Coherence
Collective artistry for the social change and innovation sector
Published by Luea Ritter on Medium, January 12, 2020.
Imagine coming into a symphony hall as the lights fade and silence settles in. You hold your breath. Out of nothingness the first voices appear. Then silence again. The singers take a breath — inhale — and then a wave of sound unfolds. This soundscape embraces you, envelops you, cracks you open. You have dived into a field of coherence.
Coherence doesn’t only happen with music. One of the places I’ve experienced coherence is with the organisation, NILE Journeys (NILE stands for Nurturing Impulses for Living Ecosystems). This group’s intention is to co-create the conditions for a culture of peace across the eleven countries of the Nile Basin, by nurturing regenerative practices for the land, the body of water, and the quality of life of the people.
I remember our second big gathering in Kenya in May 2019. We had invited more than twenty-five people from eight different countries. Most of them had never met before. We arrived, got to know each other, and dove in. A strong sense of magic and flow was tangible from the beginning. Laughter, care, deep trust, openness, and vulnerability radiated across the group.
Of course there were the usual obstacles of travel: people feeling sick, flights rescheduled, suitcases not arriving. There were also moments of intensity, tears, confusion, and not knowing. As part of the hosting and organizing team, what moved me was that the obstacles we encountered were received by everyone as an invitation to learn.
At the end, I was tired from little sleep, twelve-hour bus rides between Nairobi, Rusinga Island and the Nairobi National Park, and intense and deeply moving conversations. Yet I was rejuvenated at the same time. As I returned home, a deep AHA emerged in me, “Our practice is working.”
This sense of palpable coherence, I realized, was only possible because of the groundwork we laid in the three years leading up to that gathering.
Coherence happens when the different parts of a system come into healthy relationship with one another, as if becoming part of a larger whole.
In order to understand coherence, it’s first necessary to understand the concept of a field. We are all connected, on a conscious and subconscious level, by a tapestry of fields. Journalist and author Lynne McTaggart, who’s been called the “Malcom Gladwell of New Science,” writes about fields in this way:
The human mind and body are not separate from their environment but a pocket of pulsating power constantly interacting with this vast energy sea, and that consciousness may be central in shaping our world… We are attached and engaged, indivisible from our world, and our only fundamental truth is our relationship with it. ‘The field,’ as Einstein once succinctly put it, ‘is the only reality.’
Coherence happens when the different elements within a field align for a greater purpose. Coherence is not a noun, it’s a verb. It is something that emerges when the right conditions are put in place, when we actively tend to it as a group, team, or collective.
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So what were the conditions that contributed to the field of coherence within NILE Journeys? Well, let’s start at the beginning.
Four years before our May 2019 meeting in Kenya, I met my NILE Journeys co-founders at a conference in Findhorn, Scotland. It felt like a mere coincidence. We recognized the similarities in our life paths, and in our conversations we stumbled upon a common set of concerns that led us to the question, “What would happen if we created a platform for a regenerative culture of peace in the Nile Basin?” Following this rich encounter, I wrote up a summary of our daunting 100-year vision.
Then… nothing happened! It rested, there was silence for about a year, although we stayed in contact with one another sporadically.
In 2016, out of the blue, there was another coincidence. A funder approached one of us , saying, “We have extra money in our budget that we need to allocate in the next few months. Do you have a proposal?” Our co-founder had been carrying our proposal in his backpack for an entire year, and said, “Sure, here,” pulling out the now slightly wrinkled proposal, handing it over to them. After a moment of reading the summary, the funder said, “Wow, fantastic! This fits perfectly. Shall we start?!”
We used the funds to invite forty people from the eleven countries of the Nile Basin together for seven days, to see if our idea actually did resonate with a larger group of stakeholders.
This was our first big gathering, in March 2016. We met in Aswan, Egypt, near Philea, the Temple of Isis. Although I can’t convey in a few sentences the nature of our rich experience together, we emerged from that time with a renewed sense of trust, care, and commitment.
Then again, rest. Silence!
We continued meeting as a core team online once a week, and were able to meet twice in person over the following two years. Mostly we were refining, sensing, and sharpening our intention and strategic plan. We talked to people, started to build a network, and several lucrative offers came in. Yet there was a sense that these offers would compromise our long-term vision, so we turned them down. Relationships were deepened, proposals were written, and a few more people joined our core circle.
But foremost, we were waiting.
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This waiting is what we started calling “sitting around the fire.” We use this term to describe the act of sensing and tending to our deeper call, until clear action and direction emerge.
Looking back, I realize that those so-called “unproductive times” were crucial for cultivating coherence. They helped us learn to stay present, align, and deepen. They were not only important for getting to know each other and seeing how we functioned as a team, they also gave us time to become more familiar with the larger context of the historical, socio-political, and ecological dimensions of the Nile Basin. In hindsight, it seems that our care and awareness-based intention established a conscious and coherent field within and around everyone involved.
By the time we gathered in May 2019 in Kenya, we were harvesting the fruits of all this time sitting around the fire. The work we have done with NILE Journeys has given me a lived experience of other ways of “doing” social change and innovation work. These methods are quite simple, but they require a different set of capacities, such as:
patience and daring to wait
presence
creating a larger understanding of what’s at stake, what’s at the source of the issue
deep listening to each other and the larger inquiry
leaning into the unknown and staying in the question
tracking right timing
persistence
sensing and wayfinding
inviting multiple perspectives
curiosity and playfulness
Cultivating coherence has a lot to do with transforming our sense of urgency, and learning to channel that energy differently. NILE Journeys has tried to channel it into building long-term relationships across perceived divides, between humans and the natural world. We don’t necessarily know the answers. Yet we can trust to live along someday into the answers, as Rilke wrote.
It’s neither easier or more difficult working this way, it just requires a different frame of mind and a different kind of effort. We have to drop the belief that we know all the answers and dare to take the time, again and again, to deeply listen and be guided along the way.
Edited by Bonnie Swift