Sacred Lifeboats - About Us

SACRED LIFEBOATS

Facilitators:

Bill Kauth co-founded in 1984 the New Warrior Training Adventure of the ManKind Project, the Inner King Training and the Warrior Monk.

He is the author of A Circle of Men, published by St. Martins Press. In his role as "Visionary-at-large" with MKP, Bill has been studying the state of the world for a dozen plus years.

Zoe Alowan has been deeply engaged in sacred art for decades. As painter, sculptor, dancer, songstress, mime and storyteller, her work in women's circles reclaims beauty and wisdom. She facilitates with humor, co-honoring the Divine Feminine and Divine Masculine.

Some History

In 2004 we launched a community project called In My Village. It grew quickly to 380 people then, as quickly, disintegrated. We learned that we can form small circles of people who learn to love and trust each other, and if these circles get to know each other, it feels like community. These archetypal family units form the basis of community, historically and everywhere. My partner in this project, Tej Steiner, went on to develop Heart Circles and wrote a wonderful book I highly recommend.

In 2005 we took the State of the World conversation to 23 cities including: Milwaukee, Madison, Minneapolis, Chicago, Indianapolis, Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Santa Fe, Taos, Durango, Albuquerque, Las Cruces, Tucson, Washington DC, Baltimore, Raleigh, Charleston, Gainesville, Miami, Biscayne Bay, Mt. Shasta, Portland and here at home in Ashland, OR.

I came to three conclusions: people feel scared, want community and honestly do not know how to get it. Thus I felt called to learn what might make community really work.

Zoe and Bill at Burning Man The phenomenon of Burning Man is a world-class experiment in gift community. Imagine 50,000 people gathered every year for a full week, with no commerce – no buying or selling anything. It was there Zoe and I found each other. As she brought her refined, feminine, energy into my life, I learned to "adore the goddess" both as mother earth and humanly embodied. We married in 2008 and feel blessed to share our lives as a creative expression in which we hold intimacy as a transformational instrument. Our learning with each other deeply informs the process of building safe, intimate communities of men and women.

In 2008 we sponsored a Community-Building Symposium in which we all learned a lot from Diana Leafe Christianson and Carolyn Schaffer, leading authors on the subject.

In our steady work to build conscious community, we experienced lots of challenges. Eventually we realized that a totally new form was emerging. In 2009 we co-created Seeding the Gift Culture with Charles Eisenstein. This innovative event led to some great “gift culture” experiments, which we cover in the Build a Lifeboat section. It also catalyzed our book, We Need Each Other: Building Gift Community, now available to you as a .pdf file.

We provide this site as a toolkit and as inspiration for you to build and launch your own sacred lifeboat.

Sacred Lifeboats