Zoomology, is the art-come-science-come-dance of switching perspectives, scaling up and down fom micro to macro, to illuminate, navigate, and help spark change in the complex systems of our inner and outer worlds. Zoomology gives focus to our curiosity, enables us to map and navigate a fractured and confusing world, and, with imagination and will, invites us to collaborate in co-creating a world in which we can thrive. Or if I hadn’t just made it up while writing my ‘Zooming In, Zooming Out Substack post, that’s definitely what Zoomology would be.

Where did it originate?

I’ve been exchanging coaching sessions with Margarita Steinberg over the last couple of years. She kindly agreed to record me a testimonial in 2024, and in this excerpt talked of how valuable she has found my ‘Zoom lens’. Until that moment I hadn’t realised I had such a thing - which is one of Margarita’s many gifts - to find words that catch unique qualities in people to help them see and value what they bring to the world.

Margarita Steinberg & Paul Clarke - My Coaching Journey Pt 1.

Margarita’s metaphor prompted me to reflect on not just the value of my internal Zoom function in my coaching, but also (Zooming inwards) to its value in my own personal journey, making sense of my parts, my dimensions, my Self, and (Zoom panoramically outwards) its value in understanding my place in human systems and (Zooming out telescopically) in the natural systems to which we all belong

How does ZOOMOLOGY apply to Coaching

Margarita’s testimonial highlights a capacity we can all exercise and strengthen. In our personal journeys we can develop our capacity to step back and observe ourselves as if walking alongside ourselves. Homing in on our steady or shallow breathing, our calm or churning thoughts, our ever shifting tides of emotions, our reactions to people or happenings, or imaginings of happenings, or memories of happenings …

I consider part of my role as a coach or mentor as becoming a companion who walks alongside you for a while, listens, watches, switching perspectives to take in both the detail and the wider context, then mirroring back to you what I hear and observe. Not only what you say but what your body language, patterns of breathing, facial expressions reveal. And when I mirror these back to you, you may be surprised at what you find. That you smile when your body is tense. That every time you talk of a particular place your eyes shine. That the overarching goal you were passionate about, you now sound bored by. My aim is not just to hold up a mirror for people, but to encourage them to grow their own practice of self-reflection. To be able to walk alongside themselves, and witness themselves. The whole of themselves. When we see and understand ourselves clearly, we become more centred, at ease, curious about rather than wary of others, and present in a way that others feel they can trust.

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Learning from our own Lifelines and Landscapes

As a scaled up extension of learning about our selves I’m currently working on a ‘Red Thread’ presentation to the excellent Grokkist1 community, in which I present my whole ‘lifeline’ - the timeline of my life to date - and zoom in on key moments and phases of my life. In effect walking alongside and learning from the journey - inner and outer - of my own past ‘selves’.

Its led me to devise a simple ‘Lifelines and Landscapes’ mapping & zooming framework that helped me, and I think can be useful to you and others, as an aid to learning more about our life paths and the inner and outer factors that shape us. The framework is simple. Take a landscape oriented sheet of paper and draw a horizontal line across its centre representing your lifeline from birth to now - a central ‘thread’ along which you can home in on whatever phase of life you want to examine.

In the space above the line write ‘Inner landscapes’, imagining the dimensions of your ‘self’ in any moment of your life as a landscape to explore. In the space below the line write ‘Outer Landscapes’ signifying everything external to you in any moment - from one to one relationships to family, workplace, community, nation, race, species, cosmos. This simple-to-create framework then offers you infinite possibilities for exploring whatever point of or phase of your life you wish to explore and what you choose to pour in to it and take out of it.

Here’s an example of how it helps me learn from my lifeline:

I was born in Mountain Ash Cottage Hospital, in the Cynon Valley, South Wales, 8 years after the first delivery of a baby in an NHS hospital (also in Wales). That baby was christened Aneira after Aneuran Bevan,2 the driving force behind the establishment of the NHS and a key guide and inspiration for my older self.

Aneurin Bevan - founder of the NHS

I had suspected for many years that my birth was a difficult one but only knew for certain sometime in my forties. I now understand that my arrival into this world exposed me to sudden separation and (I imagine) terrifying confusion. While my mother was being nursed through life-threatening complications, I missed that crucial first phase of maternal bonding. My emergence into the world was disrupted by the shock and tension of emergency. From the outset I felt a yearning for touch, and ached at its absence. From as early as I remember I had an insatiable curiousity. An urge to unpuzzle whats going on. A desperation and fascination for discerning the truth of things. For finding solid, trusted ground. And also a reluctance to ask anyone for help.

Partly, this latter tendency came from the cultures and mindsets I was raised in—ones that encouraged certainty and discouraged curiosity. As good Catholics, and as working class slowly rising into the status of middle class, we took pride in presenting ourselves as a happy, well-adjusted family. And we often were—but not always, and not in all ways. Out of that tension, and the unspoken swirl of thoughts and feelings kept under wraps in my young head when I encountered incongruity, grew something lasting: a drive to question, to look beneath appearances, to find what was actually true. It became a lifelong habit of enquiry—one that found expression in songwriting, in social work, and still shapes how, even now in my 70s, I work and rework sentences with stubborn precision, trying to do justice to my ‘True Detective’s’3 expectations those early experiences forged.

Below the line I was born within a decade of the birth of the NHS, and over the years, I came to realise my debt to that social transformation, including what I owed to the gift of a free, well resourced hospital able to sustain my mothers life and deliver me into mine. In that appreciative perspective lies the origin in me of a social conscience, and a curiosity about human systems that help or hinder how we survive and thrive, or become deprived. There is a gratitude and fascination underpinning my social, political, economic perspectives - and a panoramic social lens - which fuelled a career transforming human services, and sparking human potential. Which also remains a torch I carry to this day.

What’s with the Tardis?

Why the Tardis? I hear you ask. And why the birds? (They are swallows btw). The wonderful thing about synthesis is it can welcome in anything that rings true - even a fantastical conceit. (Isn’t that what great literature, songcraft, poetry, comedy etc all do?).

So a year ago, I wrote an article on my journey with ‘ecopsychosynthesis’ (a word only pronouncable when sober), for the Association for the Advancement of Psychosynthesis4, then guest edited by the awesome Molly Young Brown5 whose collaboration work with Joanna Macy on ‘the work that reconnects’ has been absorbed into everything from Citizens Assemblies to the art of heartful climate protests. I wrote a similar timeline-based exercise and felt it lacked something.

Then I noticed, down in the stableyard, that the swallows6 had returned to nest in the barn and were whizzing around everywhere indulging in their aerial gymnastics (which included blithely orbiting my head) while gathering materials with which to build their nests.

So I had a word with them. I needed that agility, speed, manouvereability, sharp vision and joyful energy to seek out the pearls and threads strewn along my timeline, and ability to zoom them back to ‘now’, and interweave them into my new nest of intgrated self as I teeter on the cusp of elderhood.

What?’ they said. Then, bluntly, ‘We don’t do time travel’.

Tardis, Waterloo Gardens, Penylan, Cardiff 2010: pic Paul Clarke

So they were as astonished as any swallow could ever get (which isn’t very as they are the coolest of birds) when I revealed that having touched the Tardis in a Cardiff park opposite my sisters house in 2010 (thats where I took the photo) I had drawn on energy from the rift in space and time that runs through Cardiff and been gifted the ability to bestow the gift of temporal manouverability on any willing lifeforms7. So they accepted.

And I’ve invited their help again. Here they are: swooping back to my birth in 1956, while one slingshots around it to rocket up through the 1970s, gathering my first realisations of the trauma of that birth experience. Another barrels further futurewards into a 1990s Jewel Wingfield Inner Child workshop in deepest Dorset.

Swallows from the Swallow Barn, Southwell. Pic: Paul Clarke

There, I find compassion and understanding for my young ‘parts’, unlocking years of numbed-out rage. It passes through me like a storm, leaving me gently adrift in oceanic sadness—until, from nowhere, my whole body galvanises with an irresistible burst of laughter, freer and wilder than any I’ve ever known.

When the swallows bring these threads, these gems, these shards back to my present self, I witness my own journey with a deeper, kaleidoscopic sense of fragments integrating, wounds healing. I feel the old skin of negative mindsets and patterns shed away—gradually, though sometimes suddenly.

