Embodied Sensemaking – A New Media Approach For Improved Sensemaking

The simple exercise we place at the top of our articles is designed to help make you more present and embodied as you engage with online content. This helps you digest content better, notice how it makes you feel, make better sense of it, and increase discernment.

In this day and age, it reminds us to engage the practice of building the muscle of paying attention in an embodied way, something we might call a lost art.

By turning your attention inward, you break the habitual pattern of moving quickly through online content, and are invited to make sense of what is happening with more layers of yourself. In the process above, you also create a greater physiological heart and brain coherence by increasing your heart rate variability.

Part of our mission at Collective Evolution is to explore topics that can help transform our world and observe what is happening in our world from a more neutral point of view. We like to ask “what about us and our current human story creates our world, society, ideas, day-to-day choices, and policies to be the way they are?”

We are working to raise consciousness behind why humans do the things they do, and empathetically understand this at a deeper level. We have witnessed that many people like to explore themselves inward with deep introspective practices, but often this depth of practice is not brought to our external world and events. Further, those who engage in inner transformation and spiritual practice often don’t want to make sense of the outside world, and those who like to make sens of politics and current events often don’t like to engage in spiritual practice or inner transformation.

Our goal has always been to merge the two.

To best explore these questions we want to encourage readers to be in a state of mind and being where they’re more open to exploring new ideas while being more relaxed, attentive, and more free from cognitive, emotional, and trauma-based distortions.

This idea came from our founder Joe Martino, who calls it Embodied Sensemaking. He began experimenting with the idea in 2010 with Collective Evolution and formally incorporated it into the reading experience on CE in 2016 to invite a deeper understanding of what was being read or watched.

Sensemaking is the process of taking external cues in our environment, like information and facts, and making sense of them in a larger more complex picture. Embodied sensemaking is bringing the sensing, relational and intuitive capacities of the body into the process.

Our society is complex and many of our behaviors, individually and collectively, are driven by our past, trauma, and conditioning. If we can sense where these pieces might be impacting the nature of our society and the stories that happen around us, we can get a better sense of how to solve the challenges we face.

Further, when we come to make sense of current events and politics with other people, we are often caught in closed minded, ideological, or polarizing stances. We often leave out curiosity, a sense of truly attuning to one another and being open to how another person came to feel what they feel about something.

When practiced well, embodied sensemaking allows us to tune into our own emotions, the emotions of others, and the collective unconscious as we make sense of society.

How We’ve Used The Concept

Since 2009, our team has been committed to forging a radically new approach to media and the discussion of current events. We have cultivated mindfulness and embodied dialogue into our awareness in office, and we have also bought this language in our content. Further, we have developed courses to help people develop these practices and skill in their own lives so they can implement them in their own journey as well.

In 2016, we added an exercise to the top of our articles to prompt people to pause for a moment, to tune into their body, and bring a sense of coherence to their body, emotions, and mind, in order to invite a deeper layer of inquiry into WHY things happen in our world, lives and society. This has an effect of settling the nervous system so people are less prone to survival responses as they read. Since 2016, this exercise has been visible for almost 1 billion page views and likely hundreds of millions of people. This helped inform our research survey on the effects of this here.

This is important as survival physiology often keeps us in ‘enemy mode’ which isn’t ideal for good faith sensemaking. It’s ideal to seek out a threat and respond to a threat.

Over the years scientific research has come to support the approach we have been taking to help improve the way people consume, connect with, and synthesize information in order to make meaningful choices in their lives and move towards healing collective trauma.

This discussion is worthy of consideration as most platforms either focus on simple ‘feel good’ or ‘well being’ based content, or focus on news from a purely journalistic sense, often with a political bias.

Since our content focus is on both personal transformation and news/current events, we have chosen to actually measure whether or not people are having a more positive experience consuming current event information.

A recent research survey that we publicized in March 2021 shows the positive results of our approach on audiences well being, emotional state, and development of critical thinking over the 15 years our brands have been doing this work.

Coherence & Optimal Function

Decades of research show that our hearts send more information to our brains than our brains send to our hearts. When our body’s heart is beating in what is called an ‘incoherent rhythm’, it sends a message to our brains and nervous system that produces a suboptimal function that leads to a reduction in our ability to learn, make effective decisions, problem-solve, critically think, and self regulate our emotions.

When our heart is beating in a coherent rhythm, it sends coherent signals to the brain and nervous system that then brings each of these systems into synchronization physiologically. The result is the opposite of that of incoherent signals. Research shows an improvement in our ability to think clearly, navigate information, make decisions, remember things, and communicate. All of this can come from as little as 60 – 90 seconds of practices like the one we place at the top of each of our articles. Over time, these practices also helps to build self-awareness which helps us see our own bias’ more clearly.

