Two secrets about breathing and smiling
In the last couple of days I have learned a couple of secrets about breathing and smiling.
I was listening to a recording of a teaching by Thich Nhat Hahn from the 1980s and he said this:
I have lost my smile,
but don?t worry,
The dandelion has it.
If you have lost your smile and yet are still capable of seeing that a dandelion is keeping it for you, the situation is not too bad. You still have enough mindfulness to see that the smile is there. You only need to breathe consciously one or two times and you will recover your smile. The dandelion is one member of your community of friends. It is there, quite faithful, keeping your smile for you. In fact, everything around you is keeping your smile for you. You don?t need to feel isolated. You only have to open yourself to the support that is all around you, and in you. Like the friend who saw that her smile was being kept by the dandelion, you can breathe in awareness, and your smile will return.
Thich Nhat Hahn also reminds us to smile when we breathe in meditation, to reclaim our smile from whatever is holding it when we aren’t.
The second secret – two secrets really – I learned from my friend, Myriam Laberge and they were about facilitation. First, understand that the operating system of groups is in fact breathing: take an in breath to collect the oxygen you need for living, breath out to disperse energies and toxins and breathe in again. Groups thrive when they breathe, and when the transition between in breath and outbreath is marked with a sense of accomplishment and agreement, a point where we look around the group and smile. Anything you can do to get a group through this process once, helps you to build momentum so that as you open up the group to bigger and bigger work, they already have that experience of converging and smiling. Even the most conflicted group can agree on something, even if it’s the quality of the weather at the moment. Going through the cycle of opening and converging brings life and fresh oxygen to group work.
And so, leading from this Myriam’s second secret is that any process will work with this operating system but only if the facilitator is aligned authentically with it. This is why as facilitators we get into the groove on certain processes. They more we use them and deepen our understanding of them, the more authentic they become and the better we are able to work with the operating system that invites breath and smile.
