3. Is this Book for You?

A Beautiful Path Forward for the Next Billion Years

If you are happy with your worldview, or you like to focus your energy on more local issues than the whole planet. You’ll be happier if you stop reading now and keep doing what you do. But if you love to challenge your current worldview, are open to complex perspectives, and care deeply about our whole planet, keep reading!

This book is for those who understand that our challenges extend far beyond green technology and that changing our laws can ever reach. It’s a paradigmatic shift in how we perceive ourselves and our identity. It’s not a personal journey. It’s not an inner journey. It’s a collective journey out into our common wider Embraces.

What we do now sets the starting point for the next billion years. We are all making groves that have an impact as long as there is life on Earth. Everyone and everything counts.

What Participants Say about the Practice

Hundreds of people have participated in Wider Embraces sessions over the years. Many describe a powerful shift in how they see themselves and the world. Below are quotations from some of them from a Wider Embraces seminar. For each question, I’ve chosen a few answers that represent the majority of the answers.

How have the Wider Embraces changed my Worldview?

– More aware of perspectives and how they affect mine and others’ perceptions and framing.

– A more complex and kind world. Less fragmented. How important all my wider Embraces are, that I am all of them and can’t deny any of them. Owning one Embrace doesn’t make the other less important. More grounded. Better understanding of others’ views. How deeply connected we all are with everything. Everything matters.

– Experiencing the Embraces is experiencing objective realms of reality that really do widen one’s perspectives. This happens at the level of what I guess would be called ‘superconsciousness’.

How have the Wider Embraces changed My Relations?

– There is more relaxation and less judgment in my relationships with myself and those around me. “Being good” before was more of something that I should try and be, now it feels more like goodness is being unfolded.

– More at peace with myself and my relations with other humans. A whole new set of relations to my wider Embraces. Unconditional belonging as a reality.

– Less looking for approval. Live and let live. More open heart.

– My relationships are characterised by more patience, compassion and curiosity, much of the time (I can still be rather selfish at times of stress and pressure).

– When in groups, I find the embraced perspective incredibly informative in holding the space and allowing things to unfold naturally.

How have the Wider Embraces changed me as a Being?

– I am more trusting and far more aware that as a being I affect the whole field of being, for better or for worse. No more humble. More accepting of uncertainty. More joyful with small or simple things in life.

– I know myself from the inside in a new way. Before I had more of a third-person understanding of me, the person. Now it’s a first-person experience of all of me. As One. An infinite One, all Embraces.

– There is somehow less me, less little me perhaps and more big me

How have the Wider Embraces changed My Actions

– Not sure that it’s changed my behaviour that much, I’m still obliged to act in ways that harm others and the planet, although I’m more conscious of them.

– Less stressed to save the planet. Less blaming me and others. Spending time embracing planet Earth, and all my other Embraces.

– I am much more open to influence than I used to be, not influence from individuals but influence from the whole – relying more on my intuition and sense of what is being invited in the moment.

What’s the most profound reason I’m here at these meetings?

– It’s fascinating and enlivening; it opens me up to non-habitual awareness, to awareness of just how amazing existence is.

– I am here because I am a seeker; I yearn to understand myself and my reality. The Wider Embraces has helped me to break through the intersubjective in uniquely powerful ways. But, equally, I yearn to align my understanding with my self, my actions. I am deeply thankful for this community.

– A profound centring experience & grounding in a larger reality.

What do I feel about sharing the Wider Embraces with other people?

– Embraces are what people often search for, even if they don’t know about them. I want to make more people aware of their existence and give other people a new language and new experiences.

– To create multi-perspective sensemaking spaces that attend to concerns we share about ‘reality’.

– Yes, there is a longing to share with others, and it’s fueled by my care for planet Earth.

How have the Wider Embraces changed my relationship to the Planet?

– The humanitarian, biospheric, and planetary perspectives are new and fragile extensions to human experience. I feel deeply that we exercise, develop, extend and protect these perspectives, and make common sense of our shared reality through these wider embraces.

– This is the only reason. The planet has been expressing itself through me for this reason; as long as I exist, I am only now becoming conscious of it.

– Sensemaking breaks down here. What is motivating what? As planet, what motivates me? I am life.

Your experiences and takeaways will be unique to you. Both what you get out of reading this book, and what happens if and when you join a live session. Let’s dive in.

By Planet Earth to Planet Earth

This book is dedicated to the next billion years of life on planet Earth.
The planet we are all part of and expressions of.

This book is ultimately written by planet Earth to planet Earth.
As are all books on planet Earth.

If this sounds more intriguing than crazy, you are on the right page.