Mid-Life Crisis

All the above ripples forward into my ‘mid life crisis / breakthrough’ year of 2006. I had two moments of peak ‘success’ in the world. The 20th anniversary of the Meltdown music club⁷ I co-founded and the UK Charity Award⁸ I led my local Mind association to achieve). At the same time I was becoming acutely aware of my lonely, single, workaholic inner life. In the phase that followed, I downsized, moved to Bristol into an amazing shared house, worked as a part-time CEO, and dived into deep inner work—particularly with a key guide and inspiration, Jewels Wingfield.8

Jewels Wingfield - EarthHeart

My Birth and my Mid-Life-Hinge are two points on my lifeline that shed light on what was evolving within me, how the world was impacting on me, and how I came to increasingly have an impact on it! I love this Lifelines and Landscapes framework for its simple structure and capacity to hold complex dimensions and insights.

Frameworks and Invitational Spaces are key ways in which the paradigm of Synthesis gets seeded. Zoom forward a few paragraphs and see Assagioli’s Egg and Kate Raworths Doughnut as examples. Maps and lenses are two of the means by which we discern what to pour into those spaces and frameworks. We use lenses to map our surroundings, use other people’s maps to navigate their surroundings, and develop our own capacity to create our own maps of unknown territory—Zooming in for detail and Zooming out for panoramic context.

In the physical world, we do this all the time, though in ways limited by the ‘Imaginarium’ of common sense beliefs and truths about reality we take as given - even when they are myths or fairytales.. Tomas Björkman¹¹, the great Danish philosopher/entrepreneur/activist —another of my guides and inspirations— observed that when crises pile up into phases of epochal significance it’s a good moment for us to take a deep breath, and take a long hard look at everything we believe to be true. To interrogate our ‘common sense’. To discern what is evidentially true from what we imagine to be true.

Is our human nature really separate from nature?

Do unregulated markets really work like an invisible hand taking resources to where they need to be?

Are our streams of information to be trusted, or are they often as polluted as our actual streams and rivers?

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Zooming Out and Scaling up

As we Zoom out further, we see ourselves within the constellations of family, relationship, workplace, etc. And—further still—in the wider systems of culture, gender, race, tribe, sexual orientation, etc.

We can also Zoom in and out of our selves and surroundings not just in the spatial but in the temporal context too. Add memory, and the advantage of hindsight, and we can use this framework, Lifelines and Landscapes to map our timeline, our history, our childhood, our ancestry. and in doing so, unlock a richer future at the level of both Self and Systems

My ancestors came from the south and west of Ireland to the South Wales valleys a couple of generations ago, with all the cultural, religious, musical, and political dimensions that carries (in my birthplace of Mountain Ash I’ve vivid memories of riotous St Patrick’s Day parties and barely a memory of what we did on St David’s Day

And, with our imaginations, we can zoom forward into the future too. The one we desire. The one we fear. Bill Sharpe’s 3 Horizons9 provides a brilliant template for creating a detailed granular vision for the future we want. Collectively imagining forwards. I’m imagining a Substack post on that coming soon.

Human Nature as Nature

And if we’ve invested in the very best, most expansive Zoom lenses, we can widen our zooming outward to the cosmic and inward to the micro-organic to illuminate our human nature as part of, not separate from, Nature itself. Our status as mammals, as bipeds, as an evolved species, as Earthlings, as stardust. As part of what Joanna Macy calls the Web of Life10. Weirdly most dictionaries still identify ‘Human Nature’ as different in kind to ‘Nature’ itself; as a separate category. A symptom of our myopic illusion of hierarchy and dominion, and a prime source of our precarious purchase on the planet we live on.

Curating a collection of Lenses seeds a practical and visionary Synthesis

Think of the array of scientific instruments we now have to observe all aspects of the Universe, from the cosmological (telescope, optical, radio, infrared, unltraviolet gamma, etc), to the microscopic (Optical, Electron, Helium-ion, X-ray, Sub-atomic etc). Zoomology embraces all these and extends to whatever we can devise at an imaginal, metaphoric, visionary, spiritual level as well - so long as its anchors are in whats true and what works.

My most inspirational guide in understanding and embracing this approach has been Psychosynthesis founder Roberto Asssagioli.11 With his playful rigour in weaving connections between the rational, the mythological, the humbly speculative and the boldly imaginative, he models how wide we can stretch our acceptance of the invitation of synthesis to create spaces for ideas and perspectives to dance.

As a ‘macro’ equivalent to Assagioli’s Egg, I recommend Kate Raworth’s Doughnut as an impressive stab at providing a ‘compass’. Her intention is to ‘bring social and environmental concerns together in one single image … [and] set a vision for an equitable and sustainable future’. (Raworth, 2017)12

Roberto Assagioli’s Egg Diagram and Kate Raworth’s Doughnut

Framed in a doughnut shape her diagram weaves together nine planetary boundaries, ‘beyond which lie unacceptable environmental degradation and potential tipping points in Earth systems’, and ‘twelve social measures derived from internationally agreed minimum social standards. Between social and planetary boundaries lies an environmentally safe and socially just space in which humanity can thrive’. (Raworth, 2017. 13So.just as Assagioli’s ‘egg’ diagram invites in all the perspectives, methods, examples that shine a light on us and our potential as humans, while filtering out those that diminish or over-simplify us, so Kate Raworth’s Doughnut invites all the perspectives, methods and examples at the systemic level - economic, sociological, anthropological, biological, mycelial etc, with the explicit filter of the circular boundaries of the doughnut.

Kate Raworth. Byline Times Festival 2025. pic Paul Clarke

And when we look around us locally, globally, and historically, there are a galaxy of examples of ‘ways of seeing’ that shine a light on who we are and what we can achieve. From just the top of my head: shamanism, internal family systems, the concept of ‘teal’ organisations (Frederic Laloux14), the 17th century emergence and global spread of Quakerism, the counsel of all beings (Joanna Macy15), complexity theory and systems thinking, Buddhafield Festival (UK)16, the new science - and abundant metaphors - of the mycelial realm, (Merlin Sheldrake17), Zohran Mamdani’s New York, Andy Burnham’s Manchesterism18, the panoramic philosophical perspectives of Tomas Bjorkman19, the American Civil Rights mevement (Martin Luther King etc), the tectonic emotional landscapes of Bjorks song ‘Joga’,20 Rutger Bregman’s canny and compassionte books Humankind and Moral Ambition21, The Wire (TV Show), Pulitzer nominated Carole Cadwalladwr’s courageous pioneering journalism22 Zach Polansky’s Green Party23, Gabor Mate’s24 insights into Trauma in systems and cultures, and so many more.

Carol Cadwalladwr. Byline Times Festival 2025. Pic Paul Clarke

Conclusion: The Practice of Seeing

So, what is Applied Zoomology, in the end? It is not merely the act of looking. It is the discipline of choosing how to look. It is the courage to look beyond our comfortable numb common senses and cultural assumptions.

It is the recognition that the range asnd clarity of the lenses we use determine how we navigate the world we inhabit, and whether we imagine its and our potential. When we Zoom inwards, we connect to the rhythm of our heartbeat, the ebb and flow of our feelings, the specific grief of a lost moment, or joy of a head-orbiting swallow. When we Zoom out, we find the currents of history, the systems that shape our choices, the web of life that sustains us. And when we Zoom through time, with the help of swallows and Tardises and honest friends, we find that the past is not a prison, but a resource.

This is the work of synthesis: to collect these lenses, to curate them, and to employ them not just to make sense of a fractured world, but to seed a new one. To map the unknown territory not as a conqueror, but as a collaborator.

If you take nothing else from this thread, take this invitation: Pick up a lens. Try it on. See what shifts. And if the view is too narrow, or too blurry, or too frightening—step back. Zoom out. Find a new angle. The world is waiting to be seen again, and perhaps, for the first time, truly.

Coda: Mapping Your Own Constellation

Throughout this thread—and others like it—I’ve name-checked a constellation of trusted guides and inspirations. To keep them close, and to invite others to map their own, I’ve curated a gallery of my own influences and even printed a version onto a T-shirt - see my Substack post: The ‘More than a …’ T-shirt.

My T-shirt of Allies and Inspirations at Buddhafield Festival 2025. Pic Rebecca Cant

Whether my choicrs inspire or dismay you, - or likely a mix of the two - the invitation is to create your own. Later this year I’m piloting a series of workshops in Cardiff, Bristol, and online. They’re designed to help you build your own visual map of influence, aka a T-Shirt Gallery, and to create a shared space where we can compare notes on who we’d include on ours—and why.

It’s another chance to Zoom in on what sustains us, and Zoom out to see how our personal pantheon connects to the wider world. If you’d like to join the experiment, keep an eye on the newsletter for details.

