Mingus — Dreaming Accountability (self-published: 2019)

  What if we understood our accountability, not as some small insignificant act, but as an intentional drop in an ever-growing river of healing, care, and repair that had the potential to nourish, comfort and build back trust on a large scale, carving new paths of hope and faith through mountains of fear and unacknowledged pain for generations?

• Michel Bachmann — Start with Who (Medium: 2018)

  Start by building a nucleus of people that is a microcosm of the desired future from the beginning: the seed that contains the DNA for everything that is yet to come… not so much defined by having a shared vision but rather by embodying the values that the community stands for.

• Lindley Mease & David Ehrlichman — Cultivating Change Amidst Collapse (Stanford Social Innovation Review: 2020)

  Our ability to meet the overwhelming scale of the ecological crisis, along with other systemic crises, will require building movements and decentralized networks that engage large numbers of people and organizations, promote trust over transactions, and embrace an emergent approach to learn their way into the future. 

• Nafeez Ahmed — Coronavirus, Synchronous Failure and the Global Phase-Shift (Medium: 2020)

  The coronavirus outbreak is, ultimately, a lesson in not just the inherent systemic fragilities in industrial civilization, but also the limits of its underlying paradigm… That paradigm and its values have brought us so far in our journey as a species, but they have long outlasted their usefulness and now threaten to undermine our societies, and even our survival as a species.

  Getting through coronavirus will be an exercise not just in building societal resilience, but relearning the values of cooperation, compassion, generosity and kindness, and building systems which institutionalize these values. 

• Esther Perel — Why Eroticism Should Be Part of your Self-Care Plan (self-published: 2020)

  It’s about tuning into our bodies and letting them teach us what we like, what we don’t like, and what we don’t know about ourselves yet.

  Being in our bodies is not about performance or results. It’s about coming home. It's a pleasurable, sensual connection that reminds us that life is worth living even when we are in pain or struggling. 

• Tim Hollo — There’s No Time Left Not To Do Everything (Arena: 2020)

  • One of the central themes of the year for me has been a deep exploration of power: what it is, how it’s wielded, how it shows up, how it is both an obstacle and opportunity for the transformation we so urgently need. This piece was my favorite of the year reframing how we conceive power: a brilliant contribution to movement-building.

  In order to both turn around ecological collapse and generate the collective resilience that our societies need to survive and thrive in the decades ahead, we need to cultivate new democratic norms and institutions, based on the principles of ecology itself. 

• Vaclav Havel — Radical Renewal of Human Responsibility (Humanity.org: 1995)

  It is a challenge to this civilization to start understanding itself as a multi-cultural and a multi-polar civilization, whose meaning lies not in undermining the individuality of different spheres of culture and civilization but in allowing them to be more completely themselves…

  The main task in the coming era is… a radical renewal of our sense of responsibility.

Finally, if I can select from my own writing, the piece I’m most proud of is this reflection on power, synthesizing much of my learning over the last few years. But since I’m not always the best judge of my own writing, the piece you all “liked” the most was this one, on grief and finding light in darkness.

Podcasts

Without question the best new podcast of the year is Prentis Hemphill’s gorgeous Finding Our Way, referenced above. The whole 8-episode season (6 interviews, plus intro/outro) is solid gold.

Honorable mention goes to the latest offering from Scene On Radio (the folks who brought us Seeing White) in their 12-part series on democracy in America, aptly titled The Land That Never Has Been Yet; episode 9 in particular on American Empire should be required listening for all Americans.

Here are twelve individual episodes that I found particularly powerful this year, in no specific order:

• Joanna Macy: We Belong: Hope, Choice, and Our Relationship with the Earth (Insights at the Edge Podcast: 2016)

  Hope is not something you have; it’s something you do.

  Mutual belonging is our birthright.

• Radical Responsibility with Gibrán Rivera (Design for Disruption: 2020)

  The industrial model is about the compartmentalization of life; our work is about the reintegration of life.

  We are the first generation in history to steal from our descendants… because we have forgotten our ancestors.

• Frederic Laloux with an invitation to reclaim integrity and aliveness (Leadermorphosis: 2020)

  There is an aliveness that comes from saying “I don’t know the answer, but this is really important to me, and I’m no longer willing to be out of integrity any longer.”

• Brené on Shame and Accountability (Unlocking Us with Brené Brown: 2020)

  • This was really powerful; helped frame one of my newsletter posts this year diving into this topic.

  Shame is the fear of disconnection.

• The Power Manual with Cyndi Suarez (Gibran Rivera: 2018)

  • Cyndi is another of my favorite practitioners in the art of re-imagining power (distinguishing between dominant power and liberatory power). This interview is gold; a number of the insights have already re-shaped how I move in the world.

  It is the patterns of interaction that is the site of change.

