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New frontiers in inclusivity: the future and youth tech

A path for UX professionals to better serve this marginalized population

Photo: A child points to a tablet that displays a map. Image by Kelly Sikkema

What if you realized that there were millions of people using your product all the time, who your team had barely thought about?

What if you actually learned they were having not only bad user experiences but also even experiencing outright harm?

Chances are, this is happening right now. Whether we realize it or not, whether we acknowledge it or not, the products we’re working on are in the small hands of children. And their experiences are our responsibility.

Inclusivity is the call of our times, and it's the obligation of tech leadership, product designers, and UX researchers to answer it. The imperative for inclusive recruiting and experience gap research to better serve our BIPOC and LGBTQ+ users is finally becoming more firmly rooted in our field. The case for making our products accessible to those with low vision, low hearing, or situational challenges is clear and something AnswerLab and our clients have been working on for years. We’re ready to face an exciting and complex new frontier for inclusivity: youth.

“The way we raise and educate our young is the most powerful means we have to choose consciously to evolve through and beyond our current crisis.” - David Marshak

Including youth in digital experiences doesn’t mean indiscriminately putting apps into young hands and opening the floodgates to this audience. It means opening the right gates at the right times with discernment, care, and education. Here’s how:

Top principles product teams must ingrain for youth tech UX

Multi-method age assurance. Simply put, it's the product team's responsibility to know if a child is using their product. Consider which methods you'll use to develop age estimations and how you’ll protect the data they generate. The 5Rights Foundation has provided some valuable resources on responsible age assurance strategies.
Differentiated experiences. Once you know one of your end users is a child, a whole new world opens up.Your team will need to devise bundles of features, along with product education, that fit with each developmental stage, with more granularity than your team has likely considered before.
Developmentally appropriate sign up, registration, and onboarding. Inclusive youth tech products introduce their product to young people using well-researched UX principles that work for kids. You'll need to provide terms of service, rules, explanations, instructions, and education using age-appropriate language that children can actually understand. And you’ll need to consider the role of parents and caregivers in these experiences.
Social and emotional learning (SEL) embedded into content and design. The way people use digital products, especially platforms that have a social component, impacts the fabric of society. Anchor your youth tech content strategy in a set of principles that teach and reinforce emotional intelligence and civic awareness.
Default removal of features that may cause harm. For the youngest age bands, product bundles should by default disable features that children do not yet have the skills to use or interpret, such as private messaging, social metrics, infinite scrolls, and targeted advertising. You'll also need to switch off features that publicize data that could be used by others to harm children, such as geolocation data.
Approval process for third-party and unconnected content. After receiving appropriate education, older youth may choose to have experiences that include some third-party and unconnected content, but this content must meet explicit criteria for developmental appropriateness.
Research and investment into features that meet youth needs. Net-new work needs to be done so products serve their child users. Don't simply restrict them to a subset of features that were made for adults. What you need to build will depend on your context. The sky is the limit — and foundational research can help you create your youth roadmap.
Minimum viable data collection. For products used by children, no data should be collected for the purpose of targeting. Usage data that provides insight into how well the product is meeting its defined goals with regards to youth may be collected but should be anonymized.
A direct line for addressing harms. Youth tech offerings must provide a direct pathway for support, providing prompt and effective remedies when a child has been harmed. The child or their parent needs to be able to get responsive, trained user support and problems must be addressed in a timely and thorough way. Reports must be leveraged to improve the system overall.
Super simple avenues for account cancellation. Children should have the agency to cancel their account with just a few clicks, without help from others, triggering their personal data to be deleted.

A call to action: What product teams must do

It is a momentous time to be in youth research. Big changes are underway and there is a call for much more investment in this important work. Last year, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child published General Comment #14, calling all member states to higher standards of supporting the rights of children in the digital environment. Although the US is not a signatory of the Convention, there is a historic opportunity for tech companies to go beyond mere compliance and regulation and instead pioneer building a world that works for kids. To do so, we must begin by employing great strategic research. May we rise to the occasion, on behalf of all our children.

“It is evident that society should lavish upon children the greatest care so that it may in turn receive from the child new energies and potentialities.” - Maria Montessori

Here are four things you can do today:

Learn, learn, learn. When seeking to serve any marginalized group, we need an open mind, an open heart, and an open will. Consider where you feel drawn, where you can make a difference, and start exploring the literature and learning from child experts. I encourage starting with early childhood development — Harvard’s Center for the Developing Child and the Erikson Institute have wonderful resources.
Start a conversation. Reach out to someone at your workplace who cares about inclusivity, or who is a parent or caregiver, to discuss what’s important to you and the gap between where your org is and where you’d like to be. Conversations plant seeds.
Follow an organization who’s working on creating a safe and inclusive online world for youth, such as Center for Humane Technology, All Tech is Human, 5Rights Foundation, or countless others who focus on children’s media, privacy, and safety.
Share content about this topic to build awareness. Help build the rising tide that will lead to change.

A credo to support our parenting colleagues

As a devoted godmother and aunt with a deep interest in early childhood education, I was so glad for the opportunity to visit my sister and her family, As a researcher, I was also curious about how it would feel to work full time from her home during COVID, with three children under six learning from the same home.

What I learned in this micro-auto-ethnography was how distinct my social identities of “UX research professional” and “aunt” are. When I was in the middle of a complex conversation with a team member, my two little nephews snuck mischievously into my room. And although I knew I could introduce them to my colleague and then calmly talk with them, instead I froze up and tried to ignore them. Why?

As I pondered this question, I realized we need to articulate a new set of norms to help caregivers feel freer and more comfortable with the strange experience of previously separate identities colliding in the same space, the same conversation. When we all know we can count on our colleagues’ understanding and grace, we can relax into our new world in which work, kids, and life all co-exist within the same four walls.

Let’s all create a supportive environment for our colleagues and clients with young children at home by committing to the following credo to support parents:

I expect I’ll see a child now and then while on video calls for work, including during more “formal” conversations and meetings.
I will look forward to the opportunity to meet the members of my colleagues’ families and act as a respectful guest in their homes.
I will remember that parents may find it uncomfortable to combine their personal and professional identities and I will respect their boundaries.
I respect my caregiving colleagues’ need for privacy and understand if they don’t have their camera on or share about their families.
I welcome my caregiving colleagues to let me know when they have needs related to parenting. I know it’s normal for a colleague to say “I have a parenting need to attend to now” — and that these are likely to crop up unexpectedly.
I will remember that the attentional capabilities of children are still developing and that it is normal for them to need adult guidance while they work, play, or learn.
I embrace the adaptations that allow my colleagues to attend to the important learning needs of our future leaders, their children, and trust their commitment to our work.
I will honor my colleagues’ family schedules and sleep time, accounting for time zone, and work to help them enjoy a high quality of life, both in the immediate term, as well as by developing systems that better facilitate this for our team ongoingly.
I will strive to create value asynchronously when possible, and schedule live meetings mindfully, bearing in mind how these can add complexity for families.
I will embrace the spirit of the time and the invitation to welcome innovation and change.

You can show your support by sharing this credo with your teams, and ensuring that the parents you work with know they have your support and empathy.

I’m looking forward to gaining more comfort with my own identity as a professional who’s also a loving friend to very young people. And I’m looking forward to learning more about how companies can best serve the needs that families are facing during this time — and beyond.

The earthen pizza oven project - Part One

The meaning of this special family collaboration

Six adults and three kids worked together to build an handmade earthen pizza oven during the holidays in Southern California and learned a lot in the process

This year we built a pizza oven for Christmas. This was an utterly new kind of experience for me and an incredible learning and bonding experience.

I'm a researcher, and my job involves making things out of ideas, questions, words, and conversations. I have a few scattered experiences of building things — memories from middle school woodworking class, sand castles at the beach — but this was entirely of a different scale. Working with actual three-dimensional materials like sand, brick, and mud to build an actual appliance is a totally different ball game, as I found out.

We dove in, tried, struggled and failed and tried again, and ultimately over a winter month in southern California, me and my family actually created an actual thing that takes up space that can bake wood-fired pizza. Pretty delicious pizza, too.

What made me want to do this

I am on a constant quest to find or invent activities that bring me and my family members together to do creative things together with our bodies and without the need for screens or digital media. I find these activities meaningful, wholesome, inspiring, and joyous. They become the fodder for fascinating conversations and increasingly exciting creative plans.

Past holiday collaborations included, of course, our giant walking labyrinth (which I've shared about here), and our crowning achievement of creating a stop-action animated film using Christmas sugar cookies. We'd never tried anything as ambitious and complicated as building an earthen oven.

I was drawn to the idea of an earth oven after reading a beautiful book on earth architecture, Ceramic Homes and Earth Architecture: How to Build Your Own. I could relate to the idealism and poetry of Nader Khalili's writing, and I was intrigued by the practical possibilities. Something deep in my Iranian heritage was stirred. I realized: this, this is actually part of my own indigenous tradition. Building with earth and fire — this is part of who I am, who I was before my Persian ancestors were colonized in so many ways. I started to be more aware of the many ways in which my own mind has been taught to believe that things made of mass-manufactured materials are somehow better — I started to wonder about this. I started to feel a tiny yearning to build and live in a whole village made of these beautiful, gentle little homes.

And then the producer inside me wanted to execute — to do something, to make something happen. Building a whole earth house wasn't, er, realistic, so I started to daydream about smaller scale mini projects. An oven! I was delighted to find many, many videos online on how to build an earthen pizza oven, many of them promising it could be done within a day! I dug in and found Kiko Denzer's resources including his book Build Your Own Earth Oven. Yay! A manual! I believed we could do it. And we did! Read all the gory details in Part 2: How we built our earthen pizza oven [forthcoming].

What the oven gave me

The oven project brought this idealistic researcher into immediate and vivid touch with the earth's elements; with an experience of abject failure followed by literally rising from the ashes; and with a beautiful new reference point for family collaboration.

The earth's elements. I remember a moment when my sister and I were digging, my brother-in-law tending the fire, my nephews and nieces playing in water. How gorgeously wholesome it felt to fill a day with the living stuff of our Earth — to take hours at a strecth off from my usual work scribbling on notepads, talking about ideas, pecking on devices.
Abject failure and rising from the ash. In my everyday work, sometimes things can go badly. A research session can derail, a workshop or presentation can feel a little flat. But there's nothing quite like seeing something you built completely collapse into literally a smoke-belching wreck, drawing bemused and concerned shouts from neighbors. And there's nothing quite like collectively plucking our resolve, in the face of that fail and continued uncertainty, to sweep up the ashes with a six-year-old pal and try it all over again.
A family collaboration. I loved learning about my family members through seeing them in action over the course of this multi-week project! It was great to see what folks gravitated toward, where they set boundaries, how they dealt with frustrating moments, and how they helped each other and contributed, each in their own way, to the project.

Version 1.0 didn’t work at all. A few moments later it caved in spectacularly. But we didn’t give up!

Dreaming forward

I'm dreaming of a world where we all get to build things out of earth, with our hands, together with family and friends.

Where kids get to spend whole days learning joyfully, and safely, directly from earth, water, and fire — getting an understanding of the complexity of everyday objects, through building them.

Where people of all ages collaborate to build whole villages, using consent-based decision-making systems that enfranchies even the youngest among us to translate their vision into reality. Where we embrace the vivid and undeniable experience of our constructions' collapse, and support each other through failure, and learn from it.

I'm dreaming of a world where we can literally live in hamlets we have made using materials we touched, in structures we understand. Where we no longer need exotic and opaque materials freight-delivered to us by vehicles burning precious fuels ripped carelessly from our fragile planet. Where we can build comfortable, meaningful, usable works with what's right under our feet. (Plus maybe a few things from Home Depot.)

I know that an earth oven for making pizzas in isn't the most sustainable thing in the world. It actually takes quite a lot of resources to build it. And a whole lot of wood to get it hot for a pretty short time. I see this as a kind of investment in R&D. If we keep practicing, we can make more fuel-efficient ovens more sustainably; I hope eventually this kind of project will become part of the curriculum of every home and school.

