Mysterious!

What do you do, you might wonder?

It’s quite straightforward, actually: I help people solve their problems.

But, yes, there is a kind of trick to it.

What my friend is seeing - and not seeing - is this: a person tells me about their problem by describing the parts they see, and I use that information to illuminate the parts they don’t.

You could say that I read problems the way others read tea leaves or tarot cards.

But there’s nothing I want more than to de-mystify the process.

I especially want more parents and educators to develop these skills so children and teens can be empowered to understand and change things they don’t like.

Towards that end, here are three things that will help you become a mysterious problem-solver as well.

But wait! Before you read, think about something in your life that you wish were different - anything that matters to you. Use these steps to look at your issue.

Ready? Here’s Step One:

Step #1: Get clear about your “miracle”.

The Miracle Question was developed by Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg in their practice of Solution-Focused Brief Therapy. If you don’t already know it, I’m excited to share it with you.

The basic idea is this:

Imagine that a miracle has happened and your problem has completely disappeared. How is your life different now?

Frame your response as something positive that you want, not a double negative of not having what you don’t want. For example, if you need a new car, rather than saying, “I won’t have to keep going to the mechanic,” you might say, “I will feel the ease and freedom of driving a car that starts every time and makes me happy!”

Feels good, right?

The miracle question does three things:

First, it helps you get clear about what you really want.

Second, it creates the solution state and makes it more available to you than it was just a moment before. If you’ve named it well, you’ll feel a positive feeling in your body.

Third, now that the solution state has been identified, you have an additional element in your system. It’s not just you and your problem. Now you have you, your problem, and the solution state!

This is how I help people become more empowered problem solvers: I help them create maps of their questions, maps that give them more freedom and agency, and reveal the larger system in which their question is embedded.

Now, answer the miracle question for yourself. And once you’ve got that, you can move on to the next step, where you’ll build out your system even more.

Step #2: Separate the symptoms from the cause.

The parts you see are not the cause of the problem; they’re the result of it.

When my friend uses the word mysterious, I think of a magic trick.

The magician waves their hands, something surprising happens, and then you applaud, look around at the people next to you, and mouth to your neighbor, “How did they do that?!”

But, like the magician, I know that what’s really happening is not that I have magical powers. What’s really happening is that you have been trained to look in the wrong direction.

Rather than looking at the actions that would reveal the trick, you only see the surprising results.

It’s the same thing when it comes to looking at our problems; we see the result, not the cause.

You feel the pain of a headache.
You see someone asking for money at the stoplight.
You worry about a student’s ability to tell truth from fiction on social media.

Your attention is drawn to the parts of the problem you can see.

And if you want to solve the problem?

We live in a society that equates erasing the visible symptoms with solving the problem.

✅ You have a headache, you take a pill.
✅ Your city wants to address homelessness, your city council focuses on housing.
✅ Teachers want to prepare students to navigate the world, so they teach critical thinking.

In systems thinking, this is described as symptom-level or event-level thinking.

You track different symptoms or events, and then your mind creates cause-and-effect relationships between them based on what you believe to be true.

❌ But what happens when the headache keeps coming back?
❌ When mental illness and addiction are not addressed?
❌ When information overload turns “critical thinking” into choosing the silo you most align with?

Many people will say that OBVIOUSLY, I know that just fixing the symptoms won’t address the root cause of a problem.

But we still do it - because we haven’t been taught to do anything else.

So engaging in this next step may feel completely nonsensical, but TRUST THE PROCESS. It will definitely break you out of symptom-level thinking.

Step #2: Separate the symptom from the cause.

In your imagination, or on a piece of paper, create an image of the symptom and its cause as two separate things. Do this as a form of play, or intuition, or complete spontaneous nonsense. Definitely don’t do it as something you have to get right.

When I do this, I can actually feel the two parts, and my drawing reflects the felt-sense I have of them.

Example: Headache. When I sense into my headache, the symptom appears as a small but dense dot of energy in my left temple. And - in an act of complete spontaneous nonsense - when I sense into the cause, it shows up as energy in my throat. That’s a surprise!

Example: Social Media. When I sense into students on social media, the symptom feels like energy in my head, behind my eyes, and at my temples. And I feel the compulsion of scrolling.

And when I sense into the cause? I feel discomfort, almost sadness, in my upper chest. It makes me think of a mix of longing for and fear of connection. That’s very interesting!

Now it’s your turn. Working with your problem, create your own inner image of the symptom and the cause.

What if you get an impression or sensation, but you don’t know what it means? That’s pretty normal. It means the right hemisphere of your brain is giving you information that your left hemisphere hasn’t interpreted yet. Here’s what you do: journal your ideas about it. Sometimes you’ll hit on an interpretation of the experience that feels like a clear YES, that’s it. Other times it will be less clear, but hopefully you’ll have some possibilities or new insights you didn’t have before.

#3. Three kinds of intervention.

This is where you’re gonna get a bit meta. You will also learn a very important idea about real-life problem-solving: it’s not about getting the right answer. It’s about finding the solution that feels satisfactory to you right now.

Most real-life problems do not have “right answers”; they have solutions that move the situation toward greater coherence.

One of my teachers, Jan Jacob Stam, taught me this concept - I think he called it the Orders of Intervention, but I could be making that up. Anyway, it’s really helpful, so I offer it to you. However, I am using terms he didn’t use and describing it according to my own experience. So if the idea doesn’t make sense, blame me, not him.

