Co-becoming Plunge Contents

Welcome to the Co-becoming Plunge

Collected here in the Table of Contents is all the course information.

What is it that we Explore in Co-becoming?

There is something specific that we are aiming for in this course – and that is the experience of collective state change via creative participation with the animate world. What we’re exploring can’t really ever be known, but it can be practised. The knowledge of the imaginal realm is very slippery. It’s an experience, not a fact. It’s real, but cannot be pinned down.

Therefore it feels important to state that this is not a personal development course. It is, rather, a spiritual, somatic, co-creative and community development course – in service to the alive world. It actively seeks to reimagine our cultural inheritance of the concepts of individuality and separateness by consciously experiencing our participation in life’s process.

We’re investigating life – life process from the inside – in deep participation. Our role, in co-becoming, is to actively play the passive part – getting out of the way so we can bear witness to the intelligence, complexity and holding given by life. When we do that, specific and powerful experiences of the animate world can be shared. We will be making space for them, making culture with them. This is a relatively unusual thing to do in this age, but there are many precedents for this work throughout history and around the world.

This course is based on research into the rich cross-cultural similarity in accessing the animate realms. There are particular and precise instructions; there are ways of being in the body, the heart, the mind. There is an etiquette required – our deportment is important. There will be a Way of Being we’ll follow when listening to and speaking to a listening world.

Our Way of Being

The qualities of love, devotion, receptivity, generosity, humility, truthfulness, beauty, compassion, patience, responsibility and reciprocity will be revealed as essential. The alive world will help us understand that these qualities are not negotiable. More than that, they are not even human qualities – they are the qualities of life’s process. The work will make this clear.

We will be creatively participating with the world. We will experience how it expresses through each of us via deep listening, writing, and bearing witness as a group. You will be invited to read aloud what comes through stream-of-consciousness writing. There will be specific instructions on how to read and listen that are important in order to create a receptive environment for the more than human world to come into presence with us.

The intentions:

We seek a reversal of figure and ground, to let the corporeal connections, the ecological ground, the spaces between, the unfurling and infinite expanse, be the place of attending.
We rest the cognitive mind and let our wild selves, our animal, vegetal, fungal and bacterial selves show us how.
We cultivate the eros of connection, we honour the desires and drives to entangle and entwine, to be seen and to see, and to be beautiful for the world we cherish. We cultivate the vulnerability to reveal what we honour and how we love.
While we take care of and cherish our uniqueness and our knowing, yet we honour the whole above the part, and the mystery above the answer.

Creating a Shared Culture

I acknowledge the wisdom, skill and experience each of you will bring to the group – your practices, lineages and learnings will be honoured and will benefit us all.

I’ll be concentrating on the language of ecology and the body because many of the ways of speaking about this kind of ‘spiritual’ awareness have tended towards removing the body and the alive context. That’s partly because of the felt sense of it – it can feel as if we’re ‘somewhere else’ – ‘another’ world, rather than deeper into this one. Working towards a shared somatic basis aims to ground our awareness into this world.

I will also be introducing a few philosophical terms to help us describe the realms we enter. These realms have been visited and mapped by people over thousands of years.

As multi-racial post-modern people in a multicultural world, we don’t generally know one way in depth, but we can be moved by, and learn something from, the breadth and complexity of thought undertaken by humans everywhere. We live in a global culture on stolen lands – our learning will be responsive to this intense, delicate and soulful legacy.

Our Resources

We are lucky there’s been many writers, thinkers, artists, activists who have shared their journeys in this kind of work. There are a couple of stand-out books that we’ll be learning from that might be useful for you to purchase.

Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception Into the Dreaming of Earth by Stephen Harrod Buhner

Songspirals: Sharing Women’s Wisdom of Country Through Songlines by the Gay’wu Group of Women

The Stakes

We all know these are tricky times. The future looks to be trickier, and it’s clear we have to learn different ways of being in the world. For many, me included, it feels that the stakes are high, and grief percolates just below the surface. This work, and its structure, aim to support us all on a profound level, by strengthening our relationships with that which gives the truest support – the alive, intelligent, compassionate world.

