Unweaving: The Essential Art of Personal Transformation

January 30, 2025

There is a saying among weavers that to weave well, you must also know how to unweave well. This wisdom extends far beyond the loom, offering profound insights into how we might approach personal growth and social transformation. Mistakes happen. New insights emerge. We grow beyond old patterns and practices. The art of unweaving becomes not just a skill but an essential practice for authentic living and community building.

My work initially revolved around the concept of “reweaving” the community, with physical fiber weaving work as the informer to human systems, community weaving, adaptive action, and leadership foundations. One day, I was weaving on my loom and noticed an error about six inches past where I was working on the fabric. Japanese Saori weaving practices tell me to incorporate this as a design element and embrace my humanity. For this piece, while perfectionism did not stifle me, the structure, pattern and outcome led me to the act of unweaving. 

The process of unweaving takes time and focus. It involves noticing what does not work and setting the foundation for the work ahead to stand on its own. Most people do not want to embrace the unseen and gritty work, even though the logic on potential outcomes is clear. This piece took over an hour. For systems, it can take years. For personal narratives, it can take a lifetime. 

This awareness and act of unweaving shifted the direction of my current writing project, which is to examine the areas in our personal, professional, and community lives that require an understanding of “unweaving” before the action of reweaving begins.


The Foundations of Personal Fabric

Like a tapestry, our lives are composed of countless threads – beliefs, values, experiences, and inherited narratives that weave together to create our fabric. The warp threads represent our foundational experiences: family history, cultural background, significant life events, and core relationships. These vertical threads provide structure and continuity, connecting us to our history and anchoring our present moment.

The weft threads – our daily choices, evolving beliefs, and adaptive behaviors – weave through this foundation, creating patterns that become our lived experience. Sometimes, these patterns serve us well, creating beauty and functionality. Other times, they create tension, restriction, or discord that demands our attention.

Unweaving becomes necessary when we discover patterns that no longer serve us or our communities. Perhaps it’s an inherited belief about success that creates constant strain, or a learned response to conflict perpetuating disconnection. Maybe it’s an unconscious bias that limits our ability to build authentic relationships or an outdated narrative about our capabilities that keeps us small.

Unlike the skill of weaving, which we often learn in community through classes and shared wisdom, unweaving is frequently a solitary practice. We learn it through necessity, through moments of disconnect between our lived experience and our deepest truths. This solitary nature of unweaving makes it both challenging and profound – it requires courage to examine our fabric closely enough to identify what needs to be undone.

 


The Practice of Intentional Unweaving

Intentional unweaving begins with awareness. Like a weaver noticing a misaligned thread, we must develop the capacity to recognize patterns that create tension or limitation in our lives. This might show up as:

  • Recurring relationship dynamics that leave us feeling diminished
  • Professional choices that conflict with our core values
  • Belief systems that no longer align with our lived experience
  • Behavioral patterns that create disconnect rather than connection
  • Cultural adaptations that suppress our authentic expression

 

The process requires both gentleness and discernment. Not every imperfection needs correction; sometimes, the “mistakes” in our fabric add character and wisdom to the whole. The key questions become: Does this pattern diminish the integrity of the whole? Does it prevent the fabric from fulfilling its intended purpose? Does it create unnecessary suffering or limitation?

As parents and in the roles individuals take on in a family, we often default to these roles, regardless of how many years have passed since the time we all lived together as a nuclear family. As a mother, I have found myself becoming defensive far more quickly with one of my adult children than I would with any peer or friend. By examining the dynamics and patterns that have influenced our adult relationship, we have had the opportunity to unweave the dynamics that no longer serve us. 

Through my own defensiveness, I recognize that when someone becomes defensive, it often stems from past trauma. Typically, it has little to do with the person standing before us. 

Rather than repeating the cycle as we had for years, I gave my son permission to say “defensive.” Just one word. A naming and noticing of how he interpreted my presence. This allowed me to stop, ascertain whether I agreed, and take appropriate action. I could simply regroup, ask to convene later for discussion, or state that my contribution was related to something other than defensive, and we could dismantle the pattern. Unweaving a family fabric steeped in years of development took time. It yielded a new, healthy, rewarding communication dynamic that is enjoyable and sought out more often between my son and me. Unweaving our personal narratives is often the most difficult of the many arenas we enter to do the work.

Unweaving isn’t about completely dismantling our fabric. It’s about creating space – space for new understanding, new patterns, and new possibilities. This space-making happens through practices like:

  • Daily reflection and self-assessment
  • Examining our core values and their expression in our lives
  • Analyzing personal narratives and their origins
  • Identifying and challenging limiting beliefs
  • Practicing mindfulness and present-moment awareness
  • Establishing clear boundaries that honor our evolving understanding

 

The goal isn’t perfection but conscious evolution – becoming more aware of how our fabric affects our individual experiences and our ability to form meaningful connections with others.

