Reflective Organ Newsletter September Equinox 2021: Code Red for Regenerative Action

This newsletter is published quarterly using a cycle of perspectives on the Integral City viewed from: Planet, People, Place and Power. The theme of this issue is Place.

Deep Design is an all-quadrant (AQAL) process: Deep Design includes (a) research of the past geological and social history and current conditions/ situations/circumstances of the land on which delivery takes place; then (b) sensing into that history and the current subtle energetics of the land; and then (c) allowing that to both explicitly cognitively and subtle-energetically inform the design and delivery of the workshop or presentation. In particular, the current situation of the land (Mother Earth) is brought into the momentary decisions during delivery.

Hamilton, M. (2020). Ed 2. Integral City Inquiry & Action: Designing Impact for the Human Hive. Minneaplis, MN: Amaranth Press, p.193

Scroll to end of newsletter to access Free Resources.

Code Red for Regeneration First Responders

The UN’s Code Red for climate action signalled the urgency and importance to design Regeneration into all our Integral City training.

Integral City has been working with Ubiquity University (UU) collaborators attracted by Humanity Rising 2020-21. The Code Red signal moves our teaching focus beyond human sustainability and adaptation to regeneration for all life.

From the success of our week-long Cities Rising for a Regenerative World – (which we have now made into a Free Ubiquity University Course) we have signed on to co-create a new type of MBA – a Master in Regenerative Action.

As collaborators, we support the UN’s Code Red warning to act on the scientific findings of the IPCC Report #6 released August 9, 2021.

Working with a Coalition of thirty+ global leaders in the regenerativity movement, Integral City is helping UU to retool the University and Humanity Rising to activate over 400 organizations and thousands of individuals (what we call Integral City’s 4+1 Voices) who have emerged out of Humanity Rising.

Putting into practice, the Master Code of Care, we are focusing on cohorts of GenZ and Millennial students as Regeneration First Responders globally linked together to share information and innovations for Regenerative Impact.

With our coalition partners we are developing the MRA Degree featuring an Impact Project that serves as the dissertation. An Impact Project is the application of knowledge into action demonstrating that you can apply what you are learning in the real world in a way that is regenerative to communities and ecosystems.

We are building an incubator/accelerator/investment fund as well as internships linked to the bioregions and cities to support the development of the Impact Projects.

Regeneration First Responder
As we realized the urgency for cities to upskill in regenerative competencies, we welcomed the recent Chatham House study that shows that the Gen Z/Millennial market is primed and ready for climate action, green recovery – and thus regeneration – around the world.

So, beyond the MRA we realize that our highest and most critical goal is to create the life conditions for a Global Regeneration Corps – the GRC of First Responders.

We aspire to co-create the conditions for an emerging Global Regeneration Corps in the spirit of John Kennedy’s Peace Corps in the 1960s.

For them we are co-designing a Regeneration First Responder Tool Kit that will equip learners for the rapidly changing world. Regeneration First Responders are fundamental for the viable survival, adaptation and regeneration of organizations, communities and governments. The fierce urgency of NOW calls us to create cooperative communities that care for all life and for future generations.

We are connecting with the Youth UN Peace Day 2021 Initiative, POP (Protecting Our Planet) Youth Community and AIESEC to become seed beds for incubating the GRC.

Central to the training of GRC is interior development in Soft Skills and spiritual intelligence. Regenerators need to be as resilient and adaptive in their interiors as they are active and impactful in their exteriors.

The curriculum for core and elective courses includes these Regenerative intelligences and competencies:

System Regeneration: The ability to awaken and realize the unique, value-adding potential of an organization, a place and/or an ecosystem so as to create increased levels of vitality, viability, and capacity to evolve within the larger ecosystems.
Framework Thinking: The adept use and discernment of frameworks to support ordered and dynamic thinking, and the ability to act effectively within complex systems.
Self-Actualized Agency: The ongoing ability to develop capacity and capability for a powerful sense of personal agency informed by a deep understanding and care for the systems in which one is living / working.
Developmental Facilitation: The competency and capability required to help groups (communities and cities) evolve their sense of purpose and their ability to co-create / realize their regenerative potential together.
Living Systems Intervention: The ability to enact the optimum regenerative interventions based on the integrity and wisdom of living systems in their evolutionary processes and their attuning to the larger context in which all living species exist.

We invite everyone into an exploration (and/or sponsoring) of Impact Projects for Regenerative Action and investment in the Global Regeneration Corps. You can contact us through the website info@integralcity.com and we will explore the practical learning opportunities that will regenerate our world everywhere.