On the other side of the pendulum, this work can bring great joy, pleasure and sensual delight. It can also fill one with a sense of power and specialness. Sometimes, perhaps, too much! The group and process are designed to guard against some of the dangers of deep work, such as spiritual inflation, over-reach or instability. We will check in with our bodies to sense if personal or cultural trauma might be triggered by doing work that has long been culturally repressed or marginalised. We will learn to normalise and soothe, and the group will be there to support and affirm.

Our Agreements

We have been inspired by Bayo Akomolafe’s words describing his course – “This is not a safe space, but we aspire to support one another and co-create a container where we can all take risks together.”

Spiritual work like this also isn’t safe – it is deep, wild, bigger than the comfort-seeking human often desires. That’s why it’s so important to do this in community. Thus how we behave when we are together matters.

These are the agreements we ask that you adhere to:

Commit to embodying, as well as we are able, the qualities outlined in our Way of Being
Be perfectly on time, or let us know if you will be late or not attending.
Hold as utterly confidential anything of a personal or delicate matter that arises in the sessions.
Please honour us with any feedback that you feel might improve the experience of the course for you. Please hold in mind that while not all requests or suggestions may be able to be accommodated, we will do our best to be responsive.

While we value the support of the group, ultimately we must self-caretake. Luckily there are fabulous resources available – including the appendix ‘Sensory Overload and Self-Caretaking’ in the recommended text by Stephen Buhner.

No one who has done this work with me so far has been overwhelmed. Mostly this work is full of deep feeling, laughter, playfulness, and wonders, and sincere and profound connections. We are delighted to be taking this journey with you and look forward to growing in our capacity to feel into the animate world.

Course Description

This course is for those wishing to deepen both their nature connection and creative practices within a nourishing and supportive community. Using an embodied process of stream-of-consciousness writing, we will enter into presence with the more-than-human world and bring back other – and ancient – ways of knowing. We call this co-becoming: a transformative/altered state learning that comes when we open ourselves, with humility, care and wonder, to the animate world.

Through the Co-becoming Plunge we will

Encounter the depth and complexity of ecological systems through tangible embodied practices
Experience, through creative participation, the beauty, resilience and flow innate to life
Represent this learning in poetic and visual forms, and
Grow our capacity to share our imaginal and spiritual unfurling with the world.

These times are asking us to step into more life-affirming, somatically aware and interconnected knowing. In trusting the wisdom and holding of the alive world, combined with the support of a community of practitioners, this course will strengthen our capacity to make positive change.

The course will include aspects of a sangha (the Buddhist term for a spiritual community) and a writers group/creative support community. But the core of it will be body practices, meditations and writing as a way to meet the more-than-human world.

In more detail…

Diving deep, and riding the ripples out from our centre, we will come into presence with the concentric circles of being. Through various creative and embodiment processes we will experience this universe, from the tiny bacterial lives inside us all the way out to distant galaxies, with increased intimacy, animacy and attunement.

We will do this in a way that is psychologically supportive, artistically and intellectually extending, spiritually expansive and somatically grounding and integrating. The process will also include acts of service, giving back to that which nourishes us so generously.

Underpinned by values of generosity, humility, truthfulness, beauty, compassion and self-compassion, patience, and reciprocity, this course is also designed to be a fundraiser for some of our First Nations elders, the Gay’wu group of women, whose book, Songspirals, has been core to the development of the Co-becoming work. $20 from each place will go direct to them.

We will work with nine themes in circles radiating from the body.

Working with the Layers

1.A co-becoming practice session where we work with each circle in turn – the substance of our work together

2.A page on my website with optional readings, listenings, further practice suggestions, and possibilities for service

3.Artistic/physical expression – A creative practice that embeds the work in some kind of tangible form. This will give expression to each circle or layer – such as making a series of ever-bigger bowls, or an expanding painting, photo collage, weaving, mandala or garden, or visual depiction of your co-becoming stories/song-cycle/poem. The outcomes of this can then be part of an altar/special place for ongoing contemplation and ritual engagement. This is a way to bring this work into the heart of our lives, to nourish and support both us and our communities of care. The second week’s conversation will engage with this part of the project.

