Click here to register for an orientation video call on Saturday, February 4th at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Standard Time (4pm Eastern, 9pm UTC).

Collaboration is in the air. I just wrote that sentence to a friend, as I send out a few custom invitations to a design/brainstorming session. I’m finding this very energizing, to consider connecting-and-unleashing a bunch of potential energy and value around doing things together. I’m also still figuring out how to describe and position this direction within the context of Intentional Society and the extended network to which we’re connected group-to-group, so that’s what you’re invited to for a few more paragraphs here.

Contemplating the “being and/vs doing” duality/polarity is often how this domain is considered, how I’ve written about it in the past. Exploring those labels breaks down, though, at different scales in the fractal of all “being” moves/practice/attention also being acts of doing, and no “doing” being done free from a state of being. Currently I appreciate interior/exterior focus in the language. I’d say, Intentional Society has been heavily investing in interior work, doing together around interior states of being. Now, what is it like to add more of a different pole of energy?

I used the phrase “like opening up a new wing of the museum” recently to try to point at the continuation-and-expansion nature of reaching out toward exterior doing and integrity-with-outer-systems. A science museum or a children’s museum, where there are activities in each room of each wing in the space. Different people will spend more time in one or the other wing, and you can move back and forth as you please, and you learn different things that might relate to each other.

Not this week but next Saturday, newcomers can register here for our next orientation video call on January 21st at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Standard Time (4pm Eastern, 9pm UTC).

Hey, you know that old saying “all models are wrong, but some are useful”? I’ve noticed that it’s wrong. And useful, ha ha. (Woah, self-exemplifying koan 🤯) Yes, it gets at an important distinction, and it also goes too far. I’d prefer to say instead, “all models point at some truth, and all are incomplete”. Or perhaps “no map contains the whole territory, yet every map has some helpful correspondence to the territory” though that’s a little too verbose.

But the original does capture something helpful about some models being more useful than other models (at least for certain purposes, I would add) — which my re-representation doesn’t! Modeling is all about compression, which isn’t “right or wrong” at all, other than to the extent that the simplified representation helps us in some domain or task.

Okay so, this bring us now to The Relating Languages of Sara Ness, which she and her team brought to Intentional Society this last week for some workshopping. If you want to see what the model is like, the article linked above is a great intro, though some of the words/labels in the model have changed and moved around a bit so I won’t focus on the names.

Want to learn what this is all about? Click here to register for our next orientation video call on Saturday, January 21st at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Standard Time (4pm Eastern, 9pm UTC).

What is the speed of trust? If trust is a feeling, those can arise or shift quickly: witness the speed of an angry reaction, or how fast we relax in the company of a good friend. If trust is a kind of capital, a bank account of experiences, then building it takes time and many deposits of various sizes to swell the balance.

I think it’s both of those types of things (and maybe more besides that). You can walk into a room, feel the vibes, and pick up a state of trust from the culture already present, in which you may lean on your trust of that social network and e.g. share openly, trusting that people will listen and respond kindly. At least, up to a certain point! You can sense a different kind/type/level of trust when you consider deeper vulnerability, such as trusting someone with care of your kids, your house, your savings — those seem like they require capital trust reserves of a kind exemplified by a marriage or long-term relationship.

Trust seems very embodied. You can’t decide, with your logical mind, to change the degree to which you trust someone. (I mean you can convince yourself a bit, but how well does that really work?) Trust is held in the “soft animal of your body” as a somatic integration of experiences and non-verbal wisdom. With some people, you can reach very deep trust very quickly (comparatively) when you seem to align and connect on all levels, all frequencies resonating. With others, you may view trust as a long hard slog of building up bit after bit of shared ground, starting from very different places originally.

I’m limiting myself today in sticking to three things, and will claim them as interesting to anyone who reads further without a specific hook. 😉

One: The spiral. Many people have special books or texts to which they repeatedly return, time after time, and find new things with each reading. The words don’t change, but the meaning does because we change: We re-interpret anew in the context of who and how we are now.

Intentional Society has fundamental practices, and there’s something really similar to the “books re-reading you” phenomenon — similar, but not as automatic. The culture, the group’s edge, the live current, needs to be fed into the forms of the practices in order to continue the journey without a feeling of resetting/retreading. The form, the structure, isn’t the whole thing: It’s us who change and grow, and which dances with the form to make the interplay of structure and emergence.

Happy new year. As we begin our 9^th season of practice together at Intentional Society, looking back I see that what we’ve mapped out thus far is nothing less than a sufficient concise how-to model for the process of psychological growth! I’ve said these words before, here they are again:

Awareness. Acceptance. Integrity.

Those words by themselves are too thin to carry the transmission of the motions that they represent. But they each point to a motion, a movement, a verb:

Notice. Welcome. Integrate.

Hello, friends! 🎉🎉🥳🎈🎉🎉

You are invited to join us on New Year’s Day (in most time zones), January 1st starting at 1pm Pacific (4pm Eastern, 9pm UTC, or see your time here).

This is an open social for members, allies, friends, and anyone who’d like to come meet and hang out with some Intentional Society folk. The format will start with a light “intention” theme as befits stepping into a new year together, and then spread across a selection of choose-your-own breakout rooms to enable small casual conversations.

Registration link

Hello, friends! 🎉🎉🥳🎈🎉🎉

You are invited to join us on New Year’s Day (in most time zones), January 1st starting at 1pm Pacific (4pm Eastern, 9pm UTC, or see your time here).

This is an open social for members, allies, friends, and anyone who’d like to come meet and hang out with some Intentional Society folk. The format will start with a light “intention” theme as befits stepping into a new year together, and then spread across a selection of choose-your-own breakout rooms to enable small casual conversations.

Registration link

The next orientation call will be on Saturday, December 31st, leading into the new year and Season 9.

We looked back at our season a few days ago, and one story I constructed from the data is about the effect of moving to a more intentional/legible membership status declaration. What we saw in the attendance data was:

1. A larger “core” cohort of people who attended every or nearly-every session, compared to past attendance distributions
2. Less variance overall in attendance and a slightly lower average

Correlation is not causation, but in this case it seems like a sensible inference! It’s about what I would have guessed: that strengthening the membrane that marks in-ness and out-ness would both keep some people away (from dropping in sporadically) and hold some people more securely in (with a greater sense of shared investment). The aim was the latter, of course, but the former is just the flip side of the same coin.

