‘Doing less and listening more’-author of ‘Extinction Rebellion isn’t about the climate’ and XR UK co-founder Stu Basden

(recorded summer 2020)

Me:

I am now talking to Stu Basden who is one of the co-founders of Extinction Rebellion (XR) in the UK. They have been involved from the very beginning in all kinds of capacities. I first met them at their house in Bristol when I saw an advert for a free vegan curry with some kind of chat about activism, which led to my brief involvement with the Bristol branch of the Rising Up! (RU!) group. RU! Members went on to found XR. First of all, Stu, could you explain how you got involved with XR, what your role was first of all, and what your journey has been from the beginning up until the present day, including different roles you may have taken since the start?

Stu:

Sure…I am now sat in my caravan, which is parked outside the house that I used to live in, where we met. The same street where the cafe was [Cafe Connect] that the first XR meeting took place, before it was called XR…there were fifteen of us and we thought, ‘Okay, we’ve got a group here -let’s go big…’ So yeah…it is just down the road that history was made…

But maybe I’ll jump back a little bit to talk about my own journey. In 2006-7 I was studying philosophy and theology and saw all the problems in the world; justice issues etc and ‘liberation theology’ was something I was really taken by. It took me several years to find a path until 2012 when I got involved with the climate movement 350.org. I was living in Toronto at the time. We set up a local group and that became the next few years of my life, until 2015. I was very involved and became the president of the group. That was divestment fights and pipelines and all of that. Towards the end of my time there I thought, ‘There’s something missing; we need to do something bigger than this’. 350 was the big name on the block at the time. I just saw today that Bill McKibben is stepping back from his role at 350…

So I came to Europe, and travelled around Europe looking at different social movements, doing research into housing struggles in Spain, refugee struggles in Greece, anti-coal struggles in Germany and land defenses in France. Then I came across Rising Up! -this new group that was going to do an action to shut down Heathrow airport in London. I signed up for that, which was the first Rising Up! action. Then I signed up for a RU! intro training. That was Roger (Hallam), Simon (Bramwell), and Gail (Bradbrook), the three founders of Rising Up! that gave that training. Within a couple of days I was like, ‘I think I’m in. This is it! So I’ll move back to the UK… (where I’m from). Let’s do this. I like this vision. I like this strategy…a lot has been researched and laid out, so let’s see what happens’. 

So I moved to Bristol and got the RU! group set up here. We spent a couple of years developing infrastructure, like the tech, but more importantly the principles and values, strategy and vision that were behind XR (XR was born from RU!). Something that really attracted me was the concept of iterations: that we’re not going to get anything right the first time, in fact we may never get it right, but we can try things, experiment, and then learn from it and do things slightly differently…pushing the boundaries of acceptable activism…to normalise non-violent civil disobedience, which is something we have had clear success with.

Me:

Great. Do you want to say more about the different roles you have taken within XR, including training roles?

Stu:

Okay, so when we started XR we had 15 people, and we decided on the initial working groups (WG’s). I was initially one of the co-ordinators of the tech and infrastructure WG. I was also involved from the start in the Regenerative Cultures WG. At another point it was more or less me and Gail running the Media WG, which I wasn’t the most skilled at, so I was relieved when others took over. I also helped run lots of NVDA trainings, which partly became embedded in the ‘Heading For Extinction’ talk as well as in the XR ‘DNA’ trainings. I also ran some facilitation training. Last summer as XR was really growing around Europe I travelled around giving training. We gave trainings in 10 different countries including weekend-long trainings. We involved the whole kit: NVDA, XR DNA, facilitation instruction and some conflict resolution tips. 

Early on I remember Simon Bramwell saying to me, we need more facilitators in our activism. So that was something I already enjoyed doing -running workshops and facilitating spaces…then I discovered a group facilitation leadership course, which was a year long course in Process Work. This has now led to a five year long intensive study programme on Process Work, looking at group facilitation and ‘how can we deal with these difficult dynamics that sometimes come in, and what actually is the process, in each moment? How can we really find the conversation that’s wanting to happen?’ We’ve got so many ways of avoiding and talking around, so let’s find ways to allow the difficult stuff to happen. That’s something that really excites me now.

