 Welcome to another Depadaptation Q&A with me, your host, Jim Bendell, and our guest this month is Zori Tomova, who's known to many of you. I would have thought because she was a coordinator of the Depadaptation Forum for quite some time in the early days as we were setting it up. And Zori, I met in Bali and Zori became a good friend. Zori became a coach for me as well through a very difficult time as I was making sense of who I am or wanted to be with the new knowledge which was real and true for me about the state of the planet and the future. And then also Zori created something back then called the Connection Playgrounds which was her response to the information that she was hearing about the state of the world. And so that was also really important in my own reconstitution of self really. So yeah, so Zori's been a companion on my journey over the last four years now and Zori is joining us from Guatemala, I believe, is that right? Good. So I'm sorry, I'm going to ask you to unmute and say hello. It's in the evening where you are, isn't it? But are you? Yeah, unmute, unless you've got, yeah, please unmute to join us. So just say hello so we know that your mic's working. Okay, hello everyone. It's an honour for me to be here. Just like Gem was sharing, it's been a while that we've known one another and actually he's been, and meeting Gem has been a big turning point for me and a big inspiration for everything that I've been doing in IEM today. And so it's really a big honour for me to be here with all of you and to return to the Deep Adaptation Forum as this work is very close to my heart. Yeah, thank you Zori. And when we scheduled this, maybe a month or so ago, we knew how stressful the world is because of environmental change, because of polarisation, because of pandemic and pandemic policies and polarisation of that, because of ongoing conflict in the world, seems to be war happening everywhere. But obviously, what's alive for a lot of us right now, and so I thought I'd mention it in America, the 26th of February 2022. Yeah, an invasion within Europe is big news and there's such a history around that and such a traumatic history that and any conflict with nuclear powers is also really scary for everyone, not just those currently involved on the ground, which is also really awful. So I wanted to mention it and in a way, it's almost like I feel like we should go straight into that, because I do want to ask you about how you came to where you've got to with the work you do, particularly how that was not by blocking out your sense of the way the world is, but in response to it. But yeah, go straight into the deep end. We've titled this session, the wisdom of play in times like these. So times like these when a new war is on involving a nuclear power and talking to our friends and family and looking on social media, this, yeah, it's affecting people a lot. People are all debating what to do, how to respond. Various ideas being shared on that. Lots of upset as well being shared about lack of responses. The obvious question is, isn't focusing on play, frivolous, self-involved, distracting and irrelevant to the cause of reducing harm, bringing peace and justice into the world. Thank you, Jen, for asking this question. I've been wondering about the same and what's been coming up for me is basically I see this word that has just erupted as a very important invitation to come back in ourselves and in our communities and ask ourselves, how are we contributing to the peace in this world? How can we restore peace within ourselves, within our closed circles and then from there also in the collective, it might not happen. Not all of us might have the opportunity to influence global politics in the way that some others have, but we do have that which is within our control, which is how do we be at peace inside of ourselves and with one another. And what is the role that play has to do with that? What role does play in it? It also comes down to the way that we define play. So for me, play is not just the frivolous jumping around enjoying life. Play is a way of exploration, a way of exploring what are some different ways of being with one another. Play is also a way of coming back to a beginner's mind, a mind that acknowledges, hey, I don't know what's going on. And I might as well come together with others and sort of a playground as we like to call the gathering spaces that we assemble in online right now in the connection playground as a way to really make our way through what's going on. And play is not necessarily something that, at least in my definition of the world, the word is associated with the frivolousness. It can be that, it can be a lightness. But it can go much deeper than that. It can go into exploring how do we explore the unknown that is ahead of us? How do we make sense of it? How do we find a different way of being with it? So that's the significance I see right now in this moment. And in what you've just said, you've reminded me of my experience of your initiative, the connection playground, when it was happening in person. I came along to events, which was, I didn't see it as just how am I going to go and have fun right now. Because what does my body need? What does my soul need? What does my mind need? What is going to help nourish and heal me so I can be more fully engaged in whatever's happening? I definitely felt that and I definitely got that from it. But before we dive more into that, I want to also invite Katie, the leading tech support for us today, just to make an announcement about how you can all engage and ask questions at some point later on in our session today. Thank you, Gem. So for about the next 20 minutes or so, half of this gathering, Gem and Zori will be in conversation. But if you would like to ask Zori a question yourself, then you can do that by sending it to me as a direct message in the chat and be prepared. So I'm going to drop you a line to let you know if Gem's going to call on you to ask your question. And there is an assumption, we will be assuming that by submitting a question that you agree to be recorded as part of this event and the recording is going to be listed on Gem's YouTube channel. So if you would rather not have