Toronto Imaginal Transitions

Sanctuaries for a time between worlds

Seeds from Toronto Imaginal Transitions

Imaginal Transitions are experiments in creating place-based sanctuaries to practice dancing into transitions. Systems change and transition practitioners, policy makers, artists and designers gather into a dojo and dance club: spaces to practice the postures of collective transition: to learn how to flow with more skill and ease through the cycles of tension and release, work and play, discipline and flow, making and unmaking together. 

The theories of change informing the creation of sanctuaries foreground process and relationships, pleasure and play. They centre the importance of cultivating nurseries and nests of rest, where we nourish the relational soil from which new ideas and patterns might sprout. Inspirations include emergent flocking and pleasure activism from adrienne maree brown, of staying with the trouble and response-ability from Donna Haraway, of slowing down and creating sanctuary from Bayo Akomolafe, and of designing for the pluriverse from Arturo Escobar, and of cultivating trust through micro-solidarities. 

The Siren Call to Imaginal Transitions

Did you know that when a caterpillar transforms into a butterfly, it forms a cocoon and then digests and melts into a soupy organic mush? 

Right now, something is trembling and quaking in the ground of our being. And in the terrifying tumult of our systems cracking, what if we ungrip our fists and relax our jaws, and begin to breathe slowly? What if we welcome and even desire breaking down and transformation? 

What if we told you that the dark, thick soil beneath our shiny cities, our metal cars and airplanes is stillness and sanctuary. This soil is thick with mycelium and the wisdom and traumas of our ancestors and animal kin. What if we root down so deeply that we learn to sway with the movement of the earth quaking, as though we are invited into metamorphosis?

In the caterpillar’s cocoon of transformation, dormant single-celled organisms called imaginal cells begin to wake up, holding within them the seeds of future potential. At first, the immune system of the caterpillar views these cells as threats and tries to attack and kill them. 

But these imaginal cells begin to connect and communicate with each other, sharing information and multiplying until there is a tipping point – when they stop acting as individual, separate cells and begin to assemble new systems – wings, legs, eyes and antennae – and the structure of the new multicellular organism emerges…

You are invited to Imaginal Transitions, to dance into the emerging patterns and morphology of transformation. Instead of trying to figure out how to fix or intervene in systems, how do we come to learn what Donella Meadows describes as dancing with systems?

You are invited because we want to play with you and dream with you. We’re allowed to be clumsy here, laugh, cry and make mistakes. 

There are no prescribed dance moves. The dance we will learn together is relational, improvisational and emergent.

We are called to participate in a transition that is deep — it is a living ecology of becoming. The personal, the local, the cosmopolitan and the planetary braid together like sweetgrass—and are rooted deeply into place. 

In order to dance with complexity, we embrace the wisdom of the philosopher Bayo Akomolafe, who says: the times are urgent, let us slow down.

So what is Toronto Imaginal Transitions?

We are a cocoon:
we hold and nourish sanctuaries of tender stillness for grief and letting go – for individuals that dissolve into soup and allow our imaginal cells to co-form. 

We are an underground laboratory:
we conduct experiments exploring the radical phenomenology of relationships and mutual transformation.

We are a dance club:
we learn to move our bodies through flow, pleasure, and sensual, ecstatic feeling into distributed starling formation.

We are a martial arts dojo:
we invite discipline and practice and keep showing up for each other, even when it’s hard.

We are a family table:
where we eat delicious food and nourish our bodies together. 

We are a circle around a fire:
We tell stories and feel into the more-than-human elements that create the world with us. 

For us, these are all ritual spaces of mutual transformation, sanctuaries that we create in the cracks for us to slow down together, and to dance and imagine and enter new worlds.

There is already a rhythm and tempo to the process of transition.
But we might have to slow down, and in the quiet moments, listen to the wisdom of the system… how it breathes, hums, and sings through the nested ecologies of people, cultures, cars, trees and birds that weave through it all.

And depending on the frequency that we tune into, transitions can feel like collapse. Deep, tragic and painful; a slow-dance into falling apart and sinking into the deep-tissue grief of letting go. 

Transitions can feel like effort. Of sweating and rolling up our sleeves, and leaning into the heavy grind of collective work and practice. 

And transitions can also feel desirable. We can tune into the effervescent frequencies of joy, pleasure and creativity and listen to the songs that pull our tired feet and bodies effortlessly onto the dance floor. We follow the currents of aliveness that move us in ways that we might not expect, with new dance partners we might not imagine.

And these emerging relationships might form and create new patterns, like starlings that form murmurations… that begin to shape emerging economies, cultures, and systems that we do not yet know, but deeply long for. 

But where do we start? You show up. Your toes wriggle into the soil. Your body begins to melt and sway. 

