“What did you ‘know’ in the bamboo forest?”

[This question needs some explaining!]

Last night’s Studio conversation opened with small talk about what we’d done over the summer. One participant mentioned visiting a bamboo forest in China.

As the conversation progressed, we began discussing ‘multiple ways of knowing’ - one of the three framings we [loosely] hold through all our Metacrisis Diplomats sessions. The idea is that our head - our analytical mind - is only one way of perceiving the world and what is happening around us.

Other ways of knowing can include the hands, heart, and gut. Most of us move between the different ways of knowing at different times, and in different ways.

However, for many people - particularly those of us brought up with a Western perspective - we have a bias towards rational analysis. It can seem hard to ‘get out of our heads’, and in to another way of knowing.

The participant who had shared the story of the bamboo forest was curious, and asked - “How do I get into these other ways of knowing?”

Which is where the question came in:
“What did you ‘know’ in the bamboo forest?”

Initially, the participant said they would have to think about it.

“No, no - don’t think. Just answer.”

After a pause, they began to speak. They talked of “having a sense of it being safe here”, that the forest “felt right as it was”, having a deep awareness of its age and size, and more.

‘Multiple ways of knowing’ is not complicated. It’s simple [although not necessarily easy!]. It is about noticing our surroundings - sensing, feeling, reconnecting with the world around us…

Next time you are out in nature, you might like to ask yourself -

What do I ‘know’ here?