I'm dreaming of a sparklingly fun, 100%-child-friendly world, with rounded corners everywhere, an enlivenment of Christopher Alexander's Pattern Language crystallized into reality from the implicate order it lives in right now. I'm dreaming of hot tubs, garden benches, fire pits, and tiny homes hand-wrought with the tiniest of beloved hands. I'm dreaming that forces conspiring to accelerate this possibility are already right here in our human awareness. We are ready for a more fun world — we are ready to spend our afternoons collaborating on beautiful soulful harmless projects. We are ready. Let's begin.

Protecting our oven from the rain with an improvised teepee and umbrellas, we tasted a bite of pizza homemade pizza from our family-made oven

Magical paths all around us

How labyrinths connect us across generations, and how to create your own Family Labyrinth Day

A labyrinth our family built together from sand and 430+ rocks, December 2020. 5 adults, 3 children, ~3 hours

I discovered labyrinths while browsing at Mystic Journey Bookstore on Abbot Kinney, in Venice, CA. I came across a magical coffee-table book titled, appropriately, "Magical Paths" by Jeff Saward, a contemporary master labyrinth builder. The labyrinth photographs on those beautiful pages were like illuminations to me, portals to a different dimension. This beautiful, mysterious word — "labyrinth" — resounded in my consciousness; I felt gently invited to participate in a quiet, divine festival, to co-create a millenia-old ritual.

"Labyrinth people" (yes, there's a whole community out there) speak of the labyrinth as having a certain sentience. I've certainly experienced this. Like a gentle, inspired, skillful dance partner leading me through enchanted music, the labyrinth has opened up a path for me to joyfully follow, if I so choose — a path that opens up opportunities to be who I really am, ever more fully.

Have you experienced a labyrinth? Think of a labyrinth as a single long path that has been folded many times to fit into a circular shape. There are no tricks, no forks, no mistakes you can make. You decide to enter, and the path takes you to a center, and back out. That's it.

That's it, sounds so simple, so why is it a thing? There's nothing complicated or challenging about it. No problem to solve, no hidden treasure. Yet they speak to us in a deep way. Labyrinths have spontaneously arisen independently from one another in a variety of different human cultures. They are archetypes for us humans. Over thousands of years, the dimensions of the labyrinth's path and the nature of its folding have been optimized to catalyze a mood of presence and alertness in the person encountering it.

Here is a typical experience of a labyrinth: An individual is free to choose if, when, and how to enter the labyrinth — or not. When you enter, you walk to the labyrinth’s center in whatever speed or manner you choose. When you're ready, you return and exit. When others are present, there are many different ways you may encounter them on the path. As Rev. Dr. Lauren Artress, the fairy godmother of the labyrinth renaissance, says, everything that happens on the labyrinth or with the labyrinth or around the labyrinth is a metaphor. Many people report having deep and sometimes transformative insights related to a labyrinth walk.

I don't know a thing about labyrinths compared with real labyrinth people. I haven't been trained; I just learned how to make them in Jeff Saward's book and couldn't stop myself. I was a dance teacher; together with community members we made labyrinths out of Dixie cups to warm our studio before tango events; we made labyrinths out of dance shoes. I taught at a teacher training weekend that took place at a convent where there was an epic labyrinth I walked at dawn, surrounded by shy deer and old trees. During that retreat my first nephew was born. He and his siblings and cousins have become my tiny co-conspirators in my exploration of labyrinths and their power to connect and transform us.

Kinds of labyrinths

There are a zillion kinds of labyrinths, and I'm not qualified to give a run-down. But to me, the world of labyrinths has a few important categories.

Permanent vs. ephemeral labyrinths: Some labyrinths are permanently installed as part of a site, such as a church, a hospital or school. They are often made of stone or tiles or hedges or other kinds of earthly materials. Other labyrinths are ephemeral — they are made as part of a special moment, with the expectation that they'll be gone very soon. These can be made on a beach, soon to be washed away by the tide; they can be made with chalk on pavement, masking tape on a wooden floor, or any other found objects. Ephemeral labyrinths can be dismantled by the people who made them, by people who walk them, or by nature.

Walking vs. finger labyrinths: Many labyrinths are pretty big — they are made for you to walk their paths. On the other hand, there is a whole effervescence of tiny, handheld labyrinths that you "walk" with your finger or a pen. Many of them are exquisitely crafted in wood; some are 3-D printed; you can make your own with pen and ink in a few minutes.

Offered vs. cocreated labyrinths: You may stumble on a labyrinth as a public work, as part of a park, sacred space, or place of healing. It has been built for you by others, and is offered as a resource, a gift. Another way labyrinths come into being is as part of a shared activity. A family, team, or group dedicated to learning or service may co-create a labyrinth, and the process of doing so becomes part of the labyrinth experience.

Styles of labyrinths: Beyond this, there are many different labyrinth "templates." The two most focal that I'm aware of are the Chartes labyrinth and the "classical" labyrinth. Beyond this, there are tons of creative variants including contemporary labyrinths.

I gravitate toward ephemeral, co-created walking labyrinths using the classical seed patten. I also like to use hand-drawn labyrinths of all types, and pre-built wooden finger labyrinths.

Labyrinths and the young

Have you ever heard a two-year-old say the word "labyrinth"? If not, you're in for a treat. I have been stunned and enchanted by the way my littlest friends take to labyrinths, like they are the most natural thing in the world. Well — maybe they are.

They don't just ask for them — once they have experienced them, they demand them. I have had the feeling they are thirsty for labyrinths: for the way they frame space, define time, and liberate us within clear constraints. Labyrinths address many pains that most kids have:

Choice overload. Lots of kids are continually tasked to make choices, which can become stressful; it can be what a relief for them to relax and not have to choose anything for a few blessed moments.
Overstimulation. Kids' environments often contain more stimulation than kids need — toys, sounds, people, flashing things. The digital environment exacerbates this. Labyrinths are very different; they provide a rather understimulating container that allows for connecting with inner space.
Fragmentation. Often, kids' attention is broken into pieces by many competing irresistible demands. A labyrinth is such a powerful archetypal pattern that unifies attention into a moment that provides access to a mood of wholeness.
Lack of child-appropriate mindfulness practices. Mindfulness for kids is a great idea in theory, but seated practices are not well-suited to the energy levels of most children. Labyrinths have a long history of being used to support mindfulness; it's startling and provocative to see this experience take place for kids with authentic eagerness, when you hand them a wooden labyrinth. Since labyrinths allow movement, they give space for a child's energy in a way that a seated meditation doesn't.

Nothing to choose for a few sweet moments; a calm, mindful movement practice; a clear beginning, middle and end: these are the perfect ingredients of a flow state. So much of kids' lives can disrupt them from the flow states that are their birthright, their natural state of wonder and learning. Give them a labyrinth to do and I've seen super rambunctious kids like my nephews settle into stillness and rapt focus and enjoy a few moments of dream-like silence on the path.

The long, soft, round curves of a finger labyrinth relax the child's mind while the surprising hairpin turns require a little more focus. This alternation of movements has a certain grace, connecting neurons that support fine motor skills The whole form gently invites them into a moment of spaciousness, lightness, and attunement in their often busy, demanding and fragmented world. You may find that these beautiful, accessible and diverse finger labyrinths inspire and support a mood of quiet focus in your home. Experiment with using them with relaxing music, and to support transitions between day-parts.

Labyrinths and the whole family

Working on a beach labyrinth as a beautiful family activity

Families are complex, and it can be difficult to find meaningful, beautiful activities to do together. Building on my nephews' enthusiasm for labyrinths, we've started an annual Family Labyrinth Day activity which is turning into a sweet ritual. We simply choose a day when we'll build and walk our own labyrinth together as a family.

Family Labyrinth Day brings the family together for a moment characterized by creativity, playfulness, teamwork, and a whisper of the sacred. Creating a large beautiful thing that many people can walk around on is riveting, challenging, empowering. There are many creative decisions to be made and there's a lot to do — everyone, whatever their age, can contribute in a way that suits them. If you're looking for a beautiful way to spend a gentle afternoon with your family that is 100% screen free, this is it! And the ripples of good feeling created by the experience stay with you for a long time afterwards.

Here's how to go about a Family Labyrinth Day activity

1. Plan it.

Choose a day. Be sure you pick a day ahead of time and give everyone plenty of notice, so they can clear their schedule and tune in to the idea of doing something really different. Talk with whoever is the Chief Household Officer and make sure they're behind the plan. A festive written invitation sent by group message is a great way to get it on the calendar.
Find a spot. Where in your community is there a big empty space you can use for several hours? You could rent a dance studio or community space, go to the beach, or find a corner of a public park.
Choose your materials. Your space will define your materials. At the beach, you can make your labyrinth out of sand or rocks. If your surface is pavement, you could make a chalk labyrinth. If you have a wood floor, you could make your labyrinth out of blue tape or Dixie cups. Try to select the most environmentally sensitive, recycled and recyclable or biodegradable materials.
Decide on your design. I've found that building a classical labyrinth using a seed pattern makes building the thing very accessible. It becomes a gigantic, collaborative connect-the-dots exercise. If you choose a different labyrinth, think through how you'll sketch it out on the surface and get everyone clear on what their job is. If your group is large, you may want to design the labyrinth so there's plenty of room in the center.
Make it a party. With your Chief Household Officer, think through refreshments for the activity. Having snacks on hand — little oranges, granola bars, water — can give tired builders a welcome break. And having something festive to eat or drink at the completion of the labyrinth is really great. We've celebrated our labyrinths with sparkling apple cider. Be sure you bring supplies for cleanup so you can leave things as you found them.

2. Build it.

Sketch the pattern. When you get to the space, find a way to sketch out the labyrinth pattern on the surface as a guide for everyone. For instance, before doing a tape labyrinth, you can lightly draw the pattern in chalk on the wood floor. Before making a beach labyrinth, you can sketch the pattern in sand using a stick.
Let everyone find their groove. Once the family understands the project, each person will find a role that suits them. Here are some ways people can get involved:
- Creating the lines of the labyrinth by digging, drawing, and/or placing materials
- Finding and bringing materials to where the lines are being built
- Working on making the labyrinth entry special and beautiful
- Documenting the process by taking pictures and videos during building
- Cheerleading everyone, noticing and complimenting work, organizing snack breaks, sunscreen, etc.

3. Walk it.

Take a moment. After the labyrinth is built, people may need a moment to rest, celebrate, and even take a bunch of proud pictures or videos. Give this some space so all the restless energy can be shaken out before walking the labyrinth.
Put away phones. For the labyrinth to do its magic, we want to be fully present and show up fully, undistractedly, and unselfconsciously. Before the walk starts, put away all the phones and devices that might tug anyone's attention away.
Create the mood. You may want to transition into the walk by lighting candles, burning fragrant herbs like sage, or reading a short poem.
Incorporate music. Beautiful, light, ambient music can bring a powerful dimension to a labyrinth walk. If you have the bandwidth to bring a sound system, you can select prerecorded meditative music. I've also heard about people bringing instruments and noisemakers to the labyrinth so that those not walking can keep a beat and make a homespun soundtrack.
No wrong way to walk. Whatever happens on the labyrinth — internally or externally — is a gift; welcome it. Encourage people to experience the labyrinth in whatever ways they are drawn to (without disrupting others). Kids especially may be drawn to joyful and nonlinear ways of interacting with the labyrinth.
Consider a structure. You may want to offer a simple way to think about the labyrinth walk. For instance:
- Before entering, formulate a question
- While walking in, contemplate the question
- At the center, allow guidance to come to you
- While walking out, integrate the guidance

In our family, we had a beautiful midwinter walk. At the center of the labyrinth, members were invited to write their intentions for the new year on a colorful post-in note. We harvested all the post-its on a piece of posterboard at the labyrinth's exit. After everyone had walked as many times as they wanted, we read the intentions aloud and toasted to the new year.

Slow things down. You may want to explore having one person walk the labyrinth at a time, if it's a small labyrinth. Or, you may want to allow some time to pass between each new person entering the labyrinth. This can create a more alert and mindful mood.

4. Erase it.

Assuming you've created an ephemeral labyrinth, think about how you'll let go of the labyrinth.

