Meet Sue Cooper, Integral City Meshworker 2024.
“The goal of life is for your heartbeat to match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.” Joseph Campbell
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Sue Cooper: Nurse. Ayurvedic Lifestyle Educator. Mindfulness and Meditation Teacher. She is continually amazed at all that this beautiful life has to offer. She receives guidance with Grace and serves community empowerment with Care, Compassion, Love and Aliveness.
Sue Cooper is a graduate of Integral City Meshwork’s Beyond Resilient Course and has been taking her learnings to her home cities – Nottingham and Nottinghamshire – especially through her influence as a Living Cities Earth Co-Founder.
Sue calls her work Living Cities: Notts – applying the Integral City framework of the four voices to call the whole Living Cities: Notts System to learn from itself.
Sue started her career as a Nurse and then amplified that profession with Ayurvedic practices (learning with Deepak Chopra). The words that set Sue alight as a new trainee nurse in the early 1970’s came from Florence Nightingale (1820-1910):
‘The role of the nurse is to put the patient in the best possible condition so that nature can act and healing occur.’
Sue explains:
When we care for the whole person – physical, mental, emotional, spiritual in relationship with others and the environment we create a compassionate relationship and promote comfort and care. Florence Nightingale believed that incorporating five essential elements, pure air, clean water, efficient drainage, cleanliness and light/direct sunlight, these elements accelerate the body’s innate healing abilities. Whilst we now have drugs, surgeries and incredible diagnostic technologies, we must remember our interconnectivity in the World and the fundamentals of actively caring for ourself, each other, our community and our home, Mother Earth not only when we become unwell but as an act of deep responsibility to maintain vitality and active health.
For over 10 years I travelled and explored many natural healing modalities from indigenous cultures around the world, their applications to modern day Self Care and the fusion with scientific research from Health Care. The essence of these ancient cultures and traditions had been forgotten through all our advances in the scientific model of health. We had lost the art of connection to our deeper, truer, beautiful Self where we learn to feel again, to be in partnerships with family and a sense of belonging and empowerment of community and our natural environment. Alone it can be hard, together it can be fun, we simply need to open our minds and hearts to connecting and finding each other.
During my years of caring as a clinical nurse, researcher, manager, health educator and business owner, I found that the energy we brought into the relationships made possible solutions that were based on mutual respect and agency.
Compassionate community building through activating and amplifying holistic health modalities as we strengthen local ties, is what I’m called to do.
When I consider Interior Truth, I realize there is only so far you can go on your own.
I know from my own experience of overwhelm, that I need the courage to ask for help. When we are seeking help, how do we find each other? In 2017 we created a mass meditation event and holistic well-being family day in our home city of Nottingham, England. Thousands came to explore the energy and presence of all contributors sharing their skills, passion and holistic therapies. This day transformed the way we see and act with each other from competition to collaboration and still exists to this day. From this day, MOMM was born – Moments Of Mass Mindfulness .
The following year, May 2018, 3 cities, Bristol, Leeds and Nottingham linked together to be in nature and to be fully present in the parks and centre at the same time, with the intention of peace in our hearts, homes, cities and planet.
In 2019 The HeartMath Institute requested a collaboration and we expanded our small idea from 1 city to 3 cities to hundreds of cities and countries as recorded in the figures below.
For a beautiful view on how these days and initiatives evolved and co-created a harmonic resonance of well-being in the world watch this video.
MOMM is now a dynamic, volunteer-led initiative rooted in care and compassion, connection and collaboration and experienced through co-creating compassionate community gatherings, engaging in citizen, business, charity and governance action to raise awareness of mindfulness practices for conscious health and vibrant well-being.
At the same time, Sue’s Social Enterprise, Self Care World was nurturing the same intentions, offering, renewing and regenerating, fresh and vibrant perspectives of care. Like the Master/Gaia Code of Care, Sue has found that as we practice caring for our self we naturally radiate a more peaceful and heartful way to others we enliven both our communities and our world.
