The World Ethic Forum co-leads: Luea Ritter and Anaïs Sägesser, contributed two chapters to the book Imagining, Designing and Teaching Regenerative Futures: Art-Science Approaches and Inspirations From Around the World, published with Springer-Nature. Both chapters explore practical methods that support alignment, awareness, and connection and speak directly to the goals of the World Ethic Forum: grounding regenerative work in embodied presence, shared awareness, and expanded ways of knowing.
The future does not lie ahead of us. It exists right here, in our ways of being, thinking, and acting.
When individuals or groups experience fragmentation, separation, or confusion, relief might come from working with what is already here: the patterns that are alive in our present. Surfacing and intentionally engaging with these patterns, including the more deeply ingrained, can increase common ground, clarity, and alignment.
But how does one actually do that? What methods can help catalyse regenerative change, individually and collectively, by bringing these patterns into conscious awareness?
Self & Nature
Writing with Ruth Förster, Anaïs Sägesser describes a method of sensory awareness designed to (re)connect self and nature, and delve into the knowing of intraconnectedness. This practice centres on a simple premise: connection to (and experiencing ourselves as an integral part of) the natural world begins with connecting to our own felt experience.
The method invites a 10–30 minute oscillation between inner and outer modes of awareness to cultivate deeper presence and insight.
It begins with an inward check-in across four levels:
- Physical: noticing tension or movement in our body
- Emotional: sensing joy, sadness, or other affective tonalities
- Mental: observing inner thoughts, images, or dialogue
- Field sensing: attuning to “what else is here”, beyond what we can easily name.
The practice then invites a shift outwards, through an exploration of the five senses: sound (auditory), touch (haptic), smell (olfactory), taste (gustatory), and finally sight (visual).
Core to the approach is an open embrace of oscillation. Hearing a blackbird, for example, may evoke internal images, shifts in heartbeat, or subtle feelings of joy, which in turn may turn attention to a smell or a sight, and call to mind something else in the field.
Used individually, it can support self-regulation and regenerative capacity, moving us beyond stress and reactivity. Used in groups, it can open the space for an awareness of a collective connection to the more-than-human, informing or guiding the collective towards regenerative approaches.
By deliberately moving across levels of perception and sensory modes, this reflective practice can interrupt automatic reaction patterns. It more deeply serves as a reminder that we can influence the lenses through which we see the world and make meaning.
System Sensing Journey
Luea Ritter, writing with Justus Wachs and Nancy Zamierowski, presents a complementary practice: the sensing journey. This approach sits within the broader field of systems sensing: a family of somatic methods that use felt experience to illuminate relational patterns within systems like organisations, communities, or networks.
Grounded in systems thinking, systems sensing taps into our “wider ways of knowing” – intuition, emotion, embodied resonance – to understand underlying pattern of relationships within a system. These signals from somatic experience often reveal subtle dynamics that conventional cognitive approaches miss.
Engaging with a group that faces a shared challenge and/or a common intention, the sensing journey follows three steps:
- Develop a guiding question corresponding to the group’s challenge or intention, and identify the essential elements in the system – people, resources, elements of the natural world, or more subtle ‘things’ present in the system.
- Sense into these elements, one at a time, through embodied exploration.
- Reflect as a group to integrate insights from the process.
Systems sensing can surface beliefs, assumptions, unspoken expectations, or tacit mental structures. When those hidden relational, emotional, and cultural dynamics come to consciousness, it becomes more possible to engage with them, and let them evolve. By widening their awareness in this manner, teams often find themselves better aligned, more compassionate, and clearer about how to move forward.
Systems sensing is an effective pathway for releasing outdated patterns and unlocking untapped potential. By reconnecting body, mind, and system, it becomes possible to cultivate the regenerative futures already latent within the present.
Radically shared aliveness is not just an idea or a concept. It is something to be felt.