Your NameMolly Gore
Email Addressm.mclean.gore@gmail.com
Cohort AssignmentHybrid In-Person/Online with Intensive in Lisbon, Winter-Spring 2025
1. What do you see as your primary work at this stage of your life?

Well, this may be shifting. But at the moment I work with a prankster-activist collective to infiltrate sites of power, satirizing neoliberal logic through impersonations and mimicry, and then we make films about it. I see my work fundamentally as using humor and mischief to dissolve the mythology that keeps western culture locked in cycles of domination and dehumanization. Using satire to expose the scaffolding under the status quo, to expose the water we are swimming in such that we might choose something different. But I am also working as a coach through the Organic Intelligence paradigm, which is a therapeutic protocol for post-trauma growth grounded in systems theory, overlapping wisdom traditions and neurobiology. It's a method for learning to work with others as complex natural systems, and considers healing a process of coming back into synchrony with the natural systems we're nested in. Simultaneous to this course I will be writing and producing a TV show in Canada, an indigenous-led prank show flipping the script on colonialism. Mentioning it in the off chance I can figure out a way that these threads of my life overlap with the learning here.

2. What role do you see as yours to play?

In all roles I play, I feel there is something of being a liberator, loosening the strictures that keep us bound. As I grow, it takes on more a quality of being an enlivener— I seek to do work that helps others to feel and cherish the sacredness of being alive, to access wonder, to fall in love with the world and find a deep sense of belonging to the larger web of life. I suppose this is my own work for myself too, and as someone maybe a bit prone to despair, I hope to do it with as much joy and delight as possible.

3. What goals or aims do you have in regard to the above?

Most broadly, I hope to produce work that heals, that facilitates individual and cultural shifts towards a lifegiving way of being here together.

For myself, to find a sustainable (financially and energetically) way of engaging with that goal over the long term. I hope to shift more into work with material reality, to root myself through meaningful work in the place I'm in (Basque Country) which is not my original home (Chicago). I hope to find other community through this work as well, and to engage with projects that bring me into closer, beneficial relationship to the land and others.

4. Where do you feel your next arenas for personal growth are?

Humility, acceptance, and cultivating joy.

5. And for professional growth?

Becoming someone who is equipped to enrich and design projects in the real material and natural world, to organize myself in such a way that I can leverage my skills to make a consistent living as well.

I have the challenge of figuring out how to cohere the different threads of my learning and work into an offering that makes sense. I'm not sure how or if they can be woven as I hope, but I'd love to find a way to integrate all that I've learned into a coherent practice...

6. What have you invested in to get you where you are?

I have invested in mentorship over many years by finding teachers I trust and working with them. I have invested in a lot of independent learning and reading, and many years of consistent spiritual practice and meditation to understand my own mind (so much to learn, still).

7. What fields of learning and which thinkers have been important in your life?

Steve Hoskinson, for bringing systems thinking and complexity science to clinical psychology, and for opening a paradigm of trauma healing based in pleasure and . Clarissa Pinkola Estes for bringing me stories as transformational vehicles in my own development. Edward Said, for introducing me to orientalism and the kind of critical theory that helped me see my culture's thoughts and the biases entrenched therein. Thich Naht Hahn, Yongey Mingur Rinpoche, Corland Dahl, Adyashanti, Judith Blackstone, and the various non-dual spiritual teachers I've been lucky to learn and practice with along paths to liberation. The surrealists and Dadaists who used absurdity to expose oppressive cultural frameworks, especially Leonora Carrington. As a lifelong cook and former food writer, I have to mention that field of learning which is a huge source of pleasure for me, and I've always found lots of joy in bringing people together around food. I've been affected by farmer writers like Wendell Berry, writer/satirists like George Saunders, and prankster mentors with whom I work now, The Yes Men.

8. Can you frame your philosophy or cosmology of life? What role(s) do humans play in it?

Well, I feel and have always felt that humans are nature, and the ills I perceived culturally and within us individually were born from the ways we've become divorced from that recognition. I don't know is how it looks in modernity to live in a mutually enriching relationship with the life around us —I probably have some idealistic/purist ideas about the ways modernity is incompatible with our own "wildness" and the health of the planet, and I'm eager to learn some visions for what it can look like to be here, and be well, and make well. To increase health and freedom. Fundamentally, I want to live in service of the animating force that blows through us and all of life. To be a human is to be animated by life that wants to live itself, and I would like to do work that nurtures that possibility within all of us, human and otherwise. I think humans can do this for each other, and for our environments as well.

Date CreatedJanuary 30, 2025