The Six Principles of Remembering
To re-member: to put the parts back together again.
These Six Principles of Remembering and their detailed sub-categories move from pattern to detail. They offer synergistic pathways for remembering that, together, constitute a holistic approach for re-imagining personal transformation in terms of wholeness.
All of these principles are in some way relational — they restore energy, attention and intentionality to our interactions with ourselves, each-other, nature and our shared social fabric. They involve multiple ways of knowing that include the left brain as well as the right and re-ground us in the body, the senses, community and storytelling.
Getting back to wholeness is a complex process. It’s holistic and and non-linear — best not measured quantitatively but qualitatively — in terms of overall shifts in health, wellbeing, peace, purpose, self-trust and meaning richness. The principles work in concert towards a globalized transformation.
The Six Principles are: re-contextualization, re-sacralization, embodiment, immanence, stewardship, and trauma wisdom. These aren’t intended to be exhaustive, but to be deeply evocative. I use these terms to offer broad brushstrokes for a systemic approach to restoring a deeper sense of shared, embodied belonging within our transformational and cultural processes. I offer the sub categories to encourage anyone reading this — whether you’re a facilitator, an experience designer, or someone seeking to better align technology, economy and governance with the wellbeing of living systems — to use them as you work to build generatively life-centric and life-celebrating experiences and cultures.
1. Re-contextualization — skills and practices that restore our bodies, brains, minds and currencies of attention to the contexts we share with other humans, other cultures, other living beings, our places and ecologies, the planet as a whole and our cosmos. Rich context generates rich meaning, sense-making, and the capacity for non-relativistic ethics.
a. Listening — a whole body art of offering attention. The practice of absorptive, active, permeable, multi-sensory attention, both to other people and to nature.
b. Pattern Tracking — learning how to see and work with patterns in time, space, landscape, language and movement.
c. Place making — connecting with and tending to the beauty, diversity, and intelligence of one’s environment(s). Allowing oneself to be consciously shaped by these intimate relationships. Place is holonic (nested in scale). It includes your house, your yard, your neighborhood, your watershed, your bioregion and your planet.
d. Rewilding — knowing and allowing one’s own nature as an animal, organism and being who is an expression of nature.
e. Intergenerational Stewardship — weaving continuity between and evolution of multiple generations and perspectives, nurturing kinship, welcoming and integrating a multiplicity of perspectives.
f. Recognizing Original Peoples and Earth Keepers who carry contextually rich knowledge of places, plants, and natural law.
g. Attunement to the More-than-human — plants, animals, rocks, rivers, oceans, elements, forces of nature, etc.
h. Deep time — connected to multiple, kairotic cycles of time, including the seasons, the maturation arcs of different bodies (human bodies, plant bodies, animal bodies, geological bodies), and the long-arcs of galactic and universe time.
i. Bionoetic — using technology to harmonize, connect and contextualize, not to control, extract or isolate.
2. Re-sacralization — bringing the sacred back into life. Restoring the ability to feel and relate with life as sacred. Sacredness is a function of communion with the unique value of each thing. To re-sacralize implies a shift towards seeing the irreplaceable meaning, worth, and purpose of each being within the web. Re-sacralization responds to and repairs deficits in appreciation for the beauty, majesty, and implicit value of the web of life.
a. AWE — motivated, informed, shaped, grounded in experiences of felt awe, wonder, delight and communion.
b. Recognizing the reality of the soul. Soul is that transcendent intelligence which makes each thing uniquely itself.
c. Recognition of the irreplaceable value of each thing, of all things and of the web of interbeing between all things.
d. Implicitly grounded in interdependence, interconnection and interbeing.
e. Exploring and nurturing intersubjective attunement to the intelligence that flows through all things — not just humans.
f. Ceremony — daily, weekly, seasonal, and cyclic practices to harmonize human consciousness with nature, the cosmos and the soul.
g. Rights of Passage — bridging phases of life consciously in communal context and connecting individual lifetimes with the larger arc of human maturation and stewardship of the continuum of life.
h. Practicing gratitude, praise, celebration, and naming. Human consciousness elevates more-than-human consciousness.
i. Grief as sacred skill: grief, especially when practiced in community, liberates the energy and intelligence of the person or thing that was lost back into the flow of life. “Grief is how love praises what it misses.” ~Martin Prechtel
j. Invoking non-ordinary states to deepen context, communion and meaning — including psychedelics, breathwork, dance, sexuality and trance.
k. Making and sharing beauty and art for beauty’s sake.
l. Storied — welcoming non-linear, embodied, poetic, mythic and metaphorical ways of knowing and transmitting meaning. People love and protect the things they know and understand through story.
m. Owning responsibility and duty as something honorable. The Hawaiian word Kuliana expresses this perfectly. Kuliana refers to the duty one carries, the thing one stewards, the responsibility one is born to embody. A person’s dignity, validity, honor and authority is elevated through the act of knowing and caring for one’s Kuliana.
n. Nourishing clarity — invoking personal vision through direct, subjective contact with self, nature, other and divinity.