your voice and image on that, you can let me know in the chat and I can ask the question on your behalf. And yeah, so be prepared to turn your video on when we call on you. And I will invite you to unmute yourself. And this is an intimate group, so there's an opportunity to hear from lots of you. So yeah, please do send your questions directly to me in the private message in the chat. That's all, thank you. Thank you, Katie. Now, Zori, when I first met you, you were talking about your background in IT, in logistics, in performance optimization. You were talking about startups and all the work you've done with startups. And you were talking about looking at maybe creating some kind of plastics recycling business or other environmental businesses. And then after a conversation we had, within a few weeks, you'd completely changed direction. Could you just go back to that time and tell us what happened? Because I think it's many people on this call and many people who watch this conversation will be either in the process of reassessment and perhaps becoming someone new because of the kind of stuff that we talk about in the deep adaptation world. So I remember first meeting you, Jim, I was already in this process of letting go of that kind of life that you just described. I was an entrepreneur. I was working in the field of startups and IT for quite a few years. And actually a big part of my journey was realizing that the work I was doing was not close to my heart. And this was the reason I found myself in Bali in order to explore and find what else might it be that I could offer to the world and I could shape my life around. And I remember at first when I arrived, I started playing with this idea of, okay, I saw a lot of plastic that was washed up on the shore in Bali and I was thinking, okay, so maybe I could do something to solve that. Although I have absolutely no background or experience in that field, it just was hurtful for me to watch that happen. And then I started exploring what might be some solutions there. And I remember coming to this dead end where this whole idea of problem solution, just a mindset of, oh, there is a problem and let me solve it, started disintegrating because I thought, well, how can I guarantee that whatever solution I come up with to this problem does not end up creating even more problems that afterwards need to be solved or even bigger pollution or bigger issues. And so actually when I met you, I was in that state of just this whole idea, this whole mindset of I need to find problems to solve was disintegrated and I had no idea of how I orient myself in this, if there is no problem solution, then what am I doing here? And then when I met you and when you shared with me about your findings about our climate, I remember my first reaction was like, oh, you were speaking about, oh, maybe in 10 years time civilization collapses and then even people like you and me, we might be gone in that process. It might mean death, actually. And I remember asking myself, well, what if this is true? What if I'm one of those people that will just die in this process of civilization collapsing? And I said to myself, well, then I better make sure I live until that happens. And then I asked myself, but what does it mean to live? How do I know I have lived a full life? And my answer was, well, I feel alive when I feel connected, when I feel fully present and engaged with other people, with nature, with myself. And then does it really matter if I die tomorrow or in 10 years or in 50 years? If connection is what makes me feel alive, then that's what I should commit to and live according to and I should follow this thread of experience that connection is pointing me to. And in a way, if we do bring back that mindset of problem and solution, it does strike me as something that our world needs very much right now, reconnecting with ourselves, one another and nature. As all of our progress has created a lot of disconnect, a lot of isolation and a lot of mental and physical suffering for many of us. So for this, I'm forever grateful to Jim for bringing this awareness because it really helped me to align to the gifts that are mine to give and who I am today. And it became a, it wasn't just about you having, you living differently and you having fun in a different way. You created an organization, you created a framework, you invited people in to join you in that initially physical offline and then online when the pandemic hit. Could you say a little bit more about what Connection Playground is and where it's got to now a few years later? So this awareness of connection being something that I would like to focus on in the face of mortality also came with an awareness that I don't necessarily know what connection is, what are the forms it can take. And I don't feel like it's a kind of something I could ever hope to find the answer to. It felt like a kind of an inquiry. And so I realized that I need to find out more. I need to learn more. And how do I do that? And then I said, well, let's bring people together. We were in Bali, people coming from all over the world. Everyone bringing so much experience, so many different experiences of what connection might look like. And so I had this idea of just having us come together in a shared space once a week where we would just have this 45 minutes dedicated to exploring connection with nature, 45 dedicated to exploring connection with ourselves and 45 connection with others. And in each of those slots, I was just going around my week and looking for what are some gifts that others might have to bring into this exploration, whether they had any kind of background or certification in that, it was just something that they were personally exploring. They felt passionate about and was authentically present for them to be able to share in the form of an experience rather than a lecture or something like that. So it was more of this workshop kind of style exploration of different practices and things, which was just my way of creating a sort of a university really for what is connection. I stayed with that for a while while I was in Bali and it enriched my life in such incredible ways, just this way of community and coming together