Excerpt | A Glimpse into the More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible: The Art of Hosting Conversations that Matter

This article is an introduction to a body of practice and a growing global self-organising network that I feel holds a crucial piece of the puzzle of how to start to embody the new story of the civilisation that we deeply intuit is possible and that human hearts and souls long for. The ‘Art of Hosting Conversations that Matter’ is a participatory approach to life where personal practice, dialogue, hosted collective inquiry, and co-creative innovation support the healthy unfolding of human life on Earth in the complex conditions of today’s world. It is especially effective in those situations and contexts where the complexity is such that our habitual resort to ‘predict and control’ just makes things worse, and we barely dare to admit that we don’t know what to do. The pattern of this practice spans the personal and the collective, the local and the global, the inner and the outer, the visible and the invisible. Its domain—the place where it thrives—is the complex reality of living systems, the sweet spot between chaos and order where resides the co-creation of the truly new. Its ethos is a love of wholeness, a delight in the aliveness of diversity, a fierce and radical inclusion of everything that shows up in the world.An Example of Co-Creation in Action

“Imagine you have everything set up for the next five years, and then suddenly it all goes wrong. You end up losing everything. One day you lose your money; on other days you lose your friends. finally, you lose the safety of your home. You have lost it all because your society has gone wrong. And so there is nothing left to do but leave, to go somewhere else. That’s when you discover that wherever you go, people are afraid of you. After a long and difficult journey, I arrived in this country. In the four months I have been here, this is the first place I have found where people have the courage to meet strangers without fear. Thank you.”

The speaker of these words is a young Syrian man called Mike. He is speaking into a large and diverse circle of people in a historical manor house deep in the rural hinterland of Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. He has been brought to this place and this circle by a string of synchronicities, in response to his own heartfelt request—and that is another story.

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