Part of the free course Conscious Coliving in Action: Practical Steps to Getting Started. Prefer it paced? Get it by email — one lesson a day.

Day 3: Preparing yourself for conscious coliving - 5 key questions

Dear conscious human,

Imagine you're about to go on a one month solo wilderness trip. You wouldn’t just throw some trainers on and head out the door. It might take over a year of preparation before you are ready to go completely wild!

While the dangers of ill preparation may not be so obvious, the same logic applies when it comes to conscious coliving. Preparation is key to success. Before you even step your foot into the door of a conscious coliving space, here are a number of things you might want to consider prepping:

Have I developed my self-awareness to an acceptable level?
Am I (relatively) equanimous to my external triggers?
Am I able to fill my own cup and not rely heavily on others?
Am I able to live with people that aren’t my best buddies?
Am I comfortable communicating my boundaries, and receiving this from others?

Much like walking into the wilderness without preparation, living in a conscious community can be a “baptism of fire”. You might quickly develop the skills and characteristics to thrive, or you might be traumatized by communal living and never want to do it again.

The latter is actually more common than you might think. A lot of people will proclaim that community living isn’t for them after a few bad experiences without questioning why those bad experiences occurred. Spoiler: it isn’t about the other people.

The art of imperfection

While it is good to contemplate and develop these preparations, there is no ultimate goal and no absolute perfect preparation. We are all imperfect beings and living in community will always present challenges.

Prepare yourself with integrity, but don’t be hard on yourself for not being perfect and don’t wait until perfection arrives to begin (because it won’t).

Let’s go deeper into each of the five questions above.

Have I developed my self-awareness to an acceptable level?

Self-awareness is a paradoxical thing, when you don’t have it, you don’t know you don’t have it! This ignorance can have dire effects on your own wellbeing and that of the people around you.

As you can see from the course so far, it’s important to develop self-awareness, and there are two types of self-awareness we need to consider: internal and external.

Internal self-awareness: the awareness of your own emotions, motivations and reactions.

External self-awareness: the awareness of how one is perceived by others around them and the impact their emotions, motivations and reactions are having on others.

These are equally important to develop. Internal self-awareness enables you to communicate effectively how you are feeling, what you need and why you do the things you do. It also enables you to recognise patterns and, if unhealthy, change them. External self-awareness enables you to be flexible and open-minded with others and more easily navigate interpersonal relationships.

Common ways to develop self awareness include journaling, coaching or therapy, vulnerable conversations with loved ones, and learning about the psychological processes of awareness.

One introspective practice that greatly helped some of the team at Life Itself was doing a vipassana, a 10-day silent meditation retreat. You can read more about that here

Am I (relatively) equanimous to my external triggers?

Triggers arise more often when we live in close proximity to others. “Someone took the last teabag”, “Jeff left his wet towel on the floor AGAIN”, “They made this decision without me”. Reading these statements might even fire you up just from the imagination.

Most of the time the triggers are not the cause of your reaction, but rather a provocation of deeper unresolved traumas or issues. For example, being triggered by the last teabag being gone isn’t about the tea bag at all, but more about feeling forgotten by or not important to those you live with (which by the way is often NOT true).

Complete equanimity to triggers is left to the realm of monks, while the average lay person can only strive to be more equanimous. It is a great skill to hone, but it takes time, experience and great self-awareness.

If you are not equanimous to triggers, you may seek revenge, hold pent up resentment for the other person or disassociate yourself from others. If you are equanimous to a trigger, you will notice the emotions that arise in you, take a higher perspective on why you feel those emotions and dissipate the emotions through self-acceptance, compassion and possibly a chosen embodiment practice such as yoga, breathwork, or exercise.

Am I able to fill my own cup and not rely heavily on others?

While self-reliance might seem contradictory to the ideals of living in community, it’s critical to creating a balanced community experience. If everyone joined a community expecting it to provide for them, it would fail!

Reflecting back on your needs identified in the previous lesson, you will want to be able to actively fulfill those needs yourself. Of course, in lesson 2 we spoke about the needs from a community, such as a non-smoking living area, which are different from expectations or desires, e.g. if you need to eat at a certain time when no one else is eating therefore you cannot expect someone else to cook for you.*

Additionally, being aware of your own mental and emotional health or neurological challenges is important, and although these might be more common than you might be led to think, when not managed or in our awareness, they also cause you to rely heavily on others. This is different from needing support which is a natural part of being human, and one reason why we’re pro community! Therefore, it is important to navigate this truthfully and mindfully to not place undue strain on a community. Seeking external therapy, coaching or emotional support and taking responsibility for your own mental and emotional health is key. This will ensure a balanced and healthy relationship between you and the community.

