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4. Inner Transition

Transition in Totnes started with a bang, in the form of an official ‘unleashing’ event. A longer process, facilitated by a small organising group, nonetheless preceded that event. The aim of that earlier awareness-raising stage was to spread the concerns prompted by the inaugural focus of Transition on peak oil and man-made climate change. Already during that process, it was possible to witness the incipient moving of Transition differentiate into kindred streams of activity set off in response to that initial disquiet. In other words, from its very start, the phenomenon of Transition began proliferating into a growing range of experiential possibilities.

One early concern that prompted internal differentiation within Transition stemmed from the gloomy/fatalist outlook on the human condition that seemed to surface whenever the scenario of peak oil would be introduced. This outlook would emerge from suggestions, for instance, that Transition might be ‘well and good’, but people would not change unless they were forced to. In response to observations such as these – suggesting an understanding of human nature whereby fear could be the only effective motivator to spark change – a group of psychological practitioners from Totnes were tipped into getting involved. They brought with them an aspiration to develop Transition so as to address dilemmas that were related – albeit occurring on a slightly different dimension – to the initial concerns about survival from peak oil. It is interesting to follow this incipient differentiation of Transition closely. This is because the point of engagement for these psychological practitioners was not so much a willingness to ‘add’ to Transition something it lacked, which would mean falling back into a summative approach to deconstructing a whole that holds together in inextricable fashion. Instead, it was as though they felt that there was an aspect of Transition that needed to be made explicit; a distinctive quality that needed dedicated tending to, to really make itself present. In this sense, Inner Transition stands out as an instance of differentiation and self-specification of an expansive form of life that discloses new folds from within itself, as opposed to the addition of previously unrelated and separately existing ingredients. This important nuance is conveyed in the written account offered by one member of that initial group of practitioners, which it is worth quoting at length:

[C]ould it be the case that a shift in consciousness and values, an emotional literacy, and some spiritual inspiration were already implicit in the very arising of the transition movement? To me, that was clearly the case.

There was, for example, a moving beyond our collective denial that fossil fuels will peak and decline, that climate change results from our use of them and must urgently be addressed, and that economic growth can be infinite on a finite planet. Facing difficult truths and rising to meet them with a positive vision is perhaps one hallmark of inner work. There was a strong emphasis on the positive, on coming together as a community, and on dreaming out a vision for the future that would support human and other than human life, based not on greed, inequality, power-over or increasing material wealth, but on practicality, sharing, creativity, and celebration. The implicit values, in short, were not other than those embraced by spiritual teachings throughout the world.1

Prentice completes her account thus:

[M]uch of how business was conducted had clearly been influenced by various ways ‘inner work’ has come into culture. Meetings were often begun with sharing ‘go-rounds’, for example, or silence. Creative, open formats for events such as ‘world café’ [...] or ‘open space technology’ [...] were often used.2

It seems, from Prentice’s words, that certain practices and discourses that gave form to the incipient moving of Transition resonated with a group of individuals who were acquainted with them from within the wider milieu of ‘inner work’. To reiterate my initial point, therefore, the spiralling of Transition from a focus on ‘outer’ strategies for change to one also on ‘inner’ work need not so much be looked at as an addition, but rather as the bringing forth and explicit naming of a quality that had been brewing all along.

At this point, an analytic orientation towards Transition might then demand a definition of what ‘inner work’ or ‘inner change’ means. What is, in other words, the ‘inner’ in Inner Transition? (‘Inner Transition’ being the designation that accompanies the appearance of Transition into this yet-to-be-defined domain of experience.) My suggestion here is to sidestep the urge to cling to something as hard as a definition. In my own meandering through Inner Transition I have found that questions of definition mattered little to my ability to engage effectively with it. Instead, I find it easier to begin with a foray into the uses of the word ‘Inner Transition’ that I came across. This is because my conversations with various interviewees disclosed an interesting flexibility. ‘Inner Transition’ was widely understood to be more than just the name of a dedicated workgroup within the Transition initiative. Instead, it is also the quality displayed by a person – an ‘Inner Transition-type’ of person – or by an activity, as an ‘Inner Transition-type’ activity. The flexible and metaphorical character of this term demands therefore a different approach if we want to get a sense of what sets of experiences and possibilities for engagement ‘Inner Transition’ directs our attention to.

