Our Practices
Foundational practices for embodying and expressing The Experience of We
Exploring the Awareness Spiral Together
A quick start guide
Something happens. Your companion says a word, gives a look, shifts their tone. Before you even register it consciously, something inside you has already moved. You noticed something. You made sense of it. You responded. All in a breath.
Now multiply that by every moment you spend together. Noticing, making sense, responding. Noticing again, but from a different place, because your response just changed the landscape. This is the spiral. It runs constantly. It runs fast. And most of the time, it runs without either of you seeing it.
When the spiral moves well, things open. You notice more. Your interpretations get more generous, more flexible. Your responses feel creative instead of automatic. You feel more connected. But when the spiral tightens, it goes the other way. You notice less. Your interpretations narrow. Your responses become reactive. And every turn makes the next turn worse. You've felt both. You know the difference in your body before you could explain it.
The awareness spiral is the practice of learning to see this process as it moves through you. Not to control it. Just to participate. And it starts with something you can do the next time things get charged.
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.
Slow the spiral together
The next time you sense things tightening between you, either of you says: "Let's slow this down." Then walk through it together, one piece at a time.
Pause. Stop the conversation. Take a breath. You are not abandoning the moment. You are entering it more carefully.
Name what you noticed. Each of you, briefly: "What caught my attention was..." Not an argument. Just what landed.
Name the sense you made of it. "The story I told myself was..." or "I interpreted that as..." This is where most of the spiral hides. Saying it out loud loosens its grip.
Name what arose in response. "I felt..." or "My impulse was to..." You do not have to act on it. Just see it.
Choose together. Now that you can see the pieces, ask: "What do we actually want to do here?"
One round. That is all. But pulling the spiral apart into its pieces, even once, changes your relationship to everything that follows.
The full guide, The Awareness Spiral Together, maps the three phases of the spiral (noticing, sense-making, responding) and the three directions it can move (integration, fragmentation, reinforcement). It has several practices for working with the spiral:
Observing it together
Tracking its direction
Intervening at each phase
Supporting each other when one of you is caught
Mapping recurring spirals
Slowing things down in real time
And more
It also explores what to do when the spiral is moving too fast to slow, when talking about the spiral becomes its own spiral, and when patterns keep repeating despite your awareness.
Seeing the spiral does not mean controlling it. It means finding the choice points inside something that used to feel automatic. If slowing things down for one round gave you even a moment of spaciousness, there is a whole practice waiting.
If this resonates, we recommend trying …
Developing Meta-Awareness Together