It is time for all of us to mobilize regenerative action in ways that serve the wellbeing of cities/communities, bio/ecoregions and the living system of Gaia.

Gaia Regenerates Care Beyond the 7th Generation

Gaia is our Guest Editor this issue. She shares her message transmitted at the FemmeQ conference in July, 2021.

Human Hives are what MH calls cities. I like this – this fractal image captures the pattern of an ancient living system of the beehive (which has been around for 100 million years). It gives us a picture of what it looks like to see our cities as whole living systems.

Our Human Hives hold 50-90% of human population depending on which country you live in.

And they are the centres of Gaia’s Great Challenges at this stage of evolutionary emergence.

But human hives also have great potential to serve Gaia – with a Master Code of Care. Speaking with Compassionate Voices. Navigating with Maps of spiritual aliveness. Contexting, strategizing and Integrating with 12 Evolutionary Intelligences.

I invite you to appreciate the fragile strength of our human hives – holding 7 generations.

Think about the 4 generations alive today – bridging MH to her great grandson Cole … unto the generation that represents his great grandchild. That is 7 generations. It is time for humans to wake up and take the courage to create the conditions that will enable the 7^th generation to live and thrive.

Because our Human Hives and all the 4 generations alive today face Big Challenges–– Energy, Water, Climate, Food, Bio-Genetic, Psycho-Cultural. All the generations past, present and future peer out of our Human Hives at 3 possible pathways into the future. Duane Elgin projects the likely outcome of these 3 possible scenarios like this:

Status Quo – where we Crash and Collapse because we do nothing, and we burn up
Autocratic – where Authoritarian governance with Artificial Intelligence leads to autocratic control with humans losing most personal freedoms
Choosing Earth – where we Self-Organize through The Great Transition . He imagines that after an extended period of struggle (spoken to by Lynne Twist’s prophecies ), local and regional system change frees personal agency for a whole new era of aliveness and unity.

Where and How will humans find the Courage to Choose Earth?

To read Gaia’s full transmission Click Here.

Gaia Mentors Schooling for a Planet of Integral Cities 2121

Futures Lab Russia, July 2021, invited Integral City to imagine cities in 100 years. This extract from the lecture was offered by Marilyn Hamilton PhD, Founder of Integral Cities. Links to the whole series follow below.

===

I am energized and excited by the picture Gaia paints of the future of cities in 100 years. But how do we evolve our cities from 2021 to 2121? Can we backcast to see how we could develop a strategy to realize what you imagine?

Cities are Alive

Gaia: I want to inspire my intention in you. I have some … wisdom to share.

I am so grateful that James Lovelock recognized that as a planet I, Gaia, am a living system. Not only am I alive, but I am the creator of all life on this planet – and I long to have a conversation with the most complex species I have evolved to date – humans.

I want to share with you some of the ideas and design frameworks I have evolved, and how I am still in the process of evolving living, evolutionary organs for my Earth body. I have been busy creating forest organs for breathing, riparian organs for cleansing my wastes, heart organs from the savannahs of Africa, circulatory organs from my rivers and lakes and homeostasis organs from my great oceans. Now I long for a system of Reflective Organs that allow me to express my consciousness and intelligent culture. I have imagined these organs to be Integral Cities. When I imagine a Planet of Integral Cities coming into existence, I will have a whole Reflective Organ system (like Map 4), with organelles formed from organizations and cells from you individual humans.

As a planet I have been around for 4 billion years and have ancestors in the universe who have shared with me universal design patterns that I put to good use. For instance, Cities are Complex Adaptive Living Human Systems. As such they are extensions of the living organisms that form you humans as individuals and collectives. Like all living systems I have created, cities demonstrate 3 behaviors: They

Survive
Adapt/connect with environment
Regenerate

Cities Evolve

As living organisms cities have the potential to develop through characteristic (archetypal and fractal) lifecycle stages of most living systems:

child, youth, adult, elder

Each of these stages has the potential to mature in ways that expand the worldviews – and centres of care – of your individual consciousness and the culture that contains it:

Ego, Ethno, Regional, Global (Your languages describe these as I, You/We, It, Its.)

In turn each of your worldviews can be related to a potential stage of maturity in engaging with the world – that I name as:

Waking, Growing, Cleansing/Healing, Wholing

Elisabet Sahtouris, the evolution biologist who has explored so much about the living system contained in cells and microbiology, wisely recognizes that humans are a very young species. (By comparison to the honeybees that you study for insights through biomimicry – honeybees are 100 million years old). Your species is maybe a million years old if we stretch it.

