PROPOSED RESEARCH FOR MY DOCTORAL STUDIES

Cosmology for Creators: A Mixed Methods Participatory Action Research Project

Shante’ Zenith
Department of Human and Organizational Development, Fielding Graduate University
HOD 800: Doctoral Competencies
Dr. Dorothy Agger-Gupta
April 17, 2025
Introduction
For the majority of our species’ history, what we now perceive as “imagination” has been held within a wider web of animate consciousness that shapes life (Schrei, 2020). Stories are developmental worlds. They teach us how to belong. As emergent organisms, our intimacy within creative dreaming extends into the primordial, into the mythic, into the actual honesty of all that is vibrantly alive. But in modern contexts haunted by the impacts of colonization, many of us lack a contemporary cosmology that can honor the sacredness of where the creativity is coming from. This research project aims to address this ontological absence by introducing the concept of Visionary Embodiment as a metaphysics of maturation that brings creators into connection with ecosystemic consciousness that shapes our emergent becoming. I hypothesize that by reconnecting creative projects to a Kinship Worldview (Four Arrows & Narvaez, 2024) that grounds us in relationship with all of life, we can deepen our power to catalyze tangible transformation within collective imaginaries.
Research Purpose
The purpose of this research is to develop a Cosmology for Creators that bridges the liminal boundary between imagination and material reality, exploring how our ability to imagine can become a perceptual portal to seed new possibilities for culture. Dr. Sarah Van Hoy describes a visionary as “someone who is able to see something that no one else sees, who brings things into being that don’t exist yet, who moves us all in a new direction, who helps us to reinvent reality” (2017). In this research, I define Visionary Embodiment as the capacity to sense not only from the individual self, but also from the ancestral, ecological, and cosmic fields that inspire our creativity.
Contemporary creators seeking to contribute to cultural transformation need frameworks that connect their work to relational contexts beyond dominant paradigms. This is particularly challenging for creators from colonized lineages who many generations removed from ancestral cosmologies that rooted them into relationship with the earth. While they may receive creative inspiration from ancestral and ecological sources, these culturally-displaced creators often lack exposure to relational cosmologies beyond the story arcs of dominant culture. Through mixed methods research exploring how Relational Field Immersions impact creative projects, I will investigate how systemic and energetic approaches can transform the perceptual frameworks through which visionary creators imagine new realities and create inner mappings of relational cosmologies.
Literature Review
"The Dreaming" as Primordial Consciousness
My research is grounded in what Western anthropologists call "The Dreaming,” an experience of the animate fabric of consciousness perceived across many Wisdom traditions and indigenous cultures. This perspective views the cosmos as an interconnected living system rather than separate, inanimate parts (Hume, 2004). The Kogi People of Colombia's Sierra Nevada mountains call this consciousness Aluna, a primary intelligence of "thought and memory which forms a bridge between spirit and the universe...the hidden world of forces which govern the world's fertility” (Ereira, 1992). My own European ancestors expressed similar understandings through their shamanic cosmovision of the World Tree as a central axis connecting different levels of consciousness that could be accessed through ritual trance states (Bauschatz, 1982). These diverse traditions share a common animist understanding: consciousness extends beyond individual human minds and permeates all existence.
Relational Fields Shape Reality
As a Relational Field Consultant, I help creative visionaries develop their artistic works by presencing ritual contexts that honor the deeper dimensions of creativity, supporting the mutual maturation between creators and their creative projects. My approach goes beyond conventional understandings of art and healing to connect with the primordial sources of imagination, fundamentally transforming our perception of reality. This research proposes that what Western cultures call "imagination" actually draws from a broader energetic network that spans different temporal and spatial relationships as an extended consciousness. Animist practitioner Larissa Kaul invites the question: “what if using your creative power for personal and collective benefit was a universal initiation that belonged to all humans?” (2025). When we approach creative inspiration as a collective initiatory process, our art can speak directly to the energetic body of culture, moving life force away from domination towards a relational intimacy with earth.
The cosmological metaphysics I am rooted in views creativity as a ritual consciousness through which any visionary inspiration received by humans is also a channeling of wider primordial forces. We can observe these Relational Fields through "representative perception" in Systemic Constellations—a facilitation approach for collective healing begun by Bert Hellinger and influenced by the ancestor reverence practices of the Zulu people of South Africa (Ritter & Zamierowski, 2021). Systemic Constellations are a way of revealing the Relational Field patterns that are holding in place a system’s current perception of reality through a process where participants collectively sense and express relational structures that until that moment have remained invisible. This approach allows groups to access and transform entangled patterns resting beyond individual awareness, opening liberatory possibilities and clarifying emergent potential in service to ecosystemic thriving.
