We Are Nature: Partnership Tools for a Regenerative Future with Tom Mansfield

Speaker A: I think there's something really interesting coming together, um, with, uh, an understanding of ecology and living systems and something slightly more philosophical about emergence, that life is emerging, um, and that there is inherent uncertainty in the future. And the way that we move towards that and work with that requires certain ways of being. Now, lots of wisdom traditions kind of had this stuff down. How to embrace flows and be in surrender and let go and just be present to the moment. Um, but we're constantly reinventing and reframing this stuff. And so I'm really interested in the spaces where these things meet, how we are able to be with the change of life and, and, and how we, how much we know about kind of ecology and living systems.

Speaker B: Welcome to the Power of Partnership Podcast. I'm Rhianne Eisler, president of the center for Partnership Systems. This podcast brings you voices from the partnership movement. People using partnership practices to build a world that values caring nature and shared prosperity. The Power of Partnership podcast is hosted by Cherry Jacobs Pruitt, a health policy and Partnership Scholar. And now onto today's POP podcast episode.

Speaker C: Before I welcome today's guests, I want to share some information about an exciting event. On October 29, 2025, the center for Partnership Systems, in partnership with Hubcast Media, is hosting the Peace Begins at Home Summit. This livestream broadcast event is a conversation with extraordinary speakers from across the world on how to transform roots of violence and inspire peace from the inside out. This summit is more than a one day event. It is a step toward redefining how peace is understood and lived. And of course, at the heart of the summit, just like at the heart of the Power of Partnership Podcast is the life's work, uh, of Dr. Rhiann Eisler. Here's how you can be part of this transformation. Register to attend virtually and join us online to learn practical tools, connect with other partnership practitioners and be part of a community that's actively building a more caring world. Uh, you can register for the summit at www. Uh.peacebeginsathomesummit.org Become a sponsor or partner and help us amplify this message of hope and change. Your support ensures that partnership principles reach more families, more communities, and more hearts ready for transformation once again. To register, go to www. Uh.peacebeginsathomesummit.org or reach out to us@centerforpartnershipway.org Remember, peace doesn't begin with politicians or policies. Uh, peace begins at home. And it begins with each of us choosing partnership over domination, connection over control, and love over fear. We'll see you at the summit.

Speaker D: Uh, hello, Tom. On behalf of Rion Eisler and the entire center for Partnership Systems team, I want to welcome you to the Power of Partnership podcast. I'm so excited to be speaking with you today and learn more about you and your work and especially, uh, one of your latest contributions to helping create a world that's based on caring nature and shared prosperity, which are your cards for life. So welcome.

Speaker A: Thank you so much, Sherry. It really feels an honor to be here. Um, I'm delighted to be sharing this time and conversation with you. So thank you.

Speaker B: Great.

Speaker D: Well, let's start by you just sharing a bit more about who you are. I know you're joining us, um, from your home in Stroud, uh, in the west of England, which is quite a distance from where I'm calling in from, from the recording studios of Doghouse Music in Lafayette, Colorado in the United States. So Tom, I know that you are a thought leader in the regenerative movement and you're founder of the Cards for Life system that is now being used throughout the world. So, um, before we dig more deeply into that, I'd love to ask you to just share with our listeners a little bit more your life journey that's bringing you here today.

Speaker A: Great, thank you so much. Yeah, so I guess a little bit of background about me and then, and then as for life and connecting with Brian's work, um, yeah, I think. Um, so I'm here in the west of England in Stroud. I've kind of found myself back in the west country, which is where I was sort of raised. Um, so I grew up in a very rural environment. So I grew up surrounded by nature and other beings. Um, so I think that's always kind of been in my heart. That definitely gave me a particular start to life. Um, I grew up in, not homeschooled but, um, a lot, a kind of very self taught sort of environment. And um, and I did actually leave school early at ah, sort of 15 and just um, read my own way through many different subjects. History actually was always an interest because it was interest of my father's as well. And I think that probably primed me for meeting Rhian's work, ah, in the way that I did. Um, but I think those are two important bits of background of being kind of raised in nature and um, being empowered to teach myself different subjects really. Um, so I've, I've lived uh, in lots of different places since, but I found myself settling a bit back here. Um, while this is my home I'm traveling a lot and Cards for Life is really turning into a global project now. So I'm on a mission this year and next spending time in person in different countries with the partners who are bringing different versions of uh, the cards to life in their own languages. So while there's a sense of home here, it's, it's also uh, a kind of a slightly nomadic time I think.

