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🌷 Yohan

Free · one printable page

The 6 questions to ask before you join any community

The REVEAL Method: a map for reading an ecovillage or an intentional community before you give it your savings and your years.

The REVEAL Method, the one-page map of the six stepsFree PDF

Most of what goes wrong in a community can be seen before you move in, if you know where to look. This map shows you where, one step at a time.

Send me the map
What's on the map

Six steps, each with its question and its trap

R
Roots · what you carry
What am I secretly hoping a place will heal in me?
E
Environment · the real landscape
What do we share, who decides, and what happens if I leave?
V
Visit · the art of looking
What does my grid say once the euphoria has worn off?
E
Echoes · reading the people
Who really decides here, and where are the people who left?
A
Anchors · what holds you up
If the project vanished tomorrow, what would still be standing in my life?
L
Lucid choice · deciding
What would I decide in cold blood, with criteria I wrote down beforehand?

On the map, each step also names the trap waiting for you there. Print it, keep it in your bag, and take it out before every visit and before you decide.

For the readers of the book

Tell me what stayed with you, and receive the REVEAL workbook

The map gives you the six questions. The REVEAL workbook is where you really answer them. It is 20 pages to print, with one worksheet for each step, and it comes from my French course Rejoindre un écolieu les yeux ouverts, where people use it before they move. Normally it costs 14 €.

Why it matters so much: during a visit, everybody is kind, the place is beautiful, and you want to say yes. It is the worst moment to decide. With the workbook, you write your answers at home, before the visit, with a cold head. You take the Visit and Echoes sheets with you, and you look at what nobody shows you: who really decides, and where are the people who left. When you come back home, the Lucid choice sheet helps you decide with the criteria you wrote before, far from the euphoria of the weekend.

One participant of the French course told me: "I took the map with me on two community visits. It helped me notice things I probably would have overlooked." Joining a community, it is often your savings and years of your life. Twenty pages before that, it is very little. It is the tool I wish I had in 2016.

When you finish The Ecovillage Trap, write me two or three lines at yohan@en-transition.com: what stayed with you, a scene, or something you don't agree with. I read everything, I answer myself, and I send you the workbook as a thank you for your words. And if you want to help the book, you can also leave an honest review on Amazon, it is how other people find it.

Who made it

Nine years inside a French ecovillage

Yohan Sancerni

I'm Yohan Sancerni. In 2016 I co-founded the Pourgues ecovillage, in Ariège, in the foothills of the French Pyrenees, and I lived there for nine years, until the collective dissolved early in 2025. Pourgues became one of the most visited ecovillages in France.

I wrote The Ecovillage Trap so that people can go in with their eyes open. This map is its practical side: the questions I now ask before trusting any project.

In France, around 13,000 people read my newsletter, and I write about community life for 16,000 people on Instagram and 12,000 on Facebook.

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Where should I send your map?

Leave your first name and email. The map arrives right away, and now and then I'll write to you in English about life in community. No spam, and you can unsubscribe in one click.