Last orientation before the holidays: Click here to register for our next orientation video call on Saturday, December 10th at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Standard Time (4pm Eastern, 9pm UTC).

With two weeks remaining in IS Season 8, we’ve game-planned the remaining sessions to wrap up 2022. This will be a shallow concrete update, leaving the next few newsletters to wax philosophical looking backwards and forwards at the overall journey of Intentional Society.

Exploring choices together in last week‘s Community Practice Session felt useful to me on a personal level. Sometimes I wish it was easier to come away with a clean and tidy “here’s what we learned” but that’s just not how it works: when a group of people come into contact with some questions, each one of them is encountering them from a different context — and coming into contact with each other’s contexts and perspectives is a major source of how we evolve our own relationship to the topic. People learn different things, move towards each other’s perspectives to varying degrees, and generate new questions for their own personal explorations.

We’ll do a bit of a similar thing with “stories” this week. At the object level is a question like, “What’s your story of how your year was/went?” The meta layer would then be “How and why do we tell stories about ourselves?” and how we relate to those stories. Most of us might open up a bit of a new way to be aware of the stories that we’re telling ourselves constantly and unconsciously, by bringing awareness to our own story-telling processes. We’ll look at “the story of Season 8” a bit as well, and that will serve as the traditional seasonal retrospective.

New around these parts? Click here to register for our next orientation video call on Saturday, December 10th at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Standard Time (4pm Eastern, 9pm UTC). Last chance before Xmas.

Help me clarify the topic of exploration for this Sunday’s Community Practice Session, will you? Thanks.

Let’s see, there’s a juicy swirl of words like choice, commitment, coercion, conflict, confusion — gosh, I don’t know why these all start with the letter C. Anyhow, these are relevant and active topics for Intentional Society when it comes to how we relate to each other collectively and individually, and the things we might do together using our trust and connection.

Commitment feels like a loaded word, like there’s a coercion-of-future-selves that’s built into the act of “making a commitment”. Choice seems simpler but turns out to be similarly loaded: does every choice contain within it a confusion or conflict of some sort, that makes the choice be a choice?

Come find out what we’re about! Click here to register for our next orientation video call this Saturday, November 26th at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Standard Time (4pm Eastern, 9pm UTC).

Hi, James here as usual. It’s Thanksgiving today in the USA, and my social feeds are full of sincere thankfulness. It’s a wholesome time within a not-usually-as-cozy space, as honest gratitude displaces some of the usual outrage and ennui.

Relatedly, I recently read the latest @visakanv essay on earnestness, and I’ll also quote this re “it takes a surprising amount of courage to be enthusiastic about your own life.”

The courage required to be earnest and enthusiastic rather than guarded and jaded comes, I think, in the form of a willingness to be misunderstood by those who would see your earnest “yes” and judge you as either A) a naïve simpleton or B) failing at the social norm of demonstrating that you’re not a naïve simpleton by signaling your complexity. B is anchored in the (self-)socialized mindset, while A is an example of generic pre/trans perspective blindness.

Click here to register for our next orientation video call on Saturday, November 26th at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Standard Time (4pm Eastern, 9pm UTC).

What has struck me this week is a re-recognition that what we’re trying to do together is hard. I say this not because we’re struggling or have had a setback, but simply because culture and humans are so complex, and that complexity so interwoven and unconscious, that it’s quite rare and unusual to be even attempting something like this.

This thing we are attempting is to create and inhabit a new and better culture together — a transformed and transformative way-of-being that supports a stable field of high human capacity and fluidity. We want to find it, live it, and see it well enough to keep it and spread it!

Most people don’t even see their “way of being” as being a thing, since it’s indistinguishable from the default culture they’re swimming in. Then most of those that do see a “better world that our hearts know is possible” don’t know how to “find the others” to try to get there communally, and get diverted into “self help” and internal (only) change. Most of those that do seek transformative community, well, the many failures of intentional communities are louder than the successes, and then most of the successes seem pretty inaccessible or un-replicable.

Next orientation in two days: Click here to register for an orientation video call on Saturday, November 12th at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Standard Time (4pm Eastern, 9pm UTC).

Last week we tried out for the very first time our (internally synthesized, not-entirely-named) community giving and receiving practice. We requested desires/wishes/needs, we offered resources, we made proposals and responded to make matches, and did a bit of meta/debrief. Both as a facilitator and as a community member, I’m feeling encouraged and excited about how the practice flowed, the real-world impact it brought, and where this will lead our culture and relationships!

(No, I’m not going to describe the structural details here. Yes, I think we’ll publish a practice guide eventually. If you want more info sooner, reply and ask.)

A few top-of-mind highlights:

Our next newcomer orientation will be Saturday, November 12^th.

“What do we care about?” a.k.a. describing our landscape of care last week turned out pretty beautifully — in part due to the rich and meaningful topic no doubt, but also notably due to the spacious format of 60-minute breakouts in groups of 3-4. This feedback continues to tune our balance of container-and-space, optimizing for energy-giving experiences.

Next we’re returning to a giving and receiving practice that we learned about last season, actually doing the practice adapted to our IS context. This is something with a lot of potential energy attached, and we were very excited to play in this space! The dual purpose is to create value directly for ourselves, and to improve our relationship to value-flow interactions. We might not nail it first try (which is already totally fine), and I’m looking forward to what we learn here over repeated touchpoints and as an ongoing “backbone” type element of our community.

Lastly for the moment, I’m thinking about marketing. IS is visible in/to a handful of niche internet communities that we appreciate and align and ally with, but this doesn’t seem like a complete strategy. “Finding the others” is a continuous process, and I have a model that our (current, at least) zone-of-resonance is not wide enough that word-of-mouth makes up the completion of that strategy either. But it’s not “people make it inside and then don’t have a good experience”, so the direction I’m looking is at our visibility. The website/communication can be fairly easily improved, but visibility enables communication enables resonance. How should IS become a bit more visible? I’m conceptually aligned with non-coercive marketing but a novice in marketing generally and especially how to interact ethically with that domain given how ads have been arguably one of the greatest systemic evils of our modern world. Got any thoughts or ideas re visibility?

New here? You can register for our next orientation video call on Saturday, October 29th at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC).

