The Experiment

The 10 Territories of The Experiment 🌿

Over the next 10 weeks we will move through 10 areas of life - one at a time, with full attention and intention.

Think of each as a territory we enter together. We are here to explore, to see it clearly, feel it fully, and experiment with what shifts when we bring conscious awareness to it.

Week 1 — Body
Week 2 — Mind
Week 3 — Spirit
Week 4 — Time
Week 5 — Stillness
Week 6 — Creativity
Week 7 — Relationship
Week 8 — Nature
Week 9 — Vision
Week 10 — Integration

Each week builds on the last. By week 10 you will have touched every layer of your life - intentionally, experimentally, with awareness you didn't have before.

Week 7Menu — Relationship 🤝

Welcome to your seventh open buffet.

This week our territory is Relationship - the most ancient laboratory for human transformation, and the one we spend the most energy in while understanding the least consciously.

Everything we have worked with so far - body, mind, spirit, time, stillness, creativity - eventually finds its real test in relationship. It is easy to be present alone. Easy to be patient in meditation. Easy to hold your values when no one is pressing against them. Relationship is where all of that meets friction. Where the parts of us we thought we had worked through show up anyway. Where the deepest healing tends to happen, and where the deepest wounds were first made.

This week we are not trying to fix our relationships. We are trying to see them more clearly - to bring the same quality of honest, non-judgmental attention to our relating that we have been practicing in other territories all these weeks.

Before you dive into the menu, I want to introduce one teaching that will live underneath everything this week. Marshall Rosenberg spent his life studying what happens in the space between people - why some conversations create connection and others create walls, why the same words said two different ways can either open a heart or close it. He called his work Nonviolent Communication, though I prefer to think of it simply as honest, compassionate language. The core idea is this: beneath every difficult interaction, beneath every conflict and withdrawal and resentment, there are unmet needs. Not bad people. Not wrong feelings. Just needs that have not yet been heard - including your own. This week, that lens lives in the background of everything you practice. You do not need to master NVC this week. You only need to begin noticing: what do I actually need right now? And what might the other person actually need? That question alone changes everything. I will be sharing some audios with the teachings of NVC for those who’d like to know more.

Relationship is not only romantic partnership. This week we mean every significant bond - partner, parent, child, friend, colleague, the relationship with your own body, with money, with time, with God. We mean the quality of contact you are capable of with another living being. We mean the space between you and anyone you care about - what lives there, what is avoided there, what wants to change there.

Below is your menu. Choose one from each category, something that genuinely calls to you, let your instinct lead.

Trust your first instinct.

➕ ADD: choose one relationship practice to bring in this week

  • A daily moment of genuine appreciation expressed out loud - not a performance of gratitude, not a text, not a like. A spoken sentence, to one person each day, that names something specific you value about them or about what they did. Not "you're amazing." Something real. Something you noticed. Something they might not know you noticed. Marshall Rosenberg called this expressing what is alive in us - when we name what someone did and how it met a real need in us, we are not flattering them. We are connecting with them.

    A listening practice - choose one conversation this week where your only role is to listen. Not to respond, advise, relate back to your own experience, or fix. Just to receive what the other person is saying as fully as you can. Ask one follow-up question that proves you heard them. Nothing more. This is what Rosenberg called empathic presence - the gift of being fully received without being evaluated or redirected.

    A weekly relationship inventory - 10 minutes, once this week. Sit with these questions: which relationships in my life currently feel nourishing? Which feel draining? Which feel unfinished or unresolved? Which am I neglecting? This is not a to-do list - it is a map.

    A needs inventory for yourself - one of the most radical practices in Rosenberg's work is simply learning to identify your own needs clearly, without judgment and without making anyone else responsible for them. This week, once a day, pause and ask: what do I actually need right now? Not what I want from a specific person. What is the underlying need - for rest, for connection, for autonomy, for acknowledgment, for safety? Just name it. You do not have to do anything with it yet. Naming it is the beginning.

    A digital-free conversation - one meaningful conversation this week happens with phones in another room, screens closed, no interruption possible. Notice how different it feels to give and receive undivided attention.

    Your own choice - any practice that brings more consciousness to how you relate to the people who matter to you.