Of course, life can be busy. The minimum commitment is the co-becoming practice session. Everything else is designed to nourish that.

The Background to the Co-becoming Plunge

SOMATICS

Core to this work is cultivating body awareness; energies, sensuality, pleasure and liveliness, and how we may presence within the bodies of the more-than-human world. There is rich paradox in this endeavour: through body awareness we also become more attuned to that which has non-physical body – whether we call this the imaginal, the spirit world, the animist presence of all things.

Incorporating lessons from many modalities, this work is informed by body-mind practices including hatha yoga, chi gung, contact improvisation and ecstatic dance, Zen meditation, Body-Mind Centring.

PSYCHOLOGY

Focussing, process psychology, various Jungian-inspired practices, the role of trauma in culture and how this impacts our somatic experience – these are lenses to support this deep individual and community work.

PHILOSOPHY/THEOLOGY

The Co-becoming Plunge will accessibly present some of the wealth of our intellectual and spiritual history and demystify fuzzy mysticism, while deeply honouring the mystery. The course will include content influenced by Taoism, Buddhism, Tantric Hinduism, Deep Ecology, Neoplatonism, Romanticism, Feminism and Indigenous metaphysics, as well as exciting developments in neuroscience, biology and botany. We will dive deep into the experience of the Imaginal – the co-creative edge between matter and spirit, the place where all is alive and all words matter, the beautiful, powerful realm humans have long visited, the place hidden inside the old European term “faerie”, (a word derived from the ancient term fari – to speak), a place that is correlate with Aboriginal Dreaming.

The co-becoming work was consolidated during teaching the course ‘Acknowledging Country’. By bringing a spiritual, somatic and intellectual understanding of the ethical dilemma of living on stolen lands, that course sought to deepen into the challenge First Nations people have set us – to properly respect Country, and allow ourselves to be transformed by an authentic relationship with this alive and listening Earth. Indigenous philosophers and teachers who have inspired this work include Bill Neidje, Mowaljarlai, the Gay’wu group of women, Tyson Yunkaporta, Max Harrison, MK Turner, and Ian Hunter from Australia, and Martin Prechtel from Guatemala/New Mexico.

The course also draws from European mystical and Neoplatonic philosophers including Goethe, Heidegger, Jung, Hillman and Stephen Buhner. The Plunge integrates what I’ve learned from my studies with philosophers and meditation and somatic practitioners including Josh Schrei, David Abram, Bill Plotkin, Freya Mathews, Jon Young, Tom Cheetham and Zen Buddhists Susan Murphy Roshi, Junpo Denis Kelly, and Corey Hess.

ARTISTIC/POETIC PRACTICE

Creating and participating with the beautiful is a core human experience, one that can transform poverties of all kinds into dignity and richness. Beauty is often marginalised within the techno-capitalist worldview, yet it is an essential part of a human and nature-centred activism. Humble yet archetypal, storyful, unfashionable and soulful – these are ways to work with, speak with and shape with the alive world. Honouring beauty herself, beauty as an alive, animate force, will be part of this work. Creating form will be a powerful and somatic act to ground our learning.

So while developing skills and mastery in words or other artforms may be an outcome and be personally satisfying, this will be understood as a natural outcome arising from our honouring of life, and experienced as a gift to all of us, and to the whole.

SERVICE

From care for our bodies, nourishing others, tending the green ones, living lightly, random acts of kindness – this is the natural inclination of the connected soul. We will share ways in which we strengthen community bonds and feed the reciprocal flows.