Our Unique & Research Backed Style

At CE we have found that the pathway to meaningful and sustainable change in our lives and society comes from being able to self-regulate our nervous system, understand and change our habits and patterns, and also from learning how to navigate information in our world in such a way that allows us to carry our inner transformation into the realm of societal change.

In other words, sometimes people can have a spiritual practice or work on personal transformation, but don’t often apply their transformation to questioning or re-imagining things like current events, society, or politics.

We are at a critical time in humanity’s history where faith in existing institutions is deteriorating rapidly, typically based on a right intuition people have that these institutions don’t work in their favor. We must begin exploring why our world is in need of change, and at the same time be able to shift our consciousness and thinking enough that we can make societal changes from a new way of thinking and being.

In 2009, we chose to focus our journalistic, video and educational content in alignment with these findings. Focusing on a sense of ease, curiosity, and playfulness in our style. We don’t intend on trying to convince people to believe what we are reporting on, instead, we encourage them to openly explore and question. This has had a dramatic affect on how people feel when consuming our content, and how they understand what we’re producing.

Commonly reported feedback from our audience includes things like feeling more grounded, hopeful, inspired, clear, and empowered to take action in their personal lives and society. Our readers also report that they tend not to feel a notion of ‘us vs. them’ and division that often occurs when consuming media about current events. Interestingly, readers have also commonly reported that after repeated consumption of our articles, videos, podcasts or courses, they notice a stark difference in how they feel when they consume content from more traditional alternative or mainstream media. This was also a huge discovery for us as it suggests that people’s relationship with other forms of alternative media can bring them new information but does not necessarily help their well being and sense of inspiration to act.

To us, all these suggest that our style not only informs but helps to create a noticeable shift in our audiences state of being. We don’t feel that it is us doing this for our reader, we feel the style and platform invites the reader to, by nature, build their self-awareness, practice emotional regulation, and think more clearly. Imagine how this will ripple out into the world as a result. Imagine how different conversations would be about current events if more had access to this approach.

Controversial Topics & Meaningful Change

At CE, we sometimes cover ‘controversial’ topics that as a society we are often resistant to explore, whether we have a spiritual practice or not. Many of our colleagues and friends in the personal transformation space have chosen not to explore some of these subjects much as they don’t quite align with their brand messaging or line of work, we respect and agree with their choices.

However, we saw this as an important challenge to take on in our work as these ‘tough’ conversations need to be had, and we believe they can be done in a way that inspires change and well being.

Culture today is often uncomfortable with uncertainty and thus open inquiry and examination of new evidence have shut down around certain subjects. In our minds, this is causing a very societally impactful sensemaking crisis in which we have become divided, distressed, emotional, and unclear as to what is actually going on around us.

With this, we are quick to react and are often living on edge. As research shows, when we make decisions within our lives and society based on this state of being, they are often ineffective, suboptimal, and create further disharmony.

Our research has shown that 63% of our audience feels that CE helps them explore tough or controversial subjects while feeling more grounded and less emotionally charged compared to when others report on it, whether it’s a mainstream or alternative media source.

This was a very inspiring statistic for us as we feel this makes a meaningful contribution towards shifting the way media is told to bring about a better society, without being limited to only focusing on ‘good news’ which has many limitations and, we feel, does not lead to deep societal change.

In our work we have found that combining inner transformation and emotional regulation with the openness to re-imagine society and explore new ideas, even when they are controversial, has created the greater sense of empowerment, clarity and well-being amongst our readers.

In short, our work has helped to provide a path to self-awareness, practice, and the skills to tackle information openly and coherently, thus readers are not triggered by disagreements and different perspectives and are able to synthesize information into meaningful practice, solutions, and actions steps.

We’re at a critical time for developing a greater sense of self awareness, openness, and increased critical thinking so that we can better explore information without our emotions, biases, and preconceived notions getting in the way and shutting down our inquiry.

At Collective Evolution we feel that the journey to creating collective change is one founded upon personal transformation, what might be called a shift in consciousness, which is to say: we must generate a greater conscious awareness of ourselves, how we function, how to regulate our emotions, and think more clearly about what is going on around us. When we make this shift, our perception about life, society and what is possible dramatically shifts, and we begin to tap into a new story about humanity and what we want to create.

With this new story, coherence, and connection to self, we have found that people are inspired to work towards creating a greater sense of harmony and coherence in their lives and society as well. Effectively being able to see how new and emerging ideas can build a new foundation for society, instead of making small adjustments to our current society that’s built on an old and outdated story.