Nature erases it. If your labyrinth is made out of natural or found materials, nature will probably wash it away in time. In the meantime it will be a delightful and only slightly subversive monument to your family's spirit!
You erase it. If you've used tape, household objects, or other materials need to be removed, be sure everyone who built it stays involved in striking it. You can make it a joyful experience but adding big, fun music (really contrasting with the meditative music for the walk.) Maybe you'll come up with a ritual song you sing once everything is complete.
Others erase it. Be creative! I learned of a community group that made a labyrinth out of donated food items which was struck by guests in need of them later on that day, or labyrinths made from birdseed that were enjoyed by park birds. I love enacting the idea that labyrinths can nourish us, body and soul.

I would love to hear how you and your family create your unique Family Labyrinth Day experience. If you find people resonate with it and enjoy it, you may want to make it into a seasonal ritual. I bet that each year you'll discover something new!

How to think new thoughts

How do you think new thoughts? It's a practical question. We all say we want to be creative, that our world needs new ideas. But when was the last time you had a really, truly, new thought?

When was your whole mind refreshed and stunned, by the shape and rustling of a thought that you had definitely not thought before? How was that? When was the last time your wild and sane four-dimensional antenna-brain encountered, incredibly, a thought that was completely orthagonal to every thought it had ever encountered before?

If it was really new, this thought probably somehow dismantled your usual habits of thinking, while also opening up a wide new expanse along which more ideas started to gather. When did this happen most recently in your mind? And more importantly, how will you create the conditions for it to happen again, soon?

We are all much more closed-minded than we think, because we haven't committed to systematic processes to make-new our thinking. We like to think we're creative but most of our creativity is nothing more than shuffling and reshuffling the same old, outdated, worn-out concepts and conventions. Usually we take some material we know, fit it into old patterns that we remember from some other place and time, and call it "creative." That's not what I mean by new — at best, it's novel. It's easy to get stuck in familiar and crusty loops, it's easy to convince yourself that what you're doing is new because it's a nifty, cozy, convenient rearrangement of good old stuff. And it's very hard to notice that there's nothing new about that at all. To create space to think new thoughts requires, first and foremost, the willingness to actually open your mind.

"I'm open-minded!" you say. "I think new thoughts all the time!" How marvelous that is. Feel free to skip the rest, wonderous open-minded person. If I ever meet you I will be excited for our interaction because I'm pretty sure you'll blow my mind by your presence, the quality of your listening, and the effects you have on my thoughts. I would love to meet more people like you.

If you, on the other hand, like me, struggle with accessing actually new thoughts, I would like to share some perspective and practices that have helped me do so.

What is it like to think new thoughts?

At the California Academy of Sciences I saw a seahorse that blew my mind. It was so, so tiny; it was practically transparent; its body was more intricate than a three-dimensional Persian rug, covered in filigree encrustations. When was the last time you saw an animal you'd never, ever in your life seen before? Thinking a new thought is kind of like that.

How do you know your thought is new? A rule of thumb: if you're talking a lot, it's probably not. New thoughts pop into being out of a more quiet atmosphere. If you've been listening a lot — to your inner space, listening really carefully to the world and what others are saying and doing and to silent things like plants and candlelight — you just might crystallize a brand new thought.

Maybe you are sitting there thinking and working and brainstorming and ideating, looking for new thoughts. Here's the thing. If on some deep, deep deep level all your efforts are energized by a fear of some kind, even a tiny fear, you are probably not going to have actually new thoughts. Are you worried about the kids? your reputation? your safety? It's pretty normal to cover up a deep-seated fear with a lot of words.

In fact, fears and their entailments often mask themselves beautifully by wrapping themselves in a thick package of reasonable-sounding words. Why do you think people talk so much? They are rehashing, justifying, trying to come to terms with their fears. Talking probably won't help too much though. A really new thought feels completely different than all of that. It lifts you completely out of fear-space. But it takes some preparation to get there. Here are some things that have helped me, gradually, make way for murmurations of quiet, translucent, crowned sea-royalty of my mind.

Three practices that make way for new thoughts

You can't force new thoughts to be thunk by you. If you've forced them, they probably aren't new! But you can create a world in which they, like those exotic sea-creatures, might like to live. A world that is home for the new probably has the TV turned off most of the time, has relatively few mirrors, and good social media hygiene. Beyond that, I've found the following to help coax these thinks into appearing.

Divination

An ancient widsom practice, divination is the act of asking "the Universe" something, and using a chance operation in a structured and committed way to derive an answer. This process involves, first, forming a serious, honest question: a question that you really don't know the answer to, a question for which you're really open-minded, open-hearted, open to be changed. Carrying out the chance operation provides a way to focus your attention and energy in a gesture of open-minded inquiry. Once you receive the answer, which is always shocking, always familiar, always cryptic, there is a process of integrating this strange new creature into your world — a process which can last days or months.

My divination practice involves the I Ching. I am always stunned by the perfection and utter newness of the guidance it provides.

Rituals

I believe that creating, refining, and honoring rituals creates the conditions for the new, too. In one sense it might seem counterintuitive to imagine that doing the exact same thing, the exact same way, over and over and over again, would lead to new thoughts. But it does!

Because of the order, the repetition, the simplicity, and the aesthetics of a ritual, your inner space is cleared and opened, and you begin to notice finer and finer details with each iteration. Eventually, and practically unbidden, new thoughts in the shape of groundbreaking words, phrases, or images pop into your mind as you dwell in your ritual space: over a cup of coffee, during a morning walk, on the empty page of your journal, as you practice.

Randomness

I've also found that being systematically random is a wonderful way to come in contact with newness. I'm part of many communities — at work, as a tango dancer, as part of my changemaking network — and in each of these I participate in random-matching programs that pair me up with a fellow community member for a conversation.

I always make time for these conversations even though I have a packed life with lots of commitments and projects — for me, talking with someone I didn't choose has a way of leading straight to the new. These conversations have been infinitely generative and, when I engage with them with real spaciousness and curiosity, they tend to bring me into contact with surpising new ways of putting my world together. Wow, you're doing that? You're into that-thing-I-never-heard-of-but-which-sounds-so-rad? I've discovered extraordinary films, surprising thinkers, and other resources that would have never in a million years gotten my attention from these systematically random converations with people I share values and community with.

There are many, many more ways of accessing the truly new — from plant medicine to labyrinths. I believe that any authentic spiritual path is a guidebook to thinking new thoughts all the time. (Other less fun ways to think newly are crises and illnesses.) In the absence of authentic spiritual communities, and assuming we want to avoid the less fun methods, we need to work harder. Here are some ways to do that:

Honest research. As a professional researcher, I believe that it is actually quite hard, subtle work to find new thoughts in research; it's easy to replicate your own mental models instead. The next time you're researching something, how could you do it with more humility?
Deep listening. How often have you experienced being "really" listened to? Probably most people you know feel listened to about as often as you do — which is rarely. Consider upskilling your listening using Otto Scharmer's framework.
Learning from children. Many adults are continuously using their interactions with children to impose ideas on them, get them to do things, and accrue social status among other adults. If you can find it in your heart to humbly and non-patronizingly simply observe and listen to young children, you will very likely think many many thoughts you never thought before.
Developing relationships. Persisting to develop understanding in a relationship that challenges you is so easy to avoid, with all the comfortable distractions in our world. But leaning into those frictions and accessing a sense of your partner's reality helps new thoughts come.
Persisting in an art. Persisting to develop skill in a pursuit you find difficult, as part of a community or practice, will almost certainly engender new thoughts. For most people this is hard because, again, there are so many comfortable distractions — and it's hard to find healthy communities.

My little niece, who is two, is new. She has the most charming habit of gently taking my hand and saying, authoritatively yet questioningly, in her tiny perfect voice, "Maybe we could..." When I follow her, we go on miniature adventures — moonlit romps, kitchen mischief, water odysseys. Her gesture of possibility is the enactment of neurons making tingly and wonderous new connections. She is the new: every moment of every day.

As you get addicted to the new, the next path will come into being. Accept the tiniest invitations that feel completely different. It's easy to download the same old ick all the time and regurgitate it in different patterns. But what the world needs now is for you to think new thoughts — mindblowing, regal, lacelike, drenched in the bright bold colors of your soul. I hope you feel ready to build a context where that will happen for you, and to gift all of us with the new thoughts that only you can think.

Begin again now: The deep core of improvisation

Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life's desire
- John O'Donohue

Here we are, at the beginning. We’re getting ready to start. It’s beginning.

Isn’t there something crackly, electric, fun about beginning? Beginnings are riveting, juicy, fearless. They bring together the pink incomprehensibleness of a sunrise, the earthy warmth of a cup of coffee with a heaping spoonful of hope, of actual optimism for what’s before us. I love to begin. I love this.

Maybe that’s why it’s so painful to hear these ideas that it’s all over. We’re at the end. We’ve inherited a hopeless mess, and wherever you look is ruination. The future track is set, we don’t have the agency to redirect it because it was put in motion by choices other people made. Really?

I have news for you: dystopia is so yesterday. There’s nothing cool about those stories, sorry, they are a sham and pathetic excuse for entertainment, created by unimaginative and bored minds. All they do is justify your grotesque fascination with doom-scrolling, which actually just makes it worse. Stop doing that, please, for your sake and mine and everyone’s. Reboot. You can begin again. We are beginning again. We are emerging anew, today, in every moment, including right now.

What’s true is that every morning the sun rises on this insane, gorgeous garden-planet we came to live in for awhile. Every day holds a million opportunities to recreate ourselves, our relationships, and our collective experiences. And you can make the choice to charge your moments with the energy of beginnings through the way you use your attention and your body.

Begin again, today. It’s potent. It takes away the dubious luxury of making excuses. Instead of making an excuse, you can just start over. You can’t have missed the boat. You can build the boat, now. And whenever you start, that’s the beginning.

Beginnings. I’ve been studying improvisation for over twenty years, and I’ve learned that beginnings are the lifeblood of improv. As an improviser develops, she is able to perceive beginnings more finely, and create them more frequently. And improvisers who are great at creating beginnings — dozens of micro-beginnings every single minute — are the freshest, most innovative ones. They are also the ones that everyone wants to jam with, because they inspire everyone around them, by helping everyone pay attention to all that’s going on in the present moment. Have you ever been around someone whose presence helps you feel so, so alive? They are improvising, they are cultivating gardens of beginnings in each interaction, millisecond by millisecond.

The art of improv holds real gifts for these changing times. What’s not an improvised collaborative form, today? Parenting, sales, research, teaching, service…we’re all improvising, but how skillfully? Do you feel stuck carrying out something you think was started a long time ago by others? How often are you finding that energy of beginning from which all things are possible? How well are you bringing out that juicy attentiveness and co-creation in others?

This is a beginning, right here. You see it that way, because of the line that starts of a new bit of writing, that you’re deciding whether or not to commit to.

Whenever we conceptualize something as an event, we can see a beginning. A pitch begins a play. A kickoff starts a project. An overture opens a show.

But, here’s the real surprise: Any event can have many many beginnings, nested within one another. Like this one, right now.

Unlocking this was actually a huge discovery in my growth as an improviser in my practice of Argentine tango. Tango is a collaborative social dance, and a joyful night out dancing tango is really just a cascade of quantum beginnings, intrapersonally and interpersonally. There are the big obvious ones, like the start of a dance set, or the start of a song. But nested within those are the subtle ones, like the start of a musical passage, and even within that, the beginning of a shared step. And, even deeper within that are nano-beginnings — like the tiny start of your partner’s inhale, or a slight increase of pressure between the palms, or the barely noticeable arch of an eyebrow — each with dozens of potential implications and responses.

Tuning in to beginning-ness during an evening of tango was a game-changer for me. I think it’s because a real, joyful, free night of tango is filled with difficulties: many, many, many mistakes, misunderstandings, thwarted desires, confusing things, moments of self-doubt, fears of others’ judgment, disappointments and embarrassments, as each carries out their unique quest for flow, for rapture. Those things are all the reality of tango. For everyone. That’s what happens in a space that’s designed to get two people to meet one another deeply, against all odds, in a complex and distraction-filled world, and to share a moment of embodied connecting.

And that’s why learning to start over is the master key to unlocking joy: you realize you have the power to turn those difficulties into new starts by simply re-seeing them, including them. Yikes! Reboot. Oops! Renew. Aargh! Refresh.

I believe the challenges we face on the tango dance floor are part of life off the dance floor too. Mistakes, misunderstandings, thwarted desires, confusing things, moments of self-doubt, fears of others’ judgment, disappointments and embarrassments — aren’t these part of every day? They are there in any tango you might find yourself in, whether it’s at the office, at school, at your home.