Speaker B: Yeah. Beautiful, beautiful.

Speaker D: So Tom, can you provide kind of a very high level, you know, almost a 101 introduction to our listeners about that, what the term regenerative and the regenerative movement means and encompasses?

Speaker A: Thanks so much, Cherry. Yeah, for me regeneration has um, a particular meaning on a personal level. And um, the way I articulate that is uh, cycles of renewal. So something that's regenerative is able to go through cycles of renewal, whether that's a project, a relationship or some other kind of system. So I think that the cyclical nature and the renewal really key aspects of regeneration. Another definition that I work with, which kind of points a bit more to work out there in the world as opposed to my sort of personal feeling of regenerative practice. Cycles of renewal, that outer uh, facing form of regeneration for me is about creating more life than is consumed through a process. So that would be whether it's um, building buildings or um, doing agriculture or forms of medicine or education that are actually creating more life than they're consuming. And I think um, it's very aspirational this idea. There are, there are other terms around that more objective or outer focused sense of regeneration that's kind of beyond sustainability. No longer just causing no harm, but actively restoring and generating more life than is consumed. And broadly I think that's biomass. We need to restore biodiversity in many forms, um, in this time of planetary health crisis. But it's life in other senses as well. It's creativity, it's a sense of wildness and self willed, um, capacity for people to kind of lead themselves. So yeah, I also think it's about restoring life in terms of freedom, self determination, expression, creativity. I really see that kind of goes together completely with the beyond sustainability agenda of regeneration.

Speaker B: Beautiful.

Speaker D: And so what a beautiful segue into the cards for life. Tell us about how those were created and what are your hopes for that and how are they being used currently throughout the world.

