Sophy Banks reflects on 10 years at the heart of Transition

Last December, Sophy Banks, the founder of the ‘Inner Transition’ aspect of Transition Networks, moves on from Transition Network to pastures new, a moment Rob Hopkins felt needed marking.

Here is the interview with Sophy (written and audio @ SoundCloud).

Some saying caught my attention from what she says…

We have this tendency to look at the world through a particular lens. I think there are different ways of knowing truth. Some people tend to know truth through what we can measure physically and they tend to look at the whole world through the material lens. Other people think that the deepest truth we can find is known through consciousness and our inner world. People who see the world through those different lenses tend to polarise and tend not to be able to speak to each other, because they don’t have a meeting point. […]

Sometimes I feel like I’ve been like a mother in Transition Network, that I’ve been holding something about the wellbeing of the whole family, as it were. […]

Paying attention to what’s needed. It’s quite an invisible role and it’s quite difficult to see the work it takes as it’s not about doing a lot of stuff but it’s about an awareness and paying attention and bringing something at the right moment, or the moment when you think it’s needed. […]

… part of my mission was to make that training have a very strong Inner component, so relating how we do community engagement to a psychological model around change, that people have the depth to understand how to get the things that they do to work. I guess that’s been my passion, to bring that sense of – if we don’t understand how human beings work, how can we design human systems, how can we do that? […]

There’s lots of layers to that question. The simple answer is it just feels right. […]

I do really feel like what I’ve got to give has been taken. It’s been received and actually it’s time for me to go. It feels good for me. I’m tired and I need space. […] I really need a period of time where I’m still, and have time just to be with space. […]

The first thing that I would wish would be for an end to burnout […]

… for me part of what all of those many beautiful practices and movements of inner work support is this sense of what a complete human being is. That we’re not just what we do. That we’re also the depth of our love for our children and each other and the people that are vulnerable. We are the vision that we can imagine and the beauty that we both bring and want to see in the world. We are the intensity of our grief when things are lost and go wrong and the enormity of our courage to stand in the face of things that are terrifying and say we’re still going to act.