Printed in Spring 2025 in Communities Magazine #206. Reproduced here with permission.
By Daway Chou-Ren and Devin Gleeson
We (Daway and Devin) started collaborating on communities in the late 2010s at an edgy, exploratory intentional community called Bridge House. If you had asked Bridge House’s members, we would have said we were aiming at something like deep human connection. We were a group of wild people with shared interests in sexuality, personal growth, interpersonal relating, and experimentation.
Bridge House’s explorations were mostly informal, but also happened formally in two main ways:
1) Most of us shared the same tantric-adjacent, partnered meditation practice which we would engage in regularly.
2) We woke each weekday morning at 6:45, huddled together in the living room, and engaged in morning check-ins.
Check-ins were sacrosanct. They were our communal pride—our chance to play, love, connect, and experiment. We demanded each check-in be different. Once, we delivered acting monologues. Another time, we drew each other nude. Sometimes we played intimacy games and asked probing questions. Sometimes we grieved or laughed or engaged in craziness, like drinking mystery juice or seeing how long we could all hold our arms out parallel to the floor while staring into each others’ eyes. (We lasted 20 minutes.)
Although we thought we were aiming at deep connection, in retrospect what we were really committed to was sustaining something along the lines of “harmony.” This was nowhere more evident than in our unwillingness and inability to navigate relational fissures.
In almost every relationship in the community, fissures existed. This would be obvious to anyone attending our check-ins who peeked below the surface. Fissures ranged from run-of-the-mill resentments to deep, unresolved disagreements about values. For instance, Daway once proclaimed that we all did personal development so we could be more capable of having impact in the world. One housemate piped up immediately, furious and defensive: “No. Speak for yourself! Maybe some of us do this work just because we care about being better people!” Instead of using our fissures as portals to healing, transformation, or collaboration, we let them lie unexamined. They became like old wallpaper, invisible, normalized, tip-toed around, accommodated, rationalized, and unacknowledged. In some cases, we simply grew accustomed to not liking each other very much, and to not admitting this was so.
Living like this had consequences. To wit, the value-disagreement between Daway and the other housemate, which was never addressed outright, played out ongoingly in subtle and destructive relational dynamics throughout our time together until one day, Daway said he was done living with her. In other cases, the seams would occasionally burst on our harmonious way of being with interpersonal flare-ups. We thought by being permissive about these flare-ups, we were “evolved,” but without real tools for healing or transforming what was behind them, all we were doing was yelling loudly, spinning our wheels, and then acting like we were okay.
To be fair, life together wasn’t hell. But it also wasn’t the elusive Love-and-Connection Fest we claimed to want.
Eventually, we moved out of Bridge House and started a new community: Confluence. We recognized that something in Bridge House had not worked. We thought that having a clearer purpose would help. So at Confluence, we asked, “Who are we?” We repeatedly went through visioning exercises from reputable sources like Living Better Together. We even filled out and analyzed anonymous surveys where we rated each other on things like “How close am I to this person?” “How much do I like this person?” “How could this person be a better community member?” and then shared the results in communal discussions.
We did not shy away from experimenting, processing, and workshopping. We did anything we thought might create more connection, and pursued to no end an idea of closeness that would forever obliterate our unmet childhood needs around separation. We thought that if we could just get to that particular experience of connection, if we could just give each other clear and accurate enough feedback, if we all committed to hugging each other six times a day, if we had communal dinner, if we took psychedelics together, if we did weekly dates with one another, if we shared appreciations, then we would finally achieve steady-state communal bliss that would make any fissures irrelevant.
This approach did not work. The fissures remained. The commitment to harmony, noble as it was, created a community of compromise, getting by and getting along, numbness, denial, and a quality of tolerance that had more to do with resignation than with love.
In the end, we had more questions than answers: What is needed to create a community where there is authentic connection? Is connection even a worthwhile aim? How do you effectively work with fissures? What else is possible?
