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embracing shifts from within

For individuals, organisations and communities.

Luea helps navigate complexity and embrace uncertainty and creates spaces to heal, restore and enliven.

 Luea fosters dialogue and collaboration across diversity and difference.

About

Invigorating long-lasting change by supporting people to share and learn together is a core element of why I do what I do.

Encouraging dialogue and healthy confrontation within a safespace based on trust is what thrives my work.

Offering support, guidance and advice on healthy structures and aligning processes is a main focus in my practice.

Inviting experimentation at the cutting edge of collective potential and wisdom is essential to me.

My work weaves and fosters transformative change processes, creative practices, trauma and healing work, with leadership and organizational development, community building and earth-based approaches to strengthen viable and coherent ways forward.  

The design and co-creation of the required conditions for healthy long-term solutions are a foundational aspect of my contribution.

Having a background as an art curator and as a leader of international trans-disciplinary organizations has shaped a creative and thinking-beyond-the-known attitude to life. I have initiated and led festivals that integrated art with social and ecological topics and research activities.

I am trained and practice as a cranio-sacral and trauma therapist and have explored a range of holistic and indigenous methods of healing.

As a practitioner of systemic constellation and experienced in understanding living systems and complexity I am at ease with intertwined challenges and can offer grounding in the midst of seemingly chaotic dynamics.  My approach is highly informed by a regenerative, reciprocal and living systems design perspective.

Working internationally in diverse sectors, including government, health, arts, education, civil society and social entrepreneurship helps me see the underlying and shared patterns and dynamics that are at work.

I have in-depth experience and knowledge of large project facilitation and management, human psychology and indigenous practices, participatory and inclusive transformative design and processes.

Close collaboration with other highly skilled individuals and organisations is important to me. Depending on the request and need, I work as an individual and/or with the support of colleagues.

The diverse areas I am involved in and the services I offer are integral to my long-term action research into the creation of coherent fields, collective sense-making and shared and embodied practices for HOW we do WHAT we do. The organisation Collective Transitions, that I co-founded and steward serves as a vessel for this work

I am committed to creating safe and conscious environments where the whole can unfold serenely and that encourage the exploration of new, as yet unknown pathways.

…small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.

Noble Laureate, Ilya Prigogine
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News

    Services

    I create spaces in which shifts and learning can occur. These shifts can happen within individuals, groups, communities and whole regions. The work allows trusting relationships to (re-)emerge. This is the fertile soil from which healthy and powerful actions can blossom.

    Through facilitation, stewardship and coaching, I support leaders, organisations and communities to align and collaborate across perceived `boundaries` and assumptions, rooted in reciprocity and a deeper connection with each other, our communities and our planetary habitat.

    I offer guidance through different approaches as listed below. I work in the ways that fit your needs:

    • One-on-one sessions
    • Meeting, Summit and Event Design and Hosting
    • Short- and long-term processes
    • Training programs
    • Action research
    Leadership Coaching

    I help you to shift, change and transform the way you operate by understanding first how you do what you do, and by uncovering what is already there to refine and attune anew.

    … to be human is to become visible while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others… 

    David Whyte

    Leadership Coaching provides you with both in-depth support and a safe space to explore personal and professional issues. Together we explore the root cause of current and recurring challenges and discover what you need to find new strengths and capacities to embody your unique leadership potential. You will gain clarity, a deeper understanding of your own dynamics and tangible tools to move with more agility through your daily life.

    How it works

    In a leadership coaching session, I offer a caring dialog to uncover your personal questions and current challenges. Together we peel back the layers to reach a deeper sense and understanding of what is at stake, and the deeper dynamics that are at play. Together we investigate “What is the next gentle step that allows the necessary shift to happen?”.

    I offer in-person or online sessions for professional, family or personal contexts.

    Shared Leadership Training

    You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

    R. Buckminster Fuller

    These times are too complex to expect that one single leader can show us the best way forward. Today we need new embodied practices of shared leadership to tap into our collective intelligence and wisdom. Only by bringing the most diverse perspectives together can we see and understand the best steps toward our common goals, our shared humanity.

    Shared leadership practices allow us to build collective health by serving from and transcending our individual perspectives. Shared leadership builds group capacities to collaborate and organize with agility, trust and respect for both the individual and the whole, on the short and the long term.

    How it works

    A “Shared Leadership” program is customized for each team, network or organisation, depending on the context, the needs of the participants and the collective learning edges. Together we explore questions such as:

    • “How do I/we embody leadership as individuals and as a whole?”
    • “What are my/our unique potentials and contributions and what are the learning edges?”
    • “What are the leadership style that are required for the times we life in – in our communities, work and private life?”
    • “How is power held and stewarded from a conscious place?”