The purpose of this step is to figure out which interventions best satisfy the problem you have. There are three levels of intervention: Level 1: Mechanical-Efficiency; Level 2: Relational-Coherence; Level 3: Evolutionary-Disruption

1. Mechanical-Efficiency. A problem in this category is one in which you're satisfied with the system when it functions well, but it has presently become inefficient, constrained, or broken down. Mechanical problems, problems with organization, time management, or other system limitations, fall into this category. The intervention? These problems can be solved with good diagnosis, good advice, and technical knowledge. If your problem is at this level, you can probably find your solution on YouTube, for example.

2. Relational-Coherence. A problem in this category is more complex and relational. It is a system that is not functioning well, and you don’t know why or how. Your goal is to increase alignment and flow, to improve the health of the system. In other words, greater coherence. The intervention? Insight that results in relational shifts, updated and rearranged roles, and redrawn or clarified boundaries that result in more presence and openness. Most of your problems will probably fall in this category.

3. Evolutionary-Disruption. A problem in this category is one in which the system itself is at its breaking point. Sorry, but you don’t have any control over the system at this level. In this category, you and your nervous system are the points of intervention. Navigating this one is experienced by most as a personal or spiritual crisis. It requires honest self-reflection to understand how entangled you are with the dying system - and whether you can trust the new one that is emerging.

As I said at the top, this step is not about identifying the correct category for the problem. It’s about choosing the intervention that produces a result that satisfies you. And once you know the level at which you want to work, this step will point you in the direction you need to go to solve your problem.

Example: Headache. Continuing with the inner images I created in the last step, I could put my headache into category 1, Efficiency-Mechanical. In which case, taking aspirin will be satisfactory. But if I want to understand why my throat felt stuck, that’s a category 2, Relational-Coherence question. The solution at this level asks me to gain some insight about what that feeling means.

Example: Social Media. If I look at my inner image of students on social media, a category 1 intervention might be just taking away their phones. But a category 2 intervention would be about designing fun ways for my students to feel more connected to each other.

You did it! And I’ve got more.

If this was helpful, I’ve got more examples and articles coming.

And if you want even greater depth, stay tuned for details about my SenseThinking Facilitator Training in May.

Subscribe to get the latest, and feel free to PM me if you’d like to chat.

Aitabé
Family and Systemic Constellations Facilitator
Creator of SenseThinking

No AI was prompted in the writing of this article. Enjoy the creative grammar and mismatched verb tenses.

On being misunderstood (the problem with words)

Here’s what it’s like inside my body-mind when we talk: You say something, and it lands inside my awareness like a pebble in a pond.

Except it’s not a pebble. Your idea is a tiny ecosystem, and once it lands in the pond of my consciousness, the pond is actually a sensing field that is exploring the landforms and weather patterns of your ideas. In other words, I feel your ideas in my body. So when I respond to you, I’m telling you which way the winds are blowing and why the trees are bending, and you’re like: “WTF? That wasn’t an ecosystem, that was a pebble. And it wasn’t a pebble at all, it was just some words because you asked how I’m doing today.”

That happened a couple of times this week.

René Magritte, 1929, “This is not a pipe.”

We forget that words are always symbols of a deeper reality, they are never the reality itself. We have been conditioned to transact in words, to maintain narrow definitions of extracted meaning, and to reject the greater meaning that comes in through the rest of our totally ordinary and not weird intuitive perception.

In my view, the reason we can be deceived is that we have cut off our sensing from our thinking. I’ve got something to help with that, which I’ll share later.

On being understood (telepathy with words)

But THEN, I had this other exchange. I met Kerri Lake, who is often introduced as an animal communicator but is so much more. During our connection, I experienced an upleveling of communication that gave me a sense of what is possible when there are two sensethinkers in the room! The best way I can describe our exchange was telepathy with words.

What did that look like? Kerri would share her ideas. Then we would pause together and she would observe me walking around in her ideas and naming the landforms and weather patterns and she would say YES, that’s it! And we would build from there.

It reminded me of why I do what I do:

1. I want more people to play with.

2. It’s faster and has far greater depth than ordinary communication.

3. And, because we are working with the deeper reality, not the shallow, illusory, deceptive one that is constantly being spun to make us confused or hypnotized, we can reach the leverage points that create real change.

Ontological shock (or affirmation)

This term came to my attention this week, and now my world makes more sense.

Ontology is the way you construct your world, how you understand what is real. Your ontology creates your experience of what’s normal. An ontological shock is an experience that ruptures your sense of reality and normality. It is disorienting - or maybe deeply affirming! - but when integrated, it vastly expands your understanding of the nature of reality. You are left with a clear before and after: the world as you understood it before the event, and the world as you understand it now.

The dinner scene from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

A classic example is the 1977 movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The entire film is about the disruption of an ontological shock, including the desire of the people closest to return you to the world you left behind, and just be normal!!! The one they still inhabit and the only one they know as true.

In 2011, I experienced the first of several ontological shocks/affirmations as a result of Family Constellation work (FC).

FC is a healing modality that takes a systemic view of the family, but what makes it unique is the process it uses to investigate the system: other people, usually complete strangers, are chosen to “represent” members of your family system. They stand there, quietly sensing their inner experience, and then within moments, these strangers are embodying your family field with shocking precision. They have no background history, often they don’t know who or what they’re even representing, yet every time they show you a mirror of your family field.

After I got over the initial shock of that experience, my question became, if this is possible, what else is possible?

Ultimately, that led to the development of Sensethinking. But that’s not what I want to talk about here.

What I want to say is that I have an invitation for you!

I’m hosting a FREE Sensethinking Inquiry this Wednesday, April 1, about ontological shock and the boundaries of normal.