A sample of the inclinations that seem to matter for the purpose of denoting an ‘Inner Transition-type’ person are offered once again by Prentice, who describes the audience of Inner Transition initiatives as comprising of:

Counsellors, Buddhists, ecopsychologists, dance and movement teachers, people who have dealt with trauma and difficulty in their lives and in one way or another found resource in inner work and inner growth, Christians, atheists, psychotherapists, pagans, meditators and teachers of meditation, addiction workers, Quakers, coaches, psychoanalysts, social workers, teachers, poets, facilitators, mediators, people learning about nonviolent communication, a teacher of native American spirituality, teachers and practitioners of ‘mindfulness’, practitioners of T’ai Chi, Chi Gong, and Yoga, women who’ve been part of consciousness raising groups in the womens [sic] movement, people who run workshops on healing difficulties between men and women, interfaith ministers, someone from an alternative to violence project working in prisons – and even our very own Professor of Consciousness!3

Equally interesting is the final disclaimer, whereby ‘of course this is not really about what job you may do, and everyone who is interested is welcome’.4 What this shows is that the list serves purely to give an orienting sense of people’s inclinations that may make them receptive and capable of resonating with the thrust of Inner Transition, without wanting to close that list down to a definition.5 Ironically, this list also embraces a number of attachments I hold, which I would describe as relevant to developing my own curiosity for Inner Transition: a vivid interest in ecopsychology, and in embodied practices to connect experientially with the environment, as well as an incipient engagement as a poet inspired by the Dark Mountain project6 are the ones that most readily come to mind.

An open-ended collection of the sort proposed by Prentice is enough to provide readers with an idea of what types of affiliations ‘Inner Transition’ may hint towards as embodiments of ‘inner work’. I do concede that this will appear vague. However, the very tentativeness of the orientation through which it becomes possible to navigate Inner Transition should perhaps be viewed less as a shortcoming (of academic analysis) and more as a necessary quality of the process of negotiating an emerging field of experience, without rushing too soon to wedge one’s own definitional cuts.

What does Inner Transition do?

The unfolding of Transition in the realm of ‘inner work’ or ‘inner change’ is one of the most under-described aspects of the moving of Transition,7 yet one of the most telling in order to grasp its shape shifting character. As it was anticipated earlier, Inner Transition denotes, in a stricter sense, the name of a dedicated steering group inside Transition initiatives (other names that have been adopted are ‘Heart and Soul’ or ‘Spirit of Transition’).8 In a wider sense of the expression, however, it points to a wide sea of practices and attachments – ‘Inner Transition-type’ things – and it entrenches an openness and inclination, in the moving of Transition, to draw on these cultural resources.

In so doing, Inner Transition – by drawing a richer gamut of experiences into the emerging culture of Transition – occasions a significant difference in its appearing. This difference comes with the challenge of unearthing its kinship to the moving of Transition as a whole, so as to make Inner Transition an opening through which Transition becomes accessible and navigable across its many folds, as opposed to engendering fragmentation and disconnection. To this end, Prentice’s statements quoted above reveal how Inner Transition was borne out of an aspiration to make explicit particular dispositions and potentialities that could be implicitly seen at work in the incipient moving of Transition. Hence, Inner Transition can be viewed as a response to the need for developing dedicated cultural resources through which to give a standing to a variety of practical pursuits within Transition. At the same time, it faces the challenge of finding a fit with the other streams of activity that give shape to the phenomenon of Transition. This challenge is expressed lucidly by Prentice, who suggests that ‘probably because there has been a division in Western culture between inner and outer, and therefore inner- and outer-focused people, there has been on occasion some confusion about what a group such as Heart and Soul can contribute to Transition’.9

This problem is easier to grasp, once we understand how Inner Transition, by its very name, demarcates an ‘outer’ Transition, setting up an opposition that can divide as much as it can relate. When we focus on its oppositional quality vis-à-vis an ‘outer’ Transition, we can tease out the latter’s meaning – in common parlance – as entailing a change in material attachments (for example, in terms of the food one eats or the currency one spends) by some objective measure of achievement with a view to obtaining tangible results towards the goal of managing peak oil and climate change.10 The ‘outer’, in this sense, is distant from the ‘inner’. In Prentice’s words, however, this dichotomy seems to become less of a border and more of an inextricable, co-created fractal edge: ‘the outer creates the inner, and the inner creates the outer’.11 Inner Transition holds the promise of inextricably blending the two poles: ‘in coming together, we [work] to heal divisions and “splits” that may well be at the root of the mess we are in’.12 In other words, the language of inner and outer references a tradition of reasoning about experience – partitioning between a material and an immaterial, or a collective/political and a personal/spiritual – that Inner Transition seeks to blur by revealing, alongside its own specific difference, also the intrinsic relatedness to all other streams of activity that contribute to Transition’s moving.

