Bridging
For a long time, I’ve been interested in what happens when we stop separating the things that are already connected.
With a background in psychology, I began my professional training and practice in social work. After several years of clinical practice, I returned for a PhD incorporating policy, systems theory, and organizational change. I was still working within social work while looking for ways to understand and make visible more of what I could see.
Integral theory offered a framework for seeing people, relationships, organizations, and larger systems together, and for bringing perspectives into conversation that were often separated. Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) research then gave me a concrete way to point to some of these connections and introduce an integral perspective through work that was accessible within social work and beyond.
For many years, I worked from within the university and the social work profession to make these connections visible and useful. Over time, the work itself led beyond the boundaries of the institutions and professional identity in which it began.
Along the way, other experiences have become part of this inquiry. John Records has been a mentor to me for many years and an important support for my development. Love in Action, the sangha he founded, has given me a place to explore contemplative practice, spiritual inquiry, relationship, and community in a more lived and personal way. I am also currently engaged in Timeless Wisdom Training, which has become another context for this exploration.
Today, that work takes several forms: RISE — Restorative Integral Support & Empowerment — a whole person–whole community–whole systems approach to trauma-integrating organizations; writing and scholarship that continues to explore systems, institutions, and restoration; and Love in Action, a more contemplative and relational stream of practice.
What connects these things?
Perhaps that is the more interesting question.
Across fields, experiences, relationships, and ways of knowing, certain patterns keep appearing: how people heal, how relationships hold or break, how systems respond to disruption, how trust is restored, and how new possibilities become visible.
For me, bridging is not about making everything the same. It is about seeing what becomes possible when we can hold more of the whole.
Larkin Bridging is a home for that continuing conversation—and for whatever becomes possible when these ways of knowing, working, and being are brought into relationship.
