Touching the Universe

The sticky substance of being human and how I fell onto the edge of evolution.

Once my hands were in, I couldn’t take them out.

It was the late 80’s. My hair was big, my suits were red. I wore heels and spoke quickly, a little New York bleeding through.

One day the phone rang and I got an offer that at first I refused. But something nagged and within weeks I left my job, family, friends, all the familiar, to live and work on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia.

Back then, St. Lucia was just beginning to formulate the strategy and infrastructure that would eventually lead it to become a luxury travel destination. For me it was an earthy, raw, authentic place with chickens in the streets and the sound of school children singing hymns on the early morning breeze. At the market food was naked on tables. No plastic wrapping. Sometimes the roots still had earth clinging.

In my previous life, I had grown used to reading two newspapers, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, every morning. On this island, if I was very lucky, when the cruise ship came in on Tuesdays it might have a week-old paper from the states. I got my first taste of thinking global while listening to BBC radio as it dawned on me that my country was not the epicenter of the world for billions of people.

There was no internet. It took months to get a phone installed. To call family I stood in a long line awaiting my turn at a pay phone hoping someone would pick up the other end.

I learned to meditate.

Life slowed down in the heat. Most mornings my business partner and I would pull over at the edge of the jungle at a particular spot along a roadway to wait. Some mornings, after waiting an hour, we’d drive off. Other mornings the brush would shimmer and part as our carpenter emerged from the interior to hop into the car. Those were the days he worked. My red-suited business persona morphed into a tanned, pareo wrapped body as I sat with my feet propped on the sea wall, notebook on my lap, fully settled into my plein air workplace.

Just as suddenly as I had found myself in St. Lucia, I also suddenly returned home nine months later (a story for another post) quite unsure how to resume my life. One day I wandered into a bookstore to a bizarre sight: a man was slowly moving his hands about four inches above the fully clothed body of a woman lying atop a sheet on a massage table. She eventually arose astonished and revitalized. He spoke of Tibetan monks and body harmony and within days I had enrolled.

The first body I ever touched in that way — present, conscious, curious — felt like the first body I ever touched. I placed my hands above her and my fingertips drew me into an infinite universe. It was like reaching into a galaxy. I felt the stars pulsing and the endless inky darkness of her inner landscape. Or something . . . indescribable.

True touch never ends. It just settles itself into the ever more vast spaces between us. We are a species. What lies between us is an illusion that we define as empty because we’ve lost our ability to recognize the guide wires and ley lines that connect us to each other.

That day I realized I’m actually an infinitely expanding galaxy of possibility and everything looked different. Life burst with potential.

If only everyone could experience themselves this way — if we could all get a glimpse into who we really are and how interwoven all of humanity is, what an astonishing difference that could make. “This is about capacity,” something in my brain whispered.

Elisabet Sahtouris has described herself as someone who studies the past to be a better futurist. Others have described her as the brilliant evolution biologist who discovered that all living species experience a maturation cycle during which they either grow up or face their own extinction. Any guesses how humanity is doing with this?

According to Elisabet, we’ve still got a decent chance.

It seems that everything alive, from microscopic single cells to massive complex living systems, hits a period of existential crisis. No living thing makes it through this phase unless it learns and develops a series of attributes. These “Features of Healthy Living Systems” are well known to scientists and you can find them on Elisabet’s website. If an alive thing doesn’t learn to behave based on these features, it dies out as a species. That’s a pretty big downside.

The entrancing bit for me was that when a species does learn to behave based on these principles it doesn’t just survive, it begins to flourish and thrive.

By the time I began communicating with Elisabet about these principles, I had already developed a long-standing fascination for how business could become a force for positive change on the planet. I saw the emerging social enterprise movement as an early, erupting, intuitive wave of evolution. I believed if we could make these principles simple and easy to apply, business leaders would adopt them and greatly hasten our planetary transformation. I also could see that these skills built capacity, not just for evolution, but for business to thrive.

A decade of odd and internally driven compulsion for this work transformed the original 16 Features into 12 Skills —remarkably with Elisabet’s patient support and blessing. I often wondered how I fell into this work, but I also never wondered. It felt inevitable, indivisible from how my inner galaxy had been designed. Inescapable.

After many starts and stops, I finally felt ready — I’d launch in 2020. The prior year had put many things into place, and I decided to begin offering business consulting services based on applying The 12 Skills. I turned the new year with a plan to begin promoting in early spring.

By mid-March I knew everything had to change. Our collective urgent need for these skills was screaming at me. Pivot.

I asked my daughter to talk through the skills with me so I could rapidly turn them into human capacity building exercises. We made them even simpler and created the kind of deceptively short practices that make you think nothing’s going to happen. But I knew the secret of this process was to trust evolution. It’s already written in our DNA. We don’t really have anything to learn, we just have to remember. 

Once you put your hands in, you can’t take them out. When you remember the astonishing potency of your creative nature; or deeply touch another human being with your full fascination and presence turned on; or encounter, even for just an instant, that our lives are intimately interwoven and there is actually no way for you to extricate yourself from the woven threads that define our living being as humanity — once that happens, you can’t change back. You are transformed.

We are the edge of evolution. It’s not something that happens to us. It’s a moment-by-moment spiral unfolding of the universes we carry within. It’s the great and curious march of aliveness that, for millennia, has pulsed species into their next state of being. It’s diving into the limitless potential that living a deeply connected and caring life can conjure.

But I’ve gone all poetic and that’s not necessary. It’s just 12 simple skills.