What You Need For Conscious Community

Posted on May 22, 2013 by Kristen

This post continues on from the past three posts where I have been summarizing a paper by Maureen O’Hara and John K. Wood on Conscious Communities, also referred to as Integral Groups. This is the kind of group that the Process Work Institute in Portland teaches about and I have never seen anything like it before. I believe that such groups offer the best chance for our future together as a species. I believe that they are the next step in our evolution.

If you attend a group or start groups, I hope you can read the three posts previous to this one to be inspired by what is possible. If you are a group dynamic geek, please read the paper itself. The link is: http://maureen.ohara.net/pubs/Transforming%20Communities.pdf

Continuing with the summary:

There are best practices for creating a Conscious Community:

Comfortable meeting places with plenty of nature and a sense of being safe. They need to be large enough for the entire group to meet together.

Facilitators who are psychologically mature and compassionate.

Facilitators who take the time to align and attune to one another by sharing stories and resolving conflicts between themselves.

Facilitators are like a tuning fork evoking empathic resonance among those group members who then may share their consciousness state. Convenors who are outspoken and confrontational are more likely to evoke similar behavior in others in the group. If they use metaphors from art, dance, science or psychology in their own communications these modes are likely to become significant to the group, if they are analytical they will evoke intellectual discussion, if they are erotically alive, eroticism will surface, an highly emotional leaders tune into emotionalism.

The facilitator makes sure that they hear from everyone.

The facilitators pay attention to the ebb and flow of group attention, focus and energy.

A successful group has not one set of leaders but is made up entirely of leaders. Even those who choose to remain silent, lead by demonstrating the importance of following.

The most important conditions for individual growth is empathy.

Conscious Communities must have relational empathy. Relational empathy is that process wherein one attunes to the whole entity–the group. Relational empathy makes it possible to sense the interpersonal dynamics, knowledge, unconscious processes, dreams, images, narratives, concerns, feelings, sensitivities, priorities, fears–in other words the tacit and explicit consciousness–of collectives.

The presence of individuals with well-developed capacities for relational forms of empathy, as we stated earlier, greatly improves the chances that a group will experience the more extraordinary levels of consciousness.

Another key attitude in facilitators is humility. It is also one that presents a significant challenge to self-assertive professionals, most of whom value their competence and technical knowledge. By humility we refer to the willingness to suspend assumptions, to open oneself up to see things afresh, to be touched by others, and learn from them, to acknowledge crystallized routines and patterns, to embrace errors and blind-spots, be open to feedback from individuals and the group as a whole, and to be willing to risk learning in public.

The facilitators are open to the possibility that one can be moved by forces beyond one’s ken–whether framed as a spiritual reality or scientific.

It is particularly powerful when a convenor or some other kind of leader undergoes visible shifts and is seen by others in the group to be willing to learn in public. .

The facilitators are able to be present moment to moment.

In the most successful group there is continuous challenge to the obvious.

Conscious Communities believe that individuals, groups, and communities have an intrinsic tendency to self-organize and to move from disorder towards ever more complex ordered wholes.

Conscious Communities trust the “wisdom of the group.” This is not a mystical trust, but based on personal and scientific experience, rational trust, when confronted with challenge, groups usually find their way out.

Good facilitators have confidence in the group’s capacity to transcend its difficulties and who have faith in human beings.

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If you are new to this blog, here is how to use it. I post three times a week on everything having to do with sustainable community through better relationships with oneself, with another, and with groups. I write on Process Work, Nonviolent Communication, Byron Katie, and others, plus my own theories and experiences.

You can check out archives by clicking to the right on “Category” in the archive section and scrolling down. Everything I have written on relationship to self will be under that heading, everything on group dynamics will be under that heading, and so on. You can also look at posts by month. The search box above allows you to look up a single topic or name.

You are welcome to use the cartoons signed with my name, but please let people know that they came from this blog and don’t make money off of them. I hope you get a lot of useful information off of my blog. Enjoy!