➖ REMOVE: choose one thing to release this week

  • The habit of half-listening - being physically present in a conversation while mentally elsewhere, composing your response before the other person has finished speaking, or managing the interaction from behind a layer of distraction. This week, notice every time this happens. You do not need to confess it to anyone. Just notice.

    Jackal language toward yourself - Rosenberg used the image of the jackal to describe the inner voice that judges, blames, demands, and moralizes. Most of us apply this voice to others, but the harshest jackal of all is often the one we turn on ourselves. This week, notice when you speak to yourself in jackal - you should have, you always, you never, what's wrong with you. You do not need to silence it. Just name it as jackal, and see if underneath the judgment there is a need that hasn't been met.

    Giving advice when presence was asked for - the reflexive move to solve, suggest, reframe, or silver-lining another person's pain before they have finished feeling it. This week, practice staying in the feeling with someone for longer than is comfortable before moving toward resolution. Presence is usually what people need first. Advice is almost always secondary.

    Relating from your wound rather than your wholeness - the pattern of entering a relationship interaction from the place that is most hurt, most defended, or most contracted, rather than from the part of you that is genuinely well and genuinely loving. This week, before one difficult conversation, pause and ask: which part of me is about to speak?

    Scorekeeping - the unconscious ledger of who gave what, who made more effort, who apologized last, who has been carrying more. This week, put the ledger down for seven days.

    Your own choice - any relational habit that keeps real contact at a distance.

🌀 DEEPEN: choose one to commit to for the full week

  • Learn and practice the four steps of NVC once a day this week - observation, feeling, need, request. Choose one real situation from your life and move it through all four steps in your journal. What did I observe, stated as a fact without evaluation? What did I feel - not what I thought, what I actually felt in my body? What need of mine was met or unmet? What is one specific, doable request I could make, not a demand, not a forever-change, just one concrete action? By the end of the week you will have practiced one of the most useful relational tools that exists, with your own real material rather than a textbook example.

    A seven-day relationship journal - each evening this week, write briefly about one relational moment from the day. Not a complaint or a gratitude. An observation. What happened? What did I feel? What did I do with that feeling? What do I wish I had done differently?

  • Write a letter you may not send - to a person with whom something is unresolved, unspoken, or incomplete. Write everything. All of it. Without editing for their feelings or yours. This is not for them. It is for you - to move something from inside to outside, to see it, to stop carrying it internally in the dark. Decide at the end of the week what, if anything, you want to do with it.

    Explore one teaching on conscious relationship from any tradition - Harville Hendrix on the unconscious partner selection and the healing purpose of committed relationship, bell hooks on love as practice and will, Martin Buber on I-Thou versus I-It relating, the Buddhist Brahmaviharas as the four qualities of genuine love, or go deeper into Rosenberg's own book Nonviolent Communication - A Language of Life. Choose one and give it 30 minutes of real engagement.

    Have one conversation this week that you have been avoiding - not the hardest one, not necessarily. But one you have been walking around. You do not need to resolve it. You only need to begin it. If it helps, prepare by moving through the four NVC steps in your journal before you speak - what are you observing, feeling, needing, and requesting? Notice what was keeping you from it, and notice what it costs to start.

    Your own choice. And the question for this whole week: in my most important relationships, am I showing up as the person I actually want to be?

  • A few notes before you choose 🌿

    One note specific to this week: relationship is the territory where our material tends to be heaviest. If something surfaces during this week's practices that feels bigger than a journaling prompt can hold - grief, old pain, something that has been waiting a long time - please reach out to me directly rather than carrying it alone in the group. This is what the private channel is for.

    Read the menu, read the moon cycle guide and listen to yourself. There is no right answer and no comparison. What one person removes another may need to add.

    Once you have chosen please write your three choices in your notebook with today's date. If you can, make it your phone screen saver (using Canva if you fancy fancy :) or by just typing it in notes and adding to the screen saver) so you have a constant reminder. Then share them here in the group so we can hold each other's intentions.

    I will share individual guidance from your natal charts after you place your choices, in the private messages.

  • General recommendations aligned with the lunar cycle are on the separate page.