I invite you to take the art of improvisation into the micro-moments of your day through the practice of beginning again, now. It might be just what your brain was waiting for. Drop the grudges and judgy thoughts and there’s fresh open space right inside you for a million tiny flowers to wake up and smile. I am hearing my tiny niece’s questioning laughter as I type, my young nephew playing piano. The scale begins again and again and each note is a new song. Turn your life into a tango, by turning your attention into a magic wand that magically heals errors by simply starting over. How could this moment be The Beginning? What if you just left off punctuating those endings and instead wondered

What you can do to begin again, now

Give your body more beginnings per day as you work and learn in your home. How do you do that? Doing something different and specific with your body is a way to start a new “event.” Here are some examples of beginnings you can architect into your day:

Make the most of natural beginnings. I’ve written elsewhere on morning rituals, which I believe are essential to a connected and contributing life.
Change your setting. Move to a different station in the house, or go outside for a few minutes to see anew.
Interact with water. Wash your face, take a shower, wash dishes, drink a bunch of water. When our bodies interact with water we feel the freshness of a new start.
Eat something. Something crackly is usually good to create that crackle of possibility, but anything (healthy) you eat is likely to feel like a bit of a reboot.
Go on a walk. Even just walking up and down your street will generate a fresh beginning.
Do a micro-workout. There are lots of 10-minute workouts on online platforms that are great for a mid-day reboot. Obé Fitness is my favorite for super fun and brief high-intensity dance workouts.
Play a piece of music you associate with starting a new phase. Start to use the same song intentionally as a way to create a start. For me, The Edge of Glory and Alexander Hamilton are happy ways to begin a new day-part or activity.
Go for a quick run. Even five minutes around the block will do.
Take a nap. You probably need one anyway! Napping is a great way to start fresh.
Interact with fire. Lighting a candle or burning a little bit of a fragrant herb can refresh your world in seconds.
Learn and practice the “neurological reboot.” Robert Gilman of Context Institute points out that when we squinch up the muscles of our face, we let go of the past and center ourselves in the present moment, intentionally creating a micro-beginning. Wiggling your nose, making funny faces, squishing your eyebrows — it’s an intelligent way to reboot your internal chemistry.

Want to geek out on the art of improv and how the practice of beginning can transform society? Read jazz musician and educator Ed Sarath’s extraordinary book, Improvisation, Creativity, and Consciousness which has inspired me hugely in this work.

How are you beginning again? I wish you a joyful beginning of the rest of your life now. And now. And now.

Angel heart.
Is this another ending or is it a start?
Is there any way they could be apart?
In the end -
We come full circle again.
- Nick Barber

Creating joyful moments with young children on Zoom

My friendships with my nieces and nephews are among the most treasured ones in my life. I'm super interested in them, curious about them. I love talking with them, listening to what they say, and collaborating on projects together. Not being able to visit with them has been one of the worst parts of COVID for me.

With them quickly growing up (all five of them are six and under) I wanted to do something to keep these relationships alive through 2020. Working closely with them, their parents, and technology, we have discovered some ways to do that.

Here, I'll share a way you can carry out a creative and joyful Zoom call with a child as young as three. I'll talk you through how to collaborate with a child on a drawing on Zoom. I've found my nieces and nephews are happy to spend 40-60 minutes doing this with me, with minimal support from their parents once it's set up, freeing their parents to focus their attention elsewhere.

The core idea: work together on a drawing

What makes this fun is the vivid experience of creating something together. I love the process of seeing a single creative and surprising drawing emerge on the screen, just through our conversation. In the process, we're practicing all kinds of amazing skills — storytelling, design, letters and numbers, and just how to talk and relate to each other. Sometimes there's even a helping of what educators now call "social and emotional skills," too.

Lots of adults say "I can't do art. I'm not artistic." You might find it liberating to know that the art won't come from you. All you are, are the hands for the child's vision. You'll just be making lines, shapes, letters, numbers, and colors through the process of asking the child what they want.

The simplest thing is to just open up a Zoom meeting, share your screen, and choose Whiteboard. That gives you a big blank space and a few tools you can use to draw all over it.

Questions you can ask to co-create a piece of art onscreen with a child:

What should we make?
What color should that part be?
How many of them?
Where is it?
What is this one's name?
How is it feeling? Why does it feel that way? What happened?
Where is it going?
What else do we need here?
What is the title of this?

There's no special technique for using Zoom's drawing tools, they are pretty self-explanatory. Iff it doesn't behave the way you expect, no problem. Messy is good. It's fun to be exploring something together. Use lines, shapes, rubber-stamps, write text, move things around, undo and so forth. Your conversation with the child is more important than how it ends up looking!

Taking it to the next level: drawing on a real piece of paper

After doing about a dozen of these drawing sessions with my three-year-old niece, I started to want more freedom than the Annotate tool could provide. So I started looking into ways I could collaborate with her on a real, analog drawing — a drawing on a real piece of paper.

Using real paper has lots of fun benefits:

You can use any kind of coloring implement you have, including pens, highlighters, crayons, real rubber stamps, etc.
You can use any kind of surface, like cardboard or construction paper or, really, anything. (I have some blank puzzles that are fun to drawn on, then separate, and then put together with a friend.)
The child can see your actual hands working.
You can also use stickers, staplers, PostIt notes or other neat things to add layers to your drawing

It seem obvious that it would be great for a child on Zoom to see your work surface and what your hands are doing, while also seeing your face and talking with you. It's actually not trivial to implement this, but with a little bit of effort you can do it. I think the effort is well worth it, because it opens the door to all kinds of wonderful, creative conversations with extended family. With some experimentation, I finally figured out how and I'm excited to share it with you!

The core idea is this:

You'll use your desktop Zoom connection just like normal so the child can see your face
You'll add a secondary device — your smartphone. You'll log into the Zoom meeting separately through your phone, which will be mounted in a small desk tripod so it can display a view of your hands and worksurface.

The nitty gritty details of the Zoom tabletop tripod method

For this, I'm assuming you're basically familiar with Zoom and how it works. If you're not there are lots of people who can help you with that!

Prepare yourself and the family

Get a tabletop tripod. This one works perfectly, and just costs $25!
Download the Zoom app to your smartphone and log in. You also need to turn off the audio connection. Go to Settings > Meetings > Auto-Connect to Audio and make sure it's off.
Create a Zoom link for the scheduled time and email it to the child's parent.

Right before the meeting

Start setting up for the meeting 15 minutes before.

Make sure your phone is charged
Put your phone on Do Not Disturb. If you get incoming calls or notifications during the meeting, it will interrupt the video, so you want to stop those. On an iPhone, you'll find Do Not Disturb under Settings. Tap Do Not Disturb. Make sure that under "Silence" you've selected Always.
Join the Zoom meeting from desktop by clicking the invitation link. Switch to Gallery View.
Join the Zoom meeting with your smartphone. The easiest way is to open the email or text message you sent to the parents, and click the invitation link from there. When you join:
1. You may be prompted to connect audio. Hit Cancel. You don't want to connect audio because then you'll get a weird feedback loop between your desktop and smartphone audio.
2. Turn your phone landscape orientation. Looking at your desktop screen, you should see two versions of yourself, side by side, both in landscape orientation. You want it to be landscape so you get the biggest possible drawing workspace!
3. Keeping the phone sideways, place it in the tripod. Double check and see if it is right-side-up. If it's upside down, you can rotate the mount 180 degrees.
4. Make sure all your materials (paper, crayons, etc.) are close at hand.

You’re ready!

With that, you’re all set! When the child joins, after you're done with greetings and chats, and if they seem eager and ready to draw, Spotlight the video of your hands/paper. You can do this by mousing over the image of the paper, finding the "three dots" button, and selecting Spotlight Video.

Note, since your meeting will technically have three attendees (you, your hands, and the child) you'll be working within the 40-minute limit on Zoom calls if you have a free account. Forty minutes may be a perfect amount of time for this activity — but, I think Zoom should make this kind of three-way call free for families with kids!

Where could this go? The sky's the limit!

I believe our hands are potent and filled with healing energy. I believe kids are hugely interested in watching artful people who care about their craft using their hands to do skilled work. Even more important, they benefit from interacting with people who care about them and listen to them. Technology can help make this happen.

Adults and kids can explore crafting, knitting, sculpting, doing math, writing, measuring, geometry, woodwork, even music together on Zoom this way. Letting them see your hands, what you're holding, and where you're pointing, even adds a richer layer to reading a book together online, as they can see the pages and your fingers, too. It's personal, fun, interactive, and alive.

I noticed that kids point to things they see on the screen, assuming you can see what they are pointing to. It made me wonder...beyond this, what if we loving adults could also see the child's workspace, their hands, and what they were doing? I got so excited about this that I bought tripods for everyone in my family! I think there's huge potential here. But, there are also challenges:

Although setting up the tripod system is not that hard, those 15-20 minutes of setup time can be a heavy lift for busy parents who have a zillion things on their mind.
A parent would have to be willing to give up their smartphone for about an hour, which is a LOT for most parents.
Young children move around a lot as they work, and it's difficult for them to keep the materials they are working with within the Zoom frame. This can be addressed by using a taller tripod, or by taping out a square for them to work in with blue tape. Still working on these.

I hope a company will create a product/app that makes this whole thing way easier.

In the meantime, if you're apart from your dearest young friends during the holidays, think about how you can connect and spread your love through joyful creative conversations using the magic of Zoom.

Change your mindset about learning, change your child's future

“Every political, corporate, and educational leader who wants every youth to learn the same material at the same time as every other youth is an obstacle to the evolution of our species that our times demand.” — David Marshak, Inviting Youths to Claim the Power of Their Imaginations

Today many families are facing the question: What is learning? We eavesdrop on our childrens’ flat and chaotic Zoom experiences and we wonder: is this learning? Hmm. We may feel they are actually learning more in activities we would have previously classed as “mere play.”

I witnessed this firsthand. My nephew had finished his first grade Zoom “morning meeting” — an assortment of silly singsong greetings and technical problems — and was given a short break before his next “class.” This was just enough time to dive into a flow state with his elaborate Lego project — building new towers, connecting sections, dramatizing scenes between characters. As he was told he must stop and return to class, he yelled: “I hate learning! I hate learning!”

That week, I’d seen this child eagerly practice adding fractions while we were making banana muffins. He’d hand-written a sweet birthday letter for my dad. He’d begged for more time to practice his piano chords. He had thoughtfully taken in the difference between solstices and equinoxes when we discussed them over dinner and explained this to his younger brother the next morning. He’d asked questions about carbon emissions caused by cars. He was teaching his baby sister how to use a finger labyrinth. He loves learning.

His expensive private school was aware of none of these things. In the meantime, it was teaching him that learning was something completely different. Something really, really boring.

What is learning? How does our mindset and deep beliefs about learning constrain the experiences we create for our children?

Two metaphors for learning create two different realities

The tour-bus metaphor

A “tour-bus” metaphor seems to underpin our cognition of how learning works in a deep way. Think of the last time you were on a tour-bus. It may have been a tour bus while visiting a new place, or a bus ride as part of an amusement park.

Now, think about the last class you took — either in person or online. Just like a tour bus leader, you’ll hear the teacher say:

“Here we go!” or “Let’s get going!” at the beginning
“Let’s move into..” “Let’s get back on track” “We need to move on” in the middle
“We’re winding down” “We’ll stop soon” at the end

Let’s unpack the ways tour bus rides are similar to conventional classes:

The tour-bus metaphor is one instantiation of a deeper supermetaphor, LEARNING IS TRAVEL specifically, a form of travel in which a group is being driven in a moving vehicle. This structures our understanding of learning and how we think about it.

It is the reason why we worry about our kids being “behind,” why we want to be sure they are “on track,” why we want to be sure their learning is “going in the right direction.” Here are some of the entailments of this metaphor:

Everyone needs to go to the same place.
Everyone needs to get there the same way.
Everyone needs to arrive at the same time.
When the next bus is coming is unclear.
If you miss the bus, you may be at a disadvantage, because others are getting there in fuel-powered vehicles and you can only get there using your own energy.
If you get behind, it is hard to catch up. You may not even be able to catch up.
You may be late. You may not get there in time. You may miss the thing everyone is after.

