What I Took From Watching Communities Hold Through Conflict

On shared rituals, Forum work, and the practices that keep people together long after the founding dream has been accomplished or quietly faded.

What this essay argues

Sharon's reflection on the practices that let communities hold through conflict over the long run, from shared ritual to formal Forum work.

FROM THE FIELD

From the field. The Forum material here is grounded in interviews at Tamera. Forum is documented in its own right in the Library.

The essay

On shared rituals, Forum work, and the practices that hold people together long after the founding dream is accomplished.

In the last piece I wrote about conflict, I focused on what breaks communities. How conversations go underground. How power moves through side channels instead of meetings. The moment someone stops saying what they mean and starts managing how they are perceived. Several people wrote back asking the same question in different forms: fine, but what do you actually do about it? That is what I want to try to answer here.

One community I kept coming back to was Kibbutz Samar, a small intentional community in the Negev desert that has spent decades trying to do something most communities only talk about: shared income, collective decision-making, no hierarchy, no one telling anyone what to do. Yaniv has been part of it for most of his adult life.

Yaniv told me something about his community that should not be possible. "We have a very high level of collaboration, so much so that it includes sharing money. And very low-level communication." High collaboration. Low communication. In most organizations this contradiction snaps the system apart within months. This tension finally broke them, and the question that stays with me is how it held for so long, and what you have to do, day to day, to keep a system like that from collapsing.

"We have a very high level of collaboration, so much so that it includes sharing money. And very low-level communication."

— Yaniv, Kibbutz Samar

Samar was intentional about almost everything: they shared income, made decisions collectively, built a community on the premise that people could figure things out together without a manager telling them what to do. The one thing missing, or built insufficiently, was a way to talk. For a long time that was fine; the shared money, the shared work, the physical proximity, all of it held the system together without anyone having to say difficult things out loud.

Samar is one example of something I keep seeing across the archive. The governance models, the shared finances, the meeting formats, can all be working and something quieter is still going wrong. You can have excellent systems and still hit the same wall: the conversation the system requires is the one nobody knows how to have. The structure gives you a container. Filling it is a different skill entirely.

When I asked Yaniv what he would tell someone just starting, he said two things I have not been able to put down. "If you get triggered or angry, you can't just go all out on somebody. You should always think that in 10, 20, maybe 50 years, you will still live with these people." And then:

"Sharing is like BDSM. This is only between adults and only with consent."

It sounds like a provocation. I think it is one of the more precise things anyone has said to me about what community actually requires. Maturity, and an ongoing, explicit agreement between people who have chosen this together and keep choosing it.

I want to get practical in this piece. To talk about what people actually do, day to day, to manage the gap between how a community is designed and how the people in it talk to each other. The communities I spoke with are doing different things, but they are all working on the same problem.

Living in a blender

Anandeshvarii has been part of Ananda Kalyani, a spiritual community in central northern Portugal, for several years. When I asked her what it actually feels like to live there, she reached for a phrase she borrowed from a friend at a sibling community in Brazil. "Living in such a project means living in a blender." She quoted it back to me because she had found nothing more accurate.

I have heard a lot of descriptions of community life over the years. That one holds up.

The blender image is precise because it captures intensity alongside structure. Ananda Kalyani has both. They gather twice a day for kirtan and meditation, morning and evening, in the yurt or outside when the weather allows. On Sundays they hold a Dharma Chakra, a collective meditation that the wider community around the land also attends, followed by a shared meal. These are fixed points in the rhythm of the place, as central to the day as meals and sleep, and you keep them regardless of how the week is going.

The practices give friction somewhere to go. "There is no way of putting it under the rug," Anandeshvarii told me. That is the point. The twice-daily gathering works differently from a conflict resolution tool, because it operates before conflict reaches a head. It creates a kind of agreement: you will keep showing up even when showing up is uncomfortable. You are going to be in the room together, regularly, and whatever needs to surface gets a chance to.