What we do inside Intentional Society practice sessions very often feels meaningful and personally transformative. And in doing those practices and explorations, we often leave behind tons of context from the situated nature of our full lives, in order to meet other human beings in “pure” (ish) connection. It’s like, you can go to a retreat with other people, feel like you’ve touched each others’ souls, and still feel like you don’t know those people outside of that one dimension, don’t know the rest of the picture.

Sometimes we look at social connection as a spectrum between “chit chat” and “going deep”, and a typical trust dance might progress from the former to the latter. Within Intentional Society, it often ends up going in reverse! But I think it’s not a matter of “filling in the chit chat” or leaving the zone of deep care. I think the way of that dance is more a progression from “finding things in common” so as to establish a base of trust, towards then “exploring our interesting differences” which enriches and expands us.

That’s what leads me to ask, this week: “What does our whole landscape of care look like?” The people we love are a part of that picture. Our needs and how we’ll meet them. Our goals and hopes for our future. The places and communities we’re a part of. These things may be unique to us, and illustrate our differences… and yet our existing resonance and common humanity may infuse all these things with relation-ality too?

Next orientation call for newcomers is now October 29^th.

Looking both backwards and forwards, today I’m considering “emergence and purpose” as a polarity. Like stalagmites and stalactites, emergence grows from the floor bottom-up and purpose grows from the ceiling top-down. Integration would mean they meet in the middle, overlap, and grow into each other. (Or maybe some other metaphor that doesn’t imply the solidity of rock.)

What about when the don’t connect? Maybe that’s a “…yet” or maybe they’re pointed in different directions. Both modes are important, both are good (classic polarity management) and, like the infinity oscillation graph, the self-aware thing to do (when lacking an integration or resynthesis) is to get more adept at hopping between them and not getting stuck on one side or the other.

I associate both “being mode” and presence practices with the “emergence” pole, likewise the “doing mode” and intentional transformation (exterior and/or interior) with the “purpose” pole. Relatedly, I associate “postmodernism” with the former cluster and “modernism” with the latter, and “metamodernism” in the ideal as the integration of the two. (Those -‍isms can be huge ideological systems so the better stance with meta…ism is to break the ladder-of-ideology frame and hold pieces fluidly, but that’s a different topic.) Form(structure) and formlessness, even.

Orientation call this week - if there’s interest! Click here to register for an orientation video call on Saturday, October 15th at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC).

When is it better to hold tension inside an established frame, and when is it better to break the frame to ease the tension?

We had an emergent time in last Sunday’s Community Practice Session; by that I mean it didn’t go quite as I expected. I set us up to do Collective Presencing as the realization of a pull towards “longer, larger, deeper” practice after last week’s more-structured kickoff. I enjoy that practice, I assumed that was a fit for the group, I explained it and launched into it… and there were some feelings about that!

That’s not me using a euphemism to be polite or delicate or conflict-avoidant — it’s just a neutral way to say that people had different reactions, different feelings, different desires, in response to the form/frame we had entered. And that’s all good! All welcome, all okay… feelings just are what they are, and what good would it do to wish/pretend/coerce ourselves different feelings? So we welcome all feelings, and when feelings arise to the top of our attention, that’s the thing to attend to!

I’d like these updates to come a little closer to the factual transmission of what we’re doing and learning on a weekly basis. I do enjoy a little conceptual exploration now and then, but I think that a steady sense of “what’s going on” has been lacking lately and is probably one of the most useful ways to spend these words each week. (Please feel free to reply to this email if you have an opinion on the matter.)

Last Sunday marked the beginning of our 8th (quarter-long) season of Intentional Society. As I confessed to all in attendance, I have some facilitator-performance-anxiety attached to kickoff sessions: I generally try/want to do to much, infodump too much, structure too much, rush, and all those things end up pulling them away from feeling true to the real/normal spirit of these community practice sessions. This time I tried to tune in to two purposes: interpersonal connection and structural orientation. Connecting with each other, and orienting to the big-picture space.

I broke up the orientation bits this time, and interspersing them with interactive segments felt good to me, to lower the informational dose size. I showed the Member Portal doc, which is the one-stop-find-anything-shop for all of our bits. (We don’t use a strong platform product like Mighty Networks, so this is the home/anchor.) I showed the Hall of Members, where we can see who else is in the community (upgraded with pictures this time) and what they’re interested in. And I showed the Season 8 Calendar doc, which is a 3-months-at-a-glance visual that is meant to anchor the “what/when” question more firmly than the existing weekly emails.

As for connection, I made a whole sequence to facilitate meeting lots of people and ramping up gently with new folks in mind. We did both a check-in and some Social Noting in our opening, then did a few more pair breakouts touching on purpose (i.e. “why I am here”) and desires (i.e. “what I want to do”). At that point I had more breakouts planned, but changed it up to keep the group together for longer in the back end of the session.

Hello friends! Wow, 250 people receiving this now; it’s wonderful to feel your support and interest. This week I’d like to simply and straightforwardly convey an invitation to you as we begin our 8th season of Intentional Society, which runs October through December. It’s an opportune time to come into connection with this community and its relational field.

For anyone that has attended in the past, just reply to this email for the link to Sunday’s kickoff. For anyone new, click here to register for the orientation video call on Saturday, October 1^st at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC).

Sunday the 2^nd restarts our weekly Community Practice Session series. But perhaps this will be our first season with more other-day events than Sunday calls! I’m excited to find out. I’ll leave you with this consideration of how to define IS, which I’ve been using on social media this week:

Intentional Society is a community and culture of awareness, acceptance, and integrity. It’s a way of being more fully who we want to be, growing bigger selves through relational practice with aligned friends. (essence and purpose frame)

Intentional Society is a space where structure and emergence dance, where being and doing intertwine, where meta becomes object, enriching the soil of our lives to sprout forth meaningful connections and impact. (construct metaphor frame)

Intentional Society is a social laboratory exploring the latest psycho-technologies and self-therapeutic modalities, building our skills and capacities in an optimally supportive environment. (scientific frame)

Intentional Society is a set of video calls of various sizes between an international collective of humans, talking with and listening to each other, wired up with a few docs, emails, and spreadsheets. (concrete reductive frame)

Intentional Society is all those things and more, as we continue to evolve it in and between and around ourselves.

