What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire

Next Gathering:

You are invited to join us for a three-day gathering/workshop in the practice of heart-felt dialogue at New Homestead B&B, in cool and funky Rochester, Vermont.

9:00 AM Friday morning, December 4th through 3 PM Sunday afternoon, December 6th, 2009

Costs: Depending on sliding scale program fee and lodging choices, total costs for program, meals and lodging for 3 days and two nights will range from $200(shared double room) to $470 (for a single, private room).  Email sallye@blast.com for more information or to register.

Remembering Village Council:

Joining in Heartfelt Conscious Conversation During Transitional Times

We live in unprecedented and transitional times. It seems the planet cannot sustain this growth-based, energy-consumptive American economy and lifestyle, out of connection with each other and the rest of the community of life. There is an emerging movement toward relationship-based, low-energy, locally interdependent community. While the technical know-how to create such a change may exist, our ability to join deeply with one another in honest, creative conversation, especially in the face of differences and conflict, is lacking for most of us.

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Heartfelt conscious conversation is the practice of moving toward interaction based on relationship and connection and away from interaction based on the current culture’s paradigm of domination and control. During the workshop we become aware of the conditioned operations of ego and learn to shift, moment by moment, into open-heartedness, connection, and relationship.Â

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This is a unique opportunity to create a learning laboratory with others devoid of formal agenda. Instead of agenda, we build a strong group container based on our individual commitments to identify and suspend our assumptions and core beliefs, to notice and identify ego attachments and identification, to speak and listen from the heart, and to stay engaged in the face of inevitable difference and conflict. Then, with grace we are open to whatever purpose and meaning may emerge from this particular gathering.

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Workshop Description Â

The workshop begins Friday morning and ends Sunday afternoon. All participants agree to attend all sessions, since the learning is sequential and experiential in the context of the group. About 10% of the workshop is didactic, 15% is structured exercise and about 75% is applied practicum within the whole group. We will meet from 9am to 1:30pm, 4:30pm to 7pm, and 7:30pm to 10 pm Friday and Saturday and from 9am to1pm and 2pm to 3pm on Sunday.

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Learning Objectives:

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1)Â Â Â To learn and practice group communication skills that promote interaction based on deep relatedness, including the ability to embrace and explore differences, with the intention to allow to emerge a larger collective purpose, wisdom, and creativity.

2)     To deepen personal insight and awareness by creating a strong group “container” that supports expression of the full range of human emotions; support individuals to identify and suspend stuck “ego” patterns, core beliefs, and assumptions; develop greater ability to speak heart-felt truth and to listen deeply to others. While this is not group “therapy” per se’ there is generally a "therapeutic" effect for members as they come to experience greater inner and outer wholeness, allow for full expression of emotion, authenticity, and connection.

3)          To develop together courage and compassion as we sit with the transitional state of the world, fully engaged with both emerging possibilities and simultaneously the current, dire, planetary predicament. Â

4)Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â To notice and appreciate the richness and wisdom of dreams as gifts to the community as well as notice, mark, and reflect upon the development of safety and openness in group interaction and to develop the ability to facilitate that development.

Please note:Â

We request that everyone who attends the workshop agrees to view the documentary What A Way To Go: Life at the End of Empire, prior to registration, and that they not be in substantial disagreement with the analysis of our current planetary crises regarding climate change, resource depletion, species extinction and population overshoot.  While not wedded to a “doom” scenario we sense that there is value in being able to face directly into that possibility. There are few places to meet face to face in conversation with a group of others who are "on the same page" with the information. How we are to be in the face of the information is then part of what the conversation we create can address.

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Convener Bios:

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Sally Erickson, who will facilitate the workshop is a psychotherapist of 25 years in private practice, community builder, writer and artist, producer of the documentary, What A Way To Go: Life at the End of Empire, and mother of two grown offspring. Sally brings 15 years of community building experience, keen insight, kindness, strength and integrity as an initiated elder, guardian of the circle, and courageous truth-seeker.

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Tim Bennett, who joins Sally as partner in this venture, is director/writer of the documentary What A Way To Go: Life at the End of Empire, a community builder, artist, and father of three grown offspring. He is a consummate observer of process, an impeccable truth-teller and taboo-buster, and a champion of vulnerable and transparent communication. Tim also brings 15 years of community-building experience, Landmark Education seminar work, insight, quiet strength, and courage.