It’s called Ontological Boundaries: What to do when the world doesn’t make sense. It is an experiential workshop to tap into your own sensethinking capacity and to give you a window into what’s happening when the world doesn’t make sense.

Ontological Boundaries:

What to do when the world doesn’t make sense.

A FREE Sensethinking Inquiry with Aitabé
Wednesday, April 1
12 pm ET - 2 pm ET
REGISTER HERE

Experience sensethinking and gain a deeper understanding of what to do when the world doesn’t make sense.

I hope to see you on the call! Either way, have a great week.

The question came from an older African-American teacher. “I grew up in Virginia and would never think of using that word.”

I was surprised. I was leading a professional development workshop at a Bronx public school and had asked for a question to demonstrate how to access relational intelligence, what I call Sensethinking.

I expected curriculum questions, not something so personal and charged.

Immediately, I noticed bodies shifting in preparation for the discussion.

In a traditional classroom, or even a typical PD session, discussion is exactly what we would do. Maybe even a debate. More information would be brought in. People would contribute historical context and cultural perspectives. All solid pedagogy.

Of course, someone might just ask AI.

Which is quite rational.

After all, if knowledge is just information, why even bother with a discussion when AI can answer instantly?

But on this day, we took a very different approach.

Embodiment allows for something new to emerge.

We began by looking at the question differently.

“Every question is embedded in a system of relationships. What are the core relationships in this question?” I asked.

After a brief discussion, we named three elements: Black Person. White Person. The N-Word.

And we agreed to examine them in two contexts: 19th-century slavery and 21st-century youth.

I asked for three volunteers.

They stood in the center of the room, each representing one element. I placed them in the first context: slavery.

“Trust what arises,” I told them. Then we waited.

Silence. Presence. Inner listening.

Within moments, the scene begins to move.

Black Person crossed the room - far, as far as possible - from both White Person and N-Word. At the same time, White Person and N-Word moved closer together until they were shoulder to shoulder.

Black Person, now standing near the door, said, “If I could, I would leave.”

No one had told them to do this. It wasn’t coordinated or directed. But we all understood it.

We closed the scene and reset.

Three new volunteers. Same elements, new context: 21st-century youth.

Again, they began facing each other in the center of the room.

But this time, Black Person reached for N-Word and pulled them close while raising a hand towards White Person: stop.

White Person paused, then stepped back.

Black Person spoke: “This belongs to me.” N-Word nodded.

We ended the exercise there.

A silence settled in as the participants absorbed the experience. I turned to the teacher who had asked the question.

“Any reflections?”

He shook his head. “I understand,” he said.

The hidden force.

What became visible to us was something that none of us had named in the beginning: ownership.

Ownership was the missing element - the hidden organizing force of this whole system. In the first scene, ownership was explicit and brutal: human beings treated as property.

An organizing force like that doesn’t just disappear.

In the second scene, it reappeared, transformed.

We saw it in the gestures - the embrace of the n-word, the raised hand. The only words spoken: This belongs to me.

The presence of this organizing force was an insight that we couldn’t see until we embodied it.

At the end of the session, a teacher came up to me. He had represented “Black Person” in the second round.

“This is revolutionary,” he said. “When we started, I couldn’t imagine how we would answer that question without talking about it. But what we experienced - what we felt - was so clear.

This changes everything.”

Not correctness. Coherence.

“Every question is embedded in a system of relationships. What are the relationships in this question?”

I begin almost every inquiry with that same statement.

When I pose that question, we become equals. We are all learners. I do not have more information than my students. What arises will be as much a surprise for me as for them.

The facilitators I train come to understand that what we are looking for is coherence, not correctness.

Do you see how radical that is?

In this framework, our response to a question is not about being right.

It is about understanding the relationships within the question and discovering what is needed to bring those relationships into greater coherence.

We learn to look for patterns. We experiment. We sense.

We are sometimes completely confounded.

After doing this work for almost 15 years now, I experience information as a landscape that I can enter into and interact with. Each new thought becomes a new landform or force, and I can sense the qualities of that form.

In this way, I teach people to perceive at the very edge of their own knowing so they can illuminate what has been unseen.

What’s so remarkable about this work is that we can all do it.

You can do it. Your children can do it.

I guarantee you: the world will change - is changing - as more people access this capacity.

You have direct access.

You have been taught that knowledge lives outside of you: in books, in experts, in institutions, in LLMs. You have been taught that learning involves consuming and reinterpreting what you have been given.

But that is a false and limiting paradigm.

Your mind, your body, your attention, your perception: you already have everything you need. Knowing is not outside of you. It lives within you and between us.

Information is not static. It is not material that must be mined and refined.

The words and other symbols that communicate information are just the surface of a living field that you can access directly through embodied participation.

And if you’d like to learn how to do this, follow me.

I understand my work as contributing to human and planetary thriving. I partner with learning community founders who share this understanding. Message me if you have an education project you’d like my support with.

Let your inspiration and vision be your guide.

YES, stuff will come up: resistance, doubt, fear. TOTALLY NORMAL.

Work with them as they arise, get the support you need.

But don’t lose sight of your vision.

YOUR VISION IS WHAT IS NEEDED NOW.

“Fixing” does not fit these times.

“Fixing” makes sense in a coherent system, one that serves life.

But we have seen that the existing systems are based on a rotten foundation.

NOW IS THE TIME FOR THE NEW, and it is alive in your heart right now.

FOCUS on the beauty that your life is creating.

The Visionary Path this Saturday.

Would you like support saying yes to the vision that has been calling you?

An intimate, online, pay-from-the-heart coaching + systemic constellations retreat for people who feel a calling to create the new as the old systems collapse. If you want support in sensing and nurturing your vision, and revealing and clearing your resistance and fear, this is for you.