    As we dive into these questions, we simultaneously hold space for crucial and potentially uncomfortable conversations and the challenges that the group shares. Together we create prototypes that embody the experience of a participatory culture of leadership.

    The work is meant for people and organisations who face leadership challenges and who want and dare to learn new ways that are aligned to oneself, the team and the larger context. The work serves as a retreat to deepen internal coherence and nurture collective clarity to see the path ahead, together.

    Systemic Constellation

     The world is not to be put in order, the world is order. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order.

    Henry Miller

    Systemic Constellation work provides an effective way to revitalise relationships by illuminating pressing personal, professional and collective issues. The process is particularly useful when the source of the issue or the solution is not clear, where previous attempts to change have not endured or where there is a sense of being stuck.  

    It is a practical method that can be used in a range of ways to create fresh insights and clarity about situations and dynamics that have previously been vexing.

    How it works

    The constellation begins with a dialogue that clarifies the intention and identifies the guiding question or intention.

    We then use the guiding question to create a visible map of the issues at hand. By making the inter-relations of sometimes intertwined issues visible, we get fresh perspectives on complex challenges that had previously appeared to be intractable. The living map – either with representatives or objects – allows you to see and understand underlying dynamics and patterns that both limit and resource projects, leaders, teams, organizations and the wider system. Once these are made conscious it allows the whole to relax more fully. When we can see the hidden forces at play, it becomes easier to identify new paths to long-lasting resolutions and health.

    Systemic Constellation supports:

    • An understanding of issues that seem to block our life, work or project flow
    • A clear view of what is actually required at the next stage
    • The capacity to work more consciously with the living systems we are a part of
    • The liberation of potential and resource flow in both people and the work place

    and

    • The ability to act in the world with a sense of integrity and alignment.

    I offer in-person and online sessions that focus on individual, organizational and/or collective issues and challenges.

    Sessions can be either one-on-one or with a group, depending on the topic and its charge.

    I give training to learn and deepen the approach of systemic constellation, especially with a focus on collective and societal issues.

    Facilitation

    The success of an intervention depends on the inner condition of the intervener.

    Bill O’Brien, former CEO, Hanover Insurance

    Meaningful group conversations that lead to shared understanding and coherence are dependent on trust and a feeling of safety between participants.  I facilitate teams, organisations, networks, communities and regions to co-discover their shared common ground, to see their diversity of perspectives as a richness, and to co-create effective collective strategies that can be implemented with ease and clarity.

    Applications for facilitation are wide-reaching – from conference and team meetings, to collaborative networking days and participatory community engagements, to retreats and thematic explorations.

    How it works

    We start by clarifying your overarching intention and by naming the topics and conversations that need to be addressed before and during the facilitated event and process. We identify who needs to be involved so that the it can be as inclusive, successful and cross-sectorial as possible.

    My approach is informed and nurtured by Art of Hosting and Art of Participatory Leadership. I employ the Fourfold Path, World Café, Open Space Technology, Deep Circle Practice, Theory U, Dragon Dreaming and other collaborative, participative and regenerative practices.

    Stewarding Transformative Change

    Stewardship is to hold something in trust for another.

    Peter Block

    Many organisations, teams, communities and regions find themselves in a transition between a known way of being and doing that doesn’t seem to work any longer and a new, still unknown paradigm. Between these two polarities there is a wide-open gap that is filled with curiosity and uncertainty, emergence and multiple unknowns, and often also disruptive confusion.

    Navigating through these transitions and embracing the complexity that comes with them requires artistry. It requires the capacity to honour what was, and the ability to grow beyond the known to meet the future with shared responsibility, care and awareness for the inter-connectedness of life itself.

    I accompany groups during these times of transition to ensure inclusion of the whole system. I support the cultivation of building vital relationships that assist the whole group to step up to healthy, lasting outcomes for all.

    How it works

    We start by unpacking and understanding the current state. Together we make meaning of what has happened to get you where you are, reaching back as far as needed. Then, with a shared understanding of the multiple layers of “truth” of what’s under the surface we cultivate the new foundation and soil in which to plant new pathways forward.

    Deep listening, reconciliation movements and un/re-learning cycles of how we want to collaborate are a crucial part of this process. We use these tools to expand our capacity to drop judgment and separation between you and me, us and them. We start to train our collective muscles to operate as a coherent ecological system, with boundaries that are more fluent, agile and transparent. We learn to shift the thriving source from one or the other’s opinion to a shared attention and intention that builds the health of the whole.

