Yes, very resonant with my experience as well. The thought, “It takes a village to raise a child,” comes to my mind. I think not just because more hands and hearts are beneficial, because the work gets spread out, and no one person bears the full responsibility, but because when we gather in authenticity and connection, everybody’s inner resources (like awareness, presence, grounding, vision, creativity, love as a state of being, intuition, care, relationality etc) begin to flow into the group field. All of the resources become a shared field. The group field becomes highly resourced in this moment and everyone within the field benefits in whatever way is ripe for them in that moment. Life naturally knows how to thrive when it has the resources that it needs. There’s a natural impetus in our system to restore flow in the pockets within us that have been frozen through overwhelm and not enough inner or outer resources available to process the overwhelm. The power of a healthy highly resourced group field, I believe can move mountains.
Tracy, thank you for this beautifully precise description, I love this line: "The group field becomes highly resourced in this moment and everyone within the field benefits in whatever way is ripe for them in that moment." I really appreciate what you have written; you have put what I was trying to say into much clearer language. An example of the group field in action?!
Dear Matthew: I think my experience from many years ago is not quite like what you are describing here yet it sprang immediately to mind. I was a Seventh-day Adventist. You may have heard of this exclusivist yet proselytising fundamentalist Protestant sect. In the world - but not of it - desperate that its young folk be not unequally yoked. Separate. I was 16 - had just completed my matriculation exams at the end of secondary school - results not yet released - and in the week before the pagan festival which we celebrated by ignoring it (Christmas) - here in Australia at the start of summer - my little brother 15 and I had been invited to join our church pastor and his family at the annual church camp on the shores of Lake Macquarie south from Newcastle. Five nights I think it lasted. Watch out for that chap - others of similar age warned when we went to the showers. I took note of that but said nothing - having been assaulted by a church friend of my mother's when I was 11 (which included a court case - though found unproven). Anyway - the whole week built to a kind of Billy Graham Crusade crescendo - when going forward in the main tent - to give oneself to the Lord - to rededicate oneself - became the thing - a statement made in front of an enormous congregation. With invocations from the preacher of God's blessings on those who stepped forward. It was highly emotionally charged. And I stepped forward. I look back at it now and I think it a kind of hypnotism. A cultish kind of response...Three years later - not long 19 - in my 3rd year at university - my faith absolutely dissipated - this time I stepped away. A formal resignation letter tendered to the Pastor of the city church to which my membership had been transferred from my rural church - where - as a child of 12 I had been "adult" baptised. I've not since been hypnotised. I do shed tears - but more for the ugliness of a world which abuses asylum-seekers or commits genocide. Not really for myself.
I don't know what you might make of this "confession" but as I wrote above - this was my immediate response to your writing on this aspect of your time with your mentor. We had a PM here in Australia over some years till May 2022. His name was Scott Morrison - one the most shallow evangelical Pentecultist figures you could imagine. Arms waving in the air, a babblemaniac - no heart for the environment or for those caught up in US wars around the globe fleeing to safety (called here "illegals" and shipped off to nearby foreign island countries and held for years in prison gulags - people went mad, killed themselves - were sexually assaulted and tortured by private security firms winning multi-million dollar contracts to do so in these off-shore places - and restricted to journalists unless of the Murdoch/NewsCorp stable)- all part of God's plan. He was the architect/implementer of a dreadful and illegal scheme now known here as Robodebt - a computer-manipulated fraud telling hundreds of thousands they owed money - some say up to two thousand took their own lives - and who tore up one submarine contract with the French to go with something wanted by the British and the US - and now in his post-PM career works in the US alongside the evangelical fraud Mike Pompeo - making millions from the hundreds of billions of dollars which is the cost to Australians of the UKUS - along with Australia known as - AUKUS (how "awk"ward is that) new nuclear-powered submarine contract. I am hoping I am making some sense here and that the inevitable typos which creep into my writing when emotionally wrought are not too many. Jim
Hey Matthew, maybe we can understand this as a local example of psychosphere activity, and the dynamics of basic common sentience operating between humans. in some ways it would make sense that "newshounds" have a nose for the emergent story: maybe theres a particular sensitivity there?... Also, it's the kind of territory explored by Elizabeth Peil Kauffman and her work on emotional sentience; and not to mention the Gestalt (and other's notion) of the field, and so on. As it happens, if you're in California in August, Elizabeth (and Stuart) will be joining Steffi Bednarek (Gestalt/climate), Zhiwa Woodbury (climate trauma/psychosphere/quantum social change) and Molly Young Brown (work that reconnects/psychosynthesis)as keynote listeners at the HPx Gathering at Petaluma .... you guys are very much invited (and any of your readers here too, of course: the more the merrier!). https://songlines.wixsite.com/heartpolitics/gathering-2024
I think the experience last month at www.MediaStrong.co.uk saw examples of accelerated collective healing happening in the room, like a sort of group therapy, precisely because we were collected. And in spite of the formal nature of the event - no joss sticks! - and the reputation of journalism for being hard-bitten.
