Finding your way in, being present with others

Interpersonal dynamics… we all know them too well! They come up all the time; and being together in a dialogue space doesn’t prevent it from happening. We feel angry, sad, fear of judgment, shame… any of the many emotional (trauma) responses… This practice helps you on a path of generative dialogue that does not get mired in convincing others or defending oneself. You could see it as a practice of mindfulness in relationship, or mindful dialogue; or better even to call it body-fullness.

Again, we dive further in Amanda’s dairy where she shares about not being able to share what was really present in her, fear had blocked her… (she got triggered, or her nervous system got activated)… and then, in the next story, she was able to listen and witness, even in a situation that could easily be a triggering one, as it happened in real life and not inside the circle practice.

The day when I was not able to share, by Amanda Zamparo

I already feel so naked with the things that I am writing… I am going to be even more naked, if that is possible: naked with my confusion, with my messiness, showing the real body with real “flaws”.

Today I was not able to share what was coming up for me, because I was too afraid of judgments about my story. …..

At that moment, when I realized I was too afraid of sharing what was most alive, I could have just returned the talking piece to the center. Instead, I shared a piece of the story that was less intimate, less real… I didn’t make it up, the story was real, but it wasn’t what was most alive in that moment… And what really wanted to come through me, I will never know!

I can be in a Collective Presencing session whenever I decide, by Amanda Zamparo

Recently, I was talking with someone very dear to me – a close friend, with whom I have a deep relationship. He went on sharing what he was feeling, and suddenly I was observing my own reactions to it. Some grief, confusion and discomfort. When he was done, I paused for one moment, closed my eyes and I was just there, with the middle, in the middle of us. I realized there was peace in that space, and no need to respond. I realized that I was not feeling called to share anything, and if we were in a CP session, I would just sit in silence: and that is what I did. I was in a CP session, and I can be in a CP session whenever I decide to!

Suddenly, there was nothing to take personally, and he was just sharing what he needed to share. There was no need to attend. I was complete; we were complete. The old Amanda would just try to understand more deeply, ask questions, and maybe be obsessed about what he was sharing – but all that stuff comes from my conditioning, the insecure and uptight personality patterns. From the middle, there was nothing to be said, nothing to be asked.

Not speaking across the fire, but speaking to the middle and witnessing

To prevent interpersonal dynamics from spinning out, our next prompt when inviting others into this practice is this one: Not speaking across the fire. This is a serious invitation that goes deeply against our habitual speaking patterns in meetings of any kind: we want to answer, we want to agree or disagree, we want to be understood etc. Very practically, this prompt means that we don’t speak our agreement or disagreement with what someone shared, we don’t address a person in this way… in short: we suspend our judgment. Instead of arguing about who has the truth, our intention in the dialogue is to let the different spoken threads be woven together, we close the gaps through listening to the different things shared.

Of course, emotional judgments don’t go away immediately because we want it, but our invitation is to share it – whatever we notice in ourselves, in thoughts, beliefs and emotions – to the middle, and let it be held by the whole circle. There is no need to name anyone or to address someone… let your emotional charge be held by the rim.

This is sometimes easier said than done. It takes practice to be able to hold the intensities of old dynamics, of old habitual patterns, without crossing the fire, without blaming anyone, without expecting them to confirm what we bring, without … The deeper invitation here is to see the patterns – in myself, and in others – as patterns; as parts or habits that are not yet integrated in the whole of myself. We are constantly invited not to take it personally in any way, but to put emotions and related judgments (ours and from others) in the middle. Holding one another as we stumble, as we are triggered. It is a growth path through connection. Not speaking across the fire doesn’t mean we can’t mention somebody’s name or that a certain story or idea could be especially valuable or meaningful to me.

Once I captured it in this way:

Back to presence.
Embodiment.
Grounding.
Alignment: inside and outside.
Sensing the big evolutionary pull of a new human capacity.
Are we in flow? Are we in motion?
Can we speak “as the middle”?
The circle, the rim can hold it all

When we can hold old patterns in this way, our human capacity is freed up to align with a bigger collective, a bigger group of humans and even beyond. We cultivate a deep, embodied presence; with clarity of mind and an openness of the heart.

The prompt of speaking to and from the middle has on the receiving end the power and practice of witnessing. This is not a mainstream conversation or debate where one side somehow wants to win about who is speaking the truth; not speaking across the fire means that we don’t engage in agreeing or not agreeing. We deeply listen to the others; we witness them in their sharing. We take it at face value that this is how they perceive or experience things. Witnessing others can feel like doing nothing, but it is an attentive, energetic space that we hold for one another and it has its ripple effects. In a way it is pretty simple and at the same time so powerful. That seems almost a contradiction for Western trained minds, but it is connecting us to the power of noticing a simple flower opening, or noticing how the sunset is coloring the horizon.

