Intentional Society
Intentional Society is a community for people who want to grow in awareness, relationship, multi-perspective capacity, and meaning—founded by James Baker.
About: We meet together to become our best and biggest selves - to practice being the people we want to be, more consistently, with more ease and freedom. In doing so, we also then increase our capacity to love and serve both ourselves and humanity. At least, that's the intention we hold. Intentional Society is simply people, in process, being and doing together… and its fullness is in the process of being both created and discovered.
We are a geographically distributed community of seekers and friends, connecting face-to-face via video calls. We connect and reflect together in relationship as a catalyst to self-development, increased awareness, greater integrity. We relish our diversity across gender, generation, nation, ethnicity, religious (or non-) background, socioeconomic status, and other perspectives increasingly. Some of us bring backgrounds in various related fields or scenes: adult development psychology, relational practices (e.g. Authentic Relating, Circling, Collective Presencing), and the "sensemaking web" (e.g. Game B, Integral, Metamodernism). Regardless, all of us are united in one thing above all else: seeking to grow.
Our values orient around awareness and acceptance as the big themes. Awareness means consciousness and attention: taking the "balcony view" perspective on ourselves and on the people and systems we're intereacting with. Acceptance means facing reality - being able to be with what is, as it is, without deceiving ourselves. From awareness and acceptance flow greater capacity for compassion, empathy, and our ability to hold our intentions as objects of reflection. Other values we've named are: Authenticity, honesty, adventure, perspective-taking, reflection, learning, seeking, earnestness, paradox, connection, friendliness, play, kindness, curiosity, goodwill, inclusion, drive, balance, integration.
Who and what makes a good "fit" within Intentional Society? The cornerstone of our culture is first and foremost a desire to grow. It also takes an attitude of openness, humility, and of respect toward every human and the things that we can learn from interacting with them. We don't teach each other as instructors or lecturers, but rather reflect our experience of being with each other. When reflected in an honest and compassionate way, we are able self-teachers with socially-expanded insight.
Many new members thus far have come in with a high degree of emotional self-awareness and "cognitive de-fusion," having been on their own developmental journeys for some time already. This seems helpful but not essential, and we haven't established a concrete minimum age or maturity level for membership yet. If someone is looking for a bandwagon to just jump on wholeheartedly, this isn't it. Some level of "self-authorship" - defining one's self and values independently of the social context in which one grew up - seems necessary to get traction on further development.
Lastly, most of us have a fairly high degree of tolerance for nebulosity, uncertainty, and abstraction. We're making this up as we go, creating just-in-time structure as we need it. Sometimes we lean into the not-knowing - playing and sensing without pre-selecting a norm, so that we can feel into the desires and intentions we bring to a domain rather than relying on conventional or implicit norms and expectations.
Links: Main Website: www.intentionalsociety.org
Social: Twitter: www.twitter.com/IntentionalSoc