Nobody has the perfect plan for healing patriarchy and building a more life-serving culture. We are facing this transition together, creating moments of healing collectively.

During the Regenera residency in Denmark, I experienced powerful moments of healing patriarchy, moments when we tuned into our intuition, imagination, and deeper wisdom. Doing this in a community allowed healing rituals and spaces to become grounded in everyday life and everyday interactions.

Because healing isn’t just a personal journey, it’s a collective act of reclamation.

This poem captures my female experience in Regenera.

I sit with this inquiry,
how to forgive patriarchy, 
how to forgive men,
how to forgive myself, 
for what patriarchy taught me to do. 

I don’t want any more
blame men, hate men, rebel against or compete with them.

I sit with this inquiry,
how to heal the wound of patriarchy.
It sometimes feels bottomless,
when listening to the pain of other women 
and stories of touch that were never invited,
when listening to the pain of men 
and how there is no room for sensitivity. 

We touched and tended this wound, 
we raged, cried, purged and shouted. 
We created space to mourn, 
spaces to dance wildly with sisters, 
spaces to hear each other.

Men listened to the women's anger,
knowing it is a sign of healing, 
not revenge. 

We created spaces for touch, 
where my body felt safe and respected, 
learning that touch is a way to care,
not a way to consume the body.

Healing doesn’t come from the mind, 
it comes through the body. 
My cells carry stories from past generations,
stories of witches, sluts, healers, mothers, crones.
It's time for new stories to come alive. 

I sit with this inquiry,
how to see each other without the layers of patriarchy. 
I imagine a life that embraces femininity,
celebrates women taking space, men being vulnerable,
honours cycles, appreciates the sacred time of bleeding. 
A life that treats sexuality as something beautiful 
something sacred. 

Our rage, tears, love, tenderness, and wildness, 
cure the wound of patriarchy. 
Forgiveness is not linear, it spirals.
Sometimes loud, sometimes quiet and soft, 
always beyond sense-making. 

Little by little,
our bodies learn new stories, 
our cells remember other realities. 

Readers unfamiliar with the frameworks of Internal Family Systems, Nonviolent Communication, and Possibility Management that underlie this piece may find a fuller introduction in Overlapping Maps.

“I keep sitting here wanting to bring my voice to the group, but I’m too scared to do it — and I get so angry at myself.”

We’re at grouptime during Phase I of Regenera, all sitting in a circle. We’ve heard variations of this before. Some of us nod slowly, in empathic understanding — we know this conflict within ourselves. Others share their joy, celebrating that the person is finally daring to name what’s been happening inside them. A couple of people are looking at the floor, their eyes distant.

Two needs

We come into the world in a state of extraordinary vulnerability — more so than almost any other species, and for much longer. The human infant cannot regulate its own nervous system, cannot meet its own physiological needs, cannot survive alone. What it can do, with astonishing precision, is orient toward the caregiver. The need for attachment is not one feature among many in early development — it is the organising principle. Prolonged dysregulation in the absence of an attuned other is not metaphorically dangerous at that age. It is existential. The body learns this long before language arrives, and does not easily forget.

Alongside attachment, the child carries another need of equal depth: authenticity. If attachment means security and belonging, authenticity means freedom, presence, expression, truth. Neither need is a luxury. Neither is a personality preference. And they are not intrinsically in conflict. The split between them occurs through what particular gameworlds can and cannot accommodate.

The split

When the caregiver is not fully present — operating from their own unresolved wounds, their own accumulated protections — attunement falters. Not as personal pathology, but as the structural transmission of a gameworld with its own implicit rules about which parts of experience can be welcomed and which cannot. The child’s system reads this relational field with extraordinary sensitivity, learns which expressions maintain the bond and which place it at risk. And then it does what any system under existential pressure will do: it protects what it cannot afford to lose.

What gets pushed underground tends to be precisely what was most alive — the sensitivity that was too much, the vulnerability that the adults couldn’t hold, the anger that had no place, the grief that went unwitnessed, the playfulness that no one had time to nourish. The child’s parts — those already-present inner voices, feelings, and impulses that compose the internal system — take on protective roles around what has been buried: some working to keep the surface carefully managed and the bond intact, others reacting when the buried feeling gets activated anyway, numbing or erupting or pulling the whole system away from the edge.

Over time, two poles of protection consolidate around the original split. On one side: parts organised around attachment, monitoring the relational field for signs of threat, keeping expression carefully controlled, maintaining belonging at the cost of full presence. On the other: parts organised around authenticity, carrying the long-suppressed bid for expression, the frustrated impulse toward truth, the accumulated charge of what was never allowed to surface.

The attachment protectors’ expression is not securely attached expression — it comes from fear, it carries an agenda, oriented toward maintaining a bond that still feels, somewhere in the system, as though it could be lost at any moment. The authenticity protectors’ expression is not authentic expression — it carries the charge of long suppression rather than the clarity of genuine presence, and it too has an agenda: to finally be heard, to finally be allowed. Neither pole is the wound. Neither is the truthful expression of the need it is protecting. Both are young parts, doing what young parts do — defending, with the full intensity of the original danger, something that once felt like everything.

A reinforcing loop

A polarisation is not a stable state. It is a reinforcing feedback loop: each side’s movement activates the other’s response, which confirms the first side’s fear, which intensifies its strategy, which provokes a stronger response — and so on, until the system is flooded with the overwhelming feeling that was buried underneath all along. Other parts come in to prevent this: some by avoiding the situations that might trigger the polarity altogether; others by pulling the system out when it gets too close — through food, distraction, numbness, anything that interrupts the escalation before it becomes unbearable. These are not failures of will. They are the system doing exactly what it learned to do.

And the polarity does not stay inside. A part organised around a wound carries that wound’s logic into every room it enters. When we come in blended with either side — speaking from or just being present and blended with the attachment protectors’ fear or the authenticity protectors’ charge — we activate resonant polarities in the people around us. They will side with one part or against it, and the relational field will organise itself around the same split that was originally internal. What begins as one person’s wound becomes a group dynamic. Scaled further, this becomes the structure of a conflict — each side convinced it is standing for something true. We see this everywhere: in couples, in communities, in the wars around the world.

Welcoming polarised parts

Having a polarisation active does not mean one is helpless, or necessarily pulled to one side or the other. Most of us know the feeling from the inside: something gets triggered, and suddenly there is a familiar weight — the pull to go quiet, or the pull to push through — and it is very difficult to remember that there is any other option. The part has the steering wheel, and it drives with the certainty of someone who has been here before, many times, and knows exactly what is at stake.

However, if there is enough Self-energy present — enough capacity to step back from both parts without abandoning either of them — something else becomes possible. Not immediate resolution. Not the disappearance of the conflict. It is possible to be with both sides, bringing compassion to the attachment protector’s fear and presence to the authenticity protector’s frustration, without siding with either, without needing the tension to collapse before one can act. From that more spacious place, it becomes possible to speak for both parts — to find creative strategies that honour both needs at once, even imperfectly, even provisionally. This does not require the underlying wound to have been healed. It requires only enough presence to hold the whole picture, and enough trust that the picture can be held.

The risk in new gameworlds

Mainstream culture tends to celebrate the attachment side of the polarity: compliance, accommodation, the careful management of expression to maintain belonging. Most of us arrive in spaces like Regenera with years of that behind us. When a gameworld finally offers the authenticity protectors space — when the implicit rules shift, when expression is not only permitted but welcomed — something releases. The relief is real. The charge that surfaces is real. It can feel, from the inside, unmistakably like coming home.

Any gameworld, however conscious in its intentions, will tend to valorise one side of the polarity over the other. A community like Regenera, organised around authentic expression, clean feeling, and conscious presence offers something essential: a place where parts that were completely suppressed can finally breathe, where the people-pleasing and caretaking protectors can begin to relax, where previously invisible patterns come into the light. This has immense value. For many people, an environment like this can be the beginning of something that might genuinely change their lives.

At the same time, there is a subtle risk we need to watch out for: that the authenticity protectors get celebrated as the real thing — as genuine Self-expression, as clean feeling — without the awareness that they are still protectors, still organised around a fear, still carrying the charge of what was suppressed rather than the clarity of what has been healed. The burdened emotion gets mistaken for clean feeling. The part gets mistaken for Self. And the message that lands, however unintended, can be: your attachment protectors are the problem. The person who has spent years carefully managing their expression to maintain belonging — who has, in other words, been doing the only thing their system knew how to do — may find themselves sitting in a circle, hearing that the very strategies that kept them safe are now the obstacle. That the careful, frightened part of them that learned to go quiet is what stands between them and their own life. It is a heavy thing to be told, even gently. Even with the best intentions.

The authentic expression of both attachment and authenticity is Self-led. It carries much less agenda. It has genuine creativity and range in the strategies it can choose — and it is far less likely to generate reactivity in others. From that place, we can make real requests rather than demands: requests that are spacious, that allow for a no, for a counter-proposal, for creativity within the relationship — because they are not strategies over-identified with a need, but genuine invitations from a system that trusts, at least a little, that the need can be met more than one way.

The wound underneath

Underneath both protectors — underneath the polarity itself — there are exiled parts carrying the original wound: the feeling that never completed its arc, the need that went chronically or acutely unmet, the implicit memory that still reads the present through the logic of a much earlier danger. These parts carry the qualities that were pushed underground: the sensitivity, the vulnerability, the playfulness, the capacity for deep attunement. They are not damaged versions of the person. They are among the most precious things the person carries.

Reaching them requires care about pace — particularly with the attachment protectors, who may need to move very slowly, and for good reason. They are protecting wounds that are, in many cases, among the deepest the system knows. Trying to push past them toward the exile — treating their caution as information to be overridden rather than as a path to be followed — is a little like encountering great boulders on a mountain trail and reaching for the dynamite. The path exists. It winds between the rocks, through the shade, along the water. It asks to be found, not forced.

What heals at that depth is the person’s own Self meeting their own part — possibly with the presence of another Self in assistance. That contact, internal and relational at once, is what allows the implicit memory to update, the arc of feeling to finally complete, the burden to be laid down. When it happens, what is released is not only the exile’s qualities returning to the system, but the energy that was spent maintaining the internal war — energy that becomes available, now, for courage, for compassion, for genuine presence, for all the qualities of Self that were always there but could not move freely while so much of the system was occupied with the fight.

The protectors, no longer organised around a wound, can begin to turn toward the world differently — not as defenders of an old danger, but as carriers of something that was always meant to be expressed. And being in community can assist us with making that turn.

What community makes possible

There might be moments in a relational field when one person’s wound is active and the other has enough Self-energy to stay present with it — when we can say to the person who is triggered or in internal conflict: I can see something is happening for you. It makes sense that it is. We can go slowly. I’m going to take care of my own limits so I can stay genuinely open to what you’re bringing. You’re not alone in this. That quality of presence — neither fixing nor retreating, neither siding with one part nor against it — is perhaps the most precious thing one person can offer another. It is attachment functioning as it was always meant to: not as a bond maintained through the suppression of truth, but as the ground from which truth can be safely approached.

And there will be other moments — when one person’s wound activates another’s, when two systems find themselves in a polarity that neither can hold alone. In those moments, being able to say I notice this is moving something in me too, and I’m not sure I can be fully present with you right now — and for the other to hear that not as abandonment but as honesty, and to say then let’s find someone who can hold space for both of us — is not a failure of the relationship. It is the relationship functioning well.

It is attachment as resource: the community as the larger nervous system within which individual’s regulation becomes possible, the field that can hold what the dyad cannot.

This is what regenerative communities are, at their best, building toward — not a gameworld where one side of the polarity is celebrated over the other, but a field with enough collective Self-energy that our wounds, at whatever pace they need, can actually be approached and healed.

Finding ease

In such a setting, authenticity doesn’t become an end, but the baseline we can inhabit with courage and ease. A place to which we do not arrive at once, which we do not hold permanently, but which we return to, again and again, as our systems find more room to breathe. And attachment, from that place, can become something else than a source of fear. It is what emerges naturally around a system that is safe within itself: warmth, recognition, and love that do not need to be won, managed, or defended.

This article was written in accompaniment to a workshop co-created with Karl Steyaert during our shared time at Regenera Phase I. Karl’s contributions shaped much of what is written here. I am grateful for his friendship, clarity, honesty, and patience with my own inner polarisations that surfaced during our collaboration.

Note: This piece was written during the first phase of Regenera in Denmark, where a small group of us chose to live from March-May 2026 and research how to build a regenerative culture together.

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Nearly two months ago, I wrote an article titled “We have arrived.” Since then, a rich and varied tapestry of experiences has unfolded—bike rides into Odense, vocal improv jams, emergent group processes, a peace walk in Copenhagen, diverse forms of emotional healing, a weekend of nourishment called The Well of Being, field trips to the lake, a tango evening on Aon and Vienera’s terrace, and many, many 30-second dance parties.

After some weeks panicking about the impossibility of capturing these experiences in writing, I have decided to accept that my attempts to summarize, describe, and distill will be inevitably partial and incomplete.

This article is a survey of some of the themes that have been surfacing—emotional reactivity, feedback, technology, collaboration, and orienting towards a conscious purpose—with the purpose of giving readers an overview of what building a regenerative culture can look like in community.

Handling Emotional Reactivity

In a community setting, emotional reactivity impacts not only the individual but also the relational field of the group, affecting collective decision-making and what is possible in a space. Since arriving, our group has been intentionally creating a culture where emotional reactivity is met without shame and treated as an opportunity for healing and growth.

Our group has been exploring how to integrate the practices of various modalities—Possibility Management, Internal Family Systems, somatic approaches—in navigating emotions. Different options we have experimented with include:

• Creating a held space within the group setting, with the rest of the team witnessing

• Creating a separate space outside of the group in order to handle the emotion one on one

• “Parking” the emotion, to be handled later (assuming the person who is in reactivity is able to set it aside)

• Creating a space for feeling as a group (e.g., three minutes of anger to get clarity on what each person wants or does not want to be happening)

While a longer article on this topic is due, the wider frame for me is the question of how to continue loving myself and others through reactivity—both theirs and mine.