    This process draws upon diverse methods and is informed by a shared leadership, living systems and regenerative perspective. I invite the group to recognize the deeper patterns at play. I help heal and restore the past and re-organize the ways the group works together. Because the work is transformative, we work in phases. Because it is inclusive, we work with both individual as well as collective issues.

    Healing & Trauma Work

    Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

    Rainer Marie Rilke

    For individuals

    The past was always there, lived inside of you, and it helped to make you who you were. But it had to be placed in perspective. The past could not dominate the future.

    Barbara Tayler Bradford

    Healing is a natural part of evolution. Healing is about caring for and releasing the tension of what has been broken, shaken, frozen or misaligned so that inherent health can re-emerge. Healing is about forgiving and re-claiming our connection to life itself.

    By reactivating, enhancing and strengthening our own healing-powers we can restore diverse forms of imbalance sensitively and appropriately. We start by looking for the right entry points, be they emotional, mental, physical or spiritual. Together we restore the natural health of individuals or family systems.

    Healing and Trauma release provides you access to your own inner capacity of agility, confidence and natural health. This sets the stage for unlocking your unique potential and gifts. It encourages and empowered you to learn to share your uniqueness within a larger context.

    How it works

    Within a safe and gentle space, we deeply listen to the whole system and its diverse stories. I employ Cranio-Sacral therapy, Trauma therapy and holistic healing to conduct a gentle inquiry into what has happened and what your body is trying to tell us about it now. What is the invitation we are being sent? How can we best lean into this message?

    Healing and Trauma work allows us to meet the present and the future with a more open and grounded attitude. Together we sensitively listen to the pain and what lies underneath. We learn, step by step, to reactivate healthy patterns in your body, mind and heart. Acknowledging what was, letting go of what no longer serves us, and opening to the new allows you to experience a new freedom and state of centeredness.

    For groups & communities

    A living system is defined not by the individual parts, but by the relationships between them. The flow of energy.

    Unknown

    How it works

    It is very common for teams, groups and communities to experience tensions, misunderstanding and conflicts. Often it looks as if one person or a sub-group is the source of the “problem”.  Too often such a belief leads us to fall in to a pattern of “us versus them”, which creates an even bigger sense of disconnect and fragmentation.

    Yet every conflict is an invitation to look deeper – together – to understand what is really needed to find a new balance and heal as a whole.

    Healing and Trauma work for groups is based on the understanding that what shows up in an individual is a mirror of the collective as much as the collective is a mirror for the individuals. Very often disruptive patterns and behaviours that play out in the group are rooted in age-old wounds being carried along. These wounds and traumas actually just look for a place where they can be seen and recognized. Yet very often we are not aware of them. If these wounds have not been acknowledged and somehow healed, they will keep coming to the surface and knock on our doors. They return not to harm us, but to be released by us.

    I help release these recurring patterns with deep circle dialogue, Systemic Constellation work, restorative justice and/or Collective Healing work. Together we gently peel the layers away from the root of the unbalance and disruption. We reconcile and restore, forgive and honour, drop assumptions and judgments and steadily re-align as individuals and as a collective. With a bit of time, and informed by care and respect, a new pathway, a new clarity, and a new and shared story emerges.

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    Practices & Inspirations

    I draw experience, knowledge and wisdom from a spectrum of innovative, inclusive and generative methods and approaches. This allows me to accurately design processes for any given context or situation.

    This blended approach enables me to swiftly respond and adapt as learning and discovery emerges. By combining different modalities, I invite and dare individuals and groups to listen to their truth, to reveal and embrace hidden parts of a story, to re-establish connections, and to integrate and transcend.

    Intention & Coherence

    The Rainmaker – an Inspirational Story:

    “There was a great drought; for months there had not been a drop of rain and the situation became catastrophic. Some groups made processions or made prayers, some others burned joss sticks and shot off guns to frighten away the demons of the drought, but with no result. Finally, someone said: We will fetch the rainmaker. And from another province, a dried up old man appeared. The only thing he asked for was a quiet little house somewhere, and there he locked himself in for three days. On the fourth day clouds gathered and there was a great snowstorm at the time of the year when no snow was expected, an unusual amount, and the town was so full of rumours about the wonderful rain maker that somebody went to ask the man how he did it. He said: “They call you the rain maker, will you tell me how you made the snow?” And the little man said: “I did not make the snow, I am not responsible.” “But what have you done these three days?” Oh, I can explain that. I come from another country where things are in order. Here they are out of order, they are not as they should be by the ordnance of life. Therefore, the whole country is not in Balance, and I am also not in the natural order of things because I am in a discorded country. So, I had to wait three days until I was back in inner Balance, and then naturally the rain came.”

