My discovery of Transformation at the Speed of Light (TSL) and its extension called TSL2

(My story, very personal)

Update Oct. 12

There is an update to this talk, the article What happens when you fully commit to bringing Authentic Relating into all your relationships

Overall context setting for TSL and its extension which I am calling TSL Squared (or TSL2)

This is a 13 minute talk (download the audio here or read the transcript below) which was offered in September 2024 at the Twin Oaks Communities Conference in Louisa, Virginia. It tells the very personal story of a practice I discovered called Transformation at the Speed of Light (or “TSL”) along with its extension called “TSL Squared” (or TSL2), and started applying to all my relationships starting in January of 2023, achieving both spectacular successes and spectacular failures in the last 18 months. The greatest success was finding my current teaching partner (Sophie in the photo above) and building a romantic relationship with her and a life.

So what are TSL and TSL2? And where to find out more?

This here below is just a “teaser” as I am still in “soft launch” mode of TSL and TSL2. The TSL model is only 18 months old and derives from my 8 years learning and teaching in the Authentic Relating movement. Practical TSL2 is even younger (less than 6 months), however the fundamental ideas derive from man/woman and sexual polarity teachings I have been developing over the last 15 years.

Both TSL and TSL2 need more proof-in-action and also we (Sophie and I) are going to have to develop and test effective teaching strategies.

But with that being said:

• TSL is the amplification of love through Authentic Relating practices. It requires a kind of radical authenticity and it requires that you bring the model and the practice into all your relationships and social networks, be they personal or business. The outcome of the effective practice of TSL is that the universe aligns to give you what you want, and most of your relationships (not all, as some people will fall away) most of your relationships became spectacular (deep and nourishing).

• TSL2 (or TSL Squared) extends TSL. It is the amplification of turn-on (or eros) through sexual polarity, which is about understanding gender difference and particularly female orgasm. TSL2 is particularly effective for creating deep love and deep sex between men and women, and for attracting an opposite-polarity partner. I believe that TSL2 would work well for homosexual couples as well, but we don’t have any case studies for that yet.

To find out more, listen to the audio here, or check out our upcoming courses Practical Relational Leadership in Community (PRLC), sponsored by the Global Eco-Village Network) and the ongoing Practical Relational Leadership through Authentic Relating courses.

Transcript of the audio (this is my story for the last 18 months)

Note: this transcript has been edited and cleaned-up from the recording. The content is the same, so take your pick. If you can’t listen to the recording or its too garbled or fast-paced, just read the transcript below. The transcript has been edited, so its better than the recording.

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I just need to ground a little bit here…

So when I'm presenting I get stage fright, and it sort of blocks my presence. So I need to monitor that and discharge that for me to speak in a way that's present. And like I say, you can't teach Circling you can only model it. And so if I am giving a presentation about Circling and I'm not present, then I'm not a good AR leader. So let me say that upfront. But I think I'm fairly clear on what I need to say and it just needs me to get into the flow of it, which I am about to do.

So I discovered Circling in 2016, or eight years ago, after a lifetime of seeking. I was 56 at the time. I had thrown myself into every type of Large Group Awareness Training (LGAT), such as Landmark Education if you know what that is, every type of New Religious Movement (NRM), every type of therapy (I like to say that I tried every type of therapy that's ever been invented), etc. I don't need to get into the story of how that happened. I will just say that I had a very very bad depression that lasted on-and-off for about 10 years that pretty much woke me up. So I only started to come to Consciousness at age of 25. I'm 65 now, so 40 years ago I started coming to consciousness.

Then I discovered Circling in 2016 at the boulder integral Center. Circling basically checked all the boxes for me and it gave me what I was seeking in terms of a human transformational modality and community that I could dedicate my life to. Number one it is extremely powerful. Number two it's relatively inexpensive and sometimes free. And number three it's open source and under distributed leadership, so there's no one person who holds the circling brand exactly. The Authentic Relating brand has now essentially replaced what we used to call “circling”, although technically circling is a single practice within the Authentic Relating movement. Authentic Relating (or AR) is an open open source movement under distributed leadership that includes the Circling practice, along with other practices. AR is both a relationship model and a community of practice.

