The Proteus Initiative

approaching an ecology of consciousness

We work with all aspects of social change – consulting, facilitating, writing, teaching. We strive to bring together a sensibility for, understanding of, and practice towards the relationship between ecological wholeness and social coherence and healing. Enabling people to stretch their processes of inner and outer development to greater edges and depths; this is the foundation for socially responsive and life-supporting practices.

This innovative approach to Reflective Social Practice can be taken further by undertaking a postgraduate training up to and including Masters level, to learn more about this please contact us.


2024 contains various initiatives, both online and in-person, and we hope you may join us for at least one of them.

On-line:
Enabling Life - An international online programme touching on the threads of a Delicate Activism, through a Reflective Social practice. For more information and to view the brochure, please CLICK HERE. This programme has already begun, however, it is possible to join the waitlist for the next cohort, if you wish to enquire please CONTACT US.

In Person:
We are planning various programmes and initiatives for 2024, to ensure you are notified when booking opens, please subscribe to our newsletter HERE or Contact us HERE

A GOETHEAN KNOWING
September 2024
A GOETHEAN KNOWING
VIEW PDF

Some Past Processes

Some Past Processes

During the course of the past few years The Proteus Initiative has offered various workshops, amongst these are those listed below. This section serves to give further information regarding these courses, and we hope you enjoy reading more about them. For further information about any of the programmes, workshops or courses we are currently offering, please visit the Current and Coming page here or contact us.

An Occasionally-Facilitated Writing Block on Towerland Wilderness
Between 1st and 24th of May 2013

A Block of time for writers, to share, experience and explore their writing in the wild reaches of The Towerland Wilderness. A facilitated writers workshop of four and a half days duration took place between May 3rd and 8th which was optional for those at Towerland during this time. For the rest of the time, we were on hand to help with writing if and as required, and participants were also utterly free to pursue their writing without any facilitation at all – however they chose to work; we were at The Towerland Wilderness doing our own writing also throughout that time.

A first for The Proteus Initiative and The Towerland Wilderness, the overwhelming success of this programme has prompted us to offer it as an annual event. Should you wish to find out more about ‘An occasionally facilitated Writing Block on The Towerland Wilderness’ for the current year, please contact us.
 
Catching Falling Leaves … An Encounter in the Nurturing of Wilderness
A four-day workshop for women.

This process took place at The Towerland Wilderness during the April full moon: 23rd – 27th April 2013. This four-day workshop invited women to encounter both the nurturance of the wild and the self, and to experience how moving between them connects us with the world in healing, restorative ways.  Its aim was to open the space for us to stretch into the wild while focusing on the alignment of inner purpose in response to our individual and collective contexts. What is healing for us is also healing for the world. The programme was attended by women from Brazil, South Africa, Australia and Cambodia and nature offered a strong presence as we spent time in focused relationship with ourselves-in-our-world, with Nature and with each other.
 
 Leadership is Something Other: Leadership is Disciplined Intuition 
A Two-year Leadership Programme

This programme engaged a group of 18 (mostly) NGO leaders for six periods of four days each from 2010 through 2012, and thanks to a generous response from our donor EED to a request by the participants to continue the work beyond its original frame, the programme will continue in 2013. It’s an innovative, challenging programme that works with an intimate and inner response to the conundrums of a facilitative leadership, focusing on a phenomenological response to social, organisational and environmental issues. The programme foregrounds the leaders’ attentive relationship with their worlds, and builds faculties for observation, paying attention, disciplined imagination, interpersonal sensibility, inner development and organisational nous. Participants have particularly appreciated the relationship between the programme and their ongoing dilemmas and challenges in the field of their leadership … and have chosen to continue the programme into an undetermined future.
 
The Masters Programme in Reflective Social Practice, Session One
This international Masters Programme, accredited by London Metropolitan University, began in August 2012, at Towerland Wilderness, South Africa, with 21 participants from New Zealand, Brazil, South Africa, Mozambique and the United Kingdom. It offers the possibility to understand and work with more attuned, open and organic approaches to social understanding and practice, respectful of the complexity and true nature of the challenges we face in the social field. Recognising that the world we inhabit is socially and ecologically impoverished, we have chosen to design a programme that will open people’s horizons – both to themselves and to their responsibilities in terms of intervening creatively into such a world...

 
Artistas do Invisivel (Artists of the Invisible) – Practising a Social Sensibility by way of a Goethean Approach.
A programme of deep engagement with methods that help to reveal and encourage responsible participation in the unfolding of our living world, our social situations, and ourselves. (run in Brazil as a collaboration between The Proteus Initiative and Instituto Fonte: 2009 - 2011) This programme was a full-length, part-time, in-depth programme for those practitioners who were interested in pursuing – as well as collaboratively building – the art of social action and intervention from a more human, Goethean perspective. The next edition of this programme began in April 2013.

 
Building Living Thinking into a new Social Practice
A meeting of social practitioners who have entered into some relationship with The Proteus Initiative’s ideas before.

(A One-week residential at Towerland Wilderness, August 2011)

The Proteus Initiative has been working for some years towards introducing a Goethean approach of living thinking as the underpinning of a genuinely facilitative social practice. Over these years various practitioners have participated in various programmes, others have developed relationships of varying depths in various ways, and some have gone on to develop this practice further. This week at Towerland Wilderness began to explore the experiences, observations and questions living amongst those social development practitioners who chose to come. The Proteus Initiative facilitated this process; Craig and Henrike Holdrege of The Nature Institute were present as participant observers, to assist in taking the discussions further, to provide insight and challenge, to question assumption and encourage development, as well as themselves to learn from this coming together of Goethean sensibility with social intervention. The event was highly successful and a paper, as well as further work that should result from this paper, will be forthcoming shortly.
 