    I am inspired by the question “How can we – as global citizens – become circles and collectives of Rainmakers”?

    Regenerative Design and Living Systems

    Cross-Sector Dialogue and Collaboration

    Dealing with Complexity and Uncertainty

    Creativity as a resource and enabler

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    Collective Transitions

    Collective Transitions is for individuals and groups who are at the forefront of societal transformation.

    In order to create meaningful impact, businesses, organisations and groups of all sizes must be able to navigate historically unprecedented levels of complexity and uncertainty. Collective Transitions offers a grounded set of transformational approaches and practices for groups and facilitators to better navigate these shifts. It’s an action-learning and research hub working with a wide range of clients, especially social change and multi-stakeholder initiatives. 

    Collective Transitions focuses on the collective capacities needed for shifting mindsets, beliefs and deeply ingrained patterns. 

    It offers: 

    Transition Process Stewardship 

    Collective Transitions views itself as stewards, caretaking and accompanying a group through a process that reinvigorates and activates its social coherence. 

    Learn more (link to /stewardship)

    Practice Spaces 

    Trainings, workshops, retreats, and coaching

    • Wisdom of systems: systems sensing and thinking 
    • The art of transitioning collectively
    • Shared leadership: the art of leading and being led
    • Re-aligning with land and place

    Innovation Lab 

    The Innovation Lab is the beating heart of Collective Transitions and is where we develop and refine new methods for societal transformation. Partner with us for action-learning and research.

    www.collectivetransitions.org

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    Collaborations

    I am active within a global field of people who support the co-creation of healthy and conscious livelihoods and working environments. Together we are co-creating new ways of being and working that are truly regenerative and that respect all forms of life.

    I am active and involved with the following organisations:

    Nile Journeys – Nurturing Impulses for living ecosystems
    Co-founder, Coreteam and Practice Circle member

    The Nile Journeys is a platform for trans-boundary dialogue and collaboration between the civil societies of the 11 Nile Basin countries to create a regenerative culture of peace.
    http://www.nileforum.org

    Collaboratio Helvetica
    Catalyst Lab, Practitioner Circle and Learning Ecology

    Collaboratio Helvetica, a collaborative and learning ecology, creates spaces for open dialogue, social innovation labs and long-term transformation processes to create the Switzerland we want to live in. Together.
    https://www.collaboratiohelvetica.ch/

    Trans4m
    Fellow and member of the PHD program

    Trans4m is an educational institute catalysing Integral Transformation through creating and nurturing a Local-Global Movement for the Integral Renewal of People and Planet.

    Marlboro College, Southern Vermont
    Guest lecturer for “Wisdom of Systems – Systems Thinking and Systems Sensing”

    An Independent College for Independent Thinkers. As an independent, not-for-profit college rooted in progressive education, Marlboro offers an antidote to the conformity and conventional thinking that characterize many education environments.

    Voice of Nature

    Akademie für Potential Entfaltung
    Guest lecturer for Shared Leadership
    A Germany-based organisation renewing and activating a wholistic approach in theeducation sector.
    http://www.lernkulturzeit.de

    SIRCle
    Coreteam and Co-creator of the Curriculum
    EU-funded project for “Social Innovation for Resilient Communities” supporting social entrepreneurs in building resilient communities by offering a 9-stepping Stones, Pattern-language based Curriculum.
    http://sircle-project.eu

    Affiliations and Networks

    • Collective Presencing
      Practitioner and Action Researcher
      An approach that articulates the steps toward working together as a collective in a generative way.
      http://www.collectivepresencing.org/
    • Collective Alchemy
      Practitioner and Action Researcher
      This is an action research project to explore and deepen the practices of Collective Alchemy. The experiences and insights gleaned through the process highlight both its relevance and transformative potential. These insights also point to future lines of inquiry that can support collective navigation in these white-water times.
    • Collective Healing – Creating community spaces for a wiser future
      A call to collectively bring in new approaches and ways of being to allow healing in communities and between humans and the earth to emerge.
      http://www.collectivehealing.net/
    • Fo.Am
      Fo.am, a cultural laboratory re-imagining possible futures at the intersection of art, science, nature and everyday life.
      http://fo.am
    EXPLORE

    Contact

    Start a conversation, Book an appointment, Contact me:

    welcome@luearitter.org