by Anne-Chloé Destremau
If I had to think about one thing what I would remember about the Cavitation Bridgehouse, it would say, “I love that people were making orange juices for each other in the morning. They had to go pick the oranges, squeeze them and clean the whole mess afterwards. But, they did it gladly if that meant they could offer the golden juice to their friends.”
Tradition #1: Rotating Spaceholders.
During the first physical meeting of the Cavitation Bridgehouse, I - as the originator of the Bridgehouse - immediately relinquished the main spaceholding. It was crucial, for the Bridgehouse to thrive, that each member became one of the sources of creation of our temporary community.
The tradition became of rotating spaceholders.
The first rotating job is that of the Spaceholder of the Bridgehouse. That person is radically responsible for the clarity of the energetic space and purpose for the house. We rotate spaceholder every 24h.
Beyond making sure that we have cooks for lunch and a dish-washing team, the Spaceholder of the Bridgehouse shift their orientation towards being a Gameworld Builder. The practice is to attune their attention to quest-ions such as, how could our house work better? Where is the nourishment that we long for? What is too much that could be dropped? What other experiment could we try? What is to celebrate? Who is falling behind, hiding? What secret talents and knack someone could teach us? Which identity are people using today?
The challenge is to not only notice, but elegantly (and maybe invisibly) create possibility and expansion for the team. The skills involved in creating the magical energy of yellow stuff is worth an entire other article.
Being Spaceholder for a Bridgehouse is being at the crest of an endless source of 5-body food pouring down your tubes. You are the first and last at the feast.
We decided to have one common meal together each day. Spaceholders for the main meal would replace themselves each night, similar to our tradition in Expand The Box trainings and Possibility Labs. Usually, the team is of two people. After lunch, a dish-washing team volunteers to clean up dishes and leftovers. In a house of 12 people, that means each person would cook and clean once a week. Imagine how much time you are spending cooking and cleaning living on your own?
But the tradition of rotating spaceholding is more than just saving time or “knowing” who is responsible. Twice a week, cooks or cleaners are bestowed the opportunity to bless their fellow experimenters with nutritious, eccentric and experimental food as the foundation for the hour spent together around the table. People went full out: we had hand pulled Asian noodles, unpronounceable Indonesian squash dish, homemade pizza, french crepes, roasted cauliflowers in tahini sauce, wild salads, … And, the conversations matched the generosity on our plates.
Tradition #2: The Amazing Space.
I am so glad that we figured out to meet everyday. The Amazing Space became our red thread, our gravitational center, the heartbeat of the Bridgehouse. It took us less than 5 minutes to find a time that would work for almost everyone, almost every day. Quite a miracle with 12 hardened and busy spaceholders around the circle. The time was 5-7pm, before ‘dinner’ and evening calls.
The Amazing Space is set up as a Nothing space, where Everything can happen. We usually spend 10-15 minutes doing logistics for the day, before diving into the juicy stuff.
In one of the first Amazing Spaces, we made two maps of what we long to create in the Amazing Spaces.
We deepened the context and practiced Memetic Engineering and Memetic Speaking, we research about Apprentices in Archiarchy, holding space for and delivering Extraordinary Interviews, becoming Archiarchy Invention Centers spaceholders, meeting people each time as if it was the first, we took apart old decisions and gave each other wild experiments, we listened to each other’s discoveries and whipped them up to the next level of clarity, and we wrote - a lot! - together!
Among many other things, Amazing Space became a door opened for Clinton and myself to be generous with the value that we are. The rest of the day, we would often be butts-on-a-chair, in front of our computers, shaping gameworlds or writing the next book. Clinton and I might not be the funnest people to be around when we are ‘working’. We are focused. But during the Amazing Space, we would play full out on the playground of hungry and joyful researchers. The generosity in our spaceholding reflected and ignited generosity of other members in their specialized domains. And vice versa.
As a culture, it is possible to bypass the disease of competition (‘I have to do as much as so and so to be accepted’) and comparison (‘I will never be as good as so and so, so why bother?’).
Generosity is born out of necessity. When generosity is met in its full expression, you get to play as big as you truly are. Generosity breeds generosity.
Tradition #3: We Want To Know.
One tradition that we started back in my first Bridgehouse: the Writing House in 2019 in Brazil, is ‘We Want To Know’. If you are leaving the house, we want to know that you are going, where and with whom, and even maybe why. Many people react to this tradition with emotional reactivity. First comes the fear that someone else again wants to control their every move; then the anger of wanting to be free, and not accountable to anyone.
