Discover the tools and maps to create vibrant community
Our ways of living together are changing fast. As more of us are looking to co-living as a way to experience the connection and community that we desire, we are also finding that it isn’t always ice cream at the beach.
What do we need, apart from the idea of co-living in order to do it well? To resolve the inevitable human problems which arise in this context?
At this weekend workshop, Authentic Relating experts Sara Ness and Daniel Brooks will share learnings on how to navigate the territory of community life and teach how to use a number of tools designed to transform conflict into connection so communities can thrive.
In this workshop we’ll learn to:
- Create agreements that everyone can feel enrolled in
- Design and lead rituals which cultivate community spirit
- Negotiate expectations and boundaries with housemates
- Build on the innate strengths in your community to move forward rather than orienting from a sense of what’s lacking
- Learn which tools can be uses for technical problems and which to use for emotional ones (and why this difference matters)
- Navigate the way forward when there’s conflict and unease in the community
- How to have fun in the process!
Sara Ness will also present her new Relating Languages model so you can better identify communicating styles and how to relate better.
Why do we need this?
We are less restricted by the norms of generations before us, where the expectation of “grown ups” was to quickly start a family and go nuclear. We are free to invent new ways of living and working together. This is both immensely liberating, and also at times immensely frustrating.
We have few maps for creating these new friend-family structures. The social skills we acquire in life are often handed down by mimicking our parents and playing with peers, and few of us had great models for parental or young friend relationships. Tools such as setting boundaries, stating expectations, requesting support, and sharing resentments - all essential for living together - seem insurmountably scary when we have never seen them modeled well. We need ways to live together with our chosen family, without getting stuck in resentments or family dysfunctions.
Co-living holds in it so much promise to combine the classic closeness of village living with modern ways. How can we make sure it doesn’t all end in tears?
Every bad interaction we have in living together is a little death, and it makes the vital tissue of our relationships and our lives a little weaker. When you're having an awful day and your housemate doesn't acknowledge your presence when you really need it, that's a little death. When you can't be bothered to do the dishes and your housemate silently resents you but doesn't say anything, that's also a little death.
Such small incidents can either add up to deep resentments that can disrupt a community, or they can be used to get clear on our needs, strengthening our relationships. What makes the difference is having ways to clear the space between us regularly, creating small, powerful moments of connection.
Authentic Relating offers tools to strengthen the connective tissue of interaction and engagement necessary to live with people, every day.
Who is this for?
This course is for the architects, builders, designers and leaders of co-living spaces.
It’s for everyone who lives in or would like one day to live in a community like this.
Details:
DATE – 28–29 May, 2022
TIME – Saturday 11:00–18:00
Sunday 10:00–18:00
LEADERSHIP - Daniel Brooks, Sara Ness
LOCATION - Birger Jarlsgatan 58, 114 29 Stockholm, Sweden
All times are approximate.
INVESTMENT:
$345 USD (individually)
- Groups up to 4 get 25% off each ticket (enter Coupon Code GROUP25)
- Groups of 5 or more get 40% off (enter Coupon Code GROUP40)
It's an honor system. We trust you.
Ready to join us?
Daniel Brooks
Brooks is coming up on 12 years of practice with Authentic Relating and still thinks it's a pretty neat way to navigate being human together. He is a senior course leader at ART International where he gets to do Authentic Relating for a living all over Europe. He comes from a very different background than this, having been trained in physics as well as a soldier in the Danish army, with whom he went off to far away lands several times. Nowadays he prefers to go to Zen monasteries from time to time, which are in some ways like the army but much nicer on how they go about things. Co-creative community building has been an important source of fascination, nourishment and discovery for him in the past decade, and his magic is in letting your magic come out so that your dreams may meet and play with reality. He can get really nerdy about a lot of things when in the proper company, is often socially awkward despite his competencies, and he dislikes speaking of himself in the third person.
Sara Ness
Sara is a facilitator, teacher, and community-builder who is internationally notorious for having popularized the field of Authentic Relating. In college, she traveled across the United States in college studying and filming more than 30 intentional living communities, and wrote a 250-page thesis on what it takes to form intentional, authentic, integral living communities. After realizing that communication is the key to living together successfully, she founded learning communities in Austin and Houston, and compiled the source text for Authentic Relating Games. Over the past ten years, she has worked with tens of thousands of students in sectors from Google to Mindvalley to Burning Man, teaching authentic leadership and authentic communication.
Sara is passionate about exposing the joy of human connection and exploring our creative potential through relationship. She’s most lit up by creating things – projects, books, movements, systems, anything that her heart and brain can chew on at the same time. She lives in a tiny house on a chosen-family farm just outside of Austin, Texas.