A Guided "Somatic Community Design" Meditation

An exercise to help you tune into your intuition when designing and facilitating community.

Think back to the last social space you were in.

Perhaps it was a dinner party, a bar, a classroom, a coffee shop, a comedy show… wherever.

How did it feel to be in that space? Were people happy to be there? Were you happy to be there? What sights, smells, and sounds do you remember? Did you feel safe? Did you feel welcome?

Chances are, you can conjure a pretty clear sense of what it was like to be in that room.

Humans, the social creatures that we are, have this innate ability to read a social environment very quickly. It’s been critical to our survival.

Of course, when designing communities these days, we tend to forget about this skill. We use playbooks, frameworks, and canvases to tell us what to create for our community. We seek data. We make plans.

We take an intellectual approach to designing something that is very emotional, relational, and somatic. We use our minds to search for answers that our hearts and bodies already hold.

You may have read my series on emergent community design. In it, I lay out the core belief of the methodology:

“We don’t build communities, we build containers where community has a chance to emerge.”

Our intuition plays a critical role here. Effective community creators tap into their inner knowing and feeeel into the community that wants to emerge.

I’m not knocking the intellect. Conducting research is important and I love me a good community design framework. (My team and I invented several back at CMX!) What I’m saying is, don’t forget to also look inward.

With that, I was inspired by my experience with mindfulness practice, IFS (Internal Family Systems), and somatic experiences to create this guided meditation that will help you tap into your intuition for what wants to emerge in your community.

I’ve privately taken around 100 community builders through this guided meditation and the results have been surprising and inspiring. Participants report feeling more deeply connected to their community, understanding members in a new light, and having a range of new ideas for how to deepen connection in their space.

I won’t say more, so I don’t lead your experience too much. Give it a shot and see where it takes you.

I’d also love it if you’d email me or comment below to share what emerges for you through this experience, if you feel comfortable sharing. I love hearing your stories!

Find a quiet, comfortable place to sit, and when you’re ready, you can do the guided meditation using the audio or video below.

(The meditation starts at 4:02 after a brief introduction, which you’re welcome to skip)

A Guided "Somatic Community Design" Meditation (Audio)

A Guided "Somatic Community Design" Meditation (Video)

✍️ After you’ve completed the meditation, take five minutes to write down what you observed and any insights that emerged.

If you’re doing this exercise in a group, take five minutes to reflect individually before coming together as a group, and sharing what came up for you.

I can’t wait to hear what emerged!