SOUND WISDOMS

Johnny Nash - I Can See Clearly Now

I was on a life-changing ‘conscious-holiday’ in the bay of Atsitsa on the Aegean island of Skyros, in 19??, when the facilitator of an outdoor voice workshop invited us to ‘invite the song we need to sing’ to land on our shoulder, butterfly like. And then each find hidden dimensions of our voice to do it justice.

Staring out from the workshop circle to the blue Aegean and the even deeper blue sky, I don’t think I even had to disturb a single synapse in conjuring up Johnny Nash’s soaring hymn to ‘seeing clearly’. And I loved finding a new depth in my embodied voice to sing it out over the calm waters and the indigo sky of the twilit Aegean - that moment just before the stars emerged bringing their constellational galleries of Greek mythology. And there’s no better fit than that song and lyric for summoning the essence of Zoomology! With the added bonus of a charmingly low budget video featuring horses and hens as well! Enjoy, while I go and feed our hens.

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Here it is:

Key: All left to right. Top row: Carole Cadwalladwr; Roberto Assagioli; Casa Assagioli display; Roberto Assagioli portrait; Jacinda Ardern; Second Row: Mo Mowlem; Tomas Bjorkman; Third Row: Byline Times; Entangled Life - Merlin Sheldrake; Internal Family Systems - Richard Schwartz et al; Reinventing Organisations - Frederic Laloux; Humankind - Rutger Bregman: Doughnut Economics - Kate Raworth; H is for Hawk - Helen MacDonald; Adam Curtis; Bottom Row: Greta Thurnberg; Aneurin Bevan; Bjork; Gary Stevenson; Jewels Wingfield; Joanna Macy; Gabor Mate; Steve McQueen. Pic: Paul Clarke.

In this post I’d like to share with you what inspired it, who features on it, where I’m taking it in the next three weeks, and how I’ll be using it.

And if you want to inspect it more closely, and live in the UK, book a ticket for either the Byline Festival at Keele University, Staffordshire UK -Fri 11th July to Sunday 13th July 2025, or the Buddhafield Festival, Blackdown Hills in Somerset, UK, Wednesday 16th July to Sunday 20th July. Both spaces gather together an array of powerful leaders, teachers, healers, explorers and truth tellers who focus both on how we navigate turbulent times, and how we activate our will to seed change. As does my T-shirt.

And I’m dedicating this post to one of the people featured in the gallery, Joanna Macy, who through her ‘Work That Reconnects” has touched and inspired millions with her ‘devotion and commitment to mending our world’.1 I heard today that she in hospice care at home, ‘gently letting go’, surrounded by her family and friends. The message from her bedside concluded with this:

Her guidance and inspiration still ripple out into the world.

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Inspirations

In which I celebrate the moment and the image that inspired my T-Shirt Gallery, and gave me insight into a potential paradigm shift fundamental to genuinely and sustainable change in the world.

Here’s the back of my T-Shirt.

It’s 2018 and I’m standing in the foyer of Casa Assagioli, one-time Florentine home of Roberto Assagioli, founder of Psychosynthesis, and now a centre where the work he inspires continues. The most visible thing in the heart of his home as I enter the foyer, is not a large portrait of Assagioli or a sign proclaiming ‘Psychosynthesis’, but this large gallery of photo-portraits of people who inspired him, collaborated with him, resourced him on his Journey. Celebrating them, not him. A space into which his openness invites all their insights and wisdoms to dance. Not compete.

This was the moment I began to realise that Psychosynthesis was something distinct and profound. Though it took me a while to twig that this difference amounts to a more than a difference, More like a paradigm shift.

The dominant paradigm in modern Western Civilisation, is polarisation. Mainstream Economics embraces unbridled competition, unconstrained growth, and a reductive view of humans characterised by “Rational Economic Man”. And this ‘myth of separation’ increasingly infects our culture and our politics. In his Psychology Today (US) interview with Roberto Assagioli in 1954 - the last year of Assagioli’s life, Sam Keen reflected on the conflictual culture in US psychology where ‘we are accustomed to psychological warfare, regular shootouts at the “you’re-not-OK” corral’. 2 The contrast with Assagioli’s inclusive and invitational approach beguiled him - as it does me as I first encounter this display in 2018, witnessing a paradigm that models humility, gratitude, curiousity, collaboration .. and synthesis. Psychosynthesis is lots of things but at its heart it models a paradigm that embraces synthesis, not polarity.

I imagine my new T-shirt Gallery as a micro-dose of that paradigm shift.3

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Invitations

In which who I invite onto my T-shirt, who I invite to witness my T-shirt, and every person who responds positively to my invitation to create their own T-Shirt Gallery, combine to create an expanding circle of invitation.

When I wear my T-Shirt Gallery I hug to my chest the wisdoms, insights and examples I value. And of what motivated me to invite in these particular faces. These particular books.

But its function is also to be seen. For me that’s an edge of excitement and anxiety.

The excitement is being able to take into the world - or particular spaces in the world - a visible expression of who I trust and am inspired by. And offering anyone witnessing my gallery an invitation for them to create their own. A friend saw it as a ’soulful signpost’. Others may see it as a provocation. Which, if it sparks a discussion, is exciting too.

And there’s the exhilaration of being able to communicate directly with people using a white cotton space that’s free of ads, bots, trolls, algorithms, clickbait, and broligarchs.

I’ve an anxious thought, in this moment, as I get ready to catch a train to the Byline Festival, as to how Carole Cadwalladwr might react to seeing her image jostling on a T-Shirt with Bjork and Aneurin Bevan. Any one of the images I feature could trigger a negative reaction in people. At the same time 21 images, makes it likely most will find common ground somewhere among them. And, in asking who they would display as their guides and inspirations, I’m bringing curiosity and encouraging conversation. This is as much about promoting a way any of us can share who lights us up as it is a a promotion of whoever I trust and recommend

Picture: Paul Clarke

Destinations

In which a white cotton space hosting a gathering of guides and inspirations sets off to tour two larger spaces doing much the same.

In the the next few weeks I’ll be wearing my T-Shirt Gallery at two of my favourite annual gatherings, the Byline Festival organised by the UK’s leading independent source of investigative journalism, and the UK Buddhafield Festival organised by a UK based Buddhist collaborative. Both are spaces which invite the gathering of people who are looking for guidance and inspiration, and who often - though may need reminding of it - are themselves already sources of guidance and inspiration those around them.

Buddhafield Festival has a powerful emphasis on our inner journeys, including, but not exclusive to, those rooted in spiritual practices. As part of this - aided by its glorious setting in Somerset’s Blackdown Hills - it invites us to remember that our human nature is but one expression of the natural world. We are threads in the web of life. Buddhafield encourages those of us seeking transformation in the wider world to first drop anchor into our Selves and the land we stand on. And when we’re grounded and present in that ‘Base Camp’ of self, our bonding together and stepping out into the outer landscapes becomes clearer sighted and surer footed. Scattered through the Festival you’ll find Buddhafield alive with teachings inspired by Joanna Macy and Molly Young Brown’s “work that reconnects’, including the powerful workshops of Jewels Wingfield who studied with Joanna Macy, and the activities of a swathe of other groups - including Extinction Rebellion - who have used her meditations and groupwork structures (eg grief and gratitude) as. springboards for conscious activism.

All of which is but one aspect of a multifaceted jewel of a Festival, which nests in a beautiful valley, offers holding and healing spaces for rest and recovery, and buzzes with natural highs joy, dancing, and laughter. I’ll be offering my Holistic Massage sessions in the Healing Garden alongside running an hour long workshop there with Lilamayi O’Leary on Saturday 19th July at 2pm inspired in part by the work that reconnects.

Byline Festival, taking place this year at Keele University in Staffordshire UK, is a more cerebral event, emerging from the heroic, independent investigative journalism of the Byline Times. The Festival focuses on helping people navigate and seed change in the landscapes of our human systems from a place of clear understanding and progressive vision.

In a time where our streams of information have become as polluted as our actual streams and rivers (and for similar reasons), the Byline Times both in its paper and online publications, and in this annual Festival, acts as a hub of connection, collaboration, and crucially, of celebration. It’s a place to discover the strong and trusted leaders, campaigners, creatives, and change-agents that we’re blessed with as allies. And to learn from independent and pioneering journalists and analysts whose work pierces the fog of distraction and disinformation that erodes our trust and undermines democracies around the world.4

Here my T-Shirt and I will be meeting courageous journalist Carol Cadwalladwr and the practical and visionary economics of Kate Raworth - a prospect that lifts my heart. I only hope they won’t be disconcerted at seeing themselves reflected in my T-shirt gallery. And the smorgasbord on offer includes the campaigning comedy of Mark Thomas, the real-world leadership of Andy Burnham (Mayor of Greater Manchester), and the investigative relentlessness.of the Byline team themselves.

