From Our Living Laboratory: Inviting You into Deeper FEBI Practice and Integration
What qualities showed up today in our FEBI Practice Community? Wordcloud of cumulative in-session responses from participants who participated in the FEBI Practice Community pilot series 2025-26.
Written by: Nic Etheridge Calder, Jasleen Kaur, Scott Lillich and Kelly Bannister
Whether you are a seasoned FEBI practitioner, someone who dipped a toe into our recent pilot series, or you are hearing about this initiative for the very first time - we want to share with you what we’ve learned from experiences that emerged in our living FEBI laboratory.
We (Nic, Jasleen, Scott and Kelly) launched a FEBI Practice Community pilot series with a subset of FEBI certified coaches from Oct 2025 to Feb 2026. We intentionally tried out a diversity of themes and formats that invited innovation, anchoring our hope in a beautiful Japanese concept: the engawa - a welcoming porch. Our engawa vision was an in-between, liminal space, where nothing is forced, prescriptive, or rigidly pre-planned. Our focus wasn't to deliver standard programming, but to intentionally cultivate the volatile, beautiful phenomenon of emergence.
Another metaphor that quickly arose was the shared home kitchen where we’re preparing a meal together. It’s a metaphor that really shaped how we showed up and cooked up new experiences together.
We swiftly learned that holding an emergent space is not linear, nor is it easy. Out of 40 individuals invited to our "living laboratory," 32 stepped onto this porch and attended at least one session. A vibrant core group of 14 people showed up fairly consistently to help us stretch the limits of our co-creative space. Yet, as modern professionals, we are often not primed for spaces where we don't know what is going to happen. Making room for this unknown required immense intentionality and vulnerability - internally, within our planning committee, and across the pilot series community.
What the Pilot Taught Us: The Wisdom of our Collective Tensions - a FEBI Meta-Practice
As practitioners, it is easy to treat a model like FEBI as a collection of static tools to be deployed. But the profound realization of our pilot took us beyond a Practice Community built only on practicing FEBI content—we were invited to notice and live into what arises in real-time as we experience our own energy patterns within the collective rhythms of community. We look back on this pilot not just to analyze survey charts, but to read the systemic signatures of the energies at work.
Consider how our different patterns naturally create internal friction when we try to co-create without a fixed script. Throughout the pilot, we witnessed a fascinating parallel process unfold within the participant group and our own planning committee alike. Parts of us driven by Organizer and Driver energies naturally craved predictable structure, clear client utility, and instructional mastery, while other parts infused with Visionary and Collaborator energies begged for wide-open space, novelty, casual flow, and a deep tolerance for silence and the not-yet-known.
We even caught ourselves processing deeper systemic habits, noticing how we easily conflate Driver and Organizer patterns with Western domination culture. Together, we spent vital time untethering these energy patterns from paradigms of domination so we could appreciate them more clearly as life-giving expressions of wholeness.
We watched this unfold beautifully during our final "FEBI Dance Party" pilot session, where our initially confident categorization of music completely fell apart. It sparked a collective epiphany: just like songs, we as humans are such a deep, exquisite blend of all four patterns that we can’t be neatly boxed into a single category. We have to feel it out in connection with ourselves and others. This process of "feeling it out" naturally brought our different energy patterns into clear friction, exposing a fascinating meta-practice.
This friction is precisely where the deeper process of ongoing integration lives. If we gather to explore wholeness but quickly marginalize the silence when it gets uncomfortable, or if we over-structure a session to bypass the anxiety of "not knowing," we could miss the point.
Our survey mirrored the dynamics we experienced live in the sessions, revealing a "tale of two needs" based on how participants engaged. Our single-session attendees frankly shared that they felt a bit lost, rating structure and flow lower because they "hoped for more structure" and wanted concrete connections to navigate the tools. Meanwhile, our frequent attendees more deeply celebrated the messy "balance between structure and flow" (rating connection and flow very high), but noted that the 90-minute container felt far too restrictive for full processing and integration.