"From resistance comes a lot of suffering. So I try to be open."

— Anandeshvarii, Ananda Kalyani

Easy to say. Very hard to live. Over time, with enough repeated contact and enough shared ritual, the openness becomes less of a personal virtue and more of an expectation. The structure is asking something different of people than goodwill alone; the expectation of honesty starts doing its own work.

Who makes sure there is no one in charge

At Feytopia, a seasonal community that runs for a few months each year at Château de Fey in France, Poli calls the governance model a membrane structure: permeable, sitting outside the usual flat-or-hierarchical categories. People who arrived first hold more influence, though nobody assigned it to them. When someone steps up to run something, they are recognized as running it, without a formal appointment.

It sounds elegant. And then Poli told me a story.

A visitor came to Feytopia and asked who was in charge. They were told: authority is shared, decisions happen through whoever steps up, no single person is responsible for everything. The person sat with that for a moment and said: "Can you bring me to the person that makes sure that there is no person in charge."

"Can you bring me to the person that makes sure that there is no person in charge."

— Visitor to Feytopia, as told by Poli

Poli took that as a fair observation. He said: for a community to run this way, in this executional manner, it requires an institutional scaffolding. And Feytopia has one, in the form of Château de Fey itself, which has a CEO, staff, and its own operations that set the outer limits of what the community can do. The membrane floats inside a container that someone else built and maintains.

Distributed governance still requires someone to hold it together. The work becomes less visible, spread across more people, easier to take for granted until the moment a person from outside asks you to name who does it. You can describe a membrane structure in an afternoon. The years of trust that make it functional take considerably longer. Feytopia is building that trust season by season, a few months at a time, whether or not anyone calls it that.

What can you actually do?

One of the most specific answers I have found is a practice called Forum, which Tamera in Portugal has been using and refining for decades. It is worth describing in concrete terms, because the vagueness around it loses the thing that makes it work.

Forum is part of a broader tradition. Nonviolent Communication, developed by Marshall Rosenberg, gave many communities a shared language for expressing needs without blame: you separate what you observed from what you felt, and what you felt from what you are actually asking for. Art of Hosting and Open Space Technology developed structured ways to make sure decisions are not made only by whoever talks loudest. Forum draws on some of this but goes further, into territory most communication training leaves alone.

Here is how it works. The community sits in a circle. One person moves to the center and shares something: a conflict, a feeling, something that has been sitting with them unspoken. Everyone else witnesses. When the person finishes, others in the circle offer mirrors: reflections of what they observed, what the words brought up in them, what they recognized underneath what was said. The mirrors are a form of presence, the community saying back to one person: we heard you, here is what we saw. Tamera calls it a social technology for transparency, and what I find useful about that framing is that it removes the therapeutic connotation. It is not therapy. It is a practice of collective perception, a regular moment where what is usually kept private gets to exist in the room.

Uri has been part of Tamera for close to twenty years. When I asked him what made him feel that something had clicked into place when he arrived, he spoke about Forum before anything else. "There is something in the culture that allows letting go of secrets," he said. "The Forum was home for me, the allowance to be truthful with each other, in the performance and in the feedback." That description has stayed with me because it sits somewhere prior to conflict resolution as the phrase is usually understood. It is about a culture in which truth has a legitimate place to go. In most organizations and households, difficult things accumulate because there is no agreed-upon container for them, no moment in the week when it is expected and acceptable to say what is actually happening; they come out sideways, in passive behavior and gossip, in the slow erosion of trust that happens when people stop saying what they mean. Forum is a container. The circle, the center, the mirrors, these are agreements about how truth will be received, and those agreements are what make it possible for people to speak at all.