3. Embodiment — welcoming what we can know and experience as whole-bodied beings who are deeply alive, mortal and sensually connected to the physical world.
a. Welcoming the body and the right brain into the room as seats of intelligence and to balance to hyper-intellectual and hyper-masculine biases and power narratives.
b. Being present in the body, the senses, and the sensual experiences of moving, connecting, exploring, knowing and sharing.
c. Sexuality — healing sexual trauma and upholding sex and sexual energy as primal, sacred forces.
d. Hands — connected physically to what one can make and create with your own two hands.
e. Voice — liberating the strength, clarity, and embodied tone of your true voice, both in speech and song.
f. Touch — tending psychologically safe physical connection: hugs, squeezes, cuddles, shared movement and non-dual presence in touch
g. Laughter — invoking levity — an embodied gesture far deeper than words.
h. Non-shaming — directly addressing and working to heal shame of sexuality, age, race, ability or body type.
i. Contextual intelligence — allowing for how our bodies know and respond appropriately to space, place, distance, temperature, smell, etc.
j. Body-time — living and knowing at the speed of trust.
4. Immanence –the quality of being within something, i.e., within the world. Immanence, as an ontological category, also refers to the interactions between things: interactions between subjects and objects and between selves and worlds. To further understand how I use the term, I recommend a more detailed study of Forrest Landry’s Immanent Metaphysics. His concept of Foundational Triplication fleshes out immanence, transcendence and omniscience as fundamental categories of existence.
a. Here & now — in and of the world.
b. Relationally oriented — attending to the quality of interactions we choose or choose not to have.
c. Response-able — cultivating the conscious skill of being able to respond, rather than react, and to make effective choices.
d. Process is of equal importance to goal, outcome, or destination.
e. Your internal, subjective reality is only one part of the world you are co-creating. Your deepest work lives at the intersections of personal subjectivity (interiority), external objectivity and relational intersubjectivity. The “proof” is always in the quality of relationships that arise, not just in your internal state or your external (objective) results.
f. Over emphasis on “transcendence” leads to narcissism. Re-integrate all transcendent experiences in omniscience (right logic) and immanence (right interaction with self, family, community and place).
5. Stewardship — acknowledging that humans are organisms nested within the macro-organism of the Earth and have a ecological and spiritual caretaker role to fulfil within this larger ecology.
a. All-Win — moving from zero sum game dynamics where the object is to win the game over others in order to end the game to infinite game dynamics where the object is for everyone to win and to keep the game going forever.
b. Ecological Intelligence — becoming a student of life’s implicate order.
c. Dissolving anthropocentrism and homocentrism — placing humans as equals in the Circle of all Beings with curiosity and care to optimal participation in ecology and consciousness.
d. Reciprocity — giving back for everything that is received. Enact closed loops, repair and restoration in all interactions, both ecological and social.
e. Regenesis — stewarding renewal of depleted ecosystems, cultures and peoples who have been impacted by colonization and extraction.
f. Farming/husbanding/midwifing/hospicing.
g. Replacing ownership with stewardship and sharing economies.
h. Convergence of freedom and responsibility in a relational, “with” definition of freedom.
6. Trauma Wisdom — trauma exists in most human bodies, brains and nervous systems. When we interact with others through the lens of trauma, we frequently cause more trauma. So, any work towards wholeness must directly name and work to heal physical, emotional, sexual, racial, class and ecological trauma. To a lesser or greater degree, there are systemic dimensions to any individual’s trauma. It is a recipe for insanity to try to create a culture of shared belonging while denying the very real structural conditions of racism, sexism and classism that systematically perpetuate the privilege of some at the expense of the many. These conditions are historical, multi-generational and ubiquitous. To deny them is to make the challenges many people face invisible. Healing and justice require visibility, care, reconciliation, repair and sometimes reparations. All of this must be addressed on the way to communities of belonging and a culture of wholeness.
The first six guidelines in this section come directly from the CDC in partnership with the National Cener for Trauma Informed Care. These principles are replicated as best practice across a wide diversity of platforms in education, health, social work and community development. The last three principles are my additions, informed by indigenous tradition and positivist psychology.
a. Safety — physically and emotionally safe and stable environments.
b. Trustworthiness and Transparency — clearly stated agreements, expectations and behavioral norms offered transparently.
c. Peer to Peer Support — supporting non-hierarchical connection between equals.
d. Collaboration & Mutuality — healing is a collaborative and participatory process where all parties partner in the process.
e. Empowerment, Voice & Choice — encouraging those who have experienced trauma to re-establish their voices and power, to tell their stories and to define their boundaries and preferred relationships.
f. Cultural, historical & gender sensitivity — starting with awareness of structural issues and working to eliminate biases and create allyship, tending cultural sensitivity within diverse communities.
g. Ritual — Taking a lesson from indigenous and traditional cultures globally, both personal and communal rituals of grief, forgiveness, nature connection, ancestral connection and revitalization of one’s sense of purpose and vision can play pivotal roles in healing trauma and moving lives forward in ways that are more connected and whole.
h. Presence — the skill of being non-dually present with oneself and others.
i. Integration — patience with the process of fully integrating past experiences and embodying the wholeness of self.