with this inquiry. And afterwards, for a few years, I was traveling back and forth between my home country of Bulgaria and Romania where my partner was based and bringing this with me, but also going back to Bali, going to Peru, then going to Guatemala. So it was kind of like difficult to keep it anchored in an offline environment because of all of this movement. And so eventually COVID came. And as COVID arrived, I remember actually, Jem, you posted this invitation for us to gather together in online spaces and really kind of come back to community through technology. And I said, oh, actually, that's a good idea. Why don't I just reach out to all these people I had connected along the way with. And I thought it was going to be a few weeks and maybe we'd just come together and explore and support one another, gather together in this way in an online medium. And it turned out that this was something that stuck even now after COVID is kind of fading in many parts of the world. It still is here and we still keep on gathering and doing that work in an online environment which continues to be an incredible and reaching experience of community and exploration and connection. Thank you. And yeah, I do remember that. In the early days of the pandemic, it was the February or March 2020 when we realized that the ability to meet physically might be suspended for quite some time. And within the context of the Deep Adaptation Forum where we were working together at the time, we also then tried to see if people could do more stuff for each other online and you as well with the connection playground. I was wondering, there are some theories around how we are losing our ability in some parts of the world to have dialogue about difficult issues without getting angry and defensive. There are theories about how we, through social isolation, can start instinctively demonizing others There are theories then that this leads us to be more open to manipulation through mass media for whatever ends, for whatever side of any polarized issue might be talking about. Do you think that what you're doing with connection playground is relevant to that story of effectively the disruption, degradation or breakdown of normal society because of the atomization of each of us? I believe that coming together in communities is definitely a way to go about this in the sense that it supports us in self-regulating and co-regulating and having important conversations with one another. For me, one of the key ways in which I've been looking to support this way of perhaps releasing that defensiveness has been just to create an environment of safety and show up in a spirit of I don't know actually the answer to the questions that we might explore together myself or whoever is hosting that space is not coming from this position I'm going to tell you how things are but are coming from this position of well, this is a question that's important for me right now and I have my own position on it but let's have a conversation where there is no teacher there is no central figure that knows what the answer is and just really coming into that spirit of authenticity through doing that so I'm not sure if I'm answering your question Yeah, absolutely because I had thought about the importance of effectively feeling loved and having some sense of general trust in being alive in the universe and other people that can come from just playing because you're not if it's creative, it's emergent you're not trying to win in the game kind of context then that's the kind of thing it invites but yeah, what you've also said there resonates indeed and it would be great wouldn't it if all of us could have more play in our lives I'm just realising that something else though that you said there it would mean that we we're more okay with not knowing we're more okay with we label it failure, don't we like or and yet I mean we've done improv theatre together and I know you did improv theatre in the connection playground I mean there is no failure the funniest bits and the most exciting emergent bits are the things where it's just all completely spontaneous so yeah, that I think that also relates to the whole deep adaptation concept which is wow, the old answers the old truths are crumbling, the old expectations are crumbling old identities are crumbling and can we keep some space for us to play about what what might emerge from that and it will be different for different people because so many people want to rush into having a no this is what we need to do this is how to stop more harm this is the way, follow me and yeah, that can come from a place of panic it can come from a place of just rehearsing our own script about how to be a decent human being so yeah pausing and playing as perhaps is a a methodology in in collapse of where people which I certainly knew and valued and I don't know how much I have that in my life anymore so it's good to know connection playground is happening how many events happen what can we all go and join how do we do it you can we have around maybe three to four gatherings happening each week and they're all based on donation and they're co-created with a bunch of other beautiful humans from all over the world we also have spaces in which we come together to actually being that spirit of co-creation being that spirit of okay what is present for us right now in our connection with self-other in nature and then joining forces around common threads in order to create spaces that we can explore together so there's a lot of collaboration happening there's a lot of yeah just just play really just allowing for us to come together in this way and one thing that also I wanted to mention as I was listening to you is there's something about perfectionism something about just releasing this need for everything to be perfect for everything to be told out before it happens for everything to be controlled and structured and clear and somehow allowing a bit more space for emergence to actually take place for creativity really allowing our life force to kind of guide us to places where we might not be able to go if it would just be so like trying to get everything right and not fail so that's something that's been a big medicine