And just like that, together, we dance into transition.

transitions that unfold from desire and emergence

Imaginal Transitions is a sanctuary that designed to be prefigurative of the unknown future that we long for in our hearts.
Every person we invite into the project comes out of true desire, every phase that unfolds from true emergence. 

core team

We (Tara Campbell and Cheryl Hsu) invited a “core team” of twelve people to go through a six-week experimental cycle of a Dance Club for Imaginal Transitions, playing with different transition capacities and practices that focus on nourishing relationships. Rather than emailing “actors” or “stakeholders” who seem to work on paper through assumptions of power, place or utility in the system – we followed existing relationships of trust. We asked the question: Who would we desire to be in the same room with, working on transition together? 

mycelial team

A mycelial team emphasized the value of resourcing and building relationships with existing communities and micro-economies of wellbeing in Toronto. These micro-economies are already holders of practical wisdom around how we can mutually sustain wellbeing with each other during times of deep transition. We offered everyone on the core team a micro-grant to resource their community as they saw fit.

metabolism team

A metabolism team grappled with an adaptive theory of change and uncovered the key transition capacities and conditions that come out of our experimental gatherings with the core team. We considered how these insights could impact local policy innovations and institutions. 

cycle of imaginal transformation

The Cycle of Imaginal Transformation went through six phases of relational practices for transition.
dancing
forming
sanctuary
listening
releasing
dreaming

sanctuary / saŋ(k)-chə-ˌwer-ē

We create open spaces for rest and safety, for our nervous systems to relax outside of our hyper-productivity focussed environments. Sanctuaries cultivate intimacy and trust through practices like:

Collective hosting; Checking in; Slowing down; Being outside in nature, in the sun, beside the water, with each other. Eating and laughing together.

listening / li-sᵊn-iŋ

In the calm and spaciousness of these sanctuaries, we begin to listen to what is here through our senseful ways of knowing. We develop an attunement to the subtle, and practice the art of noticing through:

Collective Presencing; Meditation and being in silence together; Listening to the birds and cars, and the spaces in-between; Journaling, writing poetry and drawing what we notice to be true and unfolding; Zooming in to the microscopic and zooming out to the cosmos;

releasing / ri-ˈlēs-iŋ

One of the most difficult aspects of transition is release. We have not been culturally prepared with the rituals and practices that support the death and letting go of old systems and stories that no longer serve us. Letting go is a grieving process. We practice holding ourselves and each other through:

Collective grieving; Holding each other through holding space; Venting and crying together without shame; Sharing secrets; Leaning into the discomfort of intimacy.

dreaming / ˈdrēm-iŋ

As we create spaciousness through release, we begin to notice a subtle current of aliveness rippling in the water. We begin to trust and share our desires with each other. We start to imagine new metaphors and ideas that would have felt daring and impossible before. We practice:

Collective dreaming; sharing our deepest desires and longings; Imagining and telling new stories;

forming / ˈfȯrm-iŋ

As we dream, our hands begin to itch and our bodies want to move and play. We let go of our fears of failure and holdbacks, and allow our desires and dreams to guide the way that we form new projects, play new games. We
enter a sandbox of play and begin to make and share little scrappy experiments with each other through:

Collective playing; Making games; Mushroom foraging; Dancing like nobody’s watching; Workshopping with hurricane of sticky notes and snacks;

dancing / ˈdän(t)s-iŋ

Eventually, our little distributed experiments form into a murmuration of collective learning, and we realize that we’ve been moving in a kind of emergent flow. We trust and feel confidence in our bodies, we find the process
of making and unmaking worlds beautiful and worthwhile.

Awareness, reflection and learning; We realize that we’ve been practicing what Donella Meadows calls it
dancing with systems all along.

dreaming / ˈdrēm-iŋ

One of our dreaming practices asked a groups of 3–4 of us to dream with each other, the place and land to conjure new origin stories. 

In this Imaginal practice, we gathered human and more-than-human beings together, and considered what they desire and long for. Then we asked how these desires might weave together into a web of relationships. Through this yarning, we created new origin stories that can unfold new worlds, systems, economies and culture. These were often unusual, funny, and moving stories that allowed us to relate with beings and entities in a new way. 

We told these new origin stories to each other around a campfire by the lake. 

hidden ingredients of systems

These four ingredients are the immaterial capacities and capabilities of collective transition. We believe that when you bring together the transition ingredients of time, desire, awareness and trust into an alchemical vessel—a project, an organization, a community—something unknown and transformative happens that generates an abundance of fruits: new ideas, projects, policies, interventions, worldings! 

trust

How can we build and nourish relationships of trust?

Trust connects us to a larger organism in which we are mutually and intimately entangled, and it teaches us about setting boundaries and becoming more porous in relationships. One of the statements in Micro-Solidarity — a movement of cultivating communities of belonging and purpose—is “emotional intimacy before economic intimacy”. What if our economic systems foregrounded emotional intimacy and trust: local relationships of friendship rather than transaction? 

awareness

How do we cultivate pluri-perspectival awareness? 

Developing the capacity for reflexivity and meta-awareness is the most critical
in systems change, to sense and understand that we live and design in fractal ecologies of many overlapping systems. Cultivating pluri-perspectival seeing is to know and feel that we live in a pluriverse of many worlds, stories and ideologies – all of which have distinct values and autonomous desires that co-habit in generative tension with one another.

desire

How can we support people to explore, tune into, and trust their deep desires?

Desire also asks us to embody the tension that we want something that we don’t currently have. Wanting other worlds is a fire that can burn within us. In Toronto Imaginal Transitions, we don’t shame desire—in fact, we see desire as a vital transition capacity. What if we’re allowed to want? What if our deepest wants guide us more than we think. What if our desires were wise? What if we trusted these desires to guide us to the worlds that we want?

time

How can we free and enrich time?

The hyper-optimization of linear, quantified time is only one way we have organized ourselves within our systems, yet we feel trapped in it. Slowing down might be the most radical move, to remember and liberate ourselves into pluralities of times. We need to make sanctuary space to be present, where we can slow down and root down so that we can free time.