On the day that I write this I have heard from our Integral City Intern and a Colleague in Findhorn that they are both so ill we cannot meet even on line.

I have learned that Auroville is being attacked from within and without by political forces that are actually using JCB’s to destroy forests planted by humans to restore the desertified land.

I have heard from teams working on Education and Transformation that the teams themselves are being undermined by hierarchical structures who demand and control rather than create the life conditions for co-creativity to flourish.

On the other hand, I have been gifted healing technologies that enable me to send healing energies to others.

I have been reminded by wise elders that when political fragmentation seems to be destroying hard-won resources and capacities that the roots of these actions are probably informed by trauma and the solutions are likely to emerge through healing and strengthening relationships.

Another Integral evolutionary admires an article that appreciates two apparently conflicting points of view for their individual merits and searches for the possibility that they may both be able to serve a greater good/context without tearing each other apart.

And I have been asked to contribute integrally informed frameworks, modes and ideas about living the transformative learning in a community that wants to teach others.

All of this leads me to be curious about the need for us to practice deep awareness, meditation, and compassion, to resolve our own shadows and trauma.

Witnessing all this turbulence (both positive and negative) within communities wanting to practise the most intelligent behaviors for global wellbeing, suggests to me that with such a VUCA world we will have to adapt to many life conditions. And those life conditions arising from consciousness and culture will be exacerbated by life conditions arising from floods, fire and climate change. We are on a journey to control ourselves even as we realize that we cannot control the environmental contexts in which we find ourselves.

Is the lesson that in order to adapt with any degree of wisdom we will need to transform our worldviews, perspectives and capacities to meet the levels of complexity that we have created for ourselves? Perhaps, by investing in the transformation processes we know are calling us, we may then be positioned so that we can actually regenerate from the inside out – self/ others/place/planet?

The stages to our path ahead clearly unfold from Waking Up to the impact all levels of reality manifest on the whole. From Waking Up we must Grow Up so that we can Adapt. And I suspect that embedded in the capacity to Adapt will be a commitment to Clean Up our shadows, traumas and conflicts.  Through these processes, Adaptation will open us up to Transformation into a more complex Whole. Our worldviews, values, actions, relationships and systems must all Transform into a Whole that embraces Gaia as the home we share with all Life.

As we transform through these stages of Waking, Growing, Cleaning and Wholing, we will be positioned to Regenerate our Selves, each Other, our Places and our Planet.

Listen to the Introduction to Book 3: Integral City 3.7: Reframing Complex Challenges for Gaia’s Human Hives for a fuller discussion of Waking, Growing, Cleaning and Wholing