Deep Democracy: An Invitation

In the early 2000’s, I traveled out to Yachats, Oregon to attend a workshop with a teacher named Arny Mindell. Arny had studied at the Jung Institute in Zurich, but had broken with the Jungian orthodoxy to create his own way which he called, Process Work. I had randomly picked up one of his books, LEADER AS MARTIAL ARTIST, while visiting a friend in California. I was captivated by his ideas and was amazed at how ‘Zen’ he sounded.

In particular, I was struck by Arny’s idea of ‘deep democracy’.  ‘Deep democracy is our sense that the world is here to help us become our entire selves, and that we are here to help the world become whole.’ This perspective of a reciprocal relationship between the self and the world mirrors the Buddhist teaching of dependent co-arising—that the self and the world create each other, I wanted to learn more from him. We are not actors moving about on a large stage, but we are constantly collaborating to create the world around us. Breathing in and breathing out, we are not separate from the world in which we live.

Arny also wrote ‘Deep democracy is that special feeling of belief in the inherent importance of all parts of ourselves and all viewpoints in the world around us.’ Each of us is a multiplicity of voices and parts. Rather than privilege some voices and suppress others, we should learn to welcome all the parts of ourselves. We don’t have to let the dark voices take over, but we do need to honor and listen to them, because they too have value and contain necessary wisdom.

Likewise, we need to be actively open all the voices in the world around us, not just because everyone has a right to be heard, but because only when we see what is happening from many sides can we fully appreciate what here and act effectively. Reality is a collaborative construction and we each see it from a unique and valuable perspective.

The coast of Oregon is wild and rural. The waves crash constantly on the rocky shore—on clear calm days as well as stormy ones. The week with Arny and his wife and teaching partner Amy (and 100 plus other people) was wonderful and challenging for me. Two things I remember most: first is meeting a person who has become a life-long friend. We have gone on to lead workshops together and she remains a dear friend and collaborator to this day.

The second thing that is still vivid these many years later is Arny’s amazing presence. He’s a small man with a huge grin. Everything that arises seems to delight and intrigue him. During the workshop, he met everything, even disruption, with a level of curiosity and trust that I had never witnessed before.

In LEADER AS MARTIAL ARTIST, he put it this way: ‘Deep democracy is our sense that the world is here to help us become our entire selves, and that we are here to help the world become whole.’ This perspective deeply contradicts our usual sense of life as struggle and the heroic individual who fights and subdues the dangerous territory around her. A Tibetan Buddhist teacher once expressed this same radical sentiment when he said: ‘The world is kindly bent to ease us.’

What if it’s really true that ‘the world is here to help us?’ What if, even in this time of uncertainty and fear, there is some particular opportunity opening for each one of us to learn and to grow in new ways? And what if, in some way, our individual thoughts, words and actions are important to our collective response as we learn to cope and perhaps even thrive as humans in this new world?