New Ways of Knowing
with Jamie Wheal, Nora Bateson, Sam Lee, Trish Blain, Ari Kuschnir and Schuyler Brown
Announcing the return of my flagship course New Ways of Knowing, with a new faculty including Jamie Wheal, Nora Bateson, Sam Lee, Trish Blain, Ari Kuschnir and Schuyler Brown. Join a transformative process with people from around the world and learn skills that help us adapt and thrive in an age of crisis and transition. With live tuition from some of the brightest minds in systems change, art, music, complexity studies and peak performance. The journey begins on Wednesday, 14 January.
We are walking out of a past that can no longer sustain us and into a future yet to be born. At this moment in history, we’re facing multiple overlapping crises in ecology, politics, economics and culture. Runaway AI, rising authoritarianism, geopolitical instability and immigration tensions are all converging at once.
It’s heavy stuff… or maybe not. It all depends how we approach it.
The word crisis derives from the Greek krinein, to decide. It’s an inflection point; as much an opportunity as a catastrophe. Another ancient Greek concept is relevant here: Kainos. It means ‘new’. Not just new in form, but something we’ve never seen before.
I founded Kainos on conviction that an orientation toward what hasn’t yet been is exactly what we need right now. A lot of people I speak to, myself included, want to move into a new social reality beyond the endless cycles of extraction and consumerism, but feel tangled in systems so vast it can feel impossible to have a meaningful impact.
The first step toward social transformation is to cultivate new ways of seeing and being that unlock new possibilities in our own lives, and which deepen our agency. It’s that process that gives us the confidence, skills and inspiration to impact the world around us with our unique gifts.
Cultivating these skills and perspectives can also fill us with active hope as we enter new cultural territory.
Not blind optimism, but a particular orientation toward the unknown. Active hope is about seeking out new ideas, cultivating imagination, strengthening our agency and creativity… all while staying relaxed in the face of uncertainty. New Ways of Knowing will help you develop these skills as part of an international group of fellow explorers.
At its heart, this process is about learning how to navigate and thrive in complexity. Whether we’re trying to change our political systems, cultures, organisations or even our own minds, we’re wrestling with complex systems.
They have a life of their own, evolving and changing while we’re trying to make sense of them. To thrive in the world today, and find new solutions, we need to develop a new relationship to complexity. Not just in the systems that make up our lives, but our own inner worlds, and the places where they meet.
That doesn’t just mean gaining an intellectual understanding, but learning how to embody and flow with uncertainty, nuance and contradictory information. Knowing how to prompt AI well, as well as how to discern its dangers. Using your agency to manipulate the leverage points and feedback loops in the world around you, while also surrendering to the flow of reality.
It means practicing new ways of seeing and being that allow us to truly engage with the complexity of the world and our lives. To find those capacities, we have to go to the cutting edge of cognitive science, complexity theory, systems change and personal development.
New Ways of Knowing will teach you skills, theories and practices that help you re-orient your sensemaking, and deepen your connectedness to other people and the world. As well as curated content that helps simplify complexity theory, systems change, mythopoetics and cognitive science, you will learn practices to help you to approach problems and contradictions from a new perspective. Tap in to new insights, deepen your understanding of the systems around and within you, and flow with complexity in multiple domains of your life.
I’ve created online and in-person experiences for thousands of people, gaining positive coverage from The Guardian, BBC and GQ. My online courses have been praised for their innovation and immersion, and the most recent ‘New Ways of Knowing’ received an average rating of 9 out of 10 in post-course surveys for overall quality and value for money.
Testimonials
“The quality and spirit of the guest contributors was immeasurable, as was the wonderful moderation and guidance … Add that to the surprise but mind-blowing connections and richness provided such a rich and supportive texture to the entire course. I cannot recommend this highly enough.”
“I really loved it! I liked the length of it, and the mix of really excellent presenters….I gained so much insight into the lives of my fellow global citizens. It felt very loving and life enhancing.”
