Radical Hope #4 The Most Urgent Thing We Can Do
You can see it clearly.
The old paradigm — separate individuals managing a broken world — is failing.
Something else is needed — a felt sense of ourselves as participants in the living web, not managers standing outside it.
You agree. Most people reading this agree.
And then something happens. Someone you love says something that makes your blood rise. Or your country does something that violates everything you believe in — and you find yourself quietly making excuses for it.
The gap between understanding systems consciousness and being able to live from it under pressure is not a problem of knowledge. It is a problem of empowerment, habit and healing.
Empowerment means recovering the inner ground from which genuine agency becomes possible. Habit means practising the return to generative presence until it becomes the nervous system’s default rather than its exception. Healing means attending to what pulls us back — the personal wounds, cultural conditioning, and ancestral patterns that reassert themselves under pressure.
The roots run deeper than most of us have looked: not in the mind but in the body, in the nervous system, in patterns laid down long before you ever heard the word polycrisis — perhaps before you had words at all. Into personal wounding, into cultural and racial inheritance, into the messages carried forward in our ancestral lines.
The most urgent thing we can do is not act more, or think more clearly, or find better strategies. It is to look here.
Remembering Who You Are
We each carry two identities simultaneously, though most of us have only been taught to inhabit one.
There is the individual self — with its particular history, wounds, gifts, and story.
And there is the systemic self — the self that is nature, that is community, that is the living web of relationships in which we are always already embedded.
Self-development, in this work, is not simply about becoming a healthier and more successful individual. It is about healing the individual self sufficiently so that the systemic self becomes more available — not as a concept but as a felt reality.
Steve Gilligan has described the ego — that familiar sense of being a separate, bounded self, managing and defending its position in the world — as the original artificial intelligence.
It is a brilliant system for navigation and survival. But all subsequent generations of AI — the algorithms, the platforms, the recommendation engines that fragment our attention and amplify our outrage — are made in its image.
The cult of the individualist self is not a technology problem. It is an ego problem at civilisational scale.
The antidote is not managing the ego but remembering what lies beneath it. In the generative change work of Robert Dilts and Stephen Gilligan, this is the COACH state — Centred, Open, Aware, Connected, Holding¹ — the quality of presence from which the systemic self becomes accessible. Not a morning ritual but a thread woven through everything: returning, again and again, to a consciousness where we remember who we are.
Steve Gilligan has written: “In today’s turbulent times, the old prescription of two twenty-minute meditations each day should be shifted to at least ten two-minute COACH connections.”²
Steve Gilligan’s emphasis on frequent brief returns to presence is important — most of us are inconsistent. But the longer formal session still matters: it stabilises attention in a way that ten two-minute touches cannot fully replicate. Meditation builds the depth; the brief returns throughout the day are where compassion, patience, and presence become lived qualities rather than abstract ideas.
James Clear, the expert on habits, argues that frequency of repetition matters more than duration: showing up briefly throughout the day builds the habit faster than occasional long sessions. For the longer meditation practise, on days when you are short of time, two minutes still counts. A useful principle is to “habit-stack” your first practise of the day: “After my morning tea, I will meditate.” Connecting one habit to another supports regularity.³
Whatever your practice — meditation, yoga, prayer, somatic work, or simply the habit of pausing and breathing before you respond — the question is the same: how might you deepen and stabilise that capacity? Not as self-improvement, but because the quality of your presence is the quality of your engagement with the world.
What Holds Us Back
Hopelessness, powerlessness and isolation can live in the body as a subtle chronic deflation — a quiet collapse of agency, a sense that engagement is pointless because nothing will change.
That feeling is not weakness. It is the accumulated weight of not having been fully met — in early life, in our families, in our culture. And it cannot be thought away.
What pulls us back from systems consciousness is not lack of motivation. It is wounding that predates our awareness of the polycrisis — and wounding that runs in our collective inheritance as much as our personal history.
Our cultural, racial, and ancestral inheritance shapes what we perceive as normal, who we instinctively trust, and what futures we can even imagine.
This is not personal failure. It is the water we swim in, until we learn to see it.
Coming Home to Myself
Here is what that looks like from the inside.
One of my own triggers is a feeling of being on the outside, not fully belonging. My mother wasn’t consistently present in my early childhood, and my brother Stephen’s illness meant the family’s emotional attention was naturally drawn to him. Very early in life I learned to make sense of this by concluding that I was somehow not quite lovable enough to warrant a place at the centre. That story can occasionally emerge when I feel slightly peripheral in a group or situation today. The feeling can swell beyond what the circumstances warrant, and I can find myself making it mean something that nobody else in the room is thinking. Nowadays, I notice this and witness it pretty quickly, and bring compassion and hospitality to that ancient part of myself.
