and teachers of meditation, addiction workers, Quakers, coaches, psychoanalysts, social workers, teachers, poets, facilitators, mediators, people learning about nonviolent communication, a teacher of native American spirituality, teachers and practitioners of ‘mindfulness’, practitioners of T’ai Chi, Chi Gong, and Yoga, women who’ve been part of consciousness raising groups in the womens [sic] movement, people who run workshops on healing difficulties between men and women, interfaith ministers, someone from an alternative to violence project working in prisons – and even our very own Professor of Consciousness!3
Equally interesting is the final disclaimer, whereby ‘of course this is not really about what job you may do, and everyone who is interested is welcome’.4 What this shows is that the list serves purely to give an orienting sense of people’s inclinations that may make them receptive and capable of resonating with the thrust of Inner Transition, without wanting to close that list down to a definition.5 Ironically, this list also embraces a number of attachments I hold, which I would describe as relevant to developing my own curiosity for Inner Transition: a vivid interest in ecopsychology, and in embodied practices to connect experientially with the environment, as well as an incipient engagement as a poet inspired by the Dark Mountain project6 are the ones that most readily come to mind.
An open-ended collection of the sort proposed by Prentice is enough to provide readers with an idea of what types of affiliations ‘Inner Transition’ may hint towards as embodiments of ‘inner work’. I do concede that this will appear vague. However, the very tentativeness of the orientation through which it becomes possible to navigate Inner Transition should perhaps be viewed less as a shortcoming (of academic analysis) and more as a necessary quality of the process of negotiating an emerging field of experience, without rushing too soon to wedge one’s own definitional cuts.
What does Inner Transition do?
The unfolding of Transition in the realm of ‘inner work’ or ‘inner change’ is one of the most under-described aspects of the moving of Transition,7 yet one of the most telling in order to grasp its shape shifting character. As it was anticipated earlier, Inner Transition denotes, in a stricter sense, the name of a dedicated steering group inside Transition initiatives (other names that have been adopted are ‘Heart and Soul’ or ‘Spirit of Transition’).8 In a wider sense of the expression, however, it points to a wide sea of practices and attachments – ‘Inner Transition-type’ things – and it entrenches an openness and inclination, in the moving of Transition, to draw on these cultural resources.
In so doing, Inner Transition – by drawing a richer gamut of experiences into the emerging culture of Transition – occasions a significant difference in its appearing. This difference comes with the challenge of unearthing its kinship to the moving of Transition as a whole, so as to make Inner Transition an opening through which Transition becomes accessible and navigable across its many folds, as opposed to engendering fragmentation and disconnection. To this end, Prentice’s statements quoted above reveal how Inner Transition was borne out of an aspiration to make explicit particular dispositions and potentialities that could be implicitly seen at work in the incipient moving of Transition. Hence, Inner Transition can be viewed as a response to the need for developing dedicated cultural resources through which to give a standing to a variety of practical pursuits within Transition. At the same time, it faces the challenge of finding a fit with the other streams of activity that give shape to the phenomenon of Transition. This challenge is expressed lucidly by Prentice, who suggests that ‘probably because there has been a division in Western culture between inner and outer, and therefore inner- and outer-focused people, there has been on occasion some confusion about what a group such as Heart and Soul can contribute to Transition’.9
This problem is easier to grasp, once we understand how Inner Transition, by its very name, demarcates an ‘outer’ Transition, setting up an opposition that can divide as much as it can relate. When we focus on its oppositional quality vis-à-vis an ‘outer’ Transition, we can tease out the latter’s meaning – in common parlance – as entailing a change in material attachments (for example, in terms of the food one eats or the currency one spends) by some objective measure of achievement with a view to obtaining tangible results towards the goal of managing peak oil and climate change.10 The ‘outer’, in this sense, is distant from the ‘inner’. In Prentice’s words, however, this dichotomy seems to become less of a border and more of an inextricable, co-created fractal edge: ‘the outer creates the inner, and the inner creates the outer’.11 Inner Transition holds the promise of inextricably blending the two poles: ‘in coming together, we [work] to heal divisions and “splits” that may well be at the root of the mess we are in’.12 In other words, the language of inner and outer references a tradition of reasoning about experience – partitioning between a material and an immaterial, or a collective/political and a personal/spiritual – that Inner Transition seeks to blur by revealing, alongside its own specific difference, also the intrinsic relatedness to all other streams of activity that contribute to Transition’s moving.
The tradition of partitioning the world between a ‘secular’ and a ‘religious’ or spiritual dimension is, after all, one that has a long and troubled history, which is deconstructed critically, for example, by Timothy Fitzgerald.13 While I do not wish to enter into this academic debate here, I mention it because it provides a context to some of the dividing lines that Prentice herself points out, such as between ‘science and technology (outer focused) and religion and the humanities (inner focused)’.14 This split between outer and inner, with the latter risking to be portrayed as ‘airy-fairy’ or a waste of time, is reflected in some of the variations adopted in the naming of groups within Transition initiatives, with ‘Well-being’ or – indeed – Inner Transition being preferred to ‘Heart and Soul’, ‘perhaps feeling that the words “heart” and “soul” might be contentious’,15 because of their connection to the ‘dismal’ realm of spirituality and religion. The moving of Transition across this divide is clearly one that creates resistance and some difficulty: ‘there are hotly contested views, and strong feelings, around spirituality in particular. [...] From this point of view, allowing any spiritual presence within your movement could be seen as asking for trouble’.16
While acknowledging this challenge, Inner Transition equally weaves into the moving of Transition a dimension of experience that ought not to be censored out of prejudice, as long as its expression can happen tactfully: ‘For many people, spirituality can be explicit as well as implicit, and their spiritual life is central to their personal resilience. If we are to be inclusive, it is perhaps necessary both that no one in any sense ‘pushes’ his or her spiritual approach, but, equally, that this whole area of human experience is not unwelcome’.17
More generally, this inclusion is deemed one that can ultimately provide further momentum to the moving of Transition, as ‘the qualities that [Transition] calls forth – a move from materialism to values such as community, care, love and creativity; from arrogance and inequality to compassion – are the very stuff that spirituality was always meant to be about in the first place’.18 In other words, one could infer that Inner Transition gives a standing into the moving of Transition to the cultivation of embodied or discursive practices through which subjects are created, for whom it will be easier to resonate with the other concerns existing in the folds of Transition. Thus, to someone that has received some exposure to discursive and embodied traditions (such as shamanism or ecopsychology) that give a voice to the experience of connection with the other-than-human presences in an ecosystem, the practice of gardening or foraging can be a further validation of those attachments, providing them with greater coherence and resonance across the individual’s experience of his or her life.19
Another way of articulating the constitutive relatedness of Inner Transition to the moving of Transition as a whole is by focusing on the engagement it supports with discursive and material practices, ‘that are expected to generate ethical forms of conduct’.20 If we understand ethics not so much as the hiatus between what ought to be and what is, but rather as a process that is facilitated by particular relations in our lives,21 then we can begin to craft our understanding of Inner