The tradition of partitioning the world between a ‘secular’ and a ‘religious’ or spiritual dimension is, after all, one that has a long and troubled history, which is deconstructed critically, for example, by Timothy Fitzgerald.13 While I do not wish to enter into this academic debate here, I mention it because it provides a context to some of the dividing lines that Prentice herself points out, such as between ‘science and technology (outer focused) and religion and the humanities (inner focused)’.14 This split between outer and inner, with the latter risking to be portrayed as ‘airy-fairy’ or a waste of time, is reflected in some of the variations adopted in the naming of groups within Transition initiatives, with ‘Well-being’ or – indeed – Inner Transition being preferred to ‘Heart and Soul’, ‘perhaps feeling that the words “heart” and “soul” might be contentious’,15 because of their connection to the ‘dismal’ realm of spirituality and religion. The moving of Transition across this divide is clearly one that creates resistance and some difficulty: ‘there are hotly contested views, and strong feelings, around spirituality in particular. [...] From this point of view, allowing any spiritual presence within your movement could be seen as asking for trouble’.16

While acknowledging this challenge, Inner Transition equally weaves into the moving of Transition a dimension of experience that ought not to be censored out of prejudice, as long as its expression can happen tactfully: ‘For many people, spirituality can be explicit as well as implicit, and their spiritual life is central to their personal resilience. If we are to be inclusive, it is perhaps necessary both that no one in any sense ‘pushes’ his or her spiritual approach, but, equally, that this whole area of human experience is not unwelcome’.17

More generally, this inclusion is deemed one that can ultimately provide further momentum to the moving of Transition, as ‘the qualities that [Transition] calls forth – a move from materialism to values such as community, care, love and creativity; from arrogance and inequality to compassion – are the very stuff that spirituality was always meant to be about in the first place’.18 In other words, one could infer that Inner Transition gives a standing into the moving of Transition to the cultivation of embodied or discursive practices through which subjects are created, for whom it will be easier to resonate with the other concerns existing in the folds of Transition. Thus, to someone that has received some exposure to discursive and embodied traditions (such as shamanism or ecopsychology) that give a voice to the experience of connection with the other-than-human presences in an ecosystem, the practice of gardening or foraging can be a further validation of those attachments, providing them with greater coherence and resonance across the individual’s experience of his or her life.19

Another way of articulating the constitutive relatedness of Inner Transition to the moving of Transition as a whole is by focusing on the engagement it supports with discursive and material practices, ‘that are expected to generate ethical forms of conduct’.20 If we understand ethics not so much as the hiatus between what ought to be and what is, but rather as a process that is facilitated by particular relations in our lives,21 then we can begin to craft our understanding of Inner Transition along similar lines. This is perhaps easier to grasp by thinking back at instances where one might have been told by one’s parent to stay away from ‘bad company’. The parent’s concern for the connections through which his/her child experiences sociality reflects a folk understanding of moral behaviour as something that is furthered and facilitated by particular relations, beyond an individual’s atomistic acts of will: the life-world we inhabit defines us as much as we think we construct it through our actions. In recalling his studies on deviance, Becker equally observes how seemingly ‘radical’ choices and behaviours become acceptable after a step-wise process of building tighter attachments to a particular cultural milieu, so that a biological man does not simply wake up and decide to undergo a sex change, but that decision is one that matures after exposure to literatures, formal and informal mentors, the trappings of life lived ‘as a woman’, and so on.22

In much the same way, Inner Transition seems to rest on this understanding of ethical behaviour as a problem of facilitation, rather than compliance. Through what attachments can people gather the ability to follow and flow with the moving of Transition (not just intellectually, but through embodied resonance and felt connection)? Inner Transition, in revealing the relatedness to that moving of forms of corporeality and discourses that would otherwise risk being overlooked, enhances the possibility for individuals to surround themselves with ‘Transition things’, making the moving of Transition more tangible and inclusive.

