How Islands of Coherence in a Sea of Chaos Changes Social Change
by Louise Marra, Laura Calderon de la Barca, Lian Zeitz and John Kania (Collective Change Lab)
Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, humanity will have discovered fire .
― Pierre Teilhard De Chardin, 1923
When a system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to elevate the entire system to a higher order.
— Ilya Prigogine, Chemist and Nobel Laureate, 2020
We have entered a time in history where breakdown is occurring everywhere. The most fundamental breakdown is not outside us, it is happening within us. If we are to discover fire for a second time, and if we are to elevate our systems to a higher order, we must break patterns, shed unhelpful beliefs, and adopt different ways of being in the world.
First and foremost, we must shed the belief that, as humans, we are cognitive beings living in our minds — that our brain is the source of sensemaking while the body is a mess of skin, tissue and bones designed to hold up our precious head. In fact the body is the first source of wisdom, with more than 80% of the fibers of the vagus nerve, the largest nerve network in our bodies, flowing with sensory information from the body to the brain.
Ultimately, for our survival, humanity must better integrate mind, body and spirit while integrating these spheres with the earth’s body, where we belong. Here and now, we invite you to focus on your body, seeing it for what it is, an extraordinary source of data, insight, wisdom and the embodiment of our creative life force.
We hope you can treat what comes next as serious play. You can choose to skip over this part of the article but you’ll be reinforcing a pattern that isn’t working for you, nor is it helping you and colleagues to become more effective at catalyzing and supporting social change .
If you wish to come along we invite you to travel into your body in order to feel what it’s like to feel coherence. To paraphrase Prigogine, coherence within systems changes everything. And far and away, the best way to understand what coherence is and does, is by relating to it through the body, your body.
So, if you are up for this exploration, start by giving yourself a few moments to settle. Take a few conscious breaths and set a gentle intention to feel coherence, as we enter into this short journey, with no pressure. Just aim to feel even one percent. If we expect too much, what we will feel is our own pressure, and pressure is not coherence.
Come along and give it a go, as an inner experiment, an invitation to feel the creative life force that is your body and that flows with the flow of the earth and with life itself.
Note: For the following section, we offer you the option of playing this audio so you can close your eyes and follow Louise’s voice, and continue reading the rest of the article after the experience. If you would rather read, we will offer some cues in the text inviting you to stop and give yourself space to experience what is written on the page.
Experiencing Coherence
Stop for a moment, and see if you can simply presence yourself: observe what is happening inside your skin — the sensations in your physical body, the emotions in your emotional body, the thoughts in your mental body? Move through each body layer slowly, noticing what becomes apparent to you, with a soft and friendly attitude. Just accept all that you find without judgement.
From here, let’s slowly begin to feel our body system “systeming.Your body has many systems. We will tune into a few.
Begin with the skeletal system. Can you take a moment to feel your bones, the earth element part of your body, holding you up? Feel the energy in your bones, their density and aliveness. Take a moment to offer gratitude for this system that holds you up and allows you to move through the world. What do you notice? What felt sense do you get from tuning into your bones? What song or vibration might you hear?
Now lets go to your fluid body, the cardiovascular system, the water element part of us. Feel your heart beating, imagine it pumping blood through thousands of veins, arteries, and capilliaries — a network estimated to be around 60,000 miles. The water body includes the muscles, the soft tissue. Can you appreciate the magnitude of this function right now in your body, all keeping you alive, life wants you to live.
Next, your respiratory system, the air element of us. This amazing system that has a rhythm to it from the day we are born, that brings the gift of air and space into every cell of our body and eliminates carbon dioxide. It is an amazing collaboration in our bodies of the nasal passages, the throat, the larynx, the windpipe, the airways and the lungs — all working together, for you. All keeping you alive . What do you notice as you tune in to this system, can you feel your own bespoke rhythm? See if you can elongate the out breath for a few breath cycles and notice again, as this can help us bring our parasympathetic online, our vagus nerve.