The Visionary Path
An Online Systemic Constellations Circle

Saturday, February 21
9 AM - 3 PM ET
Pay From the Heart

MORE INFORMATION HERE

The basic premise of what I teach is this:

1. You have access to far more information than you have been conditioned to believe is possible.

2. Tapping into this capacity creates a paradigm shift in how we learn, solve problems, and understand each other.

3. It’s up to individual visionary parents and educators to adopt these practices because we can’t wait for the system to wake up.

Today is the first of many stories of what’s possible.

Mapping and sensing the question: What is the role of empathy and obligation in a well-functioning society?

Tapping into the unseen for a research paper.

In a recent coaching session, I helped a teen working on a research paper for a first-year writing course at her community college. The question her class had been given was, “What is the role of empathy and obligation in a well-functioning society?” For her research, she was provided two texts and asked to choose two additional.

I helped her map out her ideas and then sense into them. Specifically, she sensed into empathy and obligation in an unhealthy society, and then in a healthy one. She noticed that in an unhealthy society, obligation was at the center and empathy was at the perimeter. She said, “empathy is not trusted, but obligation feels like it’s on a throne.” If you look at the map, the unhealthy society is on the left.

In the healthy society, when she sensed into the elements of the system, empathy felt motherly. Empathy said, “Society can fall back on me.” She described obligation as having a light touch, like a trellis for growing plants. And she noticed that there was something else - she felt immediately that a third element was in the center. She imagined it to be a swirly center. When she went to that third element, she said, “awareness, patience, connection, not judgmental, joyful, welcoming.”

This became her thesis: empathy and obligation require a third element of awareness for a well-functioning society. She used this lens to re-examine the papers and wrote her research paper with this new perspective. She found, indeed, that each of the articles she read included an element she could identify as awareness.

This is a neurodiverse student who struggles with writing, feeling like her words get jammed up, and she can’t express herself. She still needed some help organizing her thoughts, but her writing flowed much more easily, especially with the help that I provided in transcribing her words as I coached her. And, of course, her original thinking was outstanding! She got an A.

If you look at the map, you’ll see that what she discovered was much more than just the thesis for her paper. For example, she studies permaculture, so at one point, we chose the American Chestnut tree as an inquiry about a healthy ecosystem. American Chestnuts suffer from a blight that prevents them from maturing to seed. You can see how this process can be a starting point for questions that have no known answers.

You can do this, too.

Here are some resources for you.

1. Check out Using Intuition to Understand People Better - it’s free on my YouTube Channel.

2. Get a Coaching Session with me. I can coach you through your own Sensethinking Inquiry about a subject you care about, or teach you how to do it with your children or students. I’ve got LOTS of techniques for different ages and contexts.

3. Keep an eye on this page for my New Course: Remembering Lost Ancestral Knowledge. This will be a mind-blowing, heart-opening experience in which you will take a deep dive to activate your sensing and intuition to explore ancestral knowledge that you didn’t think was possible to know. I am co-teaching this with artist Lori Wells and will share more about this in my next post.

And if this intrigues you, but you’ve got questions, drop a comment below. I love nothing more than talking about what’s possible!

Your Child’s Will

When I became a mom for the first time at 25, in 1996, no one explicitly spoke to me about my child’s will - at least, not in a positive way, as something I should protect and nurture.

A still from my son’s 2023 LEGO stop motion movie, The Rapid River.

The loudest messages were:

1. Don’t spoil your child by being too permissive, and

2. Learn how to appropriately discipline your child.

When it came to discipline, parenting culture was evolving out of spanking and into time-outs - but even then, it was confusing to me. There was still a lot of debate about spanking, with many arguing that it was benign and even necessary.

I did have a personal guide in navigating these confusing messages: my inner self. Or, more accurately, the light of my own consciousness - the same brightness that I experience now, and that I remember within me as a child.

Looking into the eyes of my child, I could see that he also had his own inner light.

How do I help that light stay bright - grow brighter, even? How do I protect this light from an outer world whose systems prioritize their own self-interest over care for others?

Your Students’ Will

When I started my teaching career in 2000, I was interested in motivation. Trained as an inquiry-based science teacher, I wanted to solve the puzzle of designing a curriculum that engaged the learners’ internal or intrinsic motivation (not the same thing, btw. I’ll do an article on that at another time.)

Research showed that external rewards or punishments actually disrupt intrinsic motivation, which I recognize now as actively harming the child. (If you’re interested in this subject, check out the work of Alfie Kohn.)

Is there free will in a compulsory system? Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

So my question became, can I design a curriculum that learners choose to engage in of their own free will?

I was dedicated to this challenge. I taught for 12 years in New York City public schools, becoming an award-winning teacher who was highly respected for my innovative curriculum design.

But had I succeeded at my goal?

If you’re an astute reader, you will have already discovered the catch: it’s not possible to have free will in a compulsory system.

When I resigned from classroom teaching in 2012, I had awakened to the reality that the system’s structures would not/could not bend to my will - nor to the collective will of a school full of wise professionals. In those systems (like most of the systems we live under), we are free only up to a point (which means we are not free).

So, yes, I was successful at designing an engaging and creative curriculum in the context of a compulsory system. But, no, my students never really had free will about whether to engage with it or not.

My Best Decision

Fast Forward to January 2023.

My two younger children are 15 and 13, and we have been unschooling for most of their childhood. Like the rest of the world, we are transitioning out of Covid disruption. I am eager to get my kids out of the house, off the screens, and into nature.

