“Every journey is a journey inwards,” wrote former Secretary General of the UN, Dag Hammarskjöld in his 1963 book, Vägmärken.
My journey to Pune and Bhubaneswar in India over the past fortnight has been no different: I’ve come away with new friends, new ideas, reimagined practices, a shift in inward and outward perspectives, and most importantly a renewed sense of what’s possible, even as we are faced with increasing constraints across educational, ecological, economic, and political domains.
I have had the honour of being a Convener of the Fourth International Conference on Regenerative Ecosystems at XIM University in Bhubaneswar, and of representing Prescott College as a founding member of AIESS, the All Interacting Evolving Systems Science consortium.
Whilst at XIM, I had the pleasure of addressing a standing-room-only assembly of MBA students on Learning To Lead beyond Equilibrium; I helped facilitate a day-long Workshop on Systems Science & Transdisciplinary Methodologies with colleagues Amar Nayak, Ray Ison, and Debadutta Panda; I joined a roundtable on Taking Systems Science & Transdisciplinarity to Regenerative Practice; I chaired a plenary session on Education, Axiology, & Methodology for Regenerativeness in Education; and presented a paper on Network Agency in Distributed Learning.
All in all a busy week!
The conference helped me develop a much deeper appreciation for systems thinking, systems dynamics, of boundaries as relationships, and the power of transdisciplinarity. ICRE 2025 drew from many different fields — from medicine to farming, from engineering to social work, from ecology to education, and from microbiology to music, dance, and theater. Through all of our panels and discussions, the conference underscored that only through an inter- and trans-disciplinary interconnectedness and shared framework that we can achieve the coherence necessary to work toward a regenerative future.
My visit to India began with several days in Pune thanks to a generous invitation from Flame University. Together with my colleague Pravar Petkar from the International Centre for Sustainability (ICfS), we met with many new collaborators, shared our perspectives in a talk on Regenerative Education and Democracy with students and faculty from across the disciplines, and grew to understand the university’s particular approach to teaching and learning. Flame is nearly unique in Indian higher education — as a liberal arts institution, it encourages students to experience a broad foundational curriculum, and to put practice forward as they engage with local and regional communities and ecologies.
This interdisciplinary approach is punctuated by Flame’s many research centres that are integrated into the student experience as well as supporting Indian community initiatives and policy development across areas of sustainability, social care, wellbeing & happiness, and more.
On my way from Flame to XIM, I had a chance to spend some time with my friend Pooja Bhale, who has been lovingly looking after a hillside in Pune for the past fourteen years, with the help of resident goats, itinerant peacocks, and an energetic circulation of dogs — along with many friends and visitors. Having founded The Farm as part of the larger Protecterra project, Pooja has taken the time to listen deeply, reflect and respond with the land for which she cares — and which in turn cares for and cultivates relationships with all who walk through its regenerating woodland.
Even now at the start of winter season, the Farm is rich with the flow of life; it’s many ponds teeming with and celebrating life of all kinds, flowers still pendulous from trellised outdoor classrooms, prayer flags among the trees and the calls of peacocks punctuating the vibrant greens of the early December afternoon.
In our closing reflective session at ICRE, I shared some words from an essay I published in the 2022 book Regenerative Learning:
“No one thing is at the centre of an ecosystem, but rather, it is comprised of relationships, processes, and networks. Often, surprising generative interactions are its essential building blocks. Why then should there be a centre to a system of learning?
This would enable us to recognise that, whatever our discipline or specialism, we are always teaching about relationships — between human and more- than-human, among people in community, about the relationships among things rather than just about the things themselves.”
Similarly, in 1974, Jiddu Krishnamurti wrote in On Education:
“Life cannot be made to conform to a system, it cannot be forced into a framework, however nobly conceived; and a mind that has merely been trained in factual knowledge is incapable of meeting life with its variety, its subtlety, its depths and great heights. . . . The highest function of education is to bring about an integrated individual who is capable of dealing with life as a whole.”
In Odia (the regional language in Orissa), as derived from Sanskrit, the terms that provide the most fertile conceptual terrain for our continuing work in regenerative systems may be ସୁସଙ୍ଗତ and ପୁନର୍ଜନ୍ମ — susangata (coherence) and punarjanma (regeneration). Their origins in Indic cultural traditions resonate with lineages interweaving Vedic and tribal concepts of interbraidedness and cyclical re-emergence.
Punarjanma draws its power from Sanskrit roots that give rise to flourishing shoots of new inner and outer dimensional growth. Susangata similarly has deep Vedic roots and derives from Sanskrit etymologies of joining together in virtuous, braided streams flowing into shared purpose. Entwined like the apparent chaos of banyan roots and trunk and branches, which work together toward their shared purpose.
The very written script of Odia is already in a centuries-old dialogue with the more-than-human, as the striking differences between scripts such as Odia (as well as Burmese, Javanese, Balinese, Tamil, Khmer, and more) and its Sanskrit origins — between the definitive horizontal line that links letters in Sanskrit and the upward curves of Odia, seems an invitation to openness and possibility. Odia is one of the palm leaf scripts, which adopted its top curves when it was written on palm leaves some thousand years ago, and because of the linear cell arrangement of the palm leaves, straight lines were more likely to tear the leaf and render it unusable. Scribes would therefore add a subtle curve to their letters, which has persisted to today.
The origin of the lettering only enhances the etymology and Indic roots of these words to build a foundation for perhaps a more multi-dimensional, practice that interweaves the grounded practice with affect and spiritual engagement with place.
Much like the rhythmic dance of the banyan’s entwining limbs, as part of our week in Bhubaneswar, we shared an evening with brilliant dancers, singers, musicians, and actors who interpreted processes of rebirth, renewal, and regeneration flowing into a coherent embodied whole that channeled embodiment and performance into expressions of invitation, relationality, and connection. We became entangled in unexpected possibilities of regenerative movement — movement that itself became coherence, and even as a group of less-than-coordinated academics, the energies of our collective embodied practice enacted the connections we had been trying to articulate throughout the conference.
If there’s one key takeaway, it’s this:
Collective practice makes coherence possible.
Join me & let’s continue to create spaces for regeneration, co-creation, and meaningful action!
Regenerative Learning Network 