Speaker A: Thank you so much. So I have a box here on the table, Cards for Life. And the strap line is we are nature. Um, so uh, I created Cards for Life first of all because I, I needed a tool like this for myself, for my own coaching practice with people. I've been working for a while with people, supporting them to explore their purpose in the context of the, the ecological crisis and the times that we live. What's a meaningful and a purposeful life in this, in this time, in this age and what are the internal things that maybe are getting in the way of that? Um, so doing this work I kind of. There were a lot of different ideas out there across sustainability, environment and regeneration that I wanted to have in an easily accessible form kind of close to me so we could explore them. So that had been kind of sitting in my mind for a while. The thing that catalyzed uh, the creation of cards for life was uh, I think it was around 2018, having not gone to school and being self taught, there was an imposter syndrome hanging around. And I thought there are some things that I want to just get some certification for. So I did my permaculture design certificate. Um, because being very concerned with how do we create more life, how do we work with complex living systems. Permaculture is a great discipline for that. Alongside that I did my NLP training. Um, for those that don't know, that's neuro linguistic programming, it doesn't give a lot away, but it's a toolkit of processes that can help us transform our relationships with ourselves and the world by understanding how they're encoded in our different senses and in our language. So I had this personal uh, practice for, this practice for personal transformation, NLP and permaculture. And I thought like there's a way to bring these things together. There's something to do with healing the world out there and healing ourselves. So having had this idea of uh, wanting to kind of create a tool to work with as a coach, once I went through both of those studies it became quite clear to me that um, I needed a format to bring these ideas together in. So Cards for Life is a deck of cards, 72 cards in three sets. And those three sets are uh, dynamics, the dynamics of living systems. Things like balance, emergence, impermanence, disruption, these kinds of dynamics, these processes that we see in all living systems. Then there's the being cards and the doing cards. So we've got being, uh, doing and dynamics. You can think of the dynamics as like the principles of nature and then ways of being and doing. And there's four exercises I've designed for the deck that combine those cards in different ways. Every card speaks to the personal and the collective, the inner and the outer. And That's a really central part of how they support this mission of connecting inner and outer work. And every card has a photographic image of nature on, of um, some depiction in nature of that, of that concept. Um, so they're always helping people connect with nature and they're allowing people to look inward and outward with the same concept. So how is emergence happening out there and how is it also showing up in my life? So they kind of span from an intuitive personal development tool all the way through to a, ah, design tool that can be used for collective action. I think that's something that's a little bit unique about them as well because we tend to find things at one end or the other of that spectrum. So how they're being used around the world now is um, when one acquires a pack of cards for life, you get access to some digital resources. There's a WhatsApp community that has about 270 practitioners in now from over 40 countries. A lot of coaches, consultants, facilitators, um, but also people working in education, architects, um, designers, many people using them for forms of personal practice. So I kind of started with this community of um, facilitators, uh, people with those skills that have been taking the cards to lots of different businesses and organizations in their work. Now that network effect has sort of kicked in and I'm having a lot of organizations come and join the facilitator training which I run, which is a basic training to go through the exercises as a group. I've started working with organizations like the Eden Project and Resurgence magazine and the Wildlife Trusts in the uk um, but now, uh, looking at some uh, advanced uh, science research and projects center in Switzerland, um, a strategic advisory between London and Dubai, more and more organizations are kind of coming to this work. And I'm working with founding teams or larger teams that are going through some kind of transition, maybe a change of leadership, launch of a new project. So cases where the cards are useful are generally some sort of change, some sort of um, inflection point and bringing the principles of nature, plus ways of being and doing active and passive into that context of some larger change, systemic change. People are finding it really helpful the sorts of reframes that the cards for Life allow is uh, one person was being hired to run a recruitment process for a leadership training organization and they found a lot of conflict, uh, with the existing system for interviews, um, or at least it felt like a conflicted situation where they had to say, I think some of these things are wrong. We need to be interviewing for different Kinds of qualities and people. He picked the impermanence card with a picture of fallen leaves on it and it gave him an instant reframe. Okay, this isn't about who's right or wrong, which questions or process is better or worse. But every year this process should go through its own renewal. Something should fall away, new things should grow. So that's like one example of when we take a living systems or a kind of nature based approach to processes, it can deconflict them and it's no longer about right or wrong or has that kind uh, of ranking. Um, but it's about cycles of renewal and that can be really liberating for everyone and more creative and productive and help us adapt to, you know, as life changes and the context changes around us. There are lots of different outcomes, you know, specific policies and processes, innovations that people have made with the cards. Um, but the work is, it's, it's on uh, shifting culture and introducing this vocabulary and it takes a little while for that to get embedded and it's softer change, you know, it's slightly harder to measure. But, um, with the success of the course which has been running for the last year, uh, and the cards are two years old actually, so it's still quite a young project. Um, the layer that's just kind of emerged from Cards for Life is a, is a practice book which is a series of templates for different workshops, um, which are even more outcome driven, uh, than the basic exercises for practicing with the cards. So the project for me is always kind of had two significant phases. One is regenerative literacy. People becoming more familiar in that, in that sense of literate with how living systems change, go through changes and adapt. And then the second phase is about regenerative innovation. So how can we come up with new ways of doing things that are attuned to life and in harmony with uh, the rest of the community of life on which we depend and are embedded. Um, so that innovation piece is now starting to emerge. Now we have a really solid kind of foundation of a community of practice.

Speaker D: So love that and I love how it's so systems based and that whole interconnectivity because that really is at the heart of Rhian Eisler's cultural transformation work. Ah, you know, one of my favorite quotes of Rhian Eisler's has always been, um, that, you know, I'm going to read it just so I get it right. We can't solve problems by thinking only about the isolated parts. Instead we need to understand the whole system in which these problems arise. And then again, of course, her focus on the core tension in all of our societies being between the partnership model and the domination model in terms of the systemic patterns that shape economics, politics and social relations at all levels. Um, so it just sounds obviously, which is why you're on the podcast, that your work is so aligned with that systems approach.

Speaker A: Yeah, thank you so much. I really feel that alignment and the language of partner and Dominator from Rhian's work, uh, I discovered in Chalice in the Blade, uh, which is the first work I read by her. And this has, uh, impacted me to this day. And I regularly recommend it actually, and get people copies of that book because I think understanding that Dominator impulse, uh, is, is, is crucial to, um, dismantling it, as you say.

Speaker D: You are listening to the Power of Partnership podcast. We hope you are enjoying today's episode and you will consider joining our family of sponsors. Or you can help us attract sponsors by downloading, following or subscribing to the series and liking and rating each episode you view on YouTube. We also would love to hear from you, including if you have a partnership story that you would like to share, reach out to us@center partnershipway.org and now back to today's episode.

