Renga
A Fund for Collaborative Awakening
What We Do
Renga is a fund with a simple mission: to encourage wholehearted presence & collaborative awakening.
As the world’s default paradigms fall away, we need more people with the presence, maturity, attunement, and integrity to model an emerging better world, and hold steady ground so that others can step into it too.
There are some reliable ways to cultivate more people like this, and to nurture the further development of the ones already here. Renga has four goals, representing an escalating ladder of those efforts:
Continue hosting retreats where people can access and practice deeper ways of being. (You can learn more about these unique retreats here.)
Cultivate mastery by funding effective trainings for practitioners.
Seed more collaborative awakening communities in the network, nurturing a more robust and lively ecosystem for this style of training.
Create a more stable purpose-driven hub.
I'll go deeper into each goal below — for now, we're gathering funding to meet the first one, ongoing retreats. Only when that one has been stabilized will we begin to branch into the second one, so on and so forth.
Goals
The underlying purpose of the fund is to facilitate a paradigm shift to a wholehearted way of being. The thesis is, we create a better future by embodying a different kind of presence together.
To drive this thesis, the fund has 4 levels of goals, which we’re hoping to grow into over time, as funding becomes more available.
Practicing
The first priority is to continue running Rosa Lewis’s retreats. These retreats are designed to facilitate a paradigm shift into a wholehearted alignment with reality, free of distortions. It's a training that marries heart and mastery; vastness and action; sensitivity and sovereignty. The space isn’t limited to a rationalist paradigm where people are just individuals who need to process their trauma, or learn some new perceptual tricks that optimize their functioning within the existing mainstream paradigm. These spaces and teachings recognize that there are direct links between nervous system capacity, energetic perception, cosmic attunement, and interpersonal clarity. You can read more about the vision here, along with some reflections from the people who have gone through these retreats.
2. Training
With those retreats able to run reliably, we’d love to be able to help people in this lineage, this network, to get the training and development they need in order to be generous to the world with their gifts.
When I talk to people whose lives have been changed, the story often begins with “I met someone who changed my idea of how it’s possible for a human to be, to act, to relate to others. Once I knew it was possible to be like that, I had to open my heart and change how I was living.”
I know a lot of impossible people like that, people who change others’ lives just by being themselves. And in most cases, these gifts are either made possible by, or supercharged by, specific trainings they took part in. I’d like to make it possible for more of us to undertake effective trainings we’re pulled towards. There’s a deep generosity to the act of honing your mastery at becoming an ongoing gift to those who encounters your skill and way of being. I hope to make that generosity more accessible to those who are called to it.
3. Scene-Building
If those two goals are firmly in hand, the next goal is to help seed similar “lineage of friends” efforts around the network. Not everyone is going to resonate with Rosa’s retreats, but almost everyone would love the opportunity to pursue something similar: a lineage of friends, a mystical network of collaborative awakening, where deeper and deeper transformation becomes possible through relationships, good containers, and good teachers.
We know firsthand how challenging it can be to get efforts like this off the ground, and we’d love to help more wholehearted communities and groups establish themselves.
4. Organizing
Fourth, we foresee opportunities to create more stable environments and organizations that embody our values — and that run on processes aligned with those values. This might take the shape of a retreat center, a co-living practice house, a purpose-driven organization, or whatever else feels appropriate when the time and funding are right. We’ll see what the world is like when we get there. The ultimate goal is to provide a structured space where people can continue practicing wholehearted awakeness and purpose while in connection with themselves, with others, and with the world.
Values
Our approach to the mystical is not about rejecting rationality and practicality, but integrating it into a wider, more wholehearted way of being.
Evolving out of a dominant paradigm that focuses on making money above all else includes forefronting values around generosity and non-self. Rather than focusing solely on what can I get from this, it’s about what happens when we all show up generously with the desire for each other’s thriving and the benefit of all beings. In this mode we are honouring what’s sacred and aligning with truth, rather than trying to control and optimise for specific outcomes.
Reducing what is sacred and alive to purely transactional or rational logic is metaphysically incorrect. You will never reach the depths of what is possible in experience if you stay in a transactional frame. Like love, dharma practice is beyond what can be measured with the mind, it must be felt and embodied in the heart.
Dana, which can be translated as generosity, is a way of giving to support the continuation of this practice and teaching. It’s a way of recognising the devotion and care that gets poured into creating these spaces for people and a way of supporting the spaces to exist in the first place.
Dana isn’t just an individual ethical practice, it’s a chance to embody different ways of being, individually and collectively, and align with how life itself moves at the mystical interdependent level.
Embodying wholehearted ways of being requires trustworthy structures that support that to happen. Removing excessive money stress for people, both practitioners and teachers, creates more breathing room in the system for energy and devotion to flow where it wants and needs to flow. Having enough funding to book a venue without worrying about how the costs are going to be covered enables the field of trust and generosity to exist and potentially scale, if that’s what wants to happen.
It’s also an opportunity to attune to the depths of life. Money is one of the densest nexus points in human experience and can contain lots of meaning and energy around things like status, safety, and power. Learning to become conscious of your relationship to money and seeing that there are different paradigms and ways of relating to it offers an opportunity to change something at a very deep level.
An important part of our wholehearted approach is that healthy mysticism doesn’t bypass the rational and pragmatic modes. We recognise the wisdom and power in measuring impact, caring about outcomes, and stewarding resources responsibly, and we hold all this within a wider field of sacred meaning.
As soon as capitalism becomes the dominant paradigm, incentives become skewed and narrow towards money-making and shallow measurable impact. The questions become things like
How we can get more people in the door, regardless of whether it feels like it will be particularly beneficial for them or us?
How can we market this in the most appealing way?
How can we create a scarcity mindset that makes people feel like they’re missing out on the one cool trick that’s going to save them?
We want to use a rational view to look clearly at what we’re doing and explore the value in it. Questions like
What does it mean to change 10 people’s lives so that everything they do from now on comes from a place of deeper integrity and wholeness?
Which interventions are the most impactful in terms of opening people’s hearts to the depth of life?
What ways do people need more support to keep these threads alive in themselves?
It’s really important to us that everything we do, we aim to do sustainably, and without losing the threads of deep care and meaning.
We value the aesthetic of, ‘everything you need and nothing more’ — inviting the middle way where practice is supported by beauty and simplicity. There’s an energetic precision in this around understanding what people need in order to thrive in their practice.
We want to build relationships with people who share our values. It is possible to make these retreats work financially between us, but when we have support from people who see the value of what we are doing, it makes it a lot easier. It means we can focus more on doing the work and less on doing a lot of practical logistics around making the work possible.
For now, we're focused on the first goal: funding retreats run by Rosa Lewis.
You can read more about them — their purpose, her teachings, and how they're uniquely different from other retreats — in this article she and I co-wrote. (The article also includes the reason I chose the name Renga for this fund.)
Why does this matter to you? Because the world needs people who can move from a deeper place of integrity in themselves and meet others from there. These retreats are an answer to that, a method of developing our capacity to be in wholehearted presence, both as people and as leaders. Each retreat is also an exploration in how we could share all this with the world more fully.
More people are getting interested in awakening and psychedelics, and there need to be trusted places where people can access some of the deepest ways of being in alignment with truth. This takes time, energy, and an enormous commitment to do well, or in a way that has a chance of scaling.
This isn’t well-paid work that fits neatly into a paradigm where you can focus on making money as a primary goal. And while we are happy to make it work financially between us, it’s a lot easier when we have support from people who see the value of what we are doing. It means we can focus more on doing the work and less on a lot of practical logistics around making the work possible.
