One of the key skills in deliberative dialogue is figuring out what we are, together. This is often called “co-sensing” or “feeling into the collective field.” There are many ways to talk about but the practice is on the one hand tricky and subtle, and on the other, blazingly obvious. In general, in North America and especially among groups of people that are actively engaged in questions about co-sening the collective field, a speech pattern I have notcied goes something like this: I feel that we need to… My thoughts are that we should… I just throw this out there …
Fresh on the heels of a gathering I co-hosted here on Bowen Island this week, I have begun a year long research project to look at how hosting, facilitating and convening conversations can help shift people, organizations and communities to new levels of awareness, work and changemaking in their worlds. Posts here that relate to this research project are tagged with “CoHo” which is one of things some of us are calling this initiative. It is a contraction of “Council of Hosts” which is how we gathered and constituted ourselves last week. As a Council – a term that refers …
Yesterday we celebrated my son’s sixth birthday with a small gathering of five of his friends based on Star Wars. We did nothing but open a space in the middle of our small house and let them bang away at each other for two hours with light sabers. For a six year old boy, this constitutes a great gift (as it does I am sure for the parents of the other boys who came!). Of course, being the Jedi master, I was obliged to fight them all at some point, and sometimes even two at a time. It was all …
This week I was in a gathering with 16 friends about the nature of hosting new organizational structures that arise from the hosting practices that seek to move groups to new levels of consciousness and collaboration. The gathering was essentially four days long, and at the end of second last day I had an interesting conversation with my friends Peggy Holman and George Por about the art of harvesting. “Harvesting” is usually thought of as a way of telling the historical story of a gathering, and as a metaphor it has some value in terms of expanding the idea beyond …
“We all fight on two fronts, the one facing the enemy and the one facing what we do to the enemy.” –Joseph Boyden, Three Day Road, p. 301 I wish I could find a more coherent way to talk about this, about the complex set of emotions I feel in wearing a poppy and believing in peace. Joseph Boyden’s quote reminds me about the humanity that is at war. Whenever humans are involved in something, it’s never simple, so bear with me. I am trying to write about something that lives strongly in my heart, and heart …