Center For Building A Culture Of Empathy And Compassion

Posted on March 29, 2013 by Kristen

My new Facebook friend Edwin Rutsch shared this quote on his website Center for Building A Culture of Empathy and Compassion:

“You love your children, but probably don’t let them in. Unless you listen, you can’t know anybody. Oh, you will know facts and what is in the newspapers and all of history, perhaps, but you will not know one single person. You know, I have come to think listening is love, that’s what it really is.” Brenda Ueland, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenda_Ueland

I trained myself to listen to my children without immediately getting mad or criticizing them. One time, one of my kids mentioned that his teacher got mad because he threw a paper airplane during class. It took all of my will power not to freak out. Instead I did just as the mother cat above is doing. I empathized with his need to throw the plane. It turned out that he was rather embarrassed that he had disrupted class and had already made the decision not to throw a paper airplane around class again. By listening to him, I actually learned a great deal about him. One of the things I learned was that he needed to go a lot faster in class. Eventually I home schooled him.

Here is another of Brenda Ueland’s wonderful insights about the nature of listening from Edwin’s website.

“Now, how to listen. It is harder than you think. Creative listeners are those who want you to be recklessly yourself, even at your very worst, even vituperative, bad- tempered.

They are laughing and just delighted with any manifestation of yourself, bad or good. For true listeners know that if you are bad-tempered it does not mean that you are always so.

They don’t love you just when you are nice; they love all of you”. Brenda Ueland

Edwin does online Empathy Circles as a way for people to practice listening and empathy..http://j.mp/QPOVPz..http://j.mp/QPOVPz

Videos Demonstrating Empathy

Posted on March 15, 2013 by Kristen

I’ve always wanted to be able to show videos of empathy in action. It’s very difficult to find movie or television clips of characters doing empathetic listening. Most characters are written to be highly reactive in conversation:

Character One: Hey, how are you doing?

Character Two: Who’re you asking?!

Character One: I had a great day at school today. The teacher called on me to be the leader.

Character Two: Really? She called on you, the spaciest kid on the block?

And so on. Most of us have no idea what empathy actually sounds like. This absence of empathy just kills me, because empathy is one of the single most helpful, loving, and health promoting things we can do for one another, next to hugging. So I am very excited to be able to introduce this link from a website called “Building A Culture of Empathy”. Edwin Rutsch offers empathy to callers and he has it on videos! I’m so happy.

How Our Minds Can Fool Us

Posted on February 27, 2013 by Kristen

I’m sitting alone in my apartment right now. My kid is at the movies with friends. Many times when I am alone like this I think I’m doing something wrong. I’m a product of thousands of hours of commercials that tell me that happiness is being surrounded by family and friends. Beer commercials with lots of rollicking laughter, Hallmark Cards with beaming family members holding hands, Coca-cola with warmhearted city scenes where strangers become friends, and so on. So a silent home must mean that I am doing something wrong. I notice that quite a large number of people do not allow their homes to be silent and fill the space with television or radio.

Byron Katie has something she calls the Turn Around, in which she flips a belief around to it’s opposite to see if it could be just as true. So if I flip around the belief that “since the house is silent, I must be doing something wrong”, then I get, “if the house is silent then I must be doing something right”. Which really could be just as true, because it means that I have time for peace and sanctuary, it means that I have an opportunity for self-awareness without continual input from other sources, and it means I may choose what I do each moment without having to compromise with anyone else.

Now that my mind is thinking in this new way, I’m actually feeling differently, too. I feel rather grateful that I am alone. I’m kind of happy about it. My body feels lighter and so does my heart. I even feel more relaxed. It’s always a surprise how much my body and feelings follow my thoughts. If I think upsetting thoughts, my entire body is upset. Furthermore, my thoughts are often wrong, just as I’ve seen right now. I was thinking in a limited way about being alone, based more on what this culture says about being alone, than on what it actually means to me.

I think back on all the times I have made decisions based on my limited understanding of something and I feel a little sad. I had no idea how much my parent’s beliefs, my teacher’s beliefs, and the beliefs I learned off of television shaped my thoughts.

