Why Sacred Systems
Letting Life Lead The Way
Our Vision
Sacred Systems aims to contribute to our evolving understanding of what it takes for communities to thrive, by integrating the ways of the ancient village, with systems thinking, embodied mysticism and lifeforce leadership.
Another way is possible
What’s our place in the web of Life?
What if the problem is not that we don't know how to build better systems - but that we have forgotten how to listen for guidance?
We are living through a profound unraveling. The systems that organize so much of our lives - our economies, institutions, communities and food systems - are increasingly revealing their inability to serve Life. We know deep inside that another way is possible -but how do we get there?
How do we create communities where people truly belong again in the greater web of life; where everyone knows how to contribute their unique gifts to the whole? And perhaps most importantly: What becomes possible when Life itself is allowed to become our teacher and guide?
Sacred Systems is an emerging body of knowledge and practice exploring these questions.
Our Perspective
The Roots of Separation
Something fundamental has become out of balance.
In our view, the roots of our current ecological, social and cultural crisis reach back into an ancient shift in the human story: when male-dominated religions gradually replaced fertility goddess traditions, and humanity began to experience itself as separate from the natural world, rather than part of an interdependent Web of Life.
With the rise of industrial, technological and digital civilisation, interdependence increasingly gave way to independence; intuitive knowing and embodied wisdom were pushed into the shadows of rational thought. Women, the Earth and Earth-based traditions became increasingly objectified, controlled and extracted from.
We believe this imbalance continues to live within our systems, our cultures, our communities - and within ourselves. The destructive results of which are now impossible to ignore. A growing number of people know: something needs to change.
Unleashing polarities in service to Life
The Rebalancing
We do not believe the answer lies in rejecting the masculine and replacing it with the feminine. We believe it lies in remembering the sacred relationship between them.
The masculine and feminine are not simply categories of men and women. They are creative and archetypal polarities present within all of us and within Life itself. Our civilisation has become profoundly imbalanced towards one pole.
Sacred Systems explores what becomes possible when these forces are brought back into balance; when men and women find the beauty inherent in their differences, and complement each other as powerful forces of nature - and unite in service to Life.
We are interested in the creative tension between these forces — and how they can help us birth something new.
The Lost Village
“When we are born, we expect what our deep-time ancestors experienced as their birthright, namely, the container of the village. We are born expecting a rich and sensuous relationship with the earth and communal rituals of celebration, grief, and healing that keep us in connection with the sacred. This is our inheritance, our birthright, which has been lost and abandoned. The absence of these requirements haunts us, even if we can’t give them a name, and we feel their loss as an ache, a vague sadness that settles over us like a fog. This lack is simultaneously one of the primary sources of our grief and one of the reasons we find it difficult to grieve. On some level, we are waiting for the village to appear so we can fully acknowledge our sorrows.”
Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief
Communities as living laboratories
At the heart of this vision is a longing for a distant memory of the Village.
A remembering of something fundamental about being human: that we are relational beings, embedded in place, dependent upon one another and intimately entangled with the more-than-human world.
We see intentional communities as living laboratories and nurseries for pioneering new systems — transitional spaces where we can experiment with different ways of relating, making decisions, sharing resources, tending land, working with trauma & conflict and organising ourselves.
A different way of knowing
Our Approach
Sacred Systems brings together four streams of knowledge and practice:
SYSTEMS THINKING
Understanding the patterns, structures and relationships that shape the whole.
EARTH-BASED WISDOM
Remembering that human beings are participants within a living Earth, not separate from it.
EMBODIED MYSTICISM
Restoring the body, intuition, direct experience and relationship with the unseen to our ways of knowing.
LIFEFORCE LEADERSHIP
Learning to recognise and follow the vitality, intelligence and creative force moving through people, communities and Life itself.
Together, these create a bridge between intellectual and embodied wisdom - because neither is enough on its own. We need the capacity create structures and listen for what wants to emerge. To hold vision and remain in relationship with Life.
