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RENEWING WARRIOR SPIRIT THROUGH COMMUNITY

An article by Alan Heeks

In the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, we see a warrior weary of his path. Tired of solitary service, he gives away his sword, hoping for renewal from relationship and community. The result is all-round misfortune: his sword is abused by others, and he never finds the support he hoped for.

This film touched me deeply. There are many warriors of the spirit who pioneer new paths of service, but who are quite isolated. Most warriors are independent characters, who don’t collaborate or accept support easily: yet without this, they risk burning themselves out in a good cause. How can these tigers, attuned to the worthy struggle, learn receptive as well as active power? Can the tigers learn to tango: to dance co-creatively with each other and with wider teams?

The troubles of our times seem overwhelming. We can easily feel like a minnow in the tide of global pressures. Communities are one way for individuals to create critical mass. Intentional communities, where people live and work together, can be creative harbours: semi-sheltered spaces to build new approaches, to demonstrate and propagate them.

I am using the term warrior to describe women or men who are powerful, visionary trailblazers wanting to serve the highest good. This idea, including the warrior as leader and hero, is well explored in Danaan Parry’s book, Warriors of the Heart. Many intentional communities evolve and revolve around one or two warriors, as Findhorn did with Eileen and Peter Caddy. A community comprising all warriors would probably burn itself out and be swamped by conflict between strong personalities. The challenge is whether a community could include and support several warriors, working as peers.

My own path to community has been through a life spent largely in the mainstream: as a child and then parent in a nuclear family, and a career as a senior manager in large businesses. Visiting Findhorn in 1990 was a profound experience of an intentional spiritual community with many of the qualities I had been missing. Since then I have spent ten years helping to create a small community and educational charity in Dorset, the Wessex Foundation. I have also visited and learned from many other intentional communities: including monasteries, farms, communes and a good few crumbling country houses.

Lone Heroes

The Judaeo-Christian culture has the cult of the saviour-hero embedded at its core. We can see this throughout mainstream society (politics, sport, business), but it is common in communities too. It puts some pretty impossible expectations on leaders: they should channel divine wisdom, work miracles, and die to save their people. Time and again, we see the cycle of leaders stepping into impossible expectations and then vilified when they fail to meet them.

We see this cycle of heroic rise and fall played out so widely that we must suspect an archetypal pattern. And so there is: it traces back before Jesus to masculine deities in many native traditions such as Osiris in Egypt. A hero grows to his zenith, fertilises the land, and then dies to ensure the continuance of the cycle. The problems arise because our society denies the existence of death and decline. The waning phase of the cycle is seen as failure and the heroes exhaust themselves trying to avoid it, instead of embracing it as the next phase of the wheel of life.

It has been a feature of the Wessex project, like so many others. The personal issues of a founder usually shape what they create. An ongoing theme of my life story is being the lone warrior who takes on the near-impossible task, and succeeds only through immense struggle. Despite my hopes of creating a strong team and sharing power, the first five years of the project were an exhausting struggle for me and the team, as we confronted our limitations with limited perspective and skill. Even since 1995, there has been a tendency to depend on one individual as the warrior-hero, resulting in overload and impossible hopes being placed on that individual.

Longing for Order

Another challenge for the warrior-hero is the kind of goals they are expected to achieve. Mainstream society sets too high a value on order, control and clarity. Because it is suffused with a mechanistic, exploitative approach to natural resources, both people and the planet, the ability to master chaos is demanded of our leaders. Even in communities who aspire to create an alternative culture, these mainstream values are so pervasive that they shape the situation. The rising levels of change and complexity we all face often outpace our skills to handle them. So it’s tempting to look to the warrior to defeat the monster and make it right for us.

Brave and strong they may be, but warriors cannot conquer change, any more than Canute could rule the waves. So we have a profound problem of impossible expectations. These leadership problems are especially painful for communities where smallish groups of people live and work together long term, and where responsibilities often exceed capacity. How can communities share leadership and responsibility and transcend the problem of heroic burnout? One answer comes from the paradigm of natural systems and organic growth.

Natural Systems

The vision for The Wessex Foundation project is to create a living, working, teaching model of sustainability and organic growth in the full sense: personal, social and environmental. To do this, we have created Magdalen Farm Centre: a 130-acre mixed organic farm in Dorset, a staff team with a breadth of teaching skills and processes, and a 34-bed residential teaching centre. We have not yet achieved full sustainability on any front, but we have learned and taught a lot. The farm is a powerful model of organic growth for any natural system, including individuals, communities and other organisations. I have developed these ideas in workshops for individuals and organisations, and in my book, The Natural Advantage: Renewing Yourself.