Me:

From a personal perspective I’ve always seen you as a facilitator. I was impressed by your facilitation of one of the XR gatherings in London a few weeks previous to one of the big XR actions….I also know you’ve been an ‘actions’ person as well. Wasn’t it with RU!, previous to XR, when you were involved in an action that resulted in you being in prison for a week?

Stu:

That’s right. That was a campaign about air pollution. [Stop Killing Londoners]. We went down to City Hall in London. We started off the week sitting in the street but the police weren’t arresting us, so we took to using chalk spray on London City Hall, graffiti-ing ‘Stop air pollution!’ and after about the third time of doing that, and going to the court and saying, ‘If you release us, we’re just going to do it again’ they said they had no choice but to send us to prison ‘on remand’ for a week. [My note: In the UK, being held ‘on remand’ refers to a temporary holding of ‘offenders’ – to prevent them getting into further mischief- until they are taken directly to court to deal with charges against them]. 

Me:

Did you do much reflecting during that time of how the prison experience might be different for people from different backgrounds? Were you all white middle class activists taking part in the action?

Stu:

Yeah…maybe a few working class but most of us were middle class. Certainly the four of us who ended up in prison were all white, and it shocked me to see how much of the prison population was black -probably 80%. This was in HMP Thameside in East London. I was like, ‘This is incredible. How on Earth is this the case, that there is this much racial injustice going on?’ We stood out there. We were ‘strange people’. There were some really friendly people there, but we didn’t have much time. I was in a cell with another activist, Ian Bray. The people were like ‘Dude, you’re crazy, why didn’t you just run away?’ We said we wanted to get arrested and taken to prison and they were like, ‘Why would you want to get in here?!’ We replied, ‘We’re experimenting with this injustice system…trying to find out what would be the effect of us going to prison…will the media pick it up etc’ 

Me:

I’m not sure if many people realise that many of the tactics of civil disobedience used by XR were discovered during the experimentation of Rising Up! actions…So I was wondering if you could now explain how the 10 Principles and Values of XR came about?

Stu:

So that was largely the work of Gail Bradbrook, as well as myself and one or two other people. There was another organisation that we pulled from, then we developed the P&V collaboratively, which is always a hard thing to do. I was responsible for the final wording of the P&V, including the ‘mitigating for power’ bit which has caused issues for being grammatically incorrect! But these are really Gail’s work. I was more of a wordsmith, to get the P&V together in a more coherent way. It took us years to work on them. There were several iterations. When we had that meeting with the 15 of us and said ‘okay yes, let’s go for it’ that was in April 2018, but 3 months earlier in January we had had another meeting where Roger Hallam had proposed, ‘Okay we’re ready, let’s go for it’ and I think at that point as a collective we said, ‘We’re not ready!’ and it was in those next 3 months that we really got those values down as we knew they were really important. That was a big part of my work for those 3 months, fine-tuning the wording and doing the longer write-ups of them. I think the longer write-ups are really important and they’re often skipped over. For instance, what it is to ‘mitigate for power’ and what it is to ‘welcome everyone and every part of everyone’; does that mean we welcome people who are intentionally disrupting the movement? Let’s get into the intracacies and not have these as blanket terms or even used sometimes to push people out or to wield power over other people. So we did our best at the time, and there’s all kinds of ripples that have come about due to things we skipped over, thinking, ‘Let’s just get something out’, you know, and there are other bits that I think have been upheld magnificently -because we put the work in initially.

Me:

I and many people appreciate the work you’ve done, but I also wonder how the P&V can be developed in the future, without damaging the work that’s been done and the coherency that they provide…can there be an ongoing collaborative evolution of the P&V? I guess different countries apply them in different ways already? I’m wary of anything becoming too set in stone.

