rev nov 2022
Table of Contents
.........................................................................................................2
How this booklet is organized....................................................................6
Chapter 1 Defining “Heartfelt look and feel”...................................................7
“Heartfelt look and feel” as a combination of factors.....................................9
Self-connection & heartfelt encounters with others as the “new spirituality”.....9
Milling-Dyad exercises as antidote for boring meetings...............................10
THE classic dyad...................................................................................11
How to tell if dyads will work in your meetings..............................................12
Inner and Outer Game of successful meetings..............................................12
Local group process fails when...................................................................13
To herd cats, Always use love, all ways........................................................14
The problem with mere talk....................................................................15
Benefits of milling-dyad exercises............................................................16
Facilitating group process is--and is not....................................................17
The Law of Rumi......................................................................................18
“Listening” for Group Facilitators.................................................................19
Chapter 2 Best Practices for personal growth events......................................20
Cell phone G&G.....................................................................................20
Short ecumenical prayer.........................................................................20
Over-estimating audience capacity to do work...........................................20
Two facilitators always better than one.....................................................21
Always prefer male-female co-facilitators..................................................21
How to warm up a strange, skeptical or hostile crowd.................................21
Demo even simple exercises up front.......................................................21
Counting off the room into pairs, triads, etc..............................................22
Require them to work with strangers........................................................22
‘Who goes first’ variations.......................................................................23
A few words on large group sharing.........................................................23
Successive rounds permit going deeper....................................................23
Duration, how long exercises last?...........................................................23
Chapter 3 Handouts, easels.......................................................................25
Slideshows and projectors......................................................................25
Easels, paper, markers...........................................................................25
Duration of milling-dyad exercises...........................................................26
Sharing, debriefing as ‘processing time’....................................................26
Support extraverts to process.................................................................26
"Clearing the room" after group releasing.................................................26
Clearing the room of drama....................................................................27
Chapter 4 Crowd-sourcing Conflict Scenario Cards.........................................28
Chapter 5 Best Practices for small group exercises........................................30
Quaker Meeting Clerks facilitators............................................................30
Chapter 6 Tracking Your Baby steps............................................................32
Scales for tracking.................................................................................33
Tracking - another description.................................................................33
Tracking: What fascinates you?...............................................................37
Tracking and how to benefit from it..........................................................37
Value of microscopic steps......................................................................38
Some history of MSIA tracking................................................................38
Chapter 7 “Going deeper” for Group Facilitators............................................40
What is “Going deeper”?.........................................................................40
Enya as “going deeper”..........................................................................40
Joni Mitchell as “going deeper”................................................................40
Robert Bly, Rumi, Kabir, Hafiz as “going deeper”........................................40
Is “group therapy” “going deeper”?..........................................................41
Self-connection as going deeper..............................................................42
Our issues resemble a game of pick-up-sticks...........................................42
Chapter 8 Going Deeper as three levels, Talking, Feeling, Needing...................44
Our waking psyche has three layers of meaning.........................................44
Three Layers of Meaning (easel chart page)..............................................46
Inception movie model of our psyche.......................................................47
Three levels of our psyche as an iceberg...................................................47
Our three levels as 3D chess (chart talk)..................................................49
WHY go deeper?....................................................................................49
Peeling the artichoke.................................................................................50
Debbie Ford on “going deeper”................................................................50
Chapter 9 End-of-event activity, ending exercises.........................................52
Have more time to fill?...........................................................................52
Need to ask for most-desired topics for follow-up event?.............................52
End of event sponge exercises................................................................53
Note to self exercise..............................................................................53
Dyad - One thing I learned was ___.........................................................53
Get them ready for traffic and driving.......................................................53
Defining “Post-workshop letdown”...........................................................53
Chapter 10 More tools for your Facilitator Toolbox.........................................55
Do use Hand-raise questions (polls).........................................................55
Facilitating Toolbox, basic tools...............................................................55
Facilitating Toolbox tools from J. William Pfeiffer..........................................56
Advanced Facilitating Toolbox tools..........................................................56
Chapter 11 Difference between wants, goals, needs and dreams.....................58
Wants vs. needs....................................................................................58
“Goals” and “needs” not the same...............................................................58
Dreams vs. goals-projects......................................................................59
Chapter 12 Self-interest alone vs. Service to self, service to others..................60
“Towards” and “away” preferences..............................................................60
Difference between priests and priestesses...................................................62
Games Trainers Play books on Amazon.....................................................63
Boring business meetings are a choice, not a necessity...............................63
Facilitator resources, free and online........................................................63
InnerSunshine Press book titles..................................................................66
Balance on All Levels PACME+Soul..............................................................66
Best Sellers.............................................................................................66
Smaller Booklets......................................................................................67
Best Practices in Energy Medicine Series......................................................67
Other CLASSICS of self-healing & Health Intuition...................................69
How this booklet is organized
Topics are organized in order of usefulness to experienced facilitators and
facilitators-in-training. Feel free to skip around per your interests.