Speaker A: I'm noticing it becoming extremely troubling. The poly crisis, the um, change of the world order, the disruption, the chaos, uh, war on multiple fronts, the ecological crisis, all of this, um, and that kind of creating. We see a sort of rise of populism and things like this. And so as more kind of Dominator culture coming through, my belief is that we are going through a species level, uh, right of passage. And as Charles Eisenstein said, if we knew we were going to make it through this time, then it wouldn't be a rite of passage. It wouldn't have that potency to fundamentally transform us. And I believe that transformation is from a kind of immature species that's kind of drawing from, uh, the planet, the larger community of life, to then coming through this rite of passage into service, into a mature kind of stewardship and service of life. And so that, that's really the big belief that kind of frames my actions and gives me a sense of hope and purpose, um, as difficult and critical as things are getting now. So my contribution in that context with Cards for Life, is to create this tool that helps us partner with nature, to think about service, to adapt and grow and be with these processes of life rather than trying to dominate and hold them and, you know, just keep growth going continuously. And control nature, um, which is backlashing in so many ways. So this language is proving, um, able to cross borders. Uh, we just launched it in France last month. It's been being translated into six different European languages. It's complete in Portuguese. In Brazil, we have a Chinese version. I just came back from Kenya, where, um, I was spending time with partners who've agreed to create a Kiswahili version for the Swahili coast in East Africa. But they're also interested in other African languages. So that vision is to not to dominate, uh, other people's thinking and export something in a colonial way. There is a decolonial aspect to this project, Cards for Life, which is about taking these concepts down to their essence. All of the ideas in Cards for Life are windows onto the same, uh, indescribable complexity, which is the living world with all of its manifold layers and complexity. But they're all little windows onto that. And those windows can be shaped slightly differently in different cultures, as different words, as different concepts, but they all kind of point towards the same thing, which is the, uh, the core of life and the life of this world. And so it's a really fascinating project to take these ideas, distill them down to their essence, and grow them in another soil. And I do that through a partnership with someone that is rooted in that region and wants to make the cards their own. So we change quite a lot. We go through a process where I really kind of, um, give way to their preferences, which is. It's proving to be quite a process for me, but I'm really enjoying letting go. The Chinese version looks very different. The Brazilian version looks very different, but it does reflect those places. And those versions have been imbued by the essence of the partners in those places who've really made it their own. Now they're spreading the cards and also running a training, replicating the model, bringing more people together, uh, in this movement of regeneration and regenerative practice. So the, the vision is for the cards really to express their own values and scale out, grow from the edges outwards like a living system, not to be kind of thought up somewhere and then pushed into the world, you know, and, and with money, money borrowed from the future and, and a marketing campaign. They're growing in an organic way, um, but still very rapidly, uh, which is really interesting. So the vision is to share this, this, this vocabulary, this living systems vocabulary around the world in many different language and really show that we can have a global conversation that's differentiated locally in lots of different places. Kind of join those things up,

Speaker D: um,

Speaker A: through, uh, a system of partnership. And what's really exciting to me is starting to bring together the translator community and I hope later this year to register a cooperative vehicle which can hold all of us. And I can then step out of the center from being a kind of, um, key decision maker. And we can actually start to do that as a circle, which I'm really excited about. And at this stage of growth, I've started to get a bit struggling, um, with the decisions I have to make. And I just realized recently, oh, these aren't actually my decisions to make yet. Soon we will have this cooperative entity and we'll be making these decisions together. Um, so that feels really exciting and it's a kind of interesting bridging time. But that's the vision of Cards for Life. I feel like I might have strayed a little bit from your question there, but I think that's a way of demonstrating that we can weave initiatives, regenerative initiatives together across the world while encouraging their own diversity, uh, and their local attunement to, uh, place. So that feels a really important thing to demonstrate with something as simple as a deck of cards, a training and a workbook, that kind of package. And it's showing up very differently in lots of different places, but still recognizably the same system and the same kind of energy. As I travel around and I meet people in different parts of the world, as I've been doing a lot this year, from Southeast Asia to East Africa, stepping out of Europe, I'm getting, uh, very different perspectives on the current sort of news cycle that's dominating from, you know, the leadership in. In the U.S. uh, to trends, um, in. In Europe, failings and trouble with the leadership here. There are other stories occurring as well that I'm starting to get in touch with, and one that's really giving me a lot of hope and inspiration, which feels like a counterpoint to some of the forms of decline that we see in the Western world is the. The rise of the Sahel States, Burkina Faso, Mali Niger. Um, incredible things are happening there. Um, spending time in some African countries, which has a lot more young people than old people, which is kind of the opposite of Europe. Everything feels very different. So I'm just sharing that as a little kind of glimpse of. There are. There are these other stories as well, I think, um, in conversations I'm in, very much in the kind of Western sphere, seem to be about collapse and decline. Um, and they're quite fearful and quite rightly so, and there's the other side of that story in other parts of the world. And so I'd like to just bring a bit more attention to that, um, as I go around.