An opportunity: a nature connection program for homeschoolers. I send my children and they spend the day outside in the snowy forest building a fire, making a shelter, and playing games. Perfect, right?

At the end of the day, my daughter is in. She says she can’t wait to return!

But my son? He doesn’t want to go back.

I’m the parent. I have the last word. I know what’s best.

I take a deep breath - and agree that he can stay home.

My daughter still prefers to be outside in the snow.

What is will, anyway?

I am not going to look up google or AI’s definition. What I share here comes from my own experience and my current sensemaking.

Let’s begin with this question:

What’s the difference between an infant and an acorn?

The way in which an infant is like an acorn is in its nature: they both have a program to develop according to their nature, their genetic patterning.

And what makes them different? The infant’s will.

Will is that part of us that is aligned with our own evolution, aligned with the unique light of consciousness that lives within each of us. And in humans, will is also free, able to make choices that give rise to new conditions and experiences.

Will is an impulse that wants to express as action. We call the alignment of will and action discipline.

The Distortion of Will

I believe that within each of us lives an expression of will whose impulses are in complete and natural alignment with our health, wholeness, and spiritual evolution.

Our free will is not designed to reproduce perfection. It is designed for our evolution, and not just personal soul evolution, but collective evolution.

To perceive and take action from will at this level is incredibly powerful.

And that is an understatement.

If we all had access to this level of personal power and coherence? Intuition, creativity, and liberation thrive here.

I believe that we don’t talk about will, because systems of oppression and extraction do not want us to learn about our power. Instead, we have been subject to the disruption and distortion of will for generations.

I don’t know how to begin to name the level of distortion, because it has been so normalized and takes new forms in each generation.

So I will describe a scene that I witnessed recently:

A mother and a child were sitting at a table. The child looked about 5 years old and was overweight. On the table was a toy truck, and leaning against the truck was a phone showing a video. The child was locked-in, staring at the video while chewing on his breakfast sandwich. The mother sat vigilantly over the child, wiping his mouth with a napkin in between bites.

Addiction is not will, it is the disruption of will.

I looked away in distress. For me, that scene was the picture of a disrupted will. He was so young, but in that moment, he was out of contact with the natural, willful impulses of his well-being.

Do you remember the research I referenced that showed how external rewards and punishments disrupt intrinsic motivation (will)? Children are absolutely drowned in rewards and punishments, and they take a myriad of forms: biological disruptors in food, candy, drinks, or pharmaceuticals; technology and media, and “normal” family and school cultures that routinely direct the child’s behavior through rewards and punishments.

Willing to trust

Back in 2023, when I told my son that he could stay home instead of spending his days at the nature school, the noise of my own fears became quite loud.

Why? When I look honestly at it, I recognize that it was parenting shame: the belief that I was failing my child. As any parent knows, this is an easy fear to tap into the instant you compare your child with others. Shame is a highly effective suppressor of will.

But I followed the best advice I’ve ever received as an unschooler: get closer.

That wise advice came from Pam Laricchia of the Living Joyfully unschooling podcast. She said that whenever your fears or worries are activated, get closer to your child. Discover what they’re actually doing, find out what they love, what’s engaging them, and what’s fun for them.

The Joyful Expression of Will

Do you want to know what was fun for my son in 2023? Making LEGO stop-motion movies. Here’s one he made while my daughter was in the forest. He became brilliant at it. He even won a film and video contest that year for a short he made for a local competition.

My son no longer makes Lego movies. His learning style is one where he fully immerses himself in a passion until he feels complete, and then he lets it go. Video production was four passions ago. It’s basketball now.

And my daughter? She loves being out in nature. It is deeply woven into her being. She is currently studying agriculture at a local community college and interns during the growing season at a local permaculture farm.

I stand with the parents and educators who are here for the next evolution of our culture - one that holds our children’s will as sacred and inviolate.

To be clear: this is not an essay to suggest children shouldn’t have appropriate boundaries, discipline, or consequences. This is not an essay to judge your parenting or teaching.

This is to illuminate what has been hidden.

Because the disruption of will has been so normalized, we need spaces to make sense of it, to clear out our own internalized suppression of will, and to discover what the healthy flourishing of will looks like.

Want to explore this subject more deeply?

What if a child’s will were understood to be sacred?

And nurturing a healthy will in our children and all people was understood to be foundational to a healthy society?

I am hosting a constellation call to inquire into the nature of will. This is not a lecture or even a traditional discussion, but an emergent and embodied inquiry.

We will explore:

• What is will, really?

• What does raising children with a healthy will enable for the child and for society?

• What happens when will is disrupted?

• And how do we heal a will that has been disrupted?

Details and registration here.

That was the message I received after three years of searching for my biological father. I never knew him. I didn’t even know his full name. Mystery surrounded him. Mystery and trauma. And longing. So I was using mystery to find him.

The whole thing started in the winter of 2013, on a suggestion by my Family Constellations teacher. Will you look for him, he asked. Impossible, I said. I’ll never find him. There’s looking, and there’s finding, he said. You can always look. Open the door on your end.

That same week, a dream. My teacher stood at the foot of my bed and said, “you want to find your father? Look here,” and he gave me a cityscape built of macaroni and construction paper, just like the constructions my children were bringing home from preschool.

Months later, I made a new friend who also happened to be clairvoyant. Let’s try, she said. We would tune in every few months, each time a new vision and a new magical lead to pursue. By the summer of 2016, I was engaging in a full-on psychic private investigation. Guidance pointed me to Toronto, and I scheduled a visit to coincide with a weekend Family Constellations workshop by a teacher I admired.

