Recently I have been reintroduced to the concept of subconscious archetypes. Archetypes are a type of pattern language that assign meaning to common recurring patterns in the human psyche. In Jungian psychology, these are used to garner deeper insight into a person’s unique mental situation. However, co-creative innovation often relies on processing similar subconscious data in a collective context.

A few weeks ago I interviewed David Passiak and, although we didn’t specifically talk about archetypes, it was the unique way in which he described co-creation that highlighted this connection:

When you’re co-creating you’re drawing out these things that are deep or hidden in your subconscious. There’s a way in which you’re coming together and you’re trying to pull out these bits and pieces inside of you or inside the other people you’re co-creating with and trying to create something that’s new and fresh and at the same time you’re trying to create something that you feel should exist in the world.

This reference to the subconscious aspect of co-creation reminded me that a big part of generative interaction is collectively refining this abstract data into meaningful outcomes that deliver value. I invite you to share your own reflections on the co-creative application of archetypal analysis with me here.

David Passiak is a keynote speaker, innovator, futurist, and author of three books – Empower – How to Co-Create the Future, Disruption Revolution, and Red Bull to Buddha. He is also the co-founder of blockchain marketing agency, Blox 7. My conversation with David covers his unique journey from religion scholar who did Ph.D. studies at Princeton on “Great Awakenings” to his current work which focuses on building movements, co-creation, crowd-based innovation, and emerging business models.

We delve deeply into David’s co-creative workshop process and unpack a specific exercise he runs people through. I found the guided meditation and visualization practice to be particularly interesting. David’s experience in this domain is extensive and he offers a wealth of insight into the near and long term future of co-creation and humanity.

Please check out his latest book, available as a free donation based download, here.

The message is clear: I must play more.

Time and time again, I am reminded that I am far to serious and it’s true. My life needs more playfulness.

There is an innocence that comes through in genuine play. Five year olds don’t care about your job title. They are immersed in the creative potential of the moment, be it finger painting or fantasy lego block adventures. With no agenda or fear of judgement, a child’s creativity knows no bounds.

Play in adult life can be a source of tremendous insight and inspiration. Yet, playing can seem like such a childish preoccupation. Who has time for play in a world filled with cellphones, meetings, and email?

I recently spoke with Jenn Sander who’s passion lies at the intersection of play and creativity. Jenn is a year-round staff member at Burning Man, advising on Global Initiatives and Innovation. She also consults on civic engagement and urban development with Re:Imagine Group, an urban prototyping lab based in San Francisco. Additionally, she is the Founder of an Urban Experience Design Studio called Play Atelier, based in Vancouver and NYC.

We talk about the power of doing things for no reason, losing track of time, and letting yourself get silly without fear of judgement. Jenn shares her philosophy on play, prototyping, and bringing adults together in fun, simple, and human ways.

“Trying to be innovative and shooting ahead can inhibit true innovative potential because you need to actually create an opportunity for people to see each other and invest in themselves via investing in each other in a much more human and simplistic way for these very diverse and mixed industry perspectives to percolate together. That’s what children do, combining different ideas until they develop a sort of clear cut perception of the world. As adults we just live in that perception and continually try to innovate within it versus exploring what a different version of society can be.”

The unfortunate tragedy is that, at times, I feel I have almost forgotten how to play. This conversation reminded me that play is at the very heart of creative endeavor.

Please enjoy.

Unbeknownst to many, besides being an entrepreneur, I am also an artist. Reconciling the two, finding synthesis in the tension, has been an unfolding journey of recognizing the inherent opportunity for creativity and meaning in all forms of creation.

Recently, I interviewed artist and entrepreneur, Jody Levy, on her approach to work and community building. Jody creates art through experience.

Five years ago her path led her to the founding of beverage company World Waters. Today, their flagship product, WTRMLN WTR, can be found in over 25,000 stores across the country. Powerful story telling and creative community building through experience driven events have played a central role in their success.

Since 2001, Jody has been creating unique events, interactive environments, brands, products, and multi-sensory installations that connect people in engaging ways. Her professional focus is all about the integration of art and technology. Jody’s experience includes working with American Idol, Chrysler, The Coachella Music Festival, Ford Motor Company, Heineken, Hewlett Packard, Lexus, MAC Cosmetics, Mos Def, Museum Of Modern Art, The Museum of Science and Industry Chicago, Palm, Paramount Pictures, Project Runway, San Francisco Museum Of Modern Art, Scion, Shades Optical, Toyota, W Hotels and many other international brands.