Pic: Paul Clarke. Carol Cadwalladwr at the Byline Times Festival in 2022.

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Our Mission: To Flood the Zone with … .

In which we imagine the potential power of a paradigm shift from one which diminishes and divides us by design, to one that we design ourselves, together. A shift in which we flood every Zone we can with curiosity, compassion, honesty, openness, joy, wonder, invitation, collaboration and an anchoring in what’s true.

Steve Bannon - the Trump adjacent cross between court jester and Bond villain - who seeds globally the dismantling of the architecture of liberal democracy by any means necessary, aided by the masterful tactic of distraction he describes as ‘flooding the zone with shit’, does not feature on my T-Shirt Gallery. But he can be a useful guide and inspiration in at least two respects.

Firstly he’s a great barometer to test our strategy against. If anything you do makes Steve Bannon giggle, stop doing it. If you’re in a movement focused on saving the planet but are sacrificing strategic gains through allowing a polarising culture war to rage through you like a wildfire, stop doing it. Whatever ‘side’ your on, there are none of whatever kind of spaces you demand on a dead planet. You are being played, and Steve Bannon is sniggering.

Secondly it’s time to make Steve Bannon frown by flooding the Zone ourselves - with everything that makes our hearts sing. That’s why I go to Buddhafield and Byline Festival. Because as well as grieving for and trying to understand the state of the world, there’s also music and theatre and dancing, and comedy, and examples galore of effective, purposeful, canny action.

What we’re facing may feel overwhelming, not least because the forces behind what we’re facing are working hard at making it seem so by flooding the zone with fear and confusion. But, as Martha Tilston reminds her children in her profound song ‘Survival Guide’, just as in the Wizard of Oz a timely tug on the curtain, exposing the the deception it conceals, can help break the spell we’re under. Because, as Martha sings,

Among our modern day ‘wizards’ of Oz count also the creators and owners of new forms of social media, and their successors in AI. They promised a progressive utopia - enhancing human wellbeing with Globe spanning threads of news, information, wisdom, knowledge, empathy, creativity and wonder. Fostering collaborative solutions to social, environmental, economic problems, and the capacity to share information and expertise as never before.

And now? To fully appreciate the scale of their betrayal of those promises, read Carole Cadwalladwr’s ‘How to Survive the Broligarchy’ posts on Substack - and let’ not be fooled again. But the goals themselves were laudable. And the tech, used in ways that are regulated and/or owned by us, could serve us in transformative ways. What can we do, individually and collectively. to reclaim these and turn the tide - reverse the flood - ourselves?

I’m now here in Byline Festival and am enraptured by the (already practically applied around the world) vision of Kate Raworth. Her Doughnut Economics Action Lab is encouraging people to remember what it’s like to own and cherish values, vision and volition, and in cities and regions around the world, evoking that especial delight and satisfaction that comes from fulfilling ourselves the promises that were made to us and broken.

Here are a few more thoughts on what we can ‘flood the zone’ with.

On a host of issues we are cowed by the distorting lens of the media we consume into believing we’re in the minority in the views we hold. When, from Gaza to wealth taxes, to Immigration to Economics, it’s evident that our perspectives are far more popular than our ‘mainstream’ media and the echo chambers of social media would have us believe. We, the people, generally don’t stand anywhere near where the average news stand says we stand. If we can find ways of breaking this ‘spiral of silence’ over actual public opinion, as compared to the myths we’re encouraged to believe, we would be pulling back the curtain on a host of issues.

The UK Government promised more robust press regulation in the manifesto they were elected on - but have thus far done little other than cosy up to some of the worst offenders. How do we hold their feet to the fire?

Meantime what other ways can we use to flood real, factual news, and new, inspiring ideas into the communities we connect to? Examples abound in this Byline Festival, but would benefit from more coordination and consistency, which its another example we progressives could learn from Steve Bannon and his allies.

Back to my now out in the world T-shirt Gallery. Wherever and however we make more visible to each other who we trust and what we stand for, in doing so we tug the curtain back a little more each time to expose the myths we buy into and which the distorting mirrors of the mediascape convince us are true. So as one of the myriad actions we could take - ‘as well as’ all the others. - if we did boldly walk the streets wearing our home made T-Shirt Galleries of Guides and Inspirations, I suspect, we would likely discover unexpected allies everywhere. `And imagine what a spur to action it can be when you realise you’re not in a minority in your values and beliefs. In my case I’m flooding - well gently spraying - the limited zone of my orbit with images of Roberto Assagioli, Joanna Macy, Kate Raworth, Tomas Bjorkman, Jacinda Ardern, Mo Mowlem, Rutger Bregman, Steve McQueen, Bjork, Greta Thurnberg, Carole Cadwalladwr etc who all, in different ways, bring a full realised humanity to their roles and actions, including a capacity for wonder and joy. Who would you add to that list? Have you got a picture of them and a handy notice board, camera, and blank T-Shirt.

My T-Shirt, then, is no mere T-Shirt. It’s a Gallery, a signpost, a space where wisdoms dance, a portal to past wisdoms, an inspiration for a wave of other human galleries … and just one expression of a Paradigm Shift that could transform the whole landscape. Essentially I’m just facing down the dominant global paradigm of insular tribes and polarised silos, by flooding the zone with cork board galleries, each a dance of wisdoms and inspirations. And you could too. If you’re inspired to create your own, I’d love you to share a photo of it, and, if you’re agreeable, add it to a gallery of galleries.

Then that galaxy of galleries and their shared insights and wisdoms would expand our peripheral awareness even further. And from that place we can:

Picture: Paul Clarke.

SOUND WISDOM

The songs of Breton-Welsh singer Katell Keineg5 explore both the depths and heights of inner emotional landscapes and the challenges of understanding, navigating and seeding change in the world. I love how her song Partisans dives into the one-to-one energy of sensuous, playful, passionately curious connection then expands it into joyful, purposeful collaborative engagement with this wounded world. From my T-shirt Gallery Jewels Wingfield and Bjork resonate in the same way, and those words from the bedside of Joanna Macy resonate even more strongly: “Let us use this time to live more vividly, more gratefully - to walk with open hearts, to say what matters, to cherish the sacred ordinary”.

4

I use the word liberal as defined by Mike Brock in his brilliant post ‘What is Liberalism’, ‘Liberalism begins with a simple but revolutionary recognition: human beings are fallible, disagreement is inevitable, and yet we must somehow organize society together. This creates what I call the fundamental liberal problem: How do conscious beings pursue truth and build institutions across disagreement, uncertainty, and difference?’

Notes From The Circus

What is Liberalism?

The word “liberal” has been so thoroughly mangled by American political discourse that it now means everything and nothing. Republicans use it as an epithet for anyone who disagrees with them. Democrats embrace it as a badge of progressive virtue. Cable news hosts deploy it as a tribal marker. Political consultants focu…

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a year ago · 223 likes · 77 comments · Mike Brock

I usually end my posts with a ‘SOUND WISDOM’ - something musical that’s relevant to what I’ve written. In this case I’m devoting the whole post to one extraordinary song. A song that, for me, speaks profoundly to the moment we’re in. As does its video. See / hear them dance between perspectives, zoom in and out gliding between our inner landscapes, relational constellations, global shifts both human and natural, wondrous and terrifying ... Sounding a warning and shining a light. I invite you to tuck this song into your own personal survival kit for these tough times

The first time I hear Martha Tilston sing ‘Survival Guide’1 I have wedged myself into a jam-packed Small World Cafe at Buddhafield Festival2 in the Blackdown Hills of Somerset, UK over a decade ago. I nurse my tumeric latte as the sun sets and the air chills. I’ve been beguiled by everything Martha has sung so far, but this song lands deeper. Startles me. Strips away my defences. It feels discombobulating to be at the same time sucked into a whirlwind of sadness, wonder, dread, courage … while simultaneously being held in the protective embrace and comforting voice of a mother’s love.

‘Survival Guide’ rang spine-tinglingly true for me back then. These days it feels even more achingly relevant to the world and the circumstances we navigate.