Stu:

They’re not the ten commandments, right? Anything that gets calcified or stuck will become unhealthy. That’s the nature of the changing reality that we live in. I guess one of the problems that we’ve encountered in XR is that there is no-one who has the mandate to change the P&V, and there are entangled issues around that, such as ‘What about the translation into other languages? Who are going to be the people to do this?’ I’m not sure how it’s possible [to change them now] as in many ways they are the glue that’s held the movement together so far. And you will always have people who are attached to the original. I’m not particularly attached to them but I think that they are good and serve a really good purpose. 

Me:

Okay so rather than change the P&V maybe we need to encourage people to go more deeply into them, for instance having study groups on the P&V.

Stu:

There have been public discussion sessions in the last few months, one on each P&V. They are about to start up again, exploring them week by week, a different one each week.

Me:

Okay great. Now I wonder if you could say something in general terms, about the way that the XR strategy has panned out? Do you think demanding the creation of citizens’ assemblies by the government to deal with the ecological and climate crisis, should still be the main strategic aim of XR?

Stu:

Okay. The strategic aim of normalising civil disobedience has been central and successful. That was a really important aim in which we’ve succeeded. When it comes to XR’s demands there’s always the question of, should we have demands at all? Demands create some incoherence -to make a demand of somebody, in some sense, is a violent act. You’re demanding rather than asking or inviting. There’s an incongruence in the meaning around that. There’s also the problem of, when you make a demand, who are you making the demand of? If you say ‘We demand system change’, that’s a big enough thing that nobody can do it, whereas to demand something specific, can be too small to be big enough to change the world in the way we need. I think citizens’ assemblies are a great idea but they’re not the only political idea out there to improve democracy. Of course, we don’t live in a democracy now -we live in the shadow of a democracy. Electoral politics has been beaten by Cambridge Analytica and other ways of manipulating people on a mass scale. We know that psychological warfare and advertising are really effective at getting people to change their beliefs and behaviour. That’s being done at a manufactured scale now, so we can’t say that electoral politics is democracy even though those who are elected would love to say, ‘the only way to do democracy is through elections’. So what do we go to beyond that, is the question, and citizens’ assemblies are one possible way of doing that. I don’t know what else is out there but I believe there are other ways of doing it. It’s just not an area of XR that I’ve been involved with, discussing these things.

Me:

That’s a great response. I wonder if you could now respond to problems of leadership culture in our society which are bound to become issues in any social movement as well, as social movements are always in part a reflection of the surrounding culture, and how the media manufactures leaders, to an extent, and how XR has really fallen victim to that at points – perhaps certain people have been too prominent and perhaps still are too prominent- I wonder if you have anything to say about that and whether that’s getting better…is this issue more about efforts to decentralise within the movement, which I know are ongoing, or the tactic of the media to always go back to the same people to represent a movement? I admire and respect leading figures within XR but I would hope to see a more decentralised movement with more diverse voices platformed.

Stu:

So…there’s probably many answers to that, and let me just try one…to talk about the high dream for humanity -the far reaching vision of where we could be, and we’re not there yet by any means, is to say that our lives are so meaningful, and so full, that we don’t need celebrities or leaders to project ourselves onto. When humanity is bored of projecting everything onto leaders and celebrities and politicians -then these people will be done away with. But until we get to that point, ‘leadership’ will be part of the reality we live in, that continues to cycle. It will change and it’s always changing. Since we are in this moment now where people feel like the meaning has been stripped away from their lives, and they’re feeling disempowered,and in many ways are disempowered, they’re going to look for other people to express things and do things which they don’t dare to do or which they don’t think they can do. So let me just pause and think about your question…

I’m not the biggest face of XR in any way. In fact I was intending to be a bit more of a public face. As we were preparing for the Rebellion last year, I thought ‘Oooh, a great way to be visually captivating, would be to dye my beard in all kinds of funky rainbow colours’ thinking that the media team would love it. I showed up in London with this bright beard, and the media team took a look at me, whispered a little bit and were like ‘Stu, you’re far too “hippie” to be in front of a camera. Don’t do a big spokesperson role this time’. So my life took a different direction because of a decision to dye my beard….

