New Eden was always more than a place to hold retreats. When Sumir Brown and I first took it on, we were also imagining a home where people could live the work of Heart iQ together. I wanted to explore what happens when the connection we experience in circle becomes part of how we share an ordinary day.
That vision met practical reality. Financial pressure, health difficulties and the ending of relationships changed what we could hold. There were times when the priority was simply keeping the centre going. The wish for community did not disappear, but finding a form that could support it took much longer than I expected.
A retreat ends; daily life continues
In the Awakened Living Project, people spent ninety days living and working at New Eden. Later, when COVID disrupted the usual rhythm of the centre, those who remained experienced another kind of community life. These experiences brought the question closer: how do we bring emotional fluency, responsibility and relational practice into the everyday running of a place?
A retreat gives us a particular container. Living together also asks us to meet shared work, different needs and the ongoing consequences of our decisions. The connection has to be able to live alongside those things.
The residency as an experiment
The Liberated Living Residency was a pilot for that exploration. Its intention was to combine enough structure to support people with enough freedom for their own contributions to emerge. Shared meals, time in nature and opportunities for practice belonged to the same day.
The people taking part were invited to contribute rather than remain only on the receiving end. Each person brought experience, gifts and a capacity to lead. That also meant learning how to listen to what the group needed rather than assuming that every offering had to take centre stage.
Leadership in ordinary life
For facilitators, this is a different kind of practice. It is one thing to hold a session and another to remain in relationship when the session has finished. Co-living brings the work into how we communicate, share responsibility and respond when our preferences differ.
The pilot was never a finished model for community. We needed the lived experience and the feedback of the people involved to discover what supported the group and what needed to change.
Two places to practise
Inside a retreat
A defined period of facilitated work creates a container for connection and exploration.
Inside daily life
Shared work, meals and decisions ask us to keep practising while living with one another.
The question that remains
The lasting value of this experiment is the question underneath it: what would it mean to create a way of living that supports the connection we say we want? For me, that question belongs as much to the practical organisation of a home as it does to the moments of depth we experience in circle.
This article reflects on the residency pilot described in the original 2025 update. It is not an invitation to a current residency.
