Repairing the ruptures: 2024 intentions
I considered 2023 the Year of the Phoenix: a time of intentional harvesting, composting, and transition. My headline for the year was “build with those who are ready,” an aspiration with three accompanying intentions (taking up the right amount of space; practicing acceptance; and surrender). For a recap of key themes, lessons, and my annual “best-of” list for favorite things that influenced my ongoing transformation in 2023, see here. I am proud to have made real progress on all three of my core intentions across the dimensions of I, We, and World that help me orient my life.
In 2023 this looked like:
- I: intentional inner work to better ground myself, a process I thought of as rooting myself more deeply in source and Earth — primarily through two facilitated psychedelic experiences and the ensuing focus on integrating lessons.
- We: deepening relationships and collaborations with kindred spirits, being increasingly choiceful about with whom I spend my time — at year-end, this includes prioritizing building with a new core team inside Building Belonging, and leaning into more co-creation with the Belonging @ Scale team.
- World: I played a lot with scale (primarily through the Belonging @ Scale initiative: our July convening in Medellín was definitely a highlight for me), and with Earth, thinking and feeling deeply about what is uniquely my work to do in the world. I’m closing the year with what feels to me like a powerful pivot to put more of my energy into the World.
I formed a new guiding declaration that will shape my energies in 2024 and beyond:
I am a commitment to repairing the ruptures of patriarchy — in myself, in my relationships, and in the world.
The intentions I’m framing below will shape how I work toward this commitment in 2024… though I suspect the declaration itself will last much longer (my last one guided me for three years).
Three intentions for 2024
I try to choose intentions that are fractal: that show up in multiple contexts in my life (as a husband, partner, parent, colleague, friend, etc.) While I am centering my professional aspirations and the work I am trying to advance in the world, in each case these also lend themselves to other relationships that are important to me.
I. Practice deep collaboration and mutual influencing.
I have felt this yearning my entire life, and have been moving toward this with intentionality since leaving the Gates Foundation back in 2016: a quest to find and do my best to embody the qualities of collective leadership that I think the world is asking for. I think I’m finally ready. Both because I finally feel sufficiently grounded in myself and my own vision, and because I’ve developed enough trust in my core partners to relax into the joy of experiencing their power and their visions… and how theirs can strengthen and improve mine. There are several steps here:
- Ground in my own vision.
- Seek out collaborations with kindred spirits: exercise discernment in the act of curation and partnership.
- Witness and hold space for the visions of my partners.
- Allow our visions to influence and push each other: this is the transformative creative potential of what Miki Kashtan calls “mutual influencing.”
- Take action… together. Taking turns leading, following, and moving together.
For 2024 I’ve chosen two primary homes for partnership (more on that below), so my work is primarily steps 3–5. But I’m always open to and seeking new collaborations, where I will endeavor to practice all five steps.
There is also something important here about power. I move through the world with a lot of power — most of it a function of my unearned socially constructed identities, some a function of my personality, my size, and the inner work I’ve done to better access my power-with. I’ve noticed people tend to respond to my power in one of four ways:
- They are threatened by my power. They see my expression of power as domination and can’t separate me from the systems they associate with people who look like me: patriarchy, white supremacy, colonialism. They react in opposition, trying to suppress my power. We might call this a fight response.
- They are overwhelmed by my power. They don’t know how to engage with me; this is a flight or freeze response.
- They are awed by my power. They put me on a pedestal and step eagerly into a follower role. This is a fawn/appease response.
- They are inspired by my power. They see and honor the gift I have, and better yet some in this category see the still-unrealized potential of what I could be but am not yet.
The first three responses leave my partners unable to access their power-within (their right relationship to their own power), and thus preclude any genuine possibility of what I yearn for, which is power-with. This year I am working hard to be better at discerning how people are reacting to me/my power. I will do my best both to partner with those in category four who are able to see my power and help me channel it effectively… and to take accountability for when I inevitably do lapse into power-over or the go-it-alone power that leaves people feeling disempowered.