We’re always going to have these ‘leaders’ and leaders at this point in human history are important. We don’t want to be in a place where there is no leadership or a movement where there is no influence; when we talk about leadership we’re talking about influence and as a movement we want to influence the world. I think the struggles come when a person speaks for a larger group, who doesn’t contain all the voices of that group, therefore they’re marginalising part of the group and that part of the group is going to feel excluded and hurt and they’re going to be angry about it. We’re in this imperfect process called ‘life’ and that’s part of the nature of things. Can we do better…? Possibly, but then we need to do a lot of work around what it means to have and to access power and have influence. There has been a move to decentralise, but when Occupy! for instance, decentralised they did so too quickly and gave away the power of the movement, and got into endless general assemblies which never got anywhere and petered out in a few months. I think XR has done well as a social movement to hold things together this far. When someone comes along with the energy to make things decentralise, they get into a powerful position, as maybe they haven’t done years of work around ‘whiteness’ and anti-oppression and racism, so now they bring this other problem in of colonialism and reinforcing hierarchy. Whereas many of us who were in RU! from the start; we’ve done years of work on this. Gail Bradbrook is a good example of this. She has travelled around and learnt from many social justice movements. So do we want to take her voice away and accidentally give it away to someone who doesn’t understand whiteness and racism? Well I’m not sure. 

There is a move to decentralise which is important, and to do it carefully, by people who can speak to diverse voices and be held accountable when they don’t. Some people with big positions in XR are doing that speaking, and some people aren’t doing it as well. There’s never going to be a clear answer on this. It’s always going to be something to ponder, work through and discuss. And do the work. To read the books around racism, and around strategy and tactics, and the psychology of media and messaging, whatever it is…we need people who are skilled up. I think a really important part of these times now, if you’re feeling disempowered, then find ways to skill up. If you’re in lockdown and you’re unable to go out and do the things and organise in the way that you want to, there’s loads of stuff online to read or watch….Certainly Black Lives Matter are calling for white people now, to do that more and more. I hope that white ears are hearing those voices. I’ve been telling people about this book, ‘Why I am no longer talking to white people about race’. I was doing this for a year and a half before I realised, ‘Ah, I should probably read the book myself’ -There are no shortcuts here. We all need to do this work.

Me:

Thanks so much Stu, that was such an in-depth and broad answer to the question. I think I’ve got quite a superficial idea of decentralisation and why leadership issues arise, so I’ll be doing some more study.

Stu:

Something to add is that when Standing Rock was happening and we had tens of thousands of people going to the camps and setting them up…I wasn’t there but I heard these stories of, you know, ‘So and so, the elder, has said…what we must do’, but then the question became, ‘Which elder? Under what authority are they an elder? Are they a hereditary chief? Or have they been installed by the Indian Act or some other thing? Whose community are they trusted by to say that they are an elder?’ One of the contradictions of white people doing anti-racism is that, yes we want to look first to those BIPOC voices, but ‘BIPOC’ is not one homogenous group that has one voice, so over time we have to develop our own analysis and our own understanding and have our own opinions which might at times disagree with people from those groups, or in those racial identities. How do we hold that? Saying, ‘I want to listen to you and really hear you, but I have developed my own analysis over time…I’m doing the work, but I hear your voice and don’t want to marginalise your voice.’

Me:

That’s a really important point. Otherwise, white people saying they want to centralise marginalised voices, without having a complex analysis of who they are to be saying that, becomes a patronising exercise. So moving on, I would like to talk about the article you wrote on Medium in January of 2019, ‘Extinction Rebellion isn’t about the climate’, the blog article which received tens of thousands of views, and which I was impressed by, at its accessibility despite its treatment of complex issues. I remember critics of XR using it as fodder on Facebook etc, saying ‘Look, see, they’re not all about the climate, they want to bring the whole system down!’ and some from XR responding with, ‘No, no, we are just a climate movement!’ -realising that those XR folk didn’t have a very deep analysis, basically.