So I listen / watch it again as a write this. A guitar weaves a circular pattern of high notes, a hypnotic arpeggio, woven tight and strong but as light as air. The woman, sat on a window sill, looks down through a first floor window at us, then at her daughter beside her, then to the corners of the window, and begins to sing a tender warning. First to the window spiders. Then to her children …

This is a song that seamlessly shifts, to and fro, between the intimate and the panoramic. Sung by a woman who, moment by moment, shifts her gaze, her focus, who she’s singing to. From the spiders, to her daughter, to us, to the world, to artic narwhals! In the video, when Martha turns from her daughter to gaze directly into our eyes, we’re suddenly included in what passes between mother and daughter - expanding the circle of intimacy to be included in the story-telling, the playful teaching, the love. The song weaves a beautiful relational web with words, gestures and eye contact. And then suddenly, in a key change, we zoom out again. This time from the small domestic constellation of mother, daughter, window spider to a world that’s changing ‘faster than light’. Listen, and experience the steady composure of her gaze on you. Do you feel your understanding challenged, your feelings stirred, your imagination invited to stretch? What can the land of Oz teach us? What hazards and wisdoms unfold beneath the artic ocean? How do we navigate a world that’s changing this fast?

This is a song that invites solidarity with the natural world, from the spiders Martha and her daughter share space with to the far away artic narwhals seeking air as they swim beneath the ice in search of breathing holes. And in conversing with these creatures Martha invites her daughter and us to remember the fundamental truth we constantly forget, the wide angle lens we dare not look through - that our human nature is just one expression of Nature’s vast web of life. That far from having dominion over nature, we are nature.3

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The portal to Oz - the quest for courage, wisdom and heart

This is a song that, for me, keeps springing fresh surprises. It's only while writing this piece that I grasped the full significance of Martha’s wish to give her daughter red shoes whose heels she could click three times and be whirlwinded away to … Oz, presumably. On reflection, what better story to seed in a child’s mind in these tumultuous times than the story of Oz.

In the book and film, the Oz Dorothy lands in, after clicking her heels, is another mad world where dark forces deceive and subjugate the people. But the adventure that ensues, as well as sparkling with fantasy and mischief, is a powerful and purposeful story to seed in a child’s heart. Scary, yes, but also nurturing hope and resilience in tough times. It values collaboration - unlikely allies join forces, set out on a quest, and together overcome the challenges they face. It confronts illusions - whether the internal illusions of ‘not being enough’ or external illusions - unveiling the weakness of the ‘powerful’. It is an adventure in which we journey alongside characters who heal and make whole again themselves and their land. The scarecrow regains his ‘brain’, the tin man his ‘heart’ and the lion his ‘courage’. And the revelation that behind the curtain the terrifying and intimidating persona of the Wizard of Oz ‘is not true’ upends power structures and transforms the land of Oz.

Back in our mad world ‘Survival Guide’ reminds us to stay alert to what is real, using our brains,4 to what is compassionate using our hearts,5 And to what prompts us into wise action - galvanising our courage6.

This final line of ‘Survival Guide’ could sound sentimental, but for how deeply it is rooted not only in concern for the planet and fear for the future, but in a mother's love. And the love of a mother who’s teaching her child to value the wonder of all creatures, from spiders to narwhals.

And that final line is also a clarion call to all of us to activate our Will. Back in the Small World Cafe, as Martha ended the song in Buddhafield, all those years ago, I felt a precious sense of connection, solidarity and common purpose ripple through gathering. Today, confronted with multiple crises and imminent ‘tipping points’, as people, as communities, as nations, as a species, what can we do to activate the ‘more than’ in each of us. The urge for curiosity, clarity, connection, collaboration and compassionate & canny action. How do we seed more songs like this, create more spaces like this, ignite more sparks for moments of awakening like this?

“At some point, perhaps in a crisis when danger threatens, an awakening occurs in which the individual discovers his [or her] will. This revelation that the self and the will are intimately connected can change a person’s whole awareness of him [or her]self and the world. [S]he sees that [s]he is a living subject, an actor, endowed with the power to choose, to relate, to bring about changes in his [or her] own personality, in others, in circumstances. And this awareness leads to a feeling of wholeness, security and joy”.

Roberto Assagioli - founder of Psychosynthesis 7

Buddhafield Festival 2025

If you live in the UK you can catch Martha Tilston in her natural habitat at this years Buddhafield Festival from Wednesday 16 July 2025 to Sunday 20 July 2025 in the Blackdown Hills, Somerset, UK. I’ll be there, offering Holistic Massages for donations in my trusty Bell Tent, somewhere in the beautiful spiral of structures, plants and healers known as the Healing Garden. Come and say hello.

I’m also intending to pilot a workshop in the Healing Garden drawing on a number of the themes and threads that weave through my Seeding Synthesis posts. Its working title is BASE CAMP & THE THREE HORIZONS. Base Camp draws on Joanna Macy and Molly Young Brown’s ‘Work that Reconnects’8 creating ways which help people drop into presence and from there ‘see the whole being’ in each other when forming as a group. We’ll then use Bill Sharp’s excellent future mapping and visioning framework Three Horizons9 to step into a particular ‘landscape’ of potential change which we’ll explore, and seek fertile soil in which to seed transformation (aka leave Buddhafield knowing what we’re going to do and where, to make a difference).

Buddhafield Festival Healing Garden (Pic Paul Clarke)

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In 2019 she gave a thrilling Ted Talk in Silicon Valley, speaking truth to the power of the Tech Bros on their home turf. A Daniel in the lions den. And was rewarded with a strategic law suit from a British tech billionnaire which effectively gagged and de-platformed her for half-a-decade.

And a couple of months ago, unbowed, she returned to give a further Silicon Valley Ted Talk.

“To give another talk that would incorporate some of my experience: a Ted Talk about being sued for giving a Ted Talk, and how the lessons I’d learned from surviving all that were a model for surviving “broligarchy” – a concept I first wrote about in the Observer in July last year: the alignment of Silicon Valley and autocracy, and a kind of power the world has never seen before. The key point I wanted to get across to this powerful and important audience is that politics is technology now. And technology is politics”.

Guardian Sunday 20th April 2025

I love that she’s here on Substack and sad that she no longer has the public platform she deserves and we need her to have.

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Nick Lowe asked/sang ‘Where are the strong and who are the trusted?’ Here’s one of them. And if we value truth, integrity and an unflinching guide what’s really going on, let’s cherish her, share her work, and shame media outlets that portray themselves as independent and in integrity to re-platform her.

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I took this pic at the Byline Times Festival in 2022 where, reemerging from the purdah of being strategically sued by a British billionnaire, Caroline Cadwalladwr gave an extraordinarily powerful and moving speech.

https://open.substack.com/pub/broligarchy/p/fuckity-bye?r=1v03p5&utm_medium=ios

SOUND WISDOM

Here’s NIGHT RALLY - a live howl of highly articulate rage from Elvis Costello in 1978. It’s a warning, and one that we’re still not heeding, as evidenced by the marginalising of Carole Cadwalladwr. And a warning that in the US day by day feels more like a prophecy. And the UK - albeit further back, is on the same slippery slope.

“You think they’re so dumb

You think they’re so funny

Wait until they’ve got you running to their

Night Rally” Elvis Costello

Margarita’s metaphor prompted me to reflect on not just the value of my internal Zoom function in my coaching, but also (Zooming inwards) to its value in my own personal journey, making sense of my parts, my dimensions, my Self, and (Zoom panoramically outwards) its value in understanding my place in human systems and (Zooming out telescopically) in the natural systems to which we all belong.

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Margarita’s testimonial highlights a capacity we can all exercise and strengthen. In our personal journeys we can develop our capacity to step back and observe ourselves as if walking alongside ourselves. Homing in on our steady or shallow breathing, our calm or churning thoughts, our ever shifting tides of emotions, our reactions to people or happenings, or imaginings of happenings, or memories of happenings …

I consider part of my role as a coach or mentor as becoming a companion who walks alongside you for a while, listens, watches, switching perspectives to take in both the detail and the wider context, then mirroring back to you what I hear and observe. Not only what you say but what your body language, patterns of breathing, facial expressions reveal. And when I mirror these back to you, you may be surprised at what you find. That you smile when your body is tense. That every time you talk of a particular place your eyes shine. That the overarching goal you were passionate about, you now sound bored by. My aim is not just to hold up a mirror for people, but to encourage them to grow their own practice of self-reflection. To be able to walk alongside themselves, and witness themselves. The whole of themselves. When we see and understand ourselves clearly, we become more centred, at ease, curious about rather than wary of others, and present in a way that others feel they can trust.

Zooming Out and Scaling up

As we Zoom out further we see ourselves within the constellations of family, relationship, workplace etc. And - even further - in the wider systems of culture, gender, race, tribe, sexual orientation etc.

