The JASC Special Issue: Arawana Hayashi on Social Presencing Theater

From the cover of the special JASC issue on Social Presencing Theater, by artist Olaf Baldini.

In her recent article in the Social Presencing Theater special issue of the Journal of Awareness-Based Systems Change (*Streams of Origin for Social Presencing Theater and Its Contribution to Social Transformation*), Arawana Hayashi reflects on the roots and impact of Social Presencing Theater (SPT), describing how the social art and awareness practices of SPT can cultivate spaces for social transformation.

We invite you to explore some of the highlights below, and to read Arawana’s full article **here **as she talks about how SPT originated and where it might want to go.

SPT is a set of awareness-based, embodied practices developed with colleagues at the Presencing Institute with the leadership of Arawana Hayashi, integrating artistic, contemplative, and social practices into systems change work—a methodology for sensing, enacting, and transforming the “social body.” In organizations, schools, and communities, SPT creates conditions for individuals and groups to perceive habitual patterns, access deeper levels of presence, and co-create new possibilities for collective action.

Hayashi situates SPT within the larger role of art in human societies. Citing Gary Snyder, she highlights:

“Art takes nothing from the world: it is a gift and an exchange. It leaves the world nourished. Poems, novels, plays, with their great deep minds of story, awaken the Heart of Compassion… Performance is art in motion; in the moment; both enactment and embodiment. This is exactly what nature herself is.”

SPT resonates with this orientation; it is a form of art-making that opens a space where presence is shared and transformation becomes possible.

Theater, broadly conceived, becomes a container for collective resonance:

“We have found that joining the view of openness with embodied practice has enabled us to create spaces that host moment-to-moment transformation in our families, teams, organizations, and communities. These spaces are ‘theaters,’ in that resonance is created by seeing and being seen.”

Such theaters are not restricted to performance halls:

“Our theater could be a classroom, office space, conference room, or community space.”

Any place where enactment and witnessing occur can become a site for social transformation:

“The result is collective seeing and sensing out of which arise fresh insights, clarity of intention, deep sense of connection, and confidence to step forward — the components of social transformation.”

Cultivating Capacities

Hayashi identifies capacities fostered through Social Presencing Theater. In the capacity to attend to stillness, practices such as Duets deliberately include pauses, creating conditions where “gestures or words arise from the big space, not confined by all our reference points.”

“These gaps are powerful spaces to open to the natural resonance that is always there but frequently missed… For a fraction of a moment, we lose our conventional reference point of ‘me.’ However, I am certain that these gaps of stillness are key to social transformation.”

This capacity creates fertile ground for connection, trust, and co-creativity. Arawana also introduces the practice of beholding:

“Being seen is the basis of feeling valued by others and leads to a sense of belonging and connection. Yet many feel that being seen and seeing is adversarial… Beholding is slowing down, attending, allowing resonance and felt-knowing to arise. Beholding is seeing with the whole body, with an open heart. Beholding is slowing down, attending, allowing resonance and felt-knowing to arise. Beholding is seeing with the whole body, with an open heart.”

Hayashi highlights diversity and contrast as central to SPT practice:

“The aesthetic concept of contrast suggests that different, even opposing, elements… can more vividly bring out the unique qualities of each element and expand our awareness to see a space that holds both.”

By working with contrast, SPT enables social fields in which differences can coexist generatively rather than becoming sources of division. Together, these capacities support co-creativity, belonging, and social transformation.

Ordinary Sacredness

Hayashi situates SPT within a wider awareness of systems, sacredness, and the collective:

“Ordinary sacredness lives in every moment. That is the basic approach that we bring to awareness-based systems transformation. We take the attitude that this team or organization is a being that has wisdom and caring at its heart… Hidden in the stuck situation is basic healthiness, sanity and care of the collective.”

Transformation is framed not as mastery over systems, but as resonance with life’s ongoing change:

“One definition for the word system is ‘interconnecting network.’ I suppose we could say that there is nothing but systems — the body-mind system, the imaginary individual-all living beings’ system, and the all living beings-Mother Earth system. But do we feel the truth of systems, of the interconnecting network?”

Awareness, in this framing, illuminates emergence:

“We and everything around us is constantly changing. Every day we experience things coming together, being born, and things falling apart and dying… We say that presencing is awareness that attends so deeply to the present moment that it can sense an emerging future.”

Recalling Otto Scharmer, Hayashi notes: “Sometimes the only thing we can know is which direction to face and where to put our next step.” Social Presencing Theater is described as precisely this training:

“Social Presencing Theater is the practice of staying in the present, knowing which direction to face, and where to put our next step. Our presence affects and moves others; their presence moves us. This movement is change.”

The result is not innovation for the sake of innovating, but a deeper attunement:

“Maybe the change is fuller resonance — facing the direction of our own wisdom, and the step is motivated by our longing to fully care for this world and each other.”

Read the full article, “Streams of Origin for Social Presencing Theater and Its Contribution to Social Transformation,” in Journal of Awareness-Based Systems Change, Volume 5, Issue 1, to hear more from Arawana in her own voice.

For more experience with the Social Arts and grassroots systems transformation, join u-lab 1x, the free global online course run by the Presencing Institute. u-lab is afree 8-week online program in partnership with MITx Online, covering the basics of Theory U and how to apply it to your own context. u-lab 1x starts its next cycle in September.