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discoveries would have happened for me if I were not [living in intentional] community.” Her talent for
community organizing led her to work as an event organizer for the FIC. On the more challenging side
of personal-growth work, Jenny notes that Shannon Farm is experiencing some difficult issues with their
current cohort of teenagers, a problem she thinks is negatively impacted by social media. Helping to
promote the personal growth of young people in intentional community poses particular challenges in
an era when the life of their peers in the larger society is often immersed in virtual relationships on social
media rather than in-person relationships.

Asking whether you want to remain a part of intentional community appears to be an important part of
the personal growth process for several of my interviewees. Jenny has thought about leaving from time
to time, and she feels that this “is the healthiest way to be in community.” She adds, “If I know I have
other options, then I know I am here by choice. It usually boils down to my really not wanting to live
anywhere else.”

To Roger, personal growth includes getting out of your head and learning to
work with your hands, something he says that rural intentional community
living provides lots of opportunities to do. In his life as a psychology
professor, Roger was widely regarded as an expert on human behavior and
he was lead editor for a series of widely-circulated, well-regarded volumes on
the Control of Human Behavior in the 1960s and 70s. But at Lake Village,
Roger learned quickly that knowledge from the ivory tower didn’t translate
well to community life. In fact, he was appalled to find that he couldn’t even
figure out ways to get kids to put away their shoes. The more he tried to
experiment with his life, the less he realized he knew. To Roger, the bottom
line from his more than four decades living in intentional community is that
“you have to live the truth to understand it.” After years of conducting
laboratory experiments on behavior, he learned “that there is no experiment
other than the real situation”, a philosophy he stresses in his book, Toward
Toward Living Well With
Living Well with Less.
Less, by Roger Ulrich (2012).
While Roger says that he doesn’t want to put down the importance of formal
education, he emphasizes, in his words, “learning by doing and the joy that comes with having the ability
to appreciate breathing in and out, fresh water, healthy food, and the need for maintaining an abiding
allegiance to the sacred mystery of which are a part.”

Roger suggests that inner peace is fostered not just by getting your hands dirty, but by getting your
hands dirty in ways that are meaningful to you and fit with your values. This point leads to the next lesson
from my interviews:

Step 2: A community focused on inner and outer peace is one that provides daily
opportunities to live out your values.

While all my interviewees talked about practices that members engage in to promote inner peace, such
as yoga and meditation, the opportunity that intentional community afforded to put their values into
practice on a daily basis seemed even more important to their sense of peace.

For example, to Valerie, a sense of inner peace comes from the lifestyle that Twin Oaks offers. She notes
that “the lifestyle blends the best of everything – a good mix of physical/mental work, extremely flexible
work conditions, comfortable living arrangements, a social environment with lots of control for
downtime, and an opportunity to live in a manner that is in strong alignment with my values (feminism,
egalitarianism, non-violence, etc.). There is nowhere else I know that offers this same blend.” She adds

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