And I will come up with distinct practices for what my work is when I encounter the other three patterns: because all four of these are possible inside of the same person depending on our specific context. I always aspire to power-with… which means I have to be the kind of person who supports people in accessing their power-within. In moments when our dynamic is preventing that… what is my work to do?
I aspire to be like the redwood: inspiring, not imposing. I want to be — and I want people to see in my size (literal and metaphorical) — an invitation for them to take up their rightful amount of space, not be cowed by how much space I take up.
II. Continued practice of slowness: allowing myself to feel.
I’ve moved at a rapid speed my entire life. And it’s genuinely difficult for me to discern how much of that is internalized supremacy culture, and how much is my natural appropriate way of being. I identify with the giraffe: we have long legs, and naturally move swiftly across the savannah.
But I’m intrigued by the medicine that awaits me when I slow down, and I’ve enjoyed the tastes I’ve had so far. I want more. There are a few dimensions here, mapping roughly to the I, We, World framework that helps orient my life.
I: I want to feel my feelings more, and be more open to feeling what is alive inside of me. In particular I have work to do around tolerating my own disappointment: to allow myself to mourn the loss — or elusiveness — of something I long for. To build my resilience so that I can keep doing what I know is mine to do: to move in the direction of my longings, following source. I don’t want my disappointment at not getting the full depth of connection that I long for… to prevent me from enjoying the connection that is present (hat-tip to Leela for this framing). This is part of my 2023 work to no longer engage in emotional averaging (see recap post here).
We: I want to slow down in my interpersonal interactions, to feel my partners… and to allow them to feel me. I talked about the four-step process I’m currently practicing around allowing my partners to feel how much they mean to me: to let them experience my vulnerability, and their influence/impact on me. This is also about being mindful about the context of our encounter: I’m less likely to forget that I am White, for example, if I am approaching interactions with slowness and care (as discussed in this year’s recap).
World: I want to create more space/time to feel the world. This was a core commitment emerging from my plant medicine journey: to be open and receptive to energies outside of me. To be permeable: to trust that I am strong enough to withstand what is flowing into me, and discerning enough to know when to disconnect (yes to letting myself feel Gaza; no to images of children suffering: honoring my capacity for how much pain I can tolerate without succumbing to overwhelm). This is about listening and connecting deeply to Source: this is only possible (at least for me) inside of carefully protected space and slowness. Earth time.
III. Discerning and distinguishing preferences from boundaries.
Ooh, this is deep and nuanced work. Over the last few years I’ve been in deep practice around getting in touch with my longings and my desires… and I’ve made great progress. But when it comes to my needs and my non-negotiables… I still struggle.
In response to someone else’s request/invitation, I feel very grounded and clear: I can get in touch with my desire, feel into my willingness, and clearly delineate the boundary of what Betty Martin calls my wheel of consent. I can offer a clear yes or no, and I can tolerate their disappointment.
But when it is me who is leading with the request/invitation… it’s much more difficult. I’m clear about my desire (synonymous here with a preference)… but it’s harder to identify the specific boundary. It’s harder to differentiate a need from a desire: a nice-to-have from a must-have. In talking this over with my wife last night I think it comes down to two things: I have to tolerate my own disappointment at potentially not getting what I long for (see above); and I then have to enforce the boundary… and tolerate the consequences. This is deep work for me: I’ve tended to take the easier path out and hope my partner does the work. If they accept my request/invitation, I don’t have to answer for myself the question of where my boundary lies, or how I might enforce it.
I value being open to influence: it’s core to healthy relationships (and particularly for men, following the Gottmans’ work) and core to my first intention around collaboration. But there are some areas where I am simply not open: hard boundaries. I owe it to myself and my partners to name what those things are, and to be honest — with myself and them — about what I will do in the event they are unable or unwilling to meet my request.
