🌳From Ego to Eco: A Pattern Recognition

Something emerged in my pattern recognition practice this week – a conversation between ancient forest wisdom and modern scarcity thinking. Perhaps it’s no coincidence as I emerge from my chrysalis year, where unexpected stillness created space for profound integration.

The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, whose name literally means "great forest teaching," speaks of letting go of ego. Meanwhile, David Farrier's exploration of "wild clocks" in Emergence Magazine reveals how we've disrupted nature's circular rhythms with linear ambition.

What fascinates me is how these patterns connect: our ego-driven scarcity mindset operates like a linear clock, always rushing forward, accumulating, fearing loss. Yet forests operate in circles of abundance – every ending feeds a beginning, every death nurtures life. As Fabrice Desmarescaux beautifully notes in Mark McCarthy's What is a Good Life? podcast: "I develop an ability to see patterns that my younger colleagues don't have. And I can step out of the battlefield to see the battle from a perspective that younger colleagues [...] they don't see these perspectives."

Last year taught me this viscerally. As unexpected stillness descended, I learned that rest isn't a stopgap between activities but a ritual of renewal. Like a chrysalis phase, what seems like dormancy is actually profound transformation. The book deal with Wiley didn’t arrive despite the stillness, but because of it.

Perhaps authenticity isn’t about building a stronger ego but about aligning with nature’s rhythms. Like forest ecosystems, where resources aren’t hoarded but circulated, what if our true self emerges not through accumulation but through flow? This is what Human Design suggests too – that our authenticity emerges when we stop resisting our natural rhythms and start flowing with them.

What patterns of abundance might emerge if we measured success not by what we accumulate, but by how well we circulate? If we traded our linear clocks for wild ones? What type of leader would you be if you operated on forest time?

#PatternRecognition #Leadership #Sustainability #SystemsThinking #WildWisdom #CircularEconomy #AuthenticLeadership #EmergenceMagazine #HumanDesign #BiologicalWisdom #CyborgShamanism

[Credit: Emergence Magazine's Wild Clocks episode with David Farrier & What is a Good Life? podcast with Fabrice Desmarescaux]