Elisabet says, as a young species, you have been and are naturally conflicted and very competitive. This is very typical of the child and youth stages of most species. This youthful stage of your species – with all its conflicts and competition is what has brought you to the circumstances that you experience in the world today. In your youth you tend to see the world through a I/It lenses and challenge life with a competitive attitude.

My first mentoring insight for you is that unless you can mature and outlive this stage to embrace a wider circle of care, and become cooperative and collaborative, your species may not mature into the organs I Gaia so greatly desire.

These are the links to the full lecture exploring the evolution of Gaia’s Human Hives in the next hundred years.

Gaia Mentors Schooling for a Planet of Integral Cities 2121 (1) Big Challenges

Gaia Mentors Schooling for a Planet of Integral Cities 2121 (2) Imagine Gaia Thrives

Gaia Mentors Schooling for a Planet of Integral Cities 2121 (3) Alive Cities Evolve

Gaia Mentors Schooling for a Planet of Integral Cities 2121 (4) World Threats

Gaia Mentors Schooling for a Planet of Integral Cities 2121 (5) Population Growth

Gaia Mentors Schooling for a Planet of Integral Cities 2121 (6) Powers of 10

Gaia Mentors Schooling for a Planet of Integral Cities 2121 (7) Demographics Evolve

Gaia Mentors Schooling for a Planet of Integral Cities 2121 (8) Nature Economy

Gaia Mentors Schooling for a Planet of Integral Cities 2121 (9) Systems Reframe

Gaia Mentors Schooling for a Planet of Integral Cities 2121 (10) Development

Gaia Mentors Schooling for a Planet of Integral Cities 2121 (11) New Cities

Gaia Mentors Schooling for a Planet of Integral Cities 2121 (12) Conclusion

Integral City Beyond Resilient, 2021 Cohort 2

Integral City is proud to deepen our partnership with Ubiquity University to deliver our flagship course Beyond Resilient: Integral City Inquiry, Action, Impact. (BR).

This course – delivered online starting ***September 15 to December 1, 2021*** , is for Catalysts who seek new ways:

to work with multiple groups and organizations to engage inquiry and action for reinventing today’s cities for the future.
to interact in-depth with the 4+1 Voices of the Integral City to prototype strategic possibilities.
to learn new solutions, tools and guiding principles to enable the emergence of sustainability and resilience for the future of cities now.
to discover the unique contributions that you make to the aliveness of the Human Hive.

Beyond Resilient (delivered online) enables Practitioners, Catalysts and Meshworkers to build capacitating scaffolds so that cities work for everyone. Participants grow their leadership to serve the city to thrive within the Master Code of Care: Caring for Self, Others, Place, Planet.

This course explores the city as the Human Hive and co-creates the conditions for you to catalyze and explore all the Voices who inhabit your spheres of influence – including family, neighbourhood, workplaces, recreation zones, communities, city, and eco-regions.

You will have the opportunity to experiment with new designs for the challenges you face in your city environments. And you will gain experience with a set of five maps and an evolutionary compass to discover new solutions to the VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) problems that plague the cities of today. You will leave the course with new tools and a set of guiding principles we call the Master Code of Care to enable the emergence of sustainability, resilience and regeneration for the future of cities now.

Faculty are Marilyn Hamilton & Beth Sanders.

Click here for Details and Registration.

Mini Book Review: The Politics of Waking Up – Power and Possibility in the Fractal Age

This brilliant book by Indra Adnan, is exactly the antidote for those who despair of ever making a difference in the usual politics of our world. It resonates with a new language of relationships in this time when we are called to revitalize our communities – Indra calls it the fractal age. Those who see the patterns of ” I-We-World, cooperation, collaboration, stories, maps and feminine intelligence” will recognize themselves in the pages.

Indra tells a personal story of a journey seeking the evidence for natural archetypal patterns and how she interprets them in deeply wholistic ways. This book has an “edginess” to the whole exploration of politics and the clear daring that she and Pat Kane set out when they co-created Alternative UK with three strategies: co-create a new media; network networks; nurture CAN’s.

The book’s exploration of fractals gives us whole new lenses to look at the world and see possibilities instead of despair. I am inspired by her multi-cultural personal journeys, commitment to service in every stage of her career – and her vulnerability and curiosity about how she can make a difference. This book shows us all that each of us as individuals belongs to a new collective that can make a difference for a world who desperately needs to regenerate in this fractal age.

I found this book a page-turning read to even move beyond Waking Up – into Growing Up power and possiblity for the work that calls Integral City into reinventing communities and cities. This book builds a bridge through/to the evolutionary impulse that connects our work.