And, further, this metaphor is elaborated by our understanding of lateness. Generally, as a culture, we believe the following things about lateness:

People are unsympathetic towards late people.
Late people are irresponsible.
Being late shows disrespect or bad character or bad upbringing.
Systems are not designed to accommodate late people and rightly so.
Late people have fewer options and benefits.
If you are late, all the good things may be already finished.
Late people are never successful.
Late people miss opportunities and can never get them back.
If you are behind, you won’t be part of the group where all the value is created.

The metaphor of LEARNING AS A MOVING VEHICLE is incredibly pervasive. Our culture has even conceived (and named) entire pieces of legislation based on this misguided and incomplete mindset toward education. Combined with our folk understanding of how bad lateness is, parents become very worried about their kids “missing school.” It may be helpful for parents to realize that the metaphor isn’t the reality.

There are many kinds of learning, and there may be a few for which the tour bus provides a useful metaphor — for instance, when a group of people are seeking efficient, superficial contact with a domain that is completely new to all of them. However, many kinds of learning require deep, tactile engagement with the world and ones’ peers, an individually-paced process, creativity and co-creativity, and other freedoms that the tour bus metaphor renders invisible.

The labyrinth metaphor

Have you experienced a walking labyrinth? A labyrinth is a single long path that has been folded many times to fit into a circular shape. The dimensions of the path and the nature of the folding have been optimized over hundreds of years to catalyze a mood of presence and alertness in the walker. Labyrinths have spontaneously arisen independently from one another in a variety of different human cultures, suggesting that they represent an archetypal form for humans.

Here is a typical experience of a labyrinth: An individual is free to choose if, when, and how to enter the labyrinth — or not. One individual enters at a time. They walk to the labyrinth’s center in whatever speed or manner they choose, and then, when they are ready, they return. If this is a group experience, there may be a facilitator who holds space and orients participants to the labyrinth. When others are present, there are many different ways one might encounter them. Many people report having deep and sometimes transformative insights in a labyrinth walk.

I see the labyrinth as a more relevant metaphor for a learning experience than the tour bus. It provides a template for agency, non-coercion, rhythm, groundedness, and individual process.

Let’s unpack the ways labyrinth walks can function as template for self-directed learning experiences:

I ask you to consider how different these journeys are — the journey of a tour bus and the journey of a walking labyrinth. When you think of things YOU want to learn, which kind of journey would you prefer? Why do you think that is?

If you are a learning experience facilitator, how would what you offer change if you let the metaphor of the labyrinth guide your relationship with learners and their relationship with the content, experience, and one another? Are there other metaphors you feel might better highlight what you see as the key dimensions of learning? To explore how metaphors work more deeply, I encourage you to read George Lakoff and Marc Johnson’s seminal work Metaphors We Live By; I’ve drawn from their approach in doing the above analysis.

What’s Next

If you are a parent, can you spot the tour buses your children are on? Seeing them, and noticing the superficial ways in which they engage, is the first part of the change process. The next step is to begin the process of exploring self-directed learning. They are many wonderful resources online, such as the podcast Honey, I’m Homeschooling the Kids! and the incredible film Class Dismissed.

My nephew is resilient. He will continue to love learning, regardless of what he calls it. The pathetic video meetings that his school was able to effortfully muster for him during COVID will quickly pass into oblivion. He will know that learning is life, and life is learning, and he will go on to create, discover, and express himself joyfully in many ways, enriching his mind and body and those of everyone around him in the process. What makes him so resilient? I like to imagine that he, and each of us, has a relationship with a learning spirit that guides our labyrinthine learning paths.

How to trust your child's learning spirit

Many parents are beginning to explore self-directed learning. Without an external system to keep things “on track,” with their child’s education, parents are likely to have many doubts, questions, and needs. Understanding the concept of a learning spirit, which I believe is foundational to self-directed learning, may be the missing piece. Let’s begin by reflecting on the purpose of learning. Where was this tour bus going, anyway?

Our culture’s illusions about the purpose of learning

We inherit an illusion that learning is organized by roles and specialties. A person is to select a specialty from a list of given options, and move into a role that represents patterned ways that that specialty has, in the past, created value. These specialties are expressed as subjects at school, then departments or concentrations in college, eventually preparing a person for a role at work. The role of our “academic advisors” or “career counsellors” has been to essentially help a person choose something from a list that will work out alright for them.

People who love us may encourage us to follow our passion, to find our calling. However, being encouraged to do that doesn’t change the underlying assumption. We still see ourselves as picking a specialty from a list of options (perhaps a larger list) and then inhabiting a role related to that speciality.

This is problematic because all those specialties are outside of you, invented for ephemeral worlds which are changing by the moment. They do not constitute a good starting point for learning, especially in the VUCA time we live in. This set of assumptions interferes with the rich way souls actually magnetize their own authentic learning experiences all the time.

How our learning spirit connects us with our life purpose

Learning spirits are indwelling forces that guide the individual toward the experiences that enables them to inhabit their life purpose. The learning spirit may express itself in the form of a passionately felt interest, a dream, and intuition or longing. It may be activated by complex systems in which the person is embedded, such as a family situation, a relationship, a health challenge, a challenge within the community, an ancestor, a connection with nature, or another way.

And, when engaged with devotion, this learning spirit is likely to create a path for the individual that is utterly unique. The path may draw on the treasures of a few different disciplines; it may catalyze the individual to inhabit a range of different roles; all those disciplines and roles are likely to evolve over time as the nature of the learning spirit becomes more and more manifest.

What becomes manifest, over time, and through the most intimate dialogue with the learning spirit, is a person’s mandate. Discovering one’s mandate may happen at any time in one’s life. It is the discovery of a sacred contract that you have promised to fulfill, in your own way, in this lifetime. You will know it when you feel it. It has a depth, an urgency, a sense of high stakes. It is infinitely generative and can take many concrete forms. It is called a mandate because there is no way to avoid it; it is required. It has the power to magnetize to you those allies and contexts that can support its realization. Through it, you naturally choose to hold yourself to a higher standard that you would without it.

A learning spirit unlocks the full potential that represented by the individual within her full life context in a manner that maximizes learning, growth, contribution, and creation.

How can I support my child’s relationship with her or his learning spirit?

Here is how you can support your child’s emerging relationship with her or his learning spirit:

Observe your child in detail. Write down your observations. Journal about them. See if you can understand the logic of her or his indwelling learning spirit. What sorts of experiences does it draw them to? What are they passionately driven to explore?
Celebrate people who don’t fit into neat roles and categories.
Facilitate mentorship with those who embody excellence.
Highlight the many ways an individual contributes to society. Contextualize the jobs people do into their larger social contribution
Normalize both linear/conventional and nonlinear paths for learning. Articulate the value that each offers. Explain what college is and the purposes it can fulfill, instead of presenting it as the only pathway forward.
Don’t imply that they must decide “what they want to be when they grow up” which implies that this is a simple answer that would take the form of a narrow role.
Don’t suggest that the “real world” is not where the child is. Make sure they know they are learning and contributing all the time in meaningful and impactful ways.
Normalize both formal education and informal learning that takes place through action research, entrepreneurial projects, community projects, and so on.

Your child's attention is sacred. Here's how to honor it

Look at your child. Look at her eyes. Look at her gaze, her expression. What is she looking at? How would you describe her attention? Look at her hands. How would you describe their focus?

We adore our kids, so we want to hug them. And we often need to communicate with them, so we call their names or ask them questions. But, doing this indiscriminately can undermine their learning. Today, I want to invite you to do a practice that will help your child learn:

Look at your child’s face before you interact with them

If your child is rapt, immersed, absorbed, intent, deeply engaged in what they are doing, halleluiah and congratulations! You’ve done something wonderful by creating an environment and providing materials and ideas that makes this possible.

The holy grail of home-based learning is for your child to spend stretches of time in a state of deep flow, when time melts away and play, exploration, and learning all fuse into one blessed beautiful engaged quiet state.

Unfortunately, many adults unwittingly fragment and disrupt childrens’ attention. Schooling itself can decimate a child’s capacity to enter the flow state, as Dan Sanchez articulates brilliantly in his piece How School Stole Your Flow.

Parents and caregivers, you can become aware of all the ways you may be undermining your children’s attention. With some practice, it will become remarkably easy to protect and deepen their flow states.

The one, foundational technique that everything else rests on is: Look at your child’s face before you interact with them. What does their face tell you? If they are absorbed, avoid the following.

Avoid doing this when your child is in a flow state

If you have noticed that your child is in a flow state, wait until later before you do these things:

Do not say their name. Their name spoken by a loved family member can disrupt them.
Do not touch them in a way that draws attention to your touch. For instance, do not bring your face close to theirs.
Do not offer them an object, even if seems related to their task. Only offer them an object if they seem stuck. Definitely do not offer them anything shiny, packaged, or novel — children find these irresistible.
Avoid calling other children’s names loudly, since this may cause the child to want to see what’s going on.
Do not play or sing songs with a strong melody or words. These are very exciting to a child and can draw their attention. Turn off background television, which will break your child’s flow.
Do not start a conversation with them. There are many things you may feel drawn to talk with your child about. See if you can hold off asking them where their backpack is, or if they are excited about an upcoming birthday, or if they want some bananas — until their flow state is winding down.
Do not seek eye contact. Eye contact is powerful! If you child feels your eyes on them, they may become distracted. If your child is busy and you are walking through their learning space, keep your eyes to yourself. At first you may feel guilty or imagine you’re ignoring them — remind yourself that they are immersed and don’t need your attention right now.

A child is incredibly sensitive to her environment. She will want to participate in any important activities happening in the space, especially with family members. Help her prolong her experience of flow by creating a bubble around her attention, treating it as the sacred process it is.

Things that can support your child’s flow state

There’s a whole learning philosophy that is designed to optimize your child’s flow: the Montessori method. I feel fortunate both to have learned in a Montessori environment, and to have taught in a Montessori classroom. If you’re interested in flow, I encourage you to read Maria Montessori’s The Absorbent Mind. Here are a few things I’ve found, in my explorations, that help a child deepen their state of flow.

Framing. Give your child’s task “edges.” It is very helpful if they have a frame that can focus their attention on the task at hand. Physically, this can take the form of a tray, a mat, or a “station.” If you don’t have these things at hand, orient their chair so there’s nothing distracting in their visual field.
Ambient reassuring touch. An occasional gentle touch on the back, hair or shoulders reassures them that you are present with them in case they need you.
Ambient sound. Natural sounds from the outdoors, the sounds of wooden things, or the sounds of other children learning with physical materials (e.g., writing sounds, soft conversation sounds) can help intensify focus for some, just as working in a café can help adults focus. Television is not a good source of ambient sound. It is quite distracting for a child.
Attending to the child. When a child is deeply engaged, they still can face obstacles and become stuck. The role of a caring adult is to track their work in such a way that you can remove obstacles that they aren’t able to see or remove.
Alternate between “work time” and transitions. As you design your home routine, think carefully about which chunks of time are for deep work, and which are transitional. Save your more chatty or administrative interactions with your children for meals and the transitions between day-parts. Use a pad to keep note of things you need to ask/tell/give them between their flows.

A note about passive digital entertainment

The focus of this essay is on protecting a child’s attention when they are bodily engaged in learning activities that involve their eyes, hands, minds and possibly other parts of their bodies in an exploration and problem-solving process.

Passively watching videos or scrolling social media can mimic the feeling of flow but without the healthy challenge that makes flow so worthwhile. Although you may see your child rapt and deeply involved in watching a YouTube video, you will want to interrupt this process when their screentime quota is nearing its end. I found Parent Co.’s tips on how to build a bridge from screentime to a different activity helpful.

Flow-creating activities for your child

Social media platforms that present kids with short and silly videos on different topics to scroll through decimate their attention and normalize the unfortunate fragmentation of the adult world.

In contrast, there are many kinds of activities that support flow in kids, and many can be facilitated with materials you have around the house. Kids of different ages have different needs, and each individual child is different. For instance, they may find flow in the following experiences with low-tech, found objects:

Taking something apart
Making something with their hands
Reading
Sorting things that are mixed together
Placing things in long lines
Working with water, earth, sand
Interacting with clothing/shoes/jewelry

Start by observing what your kids readily immerse in and explore how you can lengthen the duration of their flow state. How can you set up your home so that your child spends many hours per day in a flow state? Enjoy the journey of exploring flow with your child.

