What is "Coming Down to Earth"?
The Coming Down to Earth online summit was a live event which ran from June-July 2020. Although the summit has past, much of the content is recorded and remains on the website for anyone to access. By hosting a group, you will hopefully be able to make good use of the content you decide to focus on - there's a lot there and you may want to return several times to see different parts.
The summit emerged from the sense that the times call for new inquiries, conversations and experiments around how we experience, work with and catalyze transformation that can arise from the conflicts we encounter through life. As 2020 unfolds, amidst a global pandemic, the ongoing erosion of ecosystems capacity to sustain and generate life, social unrest, economical depression and extreme inequalities, political disconnect from the major challenges of our times, people's growing distrust of the institutions in place and broken eco-systems of sense-making, our contexts will become increasingly more volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. These conditions can easily lead to a raise in the levels and scales of a multitude of conflicts.
On the other hand, change is here, happening inside of us, in our houses, everywhere. Everything is always in the making, in constant movement. In fact, what we call self is movement, always in relationship, always be-coming. In that sense, each moment is filled with possibilities. The tide is always turning, and so are we in the middle of this great turning. The emerging future will come from the wilds of these times and our capacity to meet this space of not knowing together, with open hearts, open minds and open wills, our capacity to shapeshift. We are being called to be with our inner conflicts and the more collective ones, in a different way.
We are not offering a secret formula or the promise of an happy ending. This summit is our collective offering, an invitation to inquire into the dynamics of conflict in our lives and to open up spaces of possibilities, and perhaps reimagine what it means to be human in this time.
Here are some questions of interest to us:
How can we develop our faculties for really seeing and understanding difficult situations? How do we experience obstacles and opportunities in our life?
How can we develop respect for what is in the state of becoming, for what is about to come, in a person, in a group, in an organisation?
Can we develop the capacity to look into a conflict in ways that help its essence to be revealed?
Can we stop reproducing habits and patterns of behaviour that create results that nobody wants?
Can we meet our individual and collective shadows and traumas in ways that are conducive to more healthy and regenerative cultures?
The Coming Down to Earth Online Summit intends to open up space to hear a wide range of perspectives on how we shift from conflict resolution which attempts to solve the problems that lead to conflict, towards looking to conflict as a catalyst for transformation: changing the relationships between those in conflict to open up possibilities for deeper personal, structural, cultural shifts. Aiming to increase collaboration, co-creation and collective sensemaking, reduce violence and increase justice: our understanding of conflict transformation views peace as centered and rooted in the quality of relationships. These relationships have two dimensions: our face-to-face interactions and the ways we structure our social, political, economic, and cultural relationships.
We are striving for a world in which conflicts are seen as something natural and human, a disruptive space of possibilities. We believe that individuals and societies are able to overcome conflicts about our identities, relationships or structures if we nurture ways of seeing and being with conflicts that do not resort to violence and disconnection. When enough people have the understanding and abilities to commit to holding space for conflicts to manifest their underlying essence, we will see a growing movement towards more healthy and regenerative cultures.
This journey invites us to set our feet on the ground, fall apart, nurture the soils in which life emerges and seed the future.
“Out beyond the ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing, there is a field I will meet you there.”
— RUMI
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