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Journeying Through Islands of Coherence: The Power of Inner Transformation
Dr. Bettina Geiken, Dr. Elke Fein (IFIS-Freiburg)
In Mid-August 2025, six alumni from earlier Transformation Intensive (TI) introductory courses gathered for 7 immersive days of Transformation Intensive Advanced at Haus Schmagerow, organised by Cohere+ Associate partner EZC Partners. They delved into the hidden patterns of their self-systems—those early-learned habits and protection mechanisms buried in the unconscious that quietly undermine our goals and intentions, and which are at the same time a segway into self-states of beingness and flow beyond fear.
TI methods invite us to shine a precise and benevolent light into this unconscious terrain, revealing internal dissonance and guiding us toward greater personal coherence and integrity.
As inner misalignments diminish, we shift our inner “frequency” to better align with our life’s direction and purpose—creating instantly a more coherent field around and between us. To create forward from this vantage point is a whole different ball game for the self and the field.
Amid intensive transformational work, the retreat also embraced playful mode shifts (solo, pairs, group), lake excursions, monochord sound journeys, and joyful community in the beautiful garden with a heartfelt hospitality, providing nurturing conditions for such deep work. Consequently humor and lightness were never really far and these frequencies carried the participants through some difficult bits.
As a participant expressed it: “The transformation is shifting inner reference points and aligning them to source power. This experience ripples forward and changes what we consider possible even when “everyday life” kicks in…there is an embodied and undeniable knowing that we are fundamentally at choice.”
In the Cohere+ project we have been exploring over the last 3 years in depth many aspects of building and rebuilding coherence in self, groups and bigger collectives, thereby focussing also on understanding which kind of collective skills (in self, groups and bigger collectives), enable the building of coherence and are able to sustain and support the eternal and dynamic dance and process of coherence emerging/manifesting (in self, groups and bigger collectives) + tension/incoherence/diversity opening up the possibility of an even more extended field of coherence (in self, groups and bigger collectives)
These notions and the many other findings and results of the Cohere+ project correlate beautifully with the increasingly cited notion of “islands of coherence”, which particularly in the last years (2022-2025) has seen a significant increase across many different sectors, not only among the “usual suspects” = networks and movements of paradigmatic/systemic change agents, but across a wide range of organisations and actors.
Connecting the Dots around Islands of Coherence
On the one hand, the TI retreat at Haus Schmagerow became a fertile “island of coherence” - in which participants engaged in intentional inner transformation spanning mind, heart, body, and soul, increasing their personal agency and power to decide how to be and show up in the next moment.
There is in fact a growing “community of coherence” of people who have engaged with TI where individuals support each other in the practice of building inner coherence.
On the other hand, Cohere+ provides those “islands of coherence” with a large variety of resonant learning resources and highlights the many ways, approaches and enablers for “islands of coherence”. The Cohere+ material, exercises, tools and courses, which are all open source (thanks to the support from the Erasmus+ Programme of the EU) support transformative learning and development for individuals and organisations to intentionally cultivate and amplify a state/sense of coherence beyond a retreat or workshop.
Beware that coherence “cultivation” is always a dynamic process. It requires to strengthen the capacity to hold tensions and incoherences before coherence at a larger scale reappears, increasing the size of the islands.
The next step is that “islands of coherence” become aware of each other. With the mapping of 300 organisations of paradigmatic change makers, Cohere+ created a relevant basis for distributed emergence of resonant, regenerative systems
In essence, connecting the dots shows up as:
- TI work → ongoing personal intrapsychic clarity and field alignment
- Cohere+ tools → pathways for “coherence in action”
- Islands of Coherence → distributed emergence of resonant, regenerative systems
Together, they illustrate a powerful dynamic: inner clarity becomes outer coherence, rippling outward to support systemic transformation.