Futuring Peace Submission 2020
Prepare your mind for conflict!
It’s 2022. Europe is still crippled, America’s role in the word remains uncertain, and measures for conflict-prevention and human rights continue to be impaired. Conflict is inevitable!
Prepare your heart for peace!
Diffuse future tension with the calm of mass mindfulness via the One Heart app and rituals. Synch with the hearts of those you are likely to conflict with to contain or minimise tension. Commit today to minimise tomorrow’s conflict!
The Treaty of One Heart
Just as the boots of troops fall into rhythm as they march toward conflict, so too can the hearts of leaders and citizens of conflicting states fall into synch can now contribute to tension minimisation.
The Treaty combines ritual, controlled breathing, and mindfulness, with the ubiquitousness of smart phone technology, to connect the hearts of citizens with their leaders’—and with the citizens and leaders of the states they are in conflict with—by synching with one breathing rhythm at regular intervals.
– Generate mass mindfulness that infuses each day, thought and action with a focus on resolution
– Imbue leaders and citizens in conflict with a sense of connection, reducing emotionally charged reactions
– Buy the world time for its self-strangling political system to right itself
Breathing, mindfulness and
minimising tension
Protracted conflicts rush leaders into making significant decisions, while spot-fires of internal conflict spark emotionally charged reactions that might further prolong the conflict.
Controlled breathing can strengthen leader’s and citizen’s capacity to make calm and grounded decisions by filtering out the emotional distraction of rising tensions. Controlled breathing clears the bloodstream of the stress hormone cortisol while increasing the vitality hormone DHEA; reduces anxiety and blood pressure; allows us to control our emotional state; and fosters strong cognitive performance. [1][2][3]
The One Heart Treaty rituals
1. Leaders maintain peace with mindfullness by syncing their hearts through controlled breathing
2. Leaders & citizens maintain mindfulness throughout the conflict cycle to minimise tension
[1] Williams, M. The Science Behind BreathSync. [2] Zaccaro, A., & Piarulli, A. How Breath-Control Can Change Your Life. [3] Although heart and breathing rates are not directly correlated, breathing affects heart rate. The One Heart ritual uses this connection to symbolise syncing hearts on both sides of one conflict, through aligned breathing.
The Treaty of One Heart was a semi-finalist in Futuring Peace 2020——a competition calling for designers and futurists to create speculative artefacts that evoked novel futures of how to better sustain peace, run by the UN Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (DPPA) and Design Futures Initiative——by Damien Lutz, a UX Designer, sci-fi author, and tech blogger in Sydney, Australia.