If we wanted to create a group or a collective holding a diversity of beings, human and more-than-human, who organise themselves in line with an ecocentric worldview, then concretely, how would we put that into practice? This is a somewhat naive – but also tangible – way to frame the World Ethic Forum’s mission: inquire into the preconditions for a culture of radically shared aliveness, that gives rise to a culture of care and kinship.
This inquiry is driven by a firm aspiration to enable, curate and inhabit spaces of radically shared aliveness, and by a realistic acknowledgement that such spaces require a particular way of being together, a particular form of attention, presence, and embodiment. We see them as being different from the current default mode of collaborating and working across a diversity of stakeholders, including organisations and networks missioned with social and environmental care, where efficiency tends to crowd out presence, and output tends to crowd out the quality of relationships. In short: it requires tending to the HOW we gather, meet and act together.
The World Ethic Forum is engaged in a seven-year initial inquiry because we acknowledge that we – collectively – do not have lived experiences of those preconditions, nor how we might align across our diversity. We do have a general sense that they involve heightened presence and extended precision, a quality of attention that is wider and slower than we are typically conditioned by or trained for. So, we are looking to better understand, feel, and name what those preconditions are by engaging in practice together, staying in the not-knowing together, and tending to questions that bring us out of our individual comfort and bias zones.
As a way to anchor our reflective process, we started with a distinction between two related things: collective practices – things we do together – and collective capacities – the embodied ability to do things together. Of course, the connection between them is close and they depend on each other. What we cultivate informs what we can do, and vice versa. So, let’s go through them in turn.
Collective Practices
We understand ‘Collective Practices’ as embodied approaches that deepen our understanding through applied actions, foster the ‘how’ – our individual and collective attitude when we engage in doing – and enhance the ways we relate to ourselves, each other and the broader context (Ritter, Gyger, Sägesser, 2025). They include Social Practices (Klitkou et al., 2022), i.e. relational elements and habitual ways of repeatedly doing things in groups. Co-creating social practices that refine and expand awareness, openness, and inclusion is at the centre of our focus.
In order to collectively address and help shift deeply rooted issues, it is critical to explore how a diverse group of practitioners can be in practice together. This with the focus to expand, over time, our wider ways of knowing, so that we can better navigate uncharted territory, collectively, with care and compassion.
To be with high levels of complexity and to cultivate what we call a culture of care and kinship, practices are required that integrate diverse voices, perspectives and capacities to address challenges and underlying implicit (power) dynamics (Ritter, Gyger, Sägesser, 2023). To that end, we identified six main fields of collective practice:
- Grief: dealing with death, wounds, or suffering, and metabolising difficult emotions.
- Perspective: exploring a situation from different angles, shifting perspectives and seeing the world as others see it.
- Unlearning: transcending biases, hidden assumptions and root causes, often through wider ways of knowing and shedding light on subtle structural dynamics.
- Presence: staying with oneself and others through turbulence and uncertainty, while bearing tensions.
- Celebration: experiencing radically shared aliveness with joy, care and awe.
- Connection: cultivating a sense of inter- and intraconnectedness, anchored in a felt sense of interdependence, with other practitioners and the more-than-human.
At a more granular level, those are the practices we specifically cultivated at our 2025 gathering together – naming the related field(s) from the list above between parentheses:
- Ritual as Inquiry: Using ceremony to grieve and deal collectively with difficult emotions (A).
- Listening Beyond the Human: Expanding the scope of attention to include land, elements, and more-than-human beings (dragonflies, storks, hedgehogs, hazel bushes, wasps, …) (B, F).
- Improv theatre: improvising as a method to surface hidden assumptions, potential and collective sense-making (B)
- Tending the Fire: Practising care, intentionality, and reciprocity as a form of relational stewardship (D, F).
- Distributed Presence: Exploring how shared aliveness can travel through digital space, sustaining the collective field (D).
- Holding the In-Between: “Staying present with” in liminal states, ambiguity, and emergence without rushing to resolution (D).
- Coholding Emotion and Silence: Allowing the full spectrum of human experience to be witnessed in community (D).
- Reciprocity in Care: Recognising that tending and being tended are interdependent gestures of kinship (E, F).
Collective Capacities
We understand collective capacities as the inherent ability to perceive, feel, and interact with the world, encompassing both tangible and subtle aspects (Ritter, Gyger, Sägesser, 2025).
Capacities are developed and evolve over time through individual and collective experiences, enabling individuals and groups to deepen relationships and respond accurately and sensitively to specific situations. Collective capacities function as an interconnected ecosystem of abilities, where each capacity has the potential to adapt, build upon, and reinforce others, facilitating shared evolution through shared experiences.
Capacities serve as an essential component in advancing collective processes, enabling us to navigate complex dynamics, embrace diverse perspectives, and actively contribute to transformative change work to foster a culture of care and kinship. In particular, collective capacities enable us to embrace diverse perspectives, allowing us to experience specific situations from multiple viewpoints and draw upon diverse ways of knowing.
At a more granular level, those are the capacities we are cultivating together, and which have surfaced in 2024 & 2025:
Capacity as ‘skills’ to do things that support the group in coming together respectfully:
- Understanding of and capacity to hold rituals
- Non-violent communication
- Cultivating respect for the differences in the room
Capacity as forms of ‘self-regulation’ or ‘capacity to hold tension and ambiguity’:
- Capacity to hold contradictions, tensions or paradox
- Holding grief, joy, and paradox simultaneously
- Staying in the in liminal space, embracing awkward moments
Capacity as ‘perceptiveness’, ‘attunement’, or capacity to hear what is in the field:
- Embodied awareness
- Capacity to be moved (emotionally, intellectually, spiritually) by what is encountered.
- Showing up fully with everything we are and letting ourselves be moved
- Attunement to the living field and its invitations
- deep listening into the collective field (e.g. what wants to happen vs. what we think should happen)
- Deep listening and sensing across thresholds (human and more-than-human)
Capacity as ‘orientation’ or ‘willingness to go’ towards inquiry:
- Courage and bravery
- A willingness to inquire and let things come
- Courage to witness and stay with discomfort
- being in inquiry
Capacity as a form of ‘energetic control’ or ‘capacity for calm’:
- embracing silence & being in awe
- slowing down shift from reaction to response
- stepping back, watching ourselves & reflecting on what is happening in and around us (conscious emotional entanglement)
Capacity as ‘embrace of the collective’ or ‘collaborative orientation’:
- Orientation toward co-creation rather than control
- acting from a place of connection to self, others, nature, the subtle
Capacity as receptiveness to joy and emotions with a positive valence:
- Welcoming joy / humour / laughter / playfulness
These capacities serve as orientations. Naming them and normalising them is critical as we see them essential for radically shared aliveness and what the World Ethic Forum stands for.
A Work in Progress
Overall, what we are presenting here is not a finished map, nor are we trying to draw one. It is an attempt, by people in the middle of the terrain, who hold more knowledge than can be expressed in drawing or writing, and nevertheless attempt to share at least parts of it.
Many questions remain. How do these collective practices and collective capacities relate to one another? Are they distinct, or do they shade into each other? What would it mean to say we had genuinely developed one of these capacities, rather than simply performed an attempt at it?
We are in inquiry. What we have is a commitment to keep asking, and a growing sense that the asking itself may be as important as whatever answers eventually emerge.