Lone Wolfing Creation

After I published my last article, “We Have Arrived,” Jonas pointed out that I had “lone wolfed” the process by locking myself alone in a room for five hours and not talking to anyone. At the same time, I have been making myself a martyr when it comes to documenting what is happening at Regenera on Substack, Instagram, Spotify Podcasts, and Telegram—telling victim stories like “Nobody cares about this as much as I do” and “I have to do it all myself.”

This is not how I want to live my life—and yet it is often how I have oriented to creation. In middle school, I completed every group project alone because I did not know how to delegate tasks or empower other people’s creativity.

Before writing this article, I shared with Nina and Theo that I felt scared of lone wolfing creation and removing myself from the group in order to write. Nina gave me the possibility of sitting down for a conversation with her to sketch out the framework of the article. This not only supported me in drafting the bones of the piece, but also opened up a discovery space to celebrate what we’ve learned over the past two months.

As I write now, Theo is to my left, creating a mix of a song he and Emma recorded earlier. Jonas is working on the new Regenera website (to be deployed soon)! And I feel glad to be shifting out of my old patterns to discover what else is possible.

Finding A New Map of Work

In many of the community settings I have experienced, “work” is disconnected from daily life and togetherness. People sit on laptops taking calls all day, and what happens in “community” is distinct from how people support themselves financially. During Phase I, many people (including myself) have juggled group time with outside calls and clients. I feel sad about the irony of creating in isolation while being literally, physically in community.

In the vision I hold for regenerative communities, “work” would be fully integrated with community life. This is the aim of places like Tamera, Damanhur, and Findhorn, where people’s jobs (teaching, building, office work, etc.) are intended to both serve the community and generate an income.

At the moment, many of the people who gather in conscious community are healers by profession, because these ways of relating are not yet normalized in mainstream society. In the future, what I imagine is a village where everyone is a healer, and consciousness is integrated in whatever we do—from gardening and cooking to taking care of children and creating art.

In a temporary setting like our residency programs, earning money within the community is not viable due to structural constraints (timeline, number of people). At the same time, we can create this kind of togetherness by taking care of as many things as possible as a community, rather than outsourcing them—cooking, for example, or cleaning the house (we have a house clean once a week, on Tuesday mornings). One of my favorite activities during our time here at Avalonhuset has been “Buildings & Grounds”—two hours per week where we do yard work and take care of the grounds, including weeding, mowing, and chainsawing dead trees.

Most importantly, however, what is being created here is a culture where consciousness is simply a part of ordinary life. Whether we are doing the dishes or handling logistics, awareness is brought to the ways we are relating and how we can empower each other to be connected to our aliveness, authenticity, and wholeness.

In the meantime, until it is possible to build the physical infrastructure of a self-sustaining village, I am researching how to create a regenerative relationship with digital technology—one that is in service of life. Many of us have been experimenting with making computer use more communal: setting boundaries about time, taking scheduled breaks, working in shared spaces, and writing together instead of separately.

I am also consciously working to move more projects into collaboration: Nina and I are holding space for an online Women’s Co-Creation Circle, and Jonas and I will hold space for the Golden Circle and the Danish Ecovillage Association later this month. It has been incredibly nourishing to create alongside the humans I am currently living and relating with.

Orienting Towards Purpose

One distinction from Possibility Management is: if I do not have a conscious purpose, then I have an unconscious purpose.

At the beginning of April, Emma and Nina held a Purpose Distillation for the Regenera team to get clear on each person’s individual purpose in being here, as well as our purpose as a collective. Our “purpose pieces” are now hanging on the wall and can be viewed in Emma’s article, Connecting To Purpose Inside A Living Experiment.

As a result of this process, we began building more intentional “checkpoints” around purpose. We begin group time with a ‘What do I want?’ practice, inviting each person to consciously choose how they use their time, and end by harvesting what we learned about regenerative culture and how our actions aligned with our individual and collective purpose.

As Nina pointed out, the goal here is not to force every moment into productivity or usefulness. In college, I once did the experiment of tracking every minute of my day down to five-minute increments: checking email, buying a snack, studying, walking to class, etc. While the impulse came from wanting to live intentionally, the method was rooted in control.

The format of checkpoints, on the other hand, has created a level of consciousness that is actually regenerative—giving space for impulses to unfurl, while still remaining connected to a deeper orientation.

What Do We Want To Create Together?

One discovery I keep returning to is that intimacy arises organically when people are creating something together: holding space, writing, cooking, making music. As Emma has pointed out, one of the shadows of conscious community is that people rely on emotional processing to create connection—when closeness is actually the inevitable result of creating, working, and playing together.

I like to use the example of a community coming together to try to bake the best possible loaf of bread. In some ways, it does not matter what the mission is; as long as everyone shares in it, intimacy emerges naturally through meaningful collaboration.

In every moment, I can be conscious of my purpose: To create a beautiful meal. To watch the sunset. To write emails. To share a heart to heart connection. If I orient towards purpose, I can have closeness with anyone by discovering what it is we are meant to create together, no matter how big or small—a business, a cup of tea, a song, a space to feel, a dance, or a hug.

Feedback As Love

During the April intensive days, we worked with the New Map of Feedback & Coaching from Possibility Management. This map supports people in shifting their experience of feedback from a form of criticism to one of empowerment.

• The Old Map (what most people learned in school or from their families): Feedback is a correction or evaluation of a person’s worth.

• The New Map (an invitation to shift into higher agency and responsibility): Feedback is neutral information about what worked or didn’t work.

I had seen this map many times before. And yet the way I experienced it during the intensive days, in a practice beautifully held by Nina, was entirely different.

In this space, Nina invited the person receiving feedback to slow down and ask themselves: “Can I experience this as love?” At the same time, she invited the person giving feedback to slow down and ask themselves: “Is this coming from love right now?”

For the first time, I understood that the new map—this invitation to shift the way I relate to feedback—is not just for when I am receiving feedback, but also for when I am giving it.

If I am not coming from an orientation of love, with the purpose of being on the other person’s team, then my feedback is contaminated with the purpose of controlling them, changing them, or being right. If I have any kind of attachment to the other person taking my feedback, then I am likely trying to impose my own judgments or preferences. In that case, my feedback is not just feedback—it may be a request for how that person interacts with me, or even a boundary.

As Emma noted, giving and receiving feedback is also a part of building a culture of radical responsibility. If I do not bring my feedback to somebody, it will become a withhold and likely manifest as unconscious tension or resentment that eventually comes out sideways. Taking radical responsibility for my relationships and the group field means bringing feedback consciously and directly.

Group Time Architecture

Over the past two months, we have experimented with different cadences of group time, the times we set aside as a group to relate and create together. Right now, we meet five times a week: 10:00-12:00 on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday, 13:30-15:30 on Thursday, and 10:00-13:00 on Saturday.

We have developed the following as a “group time architecture” to loosely follow, while still allowing space for emergence. I share it here as a template others may find useful in holding spaces where each person is empowered to bring their impulses and voice.

• Centering: 5-10 min to center and land together in the space.

• Logistics: 20-30 min to take care of any practical matters (schedules, requests, offers, proposals).

• Feelings: 5-10 min of feeling as a group to move the energy in the space.

• “What do you want?”: Everyone takes 2 minutes of silence to sense into what they want to do during group time. After people have shared their impulses, one person (the spaceholder) weaves them into a coherent proposal or lets the group self-organize.

• Harvest: 5-15 minutes reserved at the end of group time to harvest what we learned about regenerative culture, community building, and how what we did aligns with our purpose.

Another practice we experimented with was a “temperature check” before the logistics space. The spaceholder might ask: “How much energy do you have?” or “How much patience do you have right now?” People use their hands to indicate an answer, with above the head meaning “a lot” (e.g., high energy, very patient) and at hip level meaning “not at all” (e.g., low energy, impatient).

This simple practice creates a culture where people are encouraged to notice and communicate their internal state, rather than unconsciously acting it out on the group. Radical responsibility, in this situation, means bringing awareness to how I am affecting the space around me. And when I see that other people are aware of how they are showing up, I am more able to meet them where they are—low energy, overwhelmed, impatient, reactive—with grace.

These past months have been nonlinear, alive, and deeply healing. Now, with only two weeks left, I find myself prematurely nostalgic for what we have created here.

Usually, my intention is to be fully present, without projecting into the future or lingering in the past—and yet there is an added sweetness that comes from recognizing the fleetingness of these moments together: Theo dancing in the stone circle. Matias playing his drum on the lawn. Ursula and Emma on guitar. Gaspar’s flute floating down the stairs.

I am grateful for everything I have experienced during this time—for the learning and growth that is possible in community, and for the depth of the human heart.

Hannah Hirsh

May 2026
Åsum, Denmark

A note on this text

This text began as personal preparation for a one-month stay here at Avalonhuset, where I (Gaspar) joined Phase I of Regenera in May 2026. The core group has a strong background in Possibility Management (PM), a modality of personal and systemic transformation that was, until very recently, completely new to me.

I am a musician, educator, and Internal Family Systems (IFS) facilitator. Shortly before writing this, I worked as an interpreter at an International Intensive Training in Nonviolent Communication (NVC) — a modality I had been engaged with for years. That experience allowed me to see that IFS and NVC could deepen each other in ways that felt significant both for my own path and for my work with clients.

As I worked to understand PM in preparation for my stay, I found myself instinctively mapping its ideas onto those two frameworks — and noticing that the three fit together in ways that felt generative rather than forced. What started as personal orientation became something worth writing down.

I am genuinely new to PM, and this text was written before any immersive experience of it. It should be read as an outsider’s attempt at a map, not as an authoritative account. I am sharing it because possibilitator Aon Solarra read it and felt it was worth putting into the world. I am grateful for his generosity, enthusiasm, and trust.

The text will inevitably contain imprecisions, particularly in its rendering of PM concepts. I welcome contact from anyone who wants to discuss the ideas, point out where the map diverges from the territory, or take the integration further.

Brief introduction to the three frameworks

Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a psychotherapeutic model developed by Richard Schwartz in the 1980s. It proposes that the mind is naturally multiple: we are each composed of a system of parts — distinct inner voices, feelings, and patterns of behavior — organized around a core Self that is not a part but a stable, undepletable source of presence and compassion. Psychological suffering arises when parts take on extreme roles in response to wounding; healing occurs when Self re-establishes a relationship of trust with those parts.

Nonviolent Communication (NVC) is a framework for awareness and communication developed by Marshall Rosenberg in the 1960s. Its foundational insight is that all human behavior is an attempt to meet universal needs, and that most interpersonal conflict arises from the strategies used to meet those needs rather than from the needs themselves. NVC offers a practice of distinguishing feelings from thoughts, and needs from the specific strategies used to meet them — cultivating a quality of attention and expression that tends toward connection rather than defense.

Possibility Management (PM) is a body of work developed by Clinton Callahan from the 1970s onward. It maps the structures of ordinary human culture — what it calls the Box — that limit experience, relationship, and collective possibility, and offers practices for operating beyond those structures. Central to PM is the distinction between feelings (present-tense signals arising in response to current conditions) and emotions (recycled states bound to unresolved past experience), a framework for radical responsibility, and a vision of next culture: communities organized around conscious presence and authentic contact.

An Integration of IFS, NVC, and PM Concepts

Basic assumptions

The optimal physiological state of human functioning corresponds to what IFS calls the Self — operating outside the Box, in full presence: a place of courage, compassion, clarity, connection, calm, creativity, curiosity, confidence, playfulness, perspective, patience, presence, persistence, and purpose; also love, gratitude, and choice. The Self corresponds to Awareness: a fluid state that assumes whatever qualities the situation requires — the state from which nonlinear space opens, where probability ceases to determine what is possible.

All our mental formations, feelings, and emotions come from our parts. It is through them that we bring Self-energy into the world: they are the ones who learn our skills and crafts, and who define our personality. They are shaped partly by genetics and partly by lived experience. When we bring Self-energy to a part, that part also connects with its own Self.

Parts maintain the homeostatic balance of our system by sending us signals — feelings and emotions — indicating whether our needs are being met or not. These needs are of three orders: physiological (air, food, sleep, sexual expression), relational (safety, attachment, connection), and individual (freedom/authenticity, creativity). The more fully they are met, the more naturally they make space for the Self. When they are not, parts occupy consciousness with uncomfortable signals — sadness, anger, shame, anxiety — pointing to that unmet need. When needs are met, on the other hand, parts can connect more with Self-energy and send us more comfortable signals, such as joy, gratitude, and relaxation.

Feelings are present-tense signals: they arise in unburdened parts, or in burdened parts held in Self-presence, and when allowed to complete their arc — arise, be felt, inform, dissolve — they leave clarity and orient action. Emotions are also signals, but bound to past experiences in which needs went unmet and the arc of feeling could not complete. They are carried by burdened parts. When we are blended with a burdened part, its emotion speaks through us directly — as reaction, story, or what PM calls low drama — with the charge and the logic of the original wound, regardless of present conditions. When we are with a burdened part but unblended from it, witnessing it from Self, the part’s past feelings can begin to complete their arc: the emotion becomes a doorway rather than a loop.

Everything we do is a strategy — more or less effective — for meeting our needs. Strategies can come from parts — which do not account for the whole system and are often attached to a specific course of action — or from a more Self-led place, which takes more parts of the system into account and has access to creativity, choice, and playfulness to generate and follow a wider range of strategies. Whether a strategy is effective for meeting our needs depends in large part on the gameworld it is played out in: the set of shared agreements, implicit rules, and narratives that define what is possible and permitted within a given relational field.

The Box, Bright Principles and shadow

The Box is constituted by the burdened parts of the system — those carrying legacy and cultural burdens, operating from survival strategies, and organised around the implicit rules of what must be exiled to maintain belonging. It is not the enemy — it is the adaptive structure the system built to survive. The work is not to destroy it but to develop the capacity to observe it from outside and, progressively, to heal its dynamics and to operate beyond them.

Each person carries Bright Principles — irreducible values or qualities that constitute their deepest nature, occupying the same ontological level as universal needs in NVC and Self qualities in IFS: the deepest layer, prior to all strategy. When a Bright Principle is exiled — because its expression threatened attachment or belonging in a particular gameworld — it does not disappear: it becomes shadow. Shadow is not absence but distortion: the Bright Principle expressing itself through layers of protection, unrecognisable to the person carrying it. A Bright Principle of fierce honesty, exiled because it threatened attachment, might become a manager that controls all speech and a firefighter that occasionally erupts in brutal bluntness — neither expressing the original Bright Principle cleanly.