A natural systems model can offer some answers to heroic burnout, and clues about teaching tigers to tango. Three major principles of such systems are organic vitality, composting waste, and growing through turbulence. This differs sharply from the mechanistic model, whose counterparts to these principles would be: synthetic external pressure; exploiting/discarding resources, and growth through order and control. The problems of this approach are all too clear, but it so pervades our culture and values that it is very hard to replace. Embodying and propagating natural principles is one of the great services which communities can contribute.

Organic Vitality

Since they are based upon human nature, you would probably agree that people and organisations are more like organisms than mechanisms. But do we have any useful models of how an organism can be cultivated renewably? Healthy, organic soil provides an eloquent metaphor to meet this need: it has inherent resilience to disease and pests and it can renew its own vitality, just like a healthy person. Some of the lessons we can learn from healthy earth are:

• Growth arises from balancing four natural elements (earth, air, sun, water/physical, spiritual, mental and emotional energy)
• Productive structures, for soil or humans, combine strength and permeability
• Inputs need to be natural energy, not artificial, eg, inspiration and appreciation, not deadlines and fear
• Cycles are a major means to renew energy and increase resilience naturally
• Organisms don’t need to be controlled and consciously managed in all details: their inherent intelligence and adaptability is outstanding.

You can see plenty of organisations where leaders and members deplete themselves trying to meet rising change and demands with mechanistic methods: logic, control, pressure, quick-fixes. Intentional community provides a great place to learn an alternative way, because many of their members are articulate, values-led, and can’t be dragooned by the hire and fire threat which most businesses use to keep cultural control.

An important feature of organisms is what can be called distributed leadership and intelligence. One example is the adaptability of healthy soil. Another is the intelligence in every cell of the body which Deepak Chopra so vividly describes. Sustainable organisations have this quality too. Instead of leadership depending on a lone hero directing a hierarchy, the structure is a web. Different individuals and sub-groups have the expertise and responsibility for specific areas. Zones of responsibility have to be fluid, boundaries fuzzy, and a range of skills are needed to handle this. If the values, skills and culture are strong and organic, all the individuals in the community can fulfil their potential and take a share of the responsibility. This sounds utopian, but I have seen Magdalen Farm Centre, Findhorn and other communities approach this quality on their better days. It takes new skills from all involved not just the leaders – more of this later.

Composting Waste

One of the most beautiful lessons I have learned from organic farming is that in natural systems, there is no waste: every output becomes a useful input. Composting is an eloquent example of this: animal excrement and plant offcuts are transformed into a major source of fertility for future growth. This transformation happens by harnessing and intensifying a natural biochemical process. The waste has to be gathered, heaped, and periodically turned to convert the energy of ‘waste’ into a useable form. Now imagine the idea of human energy waste. There is a lot of energy in our negative states: emotions like anger, anxiety or fear, in physical stress, mental perplexity and even in spiritual despair. All we need to do, as with animal excrement, is to convert this energy into a useable form.

I have applied this idea successfully in communities and other organisations. It calls for a reversal of mainstream attitudes to waste as something useless and repulsive, to be thrown out as soon as possible. It also requires a range of new skills: such as transforming tension, assertiveness, and conflict resolution. Most communities have episodes when the atmosphere feels polluted. Factions and cliques emerge, people moan in small clusters around the place, falling silent when others go by. By contrast, we have had several very constructive storms in the team at Magdalen Farm Centre. These storms are usually gatherings where strong feelings are expressed. But there is a world of difference between destructive anger, and voicing strong emotions assertively, harnessing that energy to create solutions.

Growing through Turbulence

Intensive farms use synthetic inputs to impose control and force outcomes. Artificial stimulants (fertilisers) reduce the soil’s natural resilience and so require artificial suppressants (herbicides, pesticides) for the problems they create. This mechanistic approach can force the desired crops, sometimes for many seasons, but leads to catastrophic problems: such as BSE, super-pests and nitrate pollution. By contrast, an organic farmer can’t impose control: he or she has to work co-creatively with natural forces and processes. This is the third principle: growing through turbulence. It requires a synthesis of yin and yang, of receptive flow and active drive: a search for the gift in the problem, the synergy in tension between opposing desires and viewpoints.

This principle aligns with the stages in community building described by Scott Peck in his excellent book, A Different Drum. He writes of chaos and emptiness as essential stages in the journey from pseudo-community to true community. The benefit of the natural systems model is that it can create the understanding, skills and processes to achieve this.