Lovely stuff, Matthew...thank you. I read it again, and it reminds me.... In te reo Maori there is a word, whaikorero, which I understand means the weaving of words, borrowing imagery of making a flax basket.
Heart Politics in Aotearoa/New Zealand was gifted the use of that word for one of the "pillars" of its gatherings, an evening spent in whole group circle space. Coming after 3 days of collective exploration, reflection, conversation, insight, and engagement, it is a rich, dense space. It is a held space - in that one or two people have taken the task of introducing and then paying exquisite attention to its unfolding. It has no topic, other than becoming what it will be. Like weavers of the flax basket, one does not know what will be put in it, or by whom, whilst it is being made: one can only be powerfully attentive - and intentive - to its potential. And this, of course, shapes the crafting.
"Intentive" because (at least as I experience the world) it seems that there is an underlying roiling generative dynamic flowing of coherence within which momentary differences generate possibilities (cf: Bateson's "differences that make a difference"). if time has a non-linear aspect at that level (as it seems to do when we encounter it, whether in meditation, psychedelic experience, deep connection of every kind), then it makes sense that you write "It’s as if the past is reaching forward into the present, placing filters around my perception, or scripting my reactions in ways that are beyond my conscious control." I'd suggest that "the present" also reaches back to "the past" - and "the future(s)" is also always ... present. At such times, perhaps, we notice that we are participant within a dance between fractal intelligence of the whole, and emotional sentience of the parts (and vice versa!). and the dance matters...
"Matters" - as in "becomes matter" ... the dynamics of the atmosphere overhead mean that the unseen water molecules may coalesce as clouds, and you and I watching may say "look: a cauliflower and a dragon... or maybe a horse", and then one of us half-remembers a line from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra which leads us to telling stories about our lives, learning, love and .... and something becomes deepened in ourselves and between us.
when we meet in whaikorero - although one does not use that language to name the process so much for gatherings outside Aotearoa - those holding the space do not need to spell such detail out to the group, merely to hold it in awareness, and in somehow expressing the quality of being that we may feel to be emergent in the room.
the stories told are different, and sometimes not, following on, each one prompting a response in the listeners and in the room. very very occasionally one of the "space-holders" may remind participants to give a little space between speakers... usually when it feels as if there is something trying to be spoken, and it may not be finding its way in between the words. (It reminds me of that section in Bruce Chatwin's "Songlines" where he describes riding with some aboriginal folk in an old landrover. As is the custom, one of them is quietly singing because they are traveling beside a particular line of his ancestral Dreaming and, today, he is the voice of this land ... except he is having to rush and stumble to keep up with the song because it has been learned over 40,000 years' crossing the land at walking pace, and the truck is moving at 30 miles an hour....).
following on from my earlier comments about "psychosphere", and thinking about your lovely phrasing "certain signatures ... that titrate", I feel that the combination of intention and the quality of how the intention is held shapes the relational space. all the time. it is, for many of us, easier to perceive this within a group setting, and it think this my be because we don't have to pay too much attention to allow ourselves to naturally fall into inter-human connection: we are very attuned to the emotional space of other members of our own species, especially, again, when vitalised by difference, whether in stories, attitudes, or belief.
then we may find ourselves watching with quite intent curiosity as someone interacts with an infant, or even a pet, such as a dog or cat. perhaps we are naturally sensitive to examine the ways in which one another engages beyond the limitations of language? and maybe we are always drawn to moments where a communication is accompanied by a powerful qualitative vector?
