My next phase

Living into the destiny that has stalked me...

My next ‘thing’ has started to download. After nearly seven full decades, I’ve learned that this is how it goes (for me, anyway).

Back in midlife, I was oblivious to this inner process; it was just a mix of sensations, thoughts, inspirations (none captured), and trends in which I didn‘t see the pattern. Now, it feels like an amazing blessing from the universe. I get that it has started, I get what my job is, I get that I’m being ‘used,’ I get ecstatic. Wow.

Sometime in my adolescence, I got a calling: “you should become an organizational therapist.” Say, what? At least at the time, there was no such role. Still, vaguely stumbling in this direction, I did graduate training in public administration with an emphasis on organizational dynamics. (Nope.)

Coming across the work of UCLA anthropologist Carlos Castaneda in my mid-20s, something in me woke up. Castaneda did field research with a Yaqui Indian ‘sorcerer’ named don Juan. This was the first real connection on my unfolding path. It shook up my sense of what might be real, how the world is constructed, how one could ‘be’ in the world; I was hooked. Many experiences that came after opened up, created nuance, and depth, and breadth.

Fast forward to ~2007.

I now had an upper world teacher, a power animal, had done a soul retrieval healing ceremony, downloaded the name “the collective edge,” discovered the work of Bert Hellinger and systemic constellations (clearly a primary neo-shamanic technology), and had become a recognized expert in Agile transformations.

In 2020, I founded The Collective Edge, had published a book on Agile Transformation, and was beginning to teach an Integral view of organizational coaching using our Integral Sensemaking & Adaptive Action approach: integrating the top leadership development method (The Leadership Circle), the premier culture understanding (spiral dynamics & systemic management), the most usable complex systems pattern logic (Human Systems Dynamics), and a few simple embodiment & shadow practices. All in all, a robustly complete set.

In the last couple of months, there’s been a bit of a gap in the market for traditional organizational coach training programs — following some moments of panic and questioning whether my world was collapsing — I recognized the movement of providence.

This was my chance!

Now, I would have the time to develop what could become my magnum opus — a school of organizational (systemic) shamanism, integrating primordial understanding of the spirit realm with post-post-modern understanding of organizations, complex adaptive systems, brain-wave entrainment, methods to map (subconscious) human dynamics that play out in everything from businesses to political movements. And more.

Fortunately, much of this work had already begun downloading in me more than two years ago, but there was neither a full internal picture nor the time to develop it. As I have shifted my attention to making this work my primary mission, I realize it is as if I am writing a new book: tons of books to read, long mornings (and afternoons) of listening to relevant podcasts, audio books, reading books I’ve had for years but it was not yet their time.

Working title: The Systemic Way: an ordinary shaman path to self & systemic alchemy

God willing, it will launch this Fall.