This isn’t to say that the community you choose to live in won’t be there to help you out in times of need, but going in with a baseline self-reliance is a key preparation; don’t be Syd the Hungry Ghost (from our Transforming Conflict in Communities course). As Diane Leafe Christian quotes, “Living in community cannot erase buried emotional pain.”

There is a whole wealth of wisdom that can come from developing your mental health and being able to share this can lead to great relationships. However, conscious communities fulfill a very different role to retreats or centers focused on therapeutic practices and mental health support, and this is really the key point.

*As a side note, one element of recommended glue for a community is to eat at least 4 meals a week together, across breakfast, lunch and dinner. We’ve found that the more you eat together, the stronger the community bond.

Am I able to live with people that aren’t my best buddies?

Just because you live in a community with someone, it doesn't mean you will always like all of them. Some people are just going to trigger you more often, have different approaches to tasks and may even unintentionally cause you harm. Other people might be going through a hard time or haven’t developed their self-awareness.

The point is you need to

have compassion,
be able to take different perspectives,
know when you need to take a breath,
know when to forgive,
and know when to set a boundary,
Always seek solutions to conflict (our Transforming Conflict in Community course offers great insights, tips and strategies),
and at the very least, be civil.

It’s not easy, and that is why this is a good question to ask yourself.

😄 Pssst, the answer to this question can also give you some clues into the size of communities you might be drawn to. For example, if sharing with lots of people worries you, a community with one or two small families might be better than a 50 person established community.

Am I comfortable communicating my boundaries, and receiving this from others?

Boundaries* can be a very triggering area. It’s worth taking time to reflect on how you communicate your boundaries, when and why. When we are not consciously aware of our boundaries, or have confidence in communicating them, we can often fall into the passive or the aggressive camp, and each creates problematic experiences.

A quote that really helped me (Lauren) to balance boundaries was understanding that a boundary allows me to love myself, and you, simultaneously. No boundary = a loss or reduction of love towards one party.

🚧 Equally important is being able to receive other people’s boundaries (when articulated well), without taking it personally. It is (most of the time) never about you.

If you know you struggle with communicating or receiving boundaries, then diving in deeper to develop your self-awareness and equanimity to external triggers is a good place to start, and then coupling this with communication-based skills. Skills take time to develop, so the most important thing is to show up and keep practicing, reflecting on any ‘failures’ (it’s never a failure) to help you to grow more.

*Here’s a simple article on boundaries if you need more information into what they are or how to set them (we have no affiliation with this).

Open-mindedness is the penknife

Open-mindedness is like the penknife of wilderness survival. More than any other preparation or skill you can build, having an open mind will eventually lead you to greater self-awareness, stronger interpersonal relationships and overall personal growth.

Here are a few leading questions to keep yourself open-minded towards others:

I’m feeling x and I’m not sure why, can you help me unpack it?
I want to understand why you did x, is this something you would be open to sharing?
I’m feeling x, but I know this is only my experience/perspective. I’d like to hear yours.
I need some help, x happened and I want to figure out why so that it doesn't happen again. Would you be open to supporting me through this?

The eternal experiment

Know that this journey is long and winding. Preparation will occur parallel to implementation, and the biggest mistakes will be your greatest lessons. Be accepting that this is an experiment, which requires trial and error. You will not (always) find the perfect community or find what you seek right away, but you will learn more about what you want, and maybe even discover what you thought you wanted isn’t in alignment.

Action time ✍️

The immediate task is to reflect on these 5 questions and 1 statement and understand where you are on your journey. Journal about each of the points and what steps you will take to be more prepared for conscious coliving.

In the next lesson, we will get into the practicalities of joining a conscious coliving space. This is the easiest way to experiment and hone your conscious coliving skills.

See you there.

Lauren & the Life Itself CoCo 🥥 team

If you have any feedback on the course, we’d love to hear it: [email protected]

P.S. This course is brought to you by Life Itself - https://lifeitself.org

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