I arrived in Toronto alive with possibility. My plan was to bring my quest to the Family Constellations workshop, plus I had my psychic friend on speed dial. To top it off, I had googled and found a dowser with experience finding lost people, and she offered to help me for free. The dowser needed some time, so we made an appointment for a follow-up call in a few days.

Everything felt so alive. I fully expected to manifest this impossibility, and I was supported by the loving hearts of so many. And then on the last day, my call with the dowser. I sat on a park bench and looked out across the shore of Lake Ontario as she told me that he’s not in Canada. That, in fact, it’s not clear he’s even alive.

I walked through the park in a daze. My heart felt collapsed with disappointment. I took refuge in a library nearby, wandered the stacks, pulled a random book off the shelf. A small one, about an American man living in Taiwan and the lessons he learned from his teacher, a Daoist Master. I read the whole thing in one sitting - why am I reading this book? Then, the words of the master: INVEST IN LOSS.

I left Toronto with a tender grief. How could so much magic and synchronicity could bring me to this dead end? I didn’t understand the strange wording of the phrase, “invest in loss,” but I understood loss and that was enough. I fully let go of the search.

It would take another two years before I would understand the “investment” part of that phrase.

2016 was a turning point for me - and for us collectively. And here we are, ten years on. What have you been dedicated to? Where do you need to invest in joy and creativity? Where do you need to invest in loss?

In 2018, 2 years after dropping my search, my mother sent me a 23andme DNA test for my birthday. I thought nothing of it, not even sure why she would get it for me. She had done her own test fairly recently, and doing my own just felt redundant.

I already know who I am, I told her.

Nevertheless, I spit in the tube and sent it in. A couple of weeks later, an email: Your results are in!

Those results turned my life and my sense of self completely upside-down.

The investment paid off. I had found him.

LOL! No, this is not my father. This is me and my half-brother meeting for the first time in 2018.

I was never able to contact my dad. He passed away about a month after I found him. But I found family who welcome and love me like family.

Entangled with the future?

I am sharing this story now because this was the first of three events that happened to me in 2016 - the others were just as surprising (not including the election that year, which surprised everyone).

I came to understand that this was happening because just as we can become entangled with the past, we can also become entangled with the future: that there are times when the future we are trying to create into is a future that is not meant to exist.

I believe this is happening with increasing regularity. The future cannot be predicted based on the experiences of the past.

If you would like to connect directly with your own three futures, I am leading a workshop that has become an annual event. Join me for the Three Futures Oracle.

The Three Futures Oracle
An Online Workshop

with Aitabé

Monday, December 29, 1 PM - 4:30 PM ET

Where in your life is “letting go” the greatest investment?

Details and registration.

(I’m trying out the audio feature. LMK if you like it.)

You know that game where you’re looking for something, and people say, “you’re getting warmer!” or, “you’re getting colder! You’re freezing!” A friend told me it’s called “find the slipper” in their family, so that’s what I call it now.

That game has become a metaphor for how I understand our thoughts to work. When I’m having a thought that makes me feel bad, and I have enough awareness to notice, then I imagine that my feelings are saying, “You’re getting colder!” And when I feel excited and inspired? “You’re getting hot! You’re on fire!”

I’ve taught this mental version of find the slipper to my children, so when they are imagining a situation that makes them feel bad, I can remind them that that thought feels so bad because it isn’t true.

Now, if you’re like me, that makes sense when the thought is, “I’m so stupid.” That thought will make you feel bad because it is not true. Sure, you or I might do stupid things from time to time, but it is not capital T Truth, that “I am” stupid. And Capital T Truth is what I believe our sensing is responding to - Truth that is aligned with life force. Coherence is the technical term.

But recently I’ve been having the bad feelings when I have thoughts like, “I should get a (regular) job!” And I’ve been having the good feelings when I think, “You know what would be fun? A community art project that invites bored local teens to make up stories and use overhead projectors and shadow puppets and present them outside when it’s dark at 4:30 pm.”

And then I think, FUCK I’m so broke right now. How is it that we live in a world where you can work for the pharmaceutical industry and never worry about money and go on a vacation to someplace warm and sunny and also literally kill people with your deceptive products, while the artists and healers struggle to survive, let alone thrive!

And then, THEN, I breathe.

This is what comes when I drop deeper:

YES, you’ve been living in the upside-down. It’s appropriate to be cautious of the old tools, because they are designed to replicate old systems. The frustration you’re feeling is more feedback: you are attempting to exit the upside-down, and now you’re in the in-between. Stop looking backwards, “you’re getting cold.” Turn your heart to the new that you are living-into-being, and play with the new tools of creation that operate there. You’ll know them as inspiration, connection, creativity, joy, clarity, faith, and grace. “You’re getting hot! You’re on fire!”

I will tell you from my experience that it creates an aliveness between learners that sparkles and invites emergence. It allows a new experience of learning that is about expanding into possibility.

Intuition-centered pedagogy creates a new paradigm of education that centers interbeing, as Thich Nhat Hanh named, and taps into our ability to receive and perceive information through intuition, empathy, and the body’s felt-sense and energetic senses.

This is my work with SenseThinking, but it took me many years to get here. This series describes my journey.

I know I am not alone on this path and I’m curious where you find yourself on yours.

Step 1: Finding the Driving Force to Leave Mainstream Education

Everyone’s critical of it, but it’s so hard to leave.

The state of mainstream education is a mess. That’s not news. But it persists because it’s hard to leave and the alternatives are limited. This is true for families and teachers. So what does it take to reach escape velocity? In my case, it took pain and fear.

Pain

I resigned from teaching in 2012 after being in the classroom for over a decade. Before that, I was a successful, creative, and dedicated science teacher who found teaching to be deeply satisfying.

