Radical Hope#8: Your Inner Coherence Changes the Field
You are a body that thinks.
You are nature.
You are the field of awareness in which everything happens.
You have a regular practice where you return home to systems consciousness
Then, after your practice session, you return to a world that has chaos.
Perhaps you are lucky enough to live in a family or community which is safe and peaceful.
Yet there is chaos and destruction in the larger system around all of us.
This is the eighth newsletter in a series called From Generative Practice to Radical Hope. I am exploring why deep personal development — somatic, psychological, contemplative — is not a retreat from the polycrisis but the very ground from which genuine engagement becomes possible.
Last time we explored awareness — the field of consciousness that holds all experience without being changed by it. This week we return from that ground to a world still in disorder.
Later in this series we will explore the actions you can take to make the world a better place.
First: how your own inner coherence changes the world.
Awareness is never merely private. It acts on the field around you.
A few years ago I was walking in North London. Across the road, traffic was heavy, and a motorcyclist was overtaking down the middle of the line of cars. A woman stepped off the far pavement, looking right for oncoming traffic — but the motorcycle was coming from her left. It knocked her down. She lay in the road in pain, with what turned out to be a broken leg.
The motorcyclist got off his bike, and an angry passer-by began pushing and punching him.
I felt my own stress rise, a kind of hypervigilance coming over me. Then I settled back into my centre — my hara (腹) — and dropped my hips. From that grounded place I saw a gap open between the aggressor and the motorcyclist. I stepped into it, perhaps ten inches, turned calmly to the aggressor and said: “Mate, the police are already on their way. If you continue, you’ll be arrested.” He kept shouting — now at me — but I stayed present and relaxed. Slowly his energy dissipated. I went on about my business.
Walking back down the street later, I found a policeman interviewing passers-by, and I told him what I’d seen of the accident. He looked at me and said, “You’re the man I saw on the CCTV — the one who stood between the passer-by and the motorcyclist.” And he gave me a smile of recognition.
I hadn’t done anything except find my centre and stay in it — and the violence in the field lost its charge.
There is an old story that says this better than I can.
The Rainmaker
There was a village in northern China where the land had gone dry. Not just the soil — the people too. Their breath was tight, their sleep thin, their tempers brittle. The fields had stopped listening. The sky had stopped answering.
Every remedy had been tried. Prayers rose like smoke. Rituals were performed with earnest hands. Still, the air remained locked.
At last they sent for an old man from a distant province — a man spoken of quietly, as one who carried a certain inner weather.
When he arrived, he did not diagnose, instruct, or perform. He simply stood in the dust, feeling the place with the same attention one gives to a pulse beneath the fingertips.
Then he said:
“Build me a small hut. Leave me alone.”
So they built it on the edge of the village — that in‑between place that was neither inside the disturbed field nor fully outside it. And he entered. And the door closed.
Inside that hut, he did no magic. He did not summon clouds. He did not pray for rain.
He sat with himself until the agitation of the village stopped vibrating inside him. Until his breath found its natural rhythm. Until the inner and outer worlds were no longer at odds.
Three days passed.
On the fourth day, the sky softened. Clouds gathered. Rain — or in some tellings, snow — fell with the quiet authority of something remembering itself.
When they asked him how he had done it, the old man answered with the simplicity of someone describing a fact of nature:
“I did nothing. When I arrived, I found the situation out of order. And because I entered it, I too fell out of order. So I withdrew until I was again in harmony. When I was restored, the natural order returned of itself.”
There is a principle here, therapeutic and also true of life more widely: one cannot intervene effectively from a state of inner disturbance. The first task is to restore one’s own psychological equilibrium. When this occurs, the wider relational field may reorganise spontaneously. The story is a demonstration of systemic coherence — how local restoration of order can propagate through a larger system.¹
The Rainmaker story shows this principle in human form: one person restoring their own inner order, and the wider field reorganising around them.
There are really two key steps here.
First, let’s learn to walk around the world in coherent presence. It makes a difference.
Take my local café, where I often have soup at lunchtime. I know everyone’s names, including the cooks, and I talk to them about the food. Sometimes they bring it to my table themselves rather than passing it to the waiting staff. The other day one of the cooks turned round and shouted “Bye Julian” — and eight other members of staff turned round smiling and shouted “bye” too. When you are resonantly connected, small acts of warmth have a positive impact on the field.