Want to catch the Season 8 Intentional Society kickoff? There’ll be two orientations on Saturday, September 24^th and Saturday, October 1^st for new folks. Existing members will receive a renewal-ritual form tomorrow.

Our area’s summer streak of warm weather (which means 70°F/21°C here) is now over. My kids are back in school as of yesterday, leaving the house quiet and still. That sudden void marks a pronounced transition in my daily routines, as coincidentally this is also the final week of Intentional Society’s season.

We note nature’s seasons for the change that they mark, of life and death and renewal and energy. Yet the underlying rhythm is one of constancy and yearly repetition — the embodiment of that well-known expression, “Change is the only constant in life.” Zoom out far enough on the seasons, and we can see that they are the breath of the earth, inhaling and exhaling through the millennia of the planetary lifecycle.

Why does Intentional Society operate with a seasonal framing? In conversation yesterday I said, “so we never stop reinventing ourselves” and that intention is, to me, something worth grooving deeply into our rituals and rhythms. This borrows from the accumulated wisdom of agile software development, and even further back to and beyond Deming’s iterative cycles. The “step to the outer frame” move, modern or not, differs from just marking time and reflecting like e.g. the fixed traditional liturgical calendar. Bring awareness to the awareness process itself!

Our next newcomer orientation is September 24^th, mark your calendars to catch the start of Season 8 in October.

Today I wrote in a casual social media post that within Intentional Society we aim “to grow our awareness, capacity, and integrity” and I noticed that it felt like another subtle but helpful evolution of the core message that IS stands for.

In December of 2020 I wrote “starts with awareness and intention” as to the “how” of growth in the face of personal, relational, and societal ills. I think “awareness” stuck around very practically while “intention” was better as a broad thematic word that ties together several things (e.g. “accepting and holding” and “fluid non-coercive motion”) that needed more teasing apart.

In September of 2021 I harvested “awareness, acceptance, and authenticity” from a brainstormed list of IS community values (which has lived in the Orientation Call slides since then). It seem accurate to view that shift as a breakdown of “intention” into component parts “acceptance” and “authenticity.”

The first step to getting involved is our orientation video call on Saturday, September 3rd at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC).

Unusual thing for me to say, right? Yeah. You were initially going to get a “working-in-public” newsletter of me today, going from motivation/intent to designed practice. It didn’t coalesce! I have a practice designed already, but I might redesign it if I could clarify the motivations into a more crisp expression. There are so many angles on this particular space, I’m not sure how to tell the story, it feels jumbly. I’ve asked an AR facilitator group for recommendations, to see if those would help isolate the core maneuver.

The thing itself for us to practice this Sunday could be called “dancing with scissors” or “the 3rd layer of okayness” and yet, that demands that the first two layers be explained and it’s the end of the day and I’m out of time. What was it? Well, the core of it starts with society training us to manage other people’s emotions. We learn to predict how other people might react to us, to keep ourselves safe by steering away from triggering any reactions that would come flooding back at us. It works (especially for kids, in low-power situations) but is a suboptimal cultural norm.

But I didn’t find the way in to communicate it, the thread to pull where the words start flowing. So, I can feel some disappointment and embarrassment at myself for failing to produce what I had wanted. And I can also shrug and just be okay with the fact that it didn’t happen. Then, I can imagine you reading this and thinking “what a crappy newsletter, maybe I should unsubscribe.” And I can make contact with this reality and still be okay — I’m gonna be okay even if you unsubscribe. Then, I can predict feeling shame if someone hears my previous sentence as implying “I don’t care about you (or your feelings)” because I decided to ship a crappy newsletter despite knowing that I’ve wasted your time for 350 words now. And that’s not true; I do care about you and your experience. But I’m also okay if trying to express an authentic truth results in being misinterpreted — even if I’m correct about predicting that misinterpretation (which, often, I’m not).

Click here to register for our next orientation video call on Saturday, August 27th at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC).

Seen this morning:

your child asks you, why are we here? why are we alive?
what do you say? -Tasshin

I flipped the script just now and asked my kids what they thought:
kid1: No idea. I don’t know.
kid2: Uh, because God created us?
kid3: <shrug> … I have no idea. … So, this is my lego car… 😂

Our next orientation video call is next week, Saturday August 27^th

Imagine the great hall of an ancient stone castle, as you swing open the heavy oak doors twice as tall as yourself. The large rectangular room stretches lengthwise in front of you, unoccupied, stone walls well lit by steady flames in sconces at regular intervals. As you walk down the spacious, high-ceilinged hall, you see rows of framed portraits on both sides, honoring the many people who sometimes occupy this space, the denizens of this realm. Next to each frame, you see their own words extending goodwill, as well as their current quest, where they can be found, and even a magic button to summon them. Midway down one side of the room, you find your own frame - a representation of your own presence and shared membership in the society that has built this castle and ranges across this land. Turning in a circle to survey the whole hall, you can feel the care and comradeship that suffuses even the stones themselves, and look forward to the next gathering which will animate this space with laughter and stories and song.

Thus goes the vision of the Hall of Members - a large piece of our new castle (err, excuse me: Member Portal) that anchors our community in persistent virtual space. The vision above is meant to convey the experience, the atmosphere, of our intention in having it. In reality the hall is currently a spreadsheet, and it doesn’t have any fancy VR tech or even pictures yet. The simple aim is a sense of potential and of belonging. Our regular interactions happen via live video, and while we value rich interpersonal relating far more than lower-bandwidth platforms, I think this extension of our relational container fills a gap between and outside of our calls.

The idiosyncratic name is similarly intentional, inviting questions about what it is, what it means, what might be possible in or through this handcrafted “Hall of Members” artifact. We get to co-evolve our understanding of its purpose alongside the iteration of its form and functionality. There are currently 30+ name-frames arrayed in “the hall” and I imagine that seeing it now for the first time will give us a much better sense of what kind of info wants to be there for round two. We’ll be refreshing this each season, part of our regular lifecycle of self-awareness and intention renewal.

Click here to register for our next orientation video call on Saturday, August 13th at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC).

This is a “slice of life” update, sharing what’s happening inside the IS umbrella.