So, what pushed me to leave?

I had just transferred to a new school after an extended maternity leave, and I expected to be able to transfer my skills and experience to my new school with ease. I was mistaken. Instead, my students and their needs presented a puzzle I could not solve. After a few months, it became clear that I couldn’t find the solution because the system did not have the flexibility to become what these students needed in order to succeed.

What did they need? First: they needed us to STOP and meet them where they were. They needed presence and connection. They needed skills and tools to build trust in each other and themselves.

But school was (and is) a conveyor belt with its own rules, time lines, and assessments. Students are expected to turn off their personal concerns and focus on what the curriculum tells them to care about. Getting off, or even pausing that conveyor belt, was not an option, even for the administrators. But staying on was a failure.

Why was this school so different from my previous experience? Because they served very different populations, but not in ways you might assume. I was teaching in New York City, and both schools served low- to middle-income families who were recent immigrants and English-Language learners.

The big difference was that in the first school, there was a huge diversity of languages. No one language dominated, and this allowed English to be the medium that created connections between peers and to learning.

In the second school, however, all of the students spoke Spanish. This meant that the students lived within a very strong peer culture that had it’s own values and pressures and operated separately from school culture. Of course, all schools have a contrast between peer and school culture, but this one was reinforced by the language difference and it created a bubble that I could not easily penetrate. Responding to that peer culture was their primary concern and there was very little I could do, especially as a new teacher, to create the safety they needed to focus on learning.

What it meant for me was that I was under constant stress. I struggled to speak a complete sentence before peer dynamics would break out. I was always competing for their attention. It didn’t seem to matter how creatively I approached the material, the students simply were not present enough to attend to school.

In addition to the stress of my school environment, I was commuting for hours, I had young children at home who were being sent to childcare, and I just didn’t have enough hours in the day to balance it all. I had reached my breaking point and none of the enticements of my job were enough to keep me, not the loss of income, not the loss of future retirement pension (if you’re a teacher, you know that’s a real concern!).

The one good thing was that the school was on a trimester system, and my science classes had provided enough credits for the year. I resigned in March 2012, at the end of the second trimester.

That decision completely redirected the course of my life. I’ll say more about that later.

Tomorrow I’ll speak about the fear that had me leave mainstream education altogether and start unschooling.

Aitabé sensethinking.com

When I was in my 20s, I thought that’s how change happened: you push against the system and eventually it will change from within.

So, twenty-five years ago, driven by a vision for a thriving people and planet, and prepared with my critical analysis, my creativity, and my energy, I started teaching in the public schools, hoping to be a catalyst for change.

I loved my years in the classroom… until I didn’t. I taught for twelve years before I had to admit defeat: the system was incapable of evolving to serve the needs of the students I served. Without a fundamental transformation of the system itself, no individual effort, no matter how inspired or tireless, could be enough.

“The system is bigger than the individual.”
-Jan Jacob Stam

It wasn’t until I began training in Family and Systemic Constellations in 2012 that I started to understand how systems truly operate. One teacher in particular, Jan Jacob Stam, a master systemic constellation facilitator and organizational change consultant based in the Netherlands, helped me see how systemic change works.

Here are four principles I learned:

1. The system is bigger than the people who operate it. Systems perform the functions they were designed for and have built-in defense mechanisms to maintain that function.
   
   This is where I went wrong. My personal mission has always been about thriving and human potential. The educational system, by contrast, was designed to produce workers for the marketplace. Even a large group of visionary teachers, plus a couple of administrators thrown in for good measure, can’t retrofit a complex system to serve an entirely different function.
   
   Why? Because the system’s design is embedded in every input, output, and relationship within the system. The system’s defenses are not thugs standing at the door; they are structural. Consider how closely the educational system is tied to the economic system. Even if you manage to create local shifts at your school, eventually you’ll run into immovable boundaries - like how funding works - and realize that the system isn’t budging.
   
   So, what can be done from within?
   

2. The individual can make the system more efficient.
   
   We see this in teachers who have optimized their instruction to generate strong outcomes defined by the system, such as high test scores.
   

3. Creative people within the system can evolve it into a more enlightened version of itself.
   
   In this case, individuals enlighten the original intention to its highest expression. This is what we see in the efforts of most “21st Century, Future of Education” schools. They are still preparing students for college and work, but with more creativity and care.
   

4. But when you’re called to a greater intention - one the system cannot fulfill - there is only one choice: You must leave the old system and join or build a new one.
   

Wondering if you’re at step four?

To borrow a line from a speech to performing arts students:

“If you can do anything else, do it. There are easier paths. But if you wake up every morning knowing there is nothing else you can do except follow your passion, you are in the right place.”

Share this with your teacher friend who’s trying to figure out why they feel so burnt out.

Aitabé is the creator of Sensethinking, a pedagogy of intuition+intellect.
Explore courses at sensethinking.com

Some years ago, I took a permaculture design course. For one exercise, index cards were distributed, each with a principle of permaculture written on it. Our assignment was to come up with an example of how we see that principle operating. The card I received read: Outputs are Inputs. Reflecting on this principle led to one of the most important insights I have had about the systems we have been operating under: trauma is the renewable resource.

We have been living within an ecocidal-system, one that functions by separation, extraction, oppression, consumption, and destruction of life at every level. The most effective trick of this system is that we voluntarily participate in it. We voluntarily (if deceptively) separate our minds from our bodies and our bodies from nature. We righteously isolate ourselves from family members and neighbors who have the “wrong” opinions. We are consumed by our little glass screens, which makes us the perfect consumers: helpless, hopeless, overwhelmed and only soothed by more consumption.

