The Most Important Training I’ve Ever Organized

Onboarding into the FVN's Mycelial Network

Okay, I admit it: I’m being a little facetious with the title of this post. It’s click-bait.

And at the same time, there is at least a part of me that believes it. At the very least, I am hoping that the training I’m about to talk about - and invite you into - sparks something that becomes a meaningful part of my life moving forward.

I’m not attached to any specific outcome. Over the years, I’ve let go of many of the attachments I used to have around things becoming “big,” visible, or successful by conventional standards. And still, I can feel that this matters to me. It matters in a way that feels different from most of the other trainings I’ve organized, which tend to be more or less one-offs. This, I hope, is the beginning of something that builds meaningful relationships that may last for years to come.

I’m talking about the upcoming three-month Fierce Vulnerability Kinship Lab, which will serve as part one of a two-part process for onboarding into the Fierce Vulnerability Network (FVN).

A LITTLE BIT OF CONTEXT

I thought it would be helpful to offer a bit of historical context, but then I started writing about my journey with FVN and quickly realized how difficult it is to write “a bit” about something that has been such a long, winding road. I promise to share more of that story in the future. For now, there are three things I want you to know.

First: I did not start the Fierce Vulnerability Network. FVN began in the fall of 2015 and was originally known as the Yet To Be Named Network (YTBN). I joined in December of 2018.

Second: In the fall of 2021, the network went through a naming process and chose to become the Fierce Vulnerability Network. Members of the network had attended Fierce Vulnerability workshops that I had designed with several friends, and they felt that the framework captured the essence of what YTBN was trying to bring into the world.

I was opposed to the name. At that point, I was already deep into writing Fierce Vulnerability: Healing from Trauma, Emerging through Collapse. I didn’t want my name so closely associated with what was envisioned as a decentralized network. I worried people would assume I was the founder or some kind of centralized leader. The leaders who initiated the naming process assured me they had thought deeply about this and believed it could be a win-win. Eventually, I acquiesced.

Third: While I always carried some hesitation about the network, from the very beginning I could feel that it was radically different from any organizing community I had ever been part of. A lot has changed since I joined, but my conviction remains: FVN continues to offer something genuinely unique to the world of social justice.

And it’s that conviction I want to share with you.

One awkward thing about writing this is that FVN was always envisioned as a decentralized, emergent experiment. My understanding of it may differ from someone else’s, and that’s not a problem - there is space for all of it. What follows is simply my perspective on why FVN has been so meaningful to me, and why I hope you might consider joining us.

THE WHAT

Briefly, I want to share the “what” that I am inviting you into, then share some thoughts about why FVN feels so unique and different to me.

The Fierce Vulnerability Kinship Lab is a three-month journey to deepen into the spirit of Fierce Vulnerability. I am honored to partner with Kinvene to build this program out, as none of this would have happened without their collaboration.

Throughout this three-month journey, participants will have a chance to learn from Francis Weller, Kaira Jewel Lingo, MaMuse, Lu Aya of the Peace Poets, Oren Jay Sofer, Vickie Chang and LiZhen Wang, as well as myself.

In addition to eight live virtual sessions, participants will be placed into small pods of 3-8 people – hopefully with those in your geographical regions. These pods will be invited to meet in person (where possible) to deepen with each other, and to design your own fierce vulnerability experiments – a public action, a grief ritual, an art installation, a vulnerable conversation with strangers, etc.

The first half of the journey will be a “book club” of sorts, where we will dive into the content of my book, Fierce Vulnerability. The second half will include experiential activities that not only will help you deepen into the content, but will support you in designing your public experiment.

All of this will be offered on a Gift Economy basis, outside of a small $25 registration fee which will go to support Kinvene.

After completing this journey, those who want to continue can sign up for an additional two-month onboarding program. While the Kinship Lab will deepen into the spirit of fierce vulnerability, the onboarding will be more of the nuts and bolts of what it means to join the Fierce Vulnerability Network.

So that’s the “what” of this invitation. I can tell this is already going to be a slightly longer post than usual, but I want to share just a few thoughts on why this is so meaningful to me, and why I hope it will be for you.

THE BIG QUESTIONS

I realized recently that my vocational call, at least in this season of my life, is to be in communities that are willing to ask the biggest questions.

We are living in a time of profound transition - what many call the Great Turning - when the systems that have shaped our lives are unraveling, and something new is struggling to be born. In moments like this, I find myself less interested in tunnel vision: one issue, one campaign, one legislative win. Not because those things don’t matter, but because they don’t feel sufficient.

