Synaxis and the Synactic Council
We are trained to separate facts from what matters, and then to distrust our sense of what matters. This practice is about recovering that sense, in ourselves and in the groups we belong to, so we can see the code we live in while it is running.
Two linked practices: the Synaxis, our capacity to see what is and what matters together, and the Synactic Council, where a group learns to read the code it is actually running on.
Anyone working on a culture from the inside: leaders, teams, communities and facilitators
The VMP triad, the rule book, and metanarrative architecture
Walk into almost any meeting and you can tell what is really going on, beneath what is being said.
So we trust the dashboard over the room, and treat the sense that something is hollow as a feeling to be managed rather than information.
The capacity has not gone. Under constant pressure it weakens through disuse, gets blocked, or has its readings overwritten by the code around it.
Our capacity to see what is and what matters, together. Not a gift for the few, but something we all have and can recover.
A note on the name. Synaxis is Greek (σύναξις), from a verb meaning “to bring together”. It means a gathering or assembly. The gathering, in this context, is not just the gathering of people, but the bringing of our attention and awareness together on what is in front of us.
Where the practice comes from. The practices behind the Synactic Council have long ancestors, and we name them rather than hide them. From the Quaker meeting we learn to wait in shared silence until a sense of the meeting emerges. From Ignatian discernment, attention to what draws us towards life and what drains it. From the monastic chapter, a community taking counsel together and listening to every voice, including the youngest. From Zen, the discipline of seeing without grasping. From Sufism, the watchful attention of the heart. What we leave behind is the belief each was built to serve. The practice is specified on its own terms, as disciplined meta-awareness: the effort to see what is, rather than what the dominant story reports.
Do you need a practice of your own? No prior practice is needed to take part in a Council. A simple individual practice helps, and it tends to grow out of taking part.
A Council moves through five movements, each with its own question.
What do we say matters, and what do we actually reward?
Can we stay with this before we rush to fix it?
What code are we really running on?
What matters here that we have not let ourselves see?
Having seen it together, what now feels called for?
This is the shape of a Council, not a script. How each movement is held is taught in the practice programme.
Because a code can only be changed by people who can see it, and no one sees it reliably alone. A group attending together can check what each person sees.
A practice with a definite result: a Council names the code a group is actually running on, in the group’s own words, and keeps returning to it, because codes live in systems as well as people and quietly slide back.
It gives a team a regular place to look at the gap between what it says and what it rewards, without hunting for someone to blame. The benefits are real, but they are by-products: a Council adopted only to raise productivity will not raise it.
No. A Council asks a practical question every serious organisation already cares about: is what we do consistent with what we say matters? It learns openly from traditions that have studied attention for centuries, but nothing in it asks anyone to pray, believe or adopt a faith; the discipline is simply to see what is, rather than what the dominant story reports. Anyone may step out of a Council at any time, for any reason.
The practice programme, with training in Council facilitation, is in development. Leave your details and we will let you know when the first places open.
An introduction to the Synaxis and the Synactic Council: what they are, what they are not, and a short practice to try on your own.
Free. We will also send occasional essays; unsubscribe any time.
Training in Council facilitation will be offered through the practice programme, now in development. Register your interest
Collaborate
