Intertidal Synergy

Mycelial musings prompted by an invitation to host Communal Reverie at the newly launching Relational Dojo...

The two Communal Reverie sessions in November and December went beautifully. Almost immediately after I had settled upon the decision to offer some regular rhythm of sessions in 2026, I received a curiously convergent invitation…

The vow field continues its isomorphic weavings… Starter cultures coalesce into relational networks like neurons sensefully seeking synaptogenesis…

Enter: The Dojo

James Baker reached out to me a couple of weeks ago, inviting me to host Communal Reverie recurringly as part of the Relational Dojo that he and my other friend Carol Xu are launching along with some other good folks (Justin Navestki, Ola O).

This new Dojo is birthing from the confluence between what had previously been Intentional Society’s Practice Dojo (James) and the Communication Dojo (Carol and Justin) affiliated with Starter Cultures…

Given the uncannily aligned timing, along with the growing affinity I’ve developed with James and Carol over the last year, this felt like an easy yes.

I’ll make another post soon strictly devoted to the concrete details, but right now I can sense the hidden whisperer calling forth deeper musings…

For those immediately interested, you can find more info on the Relational Dojo and sign up for Communal Reverie and the other relational practices being offered there (T-Group, Bohm Dialgoue, Being With It All) by following the link directly below.

ENTER THE DOJO

My sessions will be capped at 12 this time. I’ll be starting with a monthly cadence through March, taking April off and then possibly increasing the rhythm come late spring/early summer, depending on how things unfold.

Now, I leap into those musings…

The Intertidal Collective and The Dojo

I got to know both James and Carol better after they attended a two-day event that I co-hosted with Dechen, the result of the first appeal to collaboration she presented me with. We ended up calling it The Agile Collective.

Offering some reflections on that event will provide a helpful entry point toward conveying a crucial aspect of how I’m relating to the Relational Dojo.

As Dechen and I sensed into what sort of offering we might concoct together while she visited the Bay Area back in April this year, I found myself preoccupied with questions about the guiding protocols informing different varieties of we-space practice—particularly the ways such practical conventions inevitably serve as both enabling and limiting constraints.

We decided to experiment with these questions, designing a retreat that began by sequentially engaging with three different collective practice orientations—interpersonal (e.g., Circling, Transformative Connection); subtle field sensing (e.g., Collective Presencing, Emergent Dialogue¹); imaginal (e.g., Communal Reverie, Shared Imaginal Practice).

We wondered whether this approach might set the preliminary stages for a deeper relational cross-training, enabling a generative relaxation of the particular protocols informing each practice. Our aim was to discover a more fluidly multi-modal kind of we-space where the capacities that these practices support might dynamically intermingle, oscillate and flow together.

Here are some excerpts from the invitation we sent out:

What would it mean for human groups to become increasingly agile in their intimacy?

Can we learn to deepen our availability for multiple forms of intimacy, fluidly navigating between intrapsychic, interpersonal, transpersonal, imaginal, and cosmic territories?

What would it take for our collectives to develop this agility? And in what ways could our troubled world benefit from our doing so?

If the next Buddha is to be the Sangha, how might we honor this by becoming what our friend Ivo Mensch describes as inter-logoic agents—relationally fluid beings who can meet each other beyond the boundaries of “branded” practices and their particular constructions?

We see it as one of the developmental tasks of our cohort to become such agents: moving beyond siloed, reified practice spaces (which can become ego projects) and into a networked pedagogy.

Can the boundaries between practices become more porous?

The Agile Collective, an initial gesture in devotion to living these questions, was fruitfully imperfect, as expected; our invitation concluded with Sri Aurobindo’s words: “By your stumbling, the world is perfected.”

One crucial, and utterly unsurprising, insight I took away from our stumbling is that this sort of inter-practice fusion probably reaches greater coherence when all participants have had ample opportunity to train and develop the capacities supported by each practice modality.

Ours was a motley crew—some folks had a lot of experience with relational practices like Circling and T-Group, some had experience with the subtle field sensing modality of Collective Presencing, and other folks had gone deep with individual imaginal practice via Rob Burbea’s Soulmaking Dharma.

