When I attempt to bring people into coliving, they may appreciate it abstractly, but there’s something missing in it. They expect to be directed. They have a passivity and complacency in their behavior. They come to events saying “what can I do to help?” rather than jumping into the fray and applying their own common sense and best judgment to help.
The simplest way of me understanding the difference is that it’s moving from the norm of a tree to a graph. A hierarchy looks like a tree, and within it a chain of managers directs behavior in a top-down manner. In this model, individual contributors may stick to narrow domains and depend on top-down direction. Moreover, the people who move up in his structure often do it because they’re sucked into the social game of it all, the status, the power, etc. In contrast, within a graph everyone needs to know a bit about everything, everyone is autonomous and part of shifting coalitions, and as such it requires a lot of self-direction and common sense.
Coliving cultivates these qualities, but it’s a gradual process. In myself it took between 3-5 years for my mindset and reflexes to shift.
In Sleepawake Immersive Structure and Dynamics I discussed the Sleepawake Immersive, a 1-week retreat, and in an interesting way, I think it radicalizes people into community in a complementary way, but one which is significantly more efficient. Essentially, it provides the end result of functional community, which is a kind of unconditional holding and acceptance of one’s experience.
After running a series of alumni events, it’s been fascinating to see the degree of continuity between each cohort, that this is a stable embodied result. Moreover, this embodied updates appears to be one way. Once directly experienced, a significant percentage (maybe half?) prioritize changing other day-to-day aspects of their life to be line with the update. This is incredibly powerful, it’s so hard to organize people in a meaningful way, but to organize around a shared embodied experience has proven to be surprisingly resilient.
Could these two paths meet? Could coliving provide an accessible container for the same kind of unconditional holding as the Immersive? Are there other complements to support that process?