October 15, 2023: Neural Architectures of the Collective

One of the single most powerful things we can do to transform our wellbeing is to build community. Yet because modernity has been so de-natured by domination, this is often very hard for modern people to do in a healthy way.

Since all groups–collectives, communities, institutions, and organizations– cannot but be reflections of the consciousness of the people who make decisions within them, they reflect the foundational operating systems and cosmologies of their members. Most modern people have been steeped in domination paradigms their entire lives, and therefore create collectives that are based on verticality and power over rather than power with. We have lost the ancestral technologies of reciprocity, relatedness, and horizontality that characterized our small band hunter gatherer origins and ancestors and which are the source code for collective wellbeing.

At the present time, the Restorative Practices Alliance has members and partners in nearly 50 countries, learning a shared heart-centered language of safety and connection. It has been our wish, for some time, to help people affiliated with our work connect with others with similar interests in their local geographic areas, both formally and informally, to strengthen your relatedness with like-hearted others who are near you.

Whether we believe that the future will be harder or easier, villaging is part of the path to human thriving. We want to build collective capacity for healthy mutual accompaniment in a place-based manner.

In this three hour workshop, we will begin to explore the neural architectures of collective wellbeing, as well as to connect you with others geographically close to you who are interested in engaging in similar work. What you ultimately do with these connections is up to you– we recommend you consider forming some sort of villaging.

You can look here at our Neural Architectures of the Collective website, and here at our Incomplete and Preliminary List of Ingredients for a Village.

Over the next year we will provide a series of scaffolding trainings with our faculty, mentors, and advisors to help you deepen and develop healthy neural architectures of the collective that are place-based. This is the first such training.