And finally your nervous system, which we often work with closely, is an amazing system, part of the fire element. This divine antenna connects you to everything. It is part of the sensing mechanism of the Earth. It allows you to feel the ocean, the rocks, the trees, the animals, and of course other humans. It is always scanning for safety. It is both extraordinary and challenging, as the autonomic part often signals threat based on past experiences, even when no threat exists in the present. Its make up also ensures we can alchemise what threats are arising via resourcing and turning the vagus nerve on . Can you tune into your nervous system and feel it as an electrical system, feel its alchemy, its power? You can tune this system, resource it, re-source it.
Of course, there are other systems. We won’t go through them all, so as not to overwhelm — there is an enormous amount going on inside you. And most of it is autonomic, happening without your conscious awareness.
Now, see if you can be aware, even one percent, of the communication between these parts of you.
These systems are not isolated. They are also systeming with the world around you — influenced by the light of the sun and moon, the tides, the collective soup we are swimming in, your environment, the trees, the land, the ocean. Your body ecosystems as a microcosm of the macrocosm, as a fractal of the whole. You are an ecosystem.
Always trying to balance itself, to harmonise. Seeking ease and flow between all the parts, working together for life. Bringing all the elements together for optimal life. This process of various parts of a system working to harmonise is coherence.
The role of coherence in systems
Coherence is the magic of the system trying to harmonise itself — to bring life back into connected flow. Life wants to live fully. It wants to flow. And we are the mechanism for that — for our own life, and together for humanity and for the Earth.
We are part of this harmonising, healing flow of life. It is amazing. And it is all natural.
Notice what is happening in your system now, as you tune into coherence — this harmonising, this communication of ease between all the systems in you, and the ones surrounding you, and beyond to the stars.
Let’s unpack this more cognitively now and link it to systems change.
Coherence, as we said above, is a process. It happens when different elements in a system start to operate as a unit, as parts of a whole, and serve a higher intelligence than they could on their own, the way an orchestra comes together for a symphony.
We humans can also cohere, coming together to form families, organizations, societies. It is part of the natural process of the Universe evolving into higher forms through coherence.
So, if coherence is a natural process, why isn’t it happening in how we are “humaning” together?
How trauma interrupts coherence
One very significant reason that coherence is rare among both individuals and systems today is that the systems in our body are holding the unprocessed trauma of past generations and there is so much trauma that has accumulated over the years that is still circling and needing to be transformed, transmuted. As well, humanity must transform the trauma that is currently being created by harmful interactions with the continued oppression and different crises that our world is experiencing right now. Finally, there is the trauma that comes from living within a separation rather than holistic paradigm. This leaves humanity isolated from its ecosystem with disastrous effects.
So what does trauma have to do with coherence, you may ask. Trauma breaks our natural coherence, because it is a fragmenting force meant to help us survive overwhelming or life-threatening experiences. When we have an overwhelming experience, the natural protective wisdom in charge of our survival functions, also known as our Autonomic Nervous Systems tries to protect us from overwhelm by segmenting away a part of the energy and information that is overwhelming us, and holding it outside of our awareness, in our physical body.
We all carry bits of this unprocessed trauma. We can either be the process of harmonisation for it, or we can carry on its patterns — passing it on to the next generation, to see if our descendants are willing to become the harmonising mechanism to bring the trauma back into coherence and into the flow of life.
To date in human evolution, there has not been enough attention given to the healing of collective and intergenerational trauma or the social infrastructure set up to transmute these circling energies that continue to create destiny for humanity with no freshness.
Feeling the collective in coherence
We are the system trying to heal itself, through our nervous systems. We just haven’t yet learned to work in this way — to see that we are part of that harmonising process, and that what is arising is here to be healed or integrated, and that there is a systemic intelligence, of a higher order, guiding the process that we do not control, but to which we can give ourselves over to.
This is how the system brings itself back into coherence and flow, through us. In other words, there is some collective work for each of us to do in conjunction with this systemic intelligence, to harmonize a certain part of the collective wounds creating coherence through our own bodies. Not taking on too much, just what we have capacity for, and not alone, but together with others, and in coherence with our collective healing intelligence. When we as a collective do not engage with the system this way, the wounds get passed on to the next generation.