‘Inner work’: implicit and explicit

The dynamism involved in the effort to weave ‘outer’ into ‘inner’ Transition and vice versa (so as not to turn incipient difference into an unbridgeable rift) is reflected in the frenzy of different experiments sparked by this ongoing tension.

‘Inner Transition-type’ activities in a Transition initiative have sometimes involved the direct cultivation of ‘inner practices’. This can entail, for instance, sessions or gatherings based on ‘The Work That Reconnects’. This is a set of practices that have been popularised by activist and writer Joanna Macy in a book with Molly Brown.23 In that book, they outline various activities, rituals and exercises to cultivate particular sensitivities and inclinations in a conscious manner and bring these to our relating in the world. In the authors’ own words, the Work That Reconnects aims to address the following aspirations:

• to provide people the opportunity to experience and share with others their innermost responses to the present condition of our world

• to reframe their pain for the world as evidence of their interconnectedness in the web of life, and hence of their power to take part in its healing

• to provide people with concepts – from systems science, deep ecology, or spiritual traditions – which illumine this power, along with exercises which reveal its play in their own lives

• to provide methods by which people can experience their interdependence with, their responsibility to, and the inspiration they can draw from past and future generations, and other life-forms

• to enable people to embrace the Great Turning[24] as a challenge which they are fully capable of meeting in a variety of ways, and as a privilege in which they can take joy

• to enable people to support each other in clarifying their intention, and affirming their commitment to the healing of the world.25

To give a better sense of what a space directed at the explicit cultivation of Work That Reconnects practices ‘feels’ like, a brief anecdote may help. When I arrived in Totnes, the Inner Transition group was meeting around significant seasonal transitions (the solstice and equinox). The one meeting I did attend was held to match the Autumn Equinox, and the passage from summer to autumn. On that occasion, participants sitting in a circle were encouraged to introduce themselves by focusing on their own connection to the changing seasons, and express gratitude for what the summer had brought to them. In my own experience as an academic practicing a moderately sedentary, indoors lifestyle, seasons tend to be marked by the beginning and end of teaching terms, by the adoption of daylight-saving time, and the general sleepiness that sets on as days get shorter and colder, getting in the way of sustained academic work. Other participants, however, offered a number of observations stemming from their own experiences of growing an allotment, describing in detail relationships with plants and animals. Upon hearing these accounts, I was confronted with a novel perspective on what the change of seasons could mean, which therefore offered an opportunity to conceive a different form of relating to the season’s passing. Subsequently, the circle split into pairs, taking turns listening to each other respond to a prompt about what one was harvesting in his/her life at the turn of seasons.

Both of these exercises are described by Joanna Macy. In the first case, the sharing circle is meant to help a ‘coming from gratitude’, establishing a ‘wholesome, generative ground for all that follows’,26 as well as to allow the surfacing of ‘our pain for the world, because knowing what we treasure triggers the knowing of how threatened it is’.27 The second type of exercise, centred on active listening, is described under the heading of ‘despair work’, and aims to ‘uncover our pain for the world, and honour it. We bring to awareness our deep inner responses to the suffering of our fellow beings and the progressive destruction of the natural world, our larger body. These responses include dread, rage, sorrow, and guilt. They are healthy and inevitable – and usually blocked by the pressures of daily life and fear of being overwhelmed by despair. Now, in this first stage of the Work that Reconnects, they are allowed to surface without shame or apology’.28

Facilitating an environment where certain noticings can be articulated in a supportive setting enables the development of a shared language to discuss these, to develop familiarity with them, and ultimately to begin engaging these presences in terms of their implication for action. In a way, this is precisely the task that Joanna Macy envisages for the practices she devised, namely to nurture sensitivities that help to recognise, articulate and respond to issues that may not be able to find expression in the settings and the conversations that people may be accustomed to, outside of the sharing group.

