## Resilient Koan 04 - Dancing and Stumbling ### Koan: "How do you consciously lead a dance with the subtle dynamics, the energetic personality of a region?" ### Context: As I engage with this region, landscape, community, organisations and individuals within it I have become aware of my own preferences and posture in relationships. There are very stark contrasts in my preferred way of being and engaging with those around me. This contrast has only recently dawned on me as I have received a few 'wake up calls' from people I engage with frequently or deeply. ### Insight: I don't know. I dunno. That is, at the end of the week of consideration I literally have no idea how to engage with the subtle dynamics. I don't know how to dance. There are similar subtle dynamics that have shown up in the workplace, with friends and in my relationship to myself. There was a suggestion that why I don't have an answer is that I am maintaining a block that is the cause of the question. The distinction was made between standing still and maintaining my groundedness in the middle of dancefloor, and actually being grounded, centred, but completely able to engage with and be affected by the other dancers, partners and the music. This makes it a good koan, and one that can keep me engaged in practice for a year. ### Reflection: One reflection is on the degree to which this is a question not asked at a regional scale. In what ways may sustainability practitioners ignore the subtle dynamics, the essential character and enneagramatic type of a region when seeking to engage with it. There is something human, personal, emotional about human communities and those characters of the whole are just as real at the community as individual scale. Another reflection is on the need to pay attention to the relational, subtle dynamics personally. That there are blocks in my attention and identity that are clearly limiting my effectiveness and ability to co-learn and co-develop with other individuals, organisations and this region. My primary subtle mode of engaging has changed over my career, and the strategic, driven sort of approach that may have worked in entrepreneurial London may be just as irrelevant here as the engaging, open, facilitative green-meme approach. ### Practice: The practice is one of paying attention. Paying attention and opening space (physical, temporal) around the points where relationships are constricted and the dynamics are unhealthy. Creating options and pushing and yielding in a way that is about maintaining relationship while still moving forward and evolving in a direction. Other parts of the practice include: - actually learning from a teacher how to dance: whether this be Varey's Enneagram kata, Dieda's Way of the Superior Man, Moy's Taoist Tai Chi or some form of Swing or Rockabilly dancing ; ) - practicing the dance and feeling into it: daily practice of Body Being (in the form of Tai Chi, Surfing and related practices) and in relationships with others that become an embodiment of love and expression through engagement rather than a tactical battle. --- This is one in a series of 25 'Resilient Koans' documenting "an apithologue into the koans of practice discovered while creating resilient sustainable communities", in 2010.