Last week we welcomed Seishin from Willow Monastic Academy for a session of open exploration from curiosity. Some of that went toward the life-of-practice of a modern monastic, our respective ecologies of practice, and other topics… and also multiple folks noted and appreciated being impacted by Seishin’s quality of presence and/or energy. I’m glad to grow our group-to-group connection, aligned by similar aims and approaches, and so create another link in the meta-network.

This week we’re coming back around to IFS (Internal Family Systems) to reconnect with its parts-of-self model, vocabulary, and connect to capital-S Self (which then seems linked to personal integrity-aura, personal field feeding relational field). I label it as an “oracle” type practice, because one tends to end up learning things that they didn’t know they knew.

Next orientation call is not this week, but the following week: Saturday, August 13th at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC).

Written down in front of me, staring at me from my scratch paper notes, are the words “capacity-building.” This is a crux-y kind of tension and polarity for me, certainly in the context of Intentional Society, but even as an individual looking at today’s world and asking myself how it is best to relate. Like in this quote:

How can we move at the speed of trust… when facing the speed of catastrophe?
-Alexis Goggans, h/t Brian

There are such big challenges facing humanity, which are being felt already and which may batter us harder and sooner than most of us believe. Do we have time to “slow down”? Will anything other than slowing down (to shift who we are and the capacity we have) work? How much time and energy should one put into sharpening their axe before chopping down a tree? This is of course the explore/exploit tradeoff, the donor’s dilemma, several names for it.

In-progress change won’t shut our front door: Click here to register for our next orientation video call on Saturday, July 30th at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC).

As we loosen the requirement/commitment boundary to be more inclusive in the definition of Intentional Society membership, the juiciest question floating around our design space has been something like, “Should there be a minimum participation requirement?” for what it means to be in IS. I can’t point to many other split opinions regarding our now-accepted proposal, but it makes perfect sense that the main question about “moving the boundary” might be “to where exactly?”

On the one hand, there’s a “don’t make a rule, rules are dumb” argument — which I’m not poking fun at; I agree! Rules are dumb to the extent that they are hard or inflexible and there’s an inherent flattening of trying to partition a complex space with a single line. The more zig-zags get added to the line to capture nuance, the more you lose the simplicity benefit of having a rule in the first place. Plus, extrinsic motivation/coercion is generally bad because it displaces internal motivation, and we’re all about avoiding coercion as a practice.

On the other hand, there’s a “but it has to mean something” argument - which I also agree with! If you don’t set the bar somewhere, then the bar itself can vanish and with it, the trust that comes from sharing in common some level of commitment. Also “what’s the point?” of wanting to be a member if one is deterred by the prospect of partaking of the access it provides?

Three small vignettes of what is happening, moving, weaving around and in us:

The tangibility of our relational field was present again with us last week, when we contrasted a high-structure activity (the skill-building of Empathy Circling, the communications equivalent of isolating and exercising a few specific muscles) with a complete lack of goal/rules/structure (aside from our standard Interaction Agreements). Inside that freedom, we could still see something happening in the quality of what it’s like to be together. There’s a “we space” active in shared presence, and a connection of every I-to-We along which something energetic/empathic flows, and a web of interpersonal connections and relationships undergirding the relational field/fabric. I feel more gravity in our “us” week by week, anchoring and holding more securely the characteristics of the essence of our we-ness.

We’re trying out a name, “Community Practice Session,” to replace the generic term “General Session” in referring to our weekly calls. This also adds some specificity as we de-center the weekly call sequence in the identity of Intentional Society and make our membership membrane more inclusive. The concrete shifts are small and low-impact, just like this name change, but they add up to a perspectival expansion that will both widen and deepen the spirit of this society we’re growing together.

In our community practice session this week we’re welcoming Mary as friend and featured guest, who will introduce us to a gift economy structure, a circle practice around giving and receiving in community. This has been reified as the Gift Circle practice in one lineage, elsewhere as an Offers and Needs Market, and Mary has learned and iterated this practice in a way that focuses on giving and receiving in an intentional and conscious way.

Second-chance orientation call Saturday, July 16th at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC).

“If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.” -Blaise Pascal probably

“Brevity is the soul of wit.” -Shakespeare, Hamlet

“why waste time say lot word when few word do trick” -Kevin, The Office

…The meta-level humor here is that I just gave you three quotes where any one of them would suffice. An ironic nod to the difficulty of concision.

Thus follows a next step in the progression of condensing my writing about an identity expansion, also gestured at last week, trying to include more of why this is important:

Orientation registration link for newcomers Saturday, July 9th 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC). Season 7 kickoff on Sunday.

< Meta: I am writing to you. One part of me wants to clench (showing up in my diaphragm or nearby muscles) a message of concern, even panic, and tell me “try hard to get it right, this is important!” It doesn’t carry too far amongst my other parts, but I want to honor that care and value for the importance of this work — AND that it’s not about trying harder. >

First, the field. It feels different to me, some difference I’m carrying into this relational field. A sense of potential isn’t unusual as we embark on a new quarterly season of community gatherings, but this feels more significant, a bigger shift — in the self-identity of IS, in the leadership more people can bring forward, and in the integrity of presence and of my self that I can bring to contribute toward anchoring the field. More space, more fluidity, a stronger supportive net of capacity and security. Anchored and grounded while also free and spacious.

Then the membrane dividing in and out, that is in motion also. The field, the fabric, can hold more space, allow for a greater variety of forms for what “being in” Intentional Society looks like. If you feel a kinship with the spirit of what we are doing, I invite you to come in, there is room for you! You’re invited to join us on Sunday to hear more, regardless of whether you’ll be attending weekly this season. Get oriented on Saturday if you haven’t, or else reply to this email to ask for a meeting link if you’ve fallen off the invite list. If you can’t make it this weekend, you’ll hear more once we figure out a few more details.

<Meta status: My personal conviction has solidified directionally in vision-space. Big questions remain. This is an echolocation broadcast, bouncing it outward and seeing what reflects back. Vibe/gut/thought reactions invited!>

Intentional Society is almost ready for an identity shift. A developmental transition, where what it identifies as will shift to something that it has. (This “is a” to “has a” shift is also called the “subject to object shift” in adult development psychology, used in stage theory models for individual development. It doesn’t feel like much of an anthropomorphic stretch to fit the concept of self-identity and “how something conceives of itself” to an organization, thought there’s some transitivity behind the construct.)