for me coming from a heady perfectionistic kind of place in the kind of work I was doing before yeah I remember you once told me that so if old ways of being and doing are crumbling then we know we want something new but how are we going to discover what's new unless we play around with that like how can we think that we can work it all out from our current way of being and doing exactly which one we're going to transition to like how silly is that idea that we need to know before we then move into the new way of being and why not just realize we've got to play an experiment and trust that we're going to be more urgent and therefore that it means also welcoming diversity of experiment rather than just having this judgemental attitude about people doing different things and saying no no no that's not the way to go it's this way not that way so yeah and that for me also is very much alive when anyone's talking about then things which are very important to me like maintaining social justice human rights that flavour of judgementalism about well hmm like where's the activism and what you're doing sorry is this inactivist is this giving up on the climate fight so you must have heard that or maybe you don't hear it but I certainly do and I've often responded to say well so many people have transformed through their collapse anticipation and are active in so many different ways but I realise perhaps there's another way of responding to that which is well who are you to decide what activism is or isn't and what has an impact or not so any thoughts on this because it's quite a live debate about people wanting to label people doomers apathetic and giving up I guess that brings up the question of what this activism mean you know it's kind of like because activism is taken to mean okay we go out in the street we protest we create projects that perhaps support another way of being and this for me is also a project that supports another way of being because it has this element of bringing us together to reconnect with nature and with ourselves and one another which is a kind of a soil for other kinds of activism to emerge from so when we are ourselves in a state of well-being and self-regulation and creativity and we are open to actually connecting with nature in different ways then nature plays a bigger role in our awareness and then we can bring more action also that is aligned with bringing more awareness to nature and our connection with it so you're touching on something there that I want to explore a bit more but before I ask you about it just to say for all of you who've joined us today please if you have a question for Zari do send it to Katie Carr through private message and then we'll be coming to you in about five minutes to hear your questions and also Katie if you have a question for Zari maybe we go to you first as well so Zari you just mentioned about being open to nature to be so what I think I'm beginning to hear then is and you've said it earlier before about the idea of the fear of failure the desire for control the expectation that perfection is possible and good and to be a responsible human you must always achieve perfection or try to all of that is within a particular idea of how to know the world and how to interact with the world and you called it heady as well earlier so my sense is you have been very alive to a different way of sensing a different way of welcoming insight a different way of sense making and being guided by nature, universe, energies whatever could you tell us anything about about that because it really doesn't get much space in the kind of conversations I have in my boring academic or activist life yeah that's a beautiful question thank you Jim for asking this reconnection with nature actually it opened up for me through the early stages of the connection playground because each week there was a slot that was oh we we have 45 minutes to do something related to nature and actually it was very hard to find people that can offer a kind of an experience of connecting with nature although we have this beautiful garden in Bali where we could do that people had lots of things in relating with self and other but very few things in relating with nature so usually that was my challenge to go through my week and to actually be watching what's happening in my own connection with nature that I could offer as a shared experience with others and through time also through my own spiritual path that is related to shamanism which has brought me to places like Peru and Guatemala and Bali before that I've also been exploring yeah just this different way of being with nature where I guess it's just about going out not just with the intention of I'm just going to spend some time in nature but really meeting nature and meeting the beings of nature as a sacred other or as a part of myself and and there's been a lot that I've done in this direction like for example last year when I was here in Guatemala I lived right next to Lake Katitlan and I had this agreement with the lake that every day I used to go and actually open up to receive a message from the lake through a certain quality maybe today I would see like the algae in the water or maybe I would see you know the way that the sky was reflected in the water or something else and every day I would get that specific message or quality of transparency or pinkness or whatever it was or sometimes dead fish you know just whatever really arrives at that place where I'm about to go and have my swim I would take that quality with me and I would take it with me in my day see how it expresses and then come back the next day and report the lake. So I had this like many different ways of just really starting to acknowledge that lake not just as a you know an object but like as a being in its own right that I can have a conversation with and I can really open up to receive it wisdom and learn from so this has been something that I've thought to embody as I walk through my life looking at okay so really this larger organism that I'm part of and all the beings that I can meet whether it's a human being or it's an ant and how can I open up to the wisdom that that ant carries as well and converse with it so that's something