FVN is a place oriented toward listening to emergence, toward being guided by spirit, and toward asking the kinds of questions I posed in my book:

What if instead of chanting, we cry?
What if instead of holding signs with demands, we tell stories?
What if instead of yelling, we sing songs?
What if instead of anger, we lead with heartbreak?
What if we stop trying to win and start trying to heal?
What if we build a movement where nobody - even those on the “other” side - ever questions their belonging?
What if we understand nonviolent action as collective trauma healing?
What if instead of trying to “shut it down,” we try to “open it up” - our hearts, our relationships, our capacity for repair?
What if we mobilize the power needed to stop harm while cultivating the love necessary to heal it?

What would it take?

What if?

These are not rhetorical questions. They are living inquiries. And FVN is one of the few places I’ve experienced that takes them seriously, as the essence of our practice.

GUIDED BY SPIRIT

To embody questions like these, we have to center spirit.

In FVN, direct action is understood as ceremony. Our work is ceremonial - not in a rigid or prescriptive way, but in the sense that it is intentional, relational, and tethered to something larger than strategy alone.

In the early days, FVN meetings were held under candlelight. We turned off our devices and took notes by hand. We designated a single room as a “tech space,” so if you needed to check your phone, you had to physically leave the meeting space to do so.

These choices slowed us down. They settled our nervous systems. They helped us tether more deeply to the earth and to one another, rather than to Wifi networks and constant stimulation.

There’s a reason the network was originally called Yet To Be Named. We didn’t want to define it prematurely. We wanted the work itself to reveal what it was becoming. We explicitly resisted many of the structures that pull movements into the nonprofit industrial complex.

One of my favorite passages from our DNA Handbook reads:

“We long to see what life wants to do through us. We resist the temptation, therefore, to predict or attempt to shape the outcomes of this experiment by way of fine-tuned mission or vision statements. We simply hold trust that the teams we assemble - if true to the DNA described in these pages - will offer beautiful and sacred gifts to the continuing struggle for justice and wholeness.”

We will never be a nonprofit. We don’t use social media. We barely have a website. We will never have swag, never mind a logo, and we will never even have a general operating budget.

And while we hope this work grows, we are not interested in throwing money at it to force it to grow.

Early on, some of us imagined that if we are “successful,” we may build something akin to Extinction Rebellion or other mass movements. I once thought success might look like mobilizing millions of people into the streets. I don’t think that way anymore.

When we picture large-scale movements, we often imagine redwood forests - tall, majestic, visible from miles away. Redwoods are essential to the ecosystem, and our movements absolutely need large organizations that can mobilize people and resources at scale.

But the largest living organism on Earth is not a redwood forest. It’s an underground network of mycelium in northern Oregon. And if you were walking across that forest floor, you wouldn’t even know it was there. And yet, under the right conditions, mushrooms bloom everywhere. They appear separate, but they are all expressions of one vast living system.

That’s how I now understand FVN.

Mushrooms don’t live very long. They will never be as big as redwoods. That is not their role. FVN may never have millions of members. That is not how we measure success. Our metrics are depth of relationship and the ways we nourish the movement ecosystem with spirit.

AN EXPERIMENT IN HUMILITY

One of the things I appreciate most about FVN is its humility.

If we are going to respond honestly to the magnitude of the questions before us, we have to admit that we don’t know the answers. As a species, we have never been here before.

We have never stood on the brink of a mass-extinction event of our own making. We have never faced this depth of polycrisis. And, paradoxically, I believe we have never been this close to collective healing and liberation.

The depth of our pain marks the depth of healing that is possible.

Much of what got us here was the delusion that we could think our way out of this mess - that if we just applied enough intellect, we could control our outcomes, manage complexity, and bend the Earth to our will. Our way forward has to be different. It has to be grounded in humility, in listening, and in relationship with forces far larger than human intellect.

From the beginning, FVN has understood itself as an experiment. Not an institution meant to last forever - nothing in nature does - but an exploration of what it means to affirm life in the midst of collapse.

Over the years, FVN has taken many forms. We’ve tried multiple onboarding processes. Teams have formed and dissolved. Chapters have come and gone. At the moment, only two chapters are active. Someone recently asked me what I learned from FVN’s past “failures.”

That word stuck with me.

It’s true that many of our experiments did not last. But no scientific experiment works the first - or second, or third - time. When you are searching for something new, you run hundreds of experiments. Each one teaches you something. You adapt. You incorporate the feedback. And you try again.

What I’m grateful for is that we haven’t clung to past forms of the network just to keep them alive. Our culture is deeply afraid of death, and that fear shows up everywhere: in a medical industry that clings to a beating heart at the cost of quality of life, in relationships where we are afraid to let go of people despite a clear pattern of toxicity, in organizations that go on raising funds when it is clear it’s time has passed - and in our attachment to late-stage capitalism as we cling to our newest iPhones, Starbucks lattes, the convenience of artificial intelligence and organic produce at Whole Foods (all of which I am guilty of). When we cling to what is already decaying, strange things begin to happen.

FVN has practiced letting things compost. And so the Kinship Lab is simply the latest experiment. It may last three months. Six. A year. Or it may transform into something else entirely. What I trust is that we will continue learning how to move in the direction of life, beauty, and relationship.

THE “TYRANNY OF INCLUSIVITY”

This is not a network you join by signing up for an email list.

Miki Kashtan talks about the “tyranny of inclusivity”—the idea that real community requires mutual discernment, and that indiscriminate openness can actually undermine belonging. Creating containers of trust requires alignment, and alignment takes time.

The application process for the initial YTBN training I attended was intense, and in retrospect, I see how essential it was.

This three-month Kinship Lab, followed by an additional two-month onboarding process, is a significant commitment. But LiZhen once told me that belonging is an outgrowth of commitment. Collective liberation is no small task. Soldiers spend months in boot camp preparing for war. Spiritual practice requires rigor. And this, for us, is spiritual work.

In a movement culture saturated with security culture, FVN tries to operate with as much transparency as possible. And that requires trust and relationship - and those cannot be rushed.

We are asking a lot: five months, with no guarantee that there will even be a network to join at the end. In a world where you can download an app and instantly belong, we are choosing to slow down. I want to name that honestly - and to celebrate it.

DECENTRALIZATION AND THE MYCELIAL NETWORK

Another critical aspect of FVN is its decentralized nature. That does not mean we lack structure. In many ways, decentralized systems are more complex than hierarchical ones.

That is another reason why it is necessary to have a long, intensive onboarding process. Because each pod, chapter, or team will design its own experiments, we need to be grounded in shared values and principles. And because we don’t know what the future requires, we benefit from many parallel experiments—learning, failing, and adapting together.

FVN chapters may look radically different from one another. One team might focus on reimagining direct action. Another might focus on collective healing. Others might bring art, song, or storytelling into movement spaces, or support activists in having healing conversations with family members.

Some teams may last a few months. Others may become long-term movement homes. Several teams may converge for some time to organize larger experiments.

Each experiment is a mushroom emerging on the forest floor. The soil around each mushroom is different, so each manifestation will look likely different as they are fed bey slightly different nutrients and grow in different conditions. But we will all be connected through the same mycelial network.

And whatever experiments begins to answer some of our biggest questions will grow. As in nature, whatever new evolution works will naturally spread. We will share those lessons through the mycelial network, and that is how FVN will grow, and answer the question of what it is meant to be.

AN INVITATION

FVN is imagined as a decentralized network, and the Kinship Lab is one step toward identifying and supporting the next wave of leaders all over the world. At the same time, we’ve learned that decentralization too early can be destabilizing. In the early stages, people need more centralized support.

All of that puts me in an awkward position.

As much as I do not want to be in leadership positions, it would be irresponsible for me to not recognize the public role I currently have in the re-launch of this Network. I have a growing public profile and have written a book that shares a name with this network, and that gives me a lot of visibility and social capital, whether I want it or not. I hope to wield this responsibility with care, and to use it to remind us of the power of decentralization and lift other voices.

There is also a great deal I cannot do. Because of my neurodivergence and introversion, I am not a natural community weaver. I’m not a song leader or artist. I have my own spiritual practice, but don’t feel comfortable leading ceremony and ritual. And I hesitate to design and lead public actions.

So one of the reasons why I hope countless other leaders will emerge and step into their own leadership in FVN is because we legitimately need you. I need you.

Leadership can be a lonely place. Sometimes, writing books and giving public talks can create the illusion that I must have answers to some of these big questions (I don’t). And to be honest, I increasingly find myself wanting to step out of the front of the room and into circles where I am simply one person among others – lost, confused, afraid, but also excited and filled with deep faith.

Faith that if we slow down enough to listen to emergence, a path will reveal itself.

So this is my invitation. Join us. Take a risk. Try this three-month Kinship Lab and see what stirs. If it speaks to you, join us in the onboarding process. Take your seat in the circle.

And let’s be with these questions—together.

Final Note: This Kinship lab is hosted by Kinvene, a new platform for online courses and trans-local community building. Kinvene has not only been a technical host, but they have been a real partner in this work.

The founder of Kinvene, Michelle, approached me with interest in hosting a program for Fierce Vulnerability at the perfect time. I was just beginning to feel the desire to do less one-time events and explore longer-term engagements that builds community around the content of my book. We were also just starting to talk about the possibility of another FVN Onboarding process.

As Paolo Coelho wrote in The Alchemist, “When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.” FVN feels so much bigger than something I want. But the partnership with Kinvene does feel like something the universe brought together – because the universe itself wants this.

So I am grateful to Michelle and Kinvene for helping us with this Network relaunch – something that may not have happened without them. I encourage everyone to sign up for Kinvene’s listserv to stay updated on future programs they offer!

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