Need for a Shifting of Cosmological Frameworks
Climate destabilization and extreme resource inequality are threatening the relational feedback loops that sustain and nourish life (Dorninger et al., 2024). While storytelling through film and television has significant power to shift cultural understanding, these critical issues remain largely absent from mainstream entertainment. Narrative media has huge potential for shifting cultural narratives but there is currently very little representation of these topics in the entertainment industry. A comprehensive analysis of 250 popular films released between 2013 and 2022 revealed that less than 10% portrayed worlds where “climate change exists” and “a character knows it” (Schneider-Mayerson, 2024). Our society urgently needs visionary storytellers who can witness the complexities of our ecological destruction and create alchemy for collective regeneration through narratives that move beyond domination ideologies.
This project will draw from the 50 precepts of the Worldview Chart for Rebalancing Life Systems on Planet Earth by Four Arrows and Darcia Narvaez (2024) to create a measure for supporting Creators in shifting towards Kinship cosmologies. The theoretical foundation also incorporates Bree Greenberg's New Physics of Creation and her developmental framework The Movement of Existence (Greenberg, 2025). This framework maps the transpersonal developmental process through which humans become the channel for wider ecological and evolutionary forces, which I describe as Visionary Embodiment. I believe that many resourced creators who are sourcing Visionary Creative Projects are already fairly close to the integration of this Embodiment as a maturational process, but that their lack of of access to cosmological frameworks that honor ecosystem integrity results in a developmental asynchrony that makes it difficult for them to create narratives that transcend dominant cultural paradigms.
Research Question
This study examines how Relational Field Immersions affect the development of creative projects that aim to incorporate ecological, ancestral, and cosmic elements for cultural transformation. My central research question is: "How can Relational Field Immersions support creators to connect with Visionary Embodiment and expand their storytelling to include Kinship Cosmologies that nourish life?”This research directly addresses the tension between two conflicting worldviews: the Western colonial perspective that views imagination as contained within isolated individuals, and the animist-relational understanding that sees creative inspiration as emerging from a unified ecosystemic intelligence beyond the human. Through this exploration, I will trace how Relational Field approaches that make invisible connections perceivable and embodied can help creative visionaries position their work within broader relational contexts that support regenerative culture.
Design and Method
Orienting Frames and Modalities
This project develops a relational metaphysics grounded in the creative intelligence that sustains our living Earth. As a scholar-practitioner, I combine theoretical frameworks from five key areas: systems sensing, animist cosmologies, ecological embodiment, creative consciousness, and phenomenological perception. My practical approach utilizes two complementary methodologies that I currently work with in my professional practice supporting creative projects:
These two approaches combine to form Relational Field Immersions—structured workshops designed to connect creative imagination with wider collective contexts and expand participants' perception to include ecological realities. These immersions provide both the intervention being studied and the methodological framework for the research itself.
Iterative Mixed Methods Process
This research will use an iterative approach combining two primary methods: (1) phenomenological case studies examining Relational Field Immersions as interventions in creative projects, and (2) a mixed methods survey administered to participants at multiple points throughout the study. This participatory approach is designed to be liberatory not only for the human participants but also for the living systems that nourish us. The phenomenological component will allow for deep exploration of felt experiences and energetic-systemic aspects as they emerge in real relationships. Meanwhile, the mixed methods survey will provide quantifiable data points to track how perceptual processes shift over time, offering complementary insights to the qualitative case studies.
Participatory Co-Researchers
The study will engage diverse "Visionary Creators" as participatory co-researchers, including actors, writers, directors, showrunners, producers, interdisciplinary artists, and community practitioners who seek to develop transformative creative projects. I will aim to spread out the research population across a diverse range of socio-economic demographics. The participants will mainly be from the United States, with the possibility of also including creatives from Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia. The sample set will focus on practitioners navigating legacies of settler-colonization and deep displacement from ancestral ways of knowing. Good Energy Stories (2025) is a potential research site and partner as an existing consulting organization that works with Hollywood production teams, as they could help in sourcing visionary creators that would be interested in participating. The interviews for the research will primarily take place over zoom and the case studies of Relational Field Immersions will take place during in-person workshops in a variety of locations aligned with the project partners.