The Experience of Co-becoming: Testimonials

This is deep and profound work of joy and connection, healing and offering much meaning. …It deepens authentic living in surprising and beautiful ways. I love the community, and the intimacy of the small groups in breakout rooms. I feel supported both personally and professionally. Thanks Maya for your bravery and vulnerability, I think this is the leadership we need in such times. – Kerryn

I see the work you are inviting us to do as very significant, hugely important, and an integral step on the path to deep relationships in community and co-becoming. – Bronwen

You create a safe container and encourage and listen without judgement. It is a lovely process to allow the more-than-human world to have a voice, to be witnessed and to have agency, and this further enables a sense of belonging. Co-becoming means to loosen fixed concepts and to be with the other in a different more expansive way. There is an entering into a new pattern of relationship that is entangled, embodied and alive. It allows a new way of perceiving to emerge; pattern-thinking. The discussion, the witnessing others, and the embodied exploration all enabled a new way of being with this more expansive world. – Jacki

Acknowledging Country, Acknowledging Animacy

First, some thoughts on this ritual, and at the end of this section we’ll add a calendar of dates with your names attached.

This work we are doing is done ‘on Country’ – an Aboriginal English word meaning the alive, animate systems of ecological interconnection and kinship. Co-becoming seeks to do with work ‘in’, ‘with’ Country — acknowledging, respecting, tending, courting this animacy, this intelligence. But we cannot expect to be able to easily, innocently access such knowledge.

We know that the ancient history of deep kinship and communication between peoples and the places we live includes the legacy of violence, colonisation and trauma. There is no level on which this can be ignored. The resonant words of Rudolf Steiner are appropriate here – “each step in spiritual development requires three steps in moral development.” Our ability to allow space for the painful, complex, conflicting emotions of living upon stolen land is a doorway into more deeply knowing it, and loving it. And, perhaps, being trusted by it, by Country.

When we engage in the work of co-becoming, all of this is here in the room — as ghosts or spirits perhaps, or perhaps as our bodies that unconsciously store and accumulate experience from many many generations. The point is not to try to make all of this conscious, but rather allowing space in our bodies to be present with the immensity, complexity and intelligence of feeling. With compassion and deep listening we seek to be present to the legacy — the cultural achievement of Aboriginal Australia, the vast loss and pain, this confusing time of reckoning and re-membering.

To Acknowledge Country is, in its very nature, acknowledging animacy. And as a ritual, spoken aloud, it is addressing directly the more-than-human world. It is stating aloud to all that might be listening that we are seeking to come back into an ancient way of relating — talking with, rather than about, the world.

Some might think that to talk about animacy is a distraction from feeling the impact of the human story, the shattering and ongoing results of colonisation. This is a fair concern, given how in denial and anti-feeling our culture has been. But the intention is to pay the utmost respect to Aboriginal culture by taking seriously the importance, in their culture, of Country — of animate earth. The challenge is to speak in a way, with the appropriate depth, breadth and spaciousness, to allow room for all of this.

The paradox we’re working with is allowing ourselves to be with discomfort and, at the same time, relaxed enough to feel the grace of the more than human world. Which might be the only thing big and wise enough to guide us into different ways of knowing.

Therefore, I hope this work might skill us for making cultural change that supports and resources Aboriginal people to access and lead from this space. Trauma and injustice create barriers for Aboriginal people that we must all seek to dismantle. May this work increase our resilience and moral capacity in this space. Steiner’s quote again – every step in spiritual development requires three steps in moral development.

If all of this feels daunting, I want to say that some of the most beautiful Acknowledgements I’ve heard have come from a space of vulnerability, not-knowing and confusion — people being true to how all of this feels in them. It’s not about perfection, it’s about honesty, and cultivating the capacity to be present with the full range of emotions this ritual brings forth. There is no way to do it ‘wrong’ with such an intention.

However, it’s good practice, according to Aboriginal people I’ve learned from, to always cover three points: the name of the people on whose land we meet (or where you are calling in from), acknowledgement of their ongoing connection, and some expression of commitment to cultural change.

ACKNOWLEDGING COUNTRY DATES

April 30

May 7

May 14

May 21

May 28

June 4

June 11

June 18

June 25

July 2

July 9

Nine Layers of Being

Co-becoming Art Projects

This part of the Plunge is a creative practice that embeds the co-becoming work in some kind of tangible form. This will give expression to each layer of being that we work with, and could be as simple as writing out some of your work in a beautiful, accessible way.

