Community

You will find numerous ways to network and build community and connection here. As you consider your own Relationship Matrix Map, reach out to all the people who have a place in it. Start and join Teams of people in your life with common interests. Link reflections on your Values and Vulnerabilities with your Social Media Accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter…. Use the “Find a Soul” and “Search Teams” features to build community, for yourself and others.

Soulasto emerges from and is inspired by Transformative Justice - a social movement rooted in communities of colour, queer lives, sex worker and disability activism. What is justice for people who are targeted and punished by the existing system of law, policing and imprisonment? Transformative Justice creates space, and specific practices, for imagining and co-creating new social worlds. We learn to address harm without turning to violent systems that increase it.

Soulasto is a tool that can help us begin or continue to build networks of trustworthy relationships, with ourselves and others. Our soul path and the relational matrix that supports us will always be changing, as we change. This work needs to be alive and ongoing. Though it can be tender and full of grief, it is also fruitful, and often joyful.

The Soul Mapping processes on Soulasto are conceived as practices that work together with the Generative Conflict Map - a guide to soulful conflict. These experimental tools are offered to help us co-create communities where we feel supported to live ethically and ecstatically, according to what we value.

The Generative Conflict Map offers protocols and understandings that help us navigate conflict in generative ways, with caring attention to injury, and a calling-in to centered accountability.

Generative Conflict and Soul Mapping are meant to support Transformative Justice principles and practices at an intimate, everyday scale, where ethics is not a set of rules we follow, but a living ethos. These practices together offer ways we might weave accountability and values-based conflict resolution into everyday life in counternormative communities. They are intended to help with:

• Supporting soulful self-determination, healing and well-being
• Creating accountability processes that feel good and true; co-creating networks of care that hold us accountable to what we truly care about
• Community development: cultivating, understanding and co-creating “community” in more intimate, effective and enduring ways
• Living ethical practice in counternormative work outside of “professional standards”, “legal systems” and victimize-punish paradigms that have historically been used to harm and marginalize people disadvantaged by systemic oppressions
• Deepening intimacy and self-intimacy
• Supporting cultural transformation for the sake of social and environmental justice