Most of our world problems are collaboration and relational problems — across cultures, with the earth, and if we are to form the relational containers we need for the solutions to arrive, we must start to work with the trauma that keeps us apart and fragmented.
Take a moment to assess the quality of the relational fabric in your organisation or part of the system, you will undoubtedly see some of the fragmentation we are talking about.
Activist and author Adrienne Maree Brown provides perspective on what’s needed here, how to bring coherence into focus: “This is relationship building. And this is building trust. And consensually understanding how to be moved and inspired by each other without sometimes assuming that energy has to be sexual. That maybe that’s just an erotic exchange that’s actually about sharing knowledge, memory, power, and that to me is understanding levels of intimacy in relationship to liberation.”
We must build these relational containers that work with the flow of life, that is creative, erotic, alive, life giving, before we solution-make. The solutions will come through the coherence. We don’t want them coming from relational fragmentation. The depth and intimacy we need in our relationships must blossom for our world to flower.
Transmuting trauma into coherence
There has been enough passing it on. We need people who can metabolise, harmonise, and work in group fields to agree: it stops here. We metabolise here and we give expression to the past. We become the transforming vessel through which the circling energy of trauma is restored to the flow of life.
Our traumas need to be brought into consciousness within the vessel of a collective — and transformed — so they do not keep unconsciously affecting the future. The more the group can include what is unconscious, the more coherence we experience. More presence, more light, more love, more grounding.
When a group within a system learns to work in this way, it can transform many elements of the past that are represented by individual bodies within it. Humanity is super diverse now. One shows up with one’s ancestral lineages. Another shows up with theirs. And we all also bring the collective traumas we are all swimming in.
As we do this work, over and over, an island of coherence starts to form within ourselves, and the part of the system we are working with, and it starts to spread. Over time, we become more capable of being with higher degrees of discomfort and tension, without becoming overwhelmed and ungrounded. The coherence starts to extend to occupy more of ourselves. And when we do this as a group, or as a part of the system, we start to become an island of collective coherence.
This coherence literally shifts the trajectory of the future. We don’t dream a new future — we change the energy now, out of which a new future emerges.
If enough groups become islands of coherence in a sea of chaos, they will form a greater field of coherence even if they do not physically meet. Like the mycelium and mycorrhizal network beneath the ground, this coherence will enable — and in fact compel — a new movement of change.
And here is the important part. Though perhaps less noticed, particularly in the modern world, islands of coherence have emerged in all places across the globe at all times in human history. They are typically at the core of most successful movements, which arise through the development of an island that begins small and grows over time, sometimes astonishingly fast. Think: the Civil Rights Movement, LGBTQ Rights Movement, The Disability Rights Movement, Regenerative Agriculture and Food Systems Movement, (Re)Indigenisation movements, and Black Lives Matters.
In addition, there are many systems change efforts across the world that have created islands of coherence through employing the wisdom methodology of circles, used for thousands of years to support healing. One circle-based initiative which has been successful at creating islands of coherence in the U.S. and other counties is Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation™ (THRT). The work of TRHT, inspired by the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, is to create cross-sector islands of coherence through focusing their process on truth-telling, racial healing, relationship-building and narrative change. Using TRHT communities have focused on systems change in such areas as health, housing, education and jobs.
As much as we can point to other examples of doing this work, the most important place to look for answers to how to do this work is to search within yourself, bringing your innate gifts and your body’s wisdom to bear.
“Systeming” to create coherence
A defining quality of trauma — individual, organizational, collective — is that if we don’t transmute the trauma it keeps us stuck in responding to the trauma mostly unconsciously. If we stay in fight mode, in push mode, in fix mode, we replicate the trauma energy. And no new timeline for transformational change can emerge.
Humanity is stuck in this pattern — with climate change and with the repetitive cycles of violence that erupt continuously within the human realm. We are caught in trauma vortexes.
We all are part of the movement of life, and so are our systems. We are always “systeming”, being the system in action, in every moment — through our being, our work, our relationships, our service. Through our more-or-less coherent transmission, we inject something into the way the world moves and the way our systems operate.