Stu:

One of the big regrets that I had about the article is that I didn’t explain its origins: it was in a group facilitation process about climate change, racism and colonialism, that I heard from a Black African woman, ‘Why would I want to get involved in the climate movement? When I’m being told that the climate movement is going to make solar panels for white people to be able to continue their exploitation, and that my continent, my land, my people have been exploited for the last 500 years. It’s built into my genetics that I’ve been fighting for the last 500 years’. I haven’t given credit to the way that this woman inspired me. She deserves the credit. She’s done a lot of emotional labour, to be able to say those things in that group, so one of my regrets was not to have centred her in my article, and to say that I feel such gratitude towards her, as so many people around the world have gained through my article, the clarity of analysis with which she spoke. That was the source that allowed this article to be written. 

The other part was, after the bridges a lot of people were coming onboard to XR who hadn’t done the work around race and whiteness and were saying ‘this is a climate movement’ and of course we had intentionally talked about climate change and biodiversity loss, but then we didn’t anticipate that XR would get so big so quickly, it blew our minds (and bodies in many ways) and we didn’t have the trainings in place to talk about these larger underlying issues of anti-oppression and liberation and then I was seeing these people coming on board and saying these things, as if speaking for the movement; some decentralisation was great but people weren’t necessarily staying with the P&V of XR; a huge amount of energy was unleashed with an influx of new Rebels organising in a more decentralised way, but people were saying things which I judged to be racist. For instance ‘over-population is a problem. Look at all the brown people around the world. We need to stop birth rates in those countries’. Ouch! -you know? You get all these people talking about the climate and forgetting about the larger system that we’re involved in. So I’m glad that article did get written and did get picked up. I’m still getting weekly reports saying, ‘another 200 people this week have read the article all the way through’. At times that was thousands of people a week. I’ve not really written anything since, because it’s created such a big thing…maybe the next thing I write will be really big, but maybe it won’t be. I’ve been scared to write anything…but now I’m finally venturing out of my little cave of not writing.

Me:

I look forward to seeing what you will next make public.

Stu:

It’s about the Amazon, and the Amazon being the lungs of the planet that are in danger and are very much being assaulted, and the indigenous peoples there are falling out of the global community. We need to step up and be alongside them and stop the onslaught that’s coming at them, and allow them to bring forth their wisdom about how do they look after this absolutely vital piece of the planet…It’s not just about preserving trees, it’s about preserving the tree keepers, who have patterns and knowledge about how the rest of us can also do restoration work around the world. It’s so vital and yet so threatened in this time.

Me:

What’s your perspective on XR’s ‘4th demand’ and how that’s coming about? Personally I think it’s very necessary movement building work. Maybe some people in XR have relied on the idea of mobilising without movement building first? Maybe if the language of the 4th demand, regarding climate justice and platforming historically oppressed groups, had been included from the start within the 3 demands, a highly signalled 4th demand wouldn’t now be necessary? Some people’s response to the whole 4th demand idea is that ‘we don’t need one because citizens’ assemblies are democratic and that’s what we’re arguing for’ but obviously that’s quite superficial.

Stu:

Okay. I do think it is important to say that citizens’ assemblies are a way to bring in marginalised voices and give them a space. Behind that is the idea of deep democracy, valuing all voices. I am neither for nor against the 4th demand in any strong way -parts of me are going to be for it and parts against it. It’s complex. I don’t have a clear answer to it. I do have a concern that people might see it as ‘If we get a 4th demand that talks about justice, we can say, look at us, we are good white people. We’ve covered over our white guilt and we’re white saviours.’ That is a dynamic that’s present. It’s probably not present for everybody. Even if it is present it doesn’t mean that the 4th demand isn’t a good thing. Looking at what’s happening, it looks like the 4th demand is probably going to come into being in XR UK. There’s enough momentum behind it and it’s already there in several countries. Will it be adopted everywhere or will there be fights about it for years to come, I just don’t know. Like you said, if we had the language right in the first three demands and been more explicit about climate justice, that could have been better. I’ve found myself in a place where I just don’t know. I trust that those who are bringing this thing with such passion and momentum will be able to reflect on themselves and their own motivations, whether that includes ‘white guilt’ or other psychological complexes around being white.

