What is Organic Intelligence®?

This page gives an insight into some core elements of the OI™ framework and how that looks in my work with clients. For further info please see the Organic Intelligence website or contact me

  • One of the most foundational building blocks of the OI framework is what we call Orientation: connecting to the environment through the senses. Neuroscience has shown that our brain wants to map us in space, so that it can make micro-predictions based on registering where we are and what is happening in the here and now. As we connect to our surroundings through sight, sound, touch, smell and taste, our attention withdraws from the negativity bias and is redirected into what is: the simple, neutral reality of our environment in the here and now.

    Orientation is a portal to present moment awareness. And if our here and now reality is actually safe, then registering that through our senses sends the signal to our brain and whole physiology that we can relax, no survival mode (fight, flight and freeze) required in that moment, instead a felt sense of safety and groundedness becomes possible.

  • It may seem like a radical notion, but we can actually grow through enjoyment, pleasure, support and ease! Just as plants grow towards the sun, we flourish when we orient ourselves toward what’s working well, what’s enjoyable, what nourishes us. Most of us are very practised in knowing what’s not working and what is not pleasant, but that’s only one side of the coin. In OI we develop our radar for what’s life-affirming, what is supporting us, and we learn how to take these things in, so they may build our confidence, creativity and resilience.

    I would like to make clear I am not talking about simply ignoring our painful experiences and traumas: that would be some kind of bypassing. However I am advocating being mindful of not falling into the vortex of defining our lives and ourselves solely by our wounds and challenges. Doing so can prevent us from really growing and changing. Organic Intelligence® goes beyond focussing only on our struggles, because we are so much more, and it is through a positive reinforcement paradigm that we can grow into the fullness of our being and bring our whole selves to the world.

    In OI we use the word ‘capacity’ or ‘bandwidth’ to describe how much information and intensity of experience a person’s system can process at any given time. Imagine a small cup which is already nearly full with a backlog of unprocessed experiences - it wouldn’t take much for us to feel overwhelmed, a few more stressors and the cup would be spilling over.

    Our approach is to grow our bandwidth so that we have more capacity to participate with life and enjoy it. We increase the efficiency of our operating system and we grow a bigger container that can hold more joy and connection and can also naturally and more easefully process life’s inevitable challenges and stressors, as well as metabolising the backlog of previously undigestible experiences.

    “My own and the world’s ills will all have room within me and never crowd out nor drown out the equally endless beauty, the wonder and the love.” Steve Hoskinson, Founder, Organic Intelligence

  • Knowing what you don’t want is helpful but it’s not the full picture. I work with you to connect with what it is you really want, your values, what brings you a sense of meaning, purpose, fulfilment, what brings you joy and aliveness and a deep sense of well-being. This is the compass we explore together.

    Life is different when we start being drawn forth by a compass of what’s meaningful to us rather than spending our energy trying to get away from or avoid what we don’t want. I support you to live a life that feels aligned with your values, a life where your external environment and circumstances reflect and are an expression of your inner being, they feed and nourish each other.

  • I have a deep belief that there is an organising principal within us all, and in my work with clients I aim to partner with this essence: the natural, spontaneously emerging wisdom coming through in each moment which knows exactly how to heal and grow. This is organic intelligence.

    OI is rooted in Complex Systems Science, which seeks to understand the nature of adaptable, changeable systems, such as us human beings. A central belief is that under the right conditions, a system will be auto-organising, auto-balancing, auto-healing. Let’s take the example of a cut on your finger: given the right conditions, your innate intelligence knows exactly how to heal. We cannot make the cut heal, just like we cannot make ourselves go to sleep or make ourselves relax. Our role is to establish the right conditions, to set the stage and let our biology take care of the rest.

    And when our system’s auto-organising nature is fully in flow, we don’t have to spend our precious life energy and time trying to manage how we feel, or doing countless things to feel better. Instead, our biology does the heavy lifting for us and we are freed up to enjoy our life and do what it is we came here to do.

  • The OI framework suggests that underneath stress, overwhelm and trauma is a biology out of sync, but ready to heal, safely and naturally. So we learn to speak the language of our biology, we work from the nervous system up and establish a solid foundation to reclaim the body’s organic aliveness, connection and pleasure. We tend to our foundations so that we may rise rooted.

    OI provides a step by step mapping of how we - our biological being and nervous system - heal and grow: roadmaps for embodying one’s full self and restoring biological synchrony, where the systems which make up our human system are pulsing together in a dynamic, harmonious, creative dance. No matter what your experience has been, your body’s innate intelligence knows how to heal and thrive when supported in the right ways.

    No one size fits all, so the absolute foundation of this approach is attunement, which means me being with all that you are and all that you are becoming in each unfolding moment.

  • I don’t think anyone says this better than Michelangelo! “The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material. I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set them free.”

    We create the environment in which your own understanding emerges and reveals itself to you, remembering who you really are. Remembering your nature, recognising and feeling your pre-existent wholeness.

    OI is an integrative, mind-body approach, working with the channels of experience through which the biology expresses itself: emotion, thought, sensation, image. When these are all working together, we are in sync. And the return to biological synchrony is the return to optimal functioning and a felt sense of wholeness.

    This work is about integration, creating a space where previously overwhelming experiences can be metabolised, where the threads of our life become woven into a rich and unique tapestry. It is the movement from inner conflict and a fragmented self towards a felt sense of congruence and greater alignment.

    It is an understanding of ourselves as multi-dimensional beings, embedded and homed at many levels of belonging, from biology to Cosmos, finding our place in the order of things.