Intentional Society currently is, basically, a weekly virtual gathering of relating and exploring in service of self-led personal growth. That will start to become something that IS has, but which does not fully define the identity of IS or what it means to be a member of IS. Its self-identity will grow more expansive, with more complexity and variety of activity held within the bounds of its broadening tent.

Currently:

Click here to sign up for our next orientation video call on Saturday, June 11th at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC).

Last Sunday we finished holding a task/process as a practice and consented to a set of facilitation proposals. It felt good to declare completion and celebrate the making of some decisions, and just as strongly if felt good to have slowed down to make compassionate space for relating with our own reactions.

Most proposals were aimed at the 26th (a day run fully without me), but we’re getting started this week. Working in public, I figure I’ll try to generate and lay out here my current working guidance for facilitating an “exploring” segment of an Intentional Society general session.

• Exploring (as an IS session activity) is the breadth pole, complementing the depth pole of relating. The extension, fueling the integration.
• Exploring points to learning, extending, stretching, adventuring, perspective
• The facilitator is a leader, the lead explorer, setting the direction of the expedition
• The ideal leader stance combines both experience\expertise and invitation\questioning
• Storytelling from their unique experience brings understanding, connection, empathy
• Sourcing an invitation brings out the wisdom across the group and focuses it
• Meaning, discovery, transformation — those can’t be forced or given by a facilitator. Relational\emotional resonance is what bridges the gap of transmission, sparking similar perspective across differences. (Net: just be yourself, be real, and let your passion flow through.)
• Exploration can be play, and people are game. Exploring can be combined or coupled with relating.
• Yes, you can pick any kind of structure — and yes, “share for 10 minutes, small groups for 20” is a simple\safe\sane default starting point
• Worries about the impact of an invitation can be brought with and held as a part of the invitation. An invitation shan’t force vulnerability, but shall frame up space to allow it.

Our next orientation video call will be Saturday, June 11^th

Tech note: This email is arriving from newsletter-updates@intentionalsociety.org with hopefully improved deliverability! Please reply if you notice any difference, positive or negative, for your inbox — and do add it to your address book or safe sender list to help train the algorithms.

Hello, friend. I want to share with you about our very interesting last two weeks. But I’m also feeling a bit hesitant and unsure about how to summarize. What if this is relational practice, though — right now? Practicing presence with you imagined in front of me… if I had only a few minutes (or, <500 words) with you, how much of that should I spend on slowing down and attending to our connection?

Slow down. Attend to the field between us, surrounding us. I’m taking that with me from our experience so far in a process on which we’ve spent parts of our past two sessions: selecting those who shall facilitate (the call, the relating, the exploring) a session at the end of June, when I (James) will be absent for the first time in our 1.5-year history.

Click here to sign up for our next orientation video call on Saturday, May 28th at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC).

My desire for you is that you would be the most you that you can be in every moment. On the spectrum of potential you-ness, that you would live as the most alive you, the most spacious, most whole, most coherent, least encumbered you.

I could say “the best you” also, as you then check where your definition of “best” comes from. Does it come from the approval of others? Does it come from your accomplishments? If “best” means the the fullness of who you are and want to be, then I also wish that for you.

I wish you awareness, so that you can hold as object the many parts of your self system as they activate and move moment by moment. I wish you awareness of your awareness, such that you may learn to learn and grow how you grow — so that you can see the making-object process as you perform it.

Still trying to catch an Orientation? Next call this Saturday May 21st, 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC)

Goodhart’s law has become a fairly well-known label for the entanglement of incentives with measurements:

“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to become a good measure.”

I’ve even heard that effect name verbified as Goodharting — that measures can be Goodharted by focusing pressure upon them, and that some measures are more susceptible or resistant than others to being corrupted thusly. Goodharting is the pressure that creates the incentive to game a system, by linking measurement to reward.

Please indulge me, if you’re reading along here, as I fumble with words today. I wish to locate, coalesce, and attempt to describe an… evolutionary expansion in how I perceive of and relate to Intentional Society.

As a meta preface: The reality of IS, when I can feel the truth of it in my bones, is something I’m uncovering more than creating. It’s already there waiting for us, like dinosaur bones to paleontologists — a configuration of relations within the possibility space of reality. It’s (by definition of purpose) the living system of human awareness and agency, organizing and embodying the attractors constantly bridging from current society to the next. IS is what is possible if we attend to our deepest values and integrate across the whole of our lives.

Now, about that shift in perception. I’ll try saying, “from club to collective” and see if that points at it well enough. It’s a developmental shift, which means going from a “is-a” identity relationship to a “has-a” containment relationship — the ‘ol “transcend and include” move. By using club I mean to connote the tight-knit active social interaction that defines its boundary: the neighborhood tree-house meetup, the after-school drama club. IS has thus far been a club of active explorers, meeting weekly with each other to practice relating to ourselves and each other in awareness-building ways.

IS is that but, now I’m seeing that it is not just that, that it has that and also more than that. In using the word collective I mean to connote a wider variety of self-organized expressions, bounded by an alignment in purpose, goals, perspective, desires. As the “fuzzy cloud” of people around, coming through, and in orbit of Intentional Society (club definition) has increased steadily over the past year, the potential for an expanded collective definition of IS has kept rising.

Newcomers, our next Orientation call is this Saturday May 7th, 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC)

We were over 20 people together last Sunday, and while attendance has been gradually increasing (and fluctuates week to week), the last three weeks or so (going back to the final week of last season) has felt to me like traveling over a threshold in terms of facilitation and group-size-feel. To use a human-body analogy, it’s less like “growing pains” in one’s shins/femurs, and more like “oh look how tall you are now, you can reach that cupboard yourself.” Some shifts I’m noticing or doing:

• “Large group” check-ins still require breakout rooms, can’t do full-group check-ins and hear everyone’s voice. (We tend to alternate smaller-or-larger check-in groups)
• No longer practical for me to review random breakout assignments while facilitating. This was minimal (ensuring new folks aren’t clustered alone, occasionally gender balance) and I don’t feel a need to react to regain it now, but would need a role split to a 2nd person to do so.
• I’ve tried keeping the breakout groups steady throughout a session, rather than randomly mixing each time. This forgoes “I have a sense of knowing everyone” in favor of supporting at least some closer connections developing.
• Noticing/Meta time might be changing in feel? I mean, everything always changes, but the question is still open here re how much the dynamic has shifted/is shifting with more of a stage/wall-of-faces presence reducing the intimacy of one’s potentially-vulnerable sharing of awareness.

