From inside-out: Monica Sharma on new models of change, leadership and stewardship

Auroville Today: You are much in demand with corporations, institutions and individuals all over the world. Why have you invested so much energy in Auroville?

I’m not sure I really planned it; in a way it just happened. Perhaps destiny and grace brought us all together. A couple of Aurovilians heard about a seminar I did in Mumbai and thought I might have something useful to offer to Auroville, so they were trying to contact me. At the same time, I was planning to do a workshop for the Government of India in Pondicherry, but the venue was cancelled and we ended up in the Unity Pavilion instead. That’s when I was asked to come and do something here.

I’m attracted to Auroville, firstly, because of its sacredness. My own journey in life is informed by a sacred spirituality that my parents cultivated in me.

I’m drawn to the Ramakrishna Mission and Krishnamurthy, and I study Buddhism. But there’s an additional dimension in Auroville which is great, because here sacredness manifests in human unity through action and I resonate with people who are exploring an inner journey to manifest external change.

When you were asked to come here, were you given any kind of brief?

I don’t think I was asked to fulfil a particular need. In any case, I told them I had not come to ‘fix’ Auroville, and I would not work on governance or management structures because I have enough of that in the United Nations. I’m very clear that I’m here to manifest my own inner work and to provide a platform for others to manifest their inner work through changes in culture that promote human unity.

You have said that individual transformation is necessary but not sufficient for social transformation. So, practically, how does one move from individual transformative practice to transforming a culture or society?

The three pillars that I work on here are knowing who you are – your unique life force, your core principles – sourcing an inner sacred space for action, which you refer to as the psychic being, and creating systems and a culture that enable problems to be solved.

There is one non-negotiable: one’s core inner values. So the constant endeavour is to preserve the integrity of these values in everything you do: you must embody them. The next thing you need to be very clear about is what you ‘burn’ for, what you ache to manifest. Then you try to see what aspect of the present culture needs to shift to make that possible.

Regarding the latter, we do exercises where I ask participants to write down the five shifts in Auroville’s culture they would like to happen. Taken together, it generally comes down to about ten things they want to shift.

Everybody needs to agree on these shifts?

Yes, but each can work in his or her own way on achieving them: they don’t need to keep connecting with each other in a mass movement. So, for example, there could be a hundred different initiatives connected with afforestation.

But all these initiatives are aligned because they are working towards the ten major cultural shifts that have been identified. We have developed tools to ensure that this connection is made.

One of the important capacities you speak of is the need to recognise the invisible rules or patterns of a culture. What do you mean by this?

Take the body, for example. We may experience a fever but there’s a whole lot of other things happening in the body that make our temperature go up. It is up to us whether we want to enquire into these ‘invisible’ factors or whether we just want a quick way of getting the fever down. If we go for the quick fix, we are not going to change anything in the system or culture.

But there are also patterns that promote change, transformation. I see the invisible pattern or ‘architecture’ of Auroville as a place where the individual manifests through service, through letting go of ownership. I see a space has been consciously created here that says this is not a meditation place but a place for karma yoga; here you have to work. This very much resonates with me.

In fact, through texts like The Charter, The Dream and To Be A True Aurovilian, Mother provided very clear guidance about what you need to sign up for when you join Auroville. These values, like the fact we don’t own things but have to let go, hit at the core of the coping mechanisms of the ego. They are a template for manifesting a new society.

Is your work also designed to make us aware of the patterns that each of us has imported into Auroville from the past?

It’s absolutely that, and I need to recognise those patterns in myself as well. What comes in our way is not our intention: we have beautiful intentions. What comes in our way is our egos, and we are hijacked by our emotions.

I mentor two nobel laureates but I also work with landless construction workers; it’s the full range of humanity. But the principles of personal change remain the same because human beings think in the same way and have the same needs and blockages.

