Our Why

The Problem

People are making simple, preventible and correctible mistakes when it comes to relational and emotional life and this comes at a steep price to all of us. Collectively we are pontificating endlessly and ineffectually as to why addiction,depression and other forms of emotional distress are not only not going away but growing globally. We seem to be missing the fact that in addition to the more visible manifestations of distress, like chemical addiction and depression, that the same river that is feeding them, is also feeding dysfunction everywhere, be it how we relate to our people, which includes our families, our co-workers, our lovers, our employees, our neighbours, our trading partners, our children, our homeless, our prisoners and our most vulnerable etc. and how we relate to our economic life, our consumption, our politics, our sexuality, our work, our exercise , our money, our planet etc.. In other words, the problem is systemic and the common thread is us and how we relate.

Our basic social unit is the family and collectively its current social output is proving to not be up to the task at hand. Our economic system, our families and institutions are producing far too many citizens who are primed for a life of distress. We are living in a rationally and economically driven world that is already awash in consumption, rules and behavioural protocols. Collectively we are biased in believing that more wealth, more consumption and more rules are the solution, but as it turns out, there are problems that cannot be resolved with such remedies. These biases and the righteous and emotionally impoverished thinking that creates them, can actually make some problems worse!
Thus far our societal response is not working and is in some ways gravely misguided. According to Bruce Alexander, Professor Emeritus of Simon Fraser University, on one of his recorded presentations, he likens those of us in the therapeutic profession and other helpers, to those who are pulling out individuals from a river of distress but nobody is dealing with “the son of a bitch” who is throwing the people in upriver”. Our current medical and economic systems are great for solving problems that are physical and logistical in nature but not for problems that are emotional and relational in nature. This does not make them wrong. It just makes them irrelevant to the task at hand which is creating internal calm or emotional and relational peace within the citizenry. Ironically, in the face of unprecedented wealth, technical connectivity and economic efficiencies , our current system seems to be creating the felt experiences of scarcity, loneliness and fear.

From my perspective, the elephant in the room that has been largely ignored , is that our lives do not sufficiently reflect how we are designed emotionally. Quite simply, we are attempting to live lives we are not designed for.

The solution

Build a community from scratch with no agenda and no rules other than “Do no harm” that understands this problem and continually redesigns itself so that it best brings what its members need and do this as economically and efficiently as possible and be able to do this virtually so that anyone anywhere can participate.

For this community to be emotionally and relationally friendly, it must at every corner consult its members as to how they are emotionally and relationally. This community then would harness the same impulse that healthy families and healthy communities and tribes do anywhere—by bringing the “Resource of Each Other” or relational and emotional alignment, to its members so that they can best fit into the community they co-create and it must go one step further.

This community must resist the rational trap of creating dogma and rules in order to govern the behaviour of its members.

This way the emotional and relational interests of its members will never be subverted to the interests of the community because they are actually and exactly the same.

In this community, a body felt sense of belonging and emotional relevance or “psychosocial integration” will not be just a possibility, but a probability, because the community created will be completely informed by our universal emotional design.

This community knows at a cellular level, that we are designed to be “sensitive” to our environment and that this is good news and not a pathology to be managed or medicalized even if what is manifested emotionally is uncomfortable, deemed unattractive or proves to be inconvenient in some way to the status quo. In fact this community understands that discomfort is often a signpost, especially in the early days of course correction, not telling us where not to go but by telling us precisely where to go, when change is itself essential. In this community, all the emotional messengers will be given their rightful place as esteemed members and seated accordingly at the front of the room at the head table. They will not be kicked to the curb and “medicalized”! This membership includes anger, fear and depression!

Our design, its corresponding impulse and its innate wisdom is a given and our individual and communal response to it is not an “option”, if we are going to get serious about healing this river of distress we find ourselves in, but one of vital importance.

In Kantian terms, this will be our categorical imperative— a “something” that we must bring in order to both heal ourselves and our institutions. In historical terms, this will be our auspicious moment. It will not just happen. It will have to be made to happen. We will have to course correct. The good news is that this kind of course correction is fun and meaningful because we will be steering for the home ports we all yearn for and away from the lonely ones we currently find ourselves in.