That “Noticing time” is our last significant full-group open-mic practice, aside from some practice-debrief sharing spots. I do want to keep it that way until scale markedly changes the experience, because that felt sense of “we-space shared consciousness” and group attunement seems quite important to our overall vibe of connectedness. Even that could be split, but we’ll see how to do that whenever it ends up being the next logical step.

It’s not too late (it never is) to join the new season! Orientation call this Saturday April 30th, 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC)

The polarity of “being and doing” has danced in my head quite persistently — I was writing about it two years ago, as well as two months ago here. These two different energies, priorities, leans, seem so pivotal in the developmental transition from conventional to post-conventional logics/stages.

But, have you ever repeated a word often enough that it seems to lose all meaning for a minute? I feel a bit like that this week, looking at this relationship so intently that the terms themselves seem to dissolve. Swirling around integrative thoughts like “we’re never not being” and “even choosing to be is a doing” have me questioning what exactly I’ve been meaning with those word-pointers.

Being-ness is stillness, presence, feeling, attuning. Doing-ness is movement, acting, deciding, building. What about other nearby polarities?

New folks need an orientation call before attending general sessions. To catch the start of season 6, join us on Saturday April 2nd, 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC)

I’m feeling excited, supported, and just-the-right-amount of “how will it work out?” nervous to begin our 6^th quarterly season of Intentional Society. Today I’ve reached confidence that this is the right time to begin a big shift in our meta landscape — from “James leads all the stuff” to “this is a capable community effort.” Well, possibly the right time was even earlier, who truly knows, but I’m feeling it in the maturing call structure, the strong core group, the cultural foundation, and the momentum of group size. Now, it would be a big mistake if we didn’t start reducing the bottleneck of my leadership and perspective being so dominant. Instead of the-James-show, we can unleash the ready creativity and capability of other members to contribute their leadership, starting with the facilitation of some sections of our general sessions. Simple, yet very visible.

There are moving parts and fiddly bits to navigate along the way: minimum-viable roles and responsibilities, skill-matching and feedback, coordination, scheduling, nominating-and/or-volunteering, etc. But I’m feeling pretty sanguine towards all that, with a feeling of lightness in my bodymind contemplating the imminence of entering a phase shift that no longer smells like “letting go” (with the connotation of things falling down or given up) but like trusting and grateful interdependence and mutual support. And (reminder to myself of previous learning) I don’t need to shrink myself or my leadership to do it. It’s not a zero-sum game. Maybe “you own this too” should be a mantra for me as we walk this direction. 😆

So that evolution excites me at the meta level. Perhaps integration, of being-and-doing or other polarities, might guide us in our content-level explorations for a bit, as I touched on last week, even while we continue deepening our foundational strengths. I’m stoked, as the kinds probably no-longer even ironically say these days. I will say it sincerely, then, post-ironic sincerity. Let’s go!

This is our quarterly rest week — an in-between time of change and strategy and potential, when I put on my system design hat towards our next season. I was glad to share that hat with other community members in yesterday’s Meta Meeting, and am brimming now with connections between ideas, proposals, and collected wisdom.

The way/dao of Intentional Society is a way of being, the essence of being how-we want-to-be, inhabiting our highest values in self-awareness, spacious presence, and coherent intention…

…as. we. live. Life, everywhere and all the time, not just when we’re together. The pull/call/desire I’m describing is toward integration across outside (of General Sessions) and inside parts. Opening up to more doing-energy, while retaining our priority on being-ness. Opening up to more exterior action, to complement our interior action.

Bringing in more space for increased scope, that allows room for more complete, integrated learning loops to occur in our personal journeys: The inner game (inside ourselves, and inside our community) connects and flows outward to the outer game, which brings new feedback to fuel the inner game, and so forth.

Last orientation call of the season, this Saturday April 9^th, 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC) — come if you’d like to get involved next season beginning April 24^th

This Sunday will be our seasonal big-picture retrospective-cross-envisioning. Sensing, not just from what’s there, but also from what’s not there. Thinking about this possibility space right here right now by myself, the thing I’d like to confront is the question of whether/how I am holding Intentional Society back.

This is a good question to ask oneself regularly even if nothing at all feels held back, but something “in there” is already calling me to diagnosis. This wouldn’t be the first time: I’ve held IS back in the past by being tentative about my leadership, uncomfortable with the power embodied in my founding role. For better or worse, I currently do and drive a lot of what IS is structurally, and so any limitations of our evolution are probably tangled up in my own shadows or rigidity of direction.

The thing that’s calling to me from outside of the current IS boundary is some kind of “deep yes” resonance, a “know it when I see it” state of systemic rightness, a fitness-to-purpose that’s tangible when a whole system starts humming with the self-reinforcing energy of tipping into a new gravity well/attractor basin. I’ve tasted the potential of truly high-performing teams, and I’ve seen when a plan comes together in a complex domain, when awareness and intentionality and values and purpose all combine to produce a new mode of being-and-doing far beyond conventional capabilities.

Our orientation calls for newcomers continue this Saturday April 2nd, 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC)

“What can I un-know?”

That was the prompt and subject this week in our group practice. I’d been approaching this subject for a couple weeks before we tried the experiment last Sunday, to mixed reviews.

On the structure/container dimension, I tried to leave it minimal and loose, using “abiding in silence and holding divergence” (h/t Lisa Norton) as the main guidance. Full group, not even a talking piece, see what emerges. However, I notice that “using a prompt” itself had a stronger impact than I anticipated, and am taking a note to the effect of “the smaller the amount of structure is, the more concentrated its usage will be.”

If you’d like to experience Intentional Society, start with an orientation call Saturday March 26th, 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC)

Looking back at cases

Last Sunday we finished (for now, I think) our multi-week focus on case practices. Case work? Maybe I should say “case presencing,” verbifying “presence” to point at the act of bringing one’s presence deliberately in service of another person and their world. (Tip of the hat to the Presencing Institute for that move and for bringing Case Clinic into our usage.)

Presence could be said to be made up of our attention, our focus, our engagement, and maybe even our attitude. To give it to another person, as we do in our case practices, is a gift. The experience of receiving that gift was called “decadent” and “luxurious” by our case-sharers.

We’ve entered US Daylight Saving time - our orientation call this Saturday March 19th is at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time, which is now 8pm UTC.

Last year I was in the habit of regularly giving, in our Sunday sessions, a weekly reminder that “I don’t know what I’m doing and we’re making this all up as we go along.” I realized recently that I had fallen out of that habit of repeating that saying, and at the lower/practical level of “doing what we do together in a general session” I do think that is correct. We have more now in the way of the rhythms and routines of practicing what we practice together.

But at a higher level, this is and needs to remain true and salient in my awareness. I am reminded of Lisa Norton’s uncertainment practice, framing this as a “negative capability” of abiding in uncertainty. Maybe I could say “inverted” to highlight the complementarity — like digging a hole versus building a tower, something like making space for better foundations.

What will Intentional Society become, where will it lead us, what will we grow into with it? I don’t know. And it’s hard to maintain that openness when my mind wants to make assumptions, wants to plan and control and know, all the good effectiveness practices of systematicity that themselves need to be object-ed and transcended to re-integrate with the complexity of reality that doesn’t fit inside those systems that are small enough to fit inside our brains.

Yes we’re having an orientation call this Saturday, March 12th at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Standard Time (4pm Eastern, 9pm UTC).

Pesky clock-management note: March 12th is the last day before Daylight Savings Time hits the USA, so orientation folks can ignore. Sunday folks, remember on the 13th to A) shift your clocks forward one hour if you are inside it, or else B) move the start time of Intentional Society one hour earlier in your time zone to compensate. (Europeans, the transitory off-by-one will last for 2 weeks this year.)

With a swell of newer folks and absent some older folks lately (last week especially, but it’s a trend over 3-4 weeks), the average tenure in the room felt noticeably lower last Sunday. I found myself explaining structural aspects of the Sunday session almost as if it were the start of a new season. The “tenure effect” can swing the opposite direction as well, but I don’t think I’ve bumped into the “too insular” feeling of high tenure yet in IS the last 14 months.

Tenure/experience seems like a organizational dimension with a sweet spot and homeostatic feedback — at least, that’s what my corporate-trained OD part says. Focus on retention, or focus on recruitment, to bring the system back into balance. An organization trying to perpetuate itself kind of looks like an infinite game playing-to-keep-playing mode of self-balancing behavior. But there’s something outside that trying to get my attention today, with a “but what if we didn’t?” provocation. If “dimension” is often just another word for a polarity, what integrations are possible if we don’t just automatically swing the other direction when feeling tilted?

Our next (large!) orientation call is this Saturday, March 5th at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Standard Time (4pm Eastern, 9pm UTC).

Welcome to all the new subscribers of this little list! About 30 people attended Monday’s Stoa session live, with about 500 subsequent views on YouTube. Here is that recording, which contains a 20 minute presentation plus 35 minutes of Q&A.

With the interest/awareness triggered by the Stoa session, we might have a noticeable jump in our attendance this week. Last Sunday in our meta time, we considered how to respond to a possible surge, with “sure, let a big cohort in!” being favored over “make a waitlist and trickle people in.” So if that’s you, don’t hang back!

Last week I was talking about relational cases, so here’s a brief update. We did take the “What I really want to say” setup and pair that with Circling (more-or-less) as a sort of “relational case” or “case circling” mash-up. (When I say “case,” that concept/word is sourced from Theory U’s Case Clinic practice.) We’re not necessarily done with it, but here are a few observations:

There will be an IS orientation call this Saturday, 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Standard Time (4pm Eastern, 9pm UTC)

Stoa session on Monday!

Intentional Society is making an appearance on The Stoa! The Stoa is a “digital campfire” in the sensemaking space, appreciated by many IS members for providing access to many interesting and influential thinkers. This session will consist of a 15-20 minute talk, followed by Q&A, then some (non-recorded) relational practices. I’ll be sharing what we’ve learned from our first year of practice, and you are invited to come hear, show support, contribute questions, and play the taster games. Register here for the interactive session on Monday February 28th at 3pm Pacific (6pm Eastern, 11pm UTC).

Last week: Safety and freedom

There will be an orientation call this Saturday, 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Standard Time (4pm Eastern, 9pm UTC)

Intentional Society is making an appearance on The Stoa on the 28^th! Register here for the (3pm Pacific, 6pm Eastern, 11pm UTC) interactive session.

If I feel a little nervous and averse to writing about something, that’s probably a good signal for me to lean into it, right? Especially if that makes the case in point recursively, because the thing itself is about holding back.

The moment itself was Sunday, while Circling near the end of our latest IS session. The topic of privilege arose within the group, and I could feel myself constrict as my nervous system perked up to the possible dangers. Privilege intersects with very real and personal differences among us — of skin color, of socioeconomic status, and gosh wokeness & DEI is just about the hottest front of the current culture wars. Was it safe to talk about this, in this space, for all present participants? Would diving in push unwanted emotional labor onto non-white participants, maybe further reify the identity-label-based frames that can themselves be charged? Were there “rules” of expression we weren’t conscious of?

This Saturday, Feb 12: Orientation call 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Standard Time (4pm Eastern, 9pm UTC)
This Sunday’s community gathering features: present-moment-expression practice

I have a wondering for you: What balance do you personally hold between “seeking” growth and “letting” growth happen?

In a “seeking” state, you might be trying, practicing, rehearsing, doing certain activities. Going to the gym to exercise your muscles. Practicing your scales to improve your piano playing. Concentration meditation to train your focus. This is the “doing” mode.

In a “letting” state, you might be observing, listening, being with yourself. Listening to the sensations that are alive in your body. Facing and feeling a fear without resisting it. Opening awareness meditation being with but not involved in arising thoughts. This is the “being” mode.

Click here to sign up for our next orientation video call on Saturday, February 5th at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Standard Time (4pm Eastern, 9pm UTC)

<turns on microphone> *tap tap* ahem:

“Intentional Society is a community of people who want to grow — to develop into be the people we want to be. We create space for growth by communing with each other in relational practices, practicing being and becoming.”

…at least once a week, I’m explaining to someone what Intentional Society is. Wordings condense and smooth out slowly over time, like water wearing down rock. But there are tipping points, too, where the erosion uncovers a new path for a section of the river.