I really want to make decisions that reflect a true understanding of who I am, but I find that much of the time my understanding is limited by beliefs that I have been taught. And these beliefs affect how I think about and judge others as well. The other day I made a judgment about a woman because she happened to move like my mom. I treated her as if she were like my mom in other ways as well, but she wasn’t. It took several weeks before I caught on that my thoughts were simply not true. It’s so strange to the mind to have to doubt itself, but in the end that is the only path to wisdom. The mind is often convinced that it is definitely right or that it definitely knows something. But the truth is our minds can only know a part of the truth and are often biased by the past.

Vulnerability

Posted on February 25, 2013 by Kristen

I’m back from my workshop with Robert Gonzales. Essentially we are learning in his class to be present with our inner experience each moment and to meet that inner life with compassion. Then we practice staying in touch with our body, noticing the feelings and energies inside of us as we connect with others.

There is one exercise that we do where we go up to one of our classmates and share the feelings and body sensations going on when we are with them, usually in relationship to some thoughts we have about them. It’s kind of like true confessions. When Robert first brought up this exercise, we protested that there was no way we could tell someone how we really feel about them, they’d be upset, we would lose friends. He insisted that if we completely owned our feelings as coming from our ideas, our beliefs about how the world works, and our past traumas as children, instead of from the point of view that the other person was wrong, that something completely different would happen.

And it did. We felt closer to the person. Our compassion and understanding grew. We fell in love with one another. We learned that vulnerability with a caring person brings real healing.

A Web Site About Hugging

Posted on February 20, 2013 by Kristen

I’m still at my workshop with Robert Gonzales this week. He did the most beautiful exercise with us. We walked around the room and paired up with each of the twenty-six of us in turn and spoke the following words, “I am here. I show myself to you.” and then the other person responded, “I see you.” After three days of heartfelt sharings, we were all in happy tears after saying these words. Robert says that is all we ever really say or want anyway, we want to be seen for who we are by another.

Here is another truly lovely web site all about hugging. I think you will enjoy it immensely. Click here: http://www.gagirl.com/hugs/hug.html

Solace – A Meditation On Self-Compassion

Posted on February 13, 2013 by Kristen

I am so excited about the below video! It’s taken me around three months to make. I wanted to make something beautiful with a self-compassion meditation created by my teacher Robert Gonzales. I think it came out great with the amazing help of my colleagues Joe Mitchell and Eric Piper. It takes about ten minutes to watch. I’m hoping that you will find it a useful tool anytime you are feeling strong emotions.

I also published it on Youtube, here’s the link:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxe5QfgF4Dg&feature=youtu.be

Click on the video below to get started, I hope you enjoy it.

Loving the Inner Child in Others

Posted on January 7, 2013 by Kristen

Below is a letter written by a poet to his son. Ted Hughes was married to Sylvia Plath and had a son by her. Sadly, Nicholas seemed to have inherited the debilitating depression that afflicted his mother, he died by suicide as a young man. I cannot imagine the depth of Ted’s grief to bear the suicides of both his wife and son. But as this beautiful and insightful letter indicates, he must have been a soulful and compassionate man.

The letter is longer than the below excerpt. If you wish to read it in its entirety, you can go to Brain Pickings, http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/09/12/ted-hughes-inner-child-letter/

“It’s something people don’t discuss, because it’s something most people are aware of only as a general crisis of sense of inadequacy, or helpless dependence, or pointless loneliness, or a sense of not having a strong enough ego to meet and master inner storms that come from an unexpected angle. But not many people realize that it is, in fact, the suffering of the child inside them. Everybody tries to protect this vulnerable two three four five six seven eight year old inside, and to acquire skills and aptitudes for dealing with the situations that threaten to overwhelm it. So everybody develops a whole armour of secondary self, the artificially constructed being that deals with the outer world, and the crush of circumstances. And when we meet people this is what we usually meet. And if this is the only part of them we meet we’re likely to get a rough time, and to end up making ‘no contact’. But when you develop a strong divining sense for the child behind that armour, and you make your dealings and negotiations only with that child, you find that everybody becomes, in a way, like your own child. “ ~ Ted Hughes, Letter to his son, Brain Pickings Website

It’s especially poignant to me, the armour we put up against ourselves. It makes me sad to think about how harsh I was to my own internal child in the past. I know that many mystics and therapists say that we need to love ourselves before we can love others. That may be true, but I think in my case it was easier to see how innocent others were before I could see how innocent I am. For some of us, learning to love ourselves might be a bit easier when we learn to love others first.