“An exceptional overview of where we are in the world today and managed to have both depth and intensity as well as being a good intro to many new concepts”
“Thanks so much for this course. This was truly a game changer for me and helped me step more confidently in the space of not knowing... It’s the letting go that we collectively need to embody so we can act from a space of beauty, integrity, humility.”
The Experience
This isn’t a traditional online course; it’s an immersive process of skill-building and transformation with people from around the world. You’ll have the choice to decide which of the many practices, theories and materials are most relevant to you, and create your own personalised journey.
Every aspect of New Ways of Knowing is designed to be applied directly to your life, work or projects. In this way, the complexity of the world is your teacher, while the faculty and your fellow participants act as guides and peers to help you apply what you’re learning to real-life situations and problems.
I’ll be sharing techniques I’ve developed over the last five years to help people thrive in complexity, including my Complexity Tolerance Practice, Psychedelic Sensemaking tools and an updated version of my Sovereignty Meditation.
Our faculty will help you develop a range of new skills each week, which you’ll have a chance to deepen in weekly sessions with a ‘pod’ of three other participants.
Bestselling author and peak performance expert Jamie Wheal will teach you how to survive and thrive in collapsing systems, drawing on his experience as a mountaineer and survival guide. Author and facilitator Trish Blain will share advanced techniques to help you move between different states of consciousness and surf the ‘alive edges’ at the cusp of the unknown.
Folk singer, environmentalist and activist Sam Lee will help you orient yourself in land and history through myth and music. Creative producer Ari Kuschnir and emergence facilitator Schuyler Brown will take you on a journey blending AI, embodiment and imagination to help you vision the future. With Nora Bateson, you’ll learn how to perceive cross-contextually and move beyond the linear ways of seeing that often limit us.
You’ll also have ample opportunities for you to connect with others in the cohort beyond your ‘pod’ of four, and to explore how to create networks of support and impact together.
Breathwork Track
We also have a very limited number of ‘Breathwork Tracks’ for those who want to go deeper into a journey of personal transformation with one to one sessions with me.
Breathwork is a powerful practice that involves deep, continuous diaphragmatic breathing to elicit an altered state. It can help us unlock our creativity, help us reconnect to our bodies, and come into contact with and process unresolved feelings and thought patterns.
If you choose this option, we’ll have three guided sessions together across the duration of the course, along with support to develop your own breathwork practice. By the end of the course, you will have the foundations for a life-long skill and enjoy a healthier, more expansive breath pattern.
Logistics
There are three main ways you’ll skill-up, learn and experiment in New Ways of Knowing.
The first is in our live sessions with the faculty, which happen on Wednesdays at 8pm UK time (3pm New York and 7am Melbourne) and run for two hours (all sessions are recorded and will be available to watch if you miss one). We will have eight sessions in total, which you can read about in more detail on the website.
The second is through weekly sessions with your ‘pod’ of four people, where you’ll have a chance to embed the lessons from our faculty sessions with weekly practices and discussions. There are still pods running from the last New Ways of Knowing in 2023. In other courses, pods have led to business collaborations, and even a marriage and birth! While we can’t promise that, we can say confidently that they are a powerful way to deepen your learning and make meaningful connections.
The third way you’ll learn is more self-directed, and based on what you’re looking for. We have an extensive 100+ page workbook full of foundational frameworks and theories, from sensemaking tools and complexity theory to the science and psychology behind the practice you’re learning. You’ll also have access to our Mighty Networks (a private social network for the course) where you’ll find session recordings, a selection of the best sessions from five years of previous courses, reading lists and a place to connect and collaborate with the wider cohort.
By the end of New Ways of Knowing, you will leave with a deeper understanding of how to embrace the complexity in your life, navigate the meta-crisis and step into your agency. You will have developed new skills, identified how to apply them to your life. Above all, you will have gone on a deep collective inquiry into our shared humanity.
Check out the website for a full description of what we’re doing week by week. We have just 20 early bird tickets, so we suggest booking soon to avoid missing out.
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