  Power is abundant; micro-interactions are where we either shift the power dynamic or reinforce it.

• Resmaa Menakem — ’Notice the Rage; Notice the Silence’ (OnBeing with Krista Tippett: 2020)

  • Resmaa is one of the sages guiding us through this moment, by encouraging us to listen to the inner wisdom of our bodies; this interview is a great introduction to his work.

  The battlefield is inside our bodies.

  The reason why we want to heal the trauma of racialization is that it thwarts the emergence.

• Tyson Yunkaporta "Find the Other Others" (Team Human: 2020)

  “What we call indigenous ways of being is really just human ways of being.”

• Together Apart: Priya Parker (CTZN: 2020)

  • I listened to a number of interviews with Priya this year, including several on her own podcast by the same name: she’s really on to something. This one gave me the title for a newsletter post and is an idea I keep coming back to:

  Power is decision-making.

• Healing Resistance: A Radically Different Response to Harm with Kazu Haga & Carlos Saavedra (Irresistible: 2020)

  Resolving a conflict is about fixing issues, and reconciling a conflict is about repairing relationships. In nonviolence… you have to fix the issue in order to repair the relationship, but our end goal is the healing of relationships and the strengthening of relationships.

  The work of nonviolence can actually bring about a deeper level of change that violence just can't. And it doesn't mean that violence is a bad thing. It just means that nonviolence has the ability to heal relationships in a way that violence can't. So even if you have to use violence to keep you or your community alive, what are we doing on the other side of that to heal those relationships?

• Patriarchy is perpetuated through parenting, with Carol Gilligan — Part 1 (Your Parenting Mojo: 2020)

  • If it’s not too shameless to plug something I was involved in, this is a collaboration with friend and podcast host Jen Lumanlan, interviewing groundbreaking feminist Carol Gilligan; part of a 2-part series on patriarchy and parenting. I’m really proud of it; it felt really vulnerable to do, and I’m glad I let Jen (Lumanlan) talk me into it.

• Kinship, Community, and Consciousness – a conversation with Richard Powers (Emergence Magazine: 2020)

  Our whole culture is based upon the attempted annihilation of fear… The power of awe is that it brings us close to things that we are uncomfortable with in this culture: namely, fear and humility. Humility is the reminder that there is no separation and that we are interdependent, and therefore that we have no control.

• Love & Rage: The Path of Liberation Through Anger with Lama Rod Owens (Irresistible: 2020)

  • This whole thing is a beautiful listen; I loved in particular his reflection on “acceptance” as a paradoxical precondition for change.

  We have to be in relationship with reality as it is… Everything has to be accepted in order to really achieve liberation.

• Imani Perry on Love as an Ethic (Imagine Otherwise: 2018)

  Tending to our work is tending to ourselves.

  • Quoting Dorothy Allison: Revolutions begin when people look each other in the eyes, say ‘I want,’ and mean it.

Video/Multimedia/TED

• Action in the Anthropocene (The Rules: 2019)

  • Beautiful encapsulation of this current moment of intersecting crises, and the way out. From the folks behind The Rules, a brilliant 10-year experiment in shifting global narratives around the climate and economics.

• “Humanity's Phase Shift,” with Daniel Schmachtenberger (Rebel Wisdom: 2018)

  • In my view, one of the best sense-makers alive today. Incredible breadth and insight; well-worth the listen.

• Digital Social Innovation to Empower Democracy, with Audrey Tang (TEDx: 2019)

  • Audrey is my favorite technologist: a beautiful blend of grand vision, democratic values, humble curiosity, and a relentless will to improve. Listening to her gives me hope for the future.

One of the primary activities in/around Building Belonging this year was a set of convenings I curated called Conversations on Transformation, which we recorded as small Zoom gatherings and livestreamed on our YouTube channel. I liked them all (I’m biased!), but the clear fan favorite was this gorgeous interview on Societal Healing hosted by my friend Bo featuring Rev. angel Kyodo williams, Kazu Haga, Staci Haines, and Tada Hozumi.

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Finally, two of my own ongoing personal learnings around this whole process of reading/listening/engaging/sharing:

1) Beginning to see “learning” as a form of “doing.” It requires practice (we are embodied beings, not cognitive machines), but nonetheless the act of engaging new wisdom and integrating it is itself a form of transformation.

2) The act of curation and synthesis is an act of creation. That is the core aspiration for this newsletter: bringing different ideas into dialogue with each other in pursuit of deeper truths.

Finally, an intention I’m embracing in this year of holding on and letting go: lead from intention, not goal (hat tip to Kapil Dawda and the Wellbeing Movement for that nice framing). I offer these reflections not as fully integrated/embodied truths, but rather ongoing inquiries that continue to guide my own learning and exploration.

Wishing you all a replenishing holiday season; I look forward to building belonging together in 2021.