Joysong Collective

We live in a time of deep yearning for full-throated aliveness. The dominant, western myths of endless acquisition, increasing control, and individual separation are crumbling. There are macro-catastrophes and geopolitics and revolutions at play. But at some basic level, we simply know in our bones that we can be more fully alive in ways our current paradigms don’t support.

The Joysong Collective is a place to re-discover our fundamental joy, including and especially in the everyday places (like livelihood, parenting, grief) where we are often amnesic to remembering our already-wholeness. …

Our Joysong Collective is both tapped into the effervescence of global consciousness and rooted in local soil and embodied reality. Our first local “node” is in Sebastopol, California.

https://www.joysong.co/humans

They describe themselves as:

• "an incubator for spirit at work"
• "a playgarden for everyday aliveness"
• "a mystery school"
• "a collective experiment in co-creation"
• a "church of everyday aliveness"
• "a sangha, listening and creating in circle"

Their fundamental agreements are:

• To trust our felt sense of alignment and aliveness, 
• To listen deeply to ourselves & each other, and 
• To know that (seen or unseen) we are not alone.

What they do

Joysong Collective supports individuals and organizations in more fully integrating spirit, joy & aliveness into everyday work-life-service.

We are experimenting with new/ancient organizational, financial, and psycho-spiritual tools to support (y)our life's work in service of our planet’s regeneration. (https://www.joysong.co/)

Three main activities:

• Fellowship
  • "Yearlong 6-12 person/org inquiry into a strand of deep personal/professional work"
• Endowment
  • "raising an Endowment into a perpetual purpose trust, to be stewarded by our local/global community. The Endowment will allow us to explore the flow of gift (e.g. programs, stipends, seed investments) and reciprocity (e.g. dana, profit-share, pooled equity). The Endowment is radically transparent via OpenCollective"
• Centre
  • "building a tech-enabled “half-way house” to co-locate teams of integrative practitioners and host retreats, workshops, and co-working alongside a teahouse, bathhouse, & healing sanctuary."

Leading Questions and Problems

The problem they're trying to address is: "We each struggle to integrate our deepest psychospiritual "work" with the "work" of our everyday lives." (From their Spring/Summer 2023 Roadmap: https://www.joysong.co/mycelium)

• 'How do we co-manifest a more beautiful future?'

Paradigmatic, Whole-Systems Change

They ask questions like:

• "What if economic justice begins with remembering our already-abundance?"
  • Seeking shift from paradigm of scarcity to paradigm of abundance
• What if responsible tech requires invoking the ancestors?
  • Seeking to listen to and integrate ancestral wisdom/knowledge
• What if climate adaptation means asking the land what it wants?
  • Seeking to listen to and integrate other-than-human forms of consciousness

They seek paradigm shifts from:

• ownership –> stewardship
• transaction –> relationship
• dominance –> co-creation
• separation –> interbeing

Internal practice

They seek to practise their values in their own financial and organisational model, e.g.:

• Offering programs, services and space on a "dana" basis, meaning no upfront payment requested
• "Invit[ing] people into exploration of reciprocity, via donations and new tools for shared ownership and mutual benefit"

Key people

• Matt Jorgensen, Co-founder and General Coordinator

Organisational structure and roles

Connections

• We Will Dance with Mountains (WWDWM) course