Topics are NOT organized in a step by step “how to facilitate” course. A 300 page
academic book like this already exists in PDF online. It appears to be little read
and little used (Pfeiffer & Company Library, Presentation and Discussion
Resources: Training Technologies (Volume 23) J. William Pfeiffer, 1994).
Q: Do you use NLP ideas to manipulate audiences?
A: No. Manipulating audiences is antithetical to heartfelt group process
facilitating. Before throwing the baby out with the bathwater, please consider
heartfelt facilitating is often about arranging things to draw out participant
wisdom and new experiences in partner exercises.
An NLP book on how to use NLP ideas to manipulate audiences, has already been
written, listed in the bibliography.
One void this text addresses is explicating heartfelt facilitating for intuitive feeler
(NF) types. Our most talented group facilitators are most likely to be NFs and
whole-brained persons. A group facilitation text for them was missing, until now.
This text is written for female facilitators and anyone else interested in heartfelt
group facilitation. I invite more women to try group facilitating. This text suggests
ways to do it comfortable and healthy for everyone involved.
This is a start. If you can improve on it, have at it, contact me and you can coauthor a second edition.
Chapter 1 Defining “Heartfelt look and feel”
And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful
than the risk required to blossom ~ Anais Nin
When I ask Mr. Google to define “heartfelt experience,” he mostly scratches his
head. The best Google offers is...
Adjective re a feeling or its expression, sincere; deeply and [authentically] felt:
“our heartfelt thanks.” Synonyms: sincere · genuine · from the heart · earnest ·
profound · deep · warm · honest · wholehearted, unfeigned:
My heartfelt sympathy - Oxford Dictionaries.
Reading around, more clear might be, ‘To glean wisdom through our own
experiences, support each other practicing interpersonal competency. When
opportunity presents itself, to give/receive service.
“Heartfelt experience” connotes permission to feel a wider range of emotions than
in conventional or corporate workplace encounters. Expressing apology, remorse,
repentance and authentic forgiveness are often encouraged.
“Heartfelt experience” points to experiences not limited to:
- mere reacting, mere liking and disliking.
- the merely intellectual, to the merely mental.
“Heartfelt experience” points to experiences both above and below mere words,
mere talking. Words are going to track us back into the mind, if we let them.
dg-iceberg head-gut brain
The above iceberg diagram suggests life-changing interactions all have something
in common. Words are only the starting place, the attention holders. The “meat”
is some way of supporting the head to be more aware of feelings in the gut; or
vice versa, supporting gut to be more cognizant of support available in the head.
The endgame? More awareness of and ways to address and meet un-met needs.
Facilitating this endgame is often methods and practice in Best Practices in
interpersonal competency.
I'm aware Insight Seminars, Empathy in Action (nonviolent communication, NVC)
and Internal Family Systems (IFS) do this, to varying degrees. Can you add to
this list? Call or email me.
For everyday use, the phrase, “heartfelt look and feel” suffices to describe the
common denominator of these seminars.
“Heartfelt look and feel” as a combination of factors
Successful, effective, “heartfelt facilitating” is not just you being heartfelt Think
about “heartfelt facilitating” as a combination of factors:
- Many details, on multiple levels, done excellently,
- An intention to create-arrange opportunities for personal freedom, personal
growth and leadership development,
- An intention to enjoy and receive; so, participants will want to engage in
additional experiences with your org,
- Intention to expand awareness of the Loving Heart Center inside us, the lingua
franca of our anatomical parts, immune system, gut brain and head brain.
Keeping clear what each can handle individually and what is for the highest good
for this group at this time,
- Intention to expand awareness of Wisdom inside us, between us and around us.
Readers up on the esoteric will recognize the theme of Love-Wisdom here. In the
1960s and earlier, before the word “heartfelt” was coined, we sometimes used
the phrase “Love-Wisdom.”
Self-connection & heartfelt encounters with others as the “new
spirituality”
Many people said the word “God” died around 1964, the year of the TIME
magazine cover, “Is God dead?”
Around 2010 or before, I believe the word “spiritual” died as well. Why?
For one thing, since the Crash of 2007-2008, corporate materialism-atheism took
over mainstream culture several times more strongly than 2005 and prior.
Also words evolve. Words “die” when underlying significance shifts. If the word no
longer points to something definite in our consensus reality, we use it less and
less.
When “God” started to be defined more as each person's individual conception,
“God” as a Old Testament cultural consensus ended. In the 1060s, we began to
pass out of the Age of Great Men. e began entering the Age of A Million Heroes.
Someone external to me, defining for me what "God" means, is passé, so Picean
Age. Our new cultural consensus is “God” can and must be individually defined.