The Gremlin is the system’s anti-change coalition: the subset of protector parts most invested in maintaining the current equilibrium. These parts are most active at the threshold between the Box and expanded possibility. The Gremlin includes the inner critic: a manager using shame and self-attack to prevent exile activation. Personifying the Gremlin allows direct engagement rather than abstract analysis — and attempting to eliminate it is one of its traps, because elimination is itself a Box strategy.

Development, attachment, and exiled parts

As children, we depend entirely on other human beings to meet our physiological and safety needs and to regulate our emotional states. Our internal systems are exquisitely designed to maintain attachment: our lives depend on it. The less attuned our caregivers are to our emotional state — the more disconnected from their own Self, blended with their own parts — the more extreme and desperate the strategies our parts learn in order to get our needs met.

When stress arises, the child looks to the adult. If the adult is regulated — Self-led, outside the Box — the situation integrates around the narrative “something difficult is happening, but I am safe,” and strategies are generated creatively to meet it. If the adult is not regulated, the narrative becomes “something bad is happening and I am not safe” or “something bad is happening and it is my fault.” The strategies the child’s parts develop are not calibrated to the actual magnitude of the situation — because the internally perceived magnitude is far greater — resulting in dysregulated behavior, acting out, intense shame, shutdown, or anxiety.

The caregiver, operating from their own parts, responds to the child’s strategies rather than the child’s state — to the behavior rather than the need. This is not an individual failure but the structural transmission of a gameworld that requires certain parts to be exiled in order to perpetuate itself. The child’s system exiles the parts whose expression threatens attachment — parts that frequently carry Bright Principles directly connected to the person’s deepest truth. Exiling them has serious and lasting consequences for their health and their capacity to operate from Self.

The needs for safety and authenticity are not intrinsically in conflict. The split occurs through what, across our lives — not only in childhood; adolescence is another crucial threshold — is welcomed or not within our attachment gameworlds.

Trauma and implicit memory

By adulthood, we carry parts with adaptive strategies connected to the present, and parts with strategies that no longer are — strategies that were once the most adaptive our system could generate, but that no longer function in our adult lives and bodies. The latter attempt to meet the needs of parts exiled in implicit memory: parts from the past whose needs were situationally (acute trauma) or chronically (complex trauma) unmet. Meeting those past needs in the present is ephemeral: until we access the implicit memory and heal the wound through reconsolidation, our parts will be like hungry ghosts — seeking to satisfy deeply unmet needs from our history in present circumstances that cannot actually provide them.

This is the structure of recycled emotion: not a response to the present but the activation of an implicit memory. Resentment does not inform about what is happening now — it signals an anger wound that never completed its arc. Anxiety does not navigate the future — it loops a past fear that never had space to be felt cleanly.

When we pay attention to our feelings and emotions and how they manifest in the body, our parts begin to feel seen. When we discover the needs behind those signals, we understand why the part does what it does — what Bright Principle it is trying to express, even in distorted form — and that opens creativity to find, from greater connection with Self, a wider range of strategies to meet that need.

Relational dynamics: from low to high drama

In the relational field, parts do not operate in isolation: systems activate each other. The low drama triangle describes what happens when systems operate from parts rather than from Self: Victim, Rescuer, Persecutor — three roles in a parts-to-parts dynamic where one person’s exile activates another’s manager or firefighter, which activates the first person’s exile again. The relational system becomes a closed loop: unmet needs generating tragic strategies that keep those needs unmet.

High drama is the alternative: genuine, high-intensity contact where clean feelings are in play and outcomes are uncertain. This is Self-to-Self or Self-to-part contact — the regulated presence of one person stellating the other’s capacity for Self. It is the mechanism of empathic listening in NVC and of being with in IFS: not managing or resolving but being present with what is, creating the conditions for the other system to reorganize itself.

The distinction between responsible for and responsible to operates here with precision: I am responsible for my state, my feelings, my strategies and their impact. I am responsible to others through my commitments and my word. I am not responsible for another’s feelings or experience — assuming that responsibility is a protective strategy that forecloses genuine contact. In NVC terms: I can contribute to meeting another’s needs but if I take them as my own I will do violence to the other person and myself.

Sourcing — generating one’s state from within rather than depending on external conditions — is the Self’s capacity to offer parts what they need without first requiring the external world to provide it. Not independence from the world, but the difference between parts seeking outside what they have not received inside, and a system that can find that contact internally and from there relate to the exterior from choice.

An internal feedback loop with external consequences

All of this forms a positive feedback loop: connected with Self — outside the Box, in presence — we are aware of the signals our parts send us about whether our needs are being met or not, and we can develop effective strategies to maintain optimal homeostatic balance. The more fully needs are met, the less parts need to blend, and the more space there is for Self ro emerge. This also operates outward: we choose strategies in the external world that meet our needs more deeply, say no to those that do not, and our gameworlds change accordingly.

The loop can reverse: blended with burdened parts, we stop listening to other parts, needs go unmet, there is less space for Self and more autopilot — one part after another taking over, or a single part maintaining equilibrium by disconnecting us from the present and from life. The dominant external systems — patriarchy, colonialism, capitalism, the good/bad paradigm, power-over structures — actively tend to keep us inside the Box, because their own homeostasis depends on it. They generate cultural and transgenerational burdens — inherited gameworlds that determine which parts we must exile to belong — shaping our system’s configuration before we have any capacity for conscious choice.

There are three leverage points for inner transformation, operating at different scales and timescales: (1) at the behavioral level: bringing more presence and Self to our internal sensations, identifying clean feelings and the needs behind them, widening the strategy repertoire; (2) at the level of internal restructuring: healing past wounds so our parts respond to present needs rather than historical deficits, making more space for Self and allowing exiled Bright Principles to return to the system; (3) at the external level: changing the environments and gameworlds we participate in — surrounding ourselves with more Self-connected people, maintaining contact with the natural world, reducing structural stressors, and actively building next culture gameworlds that sustain connection with Self rather than requiring its suppression.

Being connected with our needs from Self means being connected with the planet and with life. The great systemic problems — climate crisis, geopolitical conflict, economic and social inequality, humanitarian crises — emerge from disconnection and trauma: burdened parts operating at collective scale, low drama institutionalized into the structures of entire civilizations. Individual transformation toward Self and the construction of new gameworlds where high drama — genuine contact, clean feeling, uncertain outcomes — becomes the norm rather than the exception are not parallel projects: they are the same movement at different scales.

Glossary

IFS

Blending — the state in which a part’s perspective and feelings merge with and override the Self, such that the person speaks and acts from the part rather than from Self-presence.

Burdens — painful beliefs, emotions, or bodily states that parts carry as a result of wounding. Not intrinsic to the part but acquired through experience.

Cultural and legacy burdens — burdens absorbed from the surrounding culture or transmitted across generations, carried by parts before any personal experience that would account for them.

Exile — a part pushed out of conscious awareness because its feelings, needs, or qualities were too painful or too threatening to attachment in the person’s relational environment. Exiles carry the original wounds.

Firefighter — a protector part that responds reactively when an exile is activated, acting impulsively to suppress or escape the exile’s pain.

Manager — a protector part that operates proactively to prevent exile activation by controlling behavior, environment, and relationships.

Parts — the distinct inner voices, feelings, and patterns that compose the internal system. Parts take on extreme roles only in response to wounding; they are not pathological by nature.

Protector — umbrella term for managers and firefighters: parts whose primary function is to protect the system from exile activation.

Reconsolidation — the process by which a memory is retrieved, updated with new experience, and re-stored in modified form. In IFS, healing occurs when an exile’s implicit memory is accessed in the presence of Self and updated through the experience of being witnessed and unburdened.

Self — the undepletable core of the person: a state of presence characterized by clarity, compassion, curiosity, calm, confidence, creativity, courage, and connectedness. When Self leads the internal system, parts can relax their extreme roles.

Self-led — describes a state in which Self, rather than any part, is guiding the internal system and its responses.

Unblending — the process by which a part separates sufficiently from the Self that the person can be with the part rather than in it.

NVC

Attunement — the capacity to perceive and resonate with another person’s internal state, particularly their emotional experience. The relational basis of co-regulation.

Co-regulation — the process by which one person’s regulated nervous system helps bring another’s into regulation.

Needs — universal human requirements for wellbeing, distinct from the specific strategies used to meet them. Feelings signal whether needs are met or unmet.

Strategies — the specific actions or behaviors used to meet needs. Unlike needs, strategies are particular, negotiable, and context-dependent.

PM

Being with — remaining present with an experience or person without attempting to fix, change, or escape it.

Box, the — the totality of a person’s habituated identity structure: the beliefs and survival strategies assembled in early life that define what seems possible. Not pathological but finite and navigable.

Bright Principles — the irreducible values or qualities that constitute a person’s deepest nature, prior to all strategy and conditioning. When exiled, they become shadow.

Gameworld — any shared reality maintained by collective agreement: the implicit rules and narratives that define what is possible within a given relational field, and which parts of experience must be suppressed to belong.

Gremlin — the internalized pattern that sabotages authentic presence and growth, particularly at thresholds of expansion. Personified to allow direct engagement rather than abstract analysis.

High drama — genuine contact in which clean feelings are in play and outcomes are uncertain. Distinguished from low drama by the presence of Self and the absence of manipulation.

Low drama — Box-managed conflict conducted through the roles of Victim, Rescuer, and Persecutor. A substitute for genuine contact that recycles unmet needs through strategies that perpetuate them.

Next culture — the emergent social form PM works to instantiate: communities organized around adult responsibility, conscious feeling, and authentic contact.

Nonlinear space — the field that opens when Self has sufficient presence to override the Box’s habitual management of experience. Characterized by genuine responsiveness to what is arising.

Possibility space / probability space — probability space is the domain of the Box: what is likely given current conditions. Possibility space opens when conscious presence makes available what probability alone would not predict.

Radical responsibility — taking full authorship of one’s experience, choices, and impact without blame or guilt. Not self-blame but response-ability: the capacity to respond from choice.

Shadow — a Bright Principle that has been exiled and now expresses itself in distorted form through protective layers.

Sourcing — generating one’s own state and presence from within rather than depending on external conditions.

Stellating — activating a quality in another person by embodying it oneself, through the resonant nature of human systems in genuine contact.

Bibliography

IFS

Curry-Sartori, Joanna — The Self-Led Educator. PESI Publishing, 2025.

Schwartz, Richard C. — Internal Family Systems Therapy, 2nd edition. Guilford Press, 2020.

Schwartz, Richard C. & Hübl, Thomas — Releasing Our Burdens: A Guide to Healing Individual, Ancestral, and Collective Trauma. Sounds True, 2025.

NVC

Rosenberg, Marshall B. — Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life, 3rd edition. PuddleDancer Press, 2015.

Kashtan, Arnina — The Courage to Love Yourself: Discover the Hidden Power of Self-Compassion, Authenticity, and Radical Acceptance, 2025.

PM

Callahan, Clinton — Directing the Power of Conscious Feelings: Living Your Own Truth. Hohm Press, 2014.

possibilitymanagement.org

Systems Thinking

Meadows, Donella H. — Thinking in Systems: A Primer. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008.

Scharmer, Otto & Kaeufer, Katrin — Presencing: 7 Practices for Transforming Self, Society, and Business, 2025.

One of our community members came behind me while I was sitting, wrapped his arms around my chest, and stayed. No agenda, nothing needed from me. Just presence, weight, and breath.

My whole body relaxed. The woman sitting across from me laughed, and joked about how envious she was, watching my system unwind so completely.

This moment crystallized something I have been longing to bring forward, in, for, and about community - that there is a kind of nourishment my nervous system needs that individual healing work and individual rest does not fully provide. Something that can only come through another body, another presence, another regulated nervous system: the deliberate act of being held.

And beyond my own personal need for that, I believe that communities also flourish in response to this specific type of care - the practice of containment.

Embodying the Container

Containment is a set of practices and tools for creating and holding the space inside of which I, or someone else, can release, regulate, and resource. As I practice it, containment does not seek to restrict anyone, or make anything (uncomfortable feelings, intense experiences) go away. Containment is the experience of building the frame inside which my nervous system can find its way home.

In order to embody containment, I call forth distinct qualities in myself that I continue to increase my capacity to hold - presence, patience, clarity, and groundedness. My embodiment of these is exactly the same skillset I use to offer containment to others. When I am contained within myself, when I am grounded, regulated, and centered, I find that my presence simply becomes the container for someone else. If I can say, “I’m here,” with as much honesty and clarity through both my words and my body, then I can offer containment.

The Foundation: Self-Containment

I taught a workshop called “Containment 101” at Regenera last week. We started at the foundation - how to contain oneself. My desire in offering self-containment practices was two-fold:

• To introduce containment as a practice. Being present, patient, clear, and grounded are not static traits that I have or don’t have, they are practices. The self-containment tools we went through are practices through which each of us can cultivate these states within ourselves.

• To land in the field that offering containment to someone else is the same thing as creating self-containment.

We explored a number of self-containment practices, including the following:

Box breathing - a breath pattern that involves inhaling, holding the breath at full, exhaling, and holding out at empty, on a consistent count. Also known as a square breath (so, literally a container!), I find that this breath pattern can regulate my nervous system within minutes, and is simple enough to do pretty much anywhere.

Acupressure - I shared the four points that I find particularly supportive for self-regulation. I offered these because I find them to be really effective, yet subtle low effort, interventions for when I feel ungrounded or outside of myself:

• KD1: a grounding point on the bottom of the foot that anchors the kidney meridian, and is often used to ground and ease anxiety.

• DU20: a point on the top of the head that lifts energy and clears the mind;

• CV17: a point at the center of the chest, also used for regulating energy flow and calming anxiety; and

• LI-4: a point on the hand between the thumb and index finger that relieves head and facial pressure.

Self-touch - hand on chest, arms wrapped around, hands tucked under armpits. Nothing revolutionary, but a space to explore the actual quality of the touch that we use on ourselves. How can I be intentional, patient, and loving in the way that I experience my own body, and the relationship between my hand laid on top of my skin?

Holding Me, Holding You

Once we were properly self-contained, we shifted into offering containment to each other. We moved through three layers - presence, breath, and touch.

