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Category Archives "Art of Hosting"

Happiness and kindness at Hahopa

October 12, 2013 By Chris Corrigan Art of Harvesting, Art of Hosting, Community, Emergence, First Nations, Learning One Comment

 

 

“Tell everyone you know: “My happiness depends on me, so you’re off the hook.” And then demonstrate it. Be happy, no matter what they’re doing. Practice feeling good, no matter what. And before you know it, you will not give anyone else responsibility for the way you feel – and then, you’ll love them all. Because the only reason you don’t love them, is because you’re using them as your excuse to not feel good.”

– Esther Abraham-Hicks

via whiskey river.

Heading to Hahopa today.  Hahopa is an idea.  It is a place of the heart and the imagination which is rooted in the Nuu-Chah-Nulth principle of “teaching and learning with love and kindness.”  You might say that it is a place of grace, an ideal place where we can ground our happiness in an experimental way of being.

Hahopa is the dream of my friend Pawa Haiyupis.  Pawa’s full name is Pawasquacheetl which means “she gives in the feast with the energy of bees coming out of a hive.”  For years she has wanted to give the world a place where Nuu-Chah-Nulth teachings can be offered to anyone who feels that they are useful. Inspired by our friends at Kufunda village in Zimbabwe, Pawa and her family this week are embarking on an incredible dream.  The work we do together this week will set in place a lifetime of contribution to the world.

So I am off to Tofino where we will initiate this endeavour being hosted by the land, the beach and the sea.  We are open to seeing what will come of it and how it will flow.

If you would like to support this dream, please consider donating to the Indiegogo campaign and follow along here and on the facebook page where I will be helping to harvest what we learn.

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A dialogue poem

October 7, 2013 By Chris Corrigan Art of Harvesting, Art of Hosting, Emergence, Improv, Poetry

Some of my friends and I with in the Art of Hosting community create poems from our work as a kind of harvest, a way of listening to the voices shared in a circle and reflecting back to the group, it’s wholeness using the words of those in the room.  The poems are written on the spot and read into the room, slam style. Such poems evoke energy, and honour the whole.  We call these  “dialogue poems.”  Here is the one from yesterday’s check in in Montreal with our core hosting team…

Hosting team Check in poem

Where did you practice?
Where did you act as if you could do this?
What does the silence have to show us?
What is inside this seed?

A potential to feed what is needed everywhere
Hosting is caring so we’re daring to share
what is in our jardin communitaire:
101 ways in a single day
to face the case of urban space
fall into a call of enfolded breath
and die 101 little deaths, for co-creation to be the method
that we use to create and let go.  Whoa.  Peace flows

Caroline is on the scene
and clear love flows in between us
a clean passing of a piece to serve
the swerve and curve of jangly nerves
that the emergent life turns up.
This is a romance and a dance of hosted circumstance.

The space of the public dream seems
to be called to scream from the megaphone
deep in our bones in the intention for an intervention
ot suspension to  the conventional ways of doing things.
We meet despair with care for beauty and do our duty.

Economics in the commons needs us to anchor danger
as the social order rearranges strangers into the angels of
the commons”but”but”
Words were never spoken for the broken structures I have seen
for the painful way we remain unclean in the unconscious hosting
that leaves us unseen and suffering the wasted talents of human beings
so I offer a new chance to call us all into the hall and
share the commoning of Montreal.

When there is no room at the inn we move outside and work from the rim.
And all we need to take
is one minute, innit?
Because a crack is a small thing to make.

Small is beautiful, but tiny is fuller
What is the smallest container that can hold the future?
A negotiation with a child, a wild realization that we only flower
when the smallest things claim their power
and we take an hour to be in peace with other generations.

The appearance of the aperitif
Helps us arrive and be here

This work can be hard
when we haven’t got a clue
and the parameters make us do things we don’t want to do
we host grief and hate and create the state
for the gates to open and action to gain traction
for a fraction of the cost of the money we’ve already lost.

