crown chakra
The crown chakra is also known as sahasrara and is the seventh and final chakra in the body's energy wheel system. It's located at the crown of the head and is associated with the color violet, the element of thought, and spirituality. The name sahasrara is Sanskrit for "thousand-petaled".
The I10 Framework can be utilzed for individual issues, but it can also be used to identify, examine and alter larger systems. One of the best known systems thinkers of our time was Donella (Dana) Meadows.
"So, what is a system? A system is a set of things—people, cells, molecules,or whatever—interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time. The system may be buffeted, constricted,triggered, or driven by outside forces. But the system’s response to these forces is characteristic of itself, and that response is seldom simple in the real world." (Meadows, Thinking in Systems, 2008)
"The system, to a large extent, causes its own behavior! An outside event may unleash that behavior, but the same outside event applied to a different system is likely to produce a different result.Think for a moment about the implications of that idea:
• Political leaders don’t cause recessions or economic booms.Ups and downs are inherent in the structure of the market economy.
• Competitors rarely cause a company to lose market share.They may be there to scoop up the advantage, but the losing company creates its losses at least in part through its own business policies.
• The oil-exporting nations are not solely responsible for oil price rises. Their actions alone could not trigger global price rises and economic chaos if the oil consumption, pricing, and investment policies of the oil-importing nations had not built economies that are vulnerable to supply interruptions.
• The flu virus does not attack you; you set up the conditions for it to flourish within you.
• Drug addiction is not the failing of an individual and no one person, no matter how tough, no matter how loving, can cure a drug addict—not even the addict. It is only through understanding addiction as part of a larger set of influences and societal issues that one can begin to address it". (Meadows, Thinking in Systems, 2008)
"At a time when the world is more messy, more crowded, more interconnected, more interdependent, and more rapidly changing than ever before,the more ways of seeing, the better. The systems-thinking lens allows us to reclaim our intuition about whole systems and
• hone our abilities to understand parts,
• see interconnections,
• ask “what-if” questions about possible future behaviors, and• be creative and courageous about system redesign.Then we can use our insights to make a difference in ourselves and our world." (Meadows, Thinking in Systems, 2008)
Click on the Academy for Systems Change below to learn more!
TOP 5 RESOURCES BY DONELLA (Dana) MEADOWS
If you are interested learning more about Dana’s work you might want to explore the following resources.
Envisioning a Sustainable World
—a powerful video of Dana’s speech on the crucial role that visioning plays in bringing about the world we want
Tools for the Transition to Sustainability
—in this chapter, Dana discusses the importance of visioning, networking, truth-telling, learning, and loving in the quest for sustainability
Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System
—probably Dana’s most famous article, this piece illuminates Dana’s deep wisdom about how systems work and how we can manipulate them to create the most change
—another powerful piece about how people can work with systems once they lose the illusion of control over them.
—the groundbreaking 1972 study that launched Donella Meadows onto the global stage as a leading climate thinker and writer