In our conversation Jody offers her unique experience from the front lines of launching an entirely new product category (watermelon juice) in a hyper competitive beverage industry. She shares how she’s honed their messaging and built a mission driven brand that has an edge, creates value, and inspires people to care about something.

Jody’s approach to community is all about story telling and communication. That’s the glue that holds everything together.  Jody takes us inside her role as a leader and how she communicates the story both internally and externally in a way that is always grounded in truth.

Listen through to the end to hear Jody share her personal philosophy on how the universe works and mastering the inherent duality of “decisive action in a state of surrender.”

Please enjoy our conversation.

The truth is I often find it incredibly difficult to just be myself around other people. There is an ever pervading tension in the background of my mind and it requires tremendous presence on my part to be fully expressive in the face of that tension. And it is only when I bring that fullness of being to myself that I am able to bring the fullness of myself to another. This is where true intimacy resides.

Kosha Joubert, whom I interviewed recently, shares that community is not comfortable. It is intimate. And intimacy is not comfortable. It’s powerful. The capacity for intimacy requires tremendous comfort with oneself. It requires that we show up with our full humanity, as we are, to engage with others, as they are, and through that elevate each other with deep mutual acceptance.

Kosha Joubert serves as Executive Director of the Global Ecovillage Network.  She is an international facilitator, trainer, and consultant and has worked extensively in the fields of community empowerment, intercultural collaboration and the emergence of collective wisdom. Kosha is a co-founder of Gaia Education, which develops trainings at the cutting-edge of sustainability, and is the co-author of the internationally applied curriculum of the Ecovillage Design Education programs. She grew up in South Africa under Apartheid and has spent her life working to heal social divides and trauma.

Kosha speaks of the power of collective trauma transformation. How we can learn to truly hold space for others and support them when they are triggered. Instead of tensing up and responding with aggression, we can co-regulate by consciously relaxing our own nervous system.

She shares her philosophy on leadership, community building, and a concept she calls homecoming – a way of coming back to the deeply familiar, to nature, to our bodies, and to the planet.

This conversation overflows with wisdom and unique insight. Listening to it after our recording was a profoundly uplifting experience for me. Please enjoy.

One of my emerging passions is exploring ways of being together. How do we co-exist and even thrive as a global society? Much of my work with Sutra and these podcasts revolves around trying to understand this question in some way.

Recently, my friend Alnoor Ladha introduced me to the term mystical anarchism – a form of self organization based on self agency and responsibility. In a recent essay he wrote on the subject, Alnoor emphasizes a belief in the conscious individual as the unit of free society. “This requires sovereign women and men who understand the structure of power, consent to rules they themselves have legitimized, and consciously choose to live within their own communities according to their shared principles and values.”

Alnoor is the founder of The Rules, a global network of activists, writers, researchers, artists, designers, hackers, and others focused on addressing the root causes of inequality, poverty and climate change. He is a Board Member of Greenpeace International and a visiting lecturer at New York University, Columbia University and the Ontario College of Art and Design.

A traditional framework of governance is almost implicitly based on the past – on how things were rather than how they are and how they call us to be in this moment. Mystical anarchism is a system of no system. It entails radical agency and responsibility but offers a unique freedom of being completely authentic to the demands of the moment. Leadership in this context is not just about embracing the unknown, it is about deprogramming what you think you already know.

Alnoor challenges us to simultaneously take responsibility for our own experience and contribute to the reshaping and remaking of our world. This, he says, isn’t activism – it’s just taking responsibility. What I resonate most with in this conversation is this concept of non-dualistic responsibility. Self agency and self responsibility does not exclude the broader agency and responsibility of the whole. It is a thread of the same impulse rooted in a mutual acknowledgment of the certain unknownness and interdependence of life. Honoring this calls for deep presence and mutual respect.

This conversation is a little more political than most and whether you agree with the views expressed or not, I suggest you listen to some of the deeper implications behind what Alnoor is saying. His approach to understanding the root causes of social issues offers much to consider. Please enjoy our conversation.

The journey to self expression has been a life long adventure for me. When I was younger, radical self expression – crazy hair, lots of piercings, being very loud – was a clever facade masking insecurity and lack of self acceptance. Now, some twenty years later, I encounter the creativity of my wild younger self from a completely different orientation – one of wholeness and acceptance.

I recently spoke with Timothy Phillips who shared an eloquent thought on this subject: creative self expression is the ultimate form of empowerment but it’s also a really profound vulnerability. If community exists to support self actualization, how do we create a safe space for the vulnerability that that necessarily entails?