The big movements of life are made of countless small movements, including ours.
What humanity needs now is conscious “systeming” or “eco-systeming” to evolve our future. Not by trying to change the future, but changing the energy now that always creates the future. We don’t create futures by visioning them, we create futures from the energy of the present that then creates fresh future possibilities, or not.
It is easy for us to continue the patterns of the past. But that doesn’t create new futures. The busy highway many of us travel, is a kind of drug — numbing our power to see the many moments we have to exit it and create a new future possibility. Instead we keep going on the highway, passing on the same patterns.
It might seem like a small thing, but it is so important to realize that at any moment we can pause. We can metabolise or harmonise what is arising in ourselves, our teams, our organisations, our families, our systems. In doing so, we shift that energy and create a new patterning for the future.
We need future possibilists, future weavers who bring the future into the now. People willing to become a present change creator who will create different timelines for humanity and the planet. Becoming a future possibilist is just this: we don’t focus on a future in the future, we attend to the present and how we weave the past that is arising now. We meet it with presence and light so a new possible future is born here and now. Otherwise we are just escaping the present, where the past is seeking its healing, and trying to jump into a future that feels way better than the current state, but that becomes a bypass instead of a real option.
We believe we are the planet’s healing mechanism. We are part of her architecture for new movements and new flows. But it is not about leaping into an imagined future. It’s about changing the current timelines we are on now, in each moment, as the past arises to be integrated, to be healed. This must be done collectively. As somatic therapist and healer Prentice Hempill says, “Some things seem too big to be felt alone because they are. They require the collective to hold the space for big feeling, for it to move through, and to remind us that we’re not alone.”
This isn’t the time of the heroic individual. It is the time of courageous group fields that step forward, and agree to work differently.Groups that metabolise trauma and transmute it into presence, birth new possibilities. New timelines.
To agree to work in this way is to invite coherence. It is to work toward becoming a coherent and sacred vessel for change as an island of coherence.
Working differently to attain coherence
This approach is radically different from the orthodox world. It seeks to heal as part of the work. It seeks to build coherence by healing the past energies as they arise. It works on being the system changing, to change the system.
We have developed methods and processes, ingredients for this work that we feel are important. They will need to be adapted to or created from cultural context.
All organisations and systems sit on trauma vortexes — undigested material that forms part of the organisation or system’s unresolved past. These trauma fields are always seeking to restore their swirling energy, transmuting suboptimal conditions, into flowing, free and creative energy.
We can work in ways that help this happen with some ease, and together.
We also need a new language for this work, especially in the orthodox, Anglo/English dominant world.
Bayo Akomolafe says — the therapy couch is too thin for the healing that is needed in the world, and we agree. This work of transmuting collective trauma needs a collective body. It needs groups and systems of people willing to be this vessel of change.
And the traumas are not really personal. They are intergenerational. They are collective. Our language needs to reflect this. We can say:
“Ï have ancestral rage moving through me…or fear, or shame…that wants to be met, loved, expressed.”
This is not a personal fault. It is the system seeking coherence — through us.
Coherence is all around us — in the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity — it is a foundational force in nature. Now is our time to pay closer attention to what the Earth’s patterns are telling us. We must ask ourselves: how can we harness these patterns — these energies — towards coherence and towards love. If we can make significant progress in this task, it is quite possible that for a second time in the history of the world we will have discovered fire.
Footnotes:
- Adrienne Maree Brown; Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good
2. By fields we mean the collective relational spaces that are formed when we, and others with whom we have connection and commit to working with, come together and interact for a common purpose.
3. It is important to note that islands of coherence, and movements in general, can experience resonance, harmonization and diffuse and spread, sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly. However, just as in all change, progress forward, even large progress does not guarantee success forever. Changes in context and the energy in the island of coherence can shift conditions and, as with most of the movements listed here, regress.
4. When we bring higher consciousness or light into denser consciousness or circling trauma energy, the higher frequency brings that circling energy back into flow and life force. This means it sets that trauma free.
5. Prentis Hemphill, What It Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World (Random House, 2024)