We look at the imagined campfire in the middle of our circle as actually an active, energetic space. Many use the word container these days. It is not visible in any way but is, as Cheryl wrote, woven together by our listening, our witnessing, our bodies, our attention. This energetic space that we hold together through our intentions, can absorb a lot, it can act as a parking lot for arguments and especially for interpersonal triggers. You can learn to speak your emotional charge into this center, while taking full responsibility for the fact that it is your charge, no matter where the trigger came from. You are not blaming anyone; you just need to share what is going on in you, it will help you to be back in your center and in your own grounding. The middle can hold a lot.

Speaking from the middle: not interpersonal, but intersubjective

We just mentioned speaking to the middle, and now we will dive a bit deeper into what we mean when we invite participants to speak from the middle. For sure, this could be seen as entering more of woo-territory here, but in cognitive science this is called participatory knowing (next to other types of knowing).

Collective Presencing is a dialogue and inquiry practice – that’s part of its essence – and within this overall frame it also invites to go beyond just sharing viewpoints and perspectives into the common pool. We invite the subtle signals people receive, the strange dreams they had, the images that come up… we invite to speak and to share these while our center of attention is not just in our selves, but also into the fullness of this specific group and the unique potential that it holds; as if we listen to and speak from the fabric of our shared intention. It can feel weird in the beginning, but we are fully aware that our normal kind of conversations are not going to bring us a way forward in these complex times. In this kind of sharing the personal experiences goes beyond just being personal, but they become contributions to the participatory knowing, to the knowing of the circle or the knowing as the group.

This feeling of weirdness when we share from a personal experience is a good example of an assumption that we hold unconsciously in our normal conversations. We mainly talk about what we can perceive with our physical senses, or make arguments about general ideas and look at the rest as unreal, or as holding no truth. There are lots of other assumptions underlying our Western way of talking like: it should be linear, with no deep emotions etc. On top of these general assumptions, each specific group or team is holding their (unconscious) unique ways of looking at each other and the world. Many times we need some outsiders to point us to these shadows in our group culture.

Back to sharing our subtle senses: we are looking for and practicing what some call the imaginal (not to be confused with the imaginary). Here is a nice description of what the imaginal is:

And so the imaginal is a stance and an art (and for me a discipline, since I’m wired up that way) which is not bound to a particular location or type of question, just as the artist is not bound to a particular medium or subject matter. Perhaps there is a place called the imaginal realm, where all imaginal works can be found–a great confluence of intersecting realities, creative works, and artists, like a massive art studio. If so it would be a truly stupendous, wild and magical, dangerous and haunting and brilliant place indeed.

https://katymorikawa.com/what-is-the-imaginal-and-how-does-it-differ-from-visionary-processes/

As we mentioned, besides the middle being able to be like a kind of parking lot for our emotional stirrings, we see the middle mainly as a generative space, where we tend to this imaginal realm, where we listen into the weaving of the different threads… We tend to and listen to the space in between us. It’s not just me, over here, and you over there. There is an element that is in-between, an element that is us. Of course, we don’t see it, but it is an energy that can be felt. There is some kind of field that we don’t pay much attention to in the Western world, but it is tangible and we can learn to take it more into account. Like the simple noticing of how the atmosphere is different in between the trees in an old forest, or in between houses and pavement in a city.

Thus, this practice is not an interpersonal practice – where we would dive deeper and deeper into my and your personal experience and how they interlink – but it is called an intersubjective practice. Its aim is not to improve personal lives, or become better at one-on-one communication, but about learning to attune to more-than-one-self, picking up signals and signs that are important for the inquiry that we are engaged in. It turns out – because all is related! – that indirectly it does have a positive outcome on individuals and how they relate with one another. So, this word intersubjectivity is an essential concept in this work and is related with coherence (as we might experience between the trees), group beingness, and deep interconnectedness. It captures in another way the idea of this liminal, in-between space.

Speaking from the middle: can I learn how to do it?, by Amanda Zamparo

If I attune myself with the middle, within the intersubjective space, can I speak from it?

Sometimes I don’t believe this is even possible, as I am so full of conditioning and confusion.

Sometimes, it happens. And I can never be sure if it really did happen, or if it is just another illusion… What I know for sure is that there is a release of energy, an openness and a feeling of interconnectedness when I am very attuned with the middle, either if I am just listening or if I am being spoken through. I don’t worry about how I am being perceived any longer. I don’t worry if I am speaking what I am supposed to speak, if it is something appropriate or not – and I actually don’t think about it too much. I trust that my words were enough, and my silence was enough.