  • All of nature is cyclical and in constant motion, and this includes us human beings and our biological rhythms. However, many of us will be familiar with the expectation that we should always be on an upward cycle, or cresting a wave, and the frustration and discomfort that can come when we find ourselves on the downstroke, in the ebbing tide. Without both the ebbs and the flows, a wave would not be a wave, it would be a straight line. We are not designed to live in one mode, however all too often we find ourselves attempting to do so, e.g. overriding our natural need to rest, so that we can continue doing. This is not sustainable and creates depletion, disconnection and can ultimately lead to burnout.

    In OI we create the conditions where our biology can return to its natural rhythms, where we can ride our ups and downs, like waking and sleeping, activity and rest, breathing in and breathing out. This also includes resynchronising with the wider, environmental and planetary rhythms such as the seasons, or the rising and setting of the sun and the waxing and waning of the lunar cycle. The more we are able to live in alignment with natural rhythms and be comfortable with all parts of the waves and cycles, the greater ease and harmony we will feel and the better physical and mental health we will experience.

    When our rhythms are remembered at the biological level, we feel our humanness, our interconnectedness and our wholeness.

  • Our system is actually continuously sending us signals that would trend us in the direction of auto-organisation: resources designed to nourish and support us. They come to us through the channels of experience: thoughts, emotions, sensations, images and things we connect with in our environment through our senses. The examples are infinite and are unique to each individual in each moment.

    Perhaps you’re going about your day and an image of a loved one comes into your mind, or a self-compassionate thought arises within you, or a feeling of gratitude. Perhaps you notice that your hands are resting on each other and start to feel the warmth and connection of that. Or maybe you glance out of the window and notice some trees swaying in the wind or a bird gliding in the sky.

    Sadly we can be habituated to missing these supports, through no fault of our own, but through the conditioning of the negativity bias, or what we refer to in OI as the What’s Wrong Attention (read the next segment to understand more).

    Part of my role as a Coach is to reflect back these resources to you and to support you in being able to receive them, to drink them in so they can nourish you as they’re intended to. Really we are building our capacity to receive from the Life that flows within and without. And the more we begin to notice and really register these continual provisions, the more our trust in Life naturally grows, because we realise that support is coming, always.

  • In OI we talk about the What’s Wrong Attention (WWA) as being the draw to and fixation with what’s wrong, what’s lacking, what needs to be fixed: the negativity bias. While we cannot deny there are untold amounts of suffering, injustice and devastation in our world, for our attention to be hijacked into predominantly focussing on these would be an incomplete picture, and one which is likely to deplete us and prevent us from actually effecting the kind of change we wish to. The preoccupation with what’s wrong keeps us from seeing the more beautiful things around us that naturally just function as they are meant to, and from receiving the internal and external resources that are continually coming to support us.

    This phenomenon is amplified if we have unresolved trauma keeping us living in a chronic survival response, creating an underlying sense of stress and threat, colouring our perception and experience of ourselves, others and life. Of course in that place of suffering all we want is to feel better, so we find ourselves focussing even more on the problem and how to dig it out from the roots, or we try to avoid or outrun it, which ultimately is still a preoccupation with the problem we’re trying to fix. This can be exhausting and all-consuming and can ultimately keep us looping around in the same dysregulated patterns of intensity without the resolution we so long for.

    “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Albert Einstein

    Organic Intelligence brings a necessary shift in perspective: a new paradigm of healing and growth, grounded in the sciences of positive reinforcement and biological auto-organisation, merged with the mindful awareness and compassion of contemplative practice.

    “We heal in the here-and-now, through attuned relationship, support and kindness. When our biology enters the phase of auto-organization, symptoms are relieved, self-efficacy emerges, and one’s post-trauma growth journey takes wings. By learning this new language of biological re-organization, we catalyse the only sensible healing intelligence — that which arises from within our very nature, that which has always been there.” Steve Hoskinson, Founder, Organic Intelligence

  • When I came across Organic Intelligence it felt like a relief and a joy to find an approach which embraced all of my experience and did not pathologise any of it.

    We are complex, multifaceted, ever-changing, often contradictory creatures and the greater aliveness that so many of us long to experience comes from learning to rest in the questions and paradoxes, accepting the ‘both/and’ of our lives and our nature.

    “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.” Walt Whitman

  • I believe we all have unique gifts and qualities to share. I also know it can be a process to understand what those gifts are and feel ready and able to share them, and this is something we navigate in our work together.

    “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” Oscar Wilde

    Living one’s authentic truth is for the benefit of all, this is how I believe we make our greatest contribution to the world. We cannot underestimate the ripple effect our personal healing and self-actualisation has on others and our environment.

    “We're not on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves. But in doing that you save the world. The influence of a vital person vitalizes.” Joseph Campbell

  • States of compassion, empathy, generosity, sharing, service arise naturally within us when we feel well. They are our nature, the fabric of our being, and we can have more ready access to them when in a regulated nervous system state. Conversely, when we are in a stress response it can feel like they are hidden from view because this is a conservation mode where our energy becomes single-focussed on surviving threat.

    So we may long to feel compassion but struggle to locate it within ourselves, and that can be painful in itself. Even more so when the ‘What’s Wrong Attention’ jumps in with self-judgement about our perceived lack of compassion, creating another layer of suffering.

    Feeling compassion for oneself and others naturally becomes easier once our bandwidth has grown to the point where the intensity of living doesn’t have us feeling like we’re up to our noses in discomfort and overwhelm. Our natural wellspring of compassion can flow more freely when our biology is not tweaked by the emotions of fight (irritation/anger), flight (worry/fear), and freeze (numbness/confusion).

    We are a social species, wired for connection and compassion. We become more ourselves when we have more bandwidth. We feel our humanness, our interconnectedness and our shared humanity.

Wild Geese

A poem by Mary Oliver

”You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”