Note that distributed management is is important because it reduces the cult danger. If you have one person in charge it doesn't necessarily mean it's a cult, but it gets a little cultish because the leader has the ability to fire people, or say to them, “get out of here I don't want you in my community”. You can't do that in Authentic Relating. Also when a movement or teaching is trademarked (or not open source) it generally increases commercial intent of the founders, which may or may not serve the community if the founders start to get greedy.

So Authentic Relating checked all the boxes for me. The Boulder Integral Center by the way was incredible. It's unfortunate that it folded in 2019, but when it was running you could Circle six hours a week and participate in all their parties and co-working there for 75 dollars a month. It was an incredible opportunity.

So I found circling and my seeking ended at that point. I don't mean to say that my life was complete, but I found, after 30+ years of seeking and many false starts, a developmental community and philosophy that I could dedicate my life to.

So that all happened in the fall of 2016. I had to leave Boulder because I couldn't afford to live there. I moved in with my mother, and the next year 2017 I spent a whole year Circling online, which works extremely well.

I also started my first online group which was very successful. What I do is that I invite my friends into a developmental group, up to 6 people works well, and then we Circle every week. That first group was fantastic, and then I wrote the Circling Guide in 2016 and it became he most popular book on the practice of Circling within the Authentic Relating tradition. Brian Bayer has an earlier book but he charges something like thirty dollars for, so no surprise my free book became more popular.

So that was 2017 and I continued for the next eight years running private groups. I would do online groups for free, I would invite my friends into private circles and we would Circle. I have a men's group now that's been going for five years. There's only three of us right now but it's a very powerful group and I just love these guys to pieces. We meet every week and we'll probably meet every week for the rest of our lives at this point.

Anyway I continued running experiments in private groups over the years, but the men’s group to me is like “the gold standard”, the longest-running and most successful of all the groups that I started.

Now fast forward early 2023, a year and a half ago.

The Circling Guide needed an update so I wrote the sequel, its called Relational Power which you can get online for free. I give away most of my books on the gift economy. In Relational Power I discovered and wrote about this concept that I now call Transformation at the Speed of Light, or TSL.

So transformation at the speed of light is basically the amplification of love through authentic learning practices. Now this happens fundamentally in the domain of language. Ultimately, it’s good emotional communication that makes people feel seen and cared for. Note, however, that it happens in language but ultimately its about presence which is nonverbal. What it is, is committing to the practice of loving every person who shows up in front of you, as best you can. It’s about taking AR into all your relationships and making an unconditional commitment to “love as best you understand love”. To “Love as best you understand love” means that nobody knows exactly what love is. Love is “emergent” and it can only be discovered through practice. Love is what works with the person directly in front of you, to make you feel closer to them and them to you. There is no formula for becoming a more loving person, you have to adapt to whoever is in front of you.

Anyway, early 2023 I was writing Relational Power, I discovered and wrote about TSL, and then my life fell apart. I was high as a kite for two months during the writing, this always happens and I'm always very very high when I write. But I got the TSL download, I finished the first draft of Relational Power, and then my life fell apart.

So the first six months of 2023 were the worst time in my life, and I won’t go into the details of that. But my life fell apart and this I later discovered, happens very predictably when you fully commit to the process and practice of TSL. This is also called Karma Amplification, which I wrote about in my prior post.

“Karma amplification” (or “Karma acceleration”) means that more good shit happens, but more bad shit happens too. It’s the amplification of both the good shit and the bad shit. But the overall result is that you get what you want. The universe aligns to help you, but it's a very up and down process.

So I had the worst six months of my life in early 2023, but finally in July of last year 2023 I moved to a spiritual community in Mexico it's called Namaste Village. I started leading AR there and I gathered a group, taught them circling, and that group really dropped in very powerfully. We met every week for six months, and I was thinking “how is this possible” because I had actually NOT led on the ground until then, I was always leading online and the online groups were phenomenal, but I hadn't actually ever led a group on the ground. The Namaste circle ran for 6 months and then imploded.