Towards a Thinking which is Alive
Relating processes of transformation and metamorphosis in nature to a deeper understanding and perception of these processes in ourselves and in our social context.

(A one-week residential at Towerland Wilderness, August 2011)

Craig and Henrike Holdrege are leading Goethean scholars, scientists, researchers, writers and teachers in the English-speaking world. Their work has taken their thinking in various directions, where they have become masters at making accessible a practice and body of knowledge that often may seem obscure, simply because the grasp of its leading ideas demands an experience – as well as the rigorous exercising – of both imagination and observation. During this week they worked with participants on developing the eyes and the understanding to apprehend processes of transformation and metamorphosis as they occur in nature, thus stretching our thinking into places that herald a new and very different form of consciousness. Insights gained through these days then engaged with individual and cultural processes in order to build this new way of thinking into a foundation for a new ‘ecological’ consciousness that embraces living thinking.

For the most part, The Proteus Initiative hosted rather than facilitated this process, but also played a role in enabling Towerland Wilderness to yield some of its ‘open secrets’ towards further engagement with the implications of this new way of seeing. Insights from this process are being incorporated in the paper mentioned above.
 
Seeing Nature Holistically
Discovering how a genuinely holistic perspective affects our thinking with respect to every aspect of environmental concern.

(Three day non-residential, Cape Town, August 2011)

Once again with The Proteus Initiative hosting, in the heart of Cape Town Craig Holdrege worked with botanists, environmentalists, environmental educators and social activists to achieve a real grasp of the meaning of ‘holistic’, and what it may imply to work holistically with respect to nature, the environment or on culture itself. Craig’s grasp of the nature of living process, of living ways of thinking and seeing, and of the nature of both holism and the importance of context, yields new possibilities for thinking about ecology and ecological responses to our current environmental challenges and dilemmas. Craig’s mastery works across and unites the boundaries of the natural sciences, offering an interdisciplinary, rigorous and living way of seeing the kingdom of Nature each time as if for the first time.

Cape Town offered a magnificent variety of possibilities for this process. The workshop was held at Kirstenbosch, as well as on various walks on the Cape Peninsula, where participants were able to observe plants in context.
 
Are we on the Right Track?
A Conversation around the dangers of impact assessment and evaluation

(A one-week residential, Cape Town, November 2010)

The Proteus Initiative facilitated a conversation amongst a group of southern African NGO leaders, under the auspices of EED. This conversation centred around the conundrums of evaluation for development interventions. In the event, it was a remarkably fruitful meeting which enabled a nuanced and alternative perspective to emerge concerning this contested terrain. A paper entitled The Singer not the Song – The Vexed Questions of Impact Monitoring and Social Change, by Allan Kaplan and Sue Davidoff was written as a result of this conversation. It is a very strong paper that talks to the concerns of all those concerned with development interventions, the politics and practice of evaluation, the development industry, and capacity building.
 
Standing at a Crossroads: Appropriate Action for Challenging Times
A Conversation held at Towerland in October 2010

This Conversation, facilitated by the Proteus Initiative, attracted an international group of participants from India, England, Canada, America, Mozambique, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia. It was a rich weaving of our collective stories and explorations around the responsibility we carry towards ourselves, one another, and the Earth, into the future in both our actions and our understanding. The unfolding narrative of the conversation enabled the participants to articulate and rediscover a return to ourselves … that all actions begin and end with each of us. And that if we can be present to ourselves, present to the moment, pay attention to what lives in and around us, we can begin to find responses that are healing and life-supporting. However far we have stretched in any direction, each turn deepened the sense of self that we – of necessity – must carry into the future. This is what these “challenging times” are asking of us. Each turning is a movement towards ourselves, and each turning simultaneously embraces a deeper understanding of and compassion for our world.
 
Reading from Nature
A workshop held at Towerland in October 2010

This workshop enabled a quality of intense and earnest engagement with nature, with community, and with one another. Exercises were designed to enable participants to penetrate deeper and deeper into their own experiences and understandings of themselves, their inner processes, and the living world around them. The process revealed that the more we were able to be open to this extraordinary process of aliveness, the more we were able to be open to ourselves and to one another. And so while there is the recognition that on a physical and practical level, we are entirely interdependent with nature, we also discovered – each person in their own way – that our very relationship with nature and our ability to see into the heart of nature as it is in its process of becoming, enriches and deepens our respect – and reverence – for one another and for all of life. This, of course, has profound implications for how we walk into the world … not necessarily merely by becoming more responsible citizens mitigating against climate change, but discovering that the underlying energy in nature that gives rise to – or is generating – everything that we see around us, is invisible. So too in the social world. Forces of change are invisible. What does this mean in terms of how we ‘intervene’ in the social world? What kind of ‘new activism’ are we looking towards? What are the implications for how we relate to one another, how we hold our consciousness towards forces of healing, of making whole? For what we encountered was the indivisible wholeness of nature, which also lives in the realm of the social. When we begin to know this – from the inside out – then we learn to work with these social processes in ways which are congruent with supporting their unfolding processes of becoming.