I’ve been pretty quiet with my writing lately. However, it doesn’t mean that my thoughts are not working overtime. The downside of having a hypersensitive and systemizer brain is that I feel a lot, I think a lot.
If you are to peek inside my head you will see these scenes of how my different parts are expressing themselves:
The Uncertain and insecure: but how do I do this recalibration in the first place?
The Learner: How do I sit with the knowledge and the experiences of two life-threatening events and make meaning out of it? Do I even have to make meaning out of it?
The Griever: Things were really shitty the past two months. It was scary and it threw you off the board. It’s but natural to grieve this period.
The Creator (aka Reformed Performer): Your energy levels are so down, how can we make things now?
The Chastiser: You should be able to know what to do by now. This is not your first experience of grief or difficulty.
The Activist: I agree with moving forward. There is so much work to do to make this world a better place. Every little bit counts.
The Senser: hmmmm…I notice some aches and pains here. Is this something to pay attention to?
The Compassionate One: These are all narratives that are present in where you are at right now. It doesn’t make it less or more, it just is.
The Healer: You are processing a lot and your body, heart, and soul need this space to heal.
So many voices and parts want acknowledgment and space. On one end, I am so grateful for all these voices since they lead me to my needs.
On the other end, I find myself contemplative.
How do I even begin to weave in all these voices?
How can I do this?
And by this, I meant sitting with the experiences, processing and making meaning out of it, balancing my need for contribution and desire to promote systemic change, while knowing that it is indeed a process to go through - not something to rush.
This is where the Ecocycle Mapping can be used.
ECOCYCLE MAPPING
ECOCYCLE MAPPING involves mapping out actions across four phases of development in the planning process: Birth, Maturity, Destruction, and Gestation/Renewal.
It is intended for individuals, organizations or communities who want to plot their various programs, initiatives, and efforts (even relationships!) onto the ecocycle framework.
In my consultancy work I have been introducing leaders and organizations with this tool to help them in visualizing how attention, energy, time and resources are distributed across the different phases of the ecocycle.
For those who are new to the Ecocycle, here are some information:
GESTATION - creative, messy, full of ideas, space of curiosity, exploration and experiments
BIRTH - emerging ideas are showing promise, finding new patterns of working, beginning collaborations and forming of teams
MATURITY- structures are in place, and functioning well; culture and values are shared, roles are defined; more focus on adjustments and monitoring
CREATIVE DESTRUCTION - reconsidering of services, processes, people, culture, collaborations; period of dismantling and letting go of what is not serving; restructuring and re-calibrating the system
REFLECTING ON MY ECOCYCLE
To practice what I preach, I might as well reflect and reappraise my own ecocycle.
What am I seeing?
What am I noticing?
What am I sensing?
What patterns are emerging?
Which trap/s are hindering me from moving forward?
What would be the ideal distribution of time, attention, energy, and resources across the ecocycle?
I seem to find myself in the creative destruction phase. I see myself in the CHRONIC DISASTER TRAP unable to move on and let go of the past with a tendency to "spin in circles". There is confusion, and a perception on the lack of compass or vision for the future.
Perhaps it’s also because I haven’t fully “composted” these experiences yet.
But how do we do composting of experiences?
I had a conversation with a friend lately and mentioned that composting is not something we were taught to do.
How do we do composting well?
How do we disintegrate, dissolve, and decompose what needs letting go?
How do we soften hard edges that are etched deeply in our bodies?
How do we compose collectively rather than pursuing it as an individual responsibility?
These are some questions lingering in me as I process “composting” and what I need to compost from the past experiences.
When I started writing this post I knew I would end up with more questions than answers.
Perhaps this is part of the composting process, to gather as much questions and spaces of inquiry as possible before sifting things out.
For now I am left with this invitation for myself - to choose a softer terrain in this process. I don’t need to get things in order. I don’t need to fix things. I just need to let myself be.
P.S.
I am curious what questions, thoughts, impulses are stirred in you in this inquiry. ❤️❤️❤️
Hiraya manawari,
Lana
Thank you Lana, resonates very well with my own sensing this month. For me, it is hard to sit with the overwhelm that comes with sitting with these multiple threads of inquiry, composting, questions - for the ecocycle tends not to be a neat sequence but could be messy - and wanting it to be different, the longings, the "should's"... Someone wrote the other day how it doesn't help to "shout at the seeds" for them to grow faster, which fits into your reflections here as well ;)