Dancing with the World

A trilogy on coherence, rupture, and living from presence

Part I: Dancing While the World Burns

Reflections from the edge of well-being

Last week, I attended the Hearth Summit in Ljubljana, a gathering of changemakers, artists, therapists, entrepreneurs, and visionaries. People with strong hearts and soft eyes.

People creating real change in the world.

We gathered for well-being. There were rituals, sound healing sessions, moments of stillness and celebration. There were influential and wonderful keynote speakers, there was music and dancing, sit-down dinners in beautiful spaces, where we shared four courses over guided questions, memories, stories of food as care, reflections on how we nourish ourselves and each other.

It was nice. It was meaningful. However... while we gathered, the world outside cracked louder.

Rockets fell in Gaza. Sirens howled in Ukraine. Entire families were buried in rubble. In other places, less visible, less urgent, children died of preventable disease, while their mothers stood in dry fields and prayed for rain.

And inside the halls of wellness, I heard the speakers and artists were asked not to mention it. Organizers had asked speakers to leave politics out of the conference, to take a neutral stance. Not out of malice, but to protect the container. And I understand that. Naming collapse too directly can damage a space meant for healing.

But not naming it, not feeling it, added a strange weight to the room. A kind of tension behind the smiles. Something was missing. Or perhaps: something was present, unspoken.

Until someone spoke.

A woman stood up, for Palestinians, a rabbi, one of the first female rabbis in her tradition, and said:

"Not in my name. War is not kosher."

She broke the frame. Not with blame, but with clarity.

And suddenly, the silence cracked. Others began to speak. Carefully. Uncomfortably. The field shifted. It wasn’t tidy anymore.

Some felt relief. Others, for example a sweet Israeli member of my peer group, did not know how to feel, being against war, but being Jewish. The room grew heavier. More cautious. The warmth changed texture.

It wasn’t that someone said the wrong thing. It was that someone said the real thing.

I’ve seen this before, in my work and in myself. The moment when well-being becomes a kind of soft resistance. Not to the world, but to the full truth of what is. It’s not wrong. It’s human.

We long to feel better. To feel safe. But sometimes, in that longing, we step just slightly away from presence. We create beautiful rituals not to meet life, but to buffer ourselves from it.

For me, well-being is not the absence of pain or stress or uncertainty. It’s the absence of suffering in being. My previous article describes my thoughts about this, please read it if you haven't yet.

Suffering arises when we resist the present moment, when we wish to be elsewhere, more evolved, more happy, more light-filled.

But the cost of resistance is intimacy.

We lose contact with the real. To be well, is not to feel good. It’s to remain open and present, even in the face of discomfort.

And that’s what made this aspect of the Hearth Summit difficult, and real.

It showed me, again, how easy it is for harmony to become performance. For presence to become managed. For longing to become a kind of trance.

Still, I’m grateful I was there. Grateful for the people I met, for the beauty and the brilliance I witnessed, and even for the discomfort that followed me at times.

Because that discomfort asked something of me.

Perhaps part of our work now — as healers, facilitators, makers of change — is to ask harder questions about our own movements. To wonder, quietly, when the medicine becomes a mask.

What are we protecting, when we protect the field from (the pain of) disruption?

What are we preserving, when we silence suffering?

And what is presence, if it cannot hold the ache of the world? Can we be well while the world breaks?

Can we hold joy and grief together, without splitting from either?

Can we make art at the edge of war?

In the next reflection, I want to explore this further, how coherence forms, how it protects itself, and how we begin to recognize the invisible gravity of collective moods.

But for now, I’ll leave you here, between silent concerts and sirens. Between mindful art making… and the world we left outside the door.

What lives in that space?

Part II: The Invisible Logic of the Pendulum

On collective fields, rupture, and staying awake

In certain spaces, a shared atmosphere begins to shape. Not through rules or agreements, but through an unspoken message, shaping what feels welcome to express, and what quietly stays outside the conversation. We begin to synchronize, emotionally and physically. We mirror the group’s coherence. And if that coherence is strong, it becomes almost magnetic.

It’s the tone we adopt when we want to belong. The filter we apply before we speak. The way we glance at the group before naming the thing that might not land well.

At the Hearth Summit, that rhythm was gentle. Thoughtful. Open-hearted. And also, quietly self-reinforcing. The summit was deeply sincere. It wasn’t performative. The people who came were changemakers in the truest sense. But sincerity doesn’t make us immune to the dynamics of coherence.

At some point, protecting the container from rupture began to look a lot like protecting ourselves from discomfort.

This isn’t just a summit problem. It’s a human one. We want our sacred spaces to stay intact. We want transformation to feel good. But sometimes, the deepest transformation begins where coherence breaks.

We long to hold space for everything, but when “everything” shows up, we rather choose avoidance, to stay silent.

The discrepancy I felt wasn’t about what was present. It was about what couldn’t be named without shifting the mood of the room. And that, I think, is where the risk lies. This is where discernment gets blurry. When everyone around us is listening together, dancing together, laughing and crying together, a sense of unity arises. It feels sacred. And in many ways, it is. But that unity can also be seductive. It can keep us from noticing what we’ve left outside.

Because when coherence becomes more important than contradiction, truth starts to bend. And presence becomes something we curate instead of something we live.

