I was hanging out with my mates and fellows from the Art of Hosting yesterday here on Bowen Island. Any time I get to spend with these guys changes the way I see things. Yesterday Toke Moeller was describing a game he has developed called Flowgame, which is a way of asking questions and hosting conversations to sustain flow on these questions. In passing he mentioned that in order to play, you have to have a real question, and he described a real question as a question where you have something at stake. That’s a wicked definition if you think …
After a couple of conversations around the practice workshop I am offering in two weeks, and a lot of midnight interruption on his part Michael Herman has distilled the thinking again on the practices of Open Space.: 1. Being Open-Hearted – not just the act of opening, but the practice of being that way, resting in that state. The tool here is experience, our own life experience. The workshop conversation is about the life experiences that have opened our hearts, in gentle or devastating ways – and how we’ve managed to maintain various states of openness, in spite of everything. …
So on Saturday, i stumble across a nice piece of music about Vanuatu and I write a little post about it and mention my old friend John Salong, with whom I lived in 1988. Not five minutes ago I just got off a Skype call with him. That’s less than four days from the Parking Lot to Google To John and back over Skype. Turns out that someone who was working with him Googled him, found my posting and John called to say hi and to catch up. We’re both fathers of 8-9 year kids, we’re both working in the …
By way of Harrison Owen, I was referred to Steve Hirsch of the Center for Reducing Rural Violence in Minnesota. This is one reason why I love America…stuff like this exists down there. I’m looking forward to a conversation with him on violence in First Nations communities.
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 …