Containers for transformation
As always, my primary domains of practice are in those relationships that are most important to me: in my home as a husband and parent; in my close relationships, friendships, and family; in my professional collaborations. One of the reasons I name and publish these intentions is to invite accountability and support from those with whom I am in relationship.
I. Building Belonging and Belonging @ Scale.
My primary professional collaboration this year is with a new core team in Building Belonging, with three people for whom I have deep respect: Christina Antonakos-Wallace, Leonie Smith, and Kazu Haga. I’m excited to learn and deepen with each of them, and as a collective. I’m also excited for Belonging @ Scale 2.0: we are hoping to host our second convening in late July (between EU and US elections), and I’m looking forward to co-creation around what that experience looks like.
I’m also planning to co-curate a convening at the intersection of gender and authoritarianism, specifically taking up the question of how we cultivate post-supremacist identities (an intention I first named two years ago, and now finally feel ready to take on). If we understand whiteness and the gendered construct of manhood to be created for the purpose of enshrining power-over (and therefore requiring the creation of an “other”)… to move from domination to partnership requires either reconceiving — or in my view, transcending — those domination-based identities.
II. Well-curated and facilitated multi-racial/gender space.
Another lifelong aspiration with limited actual experience. It occurred to me this year how few examples there are — even in my highly-curated life — of the types of professional partnerships I seek: white men sharing power with women of color (as a proxy for what I really want: diverse partnerships across lines of difference, to include race, gender, class, nationality, etc.).
In a review of those entities I consider kindred spirits to what I am trying to do with Building Belonging — organizations intentionally committed to building a world where everyone belongs, and doing so across lines of difference — I realized that very few are practicing this particular challenge. Instead, it feels like we so often strive for liberation and choose an easier path: either BIPOC-only groups, or white only, or women/femme-only, or in integrated contexts (meaning White and BIPOC) elevating one person into a position of structural power-over.
To be clear: I believe this is primarily a failing of white men (only a handful of the 20+ organizations/collectives I profile include white men in any meaningful capacity). We (white men) haven’t yet embraced liberation work in the deep way it requires; we don’t yet have the skills and capacities to effectively collaborate across difference without lapsing into socialized patterns of domination. And of course we can’t do it alone: it takes special patience / resilience for people with more marginalized identities to stay in relationship to white men in liberation work. And yet: it feels vitally important that we find a way. It’s the only kind of world I want to live in.
No doubt it’s hard. As a friend said recently when I lamented this situation: it’s boss-level dynamics (a reference to the boss character / highest difficulty level at the end of video games). And: damnit, I want to try. I would love more exposure to expert-level multi-racial/gender teams that are doing this work well: to learn from the white men in those spaces, and the women of color they partner with. If you know any formations / programs that do this particularly well… please let me know!
III. Eco-indigenous ways of knowing
I was excited this year to apply for the Positive Deviants fellowship hosted by the good folks at Wolf Willow Institute: an opportunity for land-based learning drawing deeply from indigenous wisdom. I was disappointed not to be able to make it happen, but remain intrigued by finding spaces to learn on and from the land… stewarded and guided by people indigenous to it. I’m not sure what specifically this will look like in 2024, or if I will have space… but I want to put it out there to learn more about similar offerings.
I’m also interested in exploring ayahuasca in a well-held communal container: I suspect some medicine lurks for me there, when the time is right.
Also: I might get a tattoo. My first ever. A joyful rainbow unicorn, of course.
I share these here as always to invite partnership where my intentions intersect with yours… and to invite accountability support from those with whom I am in relationship.
I also set specific erotic intentions for the first time this year; I won’t enumerate them here (there are limits to my courage/vulnerability/sense of privacy :-), but I really valued the practice of bringing more intentionality to that domain of my life as well, and it was interesting to me to see how they show up in the fractal intentions I’ve named above.
Wishing everyone a healthy and happy new year. May we be more grounded, more connected, and more oriented toward liberation and belonging in 2024.
In community,
Brian