Consequently, many of the tools I use are really ways of looking at ourselves and finding ways to transcend what is blocking us, like our egos and emotions. They provide bridges between who I am, in my deepest nature, and what I want to manifest in the world.

The work you do challenges many of the established ways of looking at organization. For example, you seem to be talking about a very different kind of leadership from the traditional top-down, hierarchical model. How would you describe the new concept of leadership or stewardship?

Firstly, leadership is about action and the ability to create a new future. In this sense, the new leadership is like the old one, except that for us the new future is not extreme materialism but human unity. Stewardship adds another dimension to leadership: our ability to work ‘in trust’– not owning assets, but caring for people and our planet.

Secondly, the new leadership and stewardship does not operate from the top-down or from the bottom-up.

It is from ‘inside-out’, sourcing an inner sacred space for outward manifestation. Wisdom is sourcing action from the deepest place within ourselves and generating appropriate action for meeting challenges.

The large-scale successes of leaders at the top have been based on narrowly-focused interventions, such as smallpox eradication or wealth creation. This was appropriate. But they have little experience in innovations that foster the expression of individual and collective wisdom in action. Considering the urgency and complexity of today’s crises, we have no option but to learn to do things differently.

Thirdly, leadership and stewardship is about responsible speaking and deep listening from the heart, and about the ability to generate new conversations that result in changing culture. It is about knowing who I truly am, understanding the old patterns in my culture and myself and creating new patterns that shift the status quo.

Have you seen or been told of any changes in Auroville as a result of your work here?

I have been asking some people who have participated in the workshops what they see has changed in Auroville. And what could be the next step. One of them said that our meeting culture is different now. People are listening a little more, a little deeper, and not putting others down so much in public. Another one said he had always known there were many quiet people in Auroville who wanted to do something for the community but didn’t know how to go about it. Now many of these have learned about tools that helped them manifest something that could serve The Dream. STEM Land [an innovative learning laboratory for young students. See Auroville Today, December, 2015 eds.] is just one of the examples of something that was born out of these workshops.

At the same time, Auroville cannot be complacent.

I love the global nature of Auroville, it is an entity for the world, but inevitably the external forces of India will influence it. In your immediate neighbourhood, there are issues like alcoholism and domestic violence against women. I don’t think Auroville is influenced yet; you have a certain protection. But Aurovilians need to be aware of these things and be ready to respond to them. And the response does not lie in the wisdom of the past.

Will your work with Auroville continue?

Yes. This is the last time I am doing Stage One of my Learning-in-Action programmes. I am training Aurovilians to be able to lead these workshops, but I will be coming back next year to do the next stage. And I’ll keep doing this until I am made redundant in a nice way!

Bridget (Thamarai): The programme has aligned my work from a base of what I really care about towards creating value-based results in the bioregion, while questioning the structures and normatives that hold problems in place. It has given me practical tools that allow me to reflect, design, implement and measure. Our project team (Thamarai) have grown so much through the programme that has established a shared language and mode of operation that allows us to deal with problems as they arise and to plan for the greatest impact that we as a group, and with aligned partners, can achieve.

Martin (Auroville Consulting): A few of the distinct take-aways that I got from participating in Stewardship for New Emergence are:

– Establishing a common language among my colleagues at Auroville Consulting (and within the wider Auroville Community) in regard to project design and operations;

– Project design tools that are iterative, extremely practical and that facilitate connecting actions and system change to what I deeply care about;

– Tools that can be applied in operationalizing project design and that act as a lens that foster a continuous enquiry on whether my actions are congruent with my values.

Sanjeev (STEM Land): The tools help me connect who I am with what I do – at home, in school and at work. They help me be explicit about my values and work towards shifts in systems and cultures for their manifestation. As a team, practice helps us listen deeply to each other, speak responsibly and have a common language that supports our growth while being efficient and efficacious. STEM Land was the result of a breakthrough exercise of the workshop and is a space of self-directed learning. Introducing the same tools to the children supports them transcend fear and work from their possibility.