Nobody there was versed in all three domains, and for some every one of these territories was more or less new.

Even though The Agile Collective didn’t ultimately lead to any firework crescendos of multimodal collective coherence—a tall order for two structured days of limited intervals of practice—I did come away feeling that I had briefly tasted a glimpse of what we were aiming for. It was a worthwhile step (or stumble) in a beautiful direction.

Four months or so later, Dechen leaned further into experimenting with our original aspiration during the first instantiation of The Nectary. At that point, as I recall, she was calling it interspecies collective practice.

I vividly recall one morning, sitting amid a group of four, experiencing a deeply coherent and relationally engaged unfolding that felt powerfully held by a shared sense of presence, awareness of the group field, and translucent availability for the spontaneous arrival of archetypal imagery. It was surprisingly simple, to the point where the whole “deliberate design” approach that guided the Agile Collective seemed way over the top.

Yet, amid this simplicity, I also sensed that each individual’s history of personal practice, cultivation of specific capacities, and—perhaps most essential of all—uniquely idiosyncratic unfolding, has been implicitly enfolded in all that transpired.

Dechen has since been using the word intertidal (which I love) for these sorts of “multimodal we-space” experiments, where the shapes of the protocols that train different capacities are loosened and rendered porous such that a fusion of horizons between ways of being becomes possible… As it happens, she too has been using the term “Practice Dojo” to describe the spaces she has been holding for these experiments.

Perhaps The Agile Collective was aiming for a glimpse of an “intertidal collective,” by which I mean a diverse group with practiced capacities in a variety of ways of being and relating that, when skillfully synergized, are conducive to deepening intimacy, fostering authentic coherence around shared aims, and amplifying creativity in service to those common goals.

Perhaps “practice” reaches toward an ever-receding horizon, and is thus as inexhaustible as our own potential for unfoldment. At the same time, I can readily imagine that many of the microcultural conventions informing various “practice protocols” we co-construct and co-observe² will eventually be shed as we grow into abiding ways of being-as-unfolding-relationality.

Still, on the way to becoming “intertidal collectives” of various shapes and flavors, we will probably first be well-served by a liminal culture of diverse “Dojos” (however literal or metaphorical) where distinct ways of being are encountered, and their underlying capacities practiced.

In this sense, Relational Dojo can simply be viewed as a place to stumble into cultural pockets where distinct styles of relating are practiced, such that their implicit capacities may eventually ripen and avail themselves as elements in a collage of ways of being.

On the Relational

I initially wondered whether Communal Reverie actually fits well with an explicitly “relational” dojo. On first blush, I instinctively regarded Communal Reverie as adjacent, but not identical, to “relational practices,” given that I’ve ordinarily associated the term “relational” with the more interpersonally oriented practices like Circling and T-Group.

However, my friend Tucker’s tripartite taxonomy of we-space, which I’ve quite appreciated, points to a more expanded meaning of “relational.” He distinguishes between modes of practice oriented toward interpersonal relating, field relating, and awakening relating.

“Relating” is the clear common denominator here. This shifts the frame for me: it becomes less a matter of whether this a “relational practice,” more a matter of what modality of relating this practice emphasizes.

Tucker was perceptive to place Communal Reverie in the “field relating” category, as I tend to agree with him. Communal Reverie practice doesn’t focus on the sort of direct interpersonal engagement that one finds in Circling or T-Group. It, rather, fosters conditions for relationally porous encounters with the imaginal in resonance with the group field. I’ve framed it as “an imaginally inflected presencing approach.”

Communal Reverie’s collective nature certainly makes it deeply relational as compared with many other traditions and modalities of imaginal practice. Even in the absence direct engagement between personalities, a kind of imaginal porosity between (subtle) bodies is, very often, made readily evident. My friend Rosa Lewis’s Shared Imaginal Practice is similar in this regard. I essentially started this Substack with the intention of philosophically situating and grounding this “relational turn” in approaching imaginal practice.