Me:

Thanks for your openness and honesty about that. I haven’t done enough work around race and my own potential ‘white guilt’ and so on, and the concerns you’ve raised do resonate with me. Also I contacted my friend Chit Dubey, a co-founder of XR in India, assuming he would be for the 4th demand because he’s not white, forcing me to examine my unconscious racism. He is against the 4th demand, saying that XR are losing their focus and that ‘white people are obsessed with race’. I don’t quite know where that came from so I need to talk to him further.

Stu:

My hope is that the people who are really trying to bring the 4th demand are not going to bring it and then stop there -they’ll take all of the energy, passion and drive, and do the work in groups together as white people -if they are white, and there are probably BIPOC people working on this as well- to go to the diasporic neighbourhoods of folk from diverse backgrounds and get into communication, have the conversations, build the trust across racial lines that have separated us for so long. It’s really comfortable in lots of ways to talk about a document and send lots of emails and have people’s assemblies but to actually get into groups where you don’t have the same accent or culture, and to get to know each other just as human beings -that is the work that I see as being really important. I also want to say, none of us have done enough work, right? It’s about keeping ourselves in a place of discomfort around this stuff, always looking for ways in which we can do more. Even that sentence, ‘looking for ways to do more’ doesn’t quite work for me! Sometimes it’s doing less but listening more…

Me:

Finally, what is exciting you now in your life? Perhaps you could talk more about the Process Work you have been engaged with and how that relates to your plans for the coming months?

Stu:

Okay. I have been studying this stuff for three years and I still don’t quite know how to explain it. I think part of the issue there is that we have a language that is based on things in space, rather than processes. Everything is always in flow. I could describe a water bottle more accurately as something in the process of water bottling. It’s an active agent in this ONE process that is happening: the process that contains all the relationships between everything in the universe…Process Work is really exciting me. It’s based on Taoism; it draws from Jungian psychotherapy and core process oriented psychotherapy, it’s also called Process Science, and it’s based on quantum physics and some of the cosmology that is pushing the bounds of physicists who often retreat into equations because they haven’t got ways of talking about these things, when you can actually more accurately talk about myths to describe what happens in quantum physics, rather than normal scientific language. Process Work is drawing all of these things together -spirituality too- and asking, ‘What is the process that is happening?’ Something I’ve been playing with in my own thoughts recently is, one of the early discoveries of Process Work; things that happen in our dreams when we’re sleeping, also manifest in our bodies as bodily symptoms. So that it could be that you have a pain in your stomach and that you’ll be dreaming about fireworks. Then when you talk about your stomach you’ll get an image of explosions and you’ll go ‘Ah, this is the same process that’s happening; it’s just happening in different channels which are both the symptoms of a core process that’s trying to happen.

I was listening to Alan Watts the other day and he was talking about how the Earth is not just some rock that’s infested with humans and with life; the Earth is a geological entity that grows life. So life, and humans, are symptoms of the universe. Whatever this strange awareness process is, we are symptomatic of it. And just as a symptom in the body can also manifest as dreams or synchronicities in events around us or elements of relationships, the symptom that is ‘Stuart Basden’ is almost going to be teleporting around in various different ways -or the things that we commonly describe as Stuart Basden aren’t me in my body, but parts of something else jump into me to express themselves for a time, seconds or years, then they move on. I am in the living stage of life, but when I’m in the death stage of life, the information will still be there -nothing is ever lost. Information in the universe is never lost, as Stephen Hawkings has shown. ‘I’ will always continue…so let’s pay attention more to the process that’s happening in the moment, than the specifics of a conversation or social movement or whatever it is. There is always a dreaming reality behind what is going on. It’s invisible to us. Our eyes and ears can’t tell us directly but can pick up signals, but somehow these processes are happening.