Practice I: Attention Out/Attention In

Adapted from Kasia Urbaniak’s work, one person places their full attention outward on the other. The other person puts their full attention inward on their own experience.

We oriented towards this with a practice mindset: what if there was simply no other option in the moment? What if there was nothing you could do in this moment besides place the full beam of your attention on this other being?

What if everything that was happening around you became fully folded into your internal experience? How would you need to have your body, who would you need to be in this moment to have your attention in this direction?

The person with attention out (the “container”) offers simple descriptive “you” statements: “You just smiled.” “Your inhale shifted the position of our chest.” “Your eyes are green”. “You have a forehead.”

The last statement produces a wave of surprised laughter across the room. As soon as the pure ridiculousness of telling someone they have a forehead settled, something more tender landed into the space. Under every simple observation was the same profound message: “I am here with all of you.”

Practice II: Breathing Another

Seated across from each other in pairs, making eye contact, the container guided the inhale, and the containee released into the exhale. Minutes passed as the pairs breathed together, the container growing taller as they held the frame of the inhale, the containee sighing deeper and deeper into the exhale. We expanded upon the skill of the first exercise - learning how to track each other, and open to each other deeper states of presence and surrender.

Practice III: Physical Containment

The last layer was touch. I demonstrated with one of our community members, moving from the simple, low-contact experience of holding his hand, and escalating through different holds:

• Hands on shoulders pressing downward;

• Hands on the chest and back;

• Hands on hips grounding down;

• Hands on the occiput and sacrum;

• A full hold chest to back

Each hold offered the same qualities: weight, warmth, and even pressure, fully supported by the container’s presence and attunement.

Each partner had five minutes to offer physical containment to the other. Two minutes in, the sound of one participant’s sobs filled the room. She shared afterwards the sense of immediate relief and release she had experienced as her partner held her, allowing whatever she was holding inside to unfold.

After closing the workshop together, the group gravitated almost immediately back into holding - every member of the community united in the act of embrace. It could not have been more beautiful in that moment.

But why does something like this matter long term in the community?

Holding the Holders of Healing

At Regenera, we do a tremendous amount of informal and formal healing and integration work together, so that we can create more options than our default protective patterns and survival strategies. We are committed to peeling back layers of reactivity and wounding so that we can unfold into our wholeness, both on an individual and a collective level. This work is essential and ongoing for us, and we hold and are held in healing spaces by each other on a near-daily basis.

And I notice that, particularly when I am engaged in more intensive healing work, my nervous system can get blown out in such a way that impacts how I can show up to our group. I have uncovered that the missing piece for me is not more rest or processing - it is regulation in connection.

This is where the concept of containment, which is consistently practiced in kink, BDSM, neo-tantra, and conscious relating communities, began to feel newly relevant. In those lineages, containment serves as the bookend practice (and is often called upon many times in between) for intensity and edge work. Stripped of any erotic or taboo implications, something more simple emerges about the relationship between containment and intensity. The quality of the container determines what can safely happen inside of it. Any type of intensity, profound expression, or impact - whether it be physical, emotional, or transformational - requires a container that is strong enough to hold it.

In community life, we are constantly entering each other’s worlds. We share space, meals, stories, feelings, challenges, and longings. The question isn’t whether we will impact each other, because there is no way that we won’t. My question then becomes - how can I build and sustain my inner and a collective structure to hold what arises?

The Group Body

I have discovered that the communities I have lived in, even for short amounts of time, develop something akin to a shared nervous system. Beyond just being aware of how I impact and am impacted by others by existing in close quarters, there is a moment where I suddenly realize that I am a limb in some organism that extends beyond my own skin. I call this the group body.

At its healthiest, the group body is a state of regenerative interdependence: each person choosing to take responsibility for the group field, while remaining in contact and connection with our individual parts.

Like my human body, the group bodies I have been part of are unreasonably resilient and surprisingly fragile.

When the group body frays, I have witnessed everyone involved shifting, to some degree, into survival. In our group sessions at Regenera, I have experienced this happen sometimes in the blink of an eye. When someone in the group becomes dysregulated, within moments, triggers ripple through the room. Some people snap, others freeze.

This is one of many situations where I see containment as a profound resource and impactful toolkit for re-establishing group body coherence.

Self-containing in those moments of group body instability does not mean suppressing what is happening or magically erasing the triggers. It means grounding into what is really happening in the moment, and orienting towards revealing, supporting, and integrating. One regulated person in a room can shift the entire field.

The Dance of Holding

In a therapeutic relationship, the holding goes one direction. The roles are explicitly boundaried, and this clarity can support establishing safety on both sides. Living in community, something else becomes necessary.

To offer healing or containment to each other, we are required to navigate sometimes rapidly, and always with care and attunement, between the polarity of holding and being held, and reciprocal relationship. As we build these skills of offering each other containment, we also expand each of our capacities to set boundaries - to be clear about when we are offering containment, when we are requesting that containment from someone else, and when we are operating from mutuality.

What I have experienced at Regenera is that our collective ability to set and communicate clear boundaries - both in service of containment, and around the practice of containment - expands our ability as a community to maintain the level of regulation necessary to move forward at the speed of transformation. Containment as a community practice guides our group body into states of higher and higher resilience and attunement.

Containment 101

If this inspires you to bring even just a seed of this to your communities or relationships, I invite you to start with self-containment.

Presence. Patience. Clarity. Groundedness.

The more you can hold these within yourself for yourself, for every part that exists inside you, the more time you are able to look into someone else’s eyes and say, I’m here.

The goal of containment is not to be unaffected - not to transcend triggers, or rise above conflict inside or outside of yourself. What I have received from containment (among many other practices and modalities!) is a resilient and regenerative inner structure - a place inside myself that I can return to over and over again so that I can be available and present in reality for what is meant to move through me as an individual and collective.

If you have a desire to introduce these practices into your life or community, please reach out - I want nothing more than to share the profound and moving impact of this aspect of community care.

This is a continuation of my previous writing on ‘Collective decision-making from the “Awakened We.” That piece came out of a one-month community experiment — a recognition that decision-making can be sourced from something deeper than preference, agreement, or negotiation.

Since then, the inquiry has continued in practice inside Regenera — a three-month living laboratory for building regenerative community culture.

What I’m sharing here are field notes from that lived exploration.

This matters, because the way we make decisions together is already creating the world we live in.

Collective decision-making is not just about methods. It is shaped by power, fear, belonging, and the willingness to tell the truth. In most groups, decisions are made while parts of people remain unspoken — to stay liked, to stay safe, to stay in control. Certain ideas, intuitions, or tensions are compartmentalized or softened before they enter the space. When those parts are included, something shifts. Decisions are no longer something we make, but something that emerges. And how we arrive there already shapes the culture we are creating.

Inside Regenera, we are working with Torus Technology as a simple structure for collective decision-making without central authority. In Torus we work from emergence: what serves now? Rather than trying to anticipate every scenario, we stay with what is present and alive in the moment. Decisions arise from direct contact with what is here.

This shifts decision-making away from managing outcomes, toward responsive action based on what is actually unfolding. This becomes especially relevant in complex, rapidly changing systems.

Proposals move through the group and are shaped in real time by what people sense, say, and take responsibility for. In practice, this shifts attention away from managing outcomes, and toward tracking what is actually happening in the room — in bodies, in relationships, and in the field between us.

What we are learning about collective decision-making

A number of patterns are becoming visible through our decision-making processes. I’ve seen similar dynamics across different approaches, including Sociocracy, Holocracy, and the advice process.

What is becoming visible:

1. Feelings, emotions, and preference

Torus Technology uses the intelligence of the feelings. As described in Regenera’s Codex: After a proposal is made in Torus, each person in the space holds up both hands, with fingers corresponding to their level of resistance to the proposal. Zero fingers means “I have 0 resistance to the proposal; this works for me.” Ten fingers up means “I have 10 resistance and will leave the space if this happens.”

Teammates can also show insistence by pointing fingers down. In this case, ten fingers down means “I have 10 insistence and will leave the space if this does NOT happen.”

Resistance is information that sources from the group intelligence. People share the intelligence behind their resistance or insistence, starting with the highest numbers. These shares take the form: “I feel scared/mad/sad/glad because…” For example, someone might say: “I have 5 resistance. I feel scared because 5Rhythms happens on Sundays, and many people will not be available to clean the fridge that day.”

Based on what is revealed, anyone may make a new or revised proposal—for example, “I propose a fridge cleaning rotation, with two teammates cleaning the fridge on Mondays instead of Sundays”—and check again for resistance.

There are a few distinctions we are using that are very impactful:

• feelings as present-moment information

• emotions as unresolved past experience activated now

• preference as mental positioning that may or may not be connected to present truth

When this is not distinguished, people start relating to the past as if it is happening now.

For example:

• “I feel scared about Fridays because I already have another group commitment” can be present information, useful input for our decision

• “I feel angry about cleaning rotas because of how my parents used to do it”

  is likely activated past material.

If that emotional charge is not digested, it will keep reappearing — and no decision will resolve the underlying tension. You can have ten conversations about the cleaning rota, but it won’t land.

Because the decision is not the actual issue. In our current experiments, we invite people to take responsibility for this distinction, and to process emotional charge outside of the decision-making space when needed.

At the same time, this requires care. This distinction can become a way to dismiss or bypass emotions. That’s not the work. The work is digestion — not suppression.

So that what remains can actually inform the whole.

2. Not all decisions belong in the group

One ongoing learning is discernment. First of all, because group attention is a limited resource. Second, because not every issue needs a collective decision. We noticed that so far we didn’t have any thresholds for people to discern whether to bring their decision to our collective decisionmaking space. In our group reflection it became clear that we want that, to care for efficiency and so that the process doesn’t start to drain us. We want to build a regenerative culture after all.

We invited us all to start asking questions like:

• Does this impact the whole system?

• For how long?

• Does it align with our shared purpose?

• Is this actually a collective decision?

Without this discernment, everything becomes collective — and the group loses clarity and energy.

Recently, I gave feedback to someone that their input in a logistics decision felt misaligned with the purpose of that space. I noticed fear in myself while saying it — the fear that the group’s attention was being scattered. The conversation landed, and something in their participation shifted afterward. These moments seem small, but they shape the collective field.

3. Radical responsibility and adult participation

A core practice in this space is radical responsibility.

If you can see a job, it means you have enough capacity to engage with it — not in a rescuing or caretaking way, but in a clear ownership-based way. We assume people are in relationship with what they perceive, not passive observers of it.

This shifts the culture.

Instead of outsourcing authority, people are encouraged to make proposals when they feel tension or care about something. Feelings are treated as information and energy for action, not as something to vent or manage socially.

We also actively notice when we slip into “waiting,” “tolerating,” or “enduring.” These are often subtle ways of placing authority outside oneself. In our feedback session last week multiple of the Regenera members named they could feel themselves slipping into waiting or enduring at times. We want to actively experiment with how to shift this, so decision-making truly is a regenerative process - that gives us energy.

At the same time, we stay vigilant not to collapse into drama-triangle dynamics — especially rescuing or over-owning what is not ours.

Quick feedback is an important part of radical responsibility and part of our culture here. If something is off, we name it. We treat feedback as neutral information. If someone brings something in a way that does not serve the shared purpose, it is reflected. We treat each other as on the same team in learning how to stay in adult responsibility together.

My experience is that this creates a high level of aliveness and clarity, even when it is uncomfortable.

4. Power, belonging, and truth

A recurring dynamic is the subtle question underneath proposals: do I matter here?

This shapes what gets spoken and what gets withheld. Sometimes a proposal is not only about the content itself, but also about something underneath it — a need for connection, for recognition, or for reassurance that one’s needs and perspective matter in the space.

In some moments, this shows up indirectly in decision-making: through tension, charge, or repetition of certain points that seem to carry more than just the practical issue at hand.

We experienced this clearly in one decision-making process that became increasingly tense and emotionally charged. At some point I named that there seemed to be an emotional undercurrent shaping how we were relating to the decision itself, not just to its content.

We then shifted into an “In the Open” session — a space held by the group where people could step into the center and express and embody what was actually alive in them, including raw emotion, thought, and sensation.

What became visible there was not just disagreement about the decision, but a layer of unmet expression and relational tension underneath it.

After this space, something in the field changed. The next day, decision-making moved with noticeably more ease and less friction — not because the issue was solved conceptually, but because coherence had been restored through expression of what was previously unspoken.

5. Group dynamics we are noticing

Some patterns show up repeatedly:

• waiting instead of speaking

• tolerating instead of engaging

• projecting authority outward

• pacing differences (some want speed, others slowness)

• non-verbal expression carrying part of the signal

These are not problems to fix. They are information about how the system organizes itself under pressure.

We are actively experimenting with how to work with this.

One idea is to create short pairings before sessions between someone who tends to move quickly and someone who tends to move more slowly, so that both perspectives are carried into the space more consciously.

Another experiment is to work more explicitly with the emotional layer around pacing — the fear of going too slow or too fast. This is still exploratory and not yet a formalized practice.

The intention is not to optimize behavior, but to increase awareness of what is shaping participation in real time, so that decisions are less driven by unconscious patterns and more by present-moment clarity. Over time, this tends to create more regenerative dynamics.

6. Working principles we are testing

A few simple orientations we are using in our experiments:

• “Good enough for now, safe enough to try” any decision is an experiment we try

• Decisions stay in place until they no longer work, which will show when someone brings a proposal moved by their feelings

• We don’t look for consensus or agreement, but for low resistance, so we can keep moving forward whilst including the information in the field

• We trust that breakdowns will become visible through lived experience, not scheduled review cycles

This is closer to an art than a science. A continuous calibration between structure and emergence.

Working with collective emergence

Part of this exploration is learning to listen beyond the individual. Using practices like Circling or Collective Presencing, attention shifts toward the relational field itself.

Not just: what do I want?
But: what is actually wanting to happen here?

Some traditions have worked this way for a long time, such as the Quakers.

For the Quakers, silence is not a pause — it is the ground. Decisions emerge through shared listening rather than argument or persuasion.

This requires:

• letting go of personal timing and agenda

• patience for something to take shape

• sensitivity to subtle shifts in the field

Whether or not one relates to the spiritual framing, the underlying capacity is the same: listening beyond the individual perspective, including the intersubjective field.

