Our Why
We do this work because we deeply care about the world that we are a part of, our shared home, and communities within it, human and beyond.
Across this continent and islands for the last few hundred years, damaging stories of separation and supremacy have caused deep devastation, unravelling and destruction. Beyond these shores this has taken place even longer.
Like brave and wise people who have come before us have done, let’s peel away from the gravitational pull of more of the same. Taking care of what we love in the times we’re in requires us to move beyond the habitual to seeing our role as living ancestors.
We are all being asked to shift our orientation and evolve, so that embracing and entering a new chapter can happen with flow.
Coming to Life opens – and holds open – a window for you to experience something other so that we can tend to the systemic challenges we face.
We give people a chance to comprehend the world as it is; the majesty of existence and what our modern ways of being, knowing and doing thwart – to engage with the wonderful possibilities to be “other-wise.”
Because life is abundant, intricately connected, beautiful and awesome, and in the same moment vulnerable, unravelling and collapsing. Now, more than ever, we need spaces to come home and learn and (un) learn together.
That is why we help you tend to the crises of our time through different ‘other-wise’ ways
Returning home to our connectivity, receptivity and aliveness
Becoming good living ancestors
Acknowledging Country and First Peoples and how we are all a part of – not superior or separate to – the rest of life.
Recovering nourishing patterns that support life to thrive and departing from the patterns and systems* that have created the interwoven crises.
*Systems of colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy and supremacy
We are all being asked to shift our orientation and evolve in some way. There is groundwork that we can all do so that how we respond meets what our time asks of us.
The paradox of our times
(1)
There’s a story of colonising and decolonising, and understanding our world in a different way.
(3)
There’s a story of more of the same (power over, speed, rational, separation, growth to no end) and of everything else that is present and possible through shedding the patterns that have created our crises and feeling joy, abundance and connection.
(2)
There’s a story of ecological unravelling and the ever-present pounding pulse of phenomenal diverse life.
(4)
There’s a story of separation and supremacy and there’s returning home to our interdependency and to our rightful place.
These are the 4 rivers that feed into why Coming to Life was created
The river bed is
“Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.”
“There’s a saying: ‘The times are urgent… Let us slow down.’ (I offer) the invitation to ‘slow down’, which seems like the wrong thing to do when there’s fire on the mountain. But here’s the point: in ‘hurrying up’ all the time, we often lose sight of the abundance that might help us meet today’s most challenging crises. We rush through the same patterns we are used to.”