We can also Zoom out-and-in to see ourselves not just in the spatial but in the temporal context too, of our timeline, our history, our childhood, our ancestors. Mine came from the south and west of Ireland to the South Wales valleys a couple of generations ago, with all the cultural, religious, musical and political dimensions that carries (as I remember from my childhood in the form of riotous St Patricks day parties in my birthplace of Mountain Ash. St David - patron Saint of Wales - barely got a look in).

And, with our imaginations, we can zoom forward into the future too. The one we desire. The one we fear. Bill Sharps 3 Horizons provides a brilliant template for collectively imagining forwards - I’m imagining a post on that coming soon.

Human Naturę as Nature

And if we’ve invested in the very best Zoom lens, we can widen our zooming out to the panorama of our human nature as part of, not separate from, Nature itself. Our status as mammals, as bipeds, as an evolved species, as Earthlings. As part of what Joanna Macy calls the Web of Life.

Base Camp of Self

And while all the above is positive and powerful for our individual growth and integration, my Zoom lens observes that it’s also fundamental to any prospect of change in our fractured, polarised, poly-crisis buffeted world.

The name of this substack is Seeding Synthesis … and every post or note will weave a strand in a web on interconnected strands - because that’s the world as it is. Not the simplified binaries. Marketable memes. Competing USPs. Or Culture wars that polarise and diminish us and the ‘other’ turning us into opinions on legs.

One theme of Seeding Synthesis which is at the heart of the dance between Self and Systems is drawn from a Nick Lowe lyric. The question: ‘Where are the Strong, and who are the trusted’?

As part of seeking an answer to that, within my Seeding Synthesis posts I’ll be developing the concept of small groups that gather with the intention of seeding transformation in the world, but value the wisdom that our starting point needs to be in ‘the base camp of self’. Before we step out to seed change in the world we need to be centred in our inner landscape, and meeting each other, as far as we can, from curiosity, compassion and open-hearted collaboration. I’ll be diving deeply into the methods and practices Joanna Macy and Molly Young Brown used to prepare people for environmental activism - and which were delightfully effective in the early days of Extinction Rebellion.

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Further reading / watching / listening

See my post on ‘The Strong and the Trusted - Make your own Gallery’ for inspiring examples of Zoomology - Carole Cadwalladwr, Merlin Sheldrake, Roberto Assagioli, Kate Raworth, Gabor Mate, Bjork, Frederic Laloux, Rutger Bregman. I’ll be adding Tomas Bjorkman, Mariana Mazzucato, Byline Times and Gary Stephenson to the next Gallery I create for this years Buddhafield Festival - and sadly subtracting Charles Eisenstein. Zoomology, btw, is the art-come-science-come-dance of switching perspectives, scaling up and down across the spectrum of micro to macro, to illuminate, navigate, and transform complex systems in a spirit of curiosity, collaboration and in service of co-creating a world in which we thrive. Or if I hadn’t just made it up, that’s definitely what it would be.

Byline Times Festival - held this year at Keele University in Staffordshire UK = includes courageous investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladwr and visionary economist Kate Raworth, two of my choices for my Gallery of Inspirations

Bjork and Merlin Sheldrake - two more of my Gallery of Inspirations choices - have collaborated on narrating an IMAX movie FUNGI: Web Of Life based on Sheldrake’s book ‘Entangled Life’ which will dazzle and giddify you with its Zooming in and out from the most micro-specific to the most panoramic wide angle lens in exploring the new frontier of mycelial biology.

Rutger Bergman (also in my Gallery) has a new book Moral Ambition building on his opus Humankind, and developing his crusade to challenge the pervasive myth that we humans are inherently self-centred.

Zoom is also the name of my father-in-law’s long nosed Labrador - an acknowledged expert on both particular smells and expansive smell-scapes. I’ll add his picture to the Gallery if ever he stands still enough for me to take one.

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SOUND WISDOM

So here’s Bjork, who in her song Hoja, anchors her shifting mindsets and moodsets in the tectonic forces of the Icelandic earth beneath her feet. I have long loved this song, its primal sonic landscape, and the way it’s visualised beautifully in the constantly shifting perspectives of Michel Gondry’s video.

Picture by Paul Clarke. Key: All left to right. Top row: Jacinda Ardern; Greta Thurnberg; Roberto Assagioli; Casa Assagioli display; Roberto Assagioli portrait; Mo Mowlem; Maya Angelou; Middle row: Eupsychian Management by Abraham Maslow from Assagioli’s library; Entangled Life, Merlin Sheldrake; Asylums, Erving Goffman; Internal Family Systems, Richard Schwartz et al; Reinventing Organisations Frederic Laloux; Humankind, Rutger Bregman: Bottom Row: Joanna Macy; Jan Day; Charles Eisenstein; Jewels Wingfield; Gabor Mate; Bjork; Aneurin Bevan.

Here’s a gallery I’ve created of some of the people and books I count as allies and inspirations. It hangs in my office as a helpful ‘note to self’, and I share pictures of it online as it sums up, without words, my theme/practice of Seeding Synthesis1. It is a synthesis of perspectives and wisdoms, each one an example of someone I value as strong and trusted guide. And in this post I am seeding both the idea of such a gallery and inviting you to create your own. Does that idea intrigue you? Who you would include in your gallery?

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Assembly instructions

Step 1: Look up a version of Nick Lowe’s song ‘What’s So Funny ‘Bout Peace Love and Understanding’, and set it playing on repeat. The board you’re creating is your answer to the never-so-apt question he asks in verse two and the climax of this song: ‘Where are the Strong and Who are the Trusted?’2

Step 2: Take one notice board. Mine is 60 cm x 80 cm. Source and print onto photo paper snapshots of the people (and in my case books) that, for you, are strong and trusted guides and inspirations in your life. Don’t limit the number of images you print. I really enjoyed choosing who went on my first board while holding some back for the next.

Step 3: With bluTac, or whatever works for you, attach the pictures to the board.

Step 4: If, like me, you prefer keeping your board word free - so entirely visual - create a separate A4 key to who’s who, identifying and commenting on the people and books featured. Or, if you prefer, create labels under each picture.

Step 5: When you’re happy with how your gallery looks, take a moment with each face you’ve chosen. Meet their eyes. How does that feel? What does this person bring to you, heal in you, spark in you? When you are ready widen your focus to the whole gallery. This unique constellation assembled by you. How does that feel seeing them gathered? For me I enjoyed imagining them all sharing a Zoom screen. Imagining their interactions with each other. How would yours get along if actually sharing a space together? What new ideas, initiatives, perspectives would emerge. What differences would stand out.

Step 6: Place the board where you can see it. Somewhere in your living / working space where you’ll notice it often. Maybe take a photo of it to use as a screen saver, or post on social media, or in a newsletter or blog. And, at any point, you can add to it, take it apart and reassemble it. Or create a new one.

Step 7: If you’re ready to do so, share your Gallery with others. And if you’re not, don’t. How does that choice feel? Listen to whatever causes hesitation in you, or drives you to override your hesitancy. Listen to and value, and grow in understanding of, whatever these different parts of you have to say. Listen to their vulnerability, or over-excitement, or numb confusion, or stifled rage, or stalled perfectionism. Value these parts of you as much as you value the faces on your board.

Step 8: And if and when it feels ok to share your gallery, perhaps encourage others to create their own. And, perhaps, share theirs with you?

My board - featured above - was essentially a bunch of photos printed out and stuck on a notice board in a Bell tent in Buddhafield Festival Healing Garden where I was offering massage as part of the Healing team two years ago. I loved the conversations it sparked. I’m beginning to plan a new version of the board for this years Festival - and possibly a workshop where people can create their own. And online workshops to follow.

So, here’s an invitation. I’d love both to see the Galleries you create. And - whether or not you feel able to share those, I’d love to hear how the process felt for you what you enjoyed, found challenging, gained in understanding, perspective, sense of connection etc. Send them here.

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The Inspiration

So, apart from Nick Lowe’s pithy and pertinent lyric, there’s another prime inspiration for my Gallery of Allies and Inspirations. Sharing it involves a quick jaunt through space and time. Warning: we will encounter the word ‘Psychosynthesis’. Reassurance: it’s a word that may sound to you opaque and jargonny, but when read literally as ‘a synthesis of all the psychologies - and other sources of wisdom - that shine a light on who we are and how we fulfill our potential’, is, to my mind, a game-changer that does what it says on the tin. And provides a blessed relief from the marketplace of ideas where, each day, we’re targeted with a fusillade of competing ‘magic bullets’.

