Collective Presencing as collective inquiry
Finding the guiding question
It can’t be stressed enough that Collective Presencing is in essence an inquiry process. There is always a guiding question to which we really don’t have an answer that the dialogue seeks to dive into. Although, right now as I write this, most sessions happen online as a pure practice space with participants from different corners of the world. In that sense we are hardly a project team. As we move – slowly but surely – into real world projects with this practice, the finding, the un-earthing, and the dis-covery of the real question is a deep and essential part of the practice.
Even for the online sessions, we do take great care and spend quite some time and detail on articulating the guiding question for the inquiry; to find a question that brings us to the edge of our current understanding. At the same time we see some people using it on the ground, in face-to-face meetings. The ultimate purpose of this practice is of course application in real life situations, with wicked, complex, entangled problems.
In our mainstream Western world, when encountered with problems we tend to look for solutions. It is mostly unconscious – to our conditioned minds – how different assumptions slip into how we phrase a problem. Most of the time we don’t realize how many assumptions are already baked into how we phrase our questions and thus point us to a specific and limited range of solutions. In a complex, dynamic world there aren’t any simple solutions possible, because of its living, ever-changing nature. Thus, a real generative question is one that scatters some of our unconsciously held assumptions of how people or the world works, and is in some ways pointing to a deeper level of potential and meaning.
We start in this question finding session by sharing what really is at the edge of our current understanding, what we are really, really curious of. At first the collection of shares might look quite chaotic, but surely – by listening to the soil beneath them – some kind of theme arises. Most likely there are words, spoken by different people, that have some resonance for most of the group; these will eventually end up in the formulated question. The question will be challenging for most of the participants, as it will invite them to widen and deepen their perspectives and eventually see more of the potential and possibilities.
The aim of these question-finding sessions is to become aware of our assumptions and try to articulate a question that goes beyond them. Engaging with the question, through the ongoing dialogue, will even reveal more assumptions. What this engagement leads us to is that we become more and more aware of the potential, the possibilities that are actually there, but beyond our current paradigm that limits us to see them.
It’s not an easy, quick work to do, as part of it is sensing into the deeper and wider potential that is somehow on the horizon, – although not totally visible or tangible – and still trying to pour it into words and language. Through these careful crafted questions we invite what John Vervaeke defines as ‘imaginally augmented perception and cognition’. Later in this part we write a bit more about the imaginal… in pointing to that direction we implicitly give people the message that this part of our realities is welcomed; and even needed to get a glimpse of what could be possible.
The fact that this type of dialogue is centered on a guiding question makes it different from classic Bohmian dialogue. Although the implicit assumption there is that we are inquiring into how our minds work in relation to the world at large and indeed, trying to see what kind of assumptions we are holding in this regard.
Some examples of inquiries
Below you find the guiding questions we traveled with at the beginning of our online sessions.
From April to Dec. 2020: In this pause, as we – together – sense into our potential, what is it that we glimpse?
From Jan to April 2021: As we travel through the dark forest together, how do we cultivate / uncover / live our collective night vision and our wild intelligence?
after Easter 2021: What possibilities unfold when we open into the magical trembling that dances between fear and awe? Who are we then becoming?
Summer 2021: How am I uniquely called to participate in/as the collective body/organism? How can we now express that what to this point has felt inexpressible?
January 2022: If we collectively attune our attention to what we and the planet—and what we as the planet—need together, what radical new worlds do we co-create?
Intimacy and intensity
To introduce these deep core elements of the work, let’s turn to another writing by Cheryl…
The container can hold more, by Cheryl Hsu
Thich Nhat Hanh writes about interbeing, the Buddhists have long talked about co-dependent arising. First Nations people around the world live by indigenous cosmologies of sacred interconnection. Quantum scientists like David Bohm describe the interconnected Whole. The truth is simple: we are all connected. But what does it mean to actually feel this living sensation?
David B said in the session last week: there are energies in the earth that are too much for one body to hold.
When he says this, I remember the morning I learned about the mass graves of over 750 Indigenous children that were buried in Canada. When I read an article about it, it was too much. I felt numb and disconnected. Before going into Collective Presencing that day, I could feel the pressure and tension heavy in my body. But upon arrival, something in my body felt held by the container, this collective body made up of our attention and bodies. And when it felt held, I collapsed into tears and sobbing, touching into the indescribable pain and despair that I had forced down below, now rising, swelling and passing through my body like massive tidal waves. It was painful and difficult, and it was healing and releasing. I needed to connect with the grief and suffering of these children, to sense into the intergenerational pain of the adults who put them underground, to touch the cold cement of the unfeeling institutions, systems and cultures that alienate us from each other and the planet.
The weight of Collective Trauma is too much for one body to hold. Yet I wasn’t alone. I don’t cry often, I’ve spent my entire life trying to hold it together. But sometimes, you’re holding it together behind a tough exterior, and then you see the trusted, loving face of your partner or your mother, and something cracks through. Your animal body knows, and it gloriously falls apart. You allow yourself to be held in the safe arms of your beloved.
The landscape of my body is unique to me, lined and storied with my ancestral traumas and living experiences. And yet deeper currents run beneath… a hidden order entangling us at greater depths…
The more I practice and stretch my body to hold these waves of intensity, the more the thick walls of separation begin to dissolve. Skin becomes translucent and porous. As I leak more into the world, the world trickles and spills into me, flowing through the rivers and tributaries of the body. The territory of Self becomes a dynamic meeting place of fluid circulation and reciprocity. Paradoxically, the more tender I become, the more resilient. I cry more. I laugh more. I trust more. I care more. I love more. And when I do so, I feel like I’m doing so through and for something larger than just me.