Clear Thinking in Challenging Times

This course is part of our Leadership Development Series, and can be used as a foundation course to apply for membership in our ongoing Land and Leadership Development Community.

After a year of cooking and eating at home, many of us are finally starting to see our relationship to food--and getting a clearer picture of how food and food systems impact our physical health and clarity of mind. We are also learning how our ability to think clearly is affected by the people around us, and the interactions we have (or don’t have, during a pandemic.

This discussion course will look at various intelligences at work within us and around us, and how each of these intelligences influences our own capacity for clear thinking and continual learning and development. These intelligences include the life cycles of the plants and animals we eat, the biological workforce in the landscapes where our food is grown, membranes and microbiomes, our own cravings and desires, and the communities we engage with. We will explore how to create conditions that sharpen the capacity of each of these aspects to contribute to the whole, rather than letting our collective intelligence be fragmented and degraded by extractive approaches to human health and land management.

We will use a living systems approach to learning: deep discussion, our own lived experiences, and framework thinking.

These weeklong deep dive courses attract an international group of people and create lasting connections for ongoing projects.

Here are some of the topics we will cover:

The Innate Intelligence of Life and Land
- How do soil microbes, grazing animals, gut microbes, and other life around us provide a series of membranes and filters to sort out what to keep and what to leave behind, what’s needed when, and how much? What sorts of farming strategies bring out the intelligence and resilience of the life in the land?

Discerning What You Need
- What can you do to awaken your own body’s intelligence around food, including your ability to discern what your body actually needs, and when, and how much? Do food needs change from week to week, seasonally? How do you know whether to trust a craving? What can we do in our communities that will help to awaken people’s internal wisdom about food?

The Four Paradigms of Mental and Physical Health
- What are the belief systems that we carry within us about mental and physical health? Do we believe that the mind is capable of continual development? How do various paradigms--from extractive to regenerative--play out in our lives, our economies, communities and ecosystems? Why does the health care system and mental health system pay so little attention to food?

Principles for Healthy Microbiomes in our Bodies and Landscapes
- How has our view of “germs” changed our ability to think clearly and form close relationships? What is the role of a healthy microbiome in your body and in the land around you? What are the basic principles of microbiome health?

New Strategies for Clearer Thinking Communities
- How do you harness the conflicting energies in the community around you toward a shared aim and higher purpose? How do our relationships affect our ability to think clearly, and what can we do to grow trusted communities of practice?