Thinking about the practice of holding, the most well known of the Practices of Open Space. Many writers have written about what it means to hold space in group work, but few have elucidated some of the traps inherent in this practice as Pema Chodron. In this excerpt from her recent teachings on shenpa she gets at some of the hooks that traps us in space closing:
“Here is an everyday example of shenpa. Somebody says a mean word to you and then something in you tightens� that’s the shenpa. Then it starts to spiral into low self-esteem, or blaming them, or anger at them, denigrating yourself. And maybe if you have strong addictions, you just go right for your addiction to cover over the bad feeling that arose when that person said that mean word to you. This is a mean word that gets you, hooks you. Another mean word may not affect you but we’re talking about where it touches that sore place� that’s a shenpa. Someone criticizes you�they criticize your work, they criticize your appearance, they criticize your child� and, shenpa: almost co-arising.
At Gampo Abbey it’s a small community. We’re thirty monks and nuns there. You have a pretty intimate relationship there, living in community. People were finding that in the dining room, someone would come and sit down next to them and they could feel the shenpa just because this person sat down next to them, because they had some kind of thing going about this person. Then they feel this closing down and they’re hooked.
If you catch it at that level, it’s very workable. And you have the possibility, you have this enormous curiosity about sitting still right there at the table with this urge to do the habitual thing, to strengthen the habituation, you can feel it, and it’s never new. It always has a familiar taste in the mouth. It has a familiar smell. When you begin to get the hang of it, you feel like this has been happening forever.
Generally speaking, however, we don’t catch it at that level of just open space closing down. You’re open-hearted, open-minded, and then… erkk. Right along with the hooked quality, or the tension, or the shutting down, whatever… I experience it, at the most subtle level, as a sort of tensing. Then you can feel yourself sort of withdrawing and actually not wanting to be in that place.
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I’ve been remiss in my postings of mp3s lately, so here is one for you all.
From Indigenous Resistance records, comes a track about resistance in the South Pacific archipelago of Vanuatu performed and composed by Micheal Franti and Carl Young (Spearhead). I lived for a year with a Ni-Vanuatu, John Damasing Salong, who was from Ambrym. John was at Trent University in the late 1980s with us and we had a great time together. I picked up some Bislama, the Vanuatu pidgin language and we spent many days and night singing, talking and cooking together. AT one point, encouraged by the success of the Jamaican bobsled team at the 1988 Olympics, John had the idea of going out for the 1992 Winter Olympics as the Vanuatu cross-country ski team. It never happened, but that was the kind of guy he was back then.
John came along with me to some pow wows and Ojibway ceremonies and he was always looking for connections with indigenous folks here. Once we sat around a drum with my friend James Whetung and talked about how to build a smoke house. John immediately started thinking about how he could bring traditional Ojibway smokehouse technology back to Ambrym to preserve food without relying on electricity.
Not surprisingly, John returned to Vanuatu to work in development and cultural and environmental preservation. So this track goes out to him, and hopefully the next time he Googles himself, he’ll drop by and leave a note here.
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Victoria, B.C.
I’m doing some work in Victoria at the moment. I am co-leading the Aboriginal engagement process for the Victoria Urban Development Agreement, and today we held a focus group on physical and environmental factors for success. One of the key ideas that has come forward this week has been the idea of creating a First Nations cultural precinct in Victoria, like a Chinatown for example, or more like the Jewish neighbourhoods around The Main and St. Urbain Street in Montreal, except a centre for First Nations business, services, community and culture.
In thinking about this stuff we were fortunate to hear a radio interview on CBC earlier this week with Fred Kent from the Project for Public Spaces.
I’m sure he’d be interested in some of the conversation we were having today, especially about putting First Nations culture and presence on the land. Imagine walking around the inner harbour of Victoria and knowing the Straits Salish names for the features you were looking at and the traditional and contemporary uses of the space? Imagine a vibrant and diverse First Nations market in the heart of downtown that was more than just a tourist trap, but instead acted as a hub for the community, celebrating the diversity and enterprise of the the folks who live here, and creating a safe home in the middle of Canada’s most British city?
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As many of you know, I have been focusing a great deal of attention lately on the Four Practices of Open Space, namely opening, inviting, holding and grounding. At the moment I am putting the final touches on a resource manual for an Open Space practice workshop (it’s never too late to register!) and I’ve been tracking all over the internet assembling bits and pieces. The manual can’t be too big, and of course a lot of the stuff I have found and read over the years can’t be included. However, thanks to del.icio.us, I have set up four tags, one for each of these practices, and so now you too can join in the fun, tagging stuff out there that seems to relate to these practices and subscribing to the feeds to see what we are turning up.
Here are the links:
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At the end of September I opened space for a group of citizens looking to support the Islands Trust here in British Columbia. The Islands Trust is a governance body that seeks to preserve and protect the character of the Gulf Islands, one of which is my home.
Along with a team of four other island-based OST facilitators we convened a 1.5 day Open Space on the topic of citizens supporting the islands Trust mandate. During the meeting I was interviewed for The Island Tides newspaper out of salt Spring Island and the resulting article is a pretty good summary of what happens in Open Space. If you want to see the article, you can download it here, which is a 4.3Mb pdf. The article is on page two.