Where FeelReal Started
On the morning of Saturday, November 17, 2007, I awoke from a dream with the clearest vision I’ve had before or since. Grabbing seven pieces of printer paper, I sketched out a vision for transforming communication via the Internet. I felt like Mozart. Details that were inventive and actionable flowed through me. To this day I’ve never seen a system like it.
My key idea oriented around improving communication, specifically in small group dialogue circles that occurred online, in real-time. Since most social media is an open-ended asynchronous paradigm, there isn’t much room for actual dialogue. And so we talk past each other and sink into our own stories and confirmation biases. Scientifically speaking, it’s beyond our nature to have “conversations” with more than ten people at one time and we cannot maintain relationships with more than 100 people over the course of a lifetime. The era of information confronts our limitations.We keep trying to solve our collective existential crisis with modern solutions, most of which pull us out of ourselves.
The solution is an ancient practice that, when merged with modern technology, will bring us together as a true global community.
Community is where we come together to explore vulnerabilities, looking inside and also beyond petty grievances. We need to start talking to each other again, to feel real. We need a central gathering place that honors the wisdom of everyone and the experience of the people who practice space holding.
My night storm more than twelve years ago, now known as FeelReal, envisioned courageous conversations where people meet each other online in real-time to co-create community and real solutions to our world’s more dire problems. The dialogues are facilitated by professional space holders in order to ensure brave heart spaces and active engagement. We are disrupting the passivity that most technology and social networks depend on, as well as the flood of one-to-many thought leadership channels that all clamor for limited attention space.
Once we achieve a critical mass of creative consciousness meeting together in community, people can then collectively choose to focus that energy to reverse the tide of our world’s peril. First, we’ll hold space for the space holders to seed the culture of community. Once they feel supported and the community is seeded, we’ll bring more and more people into this brave new space to use dialogue and technology to analyze and solve our common problems.
I still have this dream.
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