I have found a "qualitative safari" to be a powerful, grounding and transformative process that I can do "by myself" (as if one is ever "by oneself" when there may be only self-ing!) or, delightfully, with others. Its easier in a wilder place with growing things, but one can open to the qualitative in any place. in the concrete jungles, of course, the harder-edged qualities of strength, resistance, command, singularity, independence, efficiency tend to dominate, drowning out the others - and its always noticeable when the designer, architect or planners have been attentive to other qualities in themselves when creating the space. but, by default, the whole is always present, and so, by attending to the quality in myself, I can begin to find them even in the harder aspects of what some might term the resonant world.... (see what I did there :) !!).
and, for sure, whilst it is satisfying (and sometimes just bloody delightful and empowering!) to do such things alone, the richness of being in a shared space give us access to so much more ... for monochrome to Kodachrome to the stained glass window and then the fecund, multisensual colours of the old forest...
and then, as we have for millennia, we settle in a circle space, connect to a sense of intention, whether poverty through ceremony, or merely in the instinctive recognition of the intrinsic ceremony of the commons of people, place, and circles, the qualitative presences, touching each of differently, drawing out the stories that - variously - heal, give heart, enlighten, inspire and in-form.
Mary Oliver puts it rather more succinctly -
"I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
Yes, very resonant with my experience as well. The thought, “It takes a village to raise a child,” comes to my mind. I think not just because more hands and hearts are beneficial, because the work gets spread out, and no one person bears the full responsibility, but because when we gather in authenticity and connection, everybody’s inner resources (like awareness, presence, grounding, vision, creativity, love as a state of being, intuition, care, relationality etc) begin to flow into the group field. All of the resources become a shared field. The group field becomes highly resourced in this moment and everyone within the field benefits in whatever way is ripe for them in that moment. Life naturally knows how to thrive when it has the resources that it needs. There’s a natural impetus in our system to restore flow in the pockets within us that have been frozen through overwhelm and not enough inner or outer resources available to process the overwhelm. The power of a healthy highly resourced group field, I believe can move mountains.
Tracy, thank you for this beautifully precise description, I love this line: "The group field becomes highly resourced in this moment and everyone within the field benefits in whatever way is ripe for them in that moment." I really appreciate what you have written; you have put what I was trying to say into much clearer language. An example of the group field in action?!
Dear Matthew: I think my experience from many years ago is not quite like what you are describing here yet it sprang immediately to mind. I was a Seventh-day Adventist. You may have heard of this exclusivist yet proselytising fundamentalist Protestant sect. In the world - but not of it - desperate that its young folk be not unequally yoked. Separate. I was 16 - had just completed my matriculation exams at the end of secondary school - results not yet released - and in the week before the pagan festival which we celebrated by ignoring it (Christmas) - here in Australia at the start of summer - my little brother 15 and I had been invited to join our church pastor and his family at the annual church camp on the shores of Lake Macquarie south from Newcastle. Five nights I think it lasted. Watch out for that chap - others of similar age warned when we went to the showers. I took note of that but said nothing - having been assaulted by a church friend of my mother's when I was 11 (which included a court case - though found unproven). Anyway - the whole week built to a kind of Billy Graham Crusade crescendo - when going forward in the main tent - to give oneself to the Lord - to rededicate oneself - became the thing - a statement made in front of an enormous congregation. With invocations from the preacher of God's blessings on those who stepped forward. It was highly emotionally charged. And I stepped forward. I look back at it now and I think it a kind of hypnotism. A cultish kind of response...Three years later - not long 19 - in my 3rd year at university - my faith absolutely dissipated - this time I stepped away. A formal resignation letter tendered to the Pastor of the city church to which my membership had been transferred from my rural church - where - as a child of 12 I had been "adult" baptised. I've not since been hypnotised. I do shed tears - but more for the ugliness of a world which abuses asylum-seekers or commits genocide. Not really for myself.
