History and lineage

Ecological enquiry is a branch of enquiry restoried in 2023 by Anna-Marie Swan, and is therefore a young enquiry practise still in its becoming. It is informed by metaphysics, the natural sciences, philosophy, the more-than-human, the imaginal*, and Anna-Marie's 30-year-long personal and collective enquiry practise.

A term originated by Henry Corbin to describe a world of images and experiences more real than the physical world, Anna-Marie holds 'the imaginal' as the state of dreaming, imagining, remembering, visualising, sensing, and embodied listening.

Ecological enquiry is born of many things but two direct influences are:

1. The work of Orna Guralnik, PSYD, as showcased in Couples Therapy. Her deep curiosity and attentive facilitation of couples exploring the dynamics and roles in their relationships led Anna-Marie to found the Facilitation Pods Commons so that she could work with fellow facilitators to explore the dynamics and roles alive in our role and ‘in the room’. During the first two seasons of the Facilitation Pods Commons, Anna-Marie found that the dynamics and roles alive in the facilitator role and ‘in the room’ were relational and, when paid attention to, the relational ecology of dynamics, events, and experiences could be traced. This was the origin of ‘ecological tracing’, one of the practises specific to ecological enquiry.

   Anna-Marie was also inspired by watching Orna explore her and her clients’ dynamics within her intervision group. The depth of wisdom in the intervision group sparked a desire for her own intervision space alongside other facilitators, where they could explore their worldviews, biases, blindspots, stories, and hopes when in the facilitator role with curiosity, care, and courage.

2. Exploring the question, ‘What is alive in me when in relationship with others?’, the enquiry that lies at the heart of Transformational Connection practices. Having undergone a range of training with them, including a meditation training extending their work into the question, ‘What is alive in me when I shut my eyes?’, Anna-Marie started to widen this enquiry beyond the self and into the fundamental nature of reality.

Ecological enquiry's lineage also includes the words, concepts, practises, and work of (in no particular order): Ken Liu (especially The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories and The Hidden Girl and Other Stories), Sophie Strand (especially The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine and essays from Make Me Good Soil), Bayo Akomolafe (especially These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity's Search for Home), The Emerald podcast, Donella Meadows work on systems thinking, Elinor Ostrom's work on commons, Margaret Wheatley (especially Who Do We Choose To Be? Facing Reality | Claiming Leadership | Restoring Sanity, Tyson Yunkaporta, (especially Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World), The Overstory by Richard Powers, Ted Chiang (especially Exhalation), Otherlands: A World in the Making by Thomas Halliday, The Zen Buddhist concept and practice of 'Interbeing' shared by Thich Nhat Hanh, and On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, and many more that Anna-Marie would struggle to name but are no less important.