The ancestral patterns are often harder to see, and more consequential for our systemic engagement.
Someone can do years of personal development work, become relatively uncontracted individually, and still be acting from a culturally conditioned separateness they have never examined.
My own ancestral inheritance is tangled: English, Irish, French, German, and Jewish lineages, each carrying its own history and wound. Somewhere in that inheritance, something crystallised around the Second World War. Cousins on the Jewish side of my family died in Nazi concentration camps. The survivors, and those who loved them, carried a commitment forward: never again. I absorbed that commitment young, and it has never left me. But I have come to understand that for me it means never again for anyone — not only for one people, but all peoples. When I witness ethnic cleansing or genocide anywhere, I respond from a deep ancestral place, with grief, outrage, and sometimes fierceness. It is a trigger. Not a wrong one. But I need to recognise when it is operating, so I can respond in a way that can be heard. My mentor on this is Nelson Mandela: he used his anger in the service of a peaceful rainbow nation.
I carry a British military lineage too: "when the going gets tough, the tough get going." I sometimes dissociate from pain — including the pain of the people around me.
These patterns don't announce themselves. This week I noticed that the joy had gone out of writing, and a feeling of stress was rising. I had planned this newsletter schedule from linear mind — one a week, steady output, manageable on paper. What I hadn't consulted was the body, the quiet animal that knows when creativity needs room to ripen. As soon as I noticed, I changed the schedule. Newsletters will now go out fortnightly, except for one two-week gap when I am away. A small act of coming home.
I feel tremendous grief at my ruling class inheritance too — its sense of superiority and entitlement, and the devastation it has left behind around the world.
Yet in standing up, naming it, and doing something about it, I feel a subtle sense of healing, of grace, of rightness — of coming home to myself.
What ancestral messages do you have to reckon with?
I know people whose families came from Soviet bloc countries, from dictatorships, from communities where they were the marginalised minority — who carry a deep conviction that political engagement is pointless, that all politicians are corrupt. That too is an ancestral inheritance. And it shapes what feels possible.
It is worth sitting with these inherited convictions and asking: is this actually true today? And if there is something true in it, where does it hold — and where might it be keeping us smaller than we need to be?
The Power of Compassion
Learning to hold our own woundedness with compassion is some of the most important work we can do. Compassion is not a sentiment — it is a healing force that moves toward pain rather than away from it, and promotes psychological repair.
Perhaps the most important gift from a therapist or a good friend is that they can hold compassion for your woundedness while you are learning to have it for yourself.
As we begin to hold our own difficulty with more tenderness, we naturally begin to recognise the suffering in others. We become a healing presence — not as a duty, but spontaneously, as a result of deepening self-knowledge.
Practices for This Week
1. Practise your method for Generative Presence
Take two minutes now, or longer at your regular meditation session, to enter into your most familiar meditation, COACH, or generative presence practice. Settle into your body. Breathe. Return to whatever you know — centred, open, aware, connected, holding. Notice what shifts.
Sit with these questions:
What practices help me return to this state? Meditation, movement, prayer, breath, time in nature?
How stable does that practice feel right now?
What one small step might deepen or stabilise it?
2. What are the triggers that have you act more as a separate individual than as part of the whole?
Not self-criticism. Honest inquiry. Where do you feel the contraction when it comes?
Personal triggers first. Take five minutes if you can.
Then cultural and racial triggers. What does your inheritance assume about the world?
Then ancestral. What did your lineage carry forward that still runs in you?
What healing activity might support you in inhabiting your systemic identity more fully?
3. How much self-compassion do you have? And to what extent do you find yourself spontaneously compassionate towards others?
Do not judge yourself for what you find. If your own woundedness is still painful and spinning with thoughts, you will most likely have less capacity to extend compassion outward. Bringing compassion to yourself is the work. Then, quietly and naturally, you will find it arising for other members of the system.
Next time we go deeper into the body itself, where systems consciousness lives, waiting to be recovered more fully.
What’s the one thing from this blog that’s staying with you?
How does this land with you? What is your view?
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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With love, hope, and curiosity,
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 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).
2 Steve Gilligan, contribution to the CIMA Whole Community WhatsApp Group, 22 February 2026. Quoted with the author’s permission.
3 James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones (New York: Avery, 2018).
