A Regenerative Approach to Life
What farming has taught me about living, leading, and healing
Over the past couple of years, I have developed a fascination with regenerative agriculture.
It started as an intellectual curiosity, first inspired by Will Rolph’s work with Two Fields, a regenerative oil olive producer in Greece. In an early Yellow session he explored regenerative agriculture through the lens of the question: “What brings us alive?” In the years since, I have spent days and weeks at a time on farms throughout Sweden, getting my hands in the soil and getting rammed by rams (literally). I am doing what I can to get a first-hand picture of what it takes to help steward thriving ecosystems.
This might seem strange for someone who works with people as a coach and therapist. I’ll admit that I am as surprised as anyone else. But in my explorations so far, one thing has become clear: human development and ecosystem development are two sides of the same coin. Both are ultimately questions of aliveness.
Regenerative agriculture is a stance toward life. It’s an approach of working with an ecosystem that seeks to increase its vitality over time.
This is how I see my work with people, too. It’s about supporting people to increase their sense of aliveness. It’s about creating the conditions for people to come home to themselves and thereby be more of themselves in the world.
The more fully we are ourselves, the more fully we are alive.
Regenerative agriculture does not consist of prescriptive methods or practices. It’s an applied philosophy, where everything is contextual and nothing is set in stone.
If a practitioner helps to increase the vitality over time in their socio-and environmental ecosystem (referred to as their “holistic context”), then their work can be considered to be regenerative. If vitality decreases in their holistic context over time, it is degenerative.
Most conventional agricultural is firmly degenerative. You see this when driving on highways and passing bare and exposed fields. When farmland is stripped bare, photosynthesis will struggle, which means life will struggle. Practices like monoculture crops, extensive tilling, pesticide use, and the eradication of animal and plant diversity are often (but not always) sure ways to diminish the flourishing of life. These practices allow for short-term productivity gains, but lead to disastrous long-term consequences, including soil erosion, flooding risks, lack of carbon sequestering, biodiversity loss, and reductions in the nutritional density of our food.
When you try to separate, control, and dominate nature, you might be able to squeeze a few extra barrels and years out of the land, but eventually, it will give up. You cannot dominate your way into long-term thriving of an ecosystem.
The same is true of ourselves as human beings. When we try to control our wills into submission with judgement and pressure, we are doing long-term damage no matter how “productive” we might think we are in the moment. When we try to force ourselves to be something we are not, we are squeezing the life out of our very being.
Vitality and aliveness can seem like difficult words to define. But we know it when we see it, and we know it when we feel it.
When you feel alive, there’s a sense of expansiveness and connection. You have access to clarity and insight. There’s gratitude and excitement for what each moment brings. Choices feel obvious. Everything flows naturally. You feel aligned with yourself and with the movement of life.
On the flipside, experiences of lifelessness are just as easy to identify. There’s a sense of stuckness and inertia. Everything feels effortful. Resistance and obstruction dominate your experience. You feel depleted with no access to spark or joy. Choices feel impossible. Ideas are hard to come by. Everything feels frozen, hard, and forced.
We feel drawn to aliveness, whether we come across it in a person, a landscape, or a culture. In a vital landscape you can feel the richness of the environment affecting you. You feel connected and settled in your bones.
Unfortunately, many of us have grown up in cultures that are chronically lifeless. Dehumanizing work, excessive technology usage, and unnecessary bureaucracy are just a couple of ways in which lifelessness is institutionalized in our society.
This state of affairs might seem normal, but it is not the way things can or should be. Life does not want to be lifeless. Life wants to beget more life. Life is the process of becoming becoming, as Kevin Kelly says.
When we thwart the flow of life and try to control it into submission, we pay the price. Symptoms ranging from a sense of difficulty and stuckness to physical illnesses will emerge. When we go against the flow of life, the Nature of Things, what the Taoists call the Tao, we will suffer. One could even say that going against life is what suffering means.
As it says in the classic fourth-century mystic text Tao Te Ching:
Those who try to control…
go against the direction of the Tao.
…
When man interferes with the Tao,
the sky becomes filthy,
the earth becomes depleted,
the equilibrium crumbles,
creatures become extinct.
Our tendency to limit our aliveness is tragic yet understandable.
When we grow up in contexts that don’t allow us to be ourselves, we are forced to make a choice. Either we try in earnest to be ourselves and face exclusion and judgement, or we turn down the dial of our authentic expression in the hope of belonging to the group.
Most, if not all of us, choose the second option. We learn to keep our mouth shut to stay out of trouble. We learn to hold back our anger to keep the peace. We learn to suppress our own needs to not be annoying or demanding. We make the necessary yet heartbreaking tradeoff of giving up our aliveness in exchange for the safety and belonging we require.
