Executive Champions’ Workshop (August 20-23, 2024)

Reconnecting to Place and Re-shaping Our Future

The world’s institutions – business, education, governance, community development – and the hierarchical leadership models that shapes and animates them do not match the reality we face. The defining challenges of this age are not just climate change and inequity but the pervasive sense of fatalism and hopelessness they engender. Waiting for ‘the bosses at the top’ to solve these problems presumes they have the power to do so. But they have no magic levers to shift shared values nor silver bullet policies to alter institutional habits shaped over centuries. Meanwhile, our continuing relentless destruction of natural, social, and cultural capital makes the whole world a poorer and far less hospitable place.

But collapse, in natural and human systems, is also a time of rebirth, and there is growing evidence that long-lived cultures, like indigenous societies that have survived many millennia, have also gone through epochs of collapse and regeneration – and learning.

We believe that, amidst the chaos and fear, this is happening today as leaders at all levels, within and outside positions of formal authority and power, and across all sectors, are helping us re-direct ourselves around new guiding question. We have chased the chimera of GDP growth for centuries; how can we re-orient our societies to genuine social and ecological well-being? We have fostered a global epidemic of stress, anxiety and suicides (which increased almost 100% among US teenagers in the decade before COVID); how can we make mindfulness, compassion and genuine human connection and development mainstream priorities? We have sanctioned businesses that seek profit at any cost and schools that still educate young people in the skills and mindset of the Industrial Age; how can we re-create these core institutions as loci of (local and global) connectedness and balance?

Questions of this ilk do not have definitive answers; their power comes from holding them patiently yet resolutely, and we believe the energy and courage to do so is coming from an awakening relational sensibility that is very old. Tewa Indian teacher Gregory Cajete synthesized diverse tribal traditions of the Americas into three inseparable imperatives: individuation – the conviction that each person has distinctive gifts and a unique purpose – community – that discovering and realizing these gifts draws from and shapes our collective well-being –and land – that all this is guided by the sacred living presence of this place. These three represent an indivisible wholeness, but our experience over many years with the ECW has offered some lessons regarding a neglected focus that we continue to explore each August.

The ECW

The Blackfoot Indians say that our first relationship is with Mother Earth, and if that relationship is damaged, all others will suffer as well. Perhaps, this is exactly what is most lacking today – to re-anchor our relational sensibility of self and other in returning home to here.

Starting in the late 1990s, the ECW has offered a unique space for reflection and conversation around this theme because it is anchored in a place – in this case, the quiet energy of the Green Mountains of northern Vermont at the Trapp Family Lodge. Building on the Trapp family’s stewardship of this land for 80 years, the program, held outside in a tent for three days, has deeply touched many of us. It has rained, sometimes fiercely. The wind has blown so strongly that we have had to hastily gather up our chairs and small café tables. And the sun has shown brilliantly – mercifully, most of the time. Most of all, we have come to know the trees, the birds, the grass and the stone walls as our companions on a journey of slowing down and paying attention in a different way.

This is not a journey of a few years or even decades, and it is not a journey of the head only. Reconnecting to land starts with how our whole mind-heart-body system re-awakens to its ancestry as an expression of the Earth system. This is why the ECW integrates contemplative practices and reflective conversation with native teachings and Social Presencing Theatre – to tap multiple modalities of attending and cultivating systems intelligence. Doing this together with diverse leaders from around the world helps us understand both the differences of doing such work in very different cultural and political realities and yet the commonality of the challenges we all face.