As I mentioned, somehow we are moving into some kind of dangerous territory with this invitation to speak from the middle; at least that is what our scientific trained minds will say. Cheryl writes beautifully about this struggle, and how we integrate the mystery of life more than we realize.

What is truer than what is phenomenologically felt?, by Cheryl Hsu

The haunted one is also wiser than she admits. Amidst the fears of “woo”, something primordial and ever-present within her knows that there is more than meets the eye. There is something delicious in the mystery here. There is also something more true and more rigorous in her phenomenological experience, in the animist arts of showing up and noticing.

But then I realize that there are no obvious maps. There is a book, but it tells me: you’re going to have to navigate the territory through direct experience — through touch and felt sense, through scents and textures. Because what is more true than what is phenomenologically felt?

What does it feel like to be part of a pattern that is emerging?

I’ve relaxed that part of me that can’t tear her eyes away from the maps, like purpose, foresight and rigour, that clings with clenched fists to “proof”: Prove to me that it’s real! Show me that it’s true! Tell me that it will save the world!

It’s funny – you try to look for the perfect partner, lover, job with a list of check-list attributes that you want to see: “they must be this tall and this pretty and this smart”.

And when you encounter your Beloved, you can’t help but “fall” in love. The earth pulls you down to your knees. Your animal body recognizes what it loves.

“Reality” is so much more magical than anything you can imagine or make sense of. You are awed by the mystery of love.

And the checklist is blown away by the wind.

To close this Part 3, we offer you two writings, one by Nick Shore. He lives on the East Coast of the US, grew up in the UK and has a Pakistani background. He has a background in big business and he describes the feeling of urgency that many feel in our world today: it’s time for action! Then realizing that indeed, we need to change the basics – and how difficult that is. Enjoy his particular artistic style!

What on earth is Collective Presencing for?, by Nick Shore

Always this damn question – What is CP for?

WHAT is CP for?

What is CP FOR!?!

Well, I have finally answered it.

(At least for myself. At least for now.)

And my answer makes me happy. Because I can explain it to my Mum. Which is my acid test for bullshit.

OK – lemme break it down…

Two months ago, in an existential trigger, I quit Collective Presencing…

“Ok, ok, OKAY, enough-already.” I screamed. “I have been practicing CP for two long years. Now it’s time to go, go, GO – go do something with it. Some-Thing. Any-Thing. Shake the tree. Make it rain. Move the ball down the field.”

Well, I figured … the whole goddamn world is on FIRE and melting. And it’s obviously, globally, five-to-midnight (and several other versions of the 2021 Apocalypse du Jour narrative). I CANNOT simply sit in yet another CP session, floating around in a We-space-astro-soup, getting high off good vibes. It’s high time to ACT!

I didn’t even want to save the world. Not even a little bit.

I would have been happy to use CP to figure out what new floral pattern wallpaper to buy for my granny. Anything – just as long as it was directed at REAL LIFE ACTION.

(And just to be fair to myself, there was a lot of it about back then. I was talking to many folks in different consciousness practice fields who were rallying behind the old Elvis adage “A little less conversation, a little more action”.)

And so I took my own advice. And I tried to use CP to enact something REAL.

And it didn’t work.

Not only did it not work – it failed. Kaleidoscopically.

I brought a field of seasoned intersubjective dialogue practitioners together with business leaders – armed with a thesis that We-space’s transcendent Other might have Source-wisdom to offer on business’s key strategic questions. Game A tapping into wisdom from Game B. I described it as Googling God.***

What could possibly go wrong?!

There are a bazillion reasons why it failed. At least seventy five percent of them are based on my own shortcomings. And I’m not blaming CP for the other twenty five percent.

It just turns out that this isn’t what CP is for.

(Or at least NOT YET.)

I opened-up my project’s Black Box – as if in Pandora’s fever dream – and examined the crash data.

As I sifted through the cracked-mirror koans of my own psyche, scattered all over the crash site, this thought came to me from The Middle:

What if asking what CP is for is like asking “What is CHESS for”?

So I asked myself – what IS chess for?

My shortlist of answers unfolded as follows:

• It’s not “for” anything
• It’s for itself – the purpose of chess is chess
• It’s how medieval kings practiced battle strategy
• It’s the universe’s way of enabling Gary Kasparov to sing the song of his soul

Here’s the thing that I actually got from playing chess: when I play a lot of chess, I get amazingly good at all kinds of other hard things. Like thinking several moves ahead, concentration, memory, strategy, holding complexity…

What if CP is game-like?

What if Ria spent the last 20 years figuring out the few, simple, elegant dialogue-game-rules? (I know we Moderns hate the word rules, but stay with me. I’m on a roll.)

