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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 The participants 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. In TI, we reframe these patterns as being 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. In this way, we instantly create 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.
To the extent that intergenerational trauma can be addressed and integrated during this type of inner work, the latter actually has the potential to ripple out and forward towards the next generations. As epigenetics research has widely shown by now, trauma, not integrated, can be passed on to the next generation. But what if the same was true the other way round? What if doing the inner work of alignment, personal and field coherence could generate positive intergenerational effects, and the next generation might be facilitated in accessing coherent inner states? This would obviously need to be researched scientifically, but it points towards the hypothesis, that working on inner coherence is not just for present "self", but might positively influence current and future human fields.
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 many aspects of building and rebuilding coherence in self, groups and bigger collectives in depth over the last 3 years. Thereby, we also focused on understanding which kind of collective skills (in self, groups and bigger collectives) enable the process of building coherence and which ones are able to sustain and support it. When we aquire these skills, we can more easily engage in a dynamic dance between the poles of of coherence emerging and manifesting (in self, groups and bigger collectives) on the one hand and tension, incoherence or diversity opening up the possibility of an even more extended field of coherence (in self, groups and bigger collectives) on the other hand.
These notions and the many other findings and results of the Cohere+ project correlate beautifully with the notion of “islands of coherence”, which particularly in the last years (2022-2025) has seen a significant increase in presence across many different sectors, not only among networks and movements of paradigmatic or systemic change agents, but also beyond.
Connecting the Dots around and between Islands of Coherence
So the TI retreat at Haus Schmagerow was a fertile “island of coherence” itself, providing a safe space in which participants could engage in intentional inner transformation spanning mind, heart, body, and soul. Nourished in this way, they worked on 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.
At the same time, 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 (thanks to the support from the Erasmus+ Programme of the EU) are all open source, support transformative learning and development for individuals and organisations to intentionally cultivate and amplify a sense or even state of coherence beyond a retreat or workshop.
Beware that cultivating coherence is always a dynamic process. It requires to strengthen the capacity to hold tensions and incoherences before coherence reappears at a larger scale, increasing the size of the islands.
The next step then is that “islands of coherence” become aware of each other. By mapping 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 turns into outer coherence, rippling outward to support systems transformation.
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