Our Deep Democracy Institute is co-learning with communities in Africa, South East Asia, the Middle East, Europe, Russia, Ukraine, and the United States for the past 15 years. Each of these communities has their own distinct view of what life is, what is important and what is challenging, and what kind of change they want, how learning and  teaching can happen, what aspect of coaching and inner work can bring joy and wholeness, etc. In our learning process over the years, for me personally the most challenging aspect – apart from my own rigidity and the well known continuing unawareness of a slew of biases that plague people like me raised in straight, yt cultures, was how to get along with radically diverse views of each community of what constitutes marginalization, what is the role of power, and how do we deal with the challenges that come with that.

 

A few years ago I did find a lot of help for my inner struggles and outer paralysis around this through the Pluriverse approach and friends in their large network. The Pluriverse approach is not an alternative or competing concept to Deep Democracy, but rather a network and theoretical discussion how various decolonization processes and initiatives can support and enhance each other, even if one of them might seems contradicting the other. The Pluriverse approach was developed/is being developed by a loose network of activists, thinkers and practitioners from very different backgrounds focused on various decolonization processes across diverse cultures and communities.

I hope to give a 15 minute introduction with my understanding of some core elements of the approach and maybe 1 or 2 examples of our struggles and learning and how it helped me in on my learning path and work,  but then the main focus is to have an open discussion where we can learn from each other through exchanging our diverse experiences of the trials and tribulations of theory and practice and community life for Process Work, in my mind, an awareness based liberation and regeneration paradigm, for the individual as well as for the community they live in.