that's very typical of animistic and shamanic traditions and it's something I'm very much aligned with and it's also the reason why I'm sitting here in front of my chair you know some people have laughed because usually they see a chair and then I'm like coming in it's like why don't you sit on the chair and for me also there's something about the connection with the earth actually here in Guatemala the land of the Mayans the women used to actually not sit on the chair even if a chair was there because it was actually seen as very nurturing to be more closely connected to the earth for a woman specifically and I didn't know that before coming here it was it was something I was doing anyway and I continue doing it and so there's all of these little ways that we might not be so conscious of but are energetically very important to our well-being as is the connection with the earth itself and so shamanism for me has this way of like bringing us back down so shamanism and what you've just described for my understanding there's a niche in the so-called modern or western world where that is embraced and there's also maybe another field where it's observed and thought of as a curiosity but the majority of the people I know would quietly laugh at you or aggressively dismiss you if you ever want to take any of these ideas anywhere near normal life and you have this lightness you don't seem to ever get angry about that being the way of the modernist world or the patriarchal world do you experience patronizing negativity and dismissal and or not but if you do just how do you deal with it how do you not get angry given that there's not only an dismissal of what you've just described and the lack of embrace but also that comes upon a history of the violent repression of the ways of being that you've just expressed yeah so I've had my own share of processing anger and it's not been so much around my beliefs and my spiritual understandings it's been more around really the impact that religion has had in the western world on disconnecting us from the earth from the body, from the feminine and in specific circumstances I've experienced very deep rage for that and I guess in the rest of the time I just see it as a part of reality we don't need to all agree on the same things and if you don't agree with me that's alright like you don't have to and actually in a way those that disagree are also part of spirit they're part of what challenges me to carry whatever I'm carrying in an even deeper way so that's the way I see it and so there's this yeah just this way in which for me this spiritual understanding is inviting me to look at even conversations like that as an expression of spirit like this bridging of spirit and earth and everything we experience and each and every person that come into my field if they're coming into my field there's something for me to look at and something for me to figure out how to respond to that is also a part of me because this inner critic has been there especially in the early parts of my journey of like oh but what is this this doesn't make any sense all of these things so it's just a way of okay that's a part of me that is now appearing externalized as this other person and I get to explore how I relate to it so you're really taking a playful, curious non-controlling emergent vibe to the whole of life including people who otherwise might just be really annoying so thank you for me so many annoying people actually yeah I don't know why just my world whoops okay so thanks we're going to open up to questions now first Katie I know you had a question so if you feel like asking it go for it otherwise then we're going to be going to Rene after Katie I do feel like asking it thanks Gem Zori will you talk a little bit about your experience of play in the broadest sense that you might understand that and altered states of awareness what people might call flow states or beyond self consciousness hmm that's a beautiful question it's yeah there's been so much there so I think it was about six years ago that I first bumped into this what we might call this altered state of consciousness in a very conscious way where I first had shamanic drum journey experience I read about it there was nothing spiritual going on around me and I just said okay 20 minutes drum track you know you too let's see what happens and it just blasted me off of like everything I thought I knew it was like what the hell is going on like this this incredible rich you know diverse wilderness that is within me that I've actually never gotten to meet before and in an incredible support to my journey that I encountered to just saying oh let's play with this let's see what happens you know and further down the road I've encountered many different yeah practices that support that so for example for me even authentic relating is an altered state of consciousness what we call is deep relating in deep adaptation or inner dance or you know ways in which this can be practiced you know that does not involve plant medicine which is a big part of shamanic culture as well in some parts of the world that I've visited and I've also worked with plant medicine quite a lot so with ayahuasca phylocybin mushrooms just going into that exploration of consciousness and connection in this way and play has come forth there in big ways especially with mushrooms they tend to bring oftentimes this playful wise quality somehow the way that yeah really play connects to wisdom when you're in that state of consciousness has been quite striking for me because usually we would look at play is something that pertains to the child and wisdom is something that pertains to the old age and actually in these altered states of consciousness I've seen them come together and I've seen how much wisdom there is actually in being willing to engage with something in a playful way and yeah so I don't know if that answers your question yeah this is part of is there anything you want to add Katie or any reflection or otherwise yeah thank you maybe just part of my impulse to ask is coming from a deep adaptation perspective and that I don't think it's really appreciated or acknowledged very much the connection between altered states of consciousness