What if change-making and awakening were not separate things at all?
An article by Louise Marra · April 10, 2026
In the world of systems change, of activism, of change-making, it can be tempting to simplify things. To make bold claims. To get swept up in possibility without staying grounded in the reality of now.
I’ve worked in systems change for nearly four decades. And if I’m honest, I could see I have been spectacularly unsuccessful. What has actually changed?
That’s the question I want to sit with. The nature of change itself. And I use the word nature deliberately—because change doesn’t just happen in systems. It happens the way nature happens, I think it happens from nature as we are nature.
There is much I don’t know. But this much I do: (it isn’t a long list).
I know that I have changed. Which makes me wonder —if you see yourself as a change-maker or activist, can you trace your own journey of change? Can you notice how you’ve shifted, grown, healed?
I also know this: I’ve spent years working alongside individuals and communities who have changed too. People doing deep, connective work. People who say, again and again, that as they’ve changed, their relationships have changed with them. They have also helped people evolve.
And that matters.
Feeling Again
Much of my work has been about accompanying people on their awakening to what I call their inter-being self—their felt sense of connection to Earth, to life, to each other. It’s about remembering how to feel. How to sense the subtle movements within our bodies. How to reconnect to the currents of life flowing through us. How to feel when they are in the flow of life, or out of it. And how to get back, as part of healing.
People tell me they can feel again. That they can connect again.
To me, that is radical change.
It rewires us—from the amnesia and isolation of the dominant Western worldview—into something whole. Something alive. Something quantum, even. Something I like to call “holonographic”—a made-up word, yes, but one that speaks to us as holons: whole beings, nested within a larger whole.
And while I can’t prove it, I feel this:
These changes are like underground mycelial networks—quiet, unseen, yet deeply alive. Spreading. Connecting. Preparing the ground for transformation. Creating subterranean shifts in the relational fields between humans, and between humans and the more-than-human world.
I see it everywhere.
You may well ask, where exactly do I see it?
I see it in Pākehā—white communities—coming together with courage. Not only to face the injustices of the past, but to examine the deeper wiring that created them and still lives within us: ideas of superiority, separation, disconnection from Earth, dismissal of intuition, body wisdom, ancestral knowing, and love itself. These aren’t always people with formal power. Their influence lives in relationships, in networks, in how they show up. And they don’t stay silent. They bring their more connected selves into their circles—and that creates movement. (you can see our Pakeha Project work here www.pakehaproject.nz or our nature based courses here, www.louisemarra.com )
I see it in our work with the Collective Change Lab and in Haumanu groups where many are voluntarily coming along to use their alchemical nervous systems to join with others to transmute the past injustice into presence so a new future can be born from that place. You can see our work here www.collectivechangelab.org and https://www.centreforsocialimpact.org.nz/knowledge-base/haumanu-restorative-systems-change .
Rewiring Together
We inherit certain wiring. But we also have the capacity to rewire—to choose which patterns we strengthen, which we soften, which we let go of, which ones need new cabling, new connections and which ones are no longer required. And in a world that is not separate, any rewiring within us ripples outward.
But here’s the thing: this isn’t just individual work.
Increasingly, I see people realising that transformation must be collective. When we rewire together, something amplifies. Our interactions begin to shift the wider system. Our shared energy creates friction, disruption—enough to destabilise old patterns that can no longer hold, and create these new weavings.
As Bayo Akomolafe reminds us:
“There are things we must do, sayings we must say, thoughts we must think, that look nothing like the images of success that have so thoroughly possessed our visions of justice.”
This feels deeply true.
It doesn’t give us a checklist. It gives us a way of seeing. A way of noticing. It invites us to recognise each moment, each word, as part of the ongoing creation of a new world.
This is where systems change becomes truly interesting.
Because it gives us permission—to be strange, to be idiosyncratic, to bring our own particular medicine into the world. To be weird.
What would it mean to re-enchant the way we think, speak, and act? To disrupt the oppressive weight of “normal”? To weave this into how we approach change itself?
What if change-making and awakening were not separate things at all? I don’t see them as separate; I don’t feel them any longer separate rivers in my own being.
We can rewire the suffering of the severed self together, which helps us build the connective tissue and relational fabric in our communities, both in the practical and in the energetic realms. This means we will no longer generate action from inside isolation, rather from this connection.
This to me is radical, awakened change-making, and we have the alchemical systems within to do this.
The life force of love
And before I go any further, we must talk about love.
Not the sanitized version. Not romance. But mauri aroha—the life force of love. The generative force of the universe. We won’t change the world without it.
Love has been largely exiled from organisations, from systems, from the way we define change. But love—life force love —has the power to fold back into itself, that which seems unloveable.
This has become central to my own practice.
I often ask myself: Can I be the love for this?
For whatever is arising—especially the parts that feel difficult, uncomfortable, or unwanted.
And when I can’t—and sometimes I can’t—I ask: Can someone else hold that love for me?
We need each other in this way.
What if our changemaking worked like this too?
What if we allowed what appears to be “in the way” to become the evolving way—an invitation to expand our collective capacity to love, to transform, to respond differently?
And we cant talk about love if we don’t have a love for justice or a kinship with the earth and the more than human world. We are not really catching the current of love if we cannot include the injustices of the past and present and all beings..
Sometimes love is soft and tender and sometimes it is fierce. A clear, grounded no can be an expression of love—a boundary that makes space for something new. That allows me to love you, the world and myself at the same time.
But when that “no” is fuelled by hatred, it simply feeds the very patterns we’re trying to change. It feeds the swirling disowned hatred that fuels the world we say we don’t want anymore.
So the question becomes: how do we interrupt that cycle?
How do we meet polarisation without being consumed by it?
One practice I return to—imperfectly—is this: I bring the full spectrum of a polarised issue into my awareness. I feel it. Sit with it. Let it move through me, in connection with the Earth.
And then I respond.
Not from reactivity, but from something deeper.
The response is always different and often in all ways.
This, for me, is the path of becoming a walking restorer—rather than a repeater of the very patterns I grieve.
Midwifing a new world
These are extraordinary times. The ground is shifting beneath us. It’s easy to feel uncertain, even untethered.
And yet—within this instability lies immense possibility.
A transformative force lives within each of us.
We are not just witnesses to change—we are participants in it. Alchemists of it.
That force, to me, is mauri aroha.
So perhaps the invitation is this:
Let the world in. Let it change you. Let your old patterns be undone.
Trust your inner knowing—your intuition, your creativity, your embodied wisdom, your earth and ancestral connections you are fostering. These are your navigational tools now.
Stay open. Stay curious. Stay at least a little weird.
And remember—you are not alone.
We are part of a vast, interconnected unfolding. Our paths weaving together into something larger than any one of us.
Together, we are midwifing a new world—one rooted in connection, in care, in the remembering of what it means to belong.
And that extraordinary force of love?
It’s already within you.
Let it lead.
If you wish to experience an audio that can help you feel, or deepen your feeling of mauri aroha, listen below.