However, you may wish to explore another media to give expression to the expanding layers – such as making a series of ever-bigger bowls, or an expanding painting, photo collage, weaving, mandala or garden, or visual depiction of your co-becoming stories/song-cycle/poem.

The outcomes of this can then be part of an altar/special place for ongoing contemplation and ritual engagement. This is a way to bring this work into the heart of our lives, to nourish and support both us and our communities of care.

Not long after the vision came for this course, I discovered this commentary on Jung’s Red Book that speaks of the importance of finding a way to integrate visionary learning into physical form.

ON ASPECTS OF BEAUTY IN C.G. JUNG’S RED BOOK By Paul Brutsche

The Red Book functioned for Jung as a container, a sort of womb in which the original experiences in their overpowering force could be “caught,” contained and absorbed. The careful aesthetic presentation helped tame, form and order the powerful, fascinating and unfamiliar experiences Jung had submitted himself to. The overwhelming and the unlimited were brought into the “cosmos” of the refined writing and the beautiful images. The ineffable was transformed into the limited, individual and concrete shape of a symbolic reality.

It is easy to imagine how much effort and discipline were needed in order not to be carried away by the power of the inner experiences but on the contrary to submit them to the law of the beautiful form; how much patience and humility such a process required! The physical effort that was demanded to achieve a satisfactory representation of the images and to transcribe the texts into calligraphy was an extremely efficient way to practice “presence” and to anchor the real person in the here and now. This probably was what saved Jung from falling into a psychosis and resulted in the beautiful elaboration of The Red Book that we now see.

“I always knew that these experiences contained something precious, and therefore I knew of nothing better than to write them down in a precious, that is to say, costly book and to paint the images that emerged through reliving it all-as well as I could” (p. 360). Through aesthetic embellishment, Jung honored the value of his insights by giving them a substantial container. The uniqueness of the content is mirrored by the costliness of the form and the medium, which are treated like sacramental reality where the numinous is contained by golden receptacles like a chalice, monstrance or tabernacle.

This conveys a third meaning of the pictorial shape he gave to his Red Book: to make the intrinsic and numinous value of the experience become manifest. It corresponded to a religious and feeling-related attitude by acknowledging a sublime presence in these experiences.

With this way of honoring his inner experiences Jung was also instinctively having recourse to an adequate means of protecting himself against a dangerous identification with these contents. The profoundly meaningful and sacred value he bestowed on these experiences endowed them with the status of “given” and not “self-made” thoughts; they were not of ego, they were “other.” This was the only adequate and psychologically beneficial way of dealing with such powerful contents. It conferred the inner experiences a general and lasting significance beyond the present moment.

References and Resources

Paying respect to the lineage and the teachers: a few relevant and inspiring books, authors and podcasts

This episode of The Emerald podcast, Animism is Normative Consciousness, is a particularly good overview of the terrain we’ll be exploring.

Weird Studies. This episode on Jean Gebser touches on many of the thinkers who have helped shape my understanding of co-becoming, including Rainer Maria Rilke, Goethe, Steiner, Jung, Ken Wilber and Teilhard de Chardin. This episode On Beauty is stunning.

Favourite books

Green Man, Earth Angel – Tom Cheetham

Sand Talk – Tyson Yunkaporta

A Story About Feeling – Bill Neidje

Tao Te Ching – Ursula le Guin translation

Long Life, Honey in the Heart – Martin Prechtel

Of Water and the Spirits – Malidoma Some

News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness – Robert Bly

The Master and his Emissary: the Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World – Iain McGilchrist

The Spell of the Sensuous – David Abram

The Passion of the Western Mind – Richard Tarnas

A Blue Fire – James Hillman

The Tree of Meaning: Language, Mind and Ecology – Robert Bringhurst

Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy – Barbara Ehrenreich

The Red Book – Carl Jung

The Creative Act: A Way of Being

And some particularly pertinent extracts of the work of a scholar of Western Esotericism:

http://wouterjhanegraaff.blogspot.com/2022/10/esotericism-and-democracy-some.html

Our very sense of a Western cultural identity has been built, over many centuries, on systematic patterns of critique and polemical rejection directed at a whole range of worldviews, intellectual traditions, or spiritual practices that were perceived and promoted as incompatible with the fundamental values and assumptions of Western civilization.

