Thread by @cognitivepolicy

An insight into the prosocial process...

Today I facilitated a call between volunteers in the Earth Regenerators community who are designing websites and cultivating strategies for our continued evolution.

All of our work is done in the spirit of the gift economy. No one is being paid for what they contribute. All of us are friends who seek to serve the recuperation of health for Earth's living systems.

Some small conflicts had arisen around the lack of coordination among the different efforts. Feelings were complex and multifaceted.

So we applied insights from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy together with Elinor Ostrom's principles for managing any commons.

This included using Sociocracy to make decisions by consent and to have rounds of sharing to map out the feelings and motivations of each person in the group.

From here we could see all that needs to be honored before we can continue our Earth regeneration work together.

Revealed in the process were sensitive emotions about the need to honor gifts already given -- and also to separate near and long-term strategies.

We were successful in this and now all involved feel better about contributing. We were a prosocial group and are all healthier now.

And of course, the work will be better quality and longer lasting as a result!

It simply will not be possible to regenerate landscapes or heal ecosystems when humans become fragmented in conflicts. We must prosocially integrate, internalize, and transcend them as we do our work.