What happens when two aching bodies meet in a space of radical attention?
This is a story of dialogue as medicine, where time bends and thinking softens, where presence, imagination, and tenderness can re-animate our linear and controlling institutions.
by servane mouazan
Last year, I joined the Local Government x Collective Imagination Huddle. It was an opportunity to explore how collective imagination can enliven local democracy and community participation.
I wanted to explore how people in a room can think independently – through their unique stories and ways of thinking and perceiving – while arriving at shared outcomes that say to people and the environment: “You matter”.
My initial assumption about local authority often matches the feeling my friends and I get from their buildings:
Bland.
Not especially alive
Closed when I need it.
And often, painfully lacking windows –
Windows that open.
Maybe it’s the old rescuer in me… I imagine people in such buildings might secretly dream of escaping.
This is why I landed, during one of our Huddle sessions, in a virtual escape room with my brilliant Local Authority buddy, Community Powerhouse and deep Imagineer Lucy Atkinson.
Together, we entered into a dialogue, not a conversation.
It was a Dialogue in a Thinking Environment,
Because, you see, there are (at least) two worlds of thinking.
To paraphrase Nancy Kline:
One is the huge, dominant world of exchange thinking – transactional, repetitive, drawing mostly on what is already known, accepted, and tried. A kind of script-chewing ping-pong.
The other world is tiny and rare. It’s the world of ‘fully independent
thinking’ – full of attention, fresh, untried. It draws on what could be, it calls on the imaginaries to dance and be one. It’s a world that seeds and weaves graciously for as long and as far as the time we give ourselves.
And it’s in this tiny world that Lucy and I jumped in.
The Experiment
It was the end of a long day with back-to-back calls and Zooms.
Outside (and inside), it was cold and wet.
We found ourselves together in this breakout room
Inside that intimate digital space – with its confidentiality and time-bound edge – we knew we’d offer each other the encouragement and the curiosity to engage and be our most electrifying selves.
We promised we would offer each other our full attention and no interruption.
“What do you want to think about? What is coming up for you?”
“Right now, my body aches. Has been throbbing for 2 hours today. That stabbing feeling began six months ago.”
Lucy was also in pain. She had a tormenting and exhausting tooth pain.
I had a stabbing tennis elbow
These were pains that, while manageable (at least where we live), stop you from thinking with clarity.
Yet, they could do something for us, but only if we gave them time and room.
Because pain doesn’t respect calendars.
It doesn’t ask if you’re in a meeting or on mute.
It pulses according to another kind of rhythm—one our schedules pretend doesn’t exist
Our thoughts started to drift:
Between Clock Time – that boxed-in, mechanised, industrial, unseasonal, understanding of time as we know it. The architecture of control…
And Earth time: the cyclical, seasonal, and relational inviting rhythms of nature. The ceremony of return.
Clock Time tells us to suppress the ache, to stay productive, to keep pace with extraction.
Earth Time reminds us that pain is not an interruption—it’s a message, a teacher, a threshold.
It says:
Body gets old.
But body energises as spring returns.
Body is messenger.
Body holds memory.
Body is a place of learning.
Body loves you.
In those 40 minutes, we meandered through rich places, like two Alices in Wonderland, spinning and twirling in giant teacups of thought.
And, like Alice, the merry-go-round spun off into an imagineering journey.
We softened.
“Clock Time” became a necessary portal to Earth Time, a gathering point for leaping into the unknown and absorbing signals from our bodies and surroundings.
In this light dialogue, we took turns rhythmically, never crowding each other’s space.
We honoured the other’s swing, spring and zing of ideas.
We scaffolded each other’s Wonderland.
We became Earth.
During our dialogue, the sky opened. Rain stormed. The natural light changed.
Lucy’s screen turned black and white.
Mine got weirdly grainy.
We paused.
That silence was full of thinking
What’s new for you just now? we asked.
I noticed my aching arms had softened. The pain had slowly vanished.
Lucy’s words towards her throbbing teeth shifted.
They gave her new pieces of wisdom.
The sensations our dialogue generated – bone aches, teeth pulses, tendon throbs- became conduits for new relevant information,
They offered new waves of thinking, relational sense-making and opening.
They softened the body.
Then the timer pulled us back into Clock Time.
What Now?
Tomorrow, what will it take for us to dance each other into thinking?
To let the moss grow between the stones of bureaucracy,
To make even institutional walls feel porous,
And as people, in these buildings,
To carry and be carried, in turn, and say:
“This feeds my thinking
And now… what are your thoughts?
I am listening. You matter.”
And again
And again
For as long and as far as our time together allows.
🌳I’m Servane, a Thinking Partner for impact leaders and investors, and their teams.
I help you
- Think in Partnership
- Tend to Possibilities
- Find more Bond and Ease
Do you receive my newsletter? The next edition comes out every month.
Subscribe now if you’re keen!
http://eepurl.com/hp0h55