On the other hand, however, this particular setup for ‘Inner Transition-type’ explorations does not necessarily sit well with everyone. Among the criticism I have gathered is the therapy-like focus that seems to arise in the group, when undertaking Work That Reconnects exercises of the sort I have just described. Not everyone, in fact, is a fan of exercises that stress linguistic engagement, which may be reminiscent to him/her of collective psychotherapy.29 At times, this particular focus may equally play a role in restricting the audience to an older demographic, so that younger participants may drift towards different offerings. On another front, the Work That Reconnects is just one type of embodied and ritual practice. There are many others that one can think of, from direct experiential participation in the outdoors to yoga and dance to a maze of healing practices. In this sense, it is also the case that, to participants invested in one or the other of these different forms of practice, Inner Transition meetings that are facilitated using the Work that Reconnects may not feel very engaging, and they may drift instead towards the myriad of other offerings constellating beyond the Inner Transition group. In fact, ‘Inner Transition-type’ practices are cultivated explicitly also outside of Inner Transition groups. So it is the case, for instance, that in Totnes a number of individuals – while active as ‘Inner Transition-type’ people – would not necessarily partake in the group meetings I just described. As I mentioned, these can sometimes be limited by demographics they tend to appeal to (with attendees being older) or by the type of engagement being confined to a discursive, therapy-like atmosphere, or by leaning more towards a particular ritual practice. For this reason, ‘Inner Transition-type’ explorations equally live in a variety of other settings and gatherings that constellate the hinterland of the Inner Transition group, in the related milieu of ‘inner work’. A case in point is the weekly 5Rhythms dancing class in Totnes. 5Rhythms is a style of free form dancing, where participants discover movement and improvisation as they are taken through five different types of rhythm. In 5Rhythms, as I was able to experience, there is no real connection with words, but – as one interviewee mentioned to me – the common engagement in this collective practice is enough to build a sense of together-ness, to conjure a ‘holding space’. And in that space, at the end of one such session, participants gathered in a circle can share both impressions from the bodily journey they have undertaken together, and events that may be of interest to what quite intuitively appears as a community of like-minded people.

For others, like myself, the structure imposed by timed speaking and listening exercises in the Inner Transition meeting felt somewhat counterproductive to authentic interpersonal connection. Although this impression might have to do with the fact that I had already stumbled upon the same exercises in a number of different settings, hence it might disclose a measure of weariness from my own repeated exposure: the first few times, on the contrary, there can be a sense of something deeply liberating. Finally, not everyone may resonate with a group setting, or be comfortable engaging in practices that are explicitly designed to shift people’s sensibilities by nurturing an alternative embodied and linguistic apparatus for relating to the others (and nonhuman othernesses) we encounter and depend upon.

In sum, an explicit focus on change through conscious group practice may put some people off, by virtue of being too close to a ‘spiritual’ practice, which I mean in the sense eloquently offered to me by one interviewee, as a ‘a conscious and regular attempt to make meaning of your life and take responsibility for your emotions in the way you experience them’. To individuals that are, willingly or unwillingly, more invested in the split between ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ (sometimes accompanied by the prejudice that the latter only is worth of concern), a space constituted precisely to make room for the conscious cultivation of an alternative embodied and emotional literacy of the sort just described may be too ‘airy-fairy’ for comfort, and for letting go into the ways of this collective practice.

It would be a mistake, however, to identify ‘Inner Transition’ solely with offerings of this sort, namely with the conscious cultivation of embodied and discursive orientations, in gatherings convened explicitly for this purpose. Much as was the case with permaculture, where the relational qualities and attitudes it articulated explicitly got a new lease on life inside Transition in a Trojan horse-like way after lowering the threshold of engagement, so, perhaps the same happens with practices of ‘inner work’, of which the Work That Reconnects is but the tip of the iceberg.

Indeed, it is the case that some experiments with ‘inner work’ have a life within Transition, without being explicitly framed as such. This different form of engagement is expressed in the activity of curating ‘process input’ to Transition events, seeking to establish a ‘highly participatory style’30 in the way these are run and facilitated. Alternatively, Inner Transition practices have also tended to be woven in what is called ‘Transition Training’, namely an introduction to Transition for activists who are either engaged or willing to start a Transition initiative. In an interview with Sophy Banks, one of the original contributors to the articulation of Inner Transition and to the development of the Transition Training programme, she explained that what Transition training days seek to achieve is to give a sense of Transition as a change process. As such, there is a focus on bringing together the ‘outer’ aspects (e.g. the re-visioning and transforming of ‘physical systems for living’),31 with the psychological, ‘inner’ aspects of that change. The weaving together of this multi-directional awareness yields an attunement to the dynamics of ‘parallel process’,32 in the sense that the patterns of resistance observable outside of oneself or one’s group can often replicate themselves within the group or the individual, and therefore demand a response, lest causing a loss of consistency and fittingness between the practical goals of the group, and the ‘process’ whereby those goals are to be achieved. This explicit formulation of the problem of ‘fit’ between ends and means,33 which in turn prompts a search for appropriate ways of addressing it in the everyday of Transition, appears to be another very significant – if ‘implicit’ – manifestation of Inner Transition inside the moving of Transition as a whole.

