School of the Small & Imperfect is a weekly gathering where we practice how development happens through relationship. Horizontal in spirit, a school of fish, it moves through responsiveness rather than hierarchy, held inside a clear container that supports collective direction and depth.

The small is not about delicacy or subtlety. It’s about scale.

We step out of the habit of “throwing ourselves at the boulder of global outcome” (Jarod K. Anderson), the pressure to fix everything, to know everything, to be the person who has the right take. Instead, we orient toward where our participation is real and immediate: the room we’re in, the moment we’re shaping, the field we’re part of.

When we work at this scale, the work can actually move. The room becomes the unit of action. The encounter becomes the place where development takes shape. This is not retreat; it is the level at which change becomes possible.

What we actually do

Each week, we engage small relational experiments that help the group feel how the field is organizing:

• Where attention gathers

• Where motion begins

• Where contraction appears

• Where something wants to open

• Where multiple directions coexist

These experiments are not techniques for being a better communicator or a calmer person. They are ways of tuning into the relational field so we can participate without rushing to shape, interpret, or resolve it. Instead of working on ourselves, we work in what is happening.

This shift is where the work lives: from self as the unit of action to field as the unit of development.

How a session moves

Each gathering follows a clear arc that holds the practice and leaves room for what emerges.

We arrive together by shifting out of narrative and into contact. A small experiment comes next, something concrete the group can meet. It might mean following a subtle impulse, noticing where attention wants to wander, letting a contradiction remain, or moving at the pace of sensation instead of urgency.

This opens into the central practice, where we stay with what the group brings forward. The direction comes from the interaction itself: a hesitation, a question, a shift in tone, a small opening. The work is improvisational but not diffuse; I hold the architecture so the group can explore without scattering or collapsing.

Reflection happens through contact rather than analysis. We speak from what moved or became available, without explaining or smoothing ourselves into coherence.

We close with a simple ending that lets the work settle on its own.

Nothing here is meant to be polished. Nothing needs to be coherent. What matters is how we participate in the movement that’s already happening.

Why this work matters

We live in a world shaped by urgency, self-presentation, and inherited scripts about how to be knowable, correct, or “good.”
These pressures organize relationship before we even arrive.

School of the Small & Imperfect offers another way of participating—a way that doesn’t center performance of the self or collapse difference into comfort.

We explore:

• how to participate without contracting

• how to stay with what we don’t yet understand

• how to let multiple truths be present

• how to sense power in the field and respond without reproducing domination

• how development happens at the level of the group, not the isolated self

This is political work but not ideological work. Justice appears in how the field organizes. When we stop reorganizing moments around fear, coherence, or control, new forms of relational life become possible, forms that can return to our families, communities, and public worlds.

Development doesn’t scale through proclamations. It scales through participation. The small is not preparation; it is the site of change.

Who this is for

The school welcomes people who want to explore:

• collective emergence

• relational ethics as lived practice

• development that doesn’t center the self

• improvisation as a way of knowing and becoming

• group life as a site of possibility

• a way of participating that makes more life possible in the field

You don’t need experience with performance, somatics, or philosophy. You only need a willingness to participate without knowing where it’s going.