And then, abundance appears because we stayed with the fears
and the tears and we finally see everyone as peers.

It was a ride to get a guide that would help us get inside
the Art of Hosting and glide us to understanding, landing whatever we can
as a resource to help us plan for this.

Two thousand thirteen seems like a series of scenes
of moments that mean my life has seen
the real application of peace between human beings.
In cote d’ivoire, ravaged by war, a mayor named need
to plant a seed for people to lead the conversations
that stop the bleeding and meet the need for
the chief of chiefs to hold the belief that these ways of talking
can bring relief.

Two hundred thousand years of leadership
called into relationship, mateship and friendship
in a moment of reconciliation for a nation
where you do not have to be sorry
for the story, but you must offer a forum
for the experience of peace and a shift to dignified decorum.

We are not here to be small.
We all just want peace.
That is all.

I am touched to be here.
Daring to appear
Á table citoyen”where the rabble fits in
to chatter and natter about things that matter and
do it in public where the interests clatter
and find a place to practice together
co-create a project that’s better and better”
and shift my life to something unfettered.
by the separation that I’m deluded with.
Tend to the people that are coming,
feel the field and yield to the real.

Since January for me
It’s been a race from place to place
tracing a line from space to space
and stopping a moment to face the grace
That I have to receive for living as me  authentically
I hope to inspire near and far
people to be just who they are.

En formations nous avons les informations
pour le realization de collaboration
we carried the living spark
of what was lit in Lafontaine Parc
embodied a some light that shone in the dark
flowing from our humanity, a practice of embodied calamity!

I feel that I am a dwarf among giants
and ready to offer my heart and defiance
of what my own ego wants us to do
so we can be free.  How about you?

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10 Brilliant videos on the Art of Hosting

October 6, 2013 By Chris Corrigan Art of Hosting 3 Comments

Over the past few years Jerry Nagel and a group of practitioners in Minnesota have been working deeply with the Art of Hosting in the state.  The Bush Foundation, who has supported a lot of this work, helped create 10 fantastic videos on the Art of Hosting and some of the methods of the process.  You could look through these and get a great foundation in what it’s all about.  Enjoy!

1.  Art of Hosting – introduction:  https://vimeo.com/72614471

2. AOH Community Conversations for the common good: https://vimeo.com/40679035

3. AOH Four-fold Practice: https://vimeo.com/69785461

4. AOH Harvesting: https://vimeo.com/69785465

5. AOH Collective Story Harvest: https://vimeo.com/69798732

6. AOH Chaordic Path: https://vimeo.com/69785462

7. AOH Chaordic Stepping Stones: https://vimeo.com/69798731

8. AOH Circle Process: https://vimeo.com/69785464

9. AOH Open Space: https://vimeo.com/69798729

10.   AOH ProAction Cafe: https://vimeo.com/69798730

 

 

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Journeying to simplicity and reengagement

August 27, 2013 By Chris Corrigan Art of Hosting, Community, Travel 3 Comments

On a bus at the moment travelling from Tartu to Tallinn, through the Estonian countryside.  We pass by fields and forests that remind me deeply of the southern Ontario countryside I grew up, differing only in the occasional ruins of old Soviet collectivist farms and apartment blocks that housed their workers when this was part of the Soviet Union.

This is my second trip to Estonia and it is perhaps not my last one.  There is some much that is interesting about this country and my friends here, including a close connection to land and culture and a strong sense of both contemporary identity and traditional practices.  It somehow for me embodies the Art of Hosting.

This week we were running a Learning Village – a sort of training where we come together to work and co-create community for a week and share learning that deepens our practices of hosting and supporting authentic human being in community and organization, family and life.  We were at that Sänna Kulturmoise, an old German manor that was bought by a group of families who are running it as an intentional community and a place of learning and co-creation. We lived half our time in Open Space, half our time hosted in beautiful process with a local team led Piret Jeedas and Ivika Nögel and Robert Oetjen along with Dianna, Kritsi, Kristina, Helina, Paavo and other AoH practctioners.  James Ede, Luke Concannon, Anne Madsen and I represented the visiting contingent.