Research Process
The research will unfold in four distinct phases:
Phase 1: Collaborative Literature Review
I will begin by assembling a participatory council of co-researchers to guide a comprehensive literature review across relevant fields including indigenous futurisms, animist ritual technology, systems sensing, collective trauma healing, climate representation in entertainment, unified field theory, environmental humanities, and studies of imagination and the imaginal. This interdisciplinary review will identify key research themes and questions for the pilot study.
Phase 2: Pilot Study Interviews
During the pilot phase, I will conduct Zoom interviews with 10-25 creators to explore their relationship to the identified research themes and understand the possibilities and limitations they experience in their creative processes. Participant recruitment will utilize snowball sampling, beginning with creators I know and expanding through their recommendations. Interview questions will focus on:
Phase 3: Data Synthesis and Research Design
Working with the participatory advisory council, I will analyze the interview data through an iterative thematic process to identify refined research themes and questions This collaborative analysis will inform the design of a mixed methods participatory action research project to catalyze a paradigm shift aimed at supporting creators in deepening their Visionary Embodiment and the ecological consciousness of their creative projects.
Phase 4: Longitudinal Case Studies
The main study will follow 4-7 visionary creators from diverse disciplines (film, television, theater, visual art, writing, healing, activism) throughout the development of their creative projects. Using action research case studies paired with phenomenological observations, I will document the impact of Relational Field Immersions and ongoing Visionary Consulting on the work of each creator and their collaborative team across the span of their project. This longitudinal cohort design will include:
The research will extend to studying audience responses to these creative projects, using similar survey instruments to track how shifts in creator cosmology might ripple outward through social systems.
Research Ethics
Dual-Role Management
A key ethical consideration is my dual role as both researcher and paid consultant/facilitator for some projects in this study. To address this potential conflict of interest, I will:
Confidentiality and Data Protection
Some case studies may involve high-profile film and television projects requiring strict confidentiality. I will implement enhanced data protection measures including:
Psychological and Emotional Risk Management
The Relational Field Consulting and Systemic Constellations work may engage participants with emotionally challenging topics such as climate change and collective trauma. To mitigate potential psychological risks, I will:
Practical Implications
The practical implications of this research project are an invitation into alchemy around our relationship to the deeper purpose of our imaginations in their connection with the sacred web of life. Throughout our species' deep time history, humans have engaged in ceremonial practices that Four Arrows and Narvaez (2024) describe as "life-sustaining" rituals that nourish our kinship with the web of life. Creativity expression is a ritual for remembering the sacred within collective reality. When dominant worldviews separate our creative imaginations from the dreaming of our living earth, the sacredness our our interiority is compromised and culture is compressed within a limited aperture of social reality that excludes vital relationships with the sensual body, ancestral wisdom, and the more-than-human world. It is the loss of our contact with these wider relational forces that leaves us children of modernity so existentially lost and unable to metabolize the calcified ancestral trauma fields that are perpetuating the ecosystem-destroying worldview of domination.
A fundamental characteristic of the Dominant Worldview (Four Arrows and Narvaez, 2024) spread through colonization is the disruption of the right-sized relational feedback loops that nourish life (Dorninger et al., 2024). In healthy ecosystems, these feedback loops enable the circulation of nutrients and the metabolizing of toxins as regenerative processes for ongoing vitality. When these relationships break down, "Sacrifice Zones" emerge— toxic dump sites such as clear cut forests or landfills that become a "political ecology of life and death” (Juskus, 2023) concentrating harm in certain siloed places that become invisible to those who benefit from the separation. None of us are outside of this form of impact from colonial realities as our bodies themselves become sacrifice zones within industrial systems which extract our vitality and capacity to imagine, leaving us isolated as we absorb the impact of our society’s collective pain which in the absence of ritual has no way to be metabolized across the generations.
