A Community of Practice

The following is at the essence of the small group model I’ve been developing and testing and - well - always learning and updating. The ongoing goal is creating spaces where people connect and thrive. It was suggested to me that what I was doing was a “Community of Practice.” I realized that it is!

A community of practice is a group of people who gather around a shared intent - something each person has chosen, and chosen together. It isn't a class, and it isn't a club. Nobody is there to be fixed, and nobody is the guru. The intent is the center. Everyone holds it, and it holds everyone.

Small groups matter because some things only happen at small scale. In a circle of five or six, you are seen. You can't hide in the back row, and after a while you don't want to. Trust builds in a way it simply can't in a room of sixty. Safety isn't a nice extra; it's the ground everything else grows from. In a small, safe group, people say the true thing - sometimes for the first time in years.

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In this community, the shared intent is growth. Expansion. Going beyond the self we've each settled into. Not self-improvement as homework, but growth as a natural movement - the way a plant reaches for light. A reaching toward more aliveness, more well-being, more of who we actually are. Toward being able to say, and mean it: I know who I am. I love who I am.

The tools are small, safe, trust-based dynamic groups - and dynamic is the key word. These groups are about change. Nothing in them is meant to stay static. People arrive exactly as they are, and the group meets them there and moves with them. The trust makes it safe enough to change, and the change keeps the trust alive.

Some teachings say: stop pushing, just be. There is real wisdom in that. But I've come to see a process of expansion into being. Through alignment of mind, body, and spirit - the alignment and flow meditation we practice - the pushing falls away on its own, and being is what remains. Growth and being aren't opposites. One ripens into the other.

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None of these ideas belongs to anybody. They are for everybody. If something here rings true, take it. Try it in your own circles. Experiment, adjust, and share what you learn. The loneliness and isolation of our time won't be undone by one person holding a good idea tightly. It will be undone by many people, in many small groups, practicing together.