This is adult learning. Not to be graded. It’s not college courses etc.

It’s information for y’all to browse and use as you wish. Adult learning is not about following a prescribed pathway to take a comprehensive exam at the end or a standardized test.

It’s an experiment, a menu, and everything is technically optional. Y’all can browse, and take from the courses what y’all need today. And there’s no time limit. Y’all can come back another day and take something different away from it. It’s not pass/fail — it’s more like a guidebook not a course of study.

We mark all external materials as:

Expected: this is something we will assume students have done, so that assumption may influence materials after this point in the course.

Optional: just that. It’s a sidebar, further learning, we don’t expect this to have much if any influence over the remainder of the course.

Some optional stuff is labeled “suggested” or “recommended” — only because we think it will be very helpful for you&. It’s not something we expect everyone to have done.

Exercises are all optional, and we try to give several exercise options — not for you to “do all the exercises” but because systems all have various needs, capabilities, and skills. There’s no extra credit for trying to do everything.

We know that many of us have been pressured in school, or have had shame pushed on us in such a way that we’re very reluctant to make “mistakes” and end up perfectionists who procrastinate if we don’t think we can do something perfectly. We want to make sure you understand you have full permission to pause, start, stop, come back, re-read, do-over, mix-and-match, skip sections, read just the headings, have different headmates take the course however many times they’d like, etc.

The main point is y’all are an adult learner now, regardless of your age or whether you’re in college, and this is not a test or exam or project based course. You might find you get partway through the course, and you want or need to jump to another course to dig into another topic to further your learning before coming back to this course. And that’s totally OK. These are tools, resources, guides to help you further your 100% unique system’s growth on your own journey towards internal community.

Please take great care of yourselves, trust each other, and listen to one another. Somewhere in there y’all know what you need and when you need it. We give you these tools so you can come to trust that inner wisdom.