Speaker D: I love the use of your term cooperative entity. You know, I think a lot of the times when we're talking about, um, creating shifts in the leader per se, moving out of the leadership role, it creates a movement. But there's always been something that I've been a little uncomfortable with with the term movement that still feels like, you know, we're just kind of replacing something with something else that's clearly defined. And so I feel like that cooperative entity just gives it more of that living, breathing essence and takes it a little bit away from that terminology that feels a little bit more. More on the domination end of the paradigm.

Speaker A: Yeah, thank you for that. Um, there is a phrase that's come up recently from some other people in the, in the community of practice, which is that cards for life are like a connective tissue for the regenerative movement. So that is using that phrase, regenerative movement, but it's actually focusing on the connective tissue. A common language across different movements, we might say. So there are many great sort of online academies, things that sprung up maybe in the context of the pandemic, that's probably another conversation. But these kind of online communities of practice around nature centered leadership, a partner focus. Um, and the cards seem to be traveling between a lot of these different communities of practice. So they're not, not sort of exclusive in that way. They, they're able to kind of connect up lots of different groups. And that's happening quite rapidly. So that feels exciting. So I think that is something that's of a different quality, of a different texture to the kind of the stereotypical sort of movement building, um, that quite often has like a guru figure at the center. So if it is, if it is a movement, then it's a decentralized one and it's a distributed one. And I think that's. That's really important. M. Again, I like this language of scaling out rather than scaling up, um, which, you know, carries its own sort of nuance for people familiar with those terms. Um, but yeah, decentralized. And that's the way that living systems grow. Um, branching like a tree or a coral, what we call space filling patterns. Um, they do a lot with a very little energy. And yeah, I think that's how this system has found itself in so many different countries so quickly.

Speaker D: Yeah, it just really feels like the ultimate goal of where we need to be going to really create a different world again, as the purpose of the podcast is all about creating a world that's based on caring nature and shared prosperity. Are there other resources or, um, things that you would recommend for people who are wanting, uh, to really dive more deeply into this, these kinds of ecosystems?