P.S. Look at your child’s face before you interact with them—this principle should also bring beautiful results when applied to husbands, girlfriends, coworkers, and pretty much anyone else in your life ;)

Why Argentine Tango? A Practice Ground for Connection Skills the World Needs

How tango provides a practice ground for connection skills the world needs

Introduction

We live in a numinous world. We all are yearning to know ourselves as connected. But our institutions often are at odds with this. When we try to connect, we are stuck and stalled by our limited, inherited understanding of what connection is. Argentine tango, the dance of connectedness, provides a metaphor and model for a better way.

Today, our culture holds and reinforces many half-truths about connection. Connection isn't a switch you can just turn on or off. It's not as simple as getting online, or going out regularly with friends, or showing up at a coworking space or for your weekly yoga class, or even being happily married. We can do all these things but still feel unconnected on a deeper level.

The purpose of this work is to articulate a more complete, deeper, and more liberating model for understanding what connection is, and how we can cultivate it in our lives. This model comes directly from the embodied wisdom of Argentine Tango, a hundred-year-old improvised, social, folk dance and music tradition and growing community movement, part of humanity’s intangible cultural heritage according to UNESCO.

In this piece, I attempt to articulate the gift that tango offers to humanity in a detailed framework that brings to life four realms of connectedness tango calls on its practitioners to develop. What does it really take to tango? Whole healthy individuals, embracing each other in creative partnerships, cultivating an inspired and dedicated practice community, making space to deepen their connection to spirit.

One exciting dimension of this work is its clear articulation of Tango's intricate and nuanced model of partnering, specifically, the relationship between "leader" and "follower." In the dance, these roles are surprisingly interrelated, each requiring both initiative and receptivity, yin and yang. The model that emerges can change the way anyone thinks about leadership and followership in their life and work.

We, the improvisers

We begin in the middle of the last century, when tango entered this planet. Humanity was going through a rough patch; it was sick, almost suicidal. Rapt on mutilating parts of its own human self with tragic contraptions like atomic explosions and chambers of gas and automatic weaponry.

And in that moment of lostness there was one little organ of this vast body of seven billion people that was finally getting organized, right there along the Rio del Plata river. One part - I like to imagine a heart - that managed to rise above and below and around the myth of sadness and loneliness, to rearrange reality and show us how the next thousands of years could be.

That heart is anything that steps outside of the world of if-this-then-that-tit-for-tat. It is whatever starts to find the rat-a-tat right there in that tit-for-tat. It is that commitment to being in tune on many levels, to keep choosing to know that every bit, every sweet bit of life can be a dance and actually is just like this one right now.

That heart is all the lonely people who didn’t give up or go mad but decided to not be lonely. That heart is the musicians who broke free of “it has to be like this” and created jazz. That heart is the slaves and immigrants who chose to find a tango inside of their yearning. That heart is the kids who girded up for rap battles instead of knife fights. That heart is us - we, the improvisers.

We, the improvisers. What if the only thing holding humanity back is thinking that there’s any activity that’s not improvising? Improvising is a heroic act. Improvising is what skillful parents, effective salespeople, transformative entrepreneurs, noble statesmen do. Improvising means we pay total attention and create something for all of us we couldn’t have ever imagined in advance.

Improvising means feeling

To be an improviser in this game of life we need to re-learn how to feel. We need to be able to feel, deeply, on many levels:

To be able to feel your whole self, all the parts of your own body, to re-include in perception parts of yourself that you haven't been used to paying attention to;
Then, to be able to expand and feel another person's body - to experience their experience as if it is literally your own - your own moods, thoughts, emotions, movements;
Next, to be able to expand and feel the collective body - tune into the mood of the superorganism we form part of and feel it in all its parts, its joys, its sadnesses, its power;
Finally, to be able to expand yourself to feel yourself in your completeness, a participating autonomous center in a spirited world that you co-create

Improvisers feel. They can tune in to whichever of these levels serves the needs of the moment, serves the needs of emergent creation. They learn to do this by practicing at each of these levels. They develop themselves, they collaborate in partnerships, they participate in ensembles, and they cultivate connection with spirit.

There are so many well meaning approaches to improving the world but what many of them seem to be missing is the guidance - it must be ever so gentle - to rediscover lost forms of feeling. I don't think that even the smartest techniques, the best business master's program, or the most well-researched book on relationships will work. Unless it points us in the direction of a search for finding and anchoring an awareness of your whole self, and learning to broaden that awareness to 'selves' that include more and more of us.

We need to be able to feel, so we can improvise. And improvising is what's needed now.

Four centers of feeling

There are four centers of feeling, four possible points to place focus and feel: the Self, the Pair, the Collective, and finally Universe, Source, or what we might call Spirit.

Each of these is a natural center, and like everything in nature, holds within it the qualities that are the underlying fabric of life: the creative and the receptive, the yang and the yin.

According to ancient Chinese models of change, yang and yin have never been separated from each other and they can’t be because that’s not how they roll. Each actually rolls into the other, either gradually or quantumly; each feeds on the other; each delights in the other’s oppositeness to it.

Each of these centers is so complex - yin and yang interrelating, dancing, on an infinitesimally subtle level. Anywhere there is weariness, weirdness, or effortfulness it is likely that our analytical minds have tried to dissociate yin from yang, or cut away the complexity of their play. And the result is not too good.

In the collective space, the result is a sadly yin-deficient concept of authoritative, solitary and disconnected "leaders" who have not learned how to tune into all the levels of feelings that would allow them to serve, and yang-deficient "followers" who submit. What if each of us knew how to be a leader or a follower and could put on this role whenever life's improvisation called for it?

In the pair space, the result is that our relationships can fall apart, or simply become a context for pervasive, subtle, insidious abuse, because although we are trying to be good partners we have not learned how to feel our partners nor ourselves. What if we both could learn the yin and yang skills that would allow us to tune into and serve the needs of the creative pair?

In the self space, the result is floating, lost individuals who even as they effort toward "self-improvement" have no solid connection to the yin of their earth nor the yang of their inspiration. What kind of education would educate souls to feel who they are?

And when it comes to spirit, the result is continual ineffectual attempts to "really change" without the willingness or knowhow to actually, really, truly, get out of one's own mind and its patterns. How can we get out of our own minds?

The limits of our education system

Growing up we don’t really learn much about these things. At least I didn’t — and I got what probably some people would consider tops in education. My college motto was “in the nation’s service and the service of all nations.” And in my college, I learned about many beautiful and subtle things. But,

I never learned anything about how to go deep into myself to discover who I am and what I’m called to do, so that I could start to be of service;
I never learned what it takes to create a harmonious relationship with another individual;
I never learned what leadership is and how I could be helpful to either my nation or all nations;
I never learned how to cultivate a connection with spirit.

And I think that as a result of an epic vast hole in our whole education system there’s a lot of mixed-up thinking about these things. Because each area of focus is complex, it’s easy to surround it with half-truths that are the result of incomplete and limiting thinking. This experiment is an attempt to provide a more complete, and more nuanced framework that articulates the fullness what each is and how they interrelate.

A new framework for learning to feel

It is possible for everyone to learn how to improvise. Improvisation is based on learning how to focus and feel on each of these levels. Learning to feel on these levels requires practice and there are four practice areas. Each can be encountered and developed in any order.

Whole personhood — connecting with Self
Collaborative partnership — connecting as a Pair
Embodied stewardship — connecting as a Collective
Change — connecting as Spirit

I will explore each of these practice areas by outlining the yin and yang qualities it is built upon; highlighting the beliefs and values that can get in the way of cultivating it.

concentric circles for the four areas of focus

Whole Personhood

Discovering and re-integrating lost parts of ourselves is what makes change conceivable. Those may be parts of our bodies we have lost awareness of; buried, emotionally dense experiences; worlds of imagination that have been side-shelved.

Each of us can cultivate our wholeness through action and through receptivity. Being receptive as we tune into our self arena means opening up to feel more of ourselves and receiving the sensations of the world. That means (1) feeling our foundation, where we come from and what we are made from; (2) embracing the cycles of life and (3) opening to its extremes, creating space within for apparent contradictions; and (4) allowing experience to flow and transform organically from the present to the emerging.

Being active means choosing to dedicate more of our energy to our own blossomings, and going out to create patterns in the world that activate our own individualization. That means (1) attentively managing time and awareness resources; (2) building boundaries and strength to defend your own aligned integrity; (3) practicing extending and expanding into new spaces sensibly; and often it means (4) going ahead and changing course or direction.

When we activate and receive with respect to our self, we find ourselves returning to us a state of being that feels...good.

Collaborative Partnerships

Already when we are tiny, minutes old, we are involved in the joyful and intense game of pairing. Eye contact, sharing rhythms, playing with tension and expectation, suspense and fulfillment, tenderness and touch - we are wired to become entrained into such experiences as a source of health, safety, growth.

Somewhere, deeply, we remember the experience of knowing ourselves as part of unit that is bigger than us, a partnership, through which energy flows and creates and delights. Creativity -- of a complexity and richness beyond the possibility of a single individual -- is able to emerge through a well-structured partnership. When we find it again it can feel so natural, so like home.

Somehow, it has happened that the gesture of pairing has for some been disrupted, becoming confusing or even dangerous. But we hold the yearning, the hope, the belief, the knowledge that we can return to the world of happy pairing that is our inheritance. Maybe this is why the tango embrace for so many people, despite the anxieties it may provoke, can feel like such a joyful return.

And we can cultivate a richness of collaborative partnerships in our lives through yin and yang qualities, acting and receiving. Being active means choosing those ways that allow myself to shine and be strong as I partner: (1) choosing and adjusting my mental, emotional, or physical closeness or distance to best support the connection; (2) sharing of myself persistently with honesty and directness; and (3) choosing power, a wholeheartedness and enthusiasm that provides energy to carry out the partnership's work.

Being receptive as we open on the possibility of partnership means (1) we relearn deep noticing as we become focused and let in more of the detail of another's presence; (2) we practice listening curiously and openly to how our partner flows and offers invitations for our involvement; (3) we open up to matching their unique moods and qualities, to letting those moods and qualities become ours too; and (4) we create space for the richness and range of sensual experience that may emerge when two bodies interplay.

This dance, this tango, can feel intense, intriguing, involving. It can even become an obsession for periods of life, possibly for a whole life. Ultimately, however, its potential is in its power to be directed into service of the collective.

Embodied Stewardship

Connecting to, caring for and cultivating what is beyond ourselves and our partnerships is something that requires a particular way of concentrating attention, energy, and power. In the past it has been helpful for those who are drawn to that broader endeavor to be very visible to others, and to have far-reaching sight - to be able to see and be seen. Maybe that is where the idea of the leader as "up above" or "higher than" came up.

Today though, there is a tone of stewardship that thrives not on highness but on feeling - feeling the collective as one's own body. And from that place of feeling, it's possible to inspire the whole collective body to organize itself and allow a spirited energy to move through it, which leads to all kinds of co-creativity, renewal and revitalization.

My partner Stefan actually experiences the whole of humanity (including himself) as a single body made up of seven billion people - a body whose life is mysteriously interwoven with other bodies such as the Earth.

Assuming that collective bodies will just take care of themselves responsibly is no longer viable. For well-organized, coherent, spirited expression and expansion, centers of feeling and flow within each "superorganism" need to be awakened, opened, activated, and engaged. I picture these as similar to acupuncture points. A few acupuncture points get jiggled, and as a result my whole being is enlivened and can feel and do the creative spirit's work. And once a whole body is dancing, no part of it is excluded.

Today, we the acupuncture points (there must be millions of us in a seven-billion person body) are the promise and potential of our whole system. More than leaders who lead from on-high, who may experience themselves as separate from the bodies they seek to support, we the acupuncture points are IN the human body, OF the human body, experiencing its pains and joys and squelched yearnings, and its dream of finding its paradise, its soulful collaborative partnership with Earth, again.

The metaphors of "leadership" are telling. Here are some things we are accustomed to say:

We'll fix the company.

