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Dear Reader, History is full of stories of people who ‘saw it coming’ when others didn’t. Ignaz Semmelweis in the 1840s knew that doctors washing their hands before delivering babies would dramatically reduce maternal deaths, and was ridiculed by the medical establishment for saying so. Marine scientist Ove Hoegh-Guldberg spent the late 1990s warning that rising ocean temperatures would cause mass coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef, and got enormous pushback that her findings would damage the reef’s image (as it turned out, the mass bleaching events of 2016, 2017, 2020, and 2022 did a lot more damage to that image than her research ever could have). Both tried to share what they knew. Others chose not to see it, or had structural incentives not to. The same thing happens with knowledge that sits outside the mainstream. Cultural burning is another classic example of where whole ways of knowing get dismissed, only to be quietly recognised later. (And who gets to decide what counts as knowledge is a whole other conversation.) When you compare these stories of ‘the one who saw it coming,’ the throughline is consistent: they had skin in the game, a different vantage point, or freedom from the consensus. They were less constrained by what everyone else had agreed was true. In Process Work, we follow signals, not just the ones that confirm what we already think. The core idea is simple: follow what’s actually emerging, not what you expect to find. This is because our identity, who we think we are, sometimes limits what we’re willing to see. The same goes for groups. A team that sees itself as ‘caring and connected’ can find it hard to turn towards the conflict that keeps quietly surfacing, because it’s outside the bounds of how they see themselves. Having conflict doesn’t mean they’re not caring and connected, just that there’s something else trying to come through too. The ‘consensus’ or those mainstream norms, the known, the expected can feel like solid ground. But as the examples above show, it’s really just a view with blinkers on. Even when the signal is right there in front of us, we often find ways not to see it. So what might it look like to deliberately step outside that consensus for a while? Not to throw everything out, but to find a different vantage point, and see what becomes visible from there? That’s exactly what Grzegorz Zielinski and Martin Hemsley have built their upcoming course around. Both are deeply experienced in their fields, and both drawn to Shamanism as a practice for doing precisely this – dropping the agreed-upon world, even briefly, to listen to what else is there. In the lead-up to Stopping the World, they shared what excites them about bringing these two worlds together: We’re making this workshop for a specific kind of person, and we’ve been a bit surprised to realise that person is partly us!
Maybe you’ve trained hard, built something real, and are genuinely good at what you do. But there’s a tension that doesn’t go away: the pull between mastering your craft and still feeling alive inside it. Or maybe it’s less about work and more about life in general, the sense that somewhere along the way things got more managed and less surprising. That you used to feel more open to the strange and irrational, and you’re not quite sure when that changed.
Arnold Mindell writes about this in Shaman’s Body – the warrior who acts from love of nature, not from wanting to achieve. The shaman who is both inside and outside the community. Useful and untamed at once.
Do you want to be useful and untamed all at once? Sounds like a pretty potent combination to us. 😊 Stopping the World is a practical, in-person weekend exploring Process work and Shamanism. You’ll work with the dreaming body — body sensations, altered states, and irrational signals as doorways rather than problems to manage. You’ll practise dropping the ordinary self, even briefly, and listening to what’s underneath. Melbourne, 1–2 May 2026. Book your place now Other ways to explore this kind of work –
There’s so much on offer right now. What knowledges are calling you? ANZPOP
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