Intentional Society: The next loop of the spiral
To join us on this path, register for this orientation call Saturday January 29th, 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Standard Time (4pm Eastern, 9pm UTC)
After the party, we faced a rather open agenda. Where should we head next in our practices? I'm going to use this space here to continue refining the design that we worked up on Monday: Core relational practices plus individual development themes.
This feels like a loop around an evolving spiral, the spiral being something like the essence of Intentional Society. The practices that now feel "core" do so by virtue of their impact on us, the sense of meaning we come away with, which also correlates with our enjoyment. Here's a new phrase for describing the core: "perceiving, expressing, and sensemaking." Oh, and I notice that also almost maps to the I/we/world relating scopes — relating to "others, ourselves, and systems."
The design innovation that's most alive for me right now is the "theming" frame of bringing a developmental lens to our experience of these practices. We've done some explicitly developmental work, and some "pure" practices, but few solid combinations. I'm excited about further integration in a way that helps us give ourselves space to grow. By "space" I mean not pushing or driving ourselves to achieve what we "should," but instead listening to the pull and call of the contexts that challenge us and stretch us towards greater capacity.
This means avoiding "goal" framing this time, I think. Having goals is all well and good, but we want to dig more at the next layer down: Who will you need to be in order to to have reached that goal? Or envision an ideal state future and ask, what ways of being is that vision calling you to expand into? That's where we'll start, this Sunday — sensing into attributes of self (for example, consider the 8 C's of Self from IFS) that might serve us as thematic wayfinders.
What's alive at the intersection of (from us) longing and (towards us) calling will be different for each person, of course. I use the word "theme" to point at a low but meaningful level of specificity. A one or two word label gives us a bit of sandbox space in which to play. We'll paint with a positive brush — if there's a problem, what is the inverted ideal frame in which the problem dissolves? And we should, for our own recall and perspective, write a few things down that we can revisit at the end of the cycle.
The potential that I think awaits us is to marry the form and structure of these practices with developmental content in a progression spanning multiple weeks. In order to? In order to find the flow state, the fertile ground, the optimal conditions for us to grow towards being more and more the people we want to be. The essence of the art of expanding awareness, supported by the relational kata that guides us on the path. Eh, at this point words become fingers obscuring the moon. There is so much possibility available to us, if we can see it and become it.
Cheers,
James