Put Creation at the Center of Community, and Connection Follows
The two of us left Confluence and parted ways during COVID-19, but our questions remained open. These questions led us both to begin exploring the “gameworld” of Possibility Management and Possibility Management trainings. In essence, Possibility Management is a collection of distinctions that a group of people began discovering in the mid-1970s when they started researching questions like: “What if we took higher levels of responsibility for ourselves, our communities, and our world? What would it look like practically to take higher levels of responsibility? What kind of cultures and communities would emerge if people took higher levels of responsibility?”
Participating in these trainings about raising our level of responsibility was revelatory for us, and provided sudden clarity about what had not been working in our previous communal endeavors. Two distinctions were especially eye-opening as we formed a new community in rural New York called Magic Cow.
The first distinction was about communities and connection. Many communities form with the purpose of creating more connection. In reality, though, if a community’s goal is connection, its goal is achieved already at the very first meeting: People are together and they are connecting. The only place to go from there is to attempt to create more and more and deeper and deeper connection. But to what end? We noticed in our previous communal pursuits that sometimes we were more connected, sometimes less. There were peaks of bliss that we settled for reaching now and then, but lasting connection eluded us.
One of the proposals we started playing with at the Magic Cow was to remove connection as the central goal of the community, and to instead regard it as a byproduct of our co-creations and projects. This new orientation changed the questions we were asking as a community from “How can we be even more connected?” to “What do you want to work on next? Who wants to join me in this project? What are you (and what am I) turned on to make?”
As we began creating together—cooking, delivering transformational trainings, building a chicken coop, building a pig pen, clearing hiking trails, and engaging in emotional healing experimentation—the burden of wondering why we weren’t all a perfect fit dissipated. Just as you can see a faint star most clearly not by looking directly at it but by glancing to its side, focusing on these projects allowed us to bask in the glow of the connection and community that our mutual undertakings created without obsessing about and reworking our relational dynamics to death.
The scourge of being dissatisfied and chasing after the “perfect” connection no longer undermined our community, and instead the energy once expended on relational drama was poured straight into creation and collaboration. What emerged was a kind of relational simplicity: We appreciated and cherished each other. We even undertook an intimacy project that was unburdened by expectation. We set a purposefully unattainable goal of doing 1,000 activities together (in groups of at least two) in one week. Every activity, even walking up the stairs or brushing our teeth, became a joyous possibility for connection.
The second potent distinction we brought into the Magic Cow concerned the difference between feelings and emotions. This distinction transformed how we related and what we did with fissures.
Feelings (anger, sadness, fear, joy) generally last three minutes or less, are about the present moment, and when the energy and information from the feelings are used, the feeling goes away.
Emotions (also anger, sadness, fear, joy) often feel identical to feelings. The difference is that emotions are connected to unhealed childhood wounds from the past. An emotion is triggered when something in the present reminds us of one of these wounds. Often, this “reminder” is invisible to us. It can seem like the emotion is about what is happening right here and right now. The easiest way to differentiate between a feeling and an emotion is that emotions last longer than three minutes—maybe an hour, a day, or a month. Additionally, emotions do not go away if you take action on them in the present, because their root is in the past. If you’ve ever been in a fight with someone and the fight just keeps going no matter what compromises, apologies, or negotiations you try, then you are familiar with the mucky experience of being in an emotion. Eventually, the intensity of the emotion dissipates into numbness, but it doesn’t really go away. It simply waits for the next “reminder” to be reactivated.
On learning this distinction between emotions and feelings, we recognized that what we had called fissures were almost always the result of emotions—unhealed wounds from the past. At Bridge House and Confluence, we tiptoed around these emotions in favor of “harmony.” At Magic Cow, we created a culture where when emotions surfaced, they were immediately acknowledged and used as gateways for Emotional Healing Processes (EHPs).
Emotional Healing Processes, the Two-Week Experiment, and A New Kind of Connection
In an EHP, a “spaceholder” holds space for a “client” to explore and resolve their emotional reactivity. At Magic Cow, we all trained ourselves to hold space for EHPs.