I don't know what you might make of this "confession" but as I wrote above - this was my immediate response to your writing on this aspect of your time with your mentor. We had a PM here in Australia over some years till May 2022. His name was Scott Morrison - one the most shallow evangelical Pentecultist figures you could imagine. Arms waving in the air, a babblemaniac - no heart for the environment or for those caught up in US wars around the globe fleeing to safety (called here "illegals" and shipped off to nearby foreign island countries and held for years in prison gulags - people went mad, killed themselves - were sexually assaulted and tortured by private security firms winning multi-million dollar contracts to do so in these off-shore places - and restricted to journalists unless of the Murdoch/NewsCorp stable)- all part of God's plan. He was the architect/implementer of a dreadful and illegal scheme now known here as Robodebt - a computer-manipulated fraud telling hundreds of thousands they owed money - some say up to two thousand took their own lives - and who tore up one submarine contract with the French to go with something wanted by the British and the US - and now in his post-PM career works in the US alongside the evangelical fraud Mike Pompeo - making millions from the hundreds of billions of dollars which is the cost to Australians of the UKUS - along with Australia known as - AUKUS (how "awk"ward is that) new nuclear-powered submarine contract. I am hoping I am making some sense here and that the inevitable typos which creep into my writing when emotionally wrought are not too many. Jim
Thank you Jim for sharing these powerful, formative moments, and bringing your depth of experience to this discussion.
Hey Matthew, maybe we can understand this as a local example of psychosphere activity, and the dynamics of basic common sentience operating between humans. in some ways it would make sense that "newshounds" have a nose for the emergent story: maybe theres a particular sensitivity there?... Also, it's the kind of territory explored by Elizabeth Peil Kauffman and her work on emotional sentience; and not to mention the Gestalt (and other's notion) of the field, and so on. As it happens, if you're in California in August, Elizabeth (and Stuart) will be joining Steffi Bednarek (Gestalt/climate), Zhiwa Woodbury (climate trauma/psychosphere/quantum social change) and Molly Young Brown (work that reconnects/psychosynthesis)as keynote listeners at the HPx Gathering at Petaluma .... you guys are very much invited (and any of your readers here too, of course: the more the merrier!). https://songlines.wixsite.com/heartpolitics/gathering-2024
I will have to check out Kaufman's work! The gathering looks amazing! Might be a bit out of reach for us, but we will be there in spirit!
I think the experience last month at www.MediaStrong.co.uk saw examples of accelerated collective healing happening in the room, like a sort of group therapy, precisely because we were collected. And in spite of the formal nature of the event - no joss sticks! - and the reputation of journalism for being hard-bitten.
Yes, I agree -- that's exactly what happened, which was why the event was so powerful.
Lovely stuff, Matthew...thank you. I read it again, and it reminds me.... In te reo Maori there is a word, whaikorero, which I understand means the weaving of words, borrowing imagery of making a flax basket.
Heart Politics in Aotearoa/New Zealand was gifted the use of that word for one of the "pillars" of its gatherings, an evening spent in whole group circle space. Coming after 3 days of collective exploration, reflection, conversation, insight, and engagement, it is a rich, dense space. It is a held space - in that one or two people have taken the task of introducing and then paying exquisite attention to its unfolding. It has no topic, other than becoming what it will be. Like weavers of the flax basket, one does not know what will be put in it, or by whom, whilst it is being made: one can only be powerfully attentive - and intentive - to its potential. And this, of course, shapes the crafting.