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Get Together

~Sally Erickson

 

If you hear the song I sing,

You must understand

You hold the key to love and fear

All in your trembling hand

~

The Youngbloods, Get Together

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There was some great stuff going on in the seventies and eighties. I participated in some of it: marathon encounter groups, primal therapy, human relations and group development training, group treatment training for addressing addiction, “Scott Peck” community building workshops, twelve-step groups for families of dysfunctional families. I also saw several individual therapists over the years, and consulted with supervisors when I began my private practice. In recent years I took part in a wilderness encampment and a number of solo vision quests, and did some training in Non-violent Communication. I learned about and taught the process of formal dialogue to a couple of non-profit groups. Then Tim and I developed a workshop that was based on that, on Peck’s community building model, and on other practices that have proved helpful.Â

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For me a thread of meaning strings together the above. In all of those situations I discovered a pathway to my heart, and to others’. In those settings there were moments, minutes, and, on occasion, hours when I experienced transcendence: awareness of little or no ego in control, peaceful and tremendously alive, and in connection with others who were sharing a similar awareness.Â

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The experience of transcendence is healing and transforming by its very nature. As people discover through their own direct experience of transcendence that they are not, at their essence, the isolated ego they’ve mostly been identified with, when that discovery is taken seriously and integrated into one’s life, it proves revolutionary. A new sense of “self” or “essence”, apart from ego, emerges during those transcendent moments.Â

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I have had a handful of experiences on my own, outside a group setting or apart from an intimate exchange with a partner, when I have experienced that setting aside of ego. But the experiences I have had with groups have continued to summon me. Something  happens when a group of people simultaneously set ego aside: a sweet, peaceful, sometimes powerful connection or communion occurs. Compared to the mundane day-to-day ego-based operations of life and relationship embedded in Empire, something extraordinary awakens. That awakening is like a nourishing rain falling on a garden ready to burst forth.Â

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We’ve been waiting so long to find one another and ourselves!Â

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Moments of finding myself and others, such as I have been blessed with in these various settings, have been life-giving to me since the first marathon encounter group I attended in college. I was recruited to be a role model/peer/counselor-in-training for a community-based teenage substance abuse treatment program. During the two days and one night of the marathon I witnessed things absent from my life thus far: dogged honesty, unbounded compassion, unashamed tears. A gathering of forty people, quite young and also mature, committed to sit for many, many hours together in a strong psychological/spiritual container. The container proved strong even in the face of the full-blown and, for me, scary expression of a young man’s rage. That experience went inside me and reached a longing so deeply buried that I hadn’t any idea it was there until I found myself in that group. I have since taken that longing seriously, as a thread of purpose and direction for my whole adult life.

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Some people draw a distinction between psychological experience and spiritual experience. For me the distinction has become more and more meaningless. I have begun to see all psychological growth as spiritual and spiritual growth as intimately tied to psychological growth. So it was not a surprise to come across a spiritual teacher such as Eckhart Tolle writing and speaking about “ego,” a decidedly psychological term. More and more of that is happening with the authors I love who write about spiritual matters.

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To become free of the ego is not really a big job but a very small one. All you need to do is be aware of our thoughts and emotions—as they happen… When that shift happens, which is the shift from thinking to awareness, an intelligence far greater than the ego’s cleverness begins to operate in your life.

~Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth

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Most spiritual practice is done individually, supported by study, by teachers and other students, sometimes in long, silent retreats where only the teacher speaks. As valid as those individual paths are, in my experience they have some real limitations.  And those limitations seem based on the individualism that has been inherent in non-indigenous religious systems such as Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Taoism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, all of which grew up in the larger context of Empire. As such, those systems often reinforce the isolation of the dominant culture, and carry some of the other trappings of Empire: hierarchy, dogma, politics. Â

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The individual nature of spiritual practice can unwittingly reinforce the idea of a dominant, hierarchical power structure that comes from the culture of Empire. In this culture we’ve been programmed to “mind our own business.” We are taught that it is most effective, polite and political, to work quietly identifying and setting aside our own egos, in solitude, through meditation or prayer. By doing so we avoid overt conflict, the sharing and expression of difference, and the strong emotions that arise in the face of those. Meditating on a mountaintop has its place. Time alone to reconnect with the elements, with the non-human part of the family of life, can be precious and there is no doubt a place for that. Where is the place for transparent honesty and wholehearted compassion amongst people? Are these not the virtues of real spiritual practice? Can they be fully developed on one’s own, on the meditation cushion, in a hermitage, under a tarp in the woods, or on the mountaintop?Â

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I had a sense most of my adult life that there was something missing in individual spiritual practice, even though I have enjoyed and benefited from retreats devoted to such. What’s been missing for me in individual practice is precisely what arises when a group itself becomes the means for transcending ego. Once I dropped the distinction between psychological and spiritual practice, it became clear that there is something tremendously important here. I’ve felt called to create time and space for people to come together to do this kind of work.