In the past the oppressors we have had to deal with have by and large been external. The oppressor that currently demands our attention has slipped within us and has fooled us into believing that it is who we are. That it is us. That things and our lives are just the way they are and that our wanting it or them to be any other way is foolish, unrealistic, uneconomic or utopian. We have internalized all of this. We have facilitated an enormous inside job.

The tyrant is now internal and has convinced us that forgoing a life stuffed full of connection and meaning is but a small price to pay for the perceived safety of control, for unfettered, unconscious economic growth, for certainty and for the status quo. This is not good for us. This is poison!

This time around our liberty will not be had by raging war or assassination but by surrender.

This will feel a little odd to us and especially to our men whose internal warrior often interprets powerful internal experiences as a call to forceful action. This time we need our men to sheathe their swords and reach for something much softer and infinitely more potent. We still need them to be bold and to know that they can protect us but now we also need them to be daringly relational.

Here, there is no enemy to rage against and most certainly no war to win. Here we require no combatants. We don’t need more laws. What we do need now are friends who are friendly—trading partner who are partner like, allies and connection.

This aspect of our true nature, this ancient and glorious inheritance that is imbedded deeply within us is not ,nor ever was, the problem, even though at times we thought it was. It is simply and fundamentally, the essence of who we are and as such predetermines which way to go if we want to find our way home— if we want to truly thrive.

We believe that as a species we are homesick and that it truly is time to come home! We believe the next revolution that will rock our boat will be a relational one. The future for our species and our redemption is —Relational —And it is already here.

It has been our experience that powerfully facilitated group or “pod” process holds many clues to bringing what must be brought forward and can provide a compliment to any and all other effective modalities and systems that help us move relentlessly forward. The pod process which has revealed itself to us, is an efficient, evolving, proven modality with consistent and predictable efficacy when it comes to assisting is members in returning to the emotional and relational home we all crave; this same home that preceded us, was presented to each and every one of us at our conception and that resides within us today in the form of an immense pool of unmet, unrealized potential.

And it is fun!

We are not theorizing about something that could or should work. Instead we are talking about something that does work.

We understand that emotional and relational truths are difficult to explain. The difficulty is that while the heart has always been able to move us, it and its products, resist the perceptual reach of our rational selves much like the wind resists the perceptual reach of our seeing selves. Who has seen the wind? The answer is nobody but when we see things being moved and when we ourselves can feel it, we know the truth of the wind.

Emotional truth is similar. It is very difficult to capture in words what it feels like to be completely connected to somebody or to a community. This is why we find music and powerful poetry so moving and why we align with professional sports teams, music stars and the nation state —because we can feel their corresponding emotional winds on us and within us.

The tragedy of unnecessary suffering and lost opportunity is that it is unnecessary—the costs to us and each other are avoidable. Unfortunately it also seems to be ubiquitous. These facts leave us with enormous opportunities for each and everyone of us to course correct — to win more of what we want and love and have less of what we do not want. If we do this, it will predictably change our internal experiences, and powerfully and predictably influence how our families and institutions function for the better.

Because, as we are learning, as is our internal world, so too is our external world!

Look at your life now and how you are living it and look at the lives of others around you and ask yourself this question, “Is this what I want—really want?” And then go one step farther. Ask yourself the question a wise man once suggested we all ask ourselves,“Imagine living your life precisely the way you are living it and have lived it, not just for one lifetime, but for eternity—for millions of years and from that place ask yourself is this what I really want?” Is everything you want and love here or do you want more?

Imagine that you were a person alone in the immensity of the ocean riding the waves alone. Just you and the waves and the sky. Now imagine there was another person right there beside you riding the waves along with you— someone to share the ride with. What would have changed? You are still riding the waves in the big wide ocean but you are not alone and your not being alone is what has changed your experience of you and the waves. Now imagine if you had all the people that matter to you riding the waves along with you. You are no longer alone and they are there only because they want to be — because they want to share their ride with you.