Our Practices
Foundational practices for embodying and expressing The Experience of We
Developing Fluid Awareness Together
A quick start guide
You’re in a conversation and something shifts.
A word lands wrong. A feeling rises. And before you know it, your awareness has narrowed to a single point. You are no longer in the conversation. You are in a reaction. Your body tightened. Your interpretation locked in. Your response is already happening. The whole thing took less than a second.
This is what it feels like when awareness gets swept along. It flows like water down the familiar channel, the one carved by years of practice you never chose. Trigger, interpretation, reaction. Trigger, interpretation, reaction. The same loop, the same groove, the same destination.
But here is what changes things: awareness can also be redirected. Not forced. Not suppressed. Redirected. The way you might guide water into a new channel, gently and consistently, until the new path becomes the easier one. This is fluid awareness. Not the absence of reactivity, but the growing capacity to notice where your awareness is going and participate in its direction.
This is the culmination of a developmental sequence: presence, interoception, awareness, mindfulness, meta-awareness, and finally this. Trajectory control. The moment where "I can see what is happening" becomes "I can participate in where this goes next." And practicing it together means you do not have to do it alone.
One practice to try
Think of a person in your life who’s open to experimentation, and invite them into trying something new with you.
Catch and name together
The next time one of you notices reactivity rising, try this simple sequence together.
Name it. Either of you says: "I'm caught in something" or "I notice we're getting reactive." No blame. Just a signal.
Pause together. Stop. One breath. You are not walking away. You are creating a gap between the trigger and what comes next.
Each of you name what’s happening. Briefly. "I'm feeling defensive." "My chest is tight and I want to shut down." "I'm interpreting what you said as criticism." Just name it. Do not fix it.
Get curious together. Not interrogation. Genuine wondering. You might not know the answer, and that is fine.
Choose together. "What do we actually want here?" One conscious choice, even a small one. A different tone. A softer posture. A sentence that starts with "I feel" instead of "You always."
This isn’t about getting it right. It is about interrupting the automatic and finding, even for a moment, that there is a choice point inside what used to feel inevitable.
The full guide, Developing Fluid Awareness Together, maps the awareness spiral (noticing, sense-making, responding) and offers eight steps for slowing it down and participating consciously. It has several practices:
The fluid check-in
Catching reactive flow together
Mapping recurring patterns
Navigating difficult moments in real time
Tracking the spiral's direction
Building a culture of fluid awareness between you
It also explores what to do when both of you are caught at the same time, when you navigate differently, and when the pattern that needs attention is the dynamic between you.
Every time you consciously redirect awareness, you carve a new channel. Over time, the new channels become the easier paths. If catching reactivity together gave you even one moment of choice where there used to be compulsion, that is the practice working.
If this resonates, we recommend trying …
Developing Mindfulness Together
