Since September 2023, we have enjoyed open online meetings on enactive process, exploring our core principles:

• The experiential meaning of embodied grounding (passive but receptive consciousness) (September 2023)
• Awareness of emergent experience (October 2023)
• Negating conditioning and nourishing emergent knowing (the expression and embodiment of insight as it forms in continuous movement) (November 2023)
• Collaborative co-creative leadership (response-ability) (January 2024)

These discussions were experienced by all participants as very meaningful and enriching. They also brought in spontaneous, important themes. In Spring 2024, we continued our open sessions with such spontaneously upcoming themes.

Making Space for Openness in our Lives

As part of our weekly meetings, we explore the theme of openness: how can we bring embodied awareness to moments of openings in our meetings, and our professional and private lives? 

For various reasons – be it fatigue, overwhelm, or past experiences that left their mark – we can get stuck in rigid views, become afraid of difference or come to see others as disturbance, threat or plain evil. We care about the moments in which such protective rigidity dares to open up: What happens when we notice new aspects of ourselves or the world around us? How does openness manifest as such in various moments and situations in our lives? In our relationships/family, our work, the paths we walk in our lives (career and otherwise), in our moment-to-moment sense of being alive? What role does the body play in creating openness? Is openness something we do, or rather something we notice, or both? At what levels of subtlety does/can it happen?

We find that these questions sit at the heart of our work as enactive researchers. We are exploring our particular and different ways of opening up – of being present to openness in the different roles we take on, in conversation with others, as we move and explore our embodied presence.  As before, we do so in a combination of open dialogues, facilitated and individual/silent practice and partner work.

For us, this is an exploration that, as researchers, will ultimately impact our research projects – beyond our personal interest, we consider openness to be a crucial element for a science that supports human and non-human flourishing. If you feel so inspired, you are welcome to participate in the weekly meetings as well as in the research projects.