Deep Sensing Labs


Pioneering new methodologies to investigate the social field 

Image Credit: Dr. A. Sayed Issa M.D. Orthopaedic Surgeon

Making Visible the Deeper Dimensions of Social Fields 

Through the Deep Sensing Lab and our broader action research practice, we are pioneering new methodologies to sense, investigate, and make visible the deep structures of collective experience that conventional approaches cannot reach.
Gabriel Luna, Neuroscience Research Institute, University of California Santa Barbara. Source: Wellcome Collection.
The Deep Sensing Lab is an living research space where a global community convenes to collectively investigate real-world "cases" unfolding at the edges of social transformation in real time. Convened virtually, the lab draws participants from across continents who bring trained capacities in deep listening and co-sensing to bear on a shared inquiry.

The Method


The method, Multimodal Resonance Practice, unfolds in three "breaths" or stages, each drawing on a different sphere of knowing: intuitive, embodied, and dialogic.

Through contemplative practice, embodiment exercises, systemic mirroring, and generative dialogue, participants move from observing a situation that lays outside their experience to feeling it live in their own being.

Through this process we create the conditions for accessing fourth-person knowing.

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Fourth-person knowing: a way of knowing that originates not within me or between us, but from the larger field

that connects us to emerging future possibilities that need us in order to come into being

For more about fourth-person knowing and the methodology underlying the Deep Sensing Lab visit our Foundational Scholarship page

Deep Sensing is made possible by bringing a certain quality of attention and awareness to inquiry, described in the following principles:

1. Beholding

A participatory way of seeing that holds an unfolding situation with open presence, allowing the seeing also to see us.

2. Micro-Movements of Beholding

Through suspending, redirecting, and letting go, we shift attention from looking at to attending with to knowing as a field.

3. Attentional Breathing

Alternating between focused attention and open awareness attunes us to the particulars of a case while opening to the intuitive, imaginative, and relational realms of cognition.

 

4. Epistemological Reversal

Shifting from stepping back to observe experience to stepping into the experience, holding attention long enough for another realm of cognition to open that allows reality to disclose itself.

5. The Eye of the Needle

Passing through two thresholds: shifting the center of cognition from the head to the heart and connecting the situation one's own lived experience, which together open a distributed organ of perception that attends to a situation from the whole.

6. Healing

From the Old English hælan: to make whole. Restoring coherence across the fragmented social field shifting from individual seeing to collective sensing.

7. Shared Intention

Gathering to cultivate a planetary organ of perception through which the social field can see, sense, and renew itself.

Emerging Discoveries
Three patterns have consistently emerged from this initial experimentation:

The boundary between observer and observed softens


Participants and case-holders alike describe an experience in which a case rooted in one specific place becomes, through an iterative deep sensing process, a shared planetary case. The pattern at the heart of the situation is recognized not just cognitively but in one's own body and context, which we describe as macrocosm-microcosm inversion, where the whole begins to presence itself through the parts.

A deeper level of our shared humanity becomes tangible


The spectrum of human experience available and tolerable is broadened through shared sensing and holding. Participants frequently describe touching something essential about what it means to be human as an outcome of the lab: an experience of holding both pain and possibility in ways that exceed what is possible alone.

 

The flame of agency is kindled


Across sessions, both case-holders and co-researchers describe a shift, not just in perspective, but in energy and commitment. A renewed sense of agency emerges, born of connection rather than isolation, of feeling part of a larger field of intention and action. This is not agency that dictates the future, but agency that works in partnership with the knowing of the field.

While these are the early days, these observations point toward something significant: that the conditions for accessing fourth-person or field knowing can be created in ways that are replicable and scalable.

The Deep Sensing Lab is an early prototype for what we see as perhaps the most important scientific enterprise of our time: a rigorous, consciousness-based science of the social field.
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The Presencing Institute, a global non-profit, equips change-makers with innovative tools and methods for leading from the future as it emerges. Using our Theory U approach, we combine science, collective action, and creativity to drive systemic change, with hubs across Africa, Asia Pacific, Europe, and the Americas. 

 
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