Holding of and by all participants

Through Cheryl’s intimate sharing we can read that through the holding of all the participants of the group, and through the holding by all the participants, the energetic container, the circle, that we form and are, individuals are able to stretch in what they can hold and express in their own body. It is through the experience of this kind of dynamic that we become more and more aware of the interweaving, the reciprocal dynamic of the I and the We, the I and the land, the I and the World.

Through the sharing to the middle we hear different perspectives, and some might be against our personal opinion, or we hear things shared that trigger an old emotional field in ourselves. The intention to listen to the middle – which translates as leaving certain sharings / opinions / perspectives just there, in the middle and not taking them on, not taking them personally – is asking us to develop a capacity to hold more intensity in our body than usual. We don’t re-act as in any typical mainstream debate, but learn to come back to our own grounding and center and hold this emotional intensity, both in our own nervous system and in the co-regulation with one another. This type of dialogue can do that – it is a practice where we exercise these muscles needed so much in our time.

I have seen, again and again, that deep and vulnerable sharing of specific pain and grief by some of the participants, is a door into a deeper intimacy for the whole circle. My view on intimacy has changed from a more psychological one – I have a capacity to be intimate with you – to see intimacy as the awareness of a field where everything is connected with everything. It’s more a movement into the spiritual, with the awareness that no matter what is going on in myself, in the group, in the wider environment we can learn to dip into this intimacy. This field of possibility, of interconnectedness is always there. Bonnitta Roy says: Root into the intimacy, and reach for the imaginal. It seems that the capacity to hold deep intensity allows for notes of grace to come in.

Collective Trauma

It is good to realize that Cheryl’s tears were about a collective trauma, way beyond her personal, individual life. Most of us who are willing to change the world for the better will encounter their version of collective pain; the list is endless no matter where you actually start your journey: be it climate change and how that links with racism, be it a women’s group and how access to business capital is still difficult, be it a men’s group and how boarding schools made children dissociate from their emotions, be it a church group and how abuse was silenced … These are all very big emotional wounds that go beyond one specific person, or one specific life.

Because we are part of a shared humanity we can feel this pain in our own personal bodies. We do need one another in the holding of it, and realizing: we are broken and whole at the same time – all of us. There is no leader / parent figure who is holding the wholeness, and we are the broken ones. We are broken – which brings sadness and grief and anger – and as humans together we can bounce back, we can learn to be OK with that level of intensity. We can be with all that humans do and have done, and we can still be OK. More even, training in these dialogues to hold the stories of individual and collective pain within the circle strengthens our nervous systems, step-by-step. Another participant articulated this capacity to look at collective trauma as Together, we could stand to look. Or connecting into / building a collective nervous system.

Strong emotions, collective pain are all stretching our capacity to hold intensity but there is also a stretching happening on the level of mental capacity, our knowing (of course, also related with emotions, because we cannot really separate them). When we engage with some of these deep inquiries, we soon discover that they don’t have simple or easy answers; at least no answer just yet. Holding that we don’t know yet where we are going (combined with the feeling of urgency!) feels very uncomfortable for most of us and we would like that feeling to go away as soon as possible, at least before the end of the meeting! Thus we tend to jump to conclusions or solutions, nonetheless, not taking into account the uneasiness we feel on some deeper levels, realizing we didn’t really think – and sense – it through.

This not-knowing-yet – because the answer doesn’t exist in some area of expertise, we truly haven’t been on this edge before – could be named as the art of discomfort. In the circles dealing with racism, this capacity to be uncomfortable together has been named as a crucial growing point for all involved. In the Art of Hosting models this phase in the collective learning is named as the groan zone. When many participate in a conversation, engage with an inquiry, many viewpoints and possible solutions come up: your mind is kind of overwhelmed because there seems to be no clarity arising. That’s where holding the intensity – not letting it collapse into emotions or simple thoughts – is needed. The new capacity here is to stay in this not-knowing-yet until an original spark comes up. Many times it feels as if a flip happens: from staring blind on the problem to suddenly seeing that the opportunity is exactly hidden within the problem itself! When you have experienced this a couple of times, this intense phase of not-knowing-yet becomes exhilarating, because you know something cool might happen. Every problem is pointing us to a potential, where creative responses come from a source that I cannot name as mine, but I can plunge into it and bring some inspiration or insights back to the 3D world we live in, the inquiry that is going on now.

This flip, for lack of a better word, is very much linked with the concept of emergence. We will dive deeper into this later in Part 5.

All these capacities we have tried to untangle here help us to let our identities being less fixed, less held in the typical boxes, and become more fluid with what is happening around us.