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1/3/25
During our group chats and live gatherings, we hold space for each other’s disabilities, trauma responses.
In this year’s Winter Intake Interview, our active members have shared the member agreements that help us feel safe, help us grow, and help us lead with courage.
Let’s find out what support looks like for each other this winter.
Content warnings DO NOT mean topics are completely off-limits.
Many of us are driven toward activism as a form of trauma mastery – to reclaim control over situations that continue to harm and disregulate us.
Warnings give us an opportunity to assess whether we’re too stressed to handle a certain topic, or have the energy to engage in a brave-space conversation. Giving each other a chance to consent, to delay, or to nope out of potentially retraumatizing situations.
Just include a heads-up before talking about the above topics so we can brace ourselves and engage with consent.
While we can’t meet in person, we can still spend a couple minutes transforming the space where we connect with each other through sensory triggers. Take five minutes to prepare, as if inviting good friends over who don’t mind a bit of mess.
Don’t go overboard – no need to scrub the baseboards. Unless that’s your thing. Do what makes you feel clear-headed!
Ask: what small adjustments can we make so this gathering is different from all others?
Some examples:
This Winter incubator will be unlike all future incubators
So we’ll rearrange our spaces to create cozy nooks, wear our favorite sweaters, bring a warm mug of tea, and take a few deep breaths before entering our shared space.
Everyone has made an effort to show up for each other, including arranging for childcare, taking time off work, and setting alarms and saying ‘no’ to other fun things. This community can only work if we all do our part to respect each other’s time and build trust. Commit to staying present and giving the gift of our attention.
We will make a proactive effort to shut out distractions. Creative examples:
The world will always demand our attention, so we must get creative and unapologetic about showing up for each other.
Presume competence and honor lived experience. Make space to believe each other when we’re having a hard time with something you’ve already figured out.
We’re not gonna force each other to reject unsolicited offers, explain how we’ve already tried that or disclose painful details to justify why our challenges are not so easily solved as an aunt’s-friend’s-dentist who had a similar problem.
If we can’t handle our own reactions to seeing someone in pain, we may try to solve each others’ problems with advice, information, or volunteering unwanted services.
Even if the intent is kind, unsolicited advice creates a challenge for unwelcome emotional labor. When we ‘offering’ advice, we can come off as dismissive, or force folks who are already having a hard time to defend themselves and their choices.
So we’ll connect by listening to and respecting each other’s lived experiences. We can share our own similar experiences and emotions. And we can do this without attempting to adjust someone’s experience or feelings about their own obstacles.
It’s okay to ask ‘are you looking for advice or resources?‘ and problem-solve with consent. However, it’s not our role to jump in and to fix, rescue, or save each other.
It’s our responsibility to show up, listen, and make space so our friends can talk about hard things without challenging them about it.
If we are to transform and make change, we have to tell the truth. We can’t expose or heal the flaws in our system, in our selves, if we’re unwilling to talk about our assumptions.
We have been trained to respond with discomfort, avoidance, offense, shock, anger, or revulsion when folks challenge our most toxic cultural norms. So let’s breathe through it, and accept this gift of opportunity to respond beyond knee jerk judgement.
Get curious about the personal conditions and decisions that led to actions we disagree with. Get curious about our own reactions – and remember that they say more about ourselves than the person we’re reacting to.
Cheerfully disagree about practices and methods, celebrate our unique perspectives, and get really curious about the different ways we process and take on this work.
If we are to transform and make change, we have to tell the truth. We can’t expose or heal the flaws in our system, in our selves, if we’re unwilling to get curious about choices and behavior we don’t understand.
We have been trained to respond with discomfort, avoidance, offense, shock, anger, or revulsion when folks challenge our most toxic cultural norms. So let’s breathe through it, and accept this gift of disagreement as a way to understand the bigger system.
Get curious about the personal conditions and decisions that led to actions we disagree with. Get curious about our own reactions – and remember that they say more about ourselves than the person we’re reacting to.
The idea of ‘experts’ can only exist in a culture that approaches topics through a single lens – shaped by the dominant culture and our own assumptions. If we believe there’s only one way to know (gate-kept with inaccessible, expensive advanced degrees), our friends miss out on our cross-cultural insight and unique perspective.
In cooperative learning and mutual aid, there is no line between teaching, learning, contributing, and accepting. It’s all just sharing knowledge and experiences, the way we share air and water. We’ll work sustainably better if we can acknowledge our lived experience and hard work, but still commit to approaching ideas and exercises with a beginner’s mindset.
Our coming together isn’t a class. It’d be silly to suggest that any idea we discuss couldn’t be found elsewhere with a Google search or library card. What we can offer is space to process at our challenges and shared goals from a new perspective. We can create space and time for each other to prioritize, focus, and think deeper about how to raise kids and smash the kyriarchy with consideration and intention.
So we invite each other to revisit old ideas in a new context, integrating what we’ve learned recently with challenge patterns that keep popping up in a space full of smart, funny, compassionate friends who are also parenting luminaries and smashing the kyriarchy.
It sucks, and it hurts, but cracks are how the light gets in.
Creating space for conflict and moving through it with a commitment to healthy repair and transformative justice is how we build trust within our community. This is how we model resilience for our kids.
Each of us is invited, but not compelled to share our stories and reflections. Be willing to take risks, to say the wrong thing, to provoke a challenge, to piss each other off – but none of us are obligated to push ourselves toward a trauma reaction for the sake of another person’s edification.
Maybe discomfort looks like disagreement. Maybe it looks like awkward silence. Maybe it looks like resisting false urgency and moving slower. Or moving faster and taking action before we feel fully ready.
We notice, name, and hold space for our discomfort without pushing it (or each other) away.
Notice when you’re feeling rushed to respond, decide, or act, especially when no immediate danger or critical deadline exists.
Take a breath, name it if you notice it, and advocate for space to think, reflect, or recalibrate.
In the process of spiral praxis, approach familiar concepts with curiosity and humility, choosing to dig one layer deeper.
Instead of skimming by ideas you’ve already learned, ask questions that challenge your assumptions about how this works, particularly given changing circumstances and challenges.
Create new ways to collaborate. Leave a comment below so we can grow together.
What are you loving about our summer collective?
How we can tweak this space to be more accessible for you?
Use the contact form to submit anonymous suggestions.
©2025 Ashia Ray of Raising Luminaries™. All rights reserved.