Embodying Collective Transformation: Learnings from a 3-month experiment in creating conscious community

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Abstract

Embodying Collective Transformation (ECT) was a 3-month experiment in creating a ‘conscious community’ or deliberately developmental space: an environment for conscious engagement in inner and relational development practices for systemic transformation. Designed and hosted by a 4-person team, it took place in Autumn 2022 at the Life Itself Praxis Hub in Bergerac, France. Over the course of the 3 months there were over 30 participants exploring how to live and work together, and to address the social and ecological challenges of our times.

The program combined a week-long, in-depth training in key practices followed by a three-week residency during which people could use and practice these skills through living together in community. This report details the design, implementation and learnings from this innovative program. The findings will interest both a wider audience interested in community and inner development, as well as specialists interested in the design and delivery of programs for cultivating inner capacities personally and collectively.

Keywords: Ecology of Practices, Conscious Community, Deliberately Developmental Space, Deliberately Developmental Program, Inner Development, Inner Development Goals, Conscious Co-living, Bildung.

Executive Summary

Embodying Collective Transformation (ECT) was a three-month experiment in creating and running a “Conscious Community” or “Deliberately Developmental Space” (DDS) 1 . Each month of the program consisted of: a week-long, in-depth training in key practices, followed by a three-week residency during which people could use and practice these skills through living together in community.

The program took place from September to November 2022 at the Life Itself Praxis Hub in Bergerac, France. It was hosted by Karl Steyaert, Jocelyn Ames, Catherine Tran, and Nadine Helm. ECT was part of a broader conscious communities / deliberately developmental spaces initiative at Life Itself and was co-funded by Life Itself (Rufus Pollock) and Ekskäret Foundation (Tomas Bjorkman).

The vision of ECT was to experiment with creating more robust and whole-person developmental shifts — focusing on what is sometimes called “inner development” –– than are possible with more conventional approaches to education, workshops and training. The intent was to bring together a relatively unique integration of features:

• A multi-dimensional approach to personal and collective development with training in a rich ecology of “inner development” practices to care for personal, interpersonal, and wider world wellbeing, from meditation and Internal Family Systems, to Nonviolent Communication and collective decision-making;
• An extended period of co-living to support applied practice and embodied integration, including shared cooking and homecare, as well as participants working on outside work/projects;
• Structures to support participants’ belonging and agency, notably forming small-group “pods” and the use of Open Space Technology;
• An intentional evolution from more unilateral leadership and facilitation of learning, to increasingly shared leadership and self-organizing community.

ECT sought to invite and support people to explore the question, "How are we called to deepen our individual and collective capacity to care for all life?"

This larger purpose involved three dimensions: supporting people to "Thrive, Evolve, and Serve":

• Thrive: to increase personal wellbeing
• Evolve: to evolve personally and collectively, for example to develop in capacities such as self-compassion, empathy for others, ability to navigate conflict, etc.
• Serve: ability to act in service to the wider world

The main text of the report covers:

• Essential features of the program design, including key principles and practices;
• A selection of participants’ celebrations, naming ways in which they celebrated their deepening capacity to thrive, evolve, and serve in their lives and the world;
• Challenges and learnings from running the program, including exploring the considerable complexity of a highly diverse range of participants’ backgrounds and expectations, and the inner and outer demands on the capacity of the container and hosting team given this complexity

In addition, the Appendix offers more information on:

• Deliberately Developmental Spaces
• The ECT application process
• Detailed schedule and curriculum
• Participants and impact of the program

Excerpts

From participants' testimonials:

“We were not being taught in a simplistic way: ‘This is how you do community’, rather we were discovering together. There's something very subtle about this work. … It's like we're all each other's teachers. This kind of learning is so important in these times – to discover for ourselves how to get on with people, how to be a nourishing and positive and respecting part of a community.” - Stephen Reid

“It's like a microcosm, so everything that happens in this container is happening in the wider world. So how do we accept that, not need it to be completely fixed, not need things to be the way that we think they should be, but at the same time observe that this is happening, accept that it's happening and still gently nudge the system towards something that is more wholesome.” - Sen Zhan

Full report

Read and download the full report here.