EHPs usually go like this: A client discovers that they are experiencing an emotion—anger, sadness, fear, joy, or a mixture that lasts longer than three minutes. The client asks for a spaceholder who helps them feel their emotional reactivity as big as it really is. Because most of us have been trained to be polite members of society, what we think is “as big as it really is” is often just a fraction of what the body wants to express. In an EHP, you will hear angry yelling or pitiful wailing or fearful screaming. You might see fists or mucous waterworks or body shaking. The client has complete permission and encouragement to go as immature, wild, or nonsensical as their body wants to make it.
The client feels and begins to say the words that come with the emotions. The spaceholder asks questions like: “What are you feeling—anger, sadness, fear, or joy? Let the emotions get bigger.” Eventually, the client lands in a body memory and the questions shift to deepening the memory. “Is it daytime or nighttime? Are you inside or outside? Where are you? Are you alone or with other people? Who are you speaking to? What is happening?”
The client speaks and continues to feel. A certain completeness comes just from speaking and feeling the old emotion. But as they go deeper into the memory, they often discover big decisions they made at that time—decisions that continue to affect their lives.
An example memory might be something like this:
1) Dave’s dad yells at him for not being perfectly neat.
2) Dave feels sad and angry, and tries to speak up, but his dad yells at him even more, effectively cutting off Dave’ voice.
3) Dave is shut down. His anger and sadness never get completely used. Instead, they become incomplete emotions. He becomes terrified of speaking because speaking means he gets yelled at.
4) Dave decides unconsciously, “I will never be heard. My feelings don’t matter. What I have to say isn’t important. If I speak, I get yelled at. Best to stay quiet.”
Dave’s old emotions and unconscious decisions continue to govern his life. At the communal level, this might manifest as Dave never speaking at meetings and being completely out of touch with his feelings. Anytime someone gets loud or angry in a way that reminds him of his father, Dave might get quiet and retreat into himself. As a result, Dave feels isolated. He doesn’t create the kind of closeness he wants, and people in the community might feel very distant from him.
During an EHP, Dave would get a chance to feel all of this, see the origin of his decisions and how they are running his life, and make new, more empowering decisions. New decisions might be: “I use my feelings to speak,” “My voice is wonderful,” “I use my voice to create closeness,” “I love sharing what is inside me.” These are not superficial affirmations. At the end of an EHP when a person has felt the emotions and gone to the origin of their wound, these decisions have gravity. Magic occurs, the emotion is gone, and a new and freer life opens up.
Genuine healing is magnetic. It’s enlivening. At Magic Cow, we made healing a community-wide project by committing to two weeks straight of each going through at least one EHP per day. We did this with each other and for each other, all in the same room at the same time. We often used the relational fissures that emerged in our daily lives as doorways for entering these EHPs. Healing at Magic Cow was a public event that was celebrated rather than something private that was stigmatized or therapized.
What was it like to do healing at this communal level? New, scary, fun, loud, collaborative, and insanely bonding. We were in the thick of things, caring for and empowering each other in a deeply vulnerable way. When we came out of our healing processes, our faces were changed. They were looser, more vibrant. Years of stored up emotionality fell off, and we had each other to thank for it. The fissures went away, and what remained was a wonderful byproduct of connection, present in a quality and abundance we had not imagined possible.
As of now, there are about 750 people collaborating on learning how to hold Emotional Healing Processes. It is free to join. See possibilitymanagement.org/resources and t.me/joinchat/WC5Px3vhJLpGU-Cz. For more information contact the authors at dawaychouren@gmail.com and devingleeson4@gmail.com.
Daway Chou-Ren is a communitarian who experienced something close to unconditional love in a community 10 years ago and never looked back. He is a former empathy researcher and is dedicated to collaborating on communities that invent energetic and feelings-based transformational processes that help people evolve in the direction of love, aliveness, and responsibility. The projects he works on are at www.dawaychouren.com.
Devin Gleeson discovered Seattle’s intentional communities in his late 20s. From his first communal encounter, he was smitten. Since then, he has ongoingly cofounded, lived in, and visited communities of every type and size. As a Possibility Management trainer and facilitator, he holds spaces for communities to upgrade their thoughtware and transform themselves into laboratories of evolution, love, and collaboration. You can reach him at devingleeson4@gmail.com.