Experiments and Insights in Regenerative Cyclical Living
For the past four years I have been engaging in experiments of cyclical living and for the past year diving deeper into the potential that rhythmic living offers for regenerative pathways in our cultures, society and economy as well as composting and dismantling what doesn’t work.
These experiments have included: exploring holding regular community land gatherings during cross quarter festivals Beltane and Samhain; connecting with the rhythm and wisdom of my menstrual cycle through cycle tracking; befriending and learning about the wheel of the year; connecting with Celtic earth honouring ritual and ceremony and attuning myself to the rhythm of the moon and planets through astrology.
It’s included training and learning with the 8 shields community through the course Bringing It Home; diving into Ancestral Healing practices and Practical Animism with Daniel Foor; it’s involved living and practicing Emergent Strategy and Pleasure Activism by adrienne maree brown in a community with others; listening and reading black feminist thought like Trisha Hersey from The Nap Ministry on the power of rest as resistance. It’s including immersing myself in climate activism, learning about the reality of the harm we create to the Earth and the gravity of the task at hand; it’s included deepening my understanding of social justice, anti-racism, decoloniality and capitalism.
It’s involved connecting and rooting into the place where I am living, growing food, and being out on the land all year round seeing the seasons transition and transform. It’s included learning about death, dying, winter, yin, Elderhood, rest, stillness, fallow time and other themes associated with repairing and healing culture. It’s included building an intimate relationship with nature and the other than human life that I am surrounded by, welcoming the intelligence of the otherwise whilst de centering human intelligence.
It has been a journey into regenerative possibilities that repair harm and understanding more about the complexity of the oppressive systems we live in and our work to repair and replace them with models that honour our planetary boundaries.
It feels like there are many insights that I’ve gathered over this time, they are complex, interweave and can sometimes seem unconnected. I have a need to want to deepen the journey of regeneration and have become curious about what are the parts of this journey that might dwell on the edges. This process is iterative and I’ll most likely need to expand and explore these themes more in depth in other articles. But for now getting something out on the page feeds my desire to learn out loud.
Here are a handful of the insights I’ve gained from these ongoing experiments:
- Regenerative Cultures are about People and Land
Regeneration is largely about land, ecosystems, soil, water, carbon, pollution, and it’s also about repairing and transforming the systems and cultures that have led us towards climate collapse, it’s just as much about people and the mindsets that stop us creating regeneration. - It’s complex!
I often see my own tendency to want to over simplify and make things fit into neat boxes. Take the seasons as a map for example and how we apply them to our own life. There is always going to be multiple layers to our experience that fall outside of the seasonal cyclical model and that’s ok because cyclical living is a map and we are all going to read it differently. I’m curious how that map brings us closer to ourselves, each other and the earth community we are part of. - Micro & Macro
Our broken economic model values constant perpetual growth and it’s so deeply engrained in our psyche and in order to render that model obsolete we can support ourselves and each other to divest and de-prioritise the patterns that feed that system. I can choose to not buy into hustling, grinding and the pathology of productivity that say I must work to be worthy and instead look to listening, slowing down and being curious how I can do more with less shifting from scarcity to sufficiency. - Nurturing Slowness
Slowness, stillness and rest are imperative for our joy, our pleasure and experiencing the fullness of life. Valuing and prioritising slowness over speed is a radical act that subverts a system that thrives on urgency. It also nourishes our nervous system when we can let ourselves find ways of being that nurture slow qualities, and the mystery is that can often create more space and possibility in our work or activism. - The Self Development Wheel
What if we each knew and felt that just by being alive we were enough and worthy and that our belonging was non-negotiable. I believe our reconnection with the other than human world through nature connection and cyclical living offers us the space to slowly reclaim our belonging and remember that there’s nowhere we need to get to, we are whole and beautiful just as we are, so often we need the support to come home to that idea. - The Menstrual Cycle
Regenerative cyclical living is not just about women and people who bleed connecting with their menstrual cycle, especially not as a way to be more productive. It is about humans reconnecting with the truth that we are nature, we are deeply interconnected with it and therefore affected by it’s rhythms and patterns. The Menstrual cycle is one doorway that supports embodied cyclical living and leadership. - Cyclical wisdom is available to all genders
All humans are cyclical beings. We evolved interconnected with the world around us and it’s rhythms. Our circadian rhythms, our trauma response cycle, the way our heart pumps blood around our body, our breathe. Nature mirrors that to us in it’s moon cycles, the ebb and flow of the tide, the cycle of compost, the growth of a seed to a flower, to fruit, how trees reserve energy and nutrients in their roots in winter. You do not need to have a womb or a menstrual cycle in order to connect with cyclical wisdom, it exists in and around you all the time. - Women, Queer and Black led
How can we led by people who have experienced intersecting systemic oppression? Their perspectives and approaches have grown out of learning to not only survive, but thrive in a system that tries to dehumanise them. When regenerative cyclical living uplifts the work of people who are black, queer and women we centre radical intersectional approaches that help us build diverse and equitable cultures. And we are de-centering a patriarchal, heteronormative, white supremacist culture that wants linear, urgency, pressure, perfectionism, productivity and growth culture. - The power of Enquiry
Regenerative cyclical living has become a lifelong enquiry for me. It means I am not fixed on ‘getting’ anywhere or turning it into some productivity hack. Instead it is an enquiry that I hope will continue to lead me into deeper connection with supporting life to thrive in a myriad of ways. I try to stay curious, open and honest with myself. I will make mistakes, but the important thing is that I learn from those moments and continue to be curious. - Regenerative bypassing
A regenerative model that bypasses grief, death, dying and reckoning with harms humans have enacted on each other and the planet is not a truly regenerative pathway. It’s like a type of regenerative bypassing that focuses only on the positive and doesn’t include the space for grieving, reconciliation and processing trauma. Learning to include these things in our culture and activism is essential if we want to truly imagine regenerative possibilities. - The more I look the more I see
It feels as though each day offers up a new layer of enquiry. The more I live aligned to something that feels like regenerative cyclical living, the more patterns, habits, and conditioning I uncover. I experience the knotted web that has been created by severing our connecting to the earth and the curiosity of what I might untangle. It’s also becoming more clear that I want this to be a foundation for action in the world. The qualities associated with slow living are essential to continue to be resourced in our efforts to grow a diverse, equitable, healthy, thriving future.