Over decades, these strategies become crystallized in frozen patterns of behaviors, feelings, and thoughts. We tell ourselves it’s better to stay hidden in the shadows, and that we don’t deserve to be seen. We numb our emotions and bodies, reducing the amount of lived sensation we have to tolerate. We buckle down and “work hard” without ceasing, in the belief that the more we achieve, the more “goodness” we can accumulate, all in the hope of one day finally being accepted.
Clearly, this is a trap. No one can accept us in ways that truly matter other than ourselves. And “working hard” is a relationship with oneself defined by ceaseless pressure and judgement, under the trappings of capitalistic virtue. Exhaustion and alienation are the inevitable results. It’s the equivalent of plowing your fields to death in an effort to be more productive. There might be short-term gains, but in the long-term it spells ruin.
The remedy is not to force oneself to change nor to judge oneself as wrong. This would simply be a repetition of the prevailing patterns. Instead, regeneration is a path of gentle and compassionate inquiry. It includes recognizing all the ways in which we obstruct our aliveness, and then feeling the inevitable pain of living under such conditions. It’s a process of making the unconscious conscious, and noticing how we put a lid on our spontaneous expression. It’s about listening to the body, heart, and soul and letting our inner voices speak.
By listening deeply, without trying to change anything, regenerative change organically unfolds.
The main focus of regenerative farmers is to increase soil health. They see crops and meat not as the primary output of their operations, but as beneficial byproducts. The focus is on cultivating the conditions for life; productive output takes secondary fiddle. But luckily, in so doing, productive output will typically be greater than could be imagined beforehand. You do what you can to remove obstacles, then you step back and allow the intelligence of life to unfold.
There is an opportunity here for leaders to work in the same way and become conduits of increased vitality in their organizations. By meeting and transforming their own lifelessness, they can set examples for others to follow. They can help their teams to become curious about any stuckness they notice in themselves or the team, and then use those fragmented places as opportunities for expansion of life. They can show what the true hard work of mastery looks like by demonstrating dedication to their craft without compromising the needs of themselves or others. By focusing on creating the conditions for life to thrive, they can achieve more by shifting their attention to the “soil health” of the organization rather than its productive output.
Just as a regenerative farmer will likely adhere to the adage “Don’t disturb the soil”, a regenerative leader will likely say “Don’t disturb the people.” This is not a blind and laissez-faire abandonment of responsibility. It's a stance of maintaining continuity of contact with their holistic context without unnecessary intervention.
As the Tao Te Ching asks:
Can you love people and lead them
without imposing your will?
Can you deal with the most vital matters
by letting events take their course?
Can you step back from your own mind
and thus understand all things?
Giving birth and nourishing,
having without possessing,
acting with no expectations,
leading and not trying to control:
this is the supreme virtue.
…
The Tao nourishes by not forcing.
By not dominating, the Master leads.
Biologically, increased vitality and aliveness is what it means to be more healthy and productive.
Psychologically, increased vitality and aliveness is what it means to experience well-being and flourishing.
The same is true in so-called spiritual matters.
Spiritually, increased vitality and aliveness is what it means to be spiritually aligned and connected.
The more we are alive, the more we are aligned with that which religious traditions have referred to as God or the Divine. As the second-century St. Irenaeus of Lyon said: “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.”
The path to the Divine is inward, and the more integrated we can become with ourselves and our own aliveness, the closer we experience the sacred nature of Being. “When you're together with yourself,” says the modern mystic Brother David Steindl-Rast, “you are together with that which people have traditionally called God. ... God is that with whom or with which we are together when we are together. When we find our heart, that is where we are, together."
From whichever dimension we look at it, creating the conditions for life to thrive is a universal longing and a powerful force. Unleashing that power requires us to allow the depths of our heart to be heard. Getting in touch with our deepest humanity is what allows us to feel more connected with our greatest possibility.
When we are in harmony with ourselves, we are in harmony with the Tao:
In harmony with the Tao,
the sky is clear and spacious,
the earth is solid and full,
all creatures flourish together,
content with the way they are,
endlessly repeating themselves,
endlessly renewed.
Life wants to renew. Life wants to regenerate. Living in harmony with life, with the Tao, is how we play our part in a regenerative symphony that is desperate to burst through the seams, always knocking at our door.
When we are fully ourselves, we are simultaneously, and quite magically, allowing everything we encounter to be more of itself, too. Allowing ourselves to be fully alive is an energetic invitation, a granting of implicit permission to everything we meet to do the same in kind.
By nourishing our own soil, we become a walking fertilizer in the world. With intention and grace, life comes back to life – a process to which the only appropriate response is to stand back in wonder and awe.
We tend to the soil, watch life unfold, and bow.
Well, my gosh. What a beautiful listen. And then read. And then listen again. I see you Alex. I hear you life. All of life should know this. And of course, almost all of it does. It is us humans who are the only ones who have come to believe ,in our minds, that we are apart from the naturally, beautifully, endlessly generative life we are of. Thankfully our hearts and bodies have not forgotten. Thank-you for speaking this my friend.