which I'm putting in inverted commas because there aren't any words for it really and the relinquishment is part of deep adaptation direct experience of the fact that this individual that I think I am is not as much of the picture as I thought it was thank you so Renee hello you can unmute yourself and ask question for Zori thanks Jim hi Zori everyone else I'm going at the moment but yeah my question was about your experience of running the workshops and the sessions that you do in person versus online and I guess when I think of play I think of a real physical kind of component to it a lot of movement and sometimes this sort of forum I think it would bring a little bit more difficulty and just wondering if you'd speak about how those sessions are being for you yeah that's a wonderful question thank you Renee I see I see them as complementing one another the offline and the online gatherings and the kind of play that we can do in one case and in the other so the offline offers the opportunity to to get our bodies moving more and to get connecting through body more which is amazing and is irreplaceable at the same time the online space allows for you know if we look at play in that wider context of exploration and cross pollination as well the online allows for it's almost like different environments take to one another through us so we each have our own bubble you know that we are immersed in and so somehow as we come together in this online space there is a play in just kind of allowing for this like movement of ideas and practices and ways of being between different parts of the world that can then be brought into offline environments or even just for that playfulness that technology allows by just allowing us to connect from so many different parts of the world and share our context share our ways of being share our bubbles and get out of our bubbles too which for me is very much what play does it encourages us to get out of our bubble and try something else yeah I've been amazed at the possibilities of online interaction and once you have the confidence that actually in some ways anything that you do in the physical realm can be experimented with online then you just try it don't you so a course I teach with Katie we asked a mutual friend of ours Helen to have a go at doing improv theatre online and it worked so well you know you can even sort of just do silly things like using the fact that there's a screen like this in the box and like hello and obviously people much better than me in doing these things but anyway it's just like whatever context you're in you can play with we're going to have a question from Aidan please please unmute yourself and have your video on if possible hey Zori, hey Jim thanks it's been a really wonderful chat tying together a few things that don't normally talk to each other I run an improvised theatre company in my city and as you know improv historically is much more connected to comedy the industry of comedy it is more about fun making people laugh and I'm in this weird position where I run a company I privately you know a big believer in deep adaptation it informs a lot of my life yet in the company itself it's not really foregrounded so I sometimes am playing with this tension of the fact that through improvisation, through play people are kind of enacting deep adaptation but you know they know not what they are doing so maybe to kind of put a little example like Zori I love your example about the Charmingism of Jim your point about how would be received by some people other people and you say nature has spirit nature speaks to you you need to listen to nature you need to play with that oh that's crazy but if you go to them and you say hey I want you to pretend that the lake has spirit that the lake is saying things to you if the lake was speaking what kind of things might be saying people suddenly go oh yeah they can do that so I guess my it's a roundabout way of asking to what extent do you think we need to foreground collapse and deep adaptation in the way that we think about play or to what extent do you think we just sort of background it and trust the play processes sort of having its own pedagogical value I'll leave it there yeah it's a beautiful question and I don't know what the answer is I think both maybe I think it also depends really on the context we are in a lot of the work that I'm doing is not necessarily targeting to bring people into collapse awareness however I do feel that these questions of collapse can come up for people and also the resource that is built by just having people explore these different ways of being together in this way even if they are not collapse aware and even if they are not even considering looking in that direction for me it's a kind of it's looking at deep adaptation a little bit with how to say less clear boundaries less clear oh these are the people that are collapse aware and these are the people who are not because the people who are not they can still feel oftentimes of some things missing some things like what's going on like I'm disconnected and I want to reconnect and I want to play and do these things and and so the resource that is built through them engaging in that and through creating spaces for them to engage in that I believe it's going to be very supportive and the on setting of collapse and also the learning also of how do I hold space for others which happens in those kinds of spaces and if we have other ways of knowing all of us other than just analytical head then all or many of us at some levels are insuating what's going on the environmental breakdown the societal breakdown so in that sense it doesn't necessarily need to be named there's just you said it once didn't you that a lot of people have a sense of something being quite off in the world and there's that original trauma of separation in all of us if we've all grown up in modernist industrial consumer societies that we're hyper individualists that we consume our environment rather than just live in sacred communion with it and yeah that we carry that is something off in the world so there were we can all be naturally I think drawn to the kind of stuff you're doing sorry if we just let ourselves for some