Upcoming Integral City & Constellation Events with Place Purpose

What	When/Where	Time
Beyond Smart: Practices Tools & Maps for the Human Hive	Self-Guided Course – Anytime; Live Classes will be announced	08:00-10:00PST 16:00-18:00 BST 15:00-17:00 CET
Beyond Resilient: Integral City Inquiry Action & Impact	Wednesday September 15, 2021 Trimester (12 weeks)	16:00-18:00 BST 15:00-17:00 CET
Cities Rising for a Regenerative World	Free Course, Ubiquity University	Anytime, Self-Guided Course
Mastering Practical Learning for Regenerating City and Bioregion Ecocity World Summit 2022	Ecocity World Summit 2022, February 22-24, 2022	Check online Progeamme
Green Wave – Organizations Serving Planet, Place, People, Marilyn Hamilton Speaking (URL TBD)	October 29, 2021	8:00-10:30 PST 16:00-1730 BST
City Nestworking	Wednesday January 13, 2022 Trimester (12 weeks)	08:00-10:00 PST 16:00-18:00 BST 15:00-17:00 CET
Foundations of Doughnut Economics (Ubiquity University)	June 9 – June 30, 2021 Self-Guided Anytime
MRA, Ubiquity University	Check Ubiquity U website	Register any time. Choose Live and/or Self-Guided Learning at your own pace.
Peace Day 2021 International Day of Peace for World Leaders & Youth	September 21, 2021
FemmeQ Retreat and Global Gathering, To Ignite the Deep Feminine Intelligence needed for a Regenerative Future Blue Spirit Retreat, Nosara, Costa Rica.	July 26^th – 31^st 2021 recordings now available	Click here for Details & Recordings
Introduction to Appreciative Inquiry (AI): learn to ask what is working, to amplify successes, and focus your “appreciative lens” VENUE – CCPE Beauchamp Lodge 2 Warwick Crescent, London UK W2 6NE	Thursday & Friday 9 & 10 September 2021 9.30 – 4.30 BST	Book and pay: contact suzanne@appreciatingpeople.co.uk or 07940 726067

Authors Leading the Way to Regenerativity

These 4 books inspired the lecture to the Russia Futures Lab on Schooling for a Planet of Integral Cities 2121.

Each of them contains vital messages for all human systems in cities to regenerate aliveness for all life. Click on the book for more information.

Choose Earth

Donut Economics

Earth Democracy

Earth Dance

Urban Hub 20 e-book Spanish – Translation by Raquel Torrent, Curator Marilyn Hamilton.

“This is a truly brilliant and much needed presentation. The author has brought together an extremely intelligent group of writers and thinkers to apply Integral principles to the problems and creative openings of city, regions, ecosystems, and the biosphere itself. Each one of these areas is treated as a living, complex, integral system, and the ways that they all mutually interact are fully explored, with the added benefit that they are all looked through an integral lens, insuring that a fully whole and complete path is taken. There is really no other approach like this available, and certainly none that give as full and comprehensive and inclusive an account. I can’t recommend this approach more highly, it truly touches a level of genius.” Ken Wilber—Sex, Ecology, Spirituality; The Integral Vision

link to Amazon Spanish: https://www.amazon.es/dp/B094TJK8R9

And these for the eBook.:

https://issuu.com/paulvanschaik/docs/urbanhub20-a4-_spanish

And to download: DocDroid https://docdro.id/muJl1IY

New links for the e-book in English:

https://issuu.com/paulvanschaik/docs/urbanhub20-vuca3

https://www.slideshare.net/PauljvsSS/urban-hub20-accelerating-citychangein-a-vuca-world-thriveable-cities-244157764

Celebrating Our Cities as Regenerative Places in the Coming Quarter of 2021

Collectively it is time to do our utmost to ensure that people, especially youth, can contribute to the regeneration of nature without compromising their ability to earn a living. Ryah Chandler, Founder, Wise Generation.

September 21 marks the start of what Integral City calls the Place Quarter (from September 21 to December 21 ). We have published this newsletter early so that we can share all the opportunities that explore, enable and equip us for regeneration. We are curious about how you might respond to the searching questions of our younger generations: What tangible job prospects will be made available to them? Will these roles provide them with a competitive and reliable income? Can we establish key relationships with future employers who commit to hiring graduates – providing security for those who are bold enough to be early participants?

What motivates you to respond to Code Red and regenerate our beautiful planet for the wellbeing of all life? Where do we find the energy and resources to build bridges to the evolutionary leap into cooperation and collaboration? Visit us on our Integral City Website and Blog or post a comment about your city interests on our Mighty Network.