Tim is an architect, real estate developer, and community builder. I first encountered him years ago, when I randomly ended up at his birthday party – with some 500 other people all dressed up in wild outfits. At that time I was asking myself, who is this guy and why are so many people here for his birthday? Since then, Tim has transformed his birthday party into a diverse community of inspiring change makers called Lightning Society.

Lightning Society now has an extended reach of ten to fifteen thousand people and organizes a spectacular large scale annual gathering, all sorts of regular speaker and dinner events, and a community co-living habitation in Brooklyn. I spoke with Tim about his story, his philosophy on creating meaningful connection, and the challenges with generating income through a community oriented enterprise.

One of the most challenging questions I encounter on a daily basis is: how are you? I find my experience of the human condition to be difficult to convey through casual spoken language. Can you ever fully describe how you feel and do yourself justice as a human being? To answer, I have to somehow squeeze the entirety of my experience into a simple two word response: “I’m good.”

We need art, be it painting, poetry, or drama, to express the inexpressible. Art creates a pause that allows us to really sit with what is being communicated. Listening to this creative expression in a deeply embodied way, with your whole body, gives rise to real dialogue.

I recently spoke with Nisha Sajnani about the relationship between art and community. Nisha defines community as something that we imagine and something that we experience. Art plays a role in imagining new ways of being and belonging. It creates an imaginal bridge between what is and what could be.

Nisha shares her experience with dramatic improvisation and outlines a four step recursive cycle of mirroring and emergence based on noticing, feeling, animating, and expressing. Much of my own work is inspired by Theory U which describes a similar process called “presencing” that revolves around iteratively tuning into what is emerging. The similarity in process is uncanny: observation, stillness, crystallization, action.

Dr. Nisha Sajnani is an Associate Professor and Director of the Drama Therapy Program at NYU. She directs the As Performance: Therapeutic Theatre Lab where her primary research areas of interest include the health benefits of theatre-making as it relates to social determinants of health, stigma, and social inclusion/exclusion, relational aesthetics in therapeutic theatre, scalable storytelling based interventions in schools, and sustainable mental health care in humanitarian contexts. Nisha is the co-editor of two books, including Trauma-Informed Drama Therapy: Transforming Clinics, Classrooms, and Communities, and has published numerous chapters and articles in research publications including The Arts in Psychotherapy, The Journal of the Applied Arts and Health, Canadian Theatre Review, and Canadian Women’s Studies. She also co-produced the documentary film, Fostering Democracy Through Theater.

In our conversation Nisha shares a handful of specific techniques she uses in her own practice. She talks about how bringing people together around an art making project is a way of fostering a sense of belonging allowing for multiple ways of encountering the reality of human experience. Our conversation is both deep and, at moments, poetic.

Please enjoy.

Much of my work revolves around exploring ways to cultivate heart centered presence online. What this means can be difficult to describe and it revolves around a direct experience of mutual presence and deep relatedness between two or more people.

To be honest, there are times I question whether the internet is an appropriate medium to deliver something like this. Shouldn’t we be spending less time online and more time together, in person? Undoubtedly, yes. At the same time, I connect help but observe that technology has become almost inseparably woven into the fabric of modern communication and, as such, perhaps it can be a powerful catalyst for wholeness and heartfelt human connection.

How to deliver experiences like this in an online context is an ongoing exploration. This podcast is itself a significant part of the process as an inquiry into the work of others across related domains. Today, I have an opportunity to share a conversation with a close friend and teacher who inspired some of my earliest journeys into intentional presence.

Roman Hanis has been working closely with the indigenous Peruvian cultures in the Amazonian rainforest and Andean mountains since 2001. During this time he has devoted his life to learning the ancient wisdom of these people while seeking possibilities for creating ecological sources of sustenance for local populations and working to preserve the rainforest and its spiritual heritage of sacred medicinal plants. He is the co-founder of the Paititi Institute which stewards 4000 acres of land in the Mapacho Valley of the Peruvian Andes. Roman’s work has been featured in the documentary film, The Sacred Science, and he travels throughout Peru and the US sharing a unique blend of Eastern and indigenous knowledge through community projects, healing retreats and educational workshops.

Our conversation does a deep dive into the technical aspects of creating a safe space and handling inevitable conflict in community. Roman offers insight into a process for bringing people together in heart presence and shares a beautiful quote about his own learning journey: “Everything is perfect with infinite room for improvement.”