The great news is that natural systems do not great effort to work. They do not need human analysis, engineering, and energy intensive inputs in order to function. Only unnatural systems require such energy intensive strategies. The natural system that you already are and belong to requires only that you unplug from what’s been disrupting it. Once you withdraw your attention and energy from the ecocidal system, life-force will regenerate you.

“But what do you mean when you say only unnatural systems require energy intensive strategies? We need to work. We need to solve problems and design things. That takes a lot of energy.”

I will respond to this very reasonable question by looking the field I know best. As an educator, the world of mainstream education has been a major contributor to the ecocidal system. I am not saying that teachers themselves are consciously causing harm. The teachers I know and work with have only the best of intentions - but I could write at length about how people with good intentions participate in systems that cause harm.

Let’s look at a very specific fractal of education: how teachers are treated. Teachers are required to go through training and certification, but once they get in the classroom, they are not celebrated for their unique gifts or contributions to their field. The system is only interested in how well they comply to the directives of the system.

Teachers who think for themselves, or encourage their students to think for themselves, may have a window in which they experience a generative and creative classroom, but as any teacher who has worked for more than a year can tell you that window will quickly close when the next new “advancement” is authorized.

And finally, even if a single teacher can manage to create a bubble of genuine inquiry and engagement for their students, that teacher can do very little to meaningfully respond to the social conditions of their student’s lives. Ultimately, this overwhelms whatever is happening in the classroom.

I have just described a system that drains life-force energy, it does not regenerate it. But don’t be confused. This is not “just how it is”, this is intentional. How do I know? First, because every educator I work with desires to be in a generative field. They want to contribute their energy and creativity to responding the challenges that their school community faces. So the educational system is populated by people who would gladly be a force for positive change. The other reason I know this system is intentional is because natural systems are coherent. They possess a natural drive towards health. It is not random or bureaucratic - a natural system will seek harmony and evolution. Yes, there is work as in, forces that move things, but a coherent system is regenerative. Work is returned with greater connection, happiness, joy, satisfaction, and peace.

Natural abundance and regeneration is available to us. But it won’t be found when we’re plugged into systems of separation.

How did I come to such an idea? The seed of that insight came to me exactly 13 years ago, when I attended my first Family Constellations workshop. Here’s part 1 of that story.

January, 2012

I showed up at the Family Constellations workshop with butterflies in my stomach and a heaviness in my chest.

The butterflies were excitement, but the heaviness was less clear.

I had done some research in advance, so I had a general idea of what to expect: we would be chosen to stand in for members of a person’s family system. However, this simple description revealed nothing of the multidimensional landscape I was about to experience.

A man took the chair next to the facilitator. He described his issue: He had a confusing relationship with his mentor, a man he had great admiration for. Their time always began well, but invariably, as the visit would come to an end, he and his mentor would find themselves in conflict. “Can you help me understand why this is happening? We’re supposed to be working on a project together, but this is getting in the way,” the client asked the facilitator.

The facilitator asked him to choose two people from the group to represent him and his mentor. The man looked carefully around the circle of workshop participants and selected two people. He walked each of them to the center of the circle and placed them facing each other about six feet apart. The two representatives stood silently in the center of the room, looking down. They both described themselves feeling shaky, unsteady.

The facilitator silently observed the representatives, then turned to the client and asked him to pick two more people, second representatives for himself and his mentor. He placed the “second mentor” to the right of the first. At this point, all of the representatives he chose were men. So I was a bit surprised when he chose me, a short woman, as the second representative for himself. I stood across from the “second mentor”.

Having never done this before, I was nervous and uncertain. What was I supposed to do? What if I did it wrong? I couldn’t remember the facilitator’s specific instructions. Maybe he didn’t give me any instructions at all?

After a few moments, the facilitator asked me, “What do you notice?”

What I noticed was that my limbs felt weak. I felt that if I didn’t lie down, I would fall down. I told this to the facilitator and he instructed me to follow my movement. As I lay face down on the ground, my whole body felt cold, and I started shivering. I experienced an unusual pressure where my body touched the floor - one that I had never felt before and never felt since - as if a magnet were pulling me into the ground.

“Who is that?” the facilitator asked as he extended his hand towards me. The client looked at me on the floor and took a deep breath, “I think that’s my sister.”

“My sister died as a child. I was 6 and she was 9. My parents, in their grief, just packed up the house and we moved to another city. We never spoke of her again.”

As he said these things, I felt myself lighten. The warmth returned to my body, and I looked up at him with a sense of playfulness and happiness that “I” was being spoken of.

As the process continued, the facilitator asked me to stand. When I stood, I made eye contact with the man chosen as “the second mentor.” As I looked at him, I was overcome with emotion – so much love! Clear, radiant love. The facilitator said, “This is your father.”

The facilitator invited us to follow our movements, and “my father” and I embraced. It was our longed-for reunion.

I returned to my seat in silence and awe. The heaviness I arrived with was replaced with a sense of warmth and lightness in my heart.

Schools define information as “knowledge, facts, details about a subject.” They then go on to traffic in providing “knowledge, facts, details” about their selected subjects and call it education. But that is not true education - it is corruption.

When we write the word as in-formation, the meaning becomes clearer: in-formation is a process, not an object.

And because in-formation is a process, the greater purpose of school would be to teach students about the nature of the process: how does it come into being? How can we perceive and interpret it? How can we guide it into a formation that better serves thriving for all?

When we confuse in-formation with the forms it generates, we disempower students—and, by extension, all of humanity—from recognizing how easily we can reshape structures and systems when they fail to serve the highest good.