Secondly, when we get disturbed by the field, how quickly can we bring ourselves back into harmony with ourselves?
When we enter a situation where there is disorder, or unspoken disruptive energy in the field, we may get affected by it.
We can feel it, notice it, include it, bring compassion to the emotion, and return to coherence.
This self-compassion is the Holding or Hospitable in the Dilts and Gilligan COACH field model — Centred, Open, Aware, Connected, Holding/Hospitable. (2)
When Nelson Mandela was sentenced to over twenty-seven years in prison, he worked steadily to restore his own inner alignment — not by suppressing anger or hurt, but by learning to hold them without being governed by them. From that coherence, he built relationships with the prison guards, even learning Afrikaans to understand the worldview of the men who controlled his daily life. (3) Years later he became the stabilising figure the country’s transition needed: a man who had preserved his moral fire while cultivating the steadiness required to hold a fractured nation, and to take the first steps toward what he called the “rainbow nation.” (4)
Mandela was the right person in the right place at the right time to have a massive impact. For the rest of us, we can be satisfied with our little rainmaker moments.
The Rainmaker principle is everyday work: staying centred enough to stay in relationship.
Coherence in practice means meeting disturbance without absorbing it, so relationship remains possible — even across sharp difference.
This morning in the local vegetable shop, a man in the queue said “America has been invaded by Israel.” When I asked what he meant, he said 85% of the United States Congress were (in his words) “Jewish Israelis”. I managed to hold this in myself and said “well, American Jews give a lot of money to lobby groups and that is legal. And I bet you are mistaken about the number of Jews in Congress. Let’s both check the facts when we get home.” He agreed. I managed to stay in relationship with him, managed my feelings, made an invitation. As soon as I got home, I checked the figures, and there are 35 Jewish members out of 535 in the United States Congress, approximately 6.5% of the total. (5) I don’t know whether he will go and check the data, or whether our conversation will change anything, but at least I stayed in relationship and didn’t reinforce his prejudice, nor did I silently ignore it, and perhaps our interaction might seed something in the future. Who knows?
The Rainmaker story is also supported by science.
Coherent presence can tip the whole field towards order
Ilya Prigogine, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, revealed that living systems — ecological, social, psychological — maintain themselves through dynamic flow, not static equilibrium. But when a system is pushed far from its usual range of balance, it becomes exquisitely sensitive. Small inputs that would normally be absorbed can suddenly matter.
When the old pattern can no longer hold, the system enters a threshold state: unstable, hypersensitive, and open to reorganisation — not yet broken, not yet renewed.
In this zone, breakdown and breakthrough sit side by side. This is why a far-from-equilibrium system can tip toward higher coherence rather than collapse, and why a small, well-timed perturbation — a shift in rhythm, a restored centre of gravity, a single coherent presence — can reorganise the whole field. (6)
The organisational development consultant Margaret Wheatley shows how this plays out in human groups: order emerges from relationships, from patterns of interaction, from the quality of attention people bring to one another. Instability is not failure. A single person who is grounded, open, and present can change the dynamics of a room. The smallest coherent act — a breath, a pause, a shift in posture — can help the whole remember itself. (7)
We find this principle across disciplines: in somatic and therapeutic practice, in horse whispering, in allowing a field to rewild. In each case, a single coherent presence — or its absence — becomes the attractor around which the wider system reorganises. (8)
Coherence holds difficulty
In Newsletter 7: Our Identity as Awareness we talked about how, resting in awareness, we can observe all our thoughts, feelings, and other phenomena rising, staying a while, and changing.
Sometimes we notice tightness or pain in our body, perhaps an emotion, and we are able to watch it, let it stay a while, and let it change. Sometimes the feeling is strong and persistent, and then we need to attend to it with compassion.
There is a danger here of spiritual bypassing: using spiritual ideas or practices to avoid facing difficult emotions, psychological wounds, or relational responsibilities.
Coherence doesn’t avoid anything. It includes everything. Coherence makes us humble, sensitive, sometimes fragile, yet also strong and centred. We can hold the difficult emotions or psychological wounds without being swamped by them.
