From activist to shaper of transformation

Robin Alfred has lived in the eco-village of Findhorn in Scotland for many years. Now he applies what he learned about the power of listening and openness to greater intelligence in his work as a consultant in collective fields, and to find impetus for a new activism.

evolve: How would you describe your work? What is the core intention of what you do?

Robin Alfred: Two or three years ago, I would have said that my purpose was to help people live their potential. I would now describe myself more as somebody who is working to support the facilitation of transformational fields. I'm interested in the field in which the system is embedded because this field has intelligence. If we can access the subtle intelligence of the field, it will give us insights and facilitate movement that we otherwise have no access to – movements in both the system and the individuals who are part of that field.  So I would say now I'm a facilitator of transformational fields. At least that's my aspiration.

Recently I was working with a company to help restructure their organization. By the end of the 3-day meeting we had lots of ideas and flip charts, but nothing was really coming together. I had no particular ideas of my own to contribute either and felt the best thing I could do, as the facilitator of their process, was simply to sit in the room with as much presence as I could manage, and with my heart as open as I could have it and hold a clear intention. In my experience, intention catalyzes the field. And the groups, which were working on different themes, came back two hours later and told me that everything had fallen into place, as if by magic, and they could now see a coherent whole. Maybe part of what supported this happening was that I held a space and helped to create an energetic field with a clear intention that, in turn, helped activate the self-organizing principle and emergent purpose of the organization.

e: What do you mean by emergent purpose?

RA: Let me answer with an example: About six years ago, we ran a highly structured conference at Findhorn called the New Story Summit. I was a co-facilitator of the 7-day event and in the middle of the week, on Wednesday morning, we had scheduled a whole day of Open Space. We had a board full of Post-Its with times and venues for meetings about different topics. Now, some people went into the auditorium on the Tuesday night and rearranged all the Post-Its into a big sign that said: “WE DON’T KNOW”. They were challenging the notion that we could know what the new story for humanity needed to be. Coming in and seeing this, I felt strangely calm. This ‘WE DON’T KNOW’ was a voice from the field that was represented here and, somehow, needed to be heard. I wasn't worried when the 400 participants came in expressing various reactions to what happened, which ranged from anger to agreement. I was curious.  What is this voice telling me and us? I didn't try to fix it; I practiced being open and present. And almost minute by minute, or moment by moment, I found myself ‘downloading’ the next thing to do. We had times of chaos with different reactions being voiced, we had silence, we had some form of structured dialogue, and more. All these steps in the process just downloaded themselves through me. By the end of the morning, we had recreated a program for the afternoon. It was an amazing experience and it felt, again, as if something magical had happened.

When we have no structure to fall back on and we have no plan, all we can be is in the presence of emergence, because everything else is gone. And there's something very imminent, almost transcendent, that shows itself when we are in the presence of emergence. At the conference, people were touched by that, and we could feel the intelligence of the field manifesting through us because we weren't blocked with our plans or ideas. It just could come through. That was the high point so far of my facilitation and a realization of many things I learned on my way, especially through my time at Findhorn and with my teacher, Thomas Hübl.

e: You have lived for a long time in Findhorn. Can you say a bit more about what you learned there?

RA: I was a criminal justice social worker in the East End of London until I came to Findhorn 29 years ago. Then I had a kind of epiphany while I was sitting in a circle and suddenly felt love for everybody in the circle beyond their personality, persona and politics. I knew I wanted to live in a place and in a way where I could continue to experience that.

AS A FACILITATOR, THE MINUTE YOU THINK ABOUT WHAT YOU'RE GOING TO DO NEXT, YOU'RE LOST.

Four years later, I came to live here and for the first seven years, I learned a lot about living more consciously and more deeply, working to embody the three core principles of Findhorn: “work is love in action”, “inner listening” and “co-creation with nature”. Today I'm more outside the community but live close by.  I express my purpose in the world in a different way. The most important thing I learned, and from which I still draw in my work, is the intention to listen within and to give gratitude by offering myself to something bigger than myself.

This also guides me in my work as a facilitator. My teacher Thomas Hübl said once that, as a facilitator, the minute you think about what you're going to do next, you're lost because you are no longer really present to what is wanting to emerge.  So, when I'm facilitating a group, I now carry an intention and less and less of a prepared plan, because until we've met and tuned in with each other and listened to each other deeply, we don't know what's needed now. I am feeling much more awake and creative by inviting what wants to unfold into the space. I like to work emergently, which has a freshness to it. There is a place for training, developing skills and using models and tools, but I'm more excited and feel more creative when I focus more on holding an intention for a group, creating a coherent field imbued with presence, and allowing things to emerge from there.

e: You also apply this deeper presence and listening to a new view on activism. How does this show up in this area for you?

RA: Yes, I call myself a recovering activist because, before coming to Findhorn, I was almost compulsively involved in many social and ecological campaigns. It was a reaction against things I felt were wrong in society. A lot of activism is very well-intentioned but stays reactive. And I think, there is a different kind of activism, in which we acknowledge what is here, and then listen and tune in as deeply as we can to find out what the next evolutionary step is that we are called to take. I’ve developed a five-step recovery program for new activism. The first step is honoring the past, which means seeing ourselves as the product of billions of years of evolution, noticing that this being that lives here today is an extraordinary creation and honoring the enormity of creation that has given rise to this being that I am. There's the dust of my ancestors in me. Then I think there's a place for radical presence and to practice what Thomas Hübl calls global social witnessing. Can I host the suffering in the world? Can I feel it without either numbing myself and disassociating or becoming overwhelmed by it? Can I practice then, as a third step, a sense of bowing down, of humility, of accepting and placing something bigger than myself at the center of my life? Then I talk about the step of being still and listening, which we've touched on already; and the fifth step is to take the first step, or as poet David Whyte calls it, to ‘start close in’. Maybe the thing you have to do is take the first step. Then the next step will show itself and when you look back you can see that there was a path. This is also true for my life and my work: the path ahead is formed by each step that comes from a deeper listening to what is and wants to emerge.