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What IS dialogue?

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Very simply, dialogue may be defined as conversation that generates greater understanding. It’s been utilized in many settings, often in organizations for that purpose: greater understanding. However, this kind of practice has been developed far beyond that simple formulation. Inherent in this work is the view that conflicts arise naturally when people gather and begin to identify and disclose their thoughts, feelings, beliefs and values. As incarnate beings we have our limitations, unique ego structures, backgrounds and experiences. Inherent also is the conviction, based on practice, that conflict offers a unique opportunity for individuals and disparate groups to enlarge their understanding of both self and other, expand their limitations, move ego to the side, and thin the boundaries that define their sense of separateness.

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A group that creates a strong psychological and spiritual container becomes a virtual cauldron of personal and collective growth. That cauldron acts as an ideal classroom, both for individuals and for the group as a whole, to learn where ego-attachment to roles, beliefs, status, entitlement, etc., clash within oneself and with others in quite incoherent ways. It is a unique opportunity to become transparent about how one’s thoughts and emotions, habits, and programmed behavior affect one’s interactions and the functioning of the group. When we come together to explore the heretofore-unconscious devices of ego, we can learn to lighten up with ourselves, and with one another. We can see both the pain and the promise that lay beyond ego and persona. We may, with grace, enter moments, and even hours, of fulfilling and creative connection and interaction, with less ego and more essence and heart.

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My experience is that participation in such endeavors has changed me, or my idea of “me”. I’ve learned, with more ease and grace, to remember to sit and listen, rather than to react and close down or mount a defense, when confronted with opposing or conflicting ideas, values, or behaviors. I’ve found the cauldron to be an ideal place to practice what Eckhart Tolle suggests above, to “…be aware of our thoughts and emotions—as they happen.”Â

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It is so rare for people to gather with the intention to become aware, to awaken, through their interaction with one another. Only in such a contexts is there acknowledged support for honest, non-violent feedback, for deep self-reflective sharing, for clearer insights about self and other, and for exploration of options to the dictates of our ancient patterning and Empire-based programming.Â

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The process necessarily entails some discomfort, as we encounter those sticky egoic places. Learning to sit through discomfort may be of great value in these times. For those who have the courage and willingness to “keep their butts in the chair and their awareness in the room,” to allow diminishment of one’s ego, the rewards can be tremendous.

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A significant portion of the earth’s population will soon recognize, if they haven’t already done so, that humanity is now faced with a stark choice: Evolve or die. A still relatively small but rapidly growing percentage of humanity is already experiencing within themselves the breakup of the old egoic mind patterns and the emergences of a new dimension of consciousness.

~Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth

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Not all are called to do the work in the context of a group. But some of us are. Those of us who stick with it will find a great sense of peace and purpose, as we go about this work at this most incredible time in the human story.

 

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Conscious Conversation:

An Invitation to Explore

 

 

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A weekly group is forming in our area for the following purposes:

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1)Â Â To learn and practice group communication skills that serve to develop interaction based on deep relatedness, including the ability to embrace and explore differences with the intention to tap the larger collective wisdom and creativity.

2)  To deepen personal insight and awareness by creating a strong group “container” that supports expression of the full range of human emotions; helps individuals identify and suspend stuck “ego” patterns, core beliefs, and assumptions; develops greater ability to speak heart-felt truth and to listen deeply to others. While this is not group “therapy” per se’ there is generally a "therapeutic" effect for members as they come to experience greater inner and outer wholeness, authenticity, and connection.

3)  To develop together courage and compassion as we sit with the transitional state of the world, fully engaged with both emerging possibilities and simultaneously the current, dire, planetary predicament. Â

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The group will meet for 2.5 hours weekly for 8 weeks following the initial information meeting. Following the first meeting members will be requested to make a commitment to attend all sessions in order to deepen the group cohesion over the course of the process.

Costs:Â Members will be invited to make a small weekly ($1-$10) donation according to their means and/or to provide their home for group sessions.Â

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Source material includes:

M. Scott Peck, The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace,

William Isaacs, Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together,

Tom Atlee, The Tao of Democracy;

Peter Senge, et al., Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future;

Gregory Kramer, Insight Dialogue

Tej Steiner, Heart Circles

Marshall Rosenburg, Non-Violent Communication

Bennett & Erickson, documentary video, What A Way To Go: Life at the End of Empire.

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