We'll run the company.

We'll save the world.

We'll make it work.

All of these statements suggest a distancing or disembodiment: a sense of the thing that is meant to be led as an object - a machine to be run or fixed, a helpless entity that needs saving or motivation. But embodied stewardship is so much more involved and less egoic than our traditional idea of "leadership." When we become embodied stewards, we feel how we have been infected by our own beliefs about the collective, and discover that what holds us back may be the insidious ways we in fact see ourselves as helpless, unmotivated, machinelike.

Embodied stewardship is, like change on every level of life, enlivened and experienced through our yin capacities and our yang capacities, and it immediately loses power and impact when one side is overemphasized. Being receptive as stewards means we let in an awareness of what is real and true on a variety of levels: we notice (1) what's real in each relationship and acknowledge the adaptations of the other; we notice (2) what's real in each community - resources, sources of power, patterns of activity and thought; and we notice (3) what's real about the our times, tuning our sensitivity to the largest, broadest, finest, subtlest energies and data.

Being active means being a center of (1) imagination, deliberately creating mental space for a vision of a new world and persistently choosing to develop and refine this vision; embracing working actively with and through others to (2) sculpt responses in relation to a coherent, envisioned whole: confirming, reinforcing, amplifying, redirecting, contradicting; and finally issuing clear, doable and wholehearted (3) invitations for others to act, again and again, without dis-heartenment, with urgency and deadlines.

All of this is done peacefully, with conviviality and an orientation toward long term health and transformation, by the embodied steward.

Change

The nature of change is deep. There are two kinds of change: gradual change and quantum change. Gradual change happens through an accumulation of efforts, activities, initiatives, choices. Quantum change is when something "flips" and your whole world is now new. Both are natural.

Cultivating change is what we tend to do during times of trouble. If everything's fine, why change? When we know things not to be fine, on some internal or external level, we start making space for change. But then we often hit a wall. How can you change yourself? How can you change your mind? How do you open your own mind? I believe these are possibly the most deepest and most urgent questions out there that we need to consider. Many of the patterns that contribute to the situation we want to change are deeply embedded inside of us as heavily myelinated patterns of thought.

One major contribution of spiritual traditions is that they codify a set of practices that allow for mind-opening to take place. Sickness or disaster can also serve this function. When our minds are open, content enters our awareness from a completely different source than usual. We think things that we have never thought before. The contemplative practices that still and open the mind allows the voice of something beyond our own cognitive patterning to be present.

And when we focus on this level, on what emerges from that beyond, we connect with pure yin and pure yang, an improvisatory dance of stillness. In connection with this vast and benevolent presence, we are receptive - we still ourselves, we attend, we listen and serve. At the same time, we are active - we question, contribute, shine, and we create. And through the relationship that emerges with spirit, or spirits, we learn how to enliven and inhabit our unique individual potential, and the potentials within our partnerships and collectives, better.

concentric circles of areas of focus and techniques

A summary of skills of each area

Whole Personhood

Yin Techniques

Feel your foundation	Remembering and letting in the sensation/awareness/mood of your foundation - family, ancestry, tribe, earth.
Open to extremes	Creating space for inner tensions between contrasting extremes and even apparent contradictions.
Embrace the cycles	Acknowledging, celebrating, mourning the cyclicity of life at all levels, its endings and beginnings; following the nature of things.
Allow the flow	Allowing one thing to physically transform into (emerge from) another without interfering, and cultivating acceptance of all forms.

Yang Techniques

Change Your Direction	Keep changing and adapting the strategies guiding your life toward your vision - with openness, flexibility, adaptive learning.
Manage Your Time	Use the precious resource of your life/attention/creativity to the fullest and managing the limited hours you have on this planet/in this body with deep respect and care. Perceive, create, meet deadlines. Evolve time management habits.
Extend Sensibly	Explore your perimeters of comfort, expand what's possible while being sensible, respectful and attuned - find, articulate, and explore new edges.
Align Your Self	Seek actively to establish and maintain connection to an inner compass that keeps you attuned and in touch with your truth/nature and with choices that hold integrity.

Collaborative Partnership

Yin Techniques

focus	Able to be "with" and "in" the moment - present. Noticing and absorbed in the world of a situation or person for stretches in which time dissolves. Experiencing each moment as a beginning.
listen	Being open to something that is flowing; nonjudgmentally curious about what it is and how it is changing; receptive to ways of becoming part of it (invitations).
sense	Allowing learning and exploration through the sensual experience of nature and bodies. Opening to the richness of sensation that may emerge when two bodies interplay.
match	Allowing a different mood or quality to emanate into yours by opening what's possible for your body/emotions/mind up yet another degree.

Yang Techniques

Choose Your Distance	Choose and adjust the degree of mental, emotional, or physical closeness that matches the needs of the work.
Choose Directness	Be direct and true - non-evasive, non-oblique - in the sharing of values, feelings, needs and strategies.
Choose Power	Exuberance, enthusiastic cheerfulness: the motive force to carry out ideas - others' as well as yours - wholeheartedly. Believing in yourself/partner/community through persistent choosing to believe and direct energy.

Embodied Stewardship

Yin Techniques

follow the follower	Adapting to what's real in this relationship and acknowledging the adaptations of the other. Noticing and factoring in what the other perceives even if it doesn't match (your) reality.
follow the community	Adapting to what's real in this community - resources, source of power, patterns of activity and thought - peacefully, with conviviality and an orientation toward long term health and transformation.
follow the spirit of the times	Adapting to the spirit of the times. "Fiat mihi."

Yang Techniques

IMAGINE!	IMAGINE - deliberately create mental space for a vision of new world and persistently choose to develop and refine this vision.
SCULPT!	Work actively with and through others to shape their responses in relation to a coherent, envisioned whole: confirming, reinforcing, amplifying, redirecting, contradicting.
INVITE!	Issue clear, doable, and wholehearted invitations for others to act, again and again, without dis-heartenment, with urgency and deadlines.

Change

stillness

Let it be, let it go, let it come, let it be. Adapt, inspire. Exhale, inhale. Create, serve.

From thinking to knowing

It may be possible to intellectually grasp what I am talking about here, but, knowing it within and having access to it whenever needed only comes from much vivid experiencing and exploring.

To appreciate the depth and nuance of each of these areas of focus, and each of the complex skills that gives rise to integrating any of them, we need to bring together many resources that most people don't usually have access to:

We need to be willing to use our bodies in a variety of new ways to learn about our whole self
We need to work physically together in pairs over long periods of time to discover a feeling for partnership
We need access to a community that congregates physically together regularly so that we can tune into the feeling of the collective

There are many dynamics in our world that get in the way of accessing these things. A culture of disposable relationships, of learning-tourism, of high mobility and travel, of overcommitment and distraction; a culture that prizes the nuclear family as the most high cultural institution (there is no commensurately respected institution that is specifically geared toward the enlivenment of the social fabric); a culture where there is still fear around bodies and touch; a culture with an impoverished understanding of what community is and a myth that what it offers can be accessed without physically being present with others; a culture where, for many, a living connection with spirit is still barely at the periphery of our attention.

Considering all of that, if we want to explore and develop skill in the full framework of connection, we need to create supportive structures that will enable us to find the energy - the time, space, resources, and motivation - to pursue this work.

Improvised forms provide motivating domains for exploring the framework of connection

There are many practice domains that bring together bodies and music to explore and improvise in pairs and collectives. Improvised music-making and dance forms that are open to all kinds of all ages and experience backgrounds include capoeira, singing and drumming circles, belly dance, break dance, blues, Lindy Hop, Salsa Rueda, Argentine Tango.

To the extent that these practice communities make space for spirit - usually experienced in the form of deep respect for the paired mysteries of music and silence - they can become transformative.

As we start to work with our and others' bodies, we start to develop a deepening felt sense of respect, affection, caring for ourselves and one another. With the right guiding frameworks, and a gentle commitment to a long-term time horizon, what can emerge is a loving practice community - some might call it a "sangha" - that activates the ripening of individuality, partnership and collectivity.

There are many other physically improvisatory forms - for instance, team sports, improv theater and comedy, horseback riding - that provide socially motivating practice grounds. Since they don't hinge on a connection with music they do not fall within this context.

And there are many rich improvised forms that call forth only very specific parts of the body, usually the fingers and hands. What I'm focusing on here is those forms that require the engagement of the whole body working together with other whole bodies.

Once a connection with the form is established (which is nontrivial - the first months can feel very awkward and frustrating for most and many will drop out) the rituals, the benefits, the challenges, and the community that congregates for practice start to provide more social motivation for the practitioner to go deeper - and, as they go deeper, to explore, feel and understand in more areas of the framework.

Creating and scaling the social motivation for the forms I've just described needs to be the most urgent, highest priority of those who care about the future of education.

The power of metaphors

We often draw on our bodily experiences to understand and think about more abstract experiences. Metaphors are when we take something very abstract and make it more vivid by mapping aspects of it to a felt experience that everyone's familiar with. If I try to explain tango to you by saying, "Tango is just hugging and walking," you know what I mean because you remember how it feels to hug, and how it feels to walk. This provides you with a sense of Tango that you were not able to tap when you saw that tango performance on TV. And even though of course tango is more than "just" hugging and walking, this metaphor concisely communicates something about it that would be a lot harder to convey in any other way.

Metaphors are extremely pervasive in thought, often in ways we don't even realize. There are many subtle metaphors that continuously operate in our thinking without our explicit awareness. What they all have in common is that they come from our experiences with our bodies: their shape, size, parts, how they relate to the environment, what they need, their rhythms, etc. When we talk about the "legs of a chair," we are using a metaphor that is based knowing what human legs are and do. When we say the "this election is an epic battle" we may be thinking of or imagining what it feels like to physically fight with someone. (For more about metaphors, read Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff & Johnson, 1980)

Today we lament the quality of dialogue in our nations and communities and within and between our institutions and individuals. We may think that better dialogue will happen if everyone can go to college, or if we could find better technological solutions for engaging people. But I believe that the quality of dialogue will only change insofar as humanity develops a richer range of felt, embodied experiences to draw from to structure our thinking and thus our dialogue.

We cannot have meaningful dialogue about community if we have not had a felt experience of being in and of a community. We cannot have a meaningful dialogue about partnership - for instance "bipartisan partnership" or "organizational partnership" - if our bodies have never experienced what it actually feels like to be in partnership - what it calls on, what it calls forth, what it is about. And we cannot have meaningful dialogue about peace if we have never experienced it inside of ourselves. We cannot know and exchange about "leadership" in any meaningful ways if our bodies have never experienced what it feels like to follow a leader, to be a leader, to create gently and sensitively with and through other cherished bodies.

Urgently, we need to create cauldrons of learning, of embodied experiencing, where we can broaden the range of felt experiences that each person knows and can access. Once we know something on a feeling-level, we can then draw from it in our metaphorical thinking. And as we learn to think in new ways, ways that come out of these more rich, vivid, and nuanced experience of what it feels like to be connected on different levels, we will be able to access and activate a whole fresh kind of dialogue. A kind of dialogue that is deeply, deeply needed in the coming century as we enter a deeper level of collaboration and peace-making.

Argentine tango as a practice ground

As a practice ground for exploring connectedness, Argentine Tango is very rich. Tango provides a model for how we can be at each of these levels: powerful individuals, embracing one another to create whole healthy partnerships, moving through a room that is a whole healthy community catalyzed by a continuity of subtle acts improvisational leadership that power all deeper into connectedness, guided always by change.

Using the whole body

Tango calls for us to develop an awareness of every single part of our bodies, from the tiny parts of our feet, to our often-ignored powerhouse hips, to each individual dancing vertebra of our spines, to our thrilling and expressive ribcages, to our sensitive and responsive arms and hands, to our shoulders, necks, and faces, to the matrix of receptors that is our skin, to our lungs, our hearts, our ears and musical minds, our nervous systems and the rhythmic surges and flows of neurotransmitters that evoke emotional experiences within our bodies. Tango calls on us to know and feel these, and to coordinate them intimately with every single part of another body.

Argentine tango music

The music of tango emerged from decades of exploration and improvisation where thousands of virtuosic musicians from all over the world attempted to create the most inspiring music that would inspire the general public to embrace each other and dance in large numbers. This creative exploration went extremely deep and humanity emerged with some of the most rich, powerful, evocative music that comes from an extremely deep place of collaboration, listening, and connectedness.