Speaker A: Yeah, so I can definitely recommend some resources. So there's the Cards for Life, ah, Toolkit, which is a deck of cards. Then there's a training which is called Thinking Like Gaia. Um, that's, that's becoming very popular. And now there's a workbook which has emerged from that, which is a series of, of templates. And um, it's a really fun, multimedia, engaging kind of workbook that works with the Cards for Life. So that's just becoming available now as well. Um, so those are the kind of resources within, uh, the system that I'm working with. Um, but of course this has all been inspired by many great people, um, out there, active at the moment. People that have come before me from systems thinkers like Donella Meadow's Thinking in Systems has been a key inspiration. Fridge of Capra's the Systems View of Life, that textbook has really been a core inspiration. Um, thinkers like Nora Bateson, um, her recent book Combining is a fantastic resource. I'd like to mention, uh, Laura Storm and Giles Hutchins as well in their book Regenerative Leadership, which they really kind of almost coined that term, and Laura Storm's course, the Regenerators Academy, um, as well as the Bio Leadership Project where I work part time running the graduate program. These are some great online academies. I think there's something really interesting coming together, um, with uh, an understanding of ecology and living systems and something slightly more philosophical about emergence, that life is emerging, um, and that there is inherent uncertainty in the future and the way that we move towards that and work with that requires certain ways of being. Now, lots of wisdom traditions kind of had this stuff down. How to embrace flows and be in surrender and let go and just be present to the moment. Um, but we're constantly reinventing and reframing this stuff. And so I'm really interested in the spaces where these things meet, how we are able to be with the change of life and, and how we, how much we know about kind of ecology and living systems as well. So there are some thinkers like Neil Thies, who, um, wrote Notes on Complexity, a beautiful short book that is a really great distillation of this emergent or emergentist view of life, which I think is really Kind of bringing together a new personal development movement with, uh, a sense of care for the planet in that really expanded sense of partnership between us and the rest of the community of life so that we can go beyond the dominator mode. And a foundational work has been Ryan Eisler's the Chalice and the Blade. Um, when I read that, it was a revelation to really understand that there have been societies in the past that were true partnership societies, and that this story of domination is relatively recent in some ways and is almost certainly something that goes through cycles. And so that work is, has been so foundational because it gives me a context to, to, to work in really and to work towards partnership society. It really has informed, uh, everything that I do with the cards because the vision that's emerging with them is one based on partnership. Right. And that's the only way forward to be true to the principles of these cards and the energy that's coming through them. So, so there's, there's lots of great work and inspiration out there. Um, yeah, I hope that we can start becoming a culture that turns our efforts to cups rather than blades again or to the chalice more than the blade. Um, and I feel hopeful that we might see these changes faster than we expect because there is a groundswell, um, and it's harder to see and capture a story about that groundswell. But I really feel it in the work that I do, in the time that I spend training people and sharing these materials and learning from others. I mean, I, I really feel like I'm learning in public. That's how I'd talk about teaching.

Speaker B: Lovely.

Speaker A: I'm still at a stage where I have capacity to, to be in touch with people directly, although I can feel that getting squeezed. But I really do invite people to reach out to me if they have questions or would like a chat about the system and see if it suits them.

Speaker D: And on that note, thank you for your beautiful card that you inserted with my cards for life. That was, uh, so for our audience, I just want to make sure and, and reiterate that I will be sharing all of the resources and names of authors that Tom has shared during today's conversation. In the show notes, I'll also include a link to sponsoring the Power of Partnership podcast so we can continue sharing these powerful stories and resour to build a partnership movement across the world. Also in the show notes will be a link to the center for Partnership Systems where you can always dig deeper into Rhian Eisler's resources around the partnership domination, social Lens scale and to learn more about those four cornerstones that really are the levers to change all aspects of society away from domination to partnership. So childhood and family, gender, economics, and narratives and stories. So, Tom, before we say our goodbyes, I wonder if you have any final words that you'd like to share with our listeners and viewers.

Speaker A: Thank you, Cherry. Well, it's been an honor to be on the Power of, uh, Partnership podcast. Um, I think this is the only way for us to grow. Uh, I talked about believing that we are kind of going through a collective rite of passage. And I think what's on the other side of that is, uh, a really integrated sense of what it means to be in partnership on the broader scale. Partnership with each other, partnership with the living world, with all the beings that we share this planet with. Um, I think that's a connected state on a grand scale that we're coming to. And it. And it feels, uh, it's an inevitable progression from where we are now. If we can keep sharing this, um, these sentiments, this approach, um, and the power of partnership with each other and spread the movement.

Speaker B: Yeah, Lovely.

Speaker D: Well, Tom, I want to thank you again for being here. I've really, really enjoyed our conversation and look forward to learning more about the Cards for life and, uh, thinking like Aya resources.

Speaker A: Great. Well, I'd be very happy to welcome you into the community in any way you want to engage. Cherry, it's been a real pleasure to be on this platform.

Speaker D: Thank you for listening to the Power of Partnership podcast. We're grateful to Rising Appalachia for the use of Resilience as our Power of Partnership theme music. If you would like us to feature your partnership story or. Or if you would like to be a proud sponsor of the Power of Partnership podcast, please contact us at ah.centerartnershipway ah.org we hope you enjoyed this episode and will leave us a review on your favorite podcast channel. And don't forget to subscribe to be notified when new episodes are released. I'm, um, Cherry Jacobs Pruitt. See you next time on the the Power of Partnership Podcast. Uplift the negative. I'll show up at the table again and again and again I'll close my

Speaker A: mouth and learn to listen.