Friendship that changes you
Developmental friendship is a bond with enough trust, real contact, honest feedback, and generative conflict to change both people. These are the relationships that become the most meaningful and grow us up into the best versions of ourselves. Many friendships could become this, but rarely do. It requires a particular capacity for awareness, skillfulness, and vulnerability most of us were never taught.
The Institute of Developmental Friendship teaches the skills people need to become the kind of humans who can shepherd us through this era, and to build the friendships and communities that carry that growth.
Apply to the courseVision
A world where people form these kinds of connections, developmental friends, spiritual friends, with far more ease, and with the knowledge and awareness and skills to actually support each other on each other's paths.
We believe this matters more than ever. We need a critical mass of people who are integrated and whole, centered in themselves, able to move through the world with an open heart, with great love moving through them, able to stand in their own power and meet the power of others without getting tripped up by their own shadows and survival patterns. Pretty much every sector, every industry, every facet of our civilization needs humans at that stage of development. And you don't get there alone. You get there with friends walking the path beside you.
The long arc is a template that spreads. Ongoing groups everywhere that help each other wake up and grow up, people taking what we teach and making it their own, until skillful spiritual friendship becomes a normal part of how humans live instead of a rare stroke of luck.
The problem
Walking a path of growth on your own is hard, and good feedback and teachers are expensive. Most people don't have a friend group that does this at all.
And most friendships aren't built to hold it. When a friend finally reflects something hard back to you, it's likely done unskillfully, and that's often the beginning of the end of the connection. Or the hard thing never gets said, distance forms, and the friendship fades and nobody quite knows why. The patterns that most run us stay invisible from the inside. You can sit on a cushion forever and some of them will never surface. It takes another person to show them to you.
There's also a reason so many people choose to stay asleep. Turning towards yourself, towards life, towards other people all the way is hard. But it's much harder not to. When you don't, you live with more disconnection, more suffering, more pain.
An intro event · in person
Emotional and Relational Surfing: Tools for Developmental Friendship
A rare opportunity to join a day-long immersion with Brian and Kedar diving into these emotional and relational practices.
Saturday, August 22 · 10am-6:30pm
In Berkeley at the Berkeley Alembic
Fundamentals of Developmental Friendship
The twelve-week online cohort where you learn the practices, live, with a small group. This is the way in.
Mondays 3:00-5:30 PT · September 14 to November 30, 2026 · $1,500
Explore the course