This growing consensus now impinges on the word, “spiritual.” Our growing
consensus is “spiritual” now means something somewhat unique to each
individual on Earth.
If you can celebrate this diversity, you have talent for acceptance, tolerance and
ecumenical vision.
What replaces the word “spiritual”? I don’t know.
Best candidates seem to be two phrases:
- my method(s) of self-connection (individually defined, ask them); and
- face-to-face, heartfelt encounters with others.
If you can you add a better, new definition for "spiritual," please call or email me.
Milling-Dyad exercises as antidote for boring meetings
Re-defining “spiritual” is not the biggest of humanity’s problems.
The bigger, more serious problem is boring business meetings, at every level of
group process.
Robert Rules of Order is somewhat to blame for this. Why? If the only meetings
which come to closure and produce results are meetings limited to only people
who can tolerate long periods of boredom--then we’re in trouble.
I understand some City Council members, Congresspersons and Senators are
paid good money to sit and be bored.
Why is this a problem? It sorts for leaders whose greatest asset is tolerance for
boredom instead of leaders with good ideas and who can mobilize the public
towards positive goals.
I’m afraid too many national governments are staffed with people willing to be
paid to tolerating long abstract discussions and long periods of sitting without
learning anything.
This means we are sorting for born bureaucrats.
This means we are sorting for reducing diversity of viewpoints and multiple class
perspectives.
This means we are sorting against most women and against most Cultural
Creative Progressives.
This is how the least capable, least flexible and least creative people make
decisions, in too many groups, as of early 2018.
To re-create healthy local, face-to-face group process so it sorts for people with
juice for creating healthy, sustainable new futures, less boring, more engaging
meetings are required.
How to get more women and Cultural Creative Progressives, male and female
engaged, involved and running for office?
Less hierarchy, more physical movement, opportunity for some learning about
your self and each other.
Lists of simple group process methods, techniques, exercises have been
composed since the 1960s. This literature matured in the 1980s and culminated
in Games Trainers Play, a five volume set available in various forms.
These Games include icebreakers, milling, dyad exercises, puzzles and the like. A
sprinkling of these in group meetings of many kinds is the remedy for boring
meetings. Specifically for:
- endless talking heads,
- endless abstract rambling dissociated from the rest of the people in the room,
In the meetings you have and attend, what’s keeping you from face-to-face fun,
learning and getting to know your self and other participants better?
THE classic dyad
Dyads are the premier group process for people to work on their own mostpressing personal-professional problems, at a rate and depth of their own
choosing.
Dyads encourage face to face interaction, thinking out loud about personal issues,
matching thoughts and feelings together--new learning, all in a FUN interactive
social activity.
The following dyad is in many ways THE classic dyad:
- What’s bothering you in your life now?
- What do you know to do, that you could be doing, which you are not doing
now?
- What do you know not to do--which you are still doing?
- What do you want more of?
(I believe written by John-Roger and Pauli Sanderson of MSIA.org)
How to tell if dyads will work in your meetings
The more high education your meeting attendees have--the better dyads and
Games Trainers Play work.
Group processes in a safe-supportive environment can work with prison
populations as ten years of USM Prison Project demonstrates. Freedom to Choose
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxpWf9h76uI So a Master’s degree is not
mandatory for dyads to work.
It’s more like this. The more higher education your meeting attendees have
consumed, the more ready, willing able and wanting their are for opportunities to
exercise their own critical-independent thinking-feeling. No one else is offering
them opportunity to work on their own personal-professional problems, at a rate
and depth of their own choosing. You can offer them this benefit.
Why? It brings people closer together. If they arrive at their own “Aha!”s, then
then want to come back and will pay for the privilege.
Q: How do such dyads enliven boring meetings?
A: The more educated attendees are, the greater capacity they have to make use
of time for self-reflection, self-inquiry and self-healing. The greater their capacity
is to enjoy the fruits of critical-independent Thinking and Feeling.
All you have to do as organizer and facilitator is provide a warm, non-threatening,
interactive, interactive social environment.
Interactive exercises warm up any meeting they are added to. Only already “too
hot” meetings are a bad place for more exercises. When Sacramento blacks come
to City Hall and stand up on the Mayor’s desk demanding attention for police
shootings, Games Trainers Play has no role in the moment. later you can employ
these as listening exercises.
Inner and Outer Game of successful meetings
Boring meetings--by definition--spend time one-sidedly on either only Inner
Game of Life topics; or, on only Outer Game of Life issues.
Single-focus on Feelings for 45 minutes or more can wear you out; in just the
same way, 45 minutes on how to apportion $100 to each of three projects each
requesting $300 each.
To much of any one thing for too long is going to be boring.
Group meetings are perhaps the ONLY place where we do not acknowledge this.
