Helen Titchen Beeth is an evolutionary leader operating at the heart of Europe as a linguist and change consultant in the European Union Commission headquarters in Brussels. She is a committed European and describes herself as a student and practitioner of individual and collective evolutionary living. In practice this means that she has been learning and experimenting with ways of introducing and scaling up practices that can unleash collective intelligence in large organisations. She is part of a community called Dorpsstraat which is itself an experiment in evolutionary living. Helen describes herself as a committed European but after many years at the heart of EU institutions, she is very much a realist about the major challenges faced by the European institutions.

She believes that an old world is dying and a new one is emerging. Many of the problems we are experiencing are the death throes of old ways of being, as she puts it, rather like a rooster still running round even though its head has been cut off. We are far from having a new civilisation up and running into which we can leap but there are plenty of people experimenting and innovating.

Europe is much more than its formal institutions. Europe is its land, its people, the communities, the culture, the identities and its deep consciousness. Whilst Helen is very comfortable in many places around the world, she feels fully at home in Europe. At the same time she is both a European, very British and someone who lives on the earth. She believes that our European institutions have done their best to paper over the cracks of past conflict but there remain under the surface deep attachments to our national identities, many shadow parts and unhealed wounds.

Helen believes that the European experiment in transnational integration as an arena with potential for inventing, discovering and testing patterns that can offer humanity valuable guidance on its road to becoming a sustainable, global society. However she doesn’t wear any rose tinted spectacles and is fully aware that the whole system may well unravel and take us to a dark place. In personal terms, she walks her talk. She is investing her time and money into building a sustainable community called Dorpsstraat.

However, everything mentioned so far is superficial. Helen senses something much deeper is going on. She believes that there is a deep shift from the Piscean age to the Aquarian age- a change deep in the structure of the consciousness of our cosmos which shapes both the physical, mental and consciousness structures which we are experiencing. She senses that this is moving to a much more interconnected and flowful state. She observes that many of the structures and institutions which are currently in trouble are those based on an old parent-child model of interaction and those which are emerging tend to take self organising and peer-to-peer forms.

One of the deep shifts which she senses is the re-emergence and re-assertion of the deep feminine within us particularly, of course, in women. She doesn’t subscribe to the idea that women have somehow been passive victims in the suppression of the feminine in the last centuries. She believes that women need to show up fully in their deep feminine power and lead rather than try to occupy the space of masculine power, leaving men nowhere to go. As a mother of 2, she observes that her children are experiencing a world very far from that which she grew up in. They are exposed to hugely more influences, potential ideas, role models and opportunities. She leaves the question open as to whether or not they have leapfrogged the egocentric and ethnocentric levels of development into the world-centric level and whether or not they will miss not having a stronger, more deeply rooted national identity. She finds her children provide a mirror for her, often challenging and a source of growth.

Helen thinks that we have lost contact with our ancestral roots so much that we are having to relearn and reinvent them. We don’t really know how to live in community and men women don’t really know how to embody the masculine and feminine or to be parents. We try to learn from books, but in the end, we’re going to have to learn from experience, wisdom and intuition.

For the interview, Helen wore an Arab headscarf around the neck. I’m not sure whether or not she was conscious of that but, for me, that was highly symbolic. As European civilisation is faltering and going through radical transition, we have within our borders are very fast-growing population from Islamic backgrounds. Many people are predicting that Western civilisation in Europe will simply fade away and be replaced by an Islamic one. She acknowledges that that may happen but senses that the process is more complex than that. Helen discusses the relationship between the masculine and feminine which she observes within Muslim culture. Whatever people’s formal belief, she sees huge potential in the people around her from many different backgrounds who now lives in Brussels.