More on action systems, but this time from a poet, Anais Nin: And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. That describes shift perfectly…when the status quo becomes more painful than the move. [tags]anais nin, transformation[/tags] Photo by Ernie*
In the last couple of weeks I have been in deep and important conversations about the work of facilitating change in the world. I am just back from another Art of Hosting gathering, this time in Boulder, Colorado and, among the many many things that were on my mind there, the subject of talk and action came up. This was especially a good time to have this conversation as this particular Art of Hosting brought together many deep practitioners of both the Art of Hosting approach to facilitating change and the U-process approach to action and systemic change. …
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 …