Welcome to the Institute of Relational Being (IRB)
What is the Institute of Relational Being?
The Institute of Relational Being (IRB) offers platforms, frameworks, and experiences for nurturing holistic practices of being in a relationship with the living world. To notice, honor, and celebrate life’s relational entanglements and navigate in a co-creative and collaborative way with these living systems.
IRB welcomes you to join us in vulnerable, exploratory practices of attention, reverence, respect, and kinship with the ecological communities we inhabit. This journey is rooted in a rich soil that recognizes we are all Relational Beings who belong as part of nature, with the recognition that our relationality extends to our cosmologies.
The Institute’s genesis was sparked during transformative learning journeys at Schumacher College in the UK. Schumacher’s ecological curriculum is rooted in holistic science, engaged ecology, and regenerative practices. The Institute of Relational Being forms one star in a growing constellation of Schumacher alumni legacy projects worldwide, including Escola Schumacher Brasil, Siendo Naturaleza, and Schumacher Sprouts Belgium.
Eco-Imagination Collage co-created by humans and more-than-humans of EDT Schumacher College 2023Our Mission
The Institute of Relational Being and the ReBe App offer platforms and frameworks for nurturing and merging holistic practices and processes which help weave all humans back together with nature. And having this extend to the fabric of our collective cultural story. Our goal is to honor, highlight, and celebrate the interconnected entanglement that binds us all. This is a journey we embark on together with our more-than-human companions. Where every breath is enriched by our awareness and reverence for the multispecies, ecological communities we are a part of.
Grounded in relationships, our mission is to embark on a vulnerable exploratory process of reorientation and remembrance. Involving practices rooted in a devotion to being present.
Engaging in this relational process, you, as a human being, can gain a clearer understanding of your place as part of this shared journey, not only as a human being, but also as a Relational Being.
We support and encourage mindful and caring engagement, in collaboration with the shared ecologies we are intimately intertwined with. From an eco-cosmic framework, this allows you to embrace the magnificent relationships you have all around you that exist beyond the human-centered realm.
Through navigating reality in this way, ideally you are better able to see that you belong as part of this living planet, along with the rest of nature.
Projects & Process
Relational Being is a practice, a process, and an on-going project of co-becoming with the rest of nature, this living world, and the cosmos beyond.
The Institute of Relational Being (IRB) is engaged in many ongoing projects and processes that are working to help us humans, collectively, to be more relational beings.