Living Wholeness Route Map

Living Wholeness offers a framework for integrating living systems beyond theory and concept, into living practice. It is a framework for being systemic at every level, with ourselves in our work and communities, and especially in relationship to all of life. It offers us a means to experience ‘being systemic’ by widening the scope of what we mean by systemic and framing our work not as ‘fixing’ systems external to us, but finding new alignment with our inner and outer worlds. We can then translate what we become to our work, communities, families, homes, government, social innovations, businesses and new initiatives that can shift systems. This is the long-term work of systemic transformation: the evolution of a new culture–or new cultures–whose values, beliefs, behaviors, assumptions and meaning-making are aligned with life–cultures which function as living systems.

“Through our work in the world and living wholeness as a life practice, we have been discovering that Living Wholeness is both a worldview and a tangible fabric that weaves together qualities, practices and pathways. This practice offers a systemic transformation architecture and practice that activates breakthrough collective intelligence around radically new ways of working and living. It works on the core premise that in order to transform our systems we need to learn, individually and collectively, by cultivating a new set of assumptions.’

The LW Route Map was action-researched and galvanised in practice, through the co-hosting[1] of ‘Living Wholeness Immersions’, 9-day in-person ‘laboratories’ for catalysing systemic transformation, collective alchemy at a soul and cellular level, within a learning ecology, to then transmit and amplify efforts in local spheres of influence.

The LW Route Map was action-researched and galvanised in practice, through the co-hosting[1] of ‘Living Wholeness Immersions’, 9-day in-person ‘laboratories’ for catalysing systemic transformation, collective alchemy at a soul and cellular level, within a learning ecology, to then transmit and amplify efforts in local spheres of influence.

Essentially, the LW Route Map contains two continua – a vertical axis connecting the visible with the invisible, and a horizontal axis connecting the individual with the collective, with the nexus point – where the two axes cross – being ‘the place’ we find wholeness. To live wholeness, and consciously evolve, an inward-outward-moving spiral-journey unfolds, made up of key orientation points, patterned in this Map.

Also in play are different practices supporting Belonging, Remembering, Resilience, Resourcefulness and Responsibility; plus a iterative Process Pathway inclusive of the dimensions of: The Call, Inviting Participation, Collective Learning, Powers of Place, Organising Pattern, Resourceful Economy.

Neither ‘truth’ nor ‘terrain’, it charts a spiral-journey – starting with ‘testing the readiness’ to journey. This phase activates our questioning and calling to then stepping forward and into ‘arriving and orienting’, and our interconnection including human and more than human realms, land, the powers of place, and more, coming into relationship with self, each other and the eco-field at large. This ‘locates self’ – takes time and intentionality – inclusive of arriving physically, becoming present, opening to land and place and the multidimensional field of energy and beings, and when complete, readying for journeying together as a learning ecology.

We then enter the phase of opening to one another, to community and the collective. New moments, new experiences, explorations together, slowly create a ‘collective being’ between us – an ecology within which we can learn – for sharing stories, witnessing one another, becoming a Collective that sees, thinks, feels and acts together.

From building a learning ecology, we slip into this deeper space – a space of not knowing, and into the subterranean together. At the core, Humanity’s edge rests at the collective level, and yet, with this, attuning at the nexus-point of wholeness. What does it mean to collectively live wholeness? Here, we enter the terrain of not knowing, the sphere of collaboration, and the soul of the subterranean. In many traditions, we go into the unknown individually and then share what we have seen to the collective, but what does it take to go together into the invisible together, and together, commune with the collective and individual wild soul?

From the depths, and infused with experience and insight – returning slightly different than before, perhaps fundamentally transformed – and begin moving from the subterranean to the visible, and toward an individual space, and the call for translating what we have found in our communing and creating a new narrative: what is this saying to me? What am I now curious about? We then begin to ascend into the physical/visible.

We then transform our new narrative, giving it more form, body and definition, for where we go from here? We then transport it into where we are going, completing and opening again – moving outward and into the world.”[2]

[1] Living Wholeness Institute founders: Maria Scordialos, Vanessa Reid, Sarah Whiteley, with collaborators Yitzhak Mendelsohn, Kamyar Houbakht and Linda Mitchell.

[2] Excerpt adapted from a transcript of explanation from a Living Wholeness Immersion, cited in The Fine Line of Destiny: The subtle artistry of conscious intentional evolution © 2013, by Sarah Whiteley.