We don’t do this consciously. That’s what makes it hard to catch.

It happens in meditation groups and boardrooms. In activist circles and coaching spaces. We start out with clarity, with intention. But as the field forms, it begins to have a kind of gravity. We speak with a little more ease than we really feel. We soften edges that might stir up the atmosphere. We offer wisdom instead of doubt.

Not because we’re inauthentic, but because we care. Because we don’t want to damage something that feels good, or fragile.

But this too is a form of avoidance. A resistance wrapped in good intentions.

I’ve been sitting with this often: how do we know when we’re being moved from within… and when we’re being pulled by the momentum of something else, or only the mind?

In system thinking, we often speak about fields, invisible structures of emotion, expectation, and attention that shape how people act in a group. In some traditions, these fields are seen almost as having their own identity, their own consciousness: they move through us, drawing energy, amplifying patterns.

Vadim Zeland, the Russian thinker behind the model of Transurfing, uses the term pendulum for this kind of force, an energetic structure that feeds on identification and grows stronger the more people participate in it.

What struck me at the summit wasn’t the obvious energy of a pendulum. It was how gentle, even sacred, the field felt, and how easy it was to go along with it. It felt inspiring and I'm sure this was something the organisers intended.

Until that one voice, that rabbi, disrupted the pattern. Not with anger. With conscience.

And suddenly, we were somewhere else. No longer in the comfort of coherence, but in the truth of tension. In presence, rather than performance. This is what I mean by the invisible logic of the pendulum.

It’s not about good or bad. It’s about momentum. When a group field becomes self-reinforcing, it resists interruption, even when interruption is exactly what’s needed.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting every disruption is helpful. Or that group coherence is wrong. Sometimes, coherence is healing. But when it starts to police what may be spoken, when it prioritizes mood over truth, then even the most beautiful field becomes a trap.

One we build together.

And one we can also step out of, gently, bravely, by returning to our own inner centre. Can we feel when we’re being swept into something, even something beautiful, that pulls us away from full presence?

Can we stay open when the field wants to close?

And can we allow pain without needing to fix it, explain it, or resolve it?

This is the work. Not to be above the group field, but to remain awake inside it. To stay in touch with the moment, especially when it’s inconvenient. Especially when the heart sinks. Especially when someone stands up and says what no one else will say.

The rabbi didn’t destroy the container. She brought reality back into it.

That’s what staying awake looks like.

That return, that leaning into stillness, is what I want to explore next.

Because not all coherence is created equal. And not all disruption is collapse.

Sometimes, it’s the beginning of clarity.

Sometimes, it’s the way back to what's real.

Part III: The Descent to Presence

Moving beyond performance, toward the real

There’s a moment in every U-shaped journey where things stop making sense.

After the rupture, but before the integration, the bottom of the curve. The place where clarity hasn’t yet arrived, and the ground beneath feels uncertain. It’s the hardest place to stay. But if we rush past it, we miss something essential.

We miss the descent.

In systems thinking, this is known as the “letting go” phase. In spiritual traditions, it’s often called surrender. In my own work, I think of it as a soft distancing, from the identities and patterns that once gave us stability, but now keep us from being fully honest.

It’s here, in that stillness, that something more real can begin.

The Hearth Summit offered a glimpse of this descent. Not in the workshops or the keynotes, though those were powerful. But in the moments just after the coherence broke. When a voice cracked the container, and the room held its breath.

There was no collective breakthrough. No ecstatic unravelling. Just a shift. A pause. A subtle tension in the room. And conversations followed, in the break out moments, the meetings in the hallways and at the coffee corner. That’s what descent often looks like: not drama, but unease. Not a moment of release, but a moment of friction.

And yet, that’s the moment that matters most. If we can stay with it, without explaining it away or pushing toward resolution, something deeper opens.

We become available again. Not to the group field. Not to the role we were playing. But to the quiet intelligence beneath it all, the undercurrent.

For me, this is the heart of the work.

Whether I’m supporting someone through a moment of emotional contraction, or guiding a group toward coherence, what I care about most is:

Can we remain present, moment to moment, in the face of discomfort, without avoidance, without splitting from ourselves?

Because that’s what real well-being requires.

Not bypassing. Not soothing. Not transcendence.

But staying in touch with what is.

This is also where something like the Art of Spanda begins to make sense, not as a model, not as a method, but as an ongoing inquiry: How do we stay in resonance with life itself?

How do we respond from the deepest note within us, when the world around us is out of tune?

Spanda refers to the primordial vibration, the dynamic movement from stillness into expression, and back again. It’s not about fixing anything. It’s about meeting life with integrity. Moment to moment. Breath by breath.

And in that way, it becomes a kind of compass. Not to return us to harmony, but to help us meet dissonance without collapsing.

If there’s a path forward, I believe it begins here.

Not in the rituals we create, but in our willingness to remain awake inside them.

Not in numbing the pain, but in letting it move through us, unblocked.

Not in returning to what was, but in letting something new emerge through presence.

That’s the invitation.

To stay open, even when things fall apart.

To let our discomfort be part of the field.

To dance, even while the world burns.

And to listen, not for answers, but for the deeper rhythm beneath it all.

The one that’s always been there.

The one that begins again… when we’re finally quiet enough to hear it.