Now remember “karma amplification”. More good shit happens but more more bad shit happens. What happened is I got angry at one of the participants. I don't think I was inappropriate, but anger is a very tricky emotion and people by and large don't have the capacity to receive anger even when it is responsibly expressed. I think I expressed anger responsibly, but this woman took it badly and the group folded and that was the end of the Namaste Circle. It was kind of traumatic for me actually, but I was still floating on the success of that group which was extraordinary. Particularly at the beginning in which this group — my students, my team — started running highly successful AR events at Namaste Village. For six weeks my team ran packed rooms of AR games, we were doing hot seat games for the community and it was very popular for a while. My students took over AR leadership in this community and I could not believe it. I could not believe what was happening.

Anyway, the Namaste circle imploded, but I started an Intentional Community in the adjacent town, it was called Authentic Relating Village (ARV), and it was perhaps the world's first Authentic Relating residential community. ARV was kind of a spectacular shit show but highly developmental, I learned so much. I continued leading groups on the ground there and they were very successful as well. I enroll the people, charge them $100 first-time (and nothing for repeating) and we form a group that meets 4 times weekly for 2 hours. I ran three different groups in my time in Mexico and they were all fantastic.

So the groups were a great success, and I also started developing an AR community there, but I couldn't get any traction on ARV. The events I ran were a lot of fun but ultimately there was a misalignment there. I left Mexico and I gave up on the community. This happened early July of this year, two months ago. I would have been a year in Mexico at that point, and 8 years since I had discovered Circling. Also my online programs took off in January, I was filling paid groups every months, which was something of a comfort because after the initial success at Namaste Village, I was pretty challenged. I wrote about some of these challenges in my two prior posts.

So I gave up on ARV but I am very clear that I want to live in Intentional Community (or IC), I am an IC guy and this is the best life, it's hands-down the best way to live from my perspective. And particularly an IC that has a larger vision, a vision of being a world changing organization, of people united for higher purpose. That’s my real dream.

So I started traveling early July, and in mid-July and I began a romantic relationship with a woman who lives in Berlin her name is Sophie. We already had a very good professional relationship. She had been a PRL student in a previous course, and then I had hired her to lead another program. We already had a very successful professional relationship, she's adorable and also very cute, and we started a virtual romance eight weeks ago. For the first six weeks we were exchanging thousands of words and voicemails daily and we fell in love. Two weeks ago I went to Berlin and established sexual compatibility. We were both in love but we had never actually met, so the sexual compatibility was a wild card which certainly made me (and probably her) anxious. I mean, I am an old guy of 64, and not much to look at, and she’s a still-beautiful woman of 48. But the sexual competitively is very strong and we decided essentially to tie the knot in those two weeks. I mean it's a crazy story but it actually happened. I just flew in from Berlin on Friday, 5 days ago and I am returning there next week.

I will be returning to Berlin for two more weeks, coming back here, selling all my stuff including the car, and heading back to marry her. It’s a crazy story. The marriage needs to happen for me to get residency papers, it's not a romantic thing exactly but of course marriage is very romantic.

Anyway, that's the presentation and I'll stop the recording now.

But what I want to impress on you is that I got the TSL download in January 2023, then my life went to pot, and then a spectacular year of very rapid transformation, both good and bad followed. So it's possible that a normal person, say a person in conventional reality, would have read about TSL in early 2023 and said, you know Marco, this is just a manifestation of your bipolar brain. And I would have probably agreed with them! But after a year of continuous and intense transformation, which included some very high times and powerful community created in Mexico (even though it was not sustainable), after a year of very powerful transformation and then Sophie coming into my life, meaning that I manifested Sophie through TSL essentially — Sophie essentially validated the TSL model. Having a woman who is sexually compatible and is also a partner for personal and global transformation, that’s pretty much the only thing I have ever deeply wanted for 40 years. I even have some tears flowing here. So my manifesting Sophie was, in my mind, the validation of the TSL model, and also its sequel which is very new and I am calling TSL2.

Now I am at the point where I'm actually going to start teaching both TSL and TSL2, so this is actually the first ever lecture in the world about TSL. So thank you for listening!