What is Organic Intelligence®?
“Organic Intelligence® is a Compassion Enterprise. It is both a teaching and a practice whose aim is to provide access to powerful tools for directly and potently engaging with the needs of all living beings. Tools that establish compassion, reduce stress, and resolve trauma.”
Steve Hoskinson, founder of Organic Intelligence®
("Flocking Starlings: Beautiful Phenomenon of Murmuration" video shared with permission from Channelling Nature)
OI and Complexity Science
OI’s approach to systemic change draws from the principles of complexity science which considers the underlying conditions and networks of interactions that allow for Emergence – new order, new forms of behavior and stability – in a complex system.
We see examples of biological Emergence or Self-organization (auto-organization) in the murmuration of starlings soaring and weaving in synchrony at dusk, or the knowing of ant colonies to link their bodies to create a living bridge across a gap in their path.
There is no leader or outside force commanding these spontaneous formations which materialize in the midst of flux and seemingly chaotic behavior.
Rather, creativity and order emerge through the interrelationships of individual parts working IN SYNC within the whole.
OI coaching attunes to your physiology's unique path of emergence and eases the way for arising biological synchrony: states of being that are organizing, empowering, integrative, and enlivening.
Our physiology is an ecosystem of systems: neurobiological, respiratory, digestive, circulatory, to name a few.
Chronic stress and trauma can burden these networks with patterns of intensity that challenge and limit their processing ability: things may feel stagnant (too slow, can’t start) and/or like a churning hamster wheel (too fast, can’t stop).
These biological factors massively impact our daily experiences, thoughts, emotions, and sensory awareness in ways that can leave us feeling out of sync, overwhelmed and disconnected, from ourselves and from others.
To reconnect with the body’s native rhythms of doing and being, OI coaching supports the nervous system’s information processing at the level of its organic threshold so that acceleration (work, taking in) feels good, and deceleration (rest, letting go) feels good too.
As the physiology rests and rebalances, the system grows new resilience to meet life's complexity with increasing stamina and ease.
The ongoing partnership of expansion and conservation, stability and evolution, work and rest, taking in and giving out, are biological oscillations that promote sustainable, regenerative vitality.
OI and The Free Association Conversation
One of the hallmarks of an Organic Intelligence session is the free association conversation. Yes, post-trauma growth can happen, does happen, through natural human conversation.
Whatever theme and circumstance that's alive for you, whether it's a blip of ease, space, wonder or goodness in the midst of larger badness, suffering, and transition, it all has a place in the free association, because -- supported by OI coaching -- conversational content is a vehicle for the deeper metabolic process in the physiology.
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All of us tend to have habits of attention, neural grooves keeping us pinned to stories that prolong biological feedback loops of negative meaning-making, images, feelings, and adverse physical sensations. The internal interactions are self-reinforcing intensity patterns we might experience as "stuckness" (an undesired kind of stability).
The free association conversation is vital to the post-trauma growth process because it makes room for the familiarity of what matters to us, AND also invites spontaneity to follow our interest toward something beyond what's wrong or needs fixing -- something different, neutral, or pleasant and outside of our usual mental manufacturing.
It gives opportunity for curiosity and Orientation, the OI practice of connecting to the environment through our senses. This widening of awareness opens us to receive support from the here and now and makes way for gentle settling of our bodies. OI coaching builds on the organic resources of the present moment and our physiology so that intensity and trauma content can be processed safely.
OI and Orientation
Birdsong outside the window, the scent of an orange, a taste of tea or coffee, the seat under our tush, green leaves on a nearby plant – elements like these around might tickle our sensory interest. That ordinary, simple pleasure has value. It lets us be touched, however fleeting at first, by a sense of ease or neutrality, spaciousness, perhaps even joy.
Supported by OI coaching, Orientation (and orientation to what is pleasing and not too intense) over time provides impressions on our felt sense that safety, enjoyment, compassion are possible and available in the present moment, wherever we may find ourselves.
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Orientation and Orientation to Pleasure are the initial conditions that form new attractors for our attention and make way for the emergence of thoughts, feelings, imaginings, and sensations which are nourishing, self-supportive, empowering, and integrative.
OI coaching supports these states of safety, spaciousness, connection, and auto-organization so that post-trauma growth develops gently, naturally, from the synchrony of psyche and soma, mind and body.
The natural unfolding of a living system, in attuned response to the external environment in the here and now, is the aim and process of Organic Intelligence® coaching.