Our Practices
Foundational practices for embodying and expressing The Experience of We
Recognizing Dissonance Together
A quick start guide
There's a particular feeling when something is off between us.
Maybe we can't quite name it. A subtle tension. A slight distance. Communication feels harder than it should. The ease isn't there. Something in the body registers it before the mind catches up: a tightness in the chest, a knot in the stomach, a vague sense that we're not quite meeting.
This is dissonance. The felt sense of being out of sync.
Dissonance isn’t “bad.” It’s information. Like physical pain that alerts us to injury, dissonance alerts us to misalignment. Something in the relational field needs attention. Ignoring it doesn't make it go away. It lets the misalignment persist or deepen, silently, until the distance between us becomes hard to close.
Recognizing dissonance is the first step. We can't work with what we don't see. And the earlier we notice it, the smaller it tends to be.
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.
The early signal check
When something feels off, don't wait for it to become a problem. Name it while it's still small.
Notice the feeling. Before you can explain it, you can feel it. Tension. Distance. Friction. Something not quite right. Trust the body's signal.
Name it simply. "Something feels off between us." "I'm noticing some tension." "We feel a little out of sync." You don't need to know why. Just name that it's there.
Resist the urge to explain or blame. This isn't "you did something wrong." It's "I'm sensing something in the field that wants attention."
Get curious together. "What do you think is happening?" "Do you feel it too?" "When did this start?"
Let the naming be enough for now. Sometimes just noticing and naming the dissonance shifts something. The practice is the recognition, not the fix.
One early signal, caught and named. That's how we keep small distances from becoming large ones.
The full guide, Recognizing Dissonance Together, has several practices for developing shared sensitivity to misalignment:
Learning the body's dissonance signals
Tracking dissonance across different dimensions
Calibrating sensitivity
Building shared vocabulary for what's out of sync
And more
It also explores dissonance not as failure but as the relational field's way of telling us something important.
Dissonance is information. Let’s learn to hear it together.
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