In a marriage, you can get divorced. If you are a school teacher, you are stuck
with your colleagues in faculty meeting. You can’t divorce them.
Interactive group processes are about the only way to add variety and benefit to
meeting agendas dominated by one-sided talk about issues.
In the more rarefied world of personal-spiritual growth trainings, dyads and
processes are elegant tools to facilitate attendees moving ideas out of
abstractions into personal experience.
Q: Should FUN exercises replace agenda items altogether?
A: No. To attract and keep Cultural Creative Progressives attending, meetings
need a BALANCE of outer agenda items (productivity counts) AND time for
relaxation, fun and learning from each other.
Did you know in the late 1940s the United Nations was more productive and more
enjoyable for delegates before it was housed in a vertical skyscraper?
How? Prior to the UN skyscraper, the UN was housed in a university campus
community of small single story cottages. Delegates lived and walked between
cottages. Much work was accomplished informally, in these walking meetings.
These benefits and social opportunities disappeared when the format of the
physical building was changed from horizontal to a vertical model with elevators.
Safe confidential chats are not possible in a crowded elevator.
The magic of dyad time is opportunity for people to work on their own mostpressing issues, at their own pace. This is the big hole in our culture, a time and
place to process our life, in a safe, social, fun context.
Local group process fails when...
- Collective energy is flat. Often, a relevant underlying current has yet to be
expressed and “put on the table,”
- Your group is reluctant to make a needed decision,
- Someone makes a sarcastic comment,
- Sense of tension,
- Conversation shifts to veiled generalities. The favorite trick Conscious Waking
Selves use to avoid going deeper is to dissociate, go into their head, talk in vague
abstractions. Call people on this. Call your self on this.
The above are sign post telling you have left “heartfelt” group process and are
heading into “talking heads” territory.
Milling exercises require open space, soft music and moveable. Fixed seating as in
church pews are the great enemy of modern heathy group process. Playing soft
background music is a Best Practice.
Dyads may or may not require handouts. No background music is best.
Safe, simple group process exercises like dyads and milling exercises, are the
remedy for talking heads, too much philosophy, boring meetings and anything
keeping people from getting to know themselves and each other better.
Milling encourages language generation. Milling is a fun way to brainstorm;
milling is brainstorming in the domain of one person.
Dyads are the premier group process for people to work on their own mostpressing problems, at a depth and rate of their own choosing. Dyads encourage
face to face interaction, thinking out loud about personal issues, matching
thoughts and feelings together--new learning, all in a FUN interactive social
activity.
To herd cats, Always use love, all ways
Did you ever feel like leading group process among a room full of Progressives
was an impossible, stressful, impossible thankless job--like herding cats?
A famous, hilarious, one-minute YouTube video of cowboy cat herders is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk7yqlTMvp8
The cat herding video is funny because it’s obvious each cat has its own ideas of
what to do and how to do it. In most situations, cats have no more herd mentality
than people. The more educated your participants are, the more the facilitator in
the position of herding cats.
One of the most effective ways to herd cats is to always use love, all ways (JohnRoger). If our actions and demonstrations are loving, people will see and be
drawn to your vision and the potential for collaboration.
Focus on the Loving can insure your group does not slip backwards into merely
talking heads. Don’t let intellect take precedence over heart. That’s going
backwards.
Q: How do you present loving?
A: My experience is this has much to do with who facilitates. Find people who
have and demonstrate love and professionalism; find people who role model
loving themselves and allowing others in so they can share this.
Second, keep the event relaxed. This will counter the tendency of 1950s-1960sstyle MadMen cocktail parties with “stilted” socializing; that is, relating from only
the neck-up, too much attention on appearances-status, instead of using others
to learn about yourself and about others.
Third, go for intimacy. Avoid facilitators who are brash and forceful.
dg-how-NOT-to-facilitate
Choose facilitators who know how to invite a crowd into their story, who point out
personal treasures in themselves and others. The endgame of “success” is
gratitude for your own personal treasures and the personal treasure of others.
Q: Why is a mood of intimacy so relevant?
A: While the average Western person is extraverted, those attracted to personal
growth activity are more introverted. Where extroverts respond to volume,
introverts respond to sincerity and going deeper (intimacy).
The problem with mere talk
Talk can bring an out of balance person back into balance. This sums up the value
of 20th century talk therapies.
Talking helps Conscious Waking Self re-assert its healthy dominance; a good
listener is vital to this. To go deeper than talk, to connect with the Child Within,
you have to go higher (deeper) than language, beyond the comfort zone of
Conscious Self.
The 21st century perspective says, talk alone is a poor tool for going deeper than
talk itself—to feelings—and under feelings to needs met and un-met.
For this reason, personal growth events commonly and deliberately employ
exercises to interrupt familiar, predictable, repetitive speech patterns—pattern
interrupts. This gives individuals opportunity to “