Sue holds many voluntary roles in her local community. She is a Non-Executive Director of Positively Empowered Kids CIC, which inspires and listens to the voice of the children whilst holding an annual festival of well-being in the Nottinghamshire community. Their fourth festival in 2024 drew in over 4,000 people to enjoy all the superhero activities to experience the diverse offerings in support of young people and their families.
Sue is an honorary Ambassador to Nottingham Mindfulness Group and encourages people to connect and join in events like the weekly on-line mindfulness offering of Sean Glossop for settling the mind whilst sharing knowledge and wisdom from an array of trusted sources.
She also supports Nottinghamshire Hospice offers care at home in the community to people at the end of their life and their families. They are the largest provider of direct community care in the country and it is a deep privilege to be an ambassador for their service, their wonderful staff and volunteers and their very ethos – ‘Compassion lives here.’ Palliative care has never lost its roots in holistic care, treating the patient, family, home and community as one interactive whole.
In 2020 Sue was invited to run daily global meditations by Co-creating Europe, Caravan of Unity for 21 days leading up to World Peace Day. She remembers:
As this was during the period where we were all locked in and fairly new to the amazing opportunities that Zoom would bring to the collective, I invited meditation teachers and guides from around the world to offer a daily meditation practice and a much-appreciated time of convivial conversation. Dr Marilyn Hamilton was on the organising team and when we were out and about in the world again, Marilyn came to stay and visit the many projects and inspirational people in our local community. When I was invited to be a co-founder of Living Cities Earth, I recognised the vision deeply reflected by own passions and those of our local community.
This vision is vast and achievable as we activate in our local communities the way of being to human well together, for aliveness with love. From the Earth vision, a few of us have volunteered to distilled many of the concepts and initiated Living Cities–Notts, creating a blueprint for collective action in one of our regions in the County of Nottinghamshire. We are being welcomed in, building a network of trust through the 4 voices of the city and developing a real willingness to find a path together towards a compassionate whole person, whole system and natural way of living and working – flexing and flowing – together.
Amplifying MOMM, at the beginning of each year, Sue has become a co-creator of the 40 days of Feast for the Soul. She was invited by Sarah McLean in 2021 to become co-director of Feast for the Soul, weaving together the 40 day worldwide spiritual practice immersive. Feast for the Soul has been running for 17 years from 15th January – 23rd February each year. The free resource library is vast, featuring meditations, mindfulness practices, contemplation practices, prayers and poems from worldwide teachers and guides. From a perspective of life-long learning and practices leading to coherence, Sue curates these resources as an opportunity to experience peacefulness and calm therefore self-regulating the mind-body connection, enhancing energy and vitality and a sense of being fully present and engaged.
A highlight of 2024 for Sue was an invitation by Charter for Compassion to attend the 4 day, XIX Nobel Peace Laureates Summit in Monterrey, Mexico under the theme ‘Peace and Progress: A Path to Collective Prosperity. The summit was a catalyst for innovative solutions, fostering a renewed spirit of collaboration in the pursuit of a more peaceful and equitable future. It was a time of activating and amplifying the need for us all to step up and join together in this peaceful and passionate endeavour.
On a personal note, Sue was honoured to represent the Charter for Compassion as Ambassador from the U.K.. She delivered the Karen Armstrong Humanitarian Award to an inspirational group of activists – Seeds of Peace – honouring their dedication to empowering young leaders who will carry the torch of peace into the future, lighting the way for generations to come.
AWARD
A quintessential Meshworker, Sue catalyses islands of coherence wherever her callings take her, weaving systems into higher orders of consciousness – as captured in this inspiration from Nobel Laureate, Ilya Prigogine:
“When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.”
We are proud to award the
Integral City Meshworker of the Year 2024 to Sue Cooper.
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Definition of Meshworker
A Meshworker of the Year demonstrates the meshworking intelligence as defined on the website . Meshworking intelligence creates a “meshwork” by weaving together the best of two operating systems — one that self-organizes, and one that replicates hierarchical structures. The resulting meshwork creates and aligns complex responsive structures and systems that flex and flow.
Candidates for the Meshworkers of the Year Award invest dollars, time, effort and expertise at a level of complexity that serves a whole city or cities. Here are our previous winners:
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