Dancing with Tigers

Most intentional communities are more like organisms than mechanisms, so they are a promising seed-bed for the natural systems approach. To move beyond heroic burnout and escape the bias of mechanistic values requires new skills, not just for the tigers but for everyone involved. It means a new approach to followership as well as leadership: letting-go the dependency on the warrier-hero to make things right. Some of these new skills are described above. What other qualities would an intentional community need to enable several warriors to find their synergy, to grow through turbulence without burning up or blowing apart? I have coined the term Lion Heart Community to describe this vision.

Spiritual Thread

The book, Builders of the Dawn, is a brilliant collation of experience from many intentional communities. It observes the need for shared vision and spiritual values to sustain community. This need not mean a grandiose goal, and doesn’t require a common creed or path. My vision in founding Magdalen Farm Centre was a project accessible from the mainstream, not esoteric or overtly New Age, and this vision has rooted with those who have joined. Our spiritual aims and values are not so much stated as lived in the way we work with the people who come on our programmes. The main spiritual practice we share is times of silence.

Permeability

Some communities have an enclave mentality: a tight group with its own distinct philosophy, surrounded by suspicion from the neighbourhood. If a Lion Heart Community is to fulfil its potential for service to the wider good, it must be capable of dialogue with the locality and beyond: able to find a common language, able to hear, speak to and collaborate with the mainstream. But it also needs strength, values and resilience of its own, which don’t depend on rigidly excluding the outside world. This is the same combination of strength and permeability we find in organic soil.

Digging and Dreaming

One of the guides to intentional communities in Britain is Diggers and Dreamers, and the title is well chosen. A telling way to assess any community is where it stands on the spectrum between digging (practicalities) and dreaming (vision, spirit). It’s notoriously hard to integrate the two. Magdalen Farm Centre, like many projects, has had eras of conflict between diggers concerned that daily tasks were neglected and some people weren’t doing their share, and dreamers unhappy that mundane details were denying the time to clarify vision, values and processes.

To ground its ideals and fulfil its visions, a Lion Heart Community needs to be involved in practical work which can embody spirit. Activities like education, complementary health, market gardening and farming feature in many communities and all offer this opportunity. But doing it is not so easy. Early in my exploration of community, I visited Prinknash Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in Gloucestershire. They sadly told me that they had failed to bridge the gulf between the ‘working monks’ who tended the fields, and the ‘praying monks’: in the end, they gave up the farm.

Surely a Lion Heart Community must ground its vision, find the synergy between digging and dreaming: but how? It calls for personal maturity, patience to hear the angels, outstanding facilitation skills, and processes which can put conflict in context, which clarify detailed issues and tensions from an over-arching, shared vision. One practice which has helped me with this is the Sufi mantra, ya rahman, ya qader: open-hearted magnanimous compassion with divine strength acting through us on the earthly plane.

Collectivity

Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee of the Golden Sufi Centre believes that one of the changes in these times is that "a higher level of consciousness can be created collectively. Till now, this level has been more the domain of individuals." Perhaps it is time to replace the warrior-hero model of leadership with something else: leadership teams and self-managing bands. At Magdalen Farm Centre we are exploring how to expand the project substantially, visioning an eco-village of 50 people, a catalyst for regional, rural regeneration through local food links, health, crafts and education. I hope that this vision will also embody the qualities of a Lion Heart Community. If you would like to join in creating this vision, please contact me.

The word community is appearing increasingly in all sorts of situations, from government policy to radical economics. This is not just fashion or spin: it reflects many people’s deep desire for something which is missing from their lives: fellowship, holism, harmony with nature. Yet the practical creation of community remains difficult and elusive. Intentional communities can teach how to create this quality in many other situations, and the natural systems way is one way to achieve this.

This article is the first of a series in which I will be exploring different aspects and types of community: your comments and suggestions for this will be very welcome. If you would like to contribute your ideas and join an ongoing discussion about community, you can do so via www.living-organically.com.

Alan Heeks can be contacted on 01747-835835 or email:

References:

Warriors of the Heart, Danaan Parry, Sunstone Publications
Builders of the Dawn by Corinne McLaughlin and Gordon Davidson, Book Publishing Co, US
The Natural Advantage: Renewing Yourself by Alan Heeks, Nicholas Brealey Publishing
A Different Drum, M Scott Peck, Arrow
Quantum Healing, Deepak Chopra, Bantam