Guest Blogger: Ellen van Dongen
I feel that I can find my bearings concerning ‘place’, now. It is connected to my Lifemaps work and Integral City.
Place is part of Integral City’s Master Code. I am deeply touched and humbled by the importance and generative power of the Master Code. For me it is a beautiful expression for living a life in Oneness.
You could say, that the whole of the Lifemaps.NL framework of posters and stickers is my Lifemaps Book 1 (like the Integral City Book 1). You can choose many overlays, paths or processes to work with Lifemaps. The 4 core lifemaps are compasses for the 4 core themes: being your true self, following your life’s purpose, living your life as a personal creator and being a conscious entrepreneur. They are developed from and for the individual perspective (I, IT – subtle as well as material). The collective aspects I want to work with in groups, to complement these lifemaps, are: WEconomy + New Business Models, and place making, place caring + the Master Code.
What is the Connection to my Work?
Integral City for me first came with inspiration: being with Marilyn, listening to the story of the bees and the human hive and the four voices. I could recognize it as an important integral framework for assessment and mapping as well. From that time on I have felt, that Integral City had a place in my life. Over the last few years I always enjoyed our monthly community of practice zoom calls. I was/am curious about the source/sources and the underlying process in our systemic constellations. I see the potential of our space-holding work. I really feel involved and included. What I did not have yet was a direct point of connection into me and my work. This came last July, when I was finalizing the four big lifemaps: Being yourself, Following your mission, Living as a personal creator and Conscious business. Note: you can have a peek at Lifemaps.nl to get an impression of how these lifemaps look.
Discovering place
I was developing a set of icons which could represent key aspects and principles of creation. For me Life = creation & evolution. Everyone of us is a creator. We all co-create with one another and with Life. In my experience one of these aspects is: knowing where you are. Related to creation, this means, that when you know where you are – and you are completely there (present, but also present on that spot), in the now – your creations will have strong roots and will flourish. The symbol for this is:
After having developed the set of symbols, and after having developed the lifemap Living as a personal creator, my last test and validation was: working with this lifemap myself -going through the whole experience and finding out whether everything I needed in my process as well as in the content was provided for. So, I was choosing stickers and laying out my life’s journey on the poster. I was reflecting about what my creations could show me about my function as a personal creator. The last step in this lifemap is to look at the set of creation icons to assess where and which principles and aspects I had experienced in my life. And there was the icon meaning: knowing where you are. At that moment I saw, that this was about place, I and that I had been wondering about this for a long time.
Place connects my work with lifemaps to Integral City and vice versa
With this I have found what connects me and my work to Integral City. To follow my intuition, inquire about/into place, find the meaning of place… Find and answer questions like:
- do we have an in-built GPS and if so why and how?
- What is the connection to the four directions: N, E, S, W?
- What is the energy signature of a place and what is the meaning of it?
- What is a source and what is the relationship between place and source?
- What are places of power?
I therefore find it really great, that the lifemaps have shown me this connection. To complete the fun…. there is also a connection between the lifemaps and Integral City now, to be implemented. The four lifemaps do not explicitly include place, yet. So, I will see to it, that it will be embedded in them, in the near future.
I want my work to be about finding new integral, sustainable and conscious ways to be yourself, to live and work together. I personally will work with the lifemaps from the “I” perspective (coaches are using them for group work within organizations). And I will work with New Business Models and Integral City to cover the “WE”. The circle is round for me now, as we say it in Dutch.
This blog series continues a celebration of the launch of Book 2 in the Integral City Book Series: Integral City Inquiry & Action: Designing Impact for the Human Hive.
In this blog series, Guest Bloggers from the Integral City Community of Practice explore how each is living the practices of Placecaring & Placemaking.
The series includes:
Integral City Community Practise Placecaring and Placemaking
An Intuitive Walk Through Amsterdam
How is Your City Your Habitat?
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