Retracing what I’ve just written, I find that “relational” is already proving to be a slippery signifier. It’s not about just interpersonal relating, and yet the designation appears more applicable wherever congregations of bodies are gathered in simultaneous communion—whatever the vector of that communing might be (e.g., with one another, with the shared field, with the imaginal). Instead of trying to whittle down the vague penumbra of connotations into a precise definition, I’d prefer to leave this definitory iridescence intact, embracing many flavors of “in-betweenness”…

For me, the significance of the “relational” in Relational Dojo extends well beyond its focus on offering what might be framed as relational practices. The medium is the message, and I sense that the underlying impulse to create a relational network of affinity-based affiliation between hosts and practitioners of different practices is part of a much larger and naturally unfolding pattern: a deeper will to weave that is stirring through our culture from the ground up, creatively exfoliating the subtle influences of a common origin.

It does not appear to me that the living order of this weaving needs to be planned by the waking mind’s executive functions. It seems to be guided by the lure toward symbiogenesis, an impulse toward deepening trust and interdependence amid our metamorphic era, calling bodies to stumble into mycelial bonds from which the cultures of tomorrow may spring forth like fruiting bodies.

Mycelial Futuring

I really like “futuring” as verb. I’ve picked that up from Jeremy Johnson, who recently taught a course called Integral Futuring. The course was great, and I strongly recommend getting your hands on the forthcoming book that the course was based on (Fragments of an Integral Future), once available.

Jeremy excels at the curious art of bringing attention to the cultural present in a way that renders the future oddly palpable in close parallel with the ancient. Wound up with this relationally entangled view of time is a radically relational and entangled view of selfing. In one sense, the cultural and ecological ferment of our times appears to be catalyzing the becoming of this porously entangled kind of selfhood. In another, more fundamental sense, it seems to be revealing that “selves” have always been this way.

Here, I think of a beloved quote from Gebser (translated from his work Rilke and Spain) that I included at the end of a page on my website titled, appropriately, relations:

“What is gaining importance now is the spiritual light reigning between objects—the tension and the relation between them.”

I don’t fully know why I even made that webpage. Some creative impulse just seemed to want to do it, and I didn’t feel it necessary to resist the pull. Perhaps that page expresses an urge to render visible (however inelegantly) a growing mycelial expanse of relational entanglements amongst which intimations of some beckoning and burgeoning future is beginning to shine through the light reigning between.

James has followed a similar impulse.

When a critical mass of bodies begins mutually “vibing” with beckoning cultures of tomorrow, I suspect that they will naturally find themselves magnetized toward strange attractors that, on some preconceptual level, seem to reflect what they feel implicitly operating deep within. By simply yielding to the allurement of mutual resonance, bonds of affinity naturally form and strengthen. A mycelial substrate starts to grow of its own accord, readying itself for a transversal patchwork of entangled budding cultures.

I still remember my first conversation with James, the first time he invited me to host Communal Reverie at the Intentional Society Practice Dojo. Across our distinctions—our different backgrounds and trajectories, our overlapping and diverging conceptual lenses and internalized languages—I felt an immediate sense of resonating and vibing in mutual affinity. This was known from the deep, somewhere well beneath the explicit surface of things.

I remember the same with Carol, as we sat together chatting and drinking tea together after The Agile Collective. We hit on some shared sense of resonance with what beckons us onward in common, even if we articulate it differently and emphasize different domains.

It feels like striking oil from a shared wellspring deeper than words, a shared context of value that allows the diverse aesthetic flavors of individuating beings to hang together in wholeness.

Holding this perspective, I settle into an enjoyment of the contrast between James’s easefully down-to-earth style and the rhetorical intensity of my grand scale Luciferic bombast. The contrast between James’s reflections about Collective Presencing versus my own offers a great example.

It’s easy for me to imagine James raising an eyebrow at my mystically unrestrained musings on diaphanous glimpses of time, all the while finding that eyebrow suspended above a friendly, loving smile that says, “I don’t I see it that way, but it’s good to be entangled.”

