How do we learn to relate differently?
An ongoing inquiry into how we relate — to ourselves, to one another, to power, to difference, to land, to history, and to the more-than-human world.
I. Why Relationship?
II.What We're Exploring
III.Ways of Learning
IV. Featured Learning
V. A Living Practice
I.
Why Relationship?
Every crisis we name eventually resolves into a relationship.
A climate crisis is a relationship with land, altered past the point of reciprocity. A mental health crisis is often a relationship with self, worn thin by isolation or demand. A political crisis is usually a relationship with difference — with power, with history — breaking down in plain view.
We tend to treat these as separate emergencies, each with its own experts, its own vocabulary, its own fix. Lokah works from a different premise: that these are variations on an older, more singular problem. Something in how we learned to relate — to ourselves, to each other, to power, to land, to history, to the more-than-human world — no longer holds.
Regenerative relating begins with a set of questions rather than a set of answers.
How did we learn to relate this way? What did we inherit, and from whom? What did that inheritance cost — and who paid for it? What might a different way of relating actually require of us?
We don't believe these questions have a final answer. We believe they're worth asking, together, for a long time.
"How did we learn to relate this way?"
II.
What We're Exploring
These are some of the ideas we keep returning to — not a curriculum, more a set of questions we haven't finished asking.
BELONGING
What we're willing to belong to, and what we ask to belong to us.
POWER
Who has it, who's told they don't, and how it moves without being named.
CARE
The difference between caring for someone and managing them.
COLONIZATION
The relationships it disrupted, and the ones it invented in their place.
COMMUNITY
What holds a group together once the shared project ends.
GRIEF
What we're allowed to mourn, and what we're taught to move past too quickly.
INTERDEPENDENCE
The myth of the self-made anything.
THE BODY
What it already knows about relationship before we've said a word.
REPAIR
What happens after harm, and whether we know how to do it.
CONFLICT
Whether disagreement has to end a relationship, or can be part of one.
BOUNDARIES
Where one person ends and another begins, and why that's so hard to feel.
WHITENESS
What it obscures about itself, and what it costs everyone to keep obscuring.
RECIPROCITY
Giving and receiving as a single motion, not two separate ones.
JOY
Whether it's frivolous, or one of the more disciplined practices there is.
RESPONSIBILTY
Responding, rather than managing or performing.
ECOLOGY
Relationship at the scale of a forest, a watershed, a species.
Regenerative relating doesn't live in one format. Some of it happens in courses, built slowly over weeks, with reading and reflection between sessions. Some happens in a single evening — a public conversation, open to anyone curious enough to show up.
Some happens in reading groups, where a text becomes the occasion for a much longer conversation. Some happens in facilitated dialogue, in seasonal gatherings, in retreats that ask people to slow down long enough to notice what they usually rush past. Some of it is simply writing — an essay, a letter, a provocation, offered into the world without knowing exactly who will meet it there.
None of these forms are the point. They're vessels. What matters is what happens inside them: people thinking together, in the presence of ideas that unsettle something — in each other, and in themselves.
III.
Ways of Learning
IV.
Featured Learning
One expression of this learning ecology — an evolving collection of courses, conversations, and shared inquiries — is Before Whiteness, a long-form inquiry into the historical and philosophical construction of whiteness — approached not as an identity to defend or confess, but as a structure to be understood.
Hosted through Decolonizing Social Work, Lokah's dedicated initiative for reimagining social work and settler responsibility, it is both a learning experience within Regenerative Relating and a deeper body of work in its own right.
It offers one place to stay with these questions for months, not minutes, resisting the urge for quick conclusions in favour of careful, ongoing inquiry.
V.
A Living Practice
None of this can be mastered. There's no point at which someone becomes fully repaired, fully decolonized, fully capable of holding conflict without flinching.
Regenerative relating isn't a credential. It's a practice — resumed daily, imperfectly, usually with other people nearby, doing the same.
We don't know exactly where these questions lead. We've found that isn't a reason to stop asking them. It might be the reason to ask them with others.
If any of this is alive for you, details on upcoming courses, conversations, and gatherings live below as they're scheduled.