Listening our Shared World Into Being Opening Minds And Hearts Practice Group
I. Empathy Circles Debrief:
We began our evening by practicing Empathy Circles in 2 groups. Our topic was: “Something we can celebrate: an insight, action or experience that we are happy about”. We then came back into the larger group and shared our experience of practicing the circles:
A. Holding an empathy circle was
1) like being with friends
2) a positive, up-‐beat conversation
3) an opportunity to talk about things that really matter
4) it created the same feeling as having a talking stick, an order
5) it created a soothing and relaxing space for some
6) it made some feel less insecure
7) it made some feel like they could just be present
B. Ways in which the empathy circle impacted us:
Gratitude
1) Some of us felt gratitude for the topic, to be invited to speak about positive celebrations.
Authenticity, going deeper
1) The circle allowed us to claim the positive and made it more real.
2) The practice allowed for going deeper and for a new layer of experience to come to the surface.
3) It allowed us to be authentic and to drop deeper into what was being said.
4) Some of us experienced it as an obligation to be real, to say something that matters.
Empathy
1) for some of us, the skill of and focus on listening freed us up to be more empathetic
Being witnessed
1) Some of us likened the experience of speaking and listening of being witnessed to an initiation. Indigenous cultures have rites of passage for every stage of life and rituals at regular intervals – humans had structured ways to be heard and witnessed in one’s engagement with life.
Challenges
1) For some, an initial ‘wobbliness’, or uncertainty turned to interest during the conversation.
2) Some of us also recognized an underlying feeling of guilt about celebrating anything.
The question was also posed: What would our conversation have been like, if we were not using the Empathy Circle format? What are "ordinary" conversations often like?
C. Insights into Empathy Circles:
1) There is a marked difference between using Empathy Circles as a technique or staying with the deeper intention and listening, wanting to be open and to hear.
2) Listening is not a superficial action, it is a ’way of being’
3) Something happens in our bodies, physiologically, when we are heard and ‘feel gotten’
4) A connection, a universality, is revealed; something that is already there is made apparent.
II. De-‐brief from ‘Empathy Based Facilitation’:
1) Some of us enjoyed the opportunity to explore the topic in more detail.
2) Some of us appreciated the modeling of the facilitation – it was informative, everything that was said served a purpose.
3) The facilitation struck some of us in the way it ‘pulled out the meat’ and stuck to specifics.
4) This is called “moving down the ladder of abstraction”.
5) For some of us, we shifted from seeing things in "black and white" and wanting a solution, to becoming aware of more complexity
6) Some of us felt ourselves shifting from a state of consciousness focused on a problem or problems, to one of being interested.
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