people you have to have a real shock to just let yourself engage with the kind of things that you're doing so for me someone said wow Jim it took you realizing the end of the world for you to let yourself become more human actually might have said it worse than that like oh it's only when you realize you're going to die you can became human but so some people for the shock is actually helpful I want to go for our last question to Neil who's joining us from somewhere else completely different because I think we've had a couple of questions from Australia Neil where in the world are you I'm in Hawaii and I'm really enjoying this thank you for the work that you're doing Jim and Zori this is the first time I've been in a group with you and become familiar with your perspective I was really struck by what you said around about the 10 years if you have 10 years or less what do you want to do with that time and your answer to that was resonated with me a similar answer creating something like connection playground and when I looked more into that I saw that you're coming from you have groups on authentic relating and circling which is what I'm doing as well just being in the moment in relationship if I could do anything if I only have so much time left that's what I'd really like to do and I have groups circling groups and T groups and I'm curious what you were talking about creating safe space I'm wondering if you could say more about that what that means to you and what that looks like in your groups how you do that thank you very much that's a wonderful question and in a way it's amazing that it's coming from someone that's been involved in circling specifically because for me circling is a safe space and at the same time it's a brave space it's a space where we come to be challenged as well and in a way play for me has been this way in which we invite both actually so sometimes it's going to be just the safety of seeing somebody authentically which is a way in which authentic relating and circling has impacted me hugely because the whole spirit of the playground is done in this way of like you're not just facilitating as like somebody sending outside of the group and telling them what to do you come in and you be part of it you participate yourself in it and you show yourself authentically and I guess yeah there's been that and at the same time there is an acknowledgement that we are coming here to experiment many of the people who arrive to these spaces and start holding space don't have experience doing that so there's this sense of like can you come in here and know also that it is up to you how you engage here because it's an experimental space and so you take care of yourself as you do that and how much can we trust one another and I guess that's been something that it's safe but it's also a little bit edgy in that sense that sometimes we're playing around with things that are kind of you don't know where this is going to go and can I trust my capacity to handle it and if I cannot then I just don't enter so that's basically yeah basically the way that we've been approaching this. It reminds me of the way Katie on this call talks about it as well which is looking not at making safe spaces but spaces that are safe enough and other people often talk about it as safe enough for you to go to your tender edge as well which I think is also quite a nice phrase to think about this issue. You're working on this aren't you Zori? You're actually working is it with Maria Perkins on something in this area of facilitation and space holding? Could you just before we end could you tell us about that so people can follow up if they want to? Yeah so this is what we're working with Maria Perkinson she's also a volunteer in the deep adaptation firm and it's how I met her and she's been also an incredible companion in the connection playground in its online form so exploring and co-creating for about two years now together in that context at some point we realized there is something here about the way that we be together that we feel could be a good way of getting together with other space holders from different parts of the world in this period of there is no teacher or maybe nature is the only teacher and let's just gather together and support one another and create a space where we hold this question of how do we create an environment that supports human growth and learning and and just really do that with other people whose profession is such and it's been an incredibly rich experience there's 14 of us there right now 14 people from different parts of the world and a lot of cross-pollinating a lot of support that we receive ourselves as we go about supporting others which is very important in this profession so this is one of the things that also happens in play is that things emerge out of us engaging with one another in this way sometimes we find oh actually I vibe really well with this person and how about we go and make something together and then so this is one of the things that I feel is also a big benefit of allowing more playfulness with this opportunity to get to know one another how do we find that how do we find that is there a simple web link yet for the widening circles I can share it with you I don't know if you can post it somewhere absolutely so yes so if anyone's watching this on the youtube channel then look below or the links will be there for those of you with us now who may not do that sorry maybe you could just type the link in or Katie type the link in before we go so thank you very much sorry for spending an hour with us and sharing from all of who you are and connected and grounded as you are awesome I think you might be the first person I've hosted who sat on the floor in a deep adaptation Q&A in two years okay maybe I should do that next time let's see what happens and thank you Katie for doing the support and thank you everyone for joining from Hawaii to Australia and everywhere in between if you're interested in future Q&As then Stuart will be putting those in the deep adaptation main Facebook group when they come available that's probably the easiest way for you to know about them thank you bye bye thank you so much thank you everyone thank you Jim