We’re in Florence, Italy, 2018. The foyer of Casa Assagioli, one-time home of Roberto Assagioli, the founder of Psychosynthesis. It’s now a centre where the work he inspires continues. My wife Harriet has spent many years exploring the myriad dimensions of Psychoynthesis. I’m still walking in its foothills. We are both thrilled to visit its source. And halfway up the wide staircase, visible from the foyer, is this display.

I’d expected portraits of Assagioli to dominate the foyer. Go to the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna (where Freud lived and worked) and you are immersed in images of Sigmund Freud and selections of his work. Here in Casa Assagioli what greets you is not an image of Assagioli, nor any signs promoting ‘Psychosynthesis’. Instead here’s a large display on the wall, halfway up the stairs from the foyer, of people who inspired him, collaborated with him, resourced him on his Journey. Celebrating them, not him. Just as our blu-tack and corkboard galleries of faces celebrates them, not us.

Until visiting Casa Assagioli I’d been assuming Psychosynthesis to be an unusually expansive branch of Psychology and Psychotherapy. But this gallery of inspirations suggests something much more potent than that.

Our dominant paradigm3 in the Western world is the market of ideas – each competing against the rest. In 1974 (the last year of Assagioli’s life) he was interviewed by Psychology Today (US) journalist Sam Keen who contrasted Assagioli’s approach with:

‘the American therapeutic scene [where] we are accustomed to psychological warfare, regular shootouts at the “you’re-not-OK” corral’. Sam Keen 4

Here in 2025 the “you’re not OK corral” feels apt for not just much of our psychology, but also our polarised and tribalised economics, politics, media, culture wars etc … And we live with the consequent damage to our values, our physical and mental health, our democracies, our planets biosphere, our future. and that of our children.

In the course of the interview Keen discovers Assagioli’s embrace of

‘Both/and rather than either/or … the synthetic principle joining together what is usually kept apart’. Keen 5

Assagioli’s approach invites collaboration not competition, inclusion rather than division, synthesis rather than polarity. Assagioli himself viewed Psychosynthesis, not as another school of thought in a crowded field of competing explanations of who we humans are, but as an invitation to all the insights and wisdoms that enhance (rather than diminish) us and shine a light on our nature, to dance together in a space of humility and curiosity. 6

‘Our concern is the synthesis of all areas of the personality. That means psychosynthesis is holistic, global and inclusive’. Roberto Assagioli. Keen 7

Take another look at that display. It brings together Jung, Freud, Maslow, Buber, Indian philosopher and Polymath Tagore, esoteric English pioneer Alice Bailey, Essalen Institute co-founder Michael Murphy, Educationalist Maria Montessori, Buddhist explorer Alexandra David-Neal, founder of the Western Sufi Order Inayat Khan and more.8 Assagioli, one time student of Freud, friend of Jung, correspondent with Maslow and collaborator with many others, set out to create a space, a container, to invite in all insights and perspectives with something valuable to offer, so that they combine to illuminate and celebrate the complexity and wonder of being human.

So for me, in the tumult of 2025, the action of putting photos of those who inspire us on a cork board to create our own gallery is a radical act, embracing a paradigm shift from polarisation into synthesis. Where Steve Bannon, misinformation-monger and ally of populist demagogues around the world, talks of sowing seeds of conflict, confusion and fear by ‘flooding the zone with shit’, what we can flood the zone with in response? I’ve still got Peace Love and Understanding on a loop and the answer I hear is again courtesy of Nick Lowe’s lyrics. He asks ‘Where is the harmony?’. It’s in the Casa Assagioli wall display, and in each of our cork board galleries of inspiration. It’s in the humility and curiousity and generosity and joy of sharing with each other who our guides and inspirations are. And it’s in the wisdoms and insights all those faces offer us. Let’s flood the zone with harmony.

Sound Wisdom

When I was in Cardiff band The River Ghosts, back in the late 1980s. we played a mesmerisingly mournful, almost hypnotic minor key version of Nick Lowe’s ‘What’s so Funny ‘bout Peace Love and Understanding?’. The version here is the exact opposite! It’s the fruit of David Lynch’s Meditate America Project, was recording mid-COVID, and features Elvis Costello and Larkin Poe. Enjoy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=2XgfGUS-Two

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I've recently returned from a delightful and profound Compassionate Mental Health retreat-come-symposium in Coed Hills, Vale of Glamorgan, Wales UK, where Malcolm Stern blasted away all my masks and hiding places by asking me blindingly obvious and fiercely wise questions that rarely get asked. He’s recently launched a series of ‘Slay Your Dragons with Kindness’ podcasts - linked to his wise and moving book of the same name - and I was delighted to find Jewels Wingfield - who has long been a source of inspiration for my growth and provider of nudges for almost every radical shift I've made in my life - joining him to talk about her work. For me they are both forces of nature, cutting through to what matters and what’s true. They both stir in me that mixture of joy and terror - followed by a tingling sensation of aliveness all over - that only leaping into the freezing waters of a Scottish loch can match. And their connection goes back a long way - making for a fascinating conversation revealing much of what’s shaped them in their lives and their practice. So brace yourselves and dive in.

And while you’re at it, check out Jewels’ EarthHeart Centre in the Forest of Dean. UK. One of my takeaways from Coed Hills was the need to map existing and seed new spaces where we can drop into presence with ourselves, tune into our individual natures as being expressions of Nature itself, and meet each other with curiosity and compassion.1 For both our personal journeys and our collective response to a wounded world such places are precious. EarthHeart’s mission statement sums it up beautifully:

To co-create a world where we remember that the evolution of our consciousness is reliant on the thriving of the natural world and that the thriving of the natural world is reliant on the evolution of our consciousness

Jewels Wingfield - EarthHeart Mission Statement

Jewels and Malcolm are my first two suggestions for what will be a list and then a gallery, that answers songwriter Nick Lowe’s never more pertinent question: “Where are the Strong and Who are the Trusted?”. I’d love to hear your suggestions too. Listen to a version of the song the lyric comes from below.

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SOUND WISDOMS

Here’s the Nick Lowe song that the title of this Substack Post pilfers a lyric from. Its title poses another never-more-pertinent question: ‘What’s So Funny ‘Bout Peace Love and Understanding’. This gloriously uplifting version emerges from the late, great David Lynch’s Meditate America Foundation2 and features Elvis Costello and Larkin Poe.

It’s Monday 17th March and I’m just setting off on a return trip to Coed Hills in the Vale of Glamorgan for ‘By the Well’ - my second three day Compassionate Mental Health ‘learning retreat’.

There have now been 13 such gatherings, inspired by the vision of Brigid Bowen, who continues to co-ordinate and facilitate them with a dedicated team. And they are frequently held at Coed Hills in the Vale of Glamorgan—a rural arts and community space that feels deeply in tune with the rhythms of the land around it. And what they achieve is extraordinary.

My first such event was in Oct 2024, and my first impression was of a dizzyingly diverse gathering of mental health stakeholders, from service users to service providers, bereaved relatives to renowned experts, spanning class, race, gender, age … and bringing a kaleidoscopic array of perspectives from the UK and beyond. I remember feeling from the outset a shared intention to use this precious space, surrounded by nature, far from the clinical settings people might otherwise have met within, as a space we could all meet as equals. And by maintaining a delicate balance between the characteristics of a retreat - inviting healing and self-care - and the opportunities to learn and talk and share experiences and ideas, I found myself surprised and delighted by how quickly we participants built trust and connection, able to meet and forge a community from a place of depth. And in turn this made possible the exploration of radical, creative & compassionate alternatives to our current tangled and often dysfunctional mental health systems.

At the time I wrote:

“a retreat meets a symposium! Learning, sharing & sparking actions that ripple out into the world. Too many highlights to list … loved the examples of several cutting edge projects brought to life so vividly by those delivering and using their practices, balanced by moving - sometimes shocking - testimonies of people working in & delivering within 'stuck cultures' in many mainstream services. Now more than ever I'd love to see some national initiatives to map & provide funding at least to sustain these often precariously resourced projects that carry the vision of how all services could and should be”.

When I look back, part of the alchemy Compassionate Mental Health’s Making New Maps event, last October, achieved, was how it itself became a model in microcosm of what a Mental Health revolution could mean. And that’s one reason I’m heading back now. In ways that were as much to do deep emotional shifts and revelations as with rational reasoning, it rekindled my belief that transformative change in our collective response to people’s Mental Health issues is possible.

I’ll report back from this years gathering in future posts. Meantime here’s the shining clarity of Compassionate Mental Health’s mission statement from their website. Followed by a song which, for me, illuminates the emotional truth that anchors that mission.

AIMS of Compassionate Mental Health

https://compassionatementalhealth.co.uk/

Compassionate Mental Health is working with a network of people across the UK and internationally to transform mental health services, and radically change the conversation around mental illness.