Note: I don’t know how he’d actually react. I entertain this fantasy aloud because I wish to impart something deeper: the feeling of affinity-in-contrast. I think we would all do well to learn to acquire a taste for the flavor of vibey-coherence-amid-radical-pluralism. The times we find ourselves in, to my mind, call for this kind of ontological rewilding.

I trust that this excursion on entangled selfing reveals that, for me, the affiliative impulse working through Relational Dojo is situated in a much larger pattern that includes a lot more than practices and dojos.

Growth < Increase

Something about the whole process surrounding the Relational Dojo, including the “ontological design” of it all, feels genuinely ecological. Following lures of feeling, forming bonds of affinity, organizing into co-creative configurations, playing with the affordances and constraints of our current technological landscape to cobble together multi-platform communication networks in nonlinear arrangements, sending out signals to call shifting combinations of bodies into communion in service of nurturing different relational capacities.

From my vantage point, the seed for the Relational Dojo was planted late last year when James reached out to a number of people who host and steward unique practice modalities to propose something he was imagining as a “Developmental Relational Practices Guild.”

Amid the exploration of the possibility, someone raised the concern that this network of affiliation expresses “Game "A” motivations toward promotion for the sake of attracting more people in service to growth. Indeed, Gebser characterized the eclipsing of the qualitative by the quantitative as a signal that a given structure of consciousness has passed into its deficient phase, whereby it begins to press toward its own inevitable dissolution.

The drive to quantitative growth, reflected in the still-dominant assumption that endless growth as measured by GDP is an adequate sign of a healthy economy—thereby collapsing value into price and profit—would be an example of the deficient mental-rational consciousness par excellence.

I responded with my take:

My initial way of envisioning the value of James’s proposal had little to do with attracting more people for the sake driving our respective practices toward growth.

There are folks in this list I don’t know yet, and the prospect of getting to know them as individuals through James’ initiative enlivens me, as does the idea of learning more about the practices they host.

My ideal would be that an association between practice holders would strengthen the “mycelial fabric” amid this ecology of practices, not for the sake of making our own practices “bigger,” but rather in service to the unfolding of any individuals who find their way into the orbit of the practices we hold—and also for the deep value of weaving of new links and deepening intimacy in this “Game B” oriented crowd.

Feels to me like there is potential here, less in the way of Game A-style “growth,” more toward what Tyson Yunkaporta calls “increase.”

For me, this is about strengthening the weave, deepening the intricacy of the dance, intensifying the number of relational bonds that amplify creative potential during our time between worlds, coaxing forth each other’s soul expression, and weaving the weird mesh from which the starter cultures of the latent future may spring forth into expression…

As I interpret it, James reached for the phrase “Intentional Society” as a marker to point to a beckoning future that he is trying to live, and Carol and her collaborators landed on “Starter Cultures.” Each have their unique language and aesthetics, their matters of focus. And, yes, each have their Dojo.

Everything I’ve been circumambulating here has been an attempt to illuminate the complex subtext behind how I’m thinking about this, ultimately simple, process of affiliation. This is what inspires me to play with weaving the thread of my own Vow into the Relational Dojo.

Perhaps this leap into symbiosis will birth configurations that’ll endure for a while… Perhaps some pattern of release and dispersal will naturally come to pass relatively soon…

In any case, I like to play with the fantasy that this impulse comprises one little fruiting strand of the nascently stirring integral lifeworld as it struggles to emerge from the decaying ferment of the mental-rational world—springing forth in aliveness amid the inevitable growth toward death…

Perhaps I’ll see you in the basins of some strange attractors.

Straightforward invitation soon to come… If you’ve made it this far, I thank you for the gift of your precious time and attention…

1. I want to pay homage here to the late Thomas Steininger, whose work has significantly impacted my own. While I regret that I never had the chance to meet and work with him, I am grateful that Elizabeth Debold continues the work of Emergent Dialogue that she and Thomas stewarded together.

I highly recommend this two-part interview with Thomas:

2. Here I use “observe” in the sense of “fulfill or comply with (a social, legal, ethical, or religious obligation)”—as one, say, “observes” a certain holiday and its attendant customs.