Joining the Festival a little late? No problem, let's catch you up on what we covered in week 4:
Cultivating Terrain That Helps You Flourish
In sci-fi plots, sometimes the heroes have to build their own habitat on a hostile planet. Oxygen, water, climate, and food all need to be coaxed from nothing with a bit of plucky human ingenuity.
It's called terraforming because it's meant to mimic conditions on Earth - the ones we evolved to thrive in.
With a bit of imagination, you can extend that idea to our social habitat. We may not be physically trying to live in outer space, but the social isolation, constant digital distraction, and hustle culture we're all embedded in may as well be Mars as far as our nervous systems are concerned: it's very far away from what we evolved for.
If it sometimes feels like the effort to protect your own wellbeing is a cause of stress in itself, that's because you're working against unfriendly terrain. That terrain might be directly observable in your current external world, or you might have internalised it as patterns of thought you don't even notice anymore.
The good news is, shaping your social terrain requires no special equipment. So this week, we're going to do some very Earth-bound, very social terraforming.
Experiments in flourishing
Here's a week's worth of terrain-tweaking experiments to help you find ways to make flourishing easier, so you stop fighting the system and start shaping it. Print them out, stick them to the fridge, talk about them with a friend:
Join our end-of-week decompression session
This week we again have two options for our end-of week decompression session, at 5pm Friday via Zoom.
Helen will host a session at 5pm Sydney time, then Sarah will take over 10 hours later from Glasgow, at 5pm UK time.
Register below for whichever time zone works best for you, and we'll send you the recording even if you can't make it.