What we are experimenting with next

We are currently testing a number of experiments:

• movement and embodied sensing before decisions

• a “chair for Regenera” as a way of explicitly bringing in the being and purpose of Regenera into the space

• anchoring in wholeness: making decisions from resource rather than scarcity, including assumptions such as what if everything we need is already here?

• giving each other feedback on what feels aligned with the purpose of the space and what does not

• making smaller decisions individually, while staying in connection through asking for input or advice when needed

What this requires on a personal level

This work depends on capacity, not just intention.

We are learning to develop:

• awareness of feelings in real time

• discernment between feelings, emotions, and preference

• the ability to make clear proposals

• the willingness to ask for support

• the capacity to stay present in tension without collapsing or controlling

• the ability to give and receive feedback as neutral information

• the capacity to stay on each other’s team, even when things get tense or unclear

From technique to presence

This remains an open exploration. What becomes visible very quickly is that collective decision-making stops being a technique. It becomes a practice of being in contact: staying present with what is happening, sensing what is emerging between people, and responding without collapsing into control or withdrawal.

The experiments at Regenera are not aimed at arriving at a finished model. What we are working with is alive and continuously changing — and cannot be fully captured in a fixed structure.

What I’m interested in researching and developing further:

• a set of principles that can be applied in everyday group decisions

• more structured processes that can hold this work in larger systems

• the skills and capacities needed to train leaders in this way of working

• exploring how sourcing and collective emergence can inform more adaptive forms of decision-making

• exploring what it would take for a group to move more like a flock of birds — sensing together, moment by moment, what is needed next

I am curious what others are discovering in their own experiments with collective decision-making, and what becomes available when decisions are no longer something we manage — but something we listen our way into, together.

The snippets continue: Day III of unfiltered, unpolished, and unedited thoughts!

Today, we held a group session focused on our collective decision-making process (for more of the technicalities on the process we use, listen to our very first podcast episode). This is the group technology that we use at the highest frequency in community life - every group session opens with what we call a “logistics space,” where we make decisions both big and small using a framework called Torus Technology.

Emma brought her necessity forward in order to create this session - one of her biggest areas of research here at Regenera, and in community life in general, is collective decision-making: what works, what doesn’t, what different frameworks have to offer, and how we might weave those threads together.

I almost wrote so that we can make decisions better together — and catching that word “better” is actually what I want to write about.

The idea that one way is better and another is worse is subjective, limiting, and pressure-filled for any field of inquiry. And, at the same time, the impulse to make something “better,” or to shift a process such that it is more easeful, more purpose-filled, and more life-serving, is a motivating and driving force for change. The possibility I want to offer for navigating this tension point is the one we are experimenting with at Regenera - can we, and what does it mean to, orient towards collective decision-making, and everything else, as research?

Research has been a big part of my identity, both now and in the past. For many years, it was my full-time job as an investigator. In that phase of my life (which continues in some ways now, both as I continue to freelance as an investigator, and broaden my scope of things that I can investigate), my orientation was fundamentally problem-shaped: a client comes to me in two circumstances: either there is something they don’t have that they want, or there is something that they have or is happening that they don’t want. My job was to find and share information that bridged the gap - from problem to solution, from current reality to desired outcome. The research itself was the infrastructure connecting those two points.

I am still shaking off the impact of this framing. When Emma brought collective decision-making to the group, I noticed that there is a part of me that wants to attach the same problem/solution set up: our current style of decision-making has problems, and I want to make it work better. Research as repair.

But something shifts when I let go of that frame.

When I orient to collective decision-making (or community living, or being here at Regenera, or really life overall), as research, every moment of the process comes alive.

The old map of research: there is a problem, and I must collect information to solve it.

The new map: how present, conscious, and aware can I be of what is actually happening right now? How can I document, record, or simply make transparent what is unfolding - and then move into creation from a place of resource, of information, of things brought into the open?

If I embrace research as my orientation - to collective decision-making, to relating, to community life - then every moment can carry purpose. Every experience becomes an opportunity, if I’m willing to bring the values and principles I want to guide my inquiry.

The old fuel source for research was problem-solving. The battery of my personal research machine ran on right or wrong.

What if the fuel becomes curiosity, openness, being with, and a genuine desire to create?

Then I can wear my researcher hat in a way that opens rather than narrows - that revitalizes and imbues every moment of life with meaning, rather than reducing experience to a series of problems awaiting resolution.

I am now able to revisit our framing of Regenera as a laboratory with an increased experiential understanding. We are here researching how to create and sustain regenerative culture, on a personal, interpersonal, and systemic level, so that we can serve life, live in purpose and being together, and empower others to open to the same.

Creator’s Note: I immediately regretted making the commitment I declared yesterday as I navigated my way through an immensely full, Regenera-typical day: morning meditation and Brazilian jiu-jitsu, house cleaning, group time, several relating spaces, calls, and dinner clean up. So here I sit, facing 9 PM CET, and reminding myself that there is no barrier to me sharing - that what I publish here can be an unfinished, in the moment, mess.

In the organizing documentation for Regenera, one of our principles for engagement is that we take our triggers (pick your language: trauma, parts, emotions, reactivities, wounds) to healing processes.

We have had many internal discussions about the sensitivity of “requiring” healing (that healing can imply that there is a problem that needs to be solved; that a person is not perfect as they are, in any minute, in every way; that a person cannot be in community until they are fully “healed”; that healing something means that it disappears forever), which I’m sure I will come back to in a further piece (I’m already eagerly anticipating a collaboration with Emma about the middle ground between healing and integration).

But what continues to emerge is a group-wide commitment to healing and integrating the parts of ourselves and the experiences that live within us that stand in the way of being fully ourselves, present in the moment, and available to and for the gifts we bring into the world.

There is so much more to come here about our healing work, as we hold different forms of healing processes for each other on a near-daily basis, and I am sharing here two things we are experimenting with to directly support the healing process itself.

Both of these experiments emerged from the following: after a particularly vulnerable and revealing healing process, one Regenera collaborator went to the person who had held space for her, and shared that she was scared of the impact that knowing all of the big, messy, potentially dark things she had shared during the process would have on their relationship. As we discussed how to be with this in the group, these two possibilities/experiments emerged:

Healing Aftercare

Before entering a healing process, the person who will go through it can share with their spaceholder a “menu” of aftercare, aka the things that they might want to receive after the healing process in order to integrate. These could include wanting to be physically held for some amount of time, to have a verbal or written review of what happened during the process, to put their feet in the grass outside, to have a check in the following morning. Creating this type of menu allows for the endless unpredictable paths that a healing process could take, and creates a defined set of options from which the person can choose without exerting too much energy or decision-making power.

Defined Containers

In traditional healing/therapeutic contexts, there is a clearly set container. I enter a therapist’s office, I receive their support/services for a set amount of time, I complete my side of the exchange (generally financial), and then our interaction is complete. Living in community, I may take on multiple roles for and with someone else within the span of a couple of minutes, potentially toggling between being their friend, collaborator, healer, and taskmaster at rapid speed. In order to create the safety through which another community member can bare their deepest wounds, and also trust in the power of my bond with them, we are experimenting with the possibility of declaring at different intervals: “I am now with you in a healing capacity,” and then upon the completion of a process, to take off that identity, and re-declare that I am with them in my capacity as their friend or community member.

I’m currently part of Regenera. Regenera is a living laboratory for regenerative cultures and new forms of community. We’re one month into Phase I of Regenera, a three-month experiment in Denmark. We’re exploring what it means to live, decide, create, and relate in ways more aligned with life. The vision is to build “bridge houses”—places that experiment with regenerative culture, derive principles and practices that actually work, and create a network and curriculum that can travel and adapt to other contexts. Phase II will be in New York, Phase III in Portugal, and who knows yet where more.

There’s a lot that feels deeply right about being here: a deep shared commitment to live from interdepedence and honesty, a willingness to engage with conflict, attention to relationship, trust in emergence. I feel grateful to be inside something genuinely exploring on the edge.

About a week ago I noticed a subtle disorientation. Not because nothing is happening—quite the opposite. There’s a constant stream of activity: cooking community meals together, making decisions, sharing withholds, giving each other feedback, co-working, facilitating sessions, working on the land, spontaneous initiatives, community movie night, emotional processes, play, movement. It’s full, alive, and rich.

And still, something kept asking:

How does this all connect to why we are here?

When meaning is present, but orientation is not

It’s not a lack of engagement or depth. Quite the opposite — there’s so much happening, so much felt, so much shared.

And still, without a thread connecting each moment to something larger, experiences can feel untethered. Conversations land, decisions are made, processes open new insights — yet the accumulation of these moments doesn’t always create clarity.

There’s a subtle trap here, one I’ve seen in other conscious spaces. When purpose isn’t clearly felt or shared, relational work can quietly become self-referential. Processing becomes the center of gravity. Not because it isn’t valuable — it is — but because it lacks a clear direction. Depth slowly replaces creation. The field becomes something we focus on, rather than something we move through in service of what wants to be created.

On the other side of the spectrum is the trap of “orange” modern culture: endless doing, producing results, and staying busy, but without being rooted in purpose. Both extremes miss the point: one drifts in depth without direction, the other moves fast without grounding.

Regenera is not just a place to live differently. It’s a living lab for exploring how culture, connection, and purpose can emerge together. That implies a responsibility: experience alone is not enough. Experience needs to become learning. Learning needs to become something that can be shared. Without that movement, even meaningful engagement can feel like a swirl without anchor.

Trusting the signal

For a few days, I questioned whether this was just me. Maybe I didn’t understand the process. Maybe the point is to stay in not-knowing.

There is truth in that. But there’s a difference between not-knowing as a generative space, and not-knowing as a lack of orientation (a lot more to discover on this topic!).

Instead of trying to resolve it internally, I followed the signal outward. Together with fellow Regenera member Nina, we designed a workshop for our next group session.

From dream to experiment

The workshop was minimal in structure. We invited participants to step into their deepest dream for the next three months — not as an abstract intention, but as something already lived. What would it feel like if this period had unfolded in the most aligned way?

From there, participants roleplayed from that future, speaking as if it had already happened. This shifted: from thinking about what we want to speaking from a place where it is already real.

From that, we distilled “purpose pieces”: elements essential to bringing that future into being. Purpose was framed as a verb — something that pulls us forward while also revealing itself through deep listening. Not aspirational, not fully realized, but alive and actionable.

Some of the purpose pieces that emerged included:

• Researching how to be in connection with others and with myself.

• Meeting others with honesty and love, transforming disconnect into deeper connection.

• Sensing the pace of group movement and responding to it.

• Documenting and practicing collective decision-making.

• Exploring the living balance between relating and creating.

The next step was creating experiments; ways to engage with what had become visible.

Some personal experiments:

• Raising conscious anger three times a week to clarify voice, sharing with at least one person for feedback.

• Asking “dangerous” questions — vulnerable, edgy, necessary.

• Dedicating time to deep silence and listening.

• Embodying three minutes of conscious fear or anger, multiple times a week.

Some collective experiments:

• Weekly sessions naming disconnects and exploring withholds “in the open.”

• Circling and Surrendered Leadership for deep listening and emergence.

• Sharing presence, processes, and non-dual work as group frameworks.

• Reframing our decision-making processes as living experimentation rather than fixed outcomes.

• Collaboration time for documentation, curriculum, organization, and network building.

• Invention spaces for new practices to meet emergent challenges.

• Publicly sharing research practices and support requests.

• Music and nourishment cafes — spaces for connection beyond language.

• Regular group feedback and context deepening around culture.

What stood out was not only the content of these experiments, but the shift in orientation. A clearer sense of why something was happening and how it connected to both individual and collective movement.

Linking experience to purpose

The challenge in being here for me isn’t a lack of emergence, relational depth, or of ideas where to put our energy. It’s the translation between:

• What we experience

• What we learn

• How that learning becomes part of a larger, shared body of knowledge

Without that translation, orientation depends on individual sense-making. Some feel connected, others lose the thread.

Without a shared compass, how do we decide where to put our energy in a group session? In practice, the direction often defaults to whoever can most easily bring their voice into the space, or to what is most immediately alive — often relational tensions — or simply to whatever grabs attention in the moment. The result: purpose becomes subtle, sometimes invisible, and the field can drift into self-referential processing. Direction can also be shaped by those with a stronger internal sense of purpose — but without sharing it, clarity remains uneven. This isn’t a question of power; it’s a question of shared orientation.

What I’m exploring now

The question I keep returning to:

How can we make the connection between what we do and what we are here to create more visible, without losing the openness that allows something new to emerge?

The approach I want to start experimenting with is practical: after a session or at the end of the day, ask:

• What did we notice today?

• What does this show about how communities function?

• What might we try differently?

• Most importantly: what are we learning that could serve building regenerative culture beyond this group?

A personal edge

I notice this in myself: a sensitivity to coherence, to whether things connect — alongside a deep trust in not-knowing. It’s less a tension to resolve and more a capacity to hold: to track threads while letting them unfold beyond what I can already see.

I’m beginning to sense that this isn’t something I carry alone. Each of us plays a role in sensing, translating, and embodying what is emerging. There is a place in the system for noticing when experiences aren’t yet integrated, and for asking how the present connects to what we aim to create. Not to control, but to help the emerging culture move beyond us.

We are still inside the experiment. One month in.

People liked and appreciated the session. The purpose pieces are now up on the wall, and there’s a clearer awareness of them. How — or if — we’ll co-create together as a full group, or whether some will mainly experience while others create, is uncertain.

I’m starting to realize that staying in relationship with the question — how this connects to why we are here — is the work itself.

A living system doesn’t learn from answers; it learns from noticing, reflecting, experimenting, and participating in what wants to be created. Clarity emerges through the ongoing practice of being present to both what’s alive in the moment and to what is ready to be born.

I have committed this week to sharing something about Regenera every day.

Throughout the last month, I have felt a near-daily panic about how I can possibly document and share the extraordinary (and ordinary) aspects of what it is like to live life here. The main thing in my way has been my commitment to the unreachable standard of perfection. As a result of this commitment, I have picked apart half-finished pieces, agonized over word choice, and berated myself for my long-winded and over-complicated writing style. This has created results that don’t work for me - I have only shared one piece here, which I started writing way back in January.

