We offer this set of shared agreements below, adapted from VISIONS Inc.‘s “Guidelines for Productive Work Sessions” and popularized by East Bay Meditation Center, as starting points that you might use with your sangha as you gather.
These are not rules but practices. We invite you to use and adapt them in a way that supports, stretches, and serves.
Shared Agreements
- Speak from What you Live:
If you notice yourself speaking for others (your conversation partners, tradition, community, people like you) come back to the first person. What have you felt or witnessed? What do you know? That ground is enough. - Take Space / Make Space:
Full participation is itself a practice. Notice who is speaking, who is not, and what that might be asking of you whether that’s stepping forward or stepping back. - Listen with Full Intention:
Receive others without rehearsing your response. Be willing to be surprised, to be moved, to be changed by what you hear. When something touches you, in that it opens something, disturbs something, or lands wrong, let it register before responding. The pause before speech is itself a form of wise speech. - Witness, Don’t Fix:
When someone shares something vulnerable, the instinct to offer wisdom, perspective, or a helpful reframe is itself worth examining. What’s being offered may not be a problem to solve. Receive it as it is. The greatest gift is often simply to be heard without being redirected. - What’s Said Here, Stays Here:
Carry your insights and learnings home freely. The stories, names, and vulnerabilities of those present belong only here. If something someone shared stays with you and you want to follow up, ask first. - Accountability as Practice, Not Failure:
If you experience or cause harm, treat correction as part of the path rather than a rupture of it. We can model what it looks like to give and receive feedback with steadiness… and repair with honesty and grace. - Name What’s Difficult to Name:
Brave space means we risk saying what might be true but feels uncomfortable about our traditions, our roles, our blind spots, our collective situation with the Earth. We hold each other with enough care that the difficult thing can be said, not despite our practice, but because of it. - Speak From the Edge of Confidence:
Many of us are trained to offer what’s settled and clear. Here, we also invite you to speak from the edge, from what’s still alive, uncertain, unresolved in you. Our gatherings are enriched by your questions as much as your knowing.