It is in close connection with these concerns, for instance, that Inner Transition is a designation that can therefore apply to the adoption of ‘effective meeting’ techniques. These can involve having a check-in at the start of each meeting, to make sure that everyone in the room is feeling willing and able to engage on the topic, and are not overly absorbed by something else they may need to attend to instead. Another example is the scheduling of ‘doing’, agenda-led meetings, as well as ‘being’ meetings. These are not about achieving a particular resolution or decision, but simply facilitated spaces where conversation and conscious examination of the ‘process’ of working together, of the life of the group as a group, becomes possible. Such spaces may be held in a variety of ways, from the use of a talking stick (whereby a stick goes around and whoever holds the stick is given a space to voice and share concerns and disquiets), or through appreciative inquiry (a practice of focusing on instances of previous successes for finding new ways of relating to a problem that surfaces to attention), or by experimenting with ways of dealing with conflict. One more innovation can be the practice of having, alongside a person in charge of sticking to the agenda, a ‘keeper of time’ (to ensure that the meeting is held in the stated timeframe) and a ‘keeper of the heart’ which – in my understanding of it – is someone in charge of ensuring that no one is feeling unfairly excluded from the conversation, and is given a chance to be heard and to feel a meaningful participant.

In this sense, Inner Transition, perched between its continuity (to the unfolding of Transition) and the specific difference of ‘inner work’ (as opposed to practical, hands-on, ‘outer’ work), exists under many forms and – like permaculture – is sometimes implicit in the life of Transition, rather than explicit. The variety of expressions and experiments pertaining to Inner Transition allows to lower the threshold for gaining an awareness of the importance of ‘inner work’, making sure that people from as broad a background of inclinations as possible may be able to connect with some of the qualities that Inner Transition amplifies. This became intensely evident to me when, at the end of a meeting of the Totnes Pound working group (hence squarely in the realm of ‘outer’ Transition), a conversation took place, where the ‘process’ of the meeting was scrutinised in the light of a growing awareness of the importance of the subtle qualities of interaction as a group. More specifically, the need was raised to make sure that the style of working together would respond not merely to the immediate challenge which the working group was meeting to address (tending to a complementary currency scheme), but also to the other animating concerns pushing the development of Transition (such as to nurture empathy and care, as a way for Transitioners to ‘resource themselves’ while doing their work) so as to enable resonance across the range of realms of experience that are simultaneously enfolded in its moving. Inner Transition, in that exchange, manifested itself to me as a qualitatively prominent area of engagement that was being made recognisable and woven into the moving of Transition, starting from something as seemingly simple and commonplace as how to hold a ‘mindful’ meeting.

Along similar lines, the quality of being ‘Inner Transition-type’ can be equally recognised in another project called Transition Streets.34 Transition Streets was an attempt to facilitate the meeting of neighbours living in the same area, by offering them a blueprint of questions that could be of common concern. It drew inspiration from an earlier project that had been developed with Inner Transition input, where a large event set in motion a number of self-facilitating ‘home groups’ trying ‘to share information about the need for transition’.35 In a similar fashion, Transition Streets endeavoured to bring people living in the same neighbourhood together to discuss everyday problems, such as how to save money on heating or water. As groups worked their way through a programme of weekly topics for discussion, more lifestyle-related issues were introduced – such as in terms of food consumption and transport decisions – bringing the focus closer to routines that would be relevant to the issues of climate change and peak oil. By giving groups something to talk about, to which anyone could connect, a collective process of relating was set in motion. As part of this process, people became embroiled in group-dynamics through which to explore the implications of a deepening awareness of peak oil and climate change for their everyday practical choices. This is another example of how practices like group awareness-raising and the facilitation of peer support, which bear some lineage to the ‘inner work’ of Inner Transition, have become inextricably entwined into the wider mesh of projects that constellate the moving of Transition as a whole, and are often focal aspects of interventions initiated also outside of the purview of Inner Transition groups.