And what if we are at a stage of development of the CP game where the rules are found, and fixed. Or fixed enough to move towards something like art or even mastery within those rules. What if all of us are actually fumbling and stumbling towards a far-distant state of CP-Gary-Kasparov-ness?

But … CP is not, in fact, chess.

The goal of chess is, for example, to WIN. And one thing we know for sure about CP is that there is no winner (except perhaps the shareholders of Zoom). CP, if it is at all game-like, is not a practice that orients around victory.

It orients around holding, flowing with, and being extraordinarily present to subtle movements, to delicate ephemeral patterns, and to the complex balance of natural forces.

Like surfing?

While chess players seek to dominate the board, surfers seek to balance gracefully atop giants, riding them all the way to the shore.

The giants we balance on in CP one might call the waves of paradox. Here are five of them (but I’m sure they are as infinite as the waves on the ocean):

1. How to be ever more our authentic selves, and ever more surrendered to the group experience? (How do we experience ourselves as both wave and particle?)
2. How to take back our projections and triggers, and still speak to The Middle from our deepest authentic Truth?
3. How to bring in our whole life experience, and still come as an innocent, with the blank-canvas-presence of a beginner’s mind?
4. How to acknowledge that the Tao that can be named is not the Tao, and yet still name the Tao into being?
5. How to hold the CREATIVE TENSION OF POLAR OPPOSITES until The Field opens to a transcendent third, entirely new, freshly emergent possibility?

In CP we speak not ABOUT but rather FROM/AS what is really present here, now. We HOLD, versus collapsing into our old selves or polarizations or contractions. We hold the ever-imminent possibility of paradox. We stay with what’s presencing. Now. Now. And now.

(That’s all a little hard to explain to my mum. I’ll say it here as I might say it to her. “Imagine trying to play chess while riding a surfboard? Well it’s a bit like that… but the whole thing is a kinda group discussion about … well, around a creative question!”)

Like chess, like surfing, CP is, in one way at least, only for itself.

For the sheer bliss and blistering of doing something deceptively simple … which turns out to be stunningly subtle and complex. So much so that it requires almost superhuman (or at least evolutionary) capabilities to do it with anything remotely approaching mastery.

I can explain the basics of chess to a ten year old in a day. I can get up on a surf board with a couple of lessons from my brother-in-law. But to master these things … a lifetime. And more.

Staying whole and open and present and in-flow, and only with what’s here, and only speaking when spoken through, in a group dialogue is – it turns out – insanely difficult.

It’s certainly one of the hardest things I have ever tried to do (and I have tried to do some hard things). In certain ways it’s harder than riding on a big wave. Harder than winning at chess. Harder, I would offer, because it’s like doing both at the same time.

So why on earth bother with CP – why bother with a silly dialogical game that’s insanely hard?

Well, here’s my answer:

CP’s scope of action is strictly the group dialog itself … but its scope of impact can be universal.

By practicing Collective Presencing together, we are learning new ways to be with everything and everyone else we engage with … in the whole of the rest of our lives. You don’t bring your chess board or your surfboard into the boardroom… but you do show up as the living embodiment, a living transmission of whatever skills you have honed in those activities.

And this is my actual lived experience of CP.

By consistently engaging in this simple, elegant, difficult dialogical practice, something has happened to the consciousness that is me. Something within is ripened by it – and it’s an ineffable something that I now take with me, as me, into everything I touch.

I am more my essential, authentic self; more present; a better listener; more able to drop into creative flow states; more sensitive to images of the collective field and zeitgeist; more able to sense into what’s actually arising here, now, fresh … and I am less hijacked by my projections, my triggers, and my pre-conceived concepts.

And I am no Kasparov, that’s for damn sure. I’m more the old guy with the dad-bod high-fiving himself because he stayed on the board for six seconds … But I’m a little better at chess-surfing than I was 2 years ago … or 6 months ago … or even last week …

This particular node of consciousness in The Field (ie “me”) is evolving … and that’s my tiny contribution to the perpetual evolution of consciousness Itself. And my personal evolution is thanks in no small part to this catalytic practice called Collective Presencing.

*** a post script on “Googling God”. At time of writing (late 2021) we were blissfully unaware of the imminent Artificial Intelligence revolution which has come to pass in the ensuing years. I find it interesting that humanity’s evolving relationship to that particular technology has qualities indeed of seeking wisdom from some omniscient god-like intelligence (albeit an artificial one). This mirrors, it seems to me, a deep natural human instinctual desire to commune directly with Source-wisdom. Our choice of communing with an un-souled versus an en-souled Source seems a pressing matter in the emerging zeitgeist.