In Uri's early years at Tamera, the whole community gathered for Forum every afternoon; that rhythm has shifted, and today they meet at least once a week, with sub-communities holding their own Forums as well. He described learning, through years of that practice, a capacity more than a technique. In one Forum, someone said something he disagreed with sharply, and everything in him wanted to stand up and correct it immediately. Learning to hold that impulse, to stay present to what someone else was expressing before reaching for his own response, took years. That, in my reading, is the skill Forum is actually building: the capacity to tolerate conflict long enough to understand what it is really about, which is almost never what it appears to be on the surface.

Orna Susak spent years researching kibbutzes and wrote about the findings in her book Parallel Universes. When she talks about what keeps communities intact over the long term, she reaches for a single word: glue. By this she means the emotional and practical force that makes people keep choosing each other through difficulty, the thing that goes beyond proximity and shared values. And the most powerful form of it, in her reading, is shared experience that moves people. "Common ecstasy is the mother of all glues," she said, and by ecstasy she means something other than euphoria; the experience of feeling something strongly together, in a way that becomes part of a community's shared memory and identity.

Sitting in a circle with what is true, week after week and year after year, creates a bond different from the bond formed by shared work or shared ideology; it is the bond formed by having been witnessed, and by having witnessed others, through the things that are hardest to say. Orna named something else worth sitting with: when you make a dream come true, you lose it as a glue, because it is already accomplished. The communities that survive are the ones that notice when the force holding them is thinning and find a new one before the gap becomes a break.

"Common ecstasy is the mother of all glues."

— Orna Susak, researcher and author of Parallel Universes

What holds

The communities in this piece are very different from each other. Ananda Kalyani is a spiritual community with daily collective practice at its center. Feytopia runs for a few months each year out of a château in France. Kibbutz Samar was built on radical economic sharing in the middle of the Negev desert. Tamera has been running in Portugal for decades and developed Forum into a recurring institution. A shared problem connects all of them, the one Yaniv named at the beginning: how do you build something that requires people to talk to each other, when talking to each other is the hardest part?

After years of these conversations, one thing keeps coming through: every architecture has to be lived into. The Dharma Chakra at Ananda Kalyani gives conflict somewhere to surface, which is different from resolving it. The membrane at Feytopia distributes the holding work across many people, makes it harder to see, and in doing that puts more weight on mutual trust than most governance structures do. Forum at Tamera does something I find harder to name. It makes truth expected. And making truth expected is a different thing from making it easy. It takes years.

The tools matter, and I want to say that clearly. NVC gives you a language for talking about what is happening in you that stays on your side of the table. Forum gives you a container that works regardless of whether any individual person is feeling brave that week. These are real things that change what is possible in a room. But across community after community, I have found that the tools only work if you use them before the crisis; using them before the crisis means the real practice lives underneath the tool, in the daily decision to show up, stay in the circle, say what is true even when nothing is on fire.

Yaniv was talking about something underneath technique when he said: you should always think that in ten, twenty, thirty, maybe fifty years, you will still live with these people. That is a shift in the frame you bring to every conversation, and it changes what you are willing to say and what you are willing to hear. Every tool I have seen works better when that frame is already in place.

If this landed with you

If something in this piece landed with you, I want to hear about it. Reply here, or find me through the archive at togatherproject.eu. This is field research, and the best field research is a conversation.

If you know someone who is building something, a community, a co-living project, a new way of gathering people, share this with them. That is exactly who this is for.

And if you want to support more of this fieldwork, more interviews, more honest documentation of what actually happens when people try to live together, ToGather is currently running a campaign on Artizen.

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Bringing this into your own community

Give truth a regular place to go. Protect one recurring time where the group says what is actually happening, before it leaks out sideways. You do not need Tamera's Forum to borrow its bones: a circle, a turn to speak, and an agreement that the rest of the group listens and reflects rather than rushes to fix. Use it before the crisis, not during it.

Read the original

This essay was first published on the ToGather Substack, written by Sharon Avraham. Read it on Substack.

Related in the Living Library

• Tamera Forum
• ZEGG: Seven Values, Forum, and Sociocracy
• Circle / The Way of Council
• Truth Mandala
• The Daily Check-In Practice