…you cannot understand “esotericism” without placing it in a much wider context – that of the history of Western culture itself. At the most basic level, the box that we have labeled with that name contains more or less everything that you (and all of us) have been taught to perceive as “different,” “weird,” “problematic,” “questionable,” and even “dangerous” because it does not fit the dominant, mainstream intellectual paradigms on which our very society is built. Another way of saying this is that our perception of “esotericism” is the outcome of a long process of polemical exclusion in which “we” have been defining and defending “our” “Western” identity against everything that “we” reject as incompatible with who we are, or aspire to be.

you cannot understand “esotericism” at a deep level without questioning those hidden or explicit ideologies of Western superiority that have defined the very project of modernity as such, including its imperialist expansion and efforts to colonize the rest of the world. If you doubt this, then just think of the popular idea that “we over here” have science, but “they over there” have nothing but primitive magic.22

All the “weird stuff” that we used to put in the “esotericism” box, to keep it safely apart from what we thought “Western culture” should be really all about, will have to be taken out of that box again and brought back to the table. It must be studied seriously and without prejudice, like any other manifestation of Western culture, and must be restored to its legitimate place in our narratives about the complex history that has been unfolding in our parts of the world over the past two and a half thousand years. Essentially, that is what we are doing in the academic study of esotericism.

Once we take such a project seriously, we cannot keep thinking about “Western culture” the way we used to think about it. Our traditional stories or grand narratives about “the West” must be exposed for the ideological fictions that they really are and have always been. The well-known triumphalist storylines of Western superiority will have to be replaced by extremely different but, hopefully, more fair and accurate historical narratives of “Western culture.”

The Imaginal

If we would recover the imaginal we must first recover its organ, the heart, and its kind of philosophy. — James Hillman, The Thought of the Heart

The Imaginal is a term garnering more attention in this time of an ‘animistic turn’ in philosophy and science. It explains something I’d sensed for many years but had no idea how to express or explain.

The Imaginal is the alive and evolving space between the human and the more-than-human other. It is another place, a place within this world — not visible, but real. It is deep on the inside of things. It can only be perceived by the sense organ that is the heart. It is a powerful and strange place for those of us unused to this kind of perception, but in many times and places it is far far better understood.

The following quotes are tastes. Read Buhner, and Hillman, and Cheetham, if this whets your appetite. See the references page for details.

This between-two takes place in the opening of the difference between the one and the other, but it is in no way proper to the one or to the other—it arises from the two. Perhaps it is the sole place where existence becomes a substance of another kind… Luce Irigaray

Himma is a term from Sufism meaning intense spiritual resolve. Himma creates as ‘real’ the figures of the imagination… Himma is that mode by which the images, which we believe we make up, are actually presented to us as not of our making, as genuinely created, as authentic creatures.

I do not know what this kind of loving is, but it is not reducible to other more familiar forms… Let us call it imaginal love, a love based wholly on relationship with images and through images, a love showing in the imaginative response to the imagination in the dreams… This love does not reach only toward unifying, as we have all been so tediously taught. When we love, we want to explore, to discriminate more and more widely, to extend the intricacy that intensifies intimacy. — Hillman, James. The Dream and the Underworld, 196-7.

Philosophy…must arise in the heart in order to mediate the world truly, since… it is that subtle organ which perceives the correspondences between the subtleties of consciousness and the levels of being. This intelligence takes place by means of images which are a third possibility between mind and world. Each image coordinates within itself qualities of consciousness and qualities of world, speaking in one and the same image of the interpenetration of consciousness and world. This imaginal intelligence resides in the heart: “intelligence of the heart” connotes a simultaneous knowing and loving by means of imagining. — Hillman, The Thought of the Heart

The above essay by Hillman is available online here. It’s dense, but fascinating.