Teach me now to listen,
To strike it rich behind the linear black.
Seamus Heaney, Clearances
About the Collective Online Space
In my groups and workshops, I aim to work with the potency and richness of our shared presence and capacity to bring forth elements of our humanness together. Some of my groupwork stems from the context of Covid - when I felt an instinct to form small collective gatherings of ‘human nearness’. This vision stems from my immersion in practices of presence and relational inquiry over the past five years. In that time I have been immersed in the teachings of Thomas Hubl - and in deep practice with a field of courageous peers, adventurers and friends. Emergence & Becoming: Mondays
Presencing: Sundays
The Art of Wanting on Teachable
Relational Practice Space [forthcoming with Simon Courtney]
My overall approach
little video below [buried behind the fern] of my broad approach in the online drop-in groups…
Other teachers, teachings and sanghas have been part of this unfolding: Eugene Gendlin, Stephen Busby, Bayo Akomolafe, teachers and comrades in Diamond Approach Scandinavia.
In this collective moment, what calls me most deeply is our capacity for healing, presence, integration, evolution, mourning, savouring in small collective gatherings, sometimes called ‘we-space’ practice.
For me, this invokes both a return to a simpler tribal belonging, a vivid instinctual group intelligence, and the modernity and mysticism of yielding our fixed identity and welcoming ‘emergence’ - a growing fluidity and passion for partaking of the human collective in generative, sensitive and creative ways.
As I look back over my life, I see that the ‘we’ - the community - has been a place of rest and trust and belonging for me - from the primary school football team, to the early transition year ‘sharings’ at Newpark Comprehensive school, through to many years immersed in satsang, buddha-dharma, spiritual fields, the universe itself.
About Inquiry:
Inquiry is one of the terms used to describe our intention to speak from ‘deep interior space.’ At the heart of Inquiry is an open investigation of our experience. When we inquire, we speak as much as we can from presence, allowing ideas, experiences and connections to surface and express as they reveal themselves to us. In this sense, as in Heaney's poem, we are learning to listen deeply to ourselves, in a sacred way, and when we do, we often surprise ourselves by what we say and feel, locating veins of clarity, richness and fresh perception. This supports us in clearing mental dross, hearing ourselves freshly, tasting our lives at the frontier of our experience, and acknowledging and diffusing areas of contraction, fear and habitual blockage that may have lain stagnant within us.
“Inquiry doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re always thinking about things or formulating questions in your mind. You are simply aware and curious; you love to know and feel reality fully and clearly. You’re happy to know reality as deeply and precisely as possible. If experience is not clear, you are simply curious about it. Openness to experience becomes dynamic, challenging experience to reveal its truth. Once in a while, this curiosity might formulate itself into a specific question. You recognize that you don’t understand something, and out of love, you wish to understand it. “ AH Almaas
The map below from Eugene Gendlin - click on link - offers a more secular view of the kind of speech that supports insight, transformation, integration: