We brought back the T-Group Fishbowl once again, and three months later the format still worked its magic for us. We even did two separate fishbowls simultaneously (using “hide non-video participants” as a replacement for “Spotlight”, it’s not quite as smooth but gets the job done) to similar rave reviews. Thus this week I’m trying to learn from and incorporate/spread some of that transformational magic into other practices.

The ingredients in this special sauce include:

1. sharing personal experiences with a group
2. the “audience” effect
3. getting and giving individual observational feedback
4. pregame intention setting
5. group-level flow/interaction management

I’m thinking the first 3 were all significant: The power of vulnerability to engender heartfelt connection is huge all by itself, and IS members (supported by IS culture) were fantastic at going to deep and meaningful places. Then, some people were enlivened by the hidden observers, while others noted some anxious awareness — either way that seemed to raise the energy. And to hear someone’s attentive feedback re what they observed about you (and your relating to the group), well I know the least about what happened in all the dyad breakouts but I suspect that whatever one’s “thing to watch” is, that external-observer loop can be perspectivally powerful. (I think we see that we’re usually overly-harsh critics of ourselves, and that what people actually notice about us can be powerfully validating.)

Newcomer orientation happening this week: Click here to register for the call Saturday, May 20th at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Standard Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC)

What is the sound of silence? What picture can a thousand words paint? What transmission of heavenly glory can come through a finger?

None, and yet, resonance is available — excitation of same or similar notes across different experiences. Sometimes the gap is a chasm, as alien as Darmok and Jalad. And sometimes the resonance is vivid and instant, as we relive our own feeling-memories in comprehension of another’s.

I can’t transmit to you in words the fullness of what it was like to be in we-space last Sunday. Or what nature of understanding and kinship we touched in Circling on Tuesday. (Or of 3+ other IS crews this week I’m not in.) I can point to something, if you’re already familiar with that something enough to resonate with your own experience of it — and if enough signifiers and signposts line up to assure that the analogy is true and not a false projection.

New to IS? Click here to register for our next orientation video call on Saturday, May 20th.

Help me out today — let’s set the stage, you and I, for this Sunday’s Community Session (illustrating and continuing our sensing in Monday’s Meta Meeting). We’ll be 5 weeks into our season, coming off a couple of “doing-flavored” calls. A pull to balance is calling to us — to be together, to slow down, to do less, to attune more to ourselves and each other.

Can we tap into what’s important? What’s important in our lives, what we do, how we spend our time, what we value and prioritize? How would we guide ourselves to tap into that, are there structures that would serve? (Bentoism? Eisenhower Matrix?) No… what’s calling to us isn’t structured exercise. What is the structureless structure?

What’s important touches our identity — or rather our multiplicity of identities. Surfacing what’s important might call for a shift in identity; am I ready for that? What identities are coming into view and which am I letting go of? Let’s honor our past identities that have served us in earlier times. They’ve done their part, and we carry them with us into our self-transforming space of identity-having (vs is-a- identities). Wearing identities, like hats, helps us stay loose and fluid relative to any situation.

Click here to register for our next orientation video call on Saturday, May 20th (in 3 weeks).

Here’s what happened in our Crew Formation session this past Sunday!

• 20 people in attendance
• made 13 proposals for potential crews, with
• approximately 7 making “go” decisions,

…to continue to pursue further. And maybe a few of those won’t fully launch, as the consolidation and winnowing process concludes — and yet I was still warmly surprised by how much energy seemed to come out towards these collaborative pursuits! I get a little aflutter thinking of the potential value of all these activities and relationships that… just might not have happened outside of this frame that let us find each other in these connections? I feel some personal pride about getting to this moment, that these seeds are sprouting in the soil of our social garden.

Report on last week: We have a whittled-down version of Case Clinic we call “Mini-Cases”. One round runs in about 25 minutes, and it hits an 80/20 sweet spot (80% of the value, 20% of the time and skill required) compared to the original or to our own Edge Case. We ran it for the second time, picked up only slight tweaks, and I think it’ll be next on the to-publish list after…

Coming up this week: Crew Formation! As I wrote about a few weeks ago, this is a scaffolding event that invites people to step into leadership or co-creation and pursue what they want to do with a crew. We’ll circulate the list internally after the session, but occasional participants may particularly want to attend this Sunday if there’s something that you want to see-or-make happen!

And now, a few thoughts on trust and trust-building:

I just finished sending out “Connection Shuffle” pairings to the 22 IS members opted-in for mostly-random 1:1 getting-to-know-you calls. This is the second iteration of this format, and I think we’re finding these valuable in weaving the web of connections “behind the rectangles”.

I’ll be doing another orientation for anyone who missed the lead-in to Season 10: Click here to register for Saturday, April 22nd at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Standard Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC).

Hello from the other side of our Season 10 kickoff session last Sunday, where we had a video call screen filled with half new faces and half returning faces. It delights me to have a robust showing of newcomers, including signs that our persistence season after season is producing some amount of inflow momentum in the form of folks who hear about IS and do resonate but it takes some time and/or repetition to reach the tipping point of getting involved. I also love the “core group” (roughly hand-waving, there’s no definition/structure of that term) we have coming from Season 9 and the last couple seasons I’ve really appreciated the increasing tangibility of the “relational field” i.e. the holding and ownership of the space/vibes/norms by the group. So the challenge (in the “good problems to have” category) is, how do we best integrate the two in a way that gives us the best of both?

This session felt like it hit that mark pretty well for at least 75% of attendees. The relational structure was a getting-to-know-you sequence where each breakout group of people together shared:

• “What’s alive for you right now?” as a check-in
• “One thing I get excited about is…” for 10 min
• “If you got to know me more, you’d learn…” for 15 min
• 5-minute spotlights of group asking curious questions for 30 min

I’ll put the meta first, here: I feel residual background discomfort trying to market or promote anything. Now, I wouldn’t be surprised if that feeling is nearly universal in today’s world. Advertising in particular largely acts as a hazardous malevolent force, against which we must steel ourselves in order to resist its corrupting influences. So as each new season of Intentional Society rolls around, it’s practice in exploring “what does integrity look like here?”

I think integrity looks like non-coercive marketing (link goes to Rob Hardy’s excellent definition). Creating invitations that that aren’t about “closing” anything but instead are open doors of opportunity for aligned people with respect and honesty, caring for long term trust and relationship, letting go of attachment to controlling outcomes.

The following section is what I’m putting on the social sites of related communities this week — my attempt to float “invitations with integrity” out into receptive spaces. I still don’t fully know how to create that kind of relationship inside the format of an invitation: How self-aware does it need to be to break the standard assumptions? How can it be as honest and respectful as possible, and be up-front about that intention without getting the object-level point lost in meta-land preface? Here’s how it turned out this time — how does the following land with you?

The on-ramp to Season 10 for newcomers is an orientation call Saturday, April 15th at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Standard Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC)

“Crew” is a word I use fairly frequently in most of my circles, and I almost forget that other people don’t share the specific technical definition that I’m using. With majority vocab credit going to Microsolidarity for coalescing the term, here’s my personal definition:

a crew is a handful of people gathered by a caller toward a purpose for a time with self-awareness.

We’ve just finished our 9th season of Intentional Society, and in season 10 I’ll be excited to once again look to crewing, this time as an integrated (load-bearing, but not dominating) piece of our ecosystem. We did some early exploration in that direction, then focused for quite a while on cultivating and stabilizing the congregational scope, deepening culture, and evolving a membership structure supporting non-coercive belonging and connection.

Want to join IS Season 10? Click here to register for our next orientation video call on Saturday, April 1st at 12:00-12:55pm Pacific Standard Time (3pm Eastern, 7pm UTC).

Not only was there an experiment in our last community practice session that didn’t pan out as hoped, I made some compounding facilitation errors and felt on the verge of a meta-level failure. So hey, here’s some costly learning! I don’t think the cost was ultimately very high, as I’m thankful that the group awareness/field could and did reorient on both levels towards acceptance and learning. But here’s what I think I’ve learned personally — which may not match what other individuals present took away. These come without all the attached context, but hopefully they can still be helpful to others as well:

#1 avoid chasing the past

We may have felt cut-off at the end of the prior session, but going back to process “what felt alive a week ago” is hard to access and there’s a reason we haven’t often tried to do it. Things change, and you can’t simply think your body into a particular feeling-state. Would need a practice or something, maybe a guided visualization, something more powerful to guide us into a similar state if we really want to do that.

Not this weekend but the following, click here to register for our next newcomer orientation video call on Saturday, April 1st at 12:00-12:55pm Pacific Standard Time (3pm Eastern, 7pm UTC).

(Meta notice: purely self-serving soul-searching follows, instead of a possible reflection on our recent collective activities. Just so you know what you’re getting yourself in to.) The other day I looked at the personal intention I’d listed for myself (in the Season 9 IS Hall of Members directory):

To be courageous and not timid, sincere and not downplaying

This shook me a bit, to have written that almost three months ago and to reawaken to it again. The intent had drifted away from my awareness in-between… but then recently I’ve been sensing some new personal energy take the shape of a “be bold” directive/direction. Not a decree from the heavens, but a grounded upwelling of yes-ness in multiple circumstances when coming into contact with potential and opportunity.

Will keep it short today: There’s one thought (inspired by this twitter thread) I’d like to explore about “what kind of space” Intentional Society wants to be. The target I’m considering is at the conjunction of connection and commitment.

The word connection in this context is referring to the emotional experience of relational connecting, of feeling connected-aligned-open-vulnerable-kinship with another human being by meeting in the present moment and in a way that seems powerful past the usual social guards and filters and masks we often use.

The word commitment in this context is referring to the stability-containing-grounding-ongoing-belonging-history sense of relationship-in-community. It’s a lot more like trust and stick-to-it-ivness than any “contractual obligation” connotation of the word.

People point to workshops, events, weekend retreats, as things that have connection without commitment. On the other side, I’d point to contracts, companies, customer transactions, as things that have commitment without connection.

Intrigued newcomers can click here to register for our next orientation video call on Saturday, March 11th at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Standard Time (4pm Eastern, 9pm UTC).

IS members (and everyone) take note of the USA Daylight Savings time shift on Sunday! IS clock time will jump forward, so if your clock doesn’t also shift then things start one hour earlier (i.e. 8pm instead of 9pm GMT).

The Possibility Engines Game is a cooperative exploration for playfully uncovering possibilities for collaborations and strategies that could advance your real-world quests. I hosted a PEG last week with both IS and TB players present. (Lineage citation: Naryan and Eileen hosted the first “Emergent Strategy Game” in the ThinkBetter retreat network, inspired by a game of Wingspan. This second game was a minor-to-medium iteration on the format.)

Basic structure: Prior to the main gameplay session, each person makes a set of cards: Quest cards, Resource cards, and Action cards, all referencing real things in their lives. Then, gameplay consists of teaming up, learning about each other’s cards, scouting across other teams, and then building an Engine with your team that connects (anyone’s) cards in “a way that points to collaborative possibilities that could support one or more of your team’s Quests”.

Our next orientation video call will be on Saturday, March 11^th.

I’m contemplating the “moves” of the process, the dance, of deepening relationships. The process looks outwardly like spending more time with someone, deepening trust, more investment in or commitment to the other person, increasing connection points the weave lives together. The moves that mediate and accomplish that process are… bids?

This discussion arose in the Microsolidarity monthly call today (Intentional Society incorporates MiSo principles in our organizing) in the context of facilitating crew creation. This is also relevant to the “Possibility Engines Game” that some IS folks are playing with our ThinkBetter Network friends in a few days. (I commit to writing that up here, next week.) That’s about collaboration possibilities, and it’s unclear whether it can usefully be played with people one doesn’t already know/trust.

The whole spectrum of relationship “depth” has lots of labels, from stranger to acquaintance to friend to collaborator to partner to roommate spouse or soulmate. (And some of those status labels can span lots of different depths!) Moving between any of those (which we are almost-always doing, in some way, in every relationship) is some sort of trust dance (sourcing language from Malcolm’s descriptions).

Click here to register for our next newcomer orientation video call on Saturday, February 25th at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Standard Time (4pm Eastern, 9pm UTC).

Our IS community practice series continues to explore feedback and connect that to authenticity, expression, and the cultural norms we want to live inside. And now, for something completely different… (I wouldn’t normally consider swerving this hard topically, but this is something important I’m struggling to integrate, so!)

AI — artificial intelligence. I did some AI research in grad school and have been tracking the field for twenty years, especially the concept of “general” and/or “super” intelligence (AGI/ASI) and the “alignment” problem. In a tiny nutshell, we’re on track to create something much much smarter than humans, and this ASI should be regarded as an “alien god” which we can’t control and don’t know how to align with our human goals and preferences. Meta note: If you don’t want to contemplate potential doom & destruction right now, stop reading and come back another day.

I’ll speak plainly as I see it: This is a technological power that’s likely even more potent than nuclear weapons, and if we don’t get it exactly right on the “first try” (whenever we first cross the recursively-self-improving threshold) then it may decide to reuse all the atoms on Earth to create more of itself or whatever it values. That’s the worst-case scenario, and the likelihood predictions of experts are all over the map as to whether they think it’s near 0% probability, or near 100%, or (my poor guess) somewhere in the 10-20% range depending on factors like speed-of-takeoff and whether we get some appropriately-huge-sized disasters to motivate unprecedented human collaboration before it’s too late.

To learn more or become a member, join our orientation video call on Saturday, February 18th at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Standard Time (4pm Eastern, 9pm UTC).

After two weeks of fishbowl observation-and-debrief, the topic of feedback seems like a useful direction to pursue. I haven’t settled on how, though! Let’s use a few paragraphs to orient to strategies.

The grand-daddy of feedback processes, from my awareness of the landscape, is NVC — Nonviolent Communication, synthesized by Marshall Rosenberg 1972-1992 and published as this book which I have in my hands here. Looking through it again this week, I’m struck by how Rosenberg was introducing these ideas against such a low previous baseline, and by how much these ideas are now “in the water” and taken for granted! So much work in the psychology/development/communication fields has stood on these giant shoulders.

But the point of standing on the shoulders of giants is to see even further, and NVC itself… seems to me a bit outdated now. It feels a bit heretical to say that, and risky as I have no deep expertise from which to judge it. But I’ve never clicked with NVC’s framing and language of “I need X” (in the “observations, feelings, needs and requests” sequence) as the spot where the process bottoms out. To take many kinds of needs as ontologically basic, as well as a person’s evaluation of their needs, as unquestionable ground truth — well, that seems like an assumption begging to be deconstructed.

I first heard the term “fishbowl” (used in a social-structure sense) back in the corporate world, used to interface with execs at a leadership offsite strategy session where a small circle of chairs in the center for the active participants was encircled by an outer ring for the observers.

It’s a pretty good metaphor for its transmission of a clear boundary — clear both in the sense of understood/known and in the sense of transparent. Those on the outside can’t communicate into the fishbowl (well, one could tap on the glass, but it’s uncouth to disturb the fish) but they are welcomed by the structure itself to be witnesses, directing their attention-energy toward the center in silent support. Those on the inside know they are being observed, but focus on their engagement with each other and with the task at hand (even as one layer of their awareness may be watching themselves, in simulation of the watchers, but I won’t analyze that today).

We used this fishbowl structure in last week’s Community Practice Session, added a “buddy pairs” substructure, and put the T-Group-ish “describe your present moment experience (as accurately and concisely as you can)” task in the middle. And gosh, it produced a bunch of enthusiasm and engagement! Each person had a buddy that they were paying special attention to as an observer — and who was then their specific observer when it was their turn to be in the fishbowl. Prior to entering the fishbowl, folks gave their observers any directions/instructions about what they were interested in receiving feedback on, and then we had pair debrief breakouts after each of the T-Group times.

Stepping into the corporate fishbowl years ago felt nerve-wracking, I can still remember. In a kind and supportive environment like Intentional Society, I could see that it still wasn’t totally free of awkwardness, but it contained an awareness-focus-boost effect of some sort while still retaining basic play-exploration vibe. We’ll probably do some more of this, following the energy it engenders. I learned that “spotlight” works pretty well to execute the fishbowl effect in a Zoom environment — and as facilitator, to add my face to the visible set to avoid the disembodied “voice of god” effect. 🤣

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.