Grieving Our Way Through

Tragic Optimism and Inner Coherance

I’ve attended many of the Presencing Institute virtual offerings. The second session of their spring series, Reclaiming Human Agency: When Love is What Doesn’t Break, was one of the most inspiring and thought provoking that I have attended. Below are some highlights from notes I took during the session. They are not a complete overview of the discussion. For that, read the Presencing Institute’s recap and watch the recording here.

Otto Scharmer opened by naming what so many of us feel: that we are living in a moment of civilizational crisis, one that touches the core of what it means to be human. He then invited two guests to respond to that moment: Tristan Harris, founder of the Center for Humane Technology and the Human Movement, and Nipun Mehta, founder of ServiceSpace.

Tragic optimism

Tristan talked about his early days in Silicon Valley, what he called the “race to the bottom of the brainstem.” He watched as a small group of engineers in the Valley were essentially designing the psychological commons of humanity, the shared inner space where attention lives, and he saw the moral weight of that responsibility. He tried to change things from inside. He couldn’t go far enough. “The technosphere,” he said, “was built for extraction. It was not designed to care about the biosphere.”

“We are in a liminal place,” he continued. The old paradigms don’t have the capacity to scale. Conscious capitalism is not going to get us through. And so, what do we do?

“First, we grieve,” he said. Tragic optimism means actually feeling that grief, not bypassing it. We grieve our way through the crisis. And on the other side of grief, he said, there is love. From that place, the question becomes: how can I be in service of what I love? And then be unattached to the outcome, because we might not make it through. Every day he orients as if there is a way through.

“It is not just what we do,” Tristan said. “It is who we have to be to bring that in.”

Deep data platform of life

Nipun picked up that thread and went deeper into it. He talked about awakening what he called the “deep data platform of life,” which I understood as the knowing of the heart, the intelligence that lives below our metrics and our spreadsheets. He talked about practicing inner coherence so that we can meet the inner coherence of others. That is the ground, he said, from which real change becomes possible.

He described three levels of change. The first is awareness: knowing, for example, that buying the cheapest herbs almost certainly means poor quality. The second is impact: beginning to source only from suppliers you actually know. But the third, transformation, is where it gets interesting, and harder to measure. Transformation, he said, emerges in a field. It is a grace. Like gardening. You do your five percent and trust that nature does the rest.

He told the story of the Dalai Lama visiting Gandhi’s grave after fleeing Tibet. Standing there, he had a vision, an experience that emerged from the field and that changed how he understood his role as the head of a nation in exile. Nonviolence not as strategy but as a way of being. That is the kind of transformation Nipun is pointing toward.

Trusting inner coherence

Nipum’s comments about measuring impact has also stayed with me as it is something I struggle with at the Sustainable Herbs Initiative. “I would never ask what is the impact of your mother,” he said. “I as a human am the impact of my mother… By not insisting on measuring, by not trying to put those impacts in a box, you let them move into the complexity of the world.”

“We need to do less, to be more, and have deeper trust in coherence,” Nipum said.

His frame for leadership is not about reaching critical mass. He talked instead about critical yeast. Yeast is small, it is humble, it does its thing quietly. But without it, you can’t make bread. That is the kind of leadership that is needed now: present, humble, open to its own blind spots, and trusting the field of coherence.

I keep coming back to how much of what they were describing connects to what we try to hold at SHI. The work of sourcing herbs well, of knowing where they come from and caring about the people who grow and harvest them, is not primarily about metrics. It is about the quality of attention we bring to relationships. It is about inner coherence meeting inner coherence, whether that’s across a supply chain or across a conversation.

If you have a chance to join any of the remaining Presencing Institute sessions, I’d encourage you to do it. These are some of the conversations right now that help.