Interpersonal: Digesting ruptures

For sure, working on a project, in smaller teams, is way different than being present in a 90-minute dialogue! Interpersonal dynamics and tensions will come up and the challenge becomes how to work with them. How to deal with them in a Collective Presencing – or a life affirming – way?

The challenge is here to move beyond the types of giving feedback that are interpersonal in nature: clearing the air between two persons. What could be a repair and digesting process when ruptures happen in our intersubjective field? What if the tensions between these two people are actually not about their personal stuff but that they are picking up systemic or collective tensions that are voiced through them?

We can get acquainted with the idea that life is always happening, always emerging – through all of us. Any wounds and patterns we have from days long gone act actually as blocks where life’s energy is getting stuck. We can clearly see, from our lived experiences, that this kind of collective – with its high level of awareness and presence, and its evolutionary purpose – acts like an opening to more of life. But then, more energy clearly brings to light where the places of stuckness are. In that way we can see these kinds of collectives not only as an opening but also as a deep catalyst.

On the surface it looks like a conflict between two people, but in the context of a team that wants to access deeper collective wisdom, we don’t see this as only an interpersonal dynamic that needs solving on the interpersonal plane. This interpersonal dynamic grants an opportunity for the individual to reclaim some of her/his original life force (when working through the wounding), and equally important for the group to see the societal, cultural dynamics that are played out through these two people.

These days I try to look at conflict as sacred, and not as a problem. It is looking through a post-problem lens, where curiosity is really key. We engage with this repair process from a place of wanting to clear the field so that it can flourish more, and less from a place where my inner child was never understood and this is my chance! It is an opportunity to look deeper into ourselves (as we say: the gift is in the trauma), into each other and into the wider contexts; but for sure with a lot of care. In the context of a group it is more of a digesting, a metabolizing than just a repair. We need a lot of authentic human beings in open and clean relationships for emergence to happen. This doesn’t mean that we all like each other, as Amanda describes here:

Detached love in real life, by Amanda Zamparo

While in the first sessions of Collective Presencing at the Stoa, I could experience attraction towards some people, and resistance towards others. When going to the break-out rooms, I would be a bit disappointed for not staying in the same group as X or Z person, or maybe I would be happy for staying with A or B in the same group.

Then, something new started to happen. I didn’t care anymore about the faces and voices; I would only care about being present with whatever was happening. I would stretch myself to like someone I didn’t like the first time, and I would dissolve the liking of the ones I was feeling attracted to. I was becoming more and more in touch with the love for humanity in me. And when someone was sharing something too intense, too weird or something that makes my judgment more alive, I would then observe this, the discomfort, and also welcome it into my heart. …..

I also realized that it is much more difficult to sustain this kind of detached love in real life, rather than in a CP session. It is very easy to feel this kind of expansive and open love to anyone in a circle, because I don’t have to deal with those people in my daily life. And they don’t have to deal with me as well!

Can we let go of our preferences of being and relating to some people, rather than others?

What would be the impact of our collective experience if we all dissolved these preferences and could actually be and work with anyone and everyone?

Trust the unfoldment

Some, or even most of the interpersonal dynamics at play in the first gathering we had, were about the feminine and the masculine. We used a carefully designed repair process, where each team member could voice their own experience and the personal pain that was touched upon. We notice that this theme of balancing yin and yang carries forward its own energy. We have seen two extended inquiries for women (almost covering a year) and later Collective Presencing For Men started. Then coming to a place of mixing all genders, without losing the deep diversity and not falling back in the specific patterns when showing up together; as if we reset an old habit between men and women.

It seems the winds of change don’t belong to us, but actually to the earth, or maybe the universe. Looking around we can see through one lens that collapse is happening, and through another lens that maybe we are going through a birth canal and a new phase is appearing. The only thing we can do, like the fetus in the womb, is to trust the unfoldment. Trusting our multidimensional nature, which stretches from being natural and animal, to being aware human beings (including lots of conditioning), seems to be asked for.