I hope you are not expecting a short and final answer because C-Lab is a LAB! Part of what a lab does is try to work things out. It grapples with things. It tests hypotheses and sees if there is validity to them.
As a bit of context, I have been trying to answer the question of why we have become cyclically illiterate as a culture and how that affects us as humans for a very long time.
It would be fair to say that most of us Substack-reading-kind-of-people know that we desperately need something different to get us out of this pickle. Something to help us think, be, do, and create from a different place.
The thing with “different” is that it can’t be very very different. It has to be different enough to be cool, marketable, Instagram-able, and followable, but not too different which would generate confusion, death, or God-bless, a complete breakdown.
The problem is, this IS the “different” humanity is truly calling for but this “different” is also scary. Who would, in their right mind, choose confusion over clarity? Who would open themselves up to the level of questioning that we need to engage in to generate truly new and fresh ideas? Who would investigate their own values in a way that nothing, NOTHING, is not at stake?
If you are reading this, hopefully, that’s you!
But don’t worry, we are also aware that we shouldn’t tear all the walls down before we can build new ones. So we are here, together, to start gently (and at times not so gently) investigating what walls are not useful to us anymore and to help each other tear them down. We are here to exchange, support, inspire, and create in a truly novel way.
We often like thinking of novelty. We like thinking of birth or using birth metaphors. “I’m birthing my new self,” we say with a smile while sipping our chai latte and eating chia pudding. We often forget that this is not what birthing looks like.
There was certainly no chai latte for me when my babies were coming through.
Think cervix opening. Think incredibly intense contractions interspersed by moments of almost dinner party vibe. Think of the word surrender. We also love the word surrender. So poetic. If you have given birth or been at a birth, been on a loved one’s deathbed, or been in a situation in which trying to control the outcome was the last thing you could possibly do, you know surrender. Really know it. In your bones. If life hasn’t yet challenged you in that way, you might still hold on to an image of the word surrender that is light purple and has a bow tied around it. Surrender has grit. Surrender is the act of undoing oneself.
Reimagining surrender is a C-Lab kind of thing. It is a cyclical kind of thing. It is medicine for our times.
C-Lab is not in the business of offering pre-cooked ideas of how we should do things, change systems, or even change ourselves. C-Lab comes to offer a piece of the puzzle that has been forgotten for a very long time.
This piece, even if small in the scheme of all the pieces that compose the puzzle of our shared reality, needs to be there. Without this piece, the puzzle makes no sense.
The problem is that putting the piece back into a puzzle that has been formed without it requires a lot of re-arranging. Can you imagine?
Okay, maybe I have gone too abstract here. Let’s come back into the practical world and think of how that rearranging would show up in YOUR life.
If done well, it would most likely be like a domino effect. It would touch every relationship you have, it would affect how you work, how you think about what work is, and why you even do it. It would touch on how you define and live your values and it would even potentially change the way you think about things such as history, philosophy, psychology, and much more.
This is because, it turns out, that small little piece of the puzzle that has been missing is quite a fundamental one, and all that we have been creating without it, is in some ways, lopsided.
For example, without cyclical awareness most modern-day folk lack the tools to have deep intimate relationships to themselves or others. Without this wisdom, our education systems would be incomplete, and don’t even get me started on the medical system.
We have been so habituated by the current - mostly linear - worldview, that we don’t recognize that when we think of “basic” concepts such as courage, or strength, for example, we are actually referring to a type of courage and strength that comes more naturally to bodies that have testosterone in them and not the ebbs and flows of estrogen and progesterone.
When this is the undercurrent that drives our thinking, you can only imagine how far we’ve gone astray.
C-Lab proposes that even the current narrative about gender, equality, and inclusion perpetuates the problem they are trying to address. Why? Because our whole thinking is upside down!
Changing the way we think about things can be challenging and we certainly won’t tell you what to think! We just invite you to deeply question things that you might not have questioned before, such as:
If birthing humans is what perpetuates our species how come pregnancy, birthing and parenting are not at the center of our society?
If growing humans up to be sovereign, heart-centered individual is an important job, how come teachers and parents have such little status?
If women need to have a healthy cycle to be able to conceive, how come the menstrual cycle is so not understood?
If birth and death are such mysteries to even our most acclaimed scientists, how come we live as if we know everything?
If women have been designed ON PURPOSE to ebb and flow, wax and wane with the change in hormones (and that is how her psyche has been designed to think and create) how come we still expect her to behave as if they were the same every day and call her “flaky” or “indecisive” when she is being…well…cyclical?
C-Lab envisions a society in which we place value where value belongs. Where greed doesn’t equate to wealth and where attributes such as kindness and generosity are not taken for granted. A world in which girls become women who value and harness their cyclical intelligence and boys become men who learn to drive their tremendous impulse for creation in a way that supports all living beings. C-Lab hopes to explore gender in depth and with enough nuance to allow for all the complexities that these conversations require.
C-Lab is in the business of changing the world one person at a time.
No drop is small enough. Every drop, every person, ripples.
Join us and become part of the ripple.