• OUR VISION is of a world where more people recover after a serious mental health crisis, and people have access to a range of compassionate services to help develop positive mental health and wellbeing.

• OUR MISSION is to be a beacon for those going through tough times, and to work with a network of people and places across the UK and internationally to transform mental health services, and radically change the way we talk about and treat mental illness.

• OUR APPROACH is to work with a range of partners across the UK and globally to call for a more integrative approach to mental health – one that relies less on diagnosis and psychiatric drugs, and more on empowering the person, communities and social networks. Our activities are shaped by a belief that recovery after a mental health crisis is possible, and that good mental wellbeing can be achieved by strengthening and empowering communities, activating social networks, and providing access to inspiring opportunities and education.

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Sound Wisdoms

Chris Ridgeway’s songs are both beautifully crafted and deeply felt - deep rooted in the truths they tell, the souls they bare, and the red raw empathy they embrace. Aside of course for the ones that gleefully rock out, or comically mine the absurdity of life - though these too are immaculately crafted and still ring true. Here with Cakehole Presley, as with his earlier bands, the Howling Sleepers and the Vinegar Flies, the musicians around Chris don’t just play but live the songs. That’s why I chose this number to cap a piece about how the Compassionate Mental Health events in Coed Hills create a precious space where vulnerability is welcomed, and where it’s safe to touch our raw truths. For me this song evokes, and celebrates that too. And as Cardiff’s a stones throw from Coed Hills, I’m imagining Cakehole Presley have already sung ‘Sweet Dreams’ at one or other of Coed Hills awesome musical gatherings over the years. Hope you enjoy this intimate anthem of radical empathy.

For 25 years (1986 - 2011) I was part of the Cardiff Meltdown music & performance cooperative - a non-profit collaboration of enthusiasts bent on melting down barriers between genres, generations and in over 1000 gigs, an album and roadshows and festivals galore. It’s given me my very own internal jukebox of incredible songs, most of which - like this one - remain largely unsung. In the lockdowns, with the help of a dedicated posse of Cardiff music lovers, a trove of cassettes and vinyl from under my bed and the attics and cupboards of others became transformed into a digital archive. Parts of which have since been shared with and disseminated through the Cardiff Music Archive Project, and weaved into a 90 minute Cardiff Meltdown programme on Radio Cardiff. And highlights of which will - form time to time - pop up as Sound Wisdoms in my Seeding Synthesis posts.

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This Wednesday March 5th 2025 I'm heading down from rural Nottinghamshire to my home town of Cardiff to see a revival of 2023's acclaimed production HOUSEMATES at the Sherman Theatre. The play tells the true story of a friendship that sparked a global revolution in social care. And tells it with such skill and soul that every story beat, whether moving or shocking, or wildly hilarious, expertly draws reels us in to a compelling and inspiring story. And for me, as the world darkens and confusion and division stunt our will and pollute our imagination, Housemates reminds me of the potential in all of us to sow seeds of change.

Set in the early 1970s in Cardiff’s scandal ridden Ely Hospital - an asylum warehousing people labelled ‘mentally handicapped’ - it features a long-incarcerated patient, Alan Duncan, whose one joy in life is to crane his head out of a window once a week to listen to the distant sound of a rehearsing rock band. When Jim Mansell, a student volunteer reluctantly allowed in by Ely managers to sugar-coat its tarnished reputation, meets Alan and his friends, he is both horrified to witness the institution’s soul-crushing impact on them, and deeply moved by their spirit and resilience.

Soon Jim’s secretly taking Alan to see his own band rehearse. This small act of rebellion ignites Alan’s passion for rock ’n’ roll and plants in him a seed of possibility that he might one day escape Ely and live a life beyond its walls. With Jim’s encouragement that seed grows into an idea, then a campaign, and then after years of seemingly intractable setbacks, blossoms into a cannily negotiated pilot project where Alan and his friends move into a supported house share - the first in the world.

One of HOUSEMATES’s strokes of genius is its onstage live band, sometimes part of the drama - as when Alan watches awe-struck as Jim’s band rehearses - at other times acting as part Greek chorus and part raucous 70s pop soundtrack. It helps dispel any hint of worthy, sentimental, or agitprop theatre, delivering instead an uplifting and deeply human celebration of resilience and potential.

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My Own Connection to Alan

A little further along his timeline, I came to know the real Alan. By then, in the years after the events HOUSEMATES portrays, innovative house-share projects were inspiring a pan-Wales strategy of moving people out of institutions back into ordinary homes - with support tailored to their needs.

I volunteered and then worked in several of these, which is where Alan and I first met. Then through my friendship with Adrian Roper, who had been one of Alan’s houseshare supporters in its early days, I got to witness the depth of Alan’s passion for live music up close. To Alan’s delight Adrian was already in a regularily gigging local band - the Spasm Band. And to his further delight Ade and I formed the River Ghosts, as a vehicle for our own songwriting, shortly after co-founding regular Sunday Cardiff Meltdown nights at a local arts centre.

For the first decade of Meltdown1 and through a host of Spasm Band and River Ghosts gigs Alan was an omni-presence - an adept stage-invader and guest vocalist - loving the limelight. The climax of Housemates captures Alan’s onstage delight magically, and recreates with the audience the bond Alan developed with Cardiff gig-goers back then.

The real Alan sadly died a few years ago. Which makes it doubly satisfying to see him still hogging the limelight (channelled by the superb Gareth John). There are two lead characters in HOUSEMATES, and while we watch Jim learn to channel his anger, gather wise allies, and cannily play the arcane institutional politics that eventually see the hospital doors creak open, it is Alan’s drive to hear a band up close, to be on that stage, to become part of that fabulous noise, that provides the fuel for the revolution.

The real life Jim Mansell is also no longer with us either - but in his timeline went on to touch millions of lives as a global pioneer and expert in the field of humanising social care. My life among them. That initial Welsh wave of radical change that followed the events of HOUSEMATES gifted me my first job, supporting people moving from Ely Hospital into a terraced house close to the city centre. And throughout my subsequent career of leading innovative projects in the fields of learning disabilities and mental health, as well as in my current role of one to one coaching and mentoring, the bedrock example at the heart of HOUSEMATES of how Jim and Alan blow away a fog of labels, assumptions and mindsets to truly see and meet each other still sets the bar for human services everywhere.

Alan Duncan at Chapter Arts Centre, downstairs bar, Cardiff, on a Sunday Meltdown night in 1986

I’ve already booked tickets and recruited a small posse of other friends to join us on the 5th March 2025, some of whom knew Alan and / or were part of that period of service transformation, and others who just love brilliant, inspirational theatre. We’re looking to meet and reminisce before and after the show. If you live anywhere near Cardiff come and join us! If you live any where else in the world and have a foot in arts & theatre and/or person-centred social care, why not explore the possibility of staging your own version of Housemates.

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Why is this such a perfect first Substack post for me?

Housemates touches on my personal history, my passion for music, my distrust of labels and mindsets and definitions of being human that diminish us, and my conviction that genuine sustainable change in human systems has to have roots deep within us. Which we witness in Jim, as he sheds his rebel skin, and begins to expand his gift for seeing the ‘more than’ in people into imagining the ‘more than’ in human systems.

And I love my inner Zoom lens - the capacity to focus on the particular then widen out to the panoramic, then back again - like reading a map. Housemates does that. An intimately human origin story for a transformative global phenomenon. My inspirations often have that gift. Roberto Assagioli, Bjork, Adam Curtis, Jacinda Adhern, Merlin Sheldrake, Hilary Mantel, Carole Cadwalladwr. All seeing through the myths and mindsets that diminish us. And embracing whats possible when we channel our imagination and our will. All meeting each moment and each being with curiousity, compassion and a hint of mischief.

A note to end on

And finally, as what economist and genius Substacker Paul Klugman would call a ‘Musical Coda’ (still working out what to call my rip-off of his inspired Substack idea!) here’s a Howling Sleepers song recorded live in Chapter bar, circa 1998 for Cardiff Meltdown’s compilation Album (3 stars in ‘Q’ magazine) no less. As the song starts, singer Chris Ridgeway, spots Alan Duncan about to demonstrate another of his talents. - liberating unattended pints of beer. Chris warns the audience “nothing’s safe with Alan around”. Here’s to a hint of mischief.

There’ll be more on Cardiff Meltdown and a sprinkling of other ‘unsung’ delights from its archives in my other posts. Thanks for David Taylor of the Cardiff Music Archive project for YouTubing this Howling Sleepers gem.