Our emotional wellness is a commons.
Transformation and healing is work we do in common and in community. Here we share the tools and resources for everyone to participate. Our hope is to encourage all communities to engage in this type of care and kinship.
“Self-care can’t cure social diseases”
Our emotional reactions to the world are often the basis on which we can process, garner hope, learn and build. Our emotions are historically contingent, and all too often our emotional wellness relies on individual relationships, with partners, with a therapist, with a life coach. Here we posit that collective wellness, as are the tools and skills for tending to our communities are fundamental to a functioning & thriving world.
We use circles as a structure for processing our individual needs and struggles, as well as putting these personal experiences into a societal lens, linking the personal and the societal.
The circle structure decentralizes and distributes not only the care work, but also the tools for emotional well-being and new solidarities. We heal and transform together.
“Social freedom cannot be understood apart from what arises between people, what happens when they make something in common or when, in fact, they seek to make or remake the world in common.The world is given to me because you are also there as one to whom it is given. The world is never given to me alone but always in your company. Without you, the world does not give itself. We are worldless without one another.”
— Judith Butler
“In a fractal conception, I am a cell-sized unit of the human organism, and I have to use my life to leverage a shift in the system by how I am, as much as with the things I do. This means actually being in my life, and it means bringing my values into my daily decision making. Each day should be lived on purpose.”
- amb, Emergent Strategy
The programs of District Commons are centered around organic relationships, care and trust. Here we share what we have learned about emotional well being in collectives, and the tools to use.