It is no wonder that given this context of isolation from the very nutrients that sustain relational life, our culture invests enormous resources in creating fictional worlds to escape into, the entertainment industry channelling multi-million dollar budgets into films and television shows that often reinforce a separation between imagination and ecosystemic reality. This investment pattern becomes another sacrifice zone, diverting both financial resources and creative energy away from our tangible needs for sustainable action and resource recirculation within local communities, reifying the pattern of separation between our inner worlds and our tangible realities. And yet it is not an either/or phenomenon. We need both our access to imagination and our connection to the material world that sustains us. And we need support for the mediation between these realms again, the ritual practices that can weave us back into relationship with the sacredness of the ecosystems that sustain us. As Juskus (2023) describes, the concept of sacrifice derives from "making sacred" and carries dual meanings of both victimization and sacred life. Stories are the places where new imaginaries can enter our perception of reality. This research project provokes a paradigm shift in our relationship to creative inspiration, returning visionary process to the participatory ecological relationships that can alchemize new culture.
Conclusion
This project represents a vital response to our current ecological and cultural crisis. Through my exploration of Relational Field Immersions and their impact on creative process, I aim to demonstrate how reconnecting imagination to its ancestral and ecological roots can alchemize the sacrifice zones that fragment our world. By supporting creators in their maturation into Visionary Embodiment, we can help birth narratives that remember our relationship to the sacred web of life. As my preliminary work with creative visionaries has shown, when we provide frameworks that honor the sacred origins of creativity, artists become capable of transcending the dominant worldview that separates humans from nature. As artists, as healers, as weavers of relational cosmologies, we can reclaim the essential qualities of our vitality—our playfulness, our power, our intimacy, all our textures of aliveness which offer resonance to the audiences who are so hungry for imaginal nutrients that nourish rather than deplete our connection with ecosystemic reality. I believe this research will not only contribute to academic understanding of creative processes but will offer practical pathways for the entertainment industry to address our most pressing collective challenges around climate collapse and societal disruption. By weaving together rigorous methodology with ancestral wisdom and ecological intelligences, I hope to catalyze a paradigm shift in how we understand imagination itself—not as escape from reality, but as a powerful means of reconnecting with the living earth that nourishes our becoming.References
Bauschatz, P. C. (1982). The well and the tree: World and time in early germanic culture. Univ of Massachusetts Pr.
Dales, A., Padfield, R., & Bridge, G. (2024). Critical sustainability stories: How communicators can translate the complexity of the climate emergency and shape public narratives. Geoforum, 150, 103963. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.103963
Dorninger, C., Menéndez, L. P., & Caniglia, G. (2024). Social-ecological niche construction for sustainability: Understanding destructive processes and exploring regenerative potentials. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 379(1893), 20220431. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2022.0431
Ereira, A. (1992). The elder brothers (First Edition). Knopf.
Four Arrows and Narvaez, D. (2024) Worldview chart for rebalancing life systems on planet earth. https://worldviewliteracy.org/worldview-resources
Good Energy Stories (2025). Offerings, consulting. https://www.goodenergystories.com/offerings/consulting
Greenberg, B. (2025). The genesis of love [Manuscript in preparation], The New Physics of Creation. https://www.themovementofexistence.com/
Hume, L. (2004). Accessing the eternal: Dreaming “the dreaming” and ceremonial performance. Zygon®, 39(1), 237–258. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9744.2004.00568.x
Juskus, R. (2023). Sacrifice zones: A genealogy and analysis of an environmental justice concept. Environmental Humanities, 15(1), 3–24. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10216129
Kaul, L. (2025). The bleeding circle. https://www.larissakaul.com/the-bleeding-circle
Ritter, L., & Zamierowski, N. (2021). Systems sensing and systemic constellations for organizational transformation. Journal of Awareness-Based Systems Change, 1(2), 101–115.
Schneider-Mayerson, M. (2024). Climate reality on-screen: The climate crisis in popular films, 2013-22. Good Energy and the Buck Lab for Climate & Environment at Colby College. https://climateadvocacylab.org/system/files/2024-05/CRC-250-Report.pdf
Schrei, J. (2020, December 1). Animism is normative consciousness: The Emerald [Podcast]. https://open.spotify.com/episode/6wutqbPB6KBb4cn8dnqLE3
Van Hoy, S. Undiagnosed Visionaries. (2017). In Teaching transformation: Progressive education in action: A collaborative anthology from the Goddard Graduate Institute. Goddard Graduate Institute.
I revised my final version of this paper with the AI model Claude 3.7 Sonnet within the Tana app.
The original paper was included as a separate attachment in my assignment submission.
Note that much of the text that comprises this final paper was included in previous HOD-800 assignments and material for my Fielding Learning Plan and has been revised and restructured for this assignment.

Creativity is ritual for the regeneration of life.