My practice this week is to make it really simple. I write, I publish. I unstopper what is inside me, and create space to really enjoy it. To open to the pleasure I have in wandering between academic references, feelings, and stories. To embrace how much I love starting a sentence with an infinitive verb. To get distracted in the middle and come back. To share something that is not finished, “neat,” “meaningful,” well-ordered, or groundbreaking.

Here I go!

Fresh out of the Regenera April intensive, I am sitting with a phrase that has come up over and over again: “the map is not the territory.” After hearing the phrase at least once a week over the last month and a half, I finally looked up where it comes from. In his 1930s’ work Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, Polish-American philosopher Alfred Korzybski posits this as the first of three principles of general semantics, his discipline focused on understanding how language shapes human perception and behavior. The three principles go like this:

1. The map is not the territory;

2. No map represents all of its presumed territory; and

3. Maps are self-reflexive; i.e. we can map our maps indefinitely. Also, every map is at least, whatever else it may claim to map, a map of the map-maker: her/his assumptions, skills, work-view, etc.

So far at Regenera, “the map is not the territory” has been a cautionary tale. We have used it as a warning bell - did someone share or speak with a certainty that precluded there being other options? Did we detect in someone a rigidity that this is the way, or the only way? This phrase has guided my navigation between clarity and humility - can I be both audacious and modest in the importance and impact of my discoveries? How can I and we be trailblazers, sharing the results of our experiments as valuable and meaningful findings, without closing our fists around any attachment to value or impact?

This warning bell rang over and over again in our intensive because we spent quite a lot of it delivering “maps.” Distinct from the standard English-definition of a map (n.: a diagrammatic representation of an area of land or sea showing physical features), these are conceptual maps intended to make visible, comprehensible, and workable one interpretation of an inner, relational, or systemic experience or process.

Personal Maps: A Map For The Map-Maker

As I write this, I’m turned on by the idea of creating personal maps as a way to make visible to other people what happens inside of me, or to chart a new path forward if I want different results.

A somewhat spontaneous version of what a map like this could look like:

I noticed yesterday during a check in with another Regenera collaborator that, when he showed signs of being tired or wanting to rest (we were, after all, reclining), that I immediately stopped sharing what was happening for me. After some gently guided inquiry, I discovered that the following process was happening in me:

I am sharing something about myself --> I notice that the other person is tired/distracted/for some reason not fully present with me --> I feel scared because my story is that this person will resent me for disrupting their rest --> I stop sharing.

In mapping this out, or making it visible to myself and someone else, I was able to see a key assumption that was controlling this process: my belief that, when someone else is tired, they don’t want to or can’t continue to be with me. This assumption was based on prior experiences that I was continuing to bring forward with me and re-create by including it as a step in my “map.”

My companion offered me a new option for how this could go - he shared that he deeply values the open and exploratory quality that tiredness can bring to conversation, and that he would communicate to me if he no longer wanted to, or wasn’t able to, be with me as I shared. As I continue to integrate and heal the part of me that believes that the above map is “true,” I am trying out a new map:

I am sharing something about myself --> I notice that the other person is tired/distracted/not fully present with me --> I pause and share what is coming up for me --> I check if the other person is available for me to continue sharing --> If yes, I continue sharing --> If no, I negotiate around what I need (either to come back to what I am sharing at a later point, or to find someone else who is available to support me more immediately).

This process of individual mapping, while witnessed by another, opens up more options for me in the future - in this case, more options for connection with others by revealing myself. This is also a very explicit, targeted version of “the map is a map of the map-maker.”

Trail Maps

But coming back from that digression - in this type of “personal” mapping, I am being deliberate to specify that this is a map of how it goes in me, for me. During this intensive, however, I received feedback that, sometimes when I was presenting a map, or sharing more generally, my words landed with a certainty that, in their experience, did not allow for disagreement or other options. My first reaction to this feedback was some level of defensiveness - I want to trust that everyone around me holds their own autonomy such that my unconscious certainty cannot unseat their beingness. I want those around me to hear, “this is my experience,” “this is one option,” or “this is something to try,” implicit in everything I share, because my reality is that I am one human being in the infinite sea of humanity.

And yet, while I can want this to be true, and I can support myself and others in our practices of sovereignty such that this becomes a possibility, this was not what was happening. Thanks to me standing up in front of the room at a board (school conditioning), me and the other members of the “core” Regenera team delivering the intensive (rather than the emergent, leader-full space we had cultivated in the intensive days in March), and my own level of assertiveness and precision in how I speak, my map delivery landed as trying to control the territory.

An example of this feedback came up when some of the core team was sharing a “Map of Withholds” (more to come on that later this week), which outlines a step-by-step process of how to share something I’ve held back from someone in order to restore clarity and closeness to our connection. One of the Regenera members stopped us, and shared that he felt scared that this map would actually keep him from sharing withholds, because he would be too scared about not going through the process perfectly. He shared that he often found himself aware that he was withholding something, but wouldn’t know what it was until he had entered into a space of discovery (untethered to the Withholds Map’s process) with the other person about what was coming up.

The new definition I am trying on for “maps,” in response to this vulnerable share, is a trail map. Any map that I share is of a trail that I myself have walked from one point to another. From the point of wanting something (intimacy, connection, clarity) to the point of having created it. I will be audacious in stating that this map has worked (or not!) for me, and that I want to make a generous offer to others who may want to try the pathway. I will be humble in saying that I will very rarely (if ever) be the first person to have walked this trail, nor make an assumption that this map will work for anyone outside of me. And ultimately, I will return to the third principle, that no matter what topic or process a map explores, it is at its core a map of me, a way in which I reveal what I value, and my interpretation of how I experience the world.

It has been two weeks since we (the core team of eleven comprising Phase I of Regenera) landed in Åsum, Denmark.

What started out as a dream of researching community in order to foster a more regenerative way of living, shared by me, Jonas Ratza, Nina Chausow, and Karl Steyaert, has now become a breathing, laughing, crying, feeling, reality.

Since March 8th, Avalonhuset has been home to an extraordinary birthday celebration, withholds sessions, emotional healing processes in multiple modalities, experiments in shifting identity, deep cleans of the house, abundant bread baking and kefir brewing, spontaneous meetings of the Planetary Peace Council, visits from a parakeet named Reggie, a field trip to a local farm to buy raw milk, the establishment of a bulk food ordering system, daily meditation, twice weekly Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, the creation of the Regenera podcast, and much more.

Listen to the first episode of The Village is a Practice with Nina and Emma Van Den Boogert, above!

Below are some “mini-legends,” as well as recaps of a few areas of research that have emerged:

Celebration As Healing

March 8th was Jonas’s birthday, and I was looking forward to celebrating him. That morning, I prepared a breakfast of fried eggs, toast, salmon, avocado, cucumber, and lemon ginger tea. As we sat in the dining room, however, I noticed that, in a subtle energetic way, he was not accepting the love I was flowing to him.

When I asked what was going on, he began to tune into his feelings: “I feel sad because, for the past few years, I’ve created birthdays for myself that were miserable. I’m just beginning to discover now what it’s about. I remember my parents fighting on my birthday, even though it was supposed to be my day. I remember deciding that I didn’t get to celebrate.”

I stayed present with him as he felt his sadness. When he had stopped crying, I asked, “Will you practice allowing people to delight in you today?”

For the rest of the day, he took on the experiment—from a surprise birthday Zoom call with friends to a buckwheat cake decorated with wildflowers (assisted by Nina, Theo, and Ursula), an appreciation circle, and a 5Rhythms-inspired “wave,” Jonas allowed himself to let the love in.

This is just one example of the kind of healing that can happen in community.

Creating An Empowered Field

As the Infinity Ring (stewards of the long-term vision of Regenera), Nina, Jonas, Karl, and I scheduled three “intensive days” at the beginning of each month. We designed a program covering the basic distinctions of several transformational modalities, including Possibility Management and IFS, which we planned to deliver from Monday morning to Wednesday evening.

On Sunday, Karl brought a pivotal impulse: “Let’s scratch the plan and hold the three days in the style of surrendered leadership.”

In many spaces, I have observed that even the presence of a “spaceholder” creates implicit hierarchy. People (including me) expect that person to provide whatever it is they want (answers, aliveness, clarity) and fail to step up as empowered co-creators.

This was an experiment in trying something different, and what it created was radical.

Instead of the Infinity Ring deciding the direction of the space, the entire group was forced to reckon with what they wanted in the intensive days and what was needed to set the stage for these three months together.

Aon took a stand to come to a collective agreement on the context and purpose of Phase I, stating: “I’ve seen movements fail because they lack a clear context.” The group determined that, in order to move forward, a shared foundation of certain distinctions was needed: the Four Feelings (Anger, Sadness, Fear, and Joy) and their conscious applications, basic Parts Work, and Torus Technology (a non-hierarchical tool for collective decision-making). While these were similar conclusions to what the Infinity Ring had come to, they were made all the richer because they arose authentically from the group intelligence, rather than being imposed as top-down directives.

While I don’t recommend this experiment for every group, the background, experience, and capacity of the core team of Phase I made it possible to create a space of decentralized, co-creative leadership.

The Principle of Generosity

During the intensive days, the group worked with the Map of Low Drama, a modified version of Stephen Karpman’s Drama Triangle. The Map of Low Drama describes a common unconscious relational pattern in which people take on the roles of Victim, Persecutor, or Rescuer as a way of avoiding responsibility for their feelings and choices.

One potential hazard highlighted by the group was the tendency to become fanatical about the map—making it “wrong” or “bad” to be in Victim, Persecutor, or Rescuer, for example, or demonizing somebody because they made an offer that came from a place of care, but was “contaminated by” (i.e., carried the trace of) a Rescuer impulse.

In such instances, the group explored Generosity as a possible move: saying something like, “I see the care in what you’re doing (e.g., offering me your chair so I can sit down), and I don’t want to be rescued.”

Practiced in this way, the map becomes less a weapon for judging others and more a tool for taking responsibility and relating with clarity.

Creating vs. Relating

Early on in the intensive days, Aon brought the distinction of Relating vs. Creating: When are we in a Relating Space, and when are we in a Creating Space?

This is a distinction the Infinity Ring has been working with the past months, as well as one that Jonas and I track in our connection (we have separate chats for our Relating Space and our Creating Space).

Designating these spaces is a way to bring clarity about purpose and stay conscious of where the group is directing its energy and why.

The conversation began when Aon wanted to dive into the distinctions needed in Phase I, and a relational issue with his partner Vienera arose: “Often, in our relating, I want you to listen to me, and not just brush aside what I say,” she said.

When the group began to shift towards addressing the relational issue, Aon pushed back: “I don’t want the conversation to be derailed by every relational issue that comes up. It’s like the house is burning and I ask somebody to hand me the fire extinguisher and they say, ‘I don’t like the tone you used with me just now.’”

What Aon was pointing to was the importance of context—protecting Creating Space from being unconsciously overtaken by every interpersonal dynamic.

These relational issues inevitably affect the collective and our ability to create together. Relating is not an inconvenience to be handled so that creating can take place, but a microcosm of what is happening in the system as a whole.

What became clear in that moment was the necessity to differentiate spaces so that Creating does not devolve into endless processing and Relating is not bypassed in the name of efficiency.

In practice, this meant learning to move consciously between the two. As an experiment, our group has started to bring more clarity when proposing spaces by:

1. Naming whether it is a Relating or Creating Space

2. Sharing the purpose of the space (e.g., to foster greater intimacy in the group by sharing withholds)

3. Giving a rough sense of how long the space will take.

This creates clear containers for both, rather than collapsing them into one.

This experiment has deepened my own exploration of surrendered leadership and deconstructing hierarchy. Instead of assuming that others want what I want or beginning to unconsciously hold space, I make clear proposals and invitations—ones that others are free to accept or decline.

For example, at the start of grouptime, I might say: “I propose a Relating Space of Heart Gym (a paired practice where people feel and express from the Four Feelings) for 10 min each, for a total of 20 min. Any resistance?”

In this way, clarity of purpose allows both Creating and Relating to unfold with greater integrity.

Collaboration of the Masculine & Feminine

Some transformational modalities lean more towards the masculine (Yang), and some more towards the feminine (Yin).

Possibility Management is a Yang modality, with an emphasis on distinctions, action, efficiency, and creation. The energy of most PM spaces is what I would describe as penetrating and driving—operating with clear frameworks, precise language, and a sense of direction.

Circling is a Yin modality, with an emphasis on presence, attunement, slowness, and relating. The energy of most Circling spaces is what I would describe as spacious and open.

These two energies need one another.

Without attunement, Possibility Management spaces become cutting, aggressive, and disconnected.

Without direction, Circling spaces become stagnant, looping, and ambiguous.

One of the research areas that has emerged in Phase I is how to synthesize the masculine and feminine to create an integrated whole.

How can I hold spaces that are rooted both in deep presence and in clear purpose, and that bring people to their edge without pressure?

This is part of my current ongoing research.

The Planetary Peace Council

I was sitting in the main hall one evening when Aon and Marcus approached me to talk about collaboration with LØS (Landsforeningen af Økosamfund, the Danish Ecovillage Network). A moment later, Jonas arrived and pulled up a chair.

The air was charged with electricity, and while the conversation began with LØS, what ensued was something much bigger—an outline of a global movement, initiation journeys for youth, talks of a cryptocurrency, the “No Enemies” War Room, and a nondualistic, forceful vision for humanity—all of which will shape the future of Regenera as it continues to evolve.

Discover Regenera

For our Danish friends!

Discover Regenera is a 3-day workshop focused on collaboration and group dynamics in community.

This space focuses on practical tools for communication, shared decision-making, and responsibility in community life. We will work with simple distinctions around feelings and how they can be used constructively in everyday situations, and explore ways for individuals to take more agency and responsibility in group processes. The format is immersive and participatory—a shared experiment where we practice new ways of relating and collaborating and learn directly from what unfolds in the group.

The intention is to support ecovillages by strengthening the relational side of community life, alongside ecological and permaculture design.

Dates: 2-4 April, 10:00-18:00 daily
Contribution: 1800-3600 kr, sliding scale (includes meals and accommodation)
Location: Avalonhuset, Åsum

Registration here.

For more information, please reach out to regenera.life.project@gmail.com. 8 spots available.

Join Us

Join the Regenera Village Telegram group here. When you join, please introduce yourself and what brings you to Regenera.