The powerful embrace

Tango emerged during a time when, because of the demographics of the immigrant community in Argentina, men hugely outnumbered women. Tango dance was one of the only socially accepted ways for men and women to meet each other and played a critical role in courtship. As such, far more important than being "right" or doing the dance "correctly" was the comfort and pleasure of your partner - this was at the forefront of the leaders' minds.

The tango embrace that has emerged from this era, infused with feminist values that call forth the same dedication from both leader and follower, is a gesture of unconditional acceptance of self and partner for a finite time period. As dancers learn to Tango it teaches us how to make that gesture and how to know and communicate when we cannot, following the rich and playful Argentine tradition of inviting, accepting and declining via eye contact.

Intertwined yet distinct roles

One aspect of tango that makes it terrifically rich is how intertwined the roles are. "Leading” and “following” are only poor translations from the original culture that do not capture the fullness of the partnered relationship that is proposed and required by tango.

A more complete way of thinking about the leader's role is: inviting, offering, allowing, containing, accompanying; a more complete way of thinking about the follower's role is: flowing, dancing, going along, accompanying, influencing.

A crucial dimension of leading is following the follower. And following is so active that without the follower’s decisiveness and power, the dance breaks down. (The metaphors we have today about what leading and following are suggest that these roles are separate. When people are operating from these role-cages, I notice weakish "followers" who move around timidly, doubtfully, as if they are slightly sick; I notice tense and stressed "leaders" who are rigidly terrified by their untrue belief that they are responsible for everything and need to control it all. That’s not a tango; that’s a reflection of confused minds.)

Feeling the social body

Tango's form was forged at a time when literally hundreds of couples - strangers and friends - would be moving through room at high speeds alternating with stillness, to new and electrifying music. For this to work and for all the bodies to be actually safe requires an extremely high level of awareness of the minds and bodies of the people around you. This is why adapting to and "dancing with" the other couples in the room - allowing others couples' movement choices to constrain and inspire what each couple does - became part of the essential techniques of tango improvisation. Practicing this calls forth a kind of precise felt awareness of the collective body that is extremely rare to discover.

A co-creative community that cultivates decentralized leadership

Because transcendent tango experiences are more accessible the more you know and the more people who know you, and because big dance parties are a highlight of the experience, there is a strong incentive to get involved co-creatively in the community and to donate creative energy and resources to making it happen. Fostering a tango community requires lots of different kinds of effort and many different people contributing their energy. This fuels the growth of leadership skills and individuation.

The 22 techniques of tango

Becoming a mature tango dancer means you can create connectedness in a variety of contexts, working skillfully within yourself, your partnerships, and communities. Each of these zones requires the development of a variety of a yin techniques and yang techniques, and requires a cultivation of a connection with spirit through silence.

Here is an outline of the techniques of tango:

	Leadership - Yang
IMAGINE!	Figures	Envision and create new Tango movements, movement combinations and ways of connecting.
SCULPT!	Tone	Use the embrace to gently form your partner's response into something that coheres with the evolving creative vision.
INVITE!	Leader's Invitation	Invite another body to move toward a certain place at a certain time.
	Followership - Yang
Choose Your Distance	Proximity	Choose the distance between bodies that supports your and your partner's needs.
Choose Directness	Frontality	Keep your partner in front of you and yourself in front of your partner.
Choose Power	Follower's Power	Move with decisiveness and commitment when there is no alternative but to move.
	Soloing - Yang
Change Your Direction	The Pivot Before the Step	Pivot to change your body's direction whenever and however much needed to support the moment.
Manage Your Time	Rhythms	Match musical rhythms with physical movements.
Extend Sensibly	Extension	Stretch your leg then commit weight.
Align Your Self	Alignment	Stand and move while keeping your spine comfortably organized.
	Spirit - Yin and Yang
-stillness-	Stillness/Lovingkindness	Let it be, let it go.
	Soloing - Yin
Feel your foundation	The Whole Foot	Sensing all the richness of detail between your lower body and the floor.
Open to extremes	Spiral	Allowing for both spines' spirals to express themselves fully.
Embrace the cycles	Phrasing	Noticing when and how musical thoughts end and how the body wants to inhabit that.
Allow the flow	Flow	Tuning into the flowing that the music kindles in you and allowing it space.
	Followership - Yin
focus	Purity of Focus	Devoting your full attention to your partner instead of glancing around or thinking about things.
listen	Listening	Listening to your partner's contributions and allowing them in.
sense	Quality of Touch	Touching your partner in a way that holds discovery, newness and care in each moment.
match	Matching	Matching with sincerity the mood, rhythm, and quality of movement your partner offers.
	Leadership - Yin
follow the follower	Follow the Follower	Noticing how your partner responds to your invitations and incorporating this feedback into what's next.
follow the community	Follow the Ronda	Noticing the other couples in the room and moving in a way that makes it easy for them to cultivate their partnership.
follow the spirit of the times	Follow the Festival	Taking in the mood, pace, and possibilities of the whole event and working humbly and constructively within it to create a world where all needs are met.

What’s next?

There is much to explore as we seek to anchor these qualities and practices in our changing world. This framework is the introduction to an emerging piece on co-creation titled Why Argentine tango? Four centers of feeling and twenty-two threads of transformation. If you’d like to access new material as it becomes available, please let me know and I will update you.

If you are new to Argentine tango and curious to experience the qualities you’ve read about here, I invite you to explore foundations courses that can be done individually at home, or at home with a loved one.

If you are a tango practitioner eager to deepen your exploration of Argentine tango as a vehicle for personal and social change, please connect with the work of tango change-makers at Awaken Tango.

Change the world, one morning at a time

Even in these times, the sun rises every morning. What if we all used these special morning moments to bring to life the world we long for?

A morning ritual isn’t just essential self care. It is that, and so much more. Having a really well-structured morning ritual helps you feel whole, peaceful and inspired, and brings these powerful qualities into the rest of your day and all your relationships.

Why are mornings special?

I believe we all know on some level, intuitively, that mornings have a special power. Mornings function differently from other parts of the day. For instance:

It’s easier to be solitary in the morning and reflect inwards
Mornings are quiet, making it easier to connect with your intuition
Mornings are more likely to be in your control than other parts of the day
While you sleep, you take a break from technology, and you can extend this into your morning
What you do in the morning can set the tone for the rest of your day
Morning light has a special beauty that can help you feel very present

I’ve had a very structured morning ritual for a few years now, including coffee, walking, reading, writing. Last year, speaking with my friend Natascha, who told me about the Miracle Morning approach, I adapted it to include a quick workout. It’s been amazing to experience how doing even a 7-minute workout (this one is my favorite) has such a powerful effect on my morning.

The components of a complete morning ritual

I tinkered with my morning ritual for a long time and discovered that for me, a complete ritual actually has a pretty clear structure. I’m not here to prescribe my exact morning ritual to you, but I believe that a well-formed morning ritual will have three parts:

Part 1 — Movement: Start with a challenging movement activity. For me, the first movement is always exactly the same (squats!), and I always do it immediately after waking up (in pajamas!) It works best if you set out every little thing you need for it in advance.
Part 2 — Inspiration: The middle part of the ritual includes your choices of activities that inspire you. For me, this includes activities that enliven my senses, nourish my spirit, and connect me with inspiring ideas.
Part 3 — Connect with someone: The final stroke of the program involves connecting with a person. This could be writing a letter or a text message, sending an email or video or voice memo. It’s so beautiful to connect with someone from the inspired place you’ve reached through your ritual.

Your morning ritual template (40 minutes)
Part 1: Movement (7 minutes)	Part 2: Senses, spirit, ideas (25 minutes)			Part 3: Connect (8 minutes)
Movement	Prime your senses: Connect with your sensuality and the Earth	Prime your spirit: Connect with the sacred	Prime your ideas: Connect with creativity and imagination	Human connection
7-minute workout 3 sun salutations jump rope 200x run around the block	coffee listen to a song you love shower dry brush free-dance to a song you love enjoy a piece of fruit or berries go for a walk spend 5 minutes in your garden/yard	listen to 1 piece of sacred music read 1 sacred poem or text connect with spirit verbally: through prayer, affirmation, gratitude lovingkindness divination (I Ching, Tarot, astrology, etc.) seated meditation - breath, mantra finger labyrinth	read 1-2 pages of a challenging book duolingo language lesson or similar 3-minute challenge free-draw coloring book/coloring plates free-write	quick note to someone you intuitively think of reply to an email send a thank you/gratitude note to someone who's enriched your life write 2 letters to low-propensity voters

A few tips for success:

It will probably take a few months of experimenting and refining until you settle on your perfect ritual, and even then it may change over time.
The goal is to design a whole program that can easily be done before anyone else needs your attention. Easily.
Don’t look at news or any websites, scanning social media in any way, or read correspondence from others including direct messages.
Think of your ritual as beginning before you go to bed. Put out all your supplies (e.g., yoga mat, meditation cushion, clothes).

Deepen your morning attunement with a piece of music

Listening mindfully to music that carries the energy of love has become a powerful 3-minute segment of my morning ritual. I’ve found that the inspirational quality of music really comes alive when I focus fully on it.

Traditional, classic tango music created in the 1940s and 1950s has an extraordinary potency for me. As my friend Carmen discovered when she added it to her morning ritual, “it feels like my heart chakra is responding.” I was so struck that someone who was totally new to tango could directly sense the power of this music to connect us with the force of love.

But, it makes sense. Argentine Tango music comes from a very deep place of heartfelt connection, weaving together masculine and feminine, dancer and musician, black and white, old and new, youth and elder, in a powerful, expansive, deeply interconnected community experience. Listening — just listening — to one beautiful tango each morning brings me into direct contact with the wellspring of love I want to bring to the world.

You may find attuning to the quality of love and sensuality through tango music to enliven your mornings too. Or, you may prefer a gorgeous piece of jazz, classical music, or anything you find deeply inspiring.

I hope this gives you the motivation and the practical tools to design a magnetic and luxurious morning ritual that you’ll love to do every day. We all depend on it.

If you have found specific elements that form an essential part of your morning ritual, please share them below!

If you’d like to experiment with a ritual that weaves elements of Argentine tango into your morning — and the rest of your week — in a structured way, please consider joining my new course It Takes One To Tango.

Blog

A path for UX professionals to better serve this marginalized population

Top principles product teams must ingrain for youth tech UX

A call to action: What product teams must do

Here are four things you can do today:

The meaning of this special family collaboration

What made me want to do this

What the oven gave me

Dreaming forward

How labyrinths connect us across generations, and how to create your own Family Labyrinth Day

Kinds of labyrinths

Labyrinths and the young

Labyrinths and the whole family

Here's how to go about a Family Labyrinth Day activity

1. Plan it.

2. Build it.

3. Walk it.

4. Erase it.

What is it like to think new thoughts?

Three practices that make way for new thoughts

Divination

Rituals

Randomness

Here we are, at the beginning. We’re getting ready to start. It’s beginning.

What you can do to begin again, now

The core idea: work together on a drawing

Taking it to the next level: drawing on a real piece of paper

The nitty gritty details of the Zoom tabletop tripod method

Prepare yourself and the family

Right before the meeting

You’re ready!

Where could this go? The sky's the limit!

Two metaphors for learning create two different realities

The tour-bus metaphor

The labyrinth metaphor

What’s Next

Our culture’s illusions about the purpose of learning

How our learning spirit connects us with our life purpose

How can I support my child’s relationship with her or his learning spirit?

Look at your child’s face before you interact with them

Avoid doing this when your child is in a flow state

Things that can support your child’s flow state

A note about passive digital entertainment

Flow-creating activities for your child

How tango provides a practice ground for connection skills the world needs

Introduction

We, the improvisers

Improvising means feeling

Four centers of feeling

The limits of our education system

A new framework for learning to feel

A summary of skills of each area

From thinking to knowing

Improvised forms provide motivating domains for exploring the framework of connection

The power of metaphors

Argentine tango as a practice ground

The 22 techniques of tango﻿

What’s next?

Why are mornings special?

The components of a complete morning ritual

Deepen your morning attunement with a piece of music

The 22 techniques of tango