Daway Chou-Ren

I went to an ISTA training a few weeks ago. I thought the shamanic, energetic, and emotional tools were fairly shallow compared to what is found in an Expand the Box training. There is something about the sacredness of the transformational process that wasn’t coming through for me, and lots of spaces would stay shallow because there wasn’t the transmission of grounded presence that participants could step into. (I think the facilitators mostly had it, but they didn’t hold a container where participants could embody it). I think the ISTA L1 training does have useful alpha in that they are unafraid to use bodily touch in their processes, especially around the hips, which just makes so much sense because so much charge is locked up there. I had a tremendous time learning to give and receive Sacred Spot.

As a downstream effect of ISTA, it has re-awakening a more sexual and erotic side of me. I feel like a plant being re-watered, and I’m watching new physical/sexual channels for connecting with others become more easeful for me to use.

Alchemy House is thriving. We are building lots of wonderfully collaborative and intimate connections.

I am spending a lot of time organizing Lighting the Edge and have recently rediscovered my fire for it. I love creating a space to explore what is possible and as a creators’ jam fest, Lighting the Edge has produced really high levels of that sense in the past. A bunch of brilliant people not knowing what’s coming next and relying only on sensing the group field as well as their own competence and inventive ability to meet the moment? Perfect.

Cavitation BridgeHouse wrapped at the end of January. On the way back, Meredith and I spent some time at a friend’s horse farm in central France, where I rode a horse for the first time.

I am in Oakland now, living at the Alchemy House. My fire for hosting transformational events, with the exception of organizing the USA Possibility Tour and Lighting the Edge, is quite dim. (As I write that, I realize that it’s more accurate to say I am more interested in hosting large-scale transformational events, not one-off 2 hour workshops). I continue to want to focus more on writing, so I can meet new interesting people who come from cultures and contexts that are farther from me than I get from word-of-mouth or friends of friends connections.

Alchemy House, with many people coming from Temple and ISTA-land, is rather eros positive. This is a really wonderful place for me to explore all the corners of what 5-body intimacy actually means. Surely it includes eros and the physical body!

I am going deep into the radical writings of Curtis Yarvin. I think his conclusions about governance are quite brittle, and his thought process is useful to follow.

I’m in Crete at the Cavitation BridgeHouse, researching how to create Archiarchy with 10 other cultural creative friends. We are having lots of discovery spaces about things like memetic engineering.

I’m holding a 9-week online training called Negotiating Intimacy where men and women are partnering with each other and practicing creating archetypal and extraordinary relating. (Some of them met each other for the first time at the start!) This is a fun collaboration with Meredith, Devin, and Vera.

I’m writing more, and revamping this website to feature it. I want to be generous with sharing my thoughts and discoveries as they’re unfolding in real time. Hopefully this leads to more collaborators finding me who care about growing humans and changing culture in the way that I do. I am hungry especially for collaborators who can push my ideas mentally as well as energetically.

I’m bringing an Expand the Box training to California which will happen in May.

My main personal experiment is to practice “pulling the rug out” from the spaces I am in, starting with myself.