"Intentive" because (at least as I experience the world) it seems that there is an underlying roiling generative dynamic flowing of coherence within which momentary differences generate possibilities (cf: Bateson's "differences that make a difference"). if time has a non-linear aspect at that level (as it seems to do when we encounter it, whether in meditation, psychedelic experience, deep connection of every kind), then it makes sense that you write "It’s as if the past is reaching forward into the present, placing filters around my perception, or scripting my reactions in ways that are beyond my conscious control." I'd suggest that "the present" also reaches back to "the past" - and "the future(s)" is also always ... present. At such times, perhaps, we notice that we are participant within a dance between fractal intelligence of the whole, and emotional sentience of the parts (and vice versa!). and the dance matters...
"Matters" - as in "becomes matter" ... the dynamics of the atmosphere overhead mean that the unseen water molecules may coalesce as clouds, and you and I watching may say "look: a cauliflower and a dragon... or maybe a horse", and then one of us half-remembers a line from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra which leads us to telling stories about our lives, learning, love and .... and something becomes deepened in ourselves and between us.
when we meet in whaikorero - although one does not use that language to name the process so much for gatherings outside Aotearoa - those holding the space do not need to spell such detail out to the group, merely to hold it in awareness, and in somehow expressing the quality of being that we may feel to be emergent in the room.
the stories told are different, and sometimes not, following on, each one prompting a response in the listeners and in the room. very very occasionally one of the "space-holders" may remind participants to give a little space between speakers... usually when it feels as if there is something trying to be spoken, and it may not be finding its way in between the words. (It reminds me of that section in Bruce Chatwin's "Songlines" where he describes riding with some aboriginal folk in an old landrover. As is the custom, one of them is quietly singing because they are traveling beside a particular line of his ancestral Dreaming and, today, he is the voice of this land ... except he is having to rush and stumble to keep up with the song because it has been learned over 40,000 years' crossing the land at walking pace, and the truck is moving at 30 miles an hour....).
following on from my earlier comments about "psychosphere", and thinking about your lovely phrasing "certain signatures ... that titrate", I feel that the combination of intention and the quality of how the intention is held shapes the relational space. all the time. it is, for many of us, easier to perceive this within a group setting, and it think this my be because we don't have to pay too much attention to allow ourselves to naturally fall into inter-human connection: we are very attuned to the emotional space of other members of our own species, especially, again, when vitalised by difference, whether in stories, attitudes, or belief.
then we may find ourselves watching with quite intent curiosity as someone interacts with an infant, or even a pet, such as a dog or cat. perhaps we are naturally sensitive to examine the ways in which one another engages beyond the limitations of language? and maybe we are always drawn to moments where a communication is accompanied by a powerful qualitative vector?
I have found a "qualitative safari" to be a powerful, grounding and transformative process that I can do "by myself" (as if one is ever "by oneself" when there may be only self-ing!) or, delightfully, with others. Its easier in a wilder place with growing things, but one can open to the qualitative in any place. in the concrete jungles, of course, the harder-edged qualities of strength, resistance, command, singularity, independence, efficiency tend to dominate, drowning out the others - and its always noticeable when the designer, architect or planners have been attentive to other qualities in themselves when creating the space. but, by default, the whole is always present, and so, by attending to the quality in myself, I can begin to find them even in the harder aspects of what some might term the resonant world.... (see what I did there :) !!).
and, for sure, whilst it is satisfying (and sometimes just bloody delightful and empowering!) to do such things alone, the richness of being in a shared space give us access to so much more ... for monochrome to Kodachrome to the stained glass window and then the fecund, multisensual colours of the old forest...
and then, as we have for millennia, we settle in a circle space, connect to a sense of intention, whether poverty through ceremony, or merely in the instinctive recognition of the intrinsic ceremony of the commons of people, place, and circles, the qualitative presences, touching each of differently, drawing out the stories that - variously - heal, give heart, enlighten, inspire and in-form.
Mary Oliver puts it rather more succinctly -
"I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?"
its a question best engaged in relationship....