Support Us

If you’d like to support our work, you can become a paid subscriber on Substack or contribute to our Artizen fund:

Please comment below to share about your discoveries in transformational community building!

Love,

Hannah

Collaborator’s note: I started writing this piece in January, just following the first Regenera Villaging call to announce Phase I. Two months, three countries, and two weeks into the actual Phase I of Regenera later, my experience on this topic has expanded kaleidoscopically beyond what is represented here. And I still offer this, an initial research hypothesis into linguistic bridge building from which many experiments continue to grow.

Back in January (also known as a million years ago in community life time), we had our first Regenera Villaging call, with the purpose of sharing more about the project and inviting people to join us for our Phase I in Denmark. In our preparation for the call, we faced what proved to be a sensitive question - what “language” do we use to describe the project?

The Regenera core team (me, Hannah, Jonas, and Karl) have spent varying amounts of time (ranging from three months to three years) working with a transformational framework called Possibility Management (henceforth, “PM”). PM has expanded my capacity to relate with myself, others, and the world in unimaginably empowering ways. Since integrating the principles and practices of PM into my life, I frequently use a PM-specific lexicon, which includes non-standard definitions for English words and newly created words. The following are some examples that we use just in the first couple of pages of our codex (see below):

Codex (noun): a document defining the purpose, rules of engagement, context, structure, and governance of a project.

Context (noun): the level of responsibility that a space, team, or project is operating at, whether consciously or unconsciously.

Feelings (noun): energy and information originating in the present moment that are intended for negotiating and creating.

Emotions (noun): incomplete feelings from the past and/or an external source (an authority figure, an institution) that are intended for healing.

As we prepared to share Regenera, we asked - do we use language from PM in sharing about Regenera, as, at that point, much of the framework for the project came from PM? Or do we “translate” the terms that we use into “standard” English, knowing that some of the people on the call have no background in PM?

This quandary is not unique by a long shot to PM. In my prior career as a private investigator, I learned a new set of terms and definitions on a daily basis in order to be at home with clients from different industries. When I began CrossFit several years back, I similarly learned an entirely new set of terms that allowed me to participate in and discuss the sport.

Across these different codeswitching experiences, I have discovered that I often have (at least) two purposes in using a new lexicon: clarity (conscious), and belonging (unconscious).

Conscious Purpose: Clarity

Especially in the PM framework, words communicate more than their written, intellectual definition—many of the words are distinctions.

As I was sitting here trying to describe what distinctions mean in a PM frame without looping in PM terms, I was reminded of one of my favorite fantasy novel series, The Kingkiller Chronicle. In the second novel, The Wise Man’s Fear, the protagonist’s mentor describes the art of “naming,” a vein of magic taught at the university that the protagonist attends. He shares the near impossibility of the challenge that naming presents:

“He reached into a pocket and pulled out a river stone, smooth and dark. ‘Describe the precise shape of this. Tell me of the weight and pressure that forged it from sand and sediment. Tell me how the light reflects from it. Tell me how the world pulls at the mass of it, how the wind cups it as it moves through the air. Tell me how the traces of its iron will feel the calling of a loden-stone. All of these things and a hundred thousand more make up the name of this stone.” He held it out to us at an arm’s length. ‘This single, simple stone.’”

When I use words to communicate the distinction between feelings and emotions, you as the reader may be able to understand in your mind. However, actually holding a distinction goes beyond the level of mental understanding, and requires that something lands through experiences in your different bodies (intellectual, emotional, physical, energetic, and archetypal—all of which are, of course, also distinctions) in such a way that changes who you are moving forward.

Therefore, a conscious purpose that I have in using PM vocabulary is to be clear and specific, and not lose the potency of a distinction.

Unconscious Purpose: Belonging

“I PR’ed my snatch!”

The Crossfitters in the group applauded and pumped their fists, and the non-Crossfitters looked bemused and moderately disturbed. The joy I felt in that moment had two edges—the joy of belonging, and the unconscious benefit of how some people not understanding re-enforced my belonging.

The concept of belonging, in a setting as specific as sports and as existential as society, requires that there be an in-group and an out-group. Even if I have no (deliberate) malicious purpose to create or reinforce an out-group, believing that I can belong somewhere or to something requires that I also believe that I or other people could or do not belong.

Using language has long been my best strategy for creating belonging, and thus also exclusion and scarcity. I have used, and continue to use, complex and varied vocabulary to ensure that others think that I am “smart,” and by extension valuable and not someone to kick out.

When I look at the language I am using in any situation, I now seek to guard against my own patterns. I check if I am unconsciously excluding people for the sake of my own belonging. I see that, if I am using a term that I know or suspect someone will not understand, that my purpose is then for them to not understand.

Asking Dangerous Questions

On the Regenera Villaging call, every time I used a PM term, I defined it. I told myself that this was a reasonable compromise, taking on the risks of replacing distinctions with near-synonyms (as referenced above in Clarity) in order to guard myself against creating an out-group (Belonging).

In doing this, however, I closed a transformational door to the call attendees. I shut off the possibility that someone on the call could ask the very dangerous question—“what does that mean?”

“What does that mean” reveals that I don’t know. Not knowing is an extremely dangerous “weakness” in modern culture, which is dedicated to hierarchy and scarcity. If I don’t know, I may be judged, ridiculed, cast out, manipulated, influenced, taken advantage of, and so on.

What I have discovered in my new culture, however, is that sharing “I don’t know” opens up new, unexplored, and significant territory. I was at an event in New York in November about post-capitalist economies when my friend raised her hand, and asked what “externalities” were. The moment she asked, I realized—I didn’t know the answer! I just went along pretending that I knew, so I wouldn’t look “stupid,” and in doing so, lost the full information and impact of what the speaker was sharing.

In other spaces where people have bravely declared that they did not know, sometimes someone else gives them an answer. And more often in the spaces that I now frequent, people in the space come together and collaborate to create an experiment or path through which the prior ‘not-knower’ can discover something new for themselves and those around them.

If I had not defined every term in the Regenera Villaging call, some people may have done exactly what I have done so many times, and pretended they knew what I meant. They might even have decided that they were not interested in being involved with this project, on the basis of me using inaccessible or unintelligible language. Or they might have chosen to reveal their discomfort in not knowing, and opened a space where we could discover together how to reach a point of mutual understanding.

Building Bridges

I want to live in a culture where I and those around me are transparent and forthcoming in sharing when we don’t know, with the purpose of discovering together. Closing the gap between this new culture and the one described above (of guarding myself against not knowing and not belonging) requires practice and patience on both sides.

How do I hold space, both on the Regenera calls and in my life at large, for myself and others to practice being clear and generous in our communication?

Bridge building.

This is one of the three core areas I am committed to researching at Regenera, and one that continues to evolve for me even before entering into Phase I. I had been assuming that a bridge started at you and ended at me, which would require linear movement (e.g. I change my language, or you figure it out).

As I discovered in a recent experiment of building somatic bridges (which looked like a group of women climbing on top and underneath each other while screaming, are you touching me?!), is that bridge building is a process of negotiating intimacy. It looks like both of us (whether that is me and participants in a Regenera call, or the Regenera team and a Danish ecovillage that we visit, or me and a lover or partner) making generous offers to each other, whether that is me choosing to use a term you know, or you asking me what you mean when you don’t understand. It looks like me being clear and explicit about my purpose for selecting what language I use, and you revealing your fear of not knowing.

Instead of me coming to you, or you coming to me, we instead build a bridge together towards a place of intimacy we have not been before, so that we travel beyond anywhere either of us has ever been.

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Introduction

Current systems of capitalism and colonialism have brought humanity to a breaking point. Humans have created a web of interrelated crises by prioritizing extraction over reciprocity and control over collaboration—both with one another and with the Earth.

Small, regenerative communities offer a pathway out of current systems of separation and exploitation. And yet many community projects crumble because they lack the tools to create responsible and conscious relational dynamics.

Regenera is a living laboratory to develop new ways of relating, heal patterns of disconnection, and catalyze transformation. It is a space to cultivate the evolution of consciousness, in service of personal, interpersonal, societal, and planetary well-being.

Through time-bound communal experiments, Regenera prototypes cultures that nurture responsibility, awareness, and collaboration—planting seeds for a more regenerative future on planet Earth.

As Within, So Without

In Service of Gaia and of Life

Codex

Codex (noun): a document defining the purpose, rules of engagement, context, structure, and governance of a project.

The Codex makes Regenera visible and accessible to people outside of the project. It creates a resonance field so that potential participants, collaborators, or supporters can understand what Regenera is about and decide whether and how they want to take part in it.

At the same time, the Codex is not the project itself. If a project treats its Codex as fixed rules that must be followed, the document becomes restrictive, limiting change and creativity. A Codex is not a rulebook to replace human judgment and nuance, but a starting point. As Regenera evolves, this Codex will also evolve.

Purpose

The purpose of Regenera is twofold:

1. To serve as a living laboratory for future long-term transformational community projects

2. To document learnings and create shareable blueprints for other community initiatives

The following pillars comprise the main research at Regenera:

1. Radical Relating:

With increased consciousness and transparency in relating, possibilities for collaboration and lasting change open up.

Radical relating means meeting in the present, sharing honestly and vulnerably, and revealing parts that operate from survival and separation. Regenera will run experiments in co-creating regular emotional hygiene spaces, including deprivatizing intimacy, revealing internal and dyadic processes to the team, and employing technologies for creating a group field.

2. Community Finance:

Modern capitalist structures teach that owning and hoarding money and material possessions is necessary to survive.

Regenera’s research in community finance has two purposes: (1) to experiment with alternatives to individualistic, defensive money ownership; and (2) to reveal and heal conditioning around money and ownership. Regenera will run experiments in resource pooling, non-material value identification and transacting, and sourcing money and other resources as a collective.

3. Bridge Building

Regenera will not be an island. The team will collaborate with as many people, groups, and communities as possible, building (non-physical) bridges in the following ways:

• Developing relationships with people and projects in proximity to Regenera’s physical location;

• Cross-pollinating transformational methods, including Possibility Management, Nonviolent Communication, Nonviolent Global Liberation, Transformational Connection, Authentic Relating, Parts Work, etc., in order to mutually upgrade the existing tools; and

• Sharing research in multiple formats using clear, accessible language.

Principles of Engagement

Note: The following section uses terms developed by a framework called Possibility Management. In this particular framework, certain words (such as “feelings” and “emotions”) are defined in a way that is different from their common use in the English language.

These principles are non-negotiable in the sense that they form the starting point for this project. We, the authors of this Codex (see Infinity Ring, under Circles of Stewardship) have chosen them because, in our experience, working from these principles opens up the possibility of deeper collaboration, individual empowerment, and play.

Principles of engagement are not rules to be enforced, but guidelines. They are meant to be applied as a practice of awareness, rather than a standard of perfection.

• I practice distinguishing between “feelings” and “emotions.” Feelings are energy and information that come from the present (e.g., I feel scared that I forgot my keys, so I’m going to double check my pockets), which I can use to navigate my life. Emotions are old, unfelt feelings from the past (e.g., I feel angry because when you pointed out my shoes were dirty because it reminded me of my mom’s criticisms of my appearance). I use my feelings to navigate my life and emotions as doorways for healing. I do not try to negotiate intimacy from emotions because then I would be reacting to something that happened in the past, rather than the present.

• I use emotions as doorways to emotional healing processes, which give me the opportunity to bring any old, unfelt emotions to completion and create space for feelings with information from the present.

• I practice relating from my adult ego state, where I share and negotiate from my feelings in the present moment, and not my child ego state, where I depend on others to give me what I need; my parent ego state, where I parrot the voices of external authorities to make things “right” or “wrong”; or any other ego states rooted in survival.

• I welcome feedback as neutral information about what is working or not working, rather than experiencing it as judgment, criticism, or blame. I welcome coaching as a way to gain access to greater possibilities. In this way, I practice rapid learning in order to get a clear x on the map about where I am and the shifts I can make to get closer to where I want to be. If I am not available for feedback and coaching, I communicate that to my teammates.

• I reveal my unconscious beliefs, survival strategies, and the ways that I create separation from others (e.g., manipulation, revenge, control). I am upfront about my shadow principles, such as hierarchy, domination, and judgment, and I create spaces to receive feedback from others about how those are showing up.

Context

“Context” here refers to the level of responsibility that a space, team, or project is operating at, whether consciously or unconsciously.

Responsibility can be distinguished in 6 levels, drawn from Possibility Management:

• Zero responsibility: I cannot be held accountable for the results of any of my actions (e.g., newborn infants and people with psychological impairments).

• Child responsibility: I believe I have little to no power over what happens in my life. My default state is complaining and playing victim, waiting for someone (my parents, my partner) or something (corporations, the government) to come rescue me. If I make a mess, somebody else cleans it up.

• Adolescent responsibility: I consume energy and resources while giving back little to my community and surroundings. When I do “take responsibility,” it comes from an internal orientation of wanting to prove myself.

• Adult responsibility: Adult responsibility is fair. If I make a mess, I clean it up.

• High responsibility: This is where responsibility starts to become unfair. I begin to clean up messes that I did not make. If I see dirty dishes in the sink, I do them, not because they belong to me, but because I want everyone to benefit from having a beautiful space. I act not from a place of obligation or superiority, but because responsibility is a natural expression of my love, care, and generosity.

• Radical responsibility: I am at source for everything I am creating in my life. There is no victimhood, no persecution, no rescuing. There is only creation. This level of responsibility is the most unreasonable, and creates the highest level of empowerment. There is no blame or fault in radical responsibility. In every situation, I can find agency. Even if I am living under physically repressive conditions, I can take responsibility for the stories I tell or the way I relate to my circumstances.

Operating at a child level of responsibility creates social and ecological crises such as climate change and war by disconnecting action from consequence.

Operating at a level of radical responsibility creates radically different results. At a personal level, this looks like feeling instead of numbing, relating consciously, and responding with self-awareness rather than reactivity. At a societal level, it looks like caring for other beings (human and non-human) and developing pathways for systems change.

From this place, a different future becomes possible: a regenerative culture rooted in responsibility, integrity, and collaboration, where humans remember themselves as powerful beings, co-creating with the forces of nature.

With this purpose, the team at Regenera commits to practicing at a level of radical responsibility. Or, in other words: radical responsibility serves as the cornerstone that Regenera orients towards as a path of ongoing development.