As is the case with gardening groups discussed in ch. 3, Transition Streets curates pre-formed, ‘furnished’ spaces, where people can experience conviviality and neighbourliness as a collateral aspect of tending to a particular practice or material attachment (such as working through the talking points outlined in a booklet). Moreover, by facilitating the experience of being in a group as part of a lightly assembled setting, this makes it possible that people will take on more of an inclination to engage in groups again in the future, building on the confidence earned from previous experiences: this is how ‘sociable’ subjectivities are nurtured. In addition, by creating individuals that take the risk to be together with others, the need can be felt for a ‘Transition’ culture of acting together, offering discursive and embodied practices to use and bring into that realm of experience. In other words, incipiently assembled spaces of interaction, where people are brought together in order to do something practical they can connect to in advance, can serve to entangle one in relationships that are there to be leveraged again when support may be needed in other respects as well. Further, the deeper the involvement in a community of shared concern(s), the greater the chance that an interest arises into the process of relating itself, and questions be asked of it (such as about the consistency of ends with means) that nudge one closer to the focus of Inner Transition.36

Conclusion

Inner Transition is perhaps best understood as yet a work in progress: one having to do with disclosing continuity across the difference between ‘inner work’ and ‘outer change’. This is a process that, like all experiments, unfolds by attempts. On the one hand, one finds endeavours to bring ‘inner work’ directly within Transition, such as by organising sessions and meetings where practices – such as the Work that Reconnects – can be cultivated explicitly. On the other hand, this is a pathway that has its limits, in that certain practices may resonate more with particular demographics, differentiated by age group, or by ‘spiritual’ (or secular) persuasion. This seems to carry ‘inner work’ only so far in the moving of Transition. Stumbling blocks, however, are part of the process and, in many of the conversations I held, there seems to be a very clear sense that the focus in Transition on ‘process’ and ‘inner work’ is one of the reasons that enthused several among those I interviewed. Even if they are not necessarily involved in the Inner Transition group, they may disclose various degrees of vicinity to ‘Inner Transition-type’ activities, and everyone seems to reiterate the importance of what Inner Transition ‘holds’ for the moving of Transition as a whole.

Moreover, alongside spaces for the explicit, conscious cultivation of alternative forms of embodiment and discursive self-understandings, Inner Transition is also about (implicit) openings where ‘inner work’ transpires in the process of focusing attention to the subtle negotiations and motions involved in the practice of relating to one another. This translates in a degree of reflexivity (for instance the reflection at the end of the Totnes Pound meeting described earlier) about the extent to which the functioning of Transition groups and initiatives expresses itself through forms of relating that honour a concern for the importance of ‘inner work’. The making explicit of this concern, I suggest, is a distinctive signpost of the space of Inner Transition. Another instance of Inner Transition practices surfacing in other activities not explicitly connected to an Inner Transition group is the case of Transition Streets. As part of that project, ‘holding’ spaces were developed, where the raising of awareness around common concerns could take place in the support of a peer group that can act as a catalyst for attempting lifestyle changes (such as in terms of transport or travel). In all these ‘implicit’ ways, Inner Transition manages to lower the threshold for gaining some awareness of the importance of being mindful to the nuances of relating to each other in the process of addressing shared concerns.

The relatedness of ‘inner work’ to the moving of Transition as a whole seems, to me, to have been best articulated by Sophy Banks who, in an interview, explained:

In Transition the two things absolutely go together. We come together and do stuff, and out of that we get a different experience of community and a new sense of ourselves in the context of our culture. And when we reflect on that, you know, we see the next thing that needs doing.

In my reading of it, this appears like a suggestion that the concern for cultivating new self-understandings, forms of embodiment and practices of relating emerges almost organically from the engagements that happen in the doing of ‘Transition things’. And as this concern becomes recognisable, so can various offerings and experiments, which are available to help tend to this emergent interest, begin to disclose a new fold – Inner Transition – continuous with the moving of Transition as a whole.