When we explain, “We are interested in you. You are part of our house. We want to know where you are so we can be with you even when you are not physically close. We want to be with your needs and adventures. And, we have to be afraid when we do not know what is going on with you.” That is when people usually broke down into tears, realizing that nobody had been interested in them like this before. Past interests were often mixed with hidden purposes of manipulation and domination. It is a shock to their system that someone can love them without wanting to own them.
We practiced Collaborative Communication with each other.
This tradition extends to if you decide to spend a day in your room and not interact with anyone in the Bridgehouse. You pop your head in the living room in the morning and announce “I will be hiding in my room all day. I am fine. I will see you all tomorrow.” At this point, we discovered that it is also useful to clearly announce to the cooks, “I will not join the house for lunch, do not cook for me.”
Evidently, if you spend two consecutive days hiding away, or that you repeat the process with regularity, something else than ‘just needing a day away’ is going on. Potentially, a demon egostate is gripping your aliveness and eating your energy away when it seems you have ‘too much’ of it when surrounded with fellow geniuses.
The tradition is as you are about to walk out the door, you grab the attention of whoever is around, and shout, “I am going for a walk with this person. We will be back in 30 minutes.”
Tradition #4: Adventure Day.
There are no weekends in Archiarchy. Weekends, what a concept! You slave away 5 consecutive days doing something that you do not want to do, wistfully hoping for the weekends to come as fast as possible when supposedly you would do what you really want to do. In reality, your Gremlin owns your weekends, blowing off “steam” - the rage of being a slave - drinking, one night stands, or going for calming walks in the forest.
Who would you be if you simply did what you want? You would stop abusing yourself, others and the natural world.
So what? People always work in Archiarchy? There is no break? These questions come up often. But, they are so full of constructs and assumptions that I would be trailing off my wish to share with you about the Traditions of Generosity if I unpack them.
One of those Traditions is Adventure Day. In the Cavitation Bridgehouse, Adventure Day happened every 7th day. Adventure Day is a day of exploration, outside of the house, into unknown places. One person is the spaceholder for the Adventure Day. Anyone can join their team. The challenge is to entertain geniuses. Not an easy task. If you try to mother them, you probably send your friends into a fury. If you hold on to a fixed plan, you cement people’s wildness into broken expectations and resentment. The opportunity is to create an environment similar to a treasure hunt.
Geniuses love treasures, but most of all they love the hunt for treasures!
Our first Adventure Day led by Daway Chou-Ren and Devin Gleeson. They made us talk to art pieces, Snake Goddesses, Minotaur paintings and amphoras. The museum of Archeology and History of Iraklion, filled with dead things, came to life with the most extraordinary tales of Minoan life and Greek gods. It was so powerful that Susanne jacked into the channel of Talking To The Gods.
Meredith took us to the Samarian Gorge for her birthday, in search of an invisible tree in a mordorian landscape. We became Frodos and Sams (from Lord of the Rings) set onto a particularly impossible quest.
There is a lot to learn about sourcing Celebratory Adventure and Adventurous Celebration.
Tradition #5: Taking Care Of Each Other.
There are things that you know about taking care of yourself that others do not.
For example, we decide to use the dish-washing machine. Two members know that the common tablets leave a coat of deadly soap on the dishes to make them shine. I do not. Someone else know that a mix of 2 teaspoons of baking soda and 1 teaspoon of citric acid easily replaces the tablets. So, that is what we use.
Another example, from the corner of my eye, I see that Marina is using an aluminum-based deodorant, known to cause breast cancer. I agree with her to throw it out immediately, and to use, for example, Nuud deodorant. Clinton spend an ungodly amount of time taking photos and listing uses for other Archan Nomading Tools at: https://nomading.mystrikingly.com/#nomading-tools. I recommend checking them out.
We quickly, and thankfully not bloodily, discover that some members of the Bridgehouse would clean sharp knives and unknowingly bury them under a pile of plates and cups on the drying rack, or place them blade side up in the cutlery department of the rack! To take care of each other’s fingers, we agree to clean, dry and immediately put away any sharp object in the drawers.
