The contract below has been revised over the years since 1975 and new points added.  It will be subject to on-going revision over the years ahead, as our network culture evolves.  All participants agree to adopt the guidelines set out below.

  1. We promise each other to preserve the confidentiality of anything personal that may be discussed.
  2. We intend to listen to and receive each other.
  3. We intend to see it as OK for each of us to be who we are, at the point we are ‘at’.
  4. We offer ourselves as the person we are and whatever ideas and skills we have, as a free gift and thus make it possible for us to receive from each other, authentically.
  5. We accept responsibility for making any necessary changes in ourselves.
  6. We agree to express our personal response to the decisions or behavior of others with which we are unhappy, or else remain silent and accepting.
  7. We intend to help each other learn what we each want to learn or need to learn; yet at the same time we aim to consciously control nobody but ourselves.
  8. We promise the group that we’ll ask for whatever we want, or accept the responsibility for not asking.
  9. We accept our bodies, our feelings, our thoughts – and our spiritual or mystical experiences – as valid aspects of our own and others’ humanness. When we get upset we are free to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to those who would ‘pat us down’ (i.e., stop us from experiencing this upset.)
  10. We intend to meet group members’ needs in the order of their urgency and our individual and group readiness to work on them.
  11. We intend to allow group members their personal choice of focus in their individual workshop sessions, whether ‘macro’ or ‘micro’.
  12. We agree that individual members who express public views on social development matters do not necessarily represent those of the SDN.