Forget everything you ever learned in storybooks and movies. People are not evil. With the possible exception of very specific and rare mental illnesses, no one wants to hurt anyone. People want the best, but they often have no idea how to achieve it, and their strategies may be tragically flawed. So take the situation, say, of someone you work with who talks about you behind your back. If you were to sit them down and ask with complete nonjudgmental curiosity why they gossiped about you, and if they could look inside for the truth and not toss off some glib answer, you would probably hear something very vulnerable, very raw, and very young. You would recognize the magical thinking of a young child who wants to be loved. And while you may dislike the strategy the child chose to get that love, you’d have total compassion for that person’s inner child. That person would be like your own child.

Healing Judgmental Thoughts

Posted on November 30, 2012 by Kristen

Most of our pain around relationships is self-inflicted. For example, a woman I know told me that her former friend deliberately tried to sabotage her online presence by posting something on Facebook. But when we heard from the friend during mediation, the friend explained that her post was in response to some questions from others and had nothing to do with her friend. In this case it’s easy to see that the woman misinterpreted the other’s actions in a way that caused her own pain.

Misinterpretations and judgments get in the way of relationship. My dear teacher Robert Gonzales teaches an unusual method for dealing with these everyday judgments. In class, he had us sit with someone we had judgments about and right in front of them talk out loud about the thoughts going through our minds and the feelings we have. It feels weird to confess to all the chatter going through my mind to the very person it’s about. Plus, I was certain that they would either get mad or be hurt. Neither of which I thought I could stand. But, if we completely own our own thoughts and feelings and we don’t lay it on the other person as their fault, then what I have found is that the other person usually doesn’t feel either angry or hurt. Instead they feel curious and sometimes even compassionate.

And there is something so freeing and healing about being that vulnerable and just being heard. I decided to make a video demonstrating this technique. I am using a new program to make these cartoons and I’m still figuring it out, so the slides are a little slow to change after I finish talking. The end slide finishes with “Interpreted from a talk by Robert Gonzales given at the 2012 -2013 August LIFE Program” so that you know when the slide show is finished.

Akili Dada and Empathy

Posted on November 28, 2012 by Kristen

The most useless people are people who are driven by guilt. ~Akili Dada

How do we give back to the world out of true empathy instead of out of guilt? I’m impressed by this 3 minute video interview with Akili Dada, the activist out of Kenya. I agree with her that guilt is ultimately a self-focused emotion. What a surprise huh? Lots of religions out there are completely off track about what it takes to get us to do nice things for one another. What I like about Akili’s point is that we love to share what is wonderful in our lives out of joy. Click here for the video http://startempathy.org/videos#video-277

You may notice that the video is on a web site called startempathy.org. There are other videos about empathy on this site as well as stories about how empathy is being introduced to children.

From their web site:

Start Empathy, an initiative of Ashoka, is a community of individuals and institutions dedicated to building a future in which every child masters empathy.

Empathy is the ability to understand the feelings and perspectives of others, and to use that understanding to guide one’s actions. It is critical both to individual human development and to our collective ability to solve problems and build a stronger society.

Start Empathy is not out to build a single program, curriculum, or silver-bullet fix. Rather, we’re working to unleash demand for empathy as a core 21st century skill – collaborating with social entrepreneurs, educators, parents, and key players in the media, business, and academic sectors to make empathy as essential as reading and math in early education. Success will take all of us, and will require rethinking how we parent, educate, and raise our children in a world that is changing faster than ever before.

We know that a child who masters empathy at the age of six is less likely to bully ten years later, and that, for students, having one supportive relationship with an adult outside the family can be the difference between success and failure as an adult. And we know that far from being a “nice-to-have,” empathy – and the various skills it entails – is increasingly critical to our success at home, in the workplace, and in the world.

Loving Community

How to Improve Relationships and Create Loving Community

Tag Archives: Empathy