Structure

Circles of Stewardship

Regenera operates using circles of stewardship, which differentiate levels of decision-making. Those who hold longer-term responsibility for the project carry greater decision-making responsibility. While everyone is encouraged to make proposals and give feedback, not all decisions are of the same scope—hence the distinction of circles.

This model allows Regenera to remain non-hierarchical while guarding the context and purpose of the project.

Regenera’s Circles of Stewardship and their respective responsibilities are broadly defined as the following:

• Center: Infinity Ring – Hold direction and coherence

• Inner Field: Full Residents – Generate culture and determine structure

• Outer Field: Partial Residents – Contribute experiments and perspective

• Edge: Visitors – Participate and interact without shaping structure

• Halo: Virtual Members – Circulate insight from beyond the field

1. Center – Infinity Ring (Hannah Hirsh, Nina Chausow & Jonas Ratza)

The term “Infinity Ring” references the work of James P. Carse, who distinguishes between two types of games—finite games, played for the purpose of winning, at which time the game ends; and infinite games, played to continue the play itself, with changing rules and no end goal. The project of Regenera is an infinite game—hence the term Infinity Ring.

The Infinity Ring is responsible for defining the long-term vision of Regenera, stewarding the Codex, and guarding the context, purpose, and rules of engagement of the project. Full residents who stay for multiple phases of Regenera may enter the Infinity Ring by making a proposal to the existing Infinity Ring and taking the group through the resistance decision-making process (see Torus Technology, under Governance).

Time Commitment: Ongoing, multi-phase stewardship

​​Primary Domain: Strategic Direction
Secondary Domain: Cultural & Methodological Design

Responsibilities:

• Define the long-term vision of Regenera

• Guard the context, purpose, and rules of engagement of the project

• Make strategic decisions that affect the core pillars of research

Regenera Infinity Ring (RIR) 1.0 (Hannah Hirsh, Nina Chausow, and Jonas Ratza) is researching how to hold space without creating a hierarchy and without fixing the culture in place. RIR 1.0 does not aim to create a static way of relating; its role is to support ongoing evolution by letting things end when their time is complete, so that new possibilities can emerge.

Please note that the Infinity Ring holds and guards the context; it does not control the project. If you notice yourself deferring your power or agency to the Infinity Ring (or anyone else), you are invited to share about it transparently and explore what would support you in reclaiming your authority. This is a culture that actively supports that exploration.

2. Inner Field – Full Residents (3 months)

Full residents steer the cultural direction of Regenera by actively co-creating and guiding the core pillars of research.

Time Commitment: Full phase (3 months)

Primary Domain: Cultural & Methodological Design
Secondary Domain: Operational & Tactical Decisions

Responsibilities:

• Actively co-create the culture of the space

• Initiate and steward long-term experiments

• Hold space for relational practices and group times

• Make decisions regarding daily or weekly cadences

3. Outer Field – Partial Residents (2+ weeks)

Partial residents are researchers who participate in operational decision-making and contribute to the culture of Regenera.

Time Commitment: Two weeks or longer, as negotiated with the team

Primary Domain: Operational & Tactical Decisions

Secondary Domain: Cultural & Methodological Design

Responsibilities:

• Initiate and steward short-term experiments

• Participate in existing structures and long-term experiments

• Hold or co-hold space for relational practices

• Make proposals related to logistics, events, or short-term initiatives

4. Edge – Visitors (Under 2 weeks)

Visitors are guests inside an ongoing experiment.

Time Commitment: Less than 2 weeks, as negotiated with the team

Primary Domain: Personal & Relational Agency

Responsibilities:

• Initiate short-term experiments

• Offer reflections and feedback

• Make proposals related to logistics

5. Halo – Virtual Members

Virtual members are invited to engage in Regenera’s virtual offerings, including Telegram, other media channels, and online spaces. They may share relevant experiments and discoveries so that the village can learn collectively.

Time Commitment: Remote participation

Monthly Intensives

At the beginning of each month in Phase I (early March, April, and May), there will be a three-day intensive, required for Full and Partial Residents. These intensives serve as the foundation of the Regenera team and will include:

• Context-setting and rules of engagement;

• Distinctions that create a common language and commitment to responsibility;

• Embodied and relational practices to integrate these distinctions; and

• Group initiation spaces to create the group body and seed research questions.

The April and May intensives will revisit these distinctions as needed for new teammates. Otherwise, the focus will be on deepening the collective field and designing new experiments for the month ahead.

Phase I (March–May 2026, Denmark)

Phase I of Regenera has the secondary purpose of bringing transformational work to the Danish Ecovillage Network (LØS) and will take place at Avalonhuset (The House of Avalon) in Denmark from March 8th through May 29th. Exact arrival and departure times will be coordinated in the Telegram group for Regenera Phase I. The first three-day monthly intensive (required for Full and Partial Residents) will begin March 9th.

Avalonhuset is a hub for exploring collaborative, regenerative, and transformational ways of being, run by Aon Solarra and Vienera Godsvil. The main facility consists of 8 newly renovated rooms accommodating up to 18 guests, the Lotus Hall (a large music hall with excellent acoustics and production capabilities), and communal kitchen and lounge areas.

Located in the middle of Denmark, Avalonhuset is 5 minutes from the center of Odense and surrounded by natural and cultural attractions, including nearby forests with diverse bird life, the Odense River Trail, the beach, and the Cultural Botanical Garden. Copenhagen is accessible by train, just over an hour away.

Financial Contributions

Accommodations are offered on a sliding scale, as listed below. Any contribution above the minimum will be split equally between Avalonhuset and the Regenera Infinity Ring, as a gesture of appreciation for both the space and the spaceholding.

• Center: Infinity Ring

  • €18–30/night, plus communal food and transportation costs, accounted for biweekly

• Inner Field: Full Residents

  • €18–30/night, plus communal food and transportation costs, accounted for biweekly

• Outer Field: Partial Residents

  • €25–37/night, plus communal food and transportation costs, accounted for biweekly

• Edge: Visitors

  • €30–42/night, plus communal food and transportation costs

• Halo: Virtual Members

  • Whatever you wish to donate to make Regenera fly.

Intake Process

The first step for those who wish to join Phase I of Regenera as a Visitor, Partial Resident, or Full Resident is an intake form. This form is designed to give insight into your experience with transformational work, your motivation for building community, and areas of research you want to explore with the Regenera team.

Interviews will be conducted by the Infinity Ring to check for resonance with the purpose and context of the project; not everyone may receive an interview. Invitations to join Phase I will be determined by the Infinity Ring using the resistance decision-making process (see Torus Technology, under Governance).

Daily Living

Outside of the monthly intensives, daily life will include the following offerings co-created by the team:

• Morning movement and contemplative practices

• At least one daily co-created and shared meal

• Group sessions five times per week, which will include group field/circle technologies, radical relating spaces, and healing processes

• Dedicated weekly time for documenting and sharing experiment results through social media posts, newsletter updates, videos, and podcast recordings

• Daily time blocks for remote/computer work

• Weekly solo/recharge time

• External community engagement days

• Once a week “adventure” days to explore the surrounding area

Governance

Torus Technology

Regenera applies Torus Technology, a simple, non-hierarchical meeting technology to support efficient decision-making.

Proposals

The decision-making process begins when a person notices a job to be done. For example, say somebody notices there is no system for cleaning the fridge regularly, and the fridge is spilling over with rotten food. In a community that does not apply Torus Technology, this person might bring the issue to the rest of the team by saying “The fridge is dirty. What are we going to do about it?”

In a team that uses Torus Technology, if somebody sees a job, this means they have enough awareness to be responsible for the job. This does not mean they do it all by themselves. The first step is to make a proposal. A proposal is a clear, actionable offer, stated as “I propose…” For example, “I propose to instate a fridge cleaning rotation, with two teammates cleaning the fridge every Sunday.”

Resistance Decision-Making

After a proposal is made, each person in the space holds up both hands, with fingers corresponding to their level of resistance to the proposal. Zero fingers means “I have 0 resistance to the proposal; this works for me.” Ten fingers up means “I have 10 resistance and will leave the space if this happens.”

Teammates can also show insistence by pointing fingers down. In this case, ten fingers down means “I have 10 insistence and will leave the space if this does NOT happen.”

Resistance is information that sources from the group intelligence. People share the intelligence behind their resistance or insistence, starting with the highest numbers. These shares take the form: “I feel scared/mad/sad/glad because…” For example, someone might say: “I have 5 resistance. I feel scared because 5Rhythms happens on Sundays, and many people will not be available to clean the fridge that day.”

Based on what is revealed, anyone may make a new or revised proposal—for example, “I propose a fridge cleaning rotation, with two teammates cleaning the fridge on Mondays instead of Sundays”—and check again for resistance.

Note: Torus Technology uses the intelligence of the feelings. An emotion (e.g., “I feel angry because my mom always forced me to clean the fridge and I hated it”) is information coming from the past, not the present, and therefore is not useful as the basis for resistance to a proposal.

When the proposal is deemed “good enough for now, safe enough to try,” even if a few fingers remain, the proposal is implemented as an experiment. Anyone can make a new proposal at any point and check for resistance.

Nodes

Say there is high resistance in the group to the initial proposal and no counterproposal is reached. In that case, the next step is to create a node.

A node is a temporary working group dedicated to a specific job, composed of members of the team who care about the outcome. Anyone can start, join, or leave a node at any time.

If a job is relatively complex—e.g., determining ethical standards for sourcing communal food—there may be multiple meetings of the node. Once the node has landed upon a proposal, a representative of the node brings the proposal to the entire group and checks for resistance there.

Ideally, all team members who care about the outcome are a part of the original node, and the proposal passes with low resistance. If somebody in the wider group has high resistance, they are responsible for initiating another round of the node in order to improve the decision.

Your questions and comments about this Codex are welcome! The Infinity Ring can be reached on Telegram: @hannahhirsh, @ninachausow, @jonasratza.

Join the Regenera Village Telegram group here.

Last updated: Jan 2026

Change Log

This change log notes significant shifts in language and practice as Regenera evolves.

19 Jan 2026 – First public release

Introduction

“The quality of our relating is the quality of our creating. “

To paraphrase Erotics of Liberation, communities and projects don’t fall apart because they lack drive, ambition, or innovative ideas. They fall apart because people have Underworlds and unhealed wounds and lack the tools to handle how these elements play out in relational dynamics.

The more consciousness, transparency, and integrity we can bring to our relating spaces, the healthier our collaborations will be, and the better the chances they will have of creating real, lasting change.

Technology: Naming the Elephant

As Nina, Jonas, and I embark on the project of creating Regenera, a Living Systems Laboratory for Post-Capitalist Cultures, one of the technologies we have implemented as a form of relational hygiene is called Elephants. Also known as “clearings” or “withholds,” Elephants is the practice of making space to name any “elephants in the room.”

By checking that nothing has gone unsaid, we can prevent resentments from building up and quietly destroying the project from the inside out.

This practice can be done daily or weekly, depending on the cadence of your project. We allot 30 minutes to this practice at the end of each team meeting.

Case Study: Hannah and Jonas

During one of our team meetings, Jonas proposed implementing a resource sharing project at Youtopia, the community in Brooklyn where Nina and I currently live.

The initiative, inspired by Will Ruddick’s Grassroots Economics, would start with everyone listing the gifts or contributions they could make to a common pool (e.g. baking, massage, cleaning, maintenance tasks), as well as their needs, and identify where contributions and needs overlap, so that people can begin to exchange resources within their community, rather than outsourcing trade to a globalized economy.

When Jonas propose the initiative, I felt some low-level anger, but wasn’t conscious enough to know what it was about. My Gremlin (the part of me that protects my Box and my survival strategies) immediately handled this anger for me by saying, “You’re not even going to be here to implement the project. Nina and I would be the ones to actually do it.“

Because Nina is radically on my team, she calls me on my bullshit. When it was time to name Elephants, she said, “I feel scared that we skated over your Gremlin’s passive-aggressive comment from earlier, and that there is resentment there. Will you check what’s really going on?“

I did. Her scanning was entirely accurate—there was resentment.

A couple weeks prior, Jonas (who currently lives in Germany) had told me he was going to apply for a visa that would allow him to stay in the US for up to 6 months.

Then, a week later, he told me he had bought his flights, but that he would fly back to Berlin in January. He did not acknowledge that his plans had shifted. When I asked, he clarified that he wanted to be in Berlin for January to fulfill some obligations there.

At the time, I felt angry about the lack of communication from him, but did not voice it. Why did I not voice it? We will come to that in a moment.

Now, I told him that I wanted clear communication from him, and that the flip-flopping on his decision did not work for me.

Yet there was still something deeper going on. Because Jonas is a sensitive person, he could tell, and gave me another doorway: “I’m scared that you also feel sad I won’t be there for more time.”

Again, his scanning was accurate. I did feel sad at the time, when he shared his change in plans, as well as angry—but I did not tell him how I felt.

Because Jonas has struggle with setting boundaries in the past, I have wanted to encourage him to make his own decisions—sometimes at the cost of voicing my own feelings. In doing this, I have lost integrity by veering into rescuing him and trying to make him comfortable holding his boundaries.

In the Elephant process, I shared that I felt sad because he would not stay for a longer period, and because I wanted to share my feelings with him.

“I want you to make decisions that are right for you, and I may have feelings or emotions about them, and that’s OK,” I said.

Jonas answered that he wanted me to share my feelings—and that he would appreciate it if I still affirmed his right to make his own decisions. He requested that I deliver my communications with an affirmation first, and I agreed.

Wrap-Up

The result of this process: we created a path forward for future communications, and I cleared the resentment I had created towards Jonas. I discovered more about what was happening underneath the surface and was able to share that with him. At the end, I had the sense that the energetic field between us had been cleared—even though I had not been aware of the smudges on the glass before. Not bad for a 30-minute process!

The Elephant process makes space for these unconscious elements of our psyche to be revealed, so we can come into deeper connection. If you wish to employ Elephants, I highly recommend applying distinctions from Possibility Management, including the 4 Feelings, Feelings vs. Emotions, Expectations and Resentment, and the Feelings Form.

The full recording of this interaction (including my Gremlin comment and the Elephant process) can be viewed below.

Enjoy!

Love,

Hannah

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