Rather than viewing these opposing preferences as a design flaw, we recognize them as the ultimate FEBI practice. Tension is simply the energy patterns surfacing in real time. By learning to notice these frictions together without rushing to eliminate them, we create the conditions needed to step into intentional pattern integration. It would be easier to skip over these uncomfortable noticings to focus on a more polished, prescriptive process and learning output. Instead, we choose to honor the deeper process of ongoing integration in connection with ourselves and others.
The Go-Forward Plan: Creating Spaces for the Flow
The feedback from our pilot survey brought together a powerful collective wisdom, blending the raw experiences of our planning committee with the reflections of 20 amazing survey respondents, who spanned seasoned veteran coaches to practitioners certified for less than a year. Together, we realized something vital: this community isn’t just about practicing FEBI content. It’s about noticing and living into the real-time integration of our own energy patterns.
To honor the diverse appetites and patterns observed, going forward, we are separating our programming into two distinct spaces with their own rhythms and objectives - one providing a reliable container for peer connection, and the other offering a spacious shared kitchen for deeper experimentation, Proposed is the following:
1. FEBI Monthly Practice Group (75 minutes)
This is our core heartbeat, designed to offer a reliable container. The format of these sessions will be a repeatable, peer-to-peer structure with minimal frameworks or explanations. We will open and close with a short shared experience, and spend the bulk of our time together practicing the FEBI basics in breakouts (or as a full group if numbers are low), working with participants’ expressed needs for FEBI practice in real time.
When: First Friday of the month – beginning July 3
Time: 8:00 am Central Time – we are keeping our original pilot time slot for now to keep momentum rolling!
2. FEBI Practice Group Workshops (2–3 hours, depending on session)
For more innovative practices, we are creating dedicated deeper-dive workshops (2 to 4 per year, which may occasionally replace a regular monthly slot). Prompted by regular attendees who noted 90 minutes wasn't enough for the "brainstorming, synthesis, and processing" they craved, this is a highly collaborative environment. Here, one or more people can bring original or external frameworks to layer into FEBI, giving us the spaciousness to synthesize, create new materials, and tolerate the generative silence where novel ideas emerge.
Evolving Together (What’s on Our Radar)
We don’t have it all figured out yet, but we won’t let that stop us from getting started! Additional visions for our future FEBI horizon include:
Quarterly FEBI Webinars: To answer the call from those looking for traditional instructional mastery, tool deep-dives, and client debrief structures, a separate professional track will live outside of the FEBI Practice Community. We will carefully coordinate this scheduling so it doesn’t conflict with our practice group gatherings.
Asynchronous Community Space: Recognizing that at least 33% of respondents found the chosen timezone or timing a barrier, we are keeping our eyes on the horizon for an easier-than-email asynchronous platform to handle ad-hoc questions and discussion between sessions.
We are also keeping the possibility of a second timezone offering on our radar as the community scales and as willing facilitators in those time zones naturally emerge.
Join Us for the Launch!
The pilot proved that (in the words of one participant) this is a "beautiful, generous, and generative community." As we prepare to launch IZL’s first official and perpetual (post-pilot) FEBI Practice Group session in July, we invite all who are FEBI-certified to step onto the engawa with us and dive into an ongoing exploration of what it means to practice integration together. A dedicated email will be sent out soon to IZL’s FEBI certification list with registration details.
If you are FEBI certified and ready to let go of polish and pretense, step into the liminal space of the engawa, and dive into the deeper process of integration - the FEBI coaches kitchen is open. Come as you are, bring your presence, and together let’s explore what emerges next!
Inviting the 4 elements into our FEBI laboratory in the first pilot session to explore an innovative method called “elemental FEBI bodystorming”
Our wholehearted thanks to everyone who supported our FEBI Practice Community pilot series,
Nic, Jasleen, Scott and Kelly
Nic Etheridge Calder, Jasleen Kaur, Scott Lillich and Kelly Bannister are FEBI-certified coaches. They undertook the pilot series as a labour of FEBI love.