The quality of life is enhanced with a deep sense of community. I believe that most of us are searching, in some way, for a feeling of community in our lives. I am, anyway. On the job, in the church, at the school—any life setting is enriched when people connections have more meaning and depth.

We can better the quality of our living. I am seeking to get my life together, to discover who I am, to be me. I am trying to show myself to others, rather than to hide behind my filters and screens. I am discovering what I want in life and how to be and do the things I want. I want to connect with others and to be in the community-of-the-moment with them. These four life processes—being, showing, wanting and connecting—are the TORI processes.

TORI is an acronym for Trusting, Opening, Realizing and Interdepending. These four ubiquitous processes are life-creating processes. Each process is partly a discovering, partly a creating. I continually discover and create myself and my environment, as this seeking and creating interweaves in the process of growing. Trusting is the primary ingredient that enhances each of these processes. Fear, the antithesis of trust, is the primary hindering force—the barrier.

In the community we become increasingly aware of how fear and trust guide and monitor our lives. Learning to live with, grow through, and cope with our fears and trusts is never-ending. Community-building. Life-enriching. Central to all being.

Trusting is the central dynamic of living. With increase of trust comes release of love and warmth. The beginnings of love. The reduction of fear. The lowering of defense. The opening up to experience. Allowing others to enter our sacred spaces.

Fearing is the barrier. As we fear we close up to experience. We see attack and defend against it. We may bristle, become cautious. Become selective, reserved, cool. We develop sharp edges. We hoard our love and our warmth. We become impersonal and in role. We may manipulate ourselves and others. Rebel or resist. Become dependent and overcontrolling. Fear is pervasive and diverse.

TORI is a way of life. A viewpoint. A way of organizing experience. A framework for perceiving. A theory to be integrated into one's living and loving. It is not a technique, and is not tied to any method. Techniques may become impersonal, limiting, ends in themselves, barriers to living in the eternal moment. TORI lays no trips on the experience, creates no limitations, contains no teaching, influence, persuasion, or duress. Each of us is free to be, to choose, to grow, to be in charge of our own lives.

Community grows, emerges, happens and is—as each person moves in the being, showing, realizing, and with-ing. Only as I am truly me, show me to you, and am doing what I truly want, am I free to join you in a feeling of community. This sense of community is then described as spiritual, healing, sensual, therapeutic, redemptive, joyful, or celebrative as it happens. It happens in unique ways. Like a person, each community is unique, unprecedented, unpredictable, flowing, flowering. Like a person, the community is an event, a happening, a process.

I have joined in more than 200 TORI communities and find the experience I create for myself—within the nurturing environment that we all share in developing—to be the most powerful of all life experiences. These experiences influence everything that I do. I am learning to create my own environment in everything that I do.

I am as free, you are as free, and the community is as free as it wants to be. There are no limitations that we do not create out of our fears. I am as free as I choose to be. As a person, and as a participant, I always have a choice—in each moment—to enter or withdraw, to reject or be rejected, to wear shoes or go barefoot, to be open or to be closed, to warm or to cold, to flee or to fight—regardless of what I think the expectations of others may be.

I create my own limitations. The community creates its own limitations. Each of us, and the community, is bound by limiting assumptions (theories) that are powerful, fear-induced, trust-reduced. "We can't possibly do such things in such a large group" (thus making it impossible—fears are self-fulfilling). "We can't get anywhere without a leader or facilitator" (thus making one necessary). "People here don't want to share negative feelings, fight, or be open" (thus starting a cycle of rationalized and closed behavior, perhaps rationalizing our fear of fighting). "People might hurt each other without a therapist or leader present" (thus seeing and creating ourselves as vulnerable, dependent, and limited). We are what we assume we are. We are what we see. We can change our assumptions, our perceptions, our feelings, our being. We are limited only by our fears—and not even then, if we can learn what our fears do to us. Opening ourselves up to each other is a magic-like process. Redemptive. Religious. Awesome. Authentic community is a nurturing environment. Holistic. Healing. Wholizing.

There are many paths to community. We have discovered from about twenty years of research and experimentation that the most powerful and enduring way is to rely upon the continual interaction of people, in freedom and trust, without prearranged structure, without leaders and facilitators, without formal goals and contracts, and without the usual accountability and responsibility norms. Community grows, emerges, happens, flows. Its strength comes from trust, candor, authenticity, genuine warmth, love. Trust comes from the sharing of anger, pain, joy, lonliness, boredom, alienation, fear, ecstacy, and the realness of experience. Life in the TORI community is a replication of all life everywhere. Each of us can choose love or pain, aloneness or withness. One can choose to be governed by one's wants or the expectations of others, to take one's freedom and power or give them to others, to feel life or to talk about it, to live in the moment or in the past or future. This is the way it is in church, in the home, on the playground. In the TORI community all this is possible—as in life everywhere.

In many life situations with which we are familiar, these just-mentioned life processes are masked and obscured by an overlay of more visible and fear-induced processes of organizing, leading, administering, decision making, supervising, controlling, punishing, rewarding, manipulating, and the so-called "real" life problems and actions. It is my experience in 25 years of consulting and working with organizations of all kinds that these overlaid processes are often unnecessary; are produced by fears that are obscured and denied; are essentially defensive and strategic in character; and can be replaced in part or in whole by the TORI life-enhancing processes. Lives that are trusting and organizations that are trust-nurtured can be very different from the lives that we know in most communities. Modern life is changing very rapidly in the direction of more trust, and TORI communities are environments in which persons can learn to help this change to happen. It seems to me essential that each of us become involved in creating the kind of change we want to see happen to ourselves and in the culture.

I would like to join the community as a member as quickly as possible. I have some ideas about how we might start the process of interacting, and have found that some gently structured experiences on the first evening are helpful. We will all discover ways of using each other's resources as we experience each other in depth. I come to the experience to learn, to get in touch with myself, to participate with others in creating a community, and to be with other persons as deeply as we wish. I do not come to teach, to model behavior, to help, or to do therapy or counseling. I am responsible for my learning and assume that each of you is responsible for your learning.

Ecology is important. We hope to have as much free space as possible without the hindrance of furniture or other barriers to community flow. I encourage you to wear comfortable clothing that does not restrict movement and that allows you to sit on the floor or out on the grass. Each person is, of course, free to wear and do what he or she wishes, but consider doing away with encumbrances that intrude on full involvement in people and in experience: pipes, coffee cups, eye glasses, cigarettes, notebooks, shoes and other unnecessary clothing. Interaction is most conducive to community building when people are visible to each other in the large community space, and are in contact often—in contact through vision, touch, talk, or hearing. Fatigue is usually a symptom that I am out of contact with myself or with others, and that I am in an impersonal or alienated space. When I get tired, I use this as a cue to change what I am doing to myself.

Theory is a very significant part of the experience. Rap, reflection, and theorizing sessions occur when we see the need as a community. Descriptions of TORI theory and practice are available. Some persons find the reading helpful, either before or after the experience. If you wish to talk theory, make it happen in the community. Reflection on community theory is usually most helpful to the total community about three-fourths of the way through the experience, perhaps on Sunday morning, so that there is sufficient time remaining to get into the experience again.

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