form lasting relationships

Jamie Wheal's response when asked about how to create communities of trust: 

Provided we can trust each other enough to actually stay true to the code. And so that’s where I honestly think—and I don’t know how we do this—but what I would recommend, like an anthropologist would be like, what you need is a code of ethics…that everybody is like blood oath swear we’re committed to no matter. And then I can relax. If I know we’ve all signed up to live by the same code, and we have to develop trust by doing this, and if I’m out of line, out of integrity, I will acknowledge it and I will make reparations to the community. Not what is happening a whole bunch right now which is…“and that’s not my truth, I understand what you’re saying” multi-perspectival…because people just get burned out and tired quickly of engaging that tar baby in quicksand, and then we’re like “this is not resolved, but I don’t trust you anymore.” And so we end up fragmenting again into increasingly smaller circles. So how do we lean into this and commit to playing well? It’s like a dojo: you bow onto the mat and you bow off. You don’t storm off; you don’t sulk off. And there are rules on how we engage…no cheap shots…we fully commit to playing, learning, and training together, but there is a structure that supersedes how I feel that day, or when I get triggered…what’s a range of permissible response. (56:44)

—Rebel Wisdom. (2020, December 3). Flow & transformation, Q&A with Jamie Wheal [Audio podcast episode]. 

Creating in-Real-Life Community

Whether your interest in self-sufficiency is more motivated by a sense of sovereignty being remote and off-grid, disaster preparedness, or ecological sustainability, there are many resources for people interested in joining these projects.

There are other reasons for building community. So many people now are part of the "loneliness epidemic" as well as financially stressed. I know several aging women who have no younger family to look after them. In a way, I'm trying to help people create a small version of voluntary socialism, which I believe is vastly better than the nation as a whole moving toward socialism. Polls seem to indicate the millenials and younger will vote us into increasingly larger governments (section "Gen Zers and Millennials..."). Of course we want people to be taken care of, but very few nations have maintained successful economies while creating an adequate social safety net. Some churches do an excellent job at creating a social safety net for their own members. Likewise, some intentional communities have adopted adopted time-tested egalitarian decision-making structures to help local-scale social service projects to succeed. 

Culture and structure for maintaining community

• T-groups and experiential learning

• Refining consensus-based decision-making processes

• Holacracy

• Sociocracy

• Iroquois council (U.S. constitution founders borrowed from it)

When we also identify as fundamentally interconnected parts of an interconnected universe, rather than separate things, we stop thinking that there is any definition of success for self that isn’t a definition of success for the whole. We also stop thinking that the idea of advantaging ourselves at the expense of something else we’re inexorably interconnected to makes sense at all. We are all agents for an interconnected whole, where our sense of self is actually an emergent property of the intersection of this system with the rest of universe....So competition is an obsolete concept. (para. 21, 23) 

—Schmachtenberger, D. (2019). What is emergence and why does it matter? Inside Out.

Managing interpersonal conflict

Eckhart Tolle in The Power of Now wrote:

Humanity is under great pressure to evolve because it is our only chance of survival as a race. This will affect every aspect of your life and close relationships in particular. Never before have relationships been as problematic and conflict ridden as they are now. As you may have noticed, they are not here to make you happy or fulfilled. If you continue to pursue the goal of salvation through a relationship, you will be disillusioned again and again. But if you accept that the relationship is here to make you conscious instead of happy, then the relationship will offer you salvation, and you will be aligning yourself with the higher consciousness that wants to be born into this world. For those who hold on to the old patterns, there will be increasing pain, violence, confusion, and madness. (p. 101)

Schmachtenberger brings up the important question of how to create systems that work in non-rivalrous contexts. He says he doesn’t have the answer. He says it will emerge from collective sensemaking. Consider this as part of the answer: One multiple-award-winning program, implemented throughout schools in Costa Rica, uses a “connection practice” to get past conflict, especially to curb bullying (Johnson, 2017). It is a practice of mediation that uses the Heart Math Institute’s scientifically validated “heart coherence” techniques to promote creative problem solving. It uses the empathy and compassion of non-violent communication to help access intuitive insight and wisdom. It “speeds up the evolution of consciousness” (24:38). Before you might dismiss it based on a distaste for ideas outside the approved range of topics currently admissible for “serious” academic inquiry, give it a fair reading by looking at what independent scholars have corroborated. 

—Johnson, R. M. (2017). From confusion to connection, and from conflict to mutually met needs [Audio podcast episode]. 

Recommended podcasts

• Rita Marie Johnson: From Confusion to Connection, and from Conflict to Mutually Met Needs, from the podcast Restorative Justice On The Rise.

• Dan Munro: Radical Honesty as The Path to Bulletproof Confidence (Hex #18), from the podcast High Existence. 

Recommended Reading