AEIOU Academy of Unlearning

© Simon Stella

What is the Academy of Unlearning?

Learning organizations are undergoing a paradigm shift, from experience-centered development to learning-centered development. Evaluating life experience provides different resources than school.

Evaluating your life experience can help you develop your resources, focusing on skills for exploration and innovation.

Why an Academy of Unlearning?

Unlearning is letting go of the known, to create space for learning the unknown. Unlearning can integrate conventional scientific methods to include social development.

Unlearning is for those who dare to dream in the midst of a storm, those who crave the moments of inspiration during solitary walks; those who can quietly ignore criticism and those who cherish the power of courage tempered by humble wisdom.

Unlearning searches for what makes sense in life. The essentials are hidden in plain sight - in complex living systems that the cause-effect language of science cannot always explain. Unlearning cause-effect thinking raises systemic awareness.

What is Unlearning?

Unlearning is intertwined with living systems, which include relationships, emotions and subjective experience. Fritjof Capra’s (1996) description of living systems provide a basis for Unlearning. A living system, Capra says, has three characteristics:

1. Structure - relationships between the elements of a system
2. Pattern - rhythms and habits of a system
3. Development - how a system changes over time

Systemic structures and patterns indicate how learning affects development. Systemic rhythms and habits provide structure over time, by which a system regulates its energies. With appropriate rhythm, organizations can build and maintain health - dealing promptly with chaos, insecurity and stress.

Organizational rhythms show how energy is managed. Certain rhythms may have worked wonderfully once, but can limit the ability to adapt to changing environment. Systemic habits can become addictive justifications of denial.

Living systems "learn" patterns, develop them and reproduce them. Most systemic patterns are unconscious and complex, yet patterns become ingrained as mindless habits.

Knowing that systemic rhythms are intimately connected to learning and development, the conscious assessment and unlearning of systemic rhythms is fundamental to systemic health.

Most habits are unconscious, yet they are critically important in social development. They are part of the capacity to form relationships and to observe and interpret the world.

Observing and understanding living systems are the challenges of Unlearning.

Goals of Unlearning

The overall purpose of Unlearning is happiness. The happiness of discovery, of continuing to learn forever. The open-ended goals of Unlearning are regenerative energy ... long-term happiness (Kai-zen):

1. Find ways to remain unobtrusive
2. Observe how the world transforms with overlapping shifts of maturation
3. Increase flexibility in unexpected situations
4. Re-evaluate past events in harmony with new discoveries in human character
5. Promote laughter and humor
6. Let go of assumptions and presumptions
7. Revere and respect all
8. Facilitate fellowship

Features of Unlearning Organizations

1. Make time for evaluating, exploration and innovation
2. Continually search for improvement
3. Evaluate and update rules, policies and procedures. Processes may be outdated
4. Distinguish between deliberately breaking agreed policies and exploring what happens when outcomes differ from expectations
5. Actively listen to feedback - from internal and external sources
6. Share resources, information, people and risk. They operate in interconnected networks; resources are shared; everyone plays whatever roles are required.
7. Evaluate ideas when there is a full and well-balanced views
8. Anticipate and manage risk
9. Support innovation
10. Assign innovation projects as important; and reward risk-taking
11. Push for delivery (on tasks which are well-understood, and can successfully be planned with certainty), and allow innovation and open-ended exploration

Unlearning Spirituality

Spirituality includes unlearning guilt, conflicting ideas, emotional trauma and toxic mentorship. Spirituality includes integrating with the integrating principle beneath conflicts and the source of emotions. Spirituality is unlearning. See Code of Ethics for Spiritual Guides and Spiritual Abuse

• Unlearning is not forgetting. Unlearning is integrating with the complement of what is known. Experiencing opposites helps you unlearn what you once learned. Your mind becomes flexible and can accept integrated reality.
• Unlearning is not not-feeling. Unlearning includes accepting the source of all your emotions.
• Unlearning requires relationships. Every point of view can be accepted and integrated. The more viewpoints, the greater the integration.
• Unlearning rises above conflicts and dualities.
• Unlearning is experiencing and accepting other perceptual positions.
• Unlearning is finding relationship with a body, and with a mind.
• Unlearning answers the questions: "What am I?" "Am I a body?" "Am I a mind?"
• Unlearning is holding body and mind for fulfilling a purpose.

Unlearning Dialog

You have all the resources that you need - if you clear your emotional, intellectual and relationship debris. Then you can find your Visions and fulfill your goals.

You can email Simon Stella at <simonste@gmail.com>

Plagiarism is theft. Copyright © Simon Stella 2004-2012 All rights reserved

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Plagiarism is theft. Copyright © Martyn Carruthers 1996-2012 All rights reserved. Soulwork Systemic Coaching was primarily developed by Martyn Carruthers
to help people dissolve emotional blocks and improve relationships to achieve their goals. These concepts and strategies are for general knowledge only. Consult a physician about medical conditions and before changing medical treatment. Don't steal intellectual property ... get permission to post, publish or teach Martyn's work.