While unweaving often begins as personal work, its impact extends beyond the individual. As we become more conscious of our patterns and more skilled at compassionately examining them, we develop a greater capacity for understanding and connecting with others. Yet, in our world today, this compassionate connection often feels elusive. Without cultivating genuine curiosity and the willingness to understand what lies at the heart of most wisdom traditions, our connections become clouded by bias and judgment. 

When the world around us seems to model imposition rather than listening, when public discourse feels dominated by ego rather than understanding, it becomes challenging to find our grounding. The path forward requires patience at a time when so much feels futile. Yet, this willingness to find patience – to pause, examine, and unweave our assumptions – creates the possibility for genuine connection. 

We often hear that we have more in common than what separates us. Recently, I experienced this truth firsthand through a simple yet profound exercise in co-creation. Working as a community weaver, I had the opportunity to collaborate with Abdulrahman, a colleague from Nigeria, to define what community weaving meant to us. Aside from our engagement with the Aspen Institute Weaving Lab, our only common ground was our shared desire to unite people, believing that we are more together than alone.

We took turns writing and alternating sentences to create two paragraphs together. What emerged was a beautiful testament to the power of showing up, a willingness to do things differently and trust and respect for another’s thinking.That shared writing starts off with a sentence below written by Abdulrahman with my sentence following as we alternate turns for two paragraphs:

A story about “What weaving means to us”

I am here in my room, having an interesting exploration with Kathy at another part of the globe. The things that divide us can seem so great in number, yet in person the realization that we share far more than what separates us is strongly present. Just like how connected it felt at the instance of the appearance of my 2 daughters on the screen with all the playfulness that kids bring to the space. Can community weaving be as simple as the presence of showing up open and with a willingness to listen, play and learn from one another?

Maybe all that matters is being present to everything, picking the emerging fibers of actions and connecting them in a way that births a new thing for people. Yet, with our sense of competing priorities and busyness in the world, we seem to have lost this basic premise of interaction and simply showing up to notice what might be all that really matters. Leaving the mindset of the busy world might not be that simple for most of us until we begin to give attention to the basics of listening to ourselves and honoring our individual uniqueness as part of the community. This uniqueness could be the thread or fiber that is the piece that we bring to the weaving of our community and our contribution to the greater good.

Workplace Systems and Patterns

Looking at the systems and patterns of operations in the workplace has always been complex and daunting. We all can think of the person who holds on to how it has always been done. Post-pandemic, the weight of the need to re-examine how we operated in our workspaces and communities weighed on me so much that I left a conventional leadership role to lead the facilitation of examining how we return to work and how we create the systems that serve us best after such a disruptive period of COVID presence. 

I have found that the workload of that examination is too much for most when it takes most of our resources to do what is in front of us and move from one task to another. CEOs and leaders know that they need to look and operate differently and that organizational, mental, and physical capacity is missing. The band-aid approach is expected to offer relief if you plug a hole here or there. 

I have visited workplaces where entire senior leadership teams use a surface approach, only to discover that most of those team members will be gone in the next six months, making it impossible for the work to advance. I observe that exponential growth creates a strong need for thoughtful management and communication systems, while the workload necessitates another triage approach to get by and do what individuals believe is their best. 

A standout health system recently took bold action to look at all of its employees, including their titles, responsibilities, and skills, and cross-match them with the organization’s current needs. The current management roles had been in place for over 20 years, and many roles were no longer needed to optimally serve the community or the bottom line. Upon analysis and reflection, new titles were created that reflected organizational priorities, the needs of the organization, and desired outcomes. Positions were eliminated. Some roles existed only to generate reports that have looked great for years, though it was a lucky circumstance as no infrastructure was in place to support those report metrics and their accountable measures. People were shifted, and a few were let go. The managerial fabric of the workplace was altered and strengthened when a thoughtful examination took place, followed by a bit of risk and action. Unweaving happened. It took a long time. Deliberation, difficult decisions and thoughtful discernment were imperative to make it work. The workforce now represents what is needed in 2024 vs 2004 in a closer way. 

I often say that if systems change were easy, someone would have done it by now. All this work is incremental. It begins with self-examination at every level, whether you are a parent, a citizen, or a CEO. 

The art of unweaving teaches us that transformation isn’t always about adding more. Sometimes, it’s about creating space, examining what exists, and consciously choosing what to keep, what to modify, and what to release. As we develop this skill, we become more intentional creators of our fabric and more conscious contributors to the larger tapestry of our communities. Our threads – our unique perspectives, experiences and gifts become stronger and clearer, ready to be woven into something greater than ourselves. 

If you are ready to explore your unweaving journey, I am sharing one of a series of worksheets that are part of an upcoming book. This story mapping exercise is intended as a reflection to guide you through examining your fabric – from identifying core values to analyzing behavioral patterns. The total tool kit can help you begin the intentional practice of understanding and transforming your narrative threads. 

Connect with me at kathys@commonunity-us.com to learn more about my work, upcoming book, facilitation, speaking, and opportunities to deepen this work together at www.common-us.com

 

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