Living Positions starts from the observation that I only experience myself in relationship, never as a fixed self moving through the world. It offers a small vocabulary (position, orientation, role, story, field, moral order) for noticing how I take up a stance with someone, how they hand me another, and where the gap between the two creates tension. The paper extends this into three areas facilitators meet but rarely name. First, fields come in layers: a workplace can run officially on merit while an older layer of deference sits underneath, and economic structure and generalised trust change which positions feel safe to take. Second, capacity, meaning how much contact someone can bear, is separate from values, which makes ranking people as more or less developed a position in its own right. Third, naming my own state can be a way of controlling someone while sounding humble. I offer two tests: strip out "I notice" and see whether a claim about the other person remains, and check whether the sentence survives a "no". The paper closes with questions to carry into practice and open questions, including what would count as evidence against the framework and how far individual practice can go before the structure has to change.
Living Positions and Relatefulness
Living Positions grew out of my interest in integral theory and circling. I'm on the LevelUp programme, and that is where the framework met Relatefulness in practice.
The overlap is closest in the sections on reorientation and speaking from truth. Relatefulness asks a facilitator to own their experience and stay with what's present, and Living Positions describes the same move: notice the pull to rescue or correct, start from the body, and name my own state without assigning anything to you.
Where the two may diverge is structural power. Living Positions holds that awareness doesn't dissolve it, and that speaking from truth depends on how much trust a field has. If one person can lose their income and the other can't, naming a position costs them different amounts. I'd like to see how Relatefulness practitioners work with that.
Three parts may be useful to facilitators directly: the moral order as something that shapes a field before anyone speaks; capacity as separate from values, so a participant who struggles to stay in contact isn't read as holding the wrong outlook; and the two tests for when naming becomes control.