Being The Change
Discoveries from a Yearlong Living Laboratory
A new book by Terry Patten, Siobhan McClory, Kristin Nauth and
the Whole Community of Living in a New Republic of the Heart
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A global field of study is emerging — intentional cultural evolution — learning how to be the change by attempting it through small-scale experiments. Such experiments are exploring and refining the solutions urgently needed by our world in this moment.
Our new book shares the “secret sauce” of catalytic intimate relating through which we have awakened together in joy and effectiveness, as a gift to other daring social experiments.
In 2019, over 150 people from 13 countries committed to a yearlong social experiment in “being the change” that could catalyze the whole-systems transformation required by our civilizational crisis.
We knew we could only succeed incompletely, but we would publish all we learned — successes and failures — to benefit all groups attempting social experiments in social transformation.
People all over the world are seeking to awaken together, to cooperate in new ways that involve new depths of friendship, new agreements, and new practices. We believe this important new field will not advance primarily via abstract intellectual understanding, but rather via action-inquiry—learning by doing.
We will succeed to the degree that we learn to do the work together, as constant researchers, learners, and co-creative artists of the possible.
Being the Change offers key principles, practices and examples to help communities awaken deeper and more dynamic evolutionary friendships. This can transform each individual, each group, and your ability to make a difference.
We outline our aspirations, methodologies, successes, failures, and conclusions — from a full year of Being the Change together.
What You’ll Discover in the Book:
- Executive Summary — Overview of our social experiment and our key research findings
- Introduction —The inspiration, intentions, and design of our experiment, how we began, how we evolved, and how we challenged ourselves to keep growing and serving
- Our Findings — What worked well, what could have worked better, issues, and critiques
- We-Space — A big-picture view of “we-space” and sharing our “secret sauce” — the we-space practices of our social experiment
- Voices of Participants — Insights, reflections, poetry, and profound transformations from participants of the social experiment in their own words
- Discussion & Conclusions — Our four core hypotheses: 1) the emergence of a global field of action-inquiry and “intentional cultural evolution,” 2) the power of changing our way of being, 3) the power of an integral approach, and 4) the power of we-space. We conclude by sharing proposed directions for further research, research validity, confirmation bias, optimizing for benefit, and a co-creating a “movement of movements”
- Appendix: A Call to Yin Leadership — Transcript of the initial public talk Terry Patten gave inviting participants into the yearlong social experiment for further context
About Terry Patten
This book reports the findings of a social experiment initiated by Terry Patten. Terry is a philosopher, activist, teacher, and social entrepreneur. He is the author of A New Republic of the Heart: An Ethos for Revolutionaries, as well as Integral Life Practice, which he co-wrote with Ken Wilber and colleagues. He has taught an integral approach to personal transformation for over 15 years.
Terry is the founder of A New Republic of the Heart, a nonprofit that trains spiritual practitioners and change agents in enacting “holistic activism,” and the host of the State of Emergence podcast, which convenes daring conversations about humanity’s urgent challenges.
Terry also founded the consciousness technology company Tools for Exploration, led a team at the HeartMath Institute, and consults with businesses addressing restorative forestry, fossil-fuel alternatives, collective trauma, and empowering people to reclaim our data, online relationships, and power.
What people are saying about Terry
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