Linda Hartley, somatic educator, told me: “Each little moment of peace or healing or integration that you experience for yourself is contributing to the healing and peace of the whole. During COVID, when I was ill with long COVID and couldn’t do much, this became really important: I am working on my own healing. It’s a little drop in the ocean, but it is a drop in the ocean.”9
Part of this holding is staying attentive to the shadow — in ourselves, and in the unnamed currents that disturb the field around us. In Newsletter 9: The World is Already Speaking. Can You Hear It? we will learn to move between the whole and the parts, and begin to notice those difficult undercurrents — though the work of truly meeting them comes later, when we turn to justice.
Then in Newsletter 10: When the Flock Moves, Who Is Leading? we will explore how we join, and sometimes begin, the pro-social and pro-ecological movements already stirring around us.
Some Practices
Practice 1
Have fun! From a coherent state, bring witnessing and attentiveness to someone who could do with a bit of a boost.
Practice 2
Engage in a situation that disturbs you, find your centre, and continue to engage.
Practice 3
Intentionally go out of your comfort zone to be curious about someone with a very different view to yourself. Lead with curiosity and interest rather than judgement. What makes them think like that?
Next Time: The World is Already Speaking. Can You Hear It?
We have learned that our own coherence changes the field. Now comes a quieter, harder art — not changing the field, but listening to it. The living world is not waiting for our instructions. It is already speaking: patterned, intelligent, in motion long before our conscious mind arrives. What becomes possible when we stop trying to manage the world, and learn instead to listen to it — and to act in relation to what we hear?
Have you ever noticed a situation shift — not because you did anything externally, but because of your centredness and inner state? What was that like?
Is there a situation in your life right now where you have been trying to fix the disorder from outside? What might it mean to work on your own coherence first?
If something has resonated, or troubled you, do write to me: julian.russell@lifetalent.com. Also write to me if you want to join our WhatsApp and participate in the discussion.
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In hope and love
Julian
Julian Russell is a psychotherapist, executive coach, writer, and committed fellow traveller through the territories of inner work and public life. Drawing on decades of somatic and contemplative practice, he helps people access the capacities they already carry. He is a co-founder of the Generative Citizen community — a gathering of people who understand that how we are matters as much as what we do. His forthcoming book, Standing at the Edge of Hope, explores why personal and spiritual development is not a retreat from the world’s crises, but the very ground from which transformative engagement becomes possible.
Notes
1. Marie-Louise von Franz, one of the foremost interpreters of C. G. Jung, recounts the Rainmaker story as an example of how a single coherent individual can shift the dynamics of an entire relational field, in Psychotherapy, ed. Robert Hinshaw (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 157–59. The story was first brought into Western circulation by Richard Wilhelm in The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life, trans. Cary F. Baynes, with a commentary by C. G. Jung (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1931), 89–91. Von Franz treats the Rainmaker not as a miracle but as a demonstration of how local restoration of order can ripple outward through a complex adaptive system.
2. Robert Dilts and Stephen Gilligan, Generative Coaching, Volume 1: The Journey of Creative and Sustainable Change (Santa Cruz, CA: International Association for Generative Change, 2021).
3. Nelson Mandela reflects on his inner work during imprisonment in Long Walk to Freedom (London: Abacus, 1995).
4. For Mandela’s relational approach to reconciliation and his partnership with F. W. de Klerk, see John Carlin, Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation (London: Atlantic Books, 2008).
5. Pew Research Center, Faith on the Hill: The Religious Composition of the 119th Congress (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2025). The report identifies 35 Jewish members out of 535 in the United States Congress, approximately 6.5% of the total.
6. Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (New York: Bantam Books, 1984).
7. Margaret J. Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1992).
8. On the regulatory influence of the therapist’s presence, see Allan N. Schore, Affect Regulation and the Repair of the Self (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003); Daniel J. Siegel, The Developing Mind, 2nd ed. (New York: Guilford Press, 2012). For somatic approaches, see Linda Hartley, Wisdom of the Body Moving (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1995); Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, Sensing, Feeling, and Action (Northampton, MA: Contact Editions, 1993). For horse whispering, see Monty Roberts, The Man Who Listens to Horses (London: Hutchinson, 1996). For ecological self-organisation, see Isabella Tree, Wilding (London: Picador, 2018).
9. Linda Hartley, somatic educator and founder of the Institute for Bodywork and Movement Therapy, in conversation with the author, 14 April 2026.