What is exciting is doing a training, that allows me to get more in tune and to pick up the signals of the process of what is happening or is trying to happen even though what is manifest is sometimes trying to prevent it…if we can attune ourselves to what is trying to happen it will allow flow and allow us to enter into a flow of existence which will free up energy and possibilities that at the moment we can’t imagine, and we definitely need to get to places that we can’t imagine right now, to prevent human extinction within the next few decades…but maybe that extinction is what is meant to happen, but then we can trust that no information will be lost…in some ways it doesn’t really matter but in other ways it matters so much…there is something so miraculous about these bodies and about the world around us that is manifest, that putting all our intention and care into this world is a way of paying homage to it. I am deeply in love with life…It blows me away.

Me:

Really amazing…so when you talk about the essence of the Process Work being, getting in touch with the Core Process of what wants to happen, is that seen as a selfless thing that is trying to happen, or is it both selfless and of a self? Is it a combination of our personal unconsciouses, and also a universal unconscious? What is the concept of ‘God’ in Process Work or is there a kind of an agnostic perspective?

Stu:

There’s a concept of the oneness, of the interconnectedness of everything which is the essence of everything, where there are no polarisations or dualisms, only relationship within a system in process. Then there is the ‘dreaming reality’ where there are the polarisations, and that’s where we have dream figures, or roles, or archetypes, we might say they are collective unconscious, or they are just in this ‘group’ or moment, while these figures inhabit us, and then there’s consensus reality -that’s the stuff that we agree on. Maybe a way to talk about this would be to say, ‘Here’s this plant: in consensus reality this plant is sorrel, a woodland plant. But then I could also talk about this plant as comforting. That’s not consensus reality, that’s the plant as it relates to me. Further from that, what is in the plant that is also in me, and in the entire universe? It’s up to us to investigate in each moment, what that is. I don’t know if there is God, or many gods. In some respects Process Work is a Nature religion. We talk about the Process having some kind of sentient essence.

Me:

Why aren’t we already naturally in touch with the maximum potential of each unfolding moment? What’s gone wrong?

Stu:

I wouldn’t say anything’s gone wrong. This is the nature of the Process. Certainly we have all sorts of stories that come up that prevent us from being present in every moment and seeing what is happening in the process. That could be survival stories that we’ve had as children. It could be trauma, individual or intergenerational or collective, or species-wide, or even mammal trauma. How far does this go back? Life is trying to survive in a world where it always dies. So what are the things we’ve done to help us survive that were true in some circumstances which aren’t relevant now? It’s not just about survival but wholeness, seeing ourselves as the universe and including all parts.

Me:

Great, so how is Process Work informing your work with XR?

Stu:

When coronavirus lockdown happened, everything I was organising was big summer gatherings for Rebels to come together and learn to be together…maybe have some conflict resolution processes and relationship processes…learning how to love and trust each other on a deeper level so that our work is more fluid and beautiful and enriching -that all stopped. So I thought this was a fantastic opportunity to not go deeper into XR but to skill up and go deeper into my private studies. I will probably come back into XR or another movement that has come by the time that I am ready to bring myself fully in….As for this summer and autumn, I’ve realised I’m more burnt out than I realised or have been admitting. Maybe I’ll turn up to the next Rebellion as a good soldier and get arrested a few times, I’m not sure. But the work of relating is always important and we’re always going to get into conflict. We’ll always have things that will jarr us as a movement or have tendencies to become rigid or calcified…or make us take sides and become polarised and fight things out. I’m not against this but if we stay there too long we’ll become divided and crumble, so we need ways to see the other side, not to oppress or marginalise any voice. The work I’m doing now is to facilitate and have those conversations, to create movements that are deeper and more trustful and stronger, and flow more easily…I’m not sure when I’ll be ready to bring myself fully back in, or even if I will…if I do it will probably be in a completely different way. My energy source for activism is close to depleted, so I have to find a new energy source and come in a new way. I’m not sure what that is yet. It’s important to say ‘I don’t know’.

And so ended the interview. This is me, Matthew, again. As an extra for YouTube, I did a little intro video to this interview. I’m reading from a script in the video, and it’s a bit messy, but I think I make some valuable points, so if you think you might like it, click here. (On my channel there’s also interviews with XR ‘founders’ in various countries around the world).