As beautiful as the Art of Hosting Learning Village was, for me the journey was also about exploring something deeper here in Estonia.  I have noticed in my practice lately that it is hard to sustain the kind of energy, interest and creativity that I have always tried to bring to my work.  I have been reflecting on this and why it is and what it all means.  So the Art of Hosting gave me a chance to work with new and old friends, and to host in a radically different context where I had to be sensitive to language and culture.  But it also took place in a part of the world that has something to teach me.

Travel of course, always does this…gets us out of our patterns and ruts.  I have had very little opportunity to reflect on my work this year, and so I have been treating this journey to Europe (which includes a leg in Turkey and one in Ireland as well) to be a time to discover something new.

Here in Estonia, it has felt like I have gone through several gates.  Arriving in Europe, arriving in Estonia, spending one night in the capital Tallinn, travelling to the rural and traditional south to work at Sänna, and then a journey with friends deep into the heart of Setomaa, the region of Estonia that is home to the Seto people, a small Finno-Ugric tribe that I have come to love. Our friend Piret has a piece of land she is working on in the village of Harma, very near to the summer home of our friend Margus, who works for the Seto Nation.  Eight of us packed down to Setomaa the other night to spend the night at Margus’s house, to practice sauna together, eat at a traditional Seto guest house, sing songs from our traditions, take part in local traditional social protocols of sharing a local moonshine called hanza which is used kind of as a talking piece by Seto hosts and to rest on the land.  Yesterday morning we woke up and went walking and harvesting in the forest, picking many mushrooms, blueberries and lingonberries, visiting Piret’s land, and a new local chapel called a  tsässons, which is a traditional worship place of Seto people.  It was a journey that seemed to go every deeper into an ancient landscape of human activity, human community, deep friendship and powerful connection.  We were hosted by the land and each other and we were blessed with a quality of time and space that seems rare.

Yesterday as we were leaving, across the fields behind Margus’ place, we witnessed what I think was the teaching that this container held.  James and I stood and looked across a field at two women, a man and a horse who were taking hay from a field by hand.  The women were cutting it and carrying it to the man who was pitching it into a horse drawn hay wagon.  It was an incredibly powerful scene of continuity and tradition and also sustainability, practicality, simplicity and clarity.  We remarked that perhaps if we could simply undertake to practice these kinds of ancient human practices with such clean volition, it would be our ideal.

I am leaving Estonia for Turkey this afternoon with the thought that this simplicity of practice is what will renew me.  We humans are in love with our brains, and in making things complicated and confusing.  Sometimes harvesting the hay is so simple that we can do it the way we have always done it.  I think much of our work in hosting is the same.  We may be facing novel situiations and mproblems in the world, but there is very little that is different about how we as humans can deal with them.  To practice the ancient arts of conversations, meaning making, connection and community in the service of meeting needs, and to do that simply is the lesson.

And in some small but not insignificant way, Esotina works the obvious into my tired spirit, and the close friendships and colleagueships I share here along with a land I somehow know in my bones have hosted a little insight around simplicity that may unfold more in Turkey or Ireland.

I’m staying tuned.

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What if we can never leave?

June 15, 2013 By Chris Corrigan Art of Hosting, Being, Conversation, Facilitation, Uncategorized 6 Comments

20130615-125937.jpg

There are conversations I don’t want to have and there are conversations I show up in and where I don’t like how I show up there. How to change these?

We are always inside the conversations we don’t want to have. We cannot leave them. We always have to host from inside this place.

At some level you can never leave earth. You belong here and to every conversation that is happening here. You are invited to host it all. That is your obligation for being given the gift of life.

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