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 for consideration…
- I’m not sure but I think we…
In other words, oin our efforts to discern the collective, we very often start with a non-definitive statement about our personal relation to what might be held collectively. Very often these kinds of statements serve to keep us stuck in individual perspectives. What we end up talking about is our own perspectives on things. Instead of sensing into the whole, we are negotiating with the parts. There is no emergent sense of what we have between us.
Last week, I was working with some ha’wilh (chiefs) from the Nuu-Chah-Nulth nations of the west coast of Vancouver Island. (We were in this building). Although this was a somewhat standard government consultation meeting, these ha-wiilh are quite practiced in traditional arts of deliberation. Much of the conversation during the day conformed to the above pattern, but at one point, for about a half an hour, there was a deep deliberative tone that came over the meeting. We were talking about a government policy that is aimed at protecting wild salmon, an absolutely essential animal to Nuu-Chah-Nulth communities.
When talk about the policy, the pace of the conversation slowed down and the ha’wilh entered this pattern:
- We need to support this policy. I support it.
- We have to find a way to involve the province in this. Here’s who I know on this.
- Logging in our watersheds affects these fish and our communities are affected as well. What can we do about that?
The essence of this pattern is that one waits for something to be so obvious that a dclarative statement about “we,” “us” or “our” begs to be stated. And once it is stated, it is supported with a statement about how “I” relate to that whole.
This produces a number of profound shifts in a field, and very quickly. First, it slows everything down. It is not possible to rush to conclusions about what is in the collective field. Second, it builds conidence and accountability into the speech acts. It is very, very difficult to say “we need to support this” if you are uncertain of whether we do or not. This shift takes us from random individual thoughts and speculations into a space where we need to think carefully, sense outside of our own inner voice and speak clearly what is in the middle.
This is a very abstract notion, but anyone who has driven a car or ridden a bike in traffic knows what I am talking about. When we are driving our cars together, we are actually creating traffic. Traffic is the emergent phenomenon, the thing that we can only do together. In order to create traffic that serves us, we need to be constantly sensing the field of the road. This involves figuring out what other drivers are doing, noticing the flow and engaging safely but confidently. You need to both claim space and leave space to drive safely. Anyone who offers something into the field that is too focused on the individual disturbs the field significantly. They drive like road hogs, dangerous, not fully connected to the field around them.
So the teaching of the ha’wilh is very straightforward for any form of deliberation and co-sening: quickly go to the “we.”
[tags]co-sensing, deliberation[/tags]
Photo by Wam Mosely
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 more to the method of deliberation among ourselves and not to a formal structure – we identified a key need that caused us to be joined in our work. All of us present at the gathering work with people who are stuck, affected by large scale systemic forces that conspire to constrain them. Not knowing how to work within these constraints is an incredibly disempowering feeling, as is working at one level, on say resource conservation, when you are fully aware of the large scale processes unfolding around you, like climate change, over which we have no control.
In a Council we decided that as a group our purpose was jointly to look at how we can be forces of conscious evolution through hosting. For me, conscious evolution is as simple as having the experience of becoming “bigger” in terms of consciousness of forces and systems and the impact we can have on those forces and systems.
What is interesting is that despite the fact that we are small players working in a big system, and we KNOW that our effect in the world is usually small and local, there is something almost inherent in human nature that convinces us that we can have more impact than it appears. To be sure, this sentiment sometimes becomes arrogance, especially here in North America, but everywhere I have been in this world, among many different people living in wildly different circumstances, I find this pattern of optimism. Whether or not that optimism is productive, or stands a chance at worldchanging is an interesting question, but even more interesting for me is this question: if we are truly products of the global earth system, and we know that we are simply small pieces of a huge and complex living system, where does this impulse, calling or optimism come from?
There seems to be something about being human that allows us to respond to a call that is bigger that the space we occupy in the system of life on earth. I am curious about what this call means and what happens when we respond to it, and also how we come in alignment with the various fields that seem to accelerate change. In short, why does one person think he or she can make a difference, and why does that sometimes actually happen? What needs to come into alignment to make change flow?
Ultimately I am looking for patterns. For me, my inquiry for the work is to look at a number of questions:
- What are the patterns that hold us and what can we learn about those patterns about how things evolve, how changes can flow through systems?
- How do we as hosts help to create the conditions for conscious evolution within systems?
- What are the patterns for doing this work?
In terms of the work of CoHo, this inquiry underpins my existing work, and is definitely my learning edge in terms of my work as a facilitator of process with groups that seek change. I invite you, and we invite you, to join us. I’ll post more information on how to in the coming weeks.
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 going so well until I turned and got stabbed right in the eye by a boy less than half my size. My vision went blurry and my eye started to weep. I was fine in the end, but I had to retire, knowing the humlity of what it must feel like to be slain by Yoda.
[tags]yoda, star wars[/tags]
“The secret of life is to have a question or task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day of your whole life and the most important thing is – it must be something you cannot possibly do!”
— Henry Moore
With thanks to my friend Patti DeSante, and also Michael Jones, who uses this quote in “Artful Leadership” (.pdf).
[tags]Henry Moore, Michael Jones, secret of life[/tags]
Photo of Henry Moore sculpture at Hakone Open Air Museum by Nemo’s Great Uncle
cultivate eyes
that enable you to see
through the storms that are right here
to the storms that are coming
in that depth –
great beauty and peace.
photo by damaruc