The trick with the Tradition of ‘Taking Care of Each Other’ is not to fall in the trap of your own Box’s Nits. Nits are your neurotic ideas about how things should be: all the dishes have to be put away immediately, there should be no leftovers, the rubbish is full when it is half-full or the rubbish is not full until we can no longer squeeze one more ounce of trash, … etc. Everybody has a Box, and everybody has thousands of nits. Nits are not about taking care of each other, they are about taking care of your Box.
The other trap is to withhold what you notice, and let other people suffer for no good reason but your Gremlin’s wish for Schadenfreude.
What about house-cleaning? Without discussing it, people simply started doing spot cleaning: sweeping the kitchen or the stairs, wiping the sink in the common bathroom, emptying the ashes from the fire pit, exceptionally vacuuming the living room, wiping the shared tables before an Amazing Space, or folding the blankets before going to bed. For 6 weeks, we did not spend one moment more than necessary to maintain the optimal level of Drala for us to do our transformational work.
Taking Care of Each Other as a tradition shines light on the group intelligence of our unique sensitivity.
One of the biggest blocks to Taking Care of Each Other is the fear of Radical Relying on one’s own clarity and experience. We can rejoice in our ability to remove Energetic Block in order to liberate intelligence!
Tradition #6: Money Is Simple.
We all have different ways to spend money, depending on our constructs, thoughtware, relationship with abundance and generosity. Money was not a central question in the Bridgehouse, but it still showed up in some negotiation.
The Tradition is to make money simple: we split costs of house, food and car rental equally among ourselves.
When you shop, you shop for everyone.
When we go to the restaurant, one person pays. We split the bill equally later.
What if someone breaks something, who pays for it? After half-a-dozen possibilities, we decided for this Bridgehouse that if you break it, you pay for it. We found that what was needed and wanted at this point in our individual and collective paths was to train ourselves to pay attention to our attention. A few members revealed that they had been thinking out loud ‘I will drop this cup’ or ‘I will cut my finger’ or ‘I will get hit by this car’. Those are powerful incantations made by powerful beings. Those things tend to come up from unknown dark forces. The practice is to explode them in your mind and replace the image with you placing the cup unharmed in the cupboard, cutting the carrots without cutting your finger for the soup, or crossing the road and getting home safely.
What if someone says, “I don’t eat all the fancy expensive stuff you are buying, so I do not want to pay for it”? In this case, for this person, we negotiated to “Please tell us how much you want to spend on food per week, and if our shared cost is more we will divide it among the rest of us.” After this conversation, the subject never came up again, and the person split the cost with the rest of us.
There is no rule about handling money. Our Archan approch answers the question “What would create the most Evolution, Love, Creation and Possibility right now about this?”
At any time, someone could have renegotiated this deal based on newly build matrix to catch more awareness.
What if someone says, I am leaving 10 days earlier and I do not want to pay for the last week of the rental car, would you be willing to pay 2.85€ more each to cover my part? The answer in this case was: “You are not delivering enough worktalk. If you have time to worry and figure out the 2.85€ per person, you have time, energy and brain space to write articles, websites and empower other people. I do not mind paying the 2.85€, but I do mind that you are using your precious energy on these details.”
Tradition #7: Abundant Celebration.
It turned out that during our stay in the Bridgehouse, we were gifted with two birthdays, one Archmas and one passage to the New Year. There were perfect reasons to celebrate each other, despite that celebration does not need a reason. Living together for such a short amount of time was cause enough for celebration.
Sophia Wegele started the tradition to celebrate Vera Franco when she missed our Monday Amazing Space to hold space for a particularly challenging Gremlin Transformation Chapter 0 with 7 men. Vera would come down the stairs, and Sophia would be wiggling her fingers until she could hug Vera.
We celebrated written articles, new clients, successful Introduction to Good Girl Buster Training, intensely held Possibility Coaching sessions, as well as simple public gestures of affection between couples who were shy in the beginning.
We rejoiced in each other's company by baking evening-snack Toll House cookies for the whole house more than once a week (and sometimes more than once a day!).
The way it looks to me is Archan Celebration is not a pause in our lives to pat ourselves on the back of what we have accomplished.
Celebration is an integral part of being with each other and loving each other. Celebration is offered by holding space for a coming together. A movie night is a celebration as we push the low table to the side, bring the mats, cushions and blankets to sprawl on. We celebrate that we want to be that close physically, emotionally and archetypally touching each other.
We made the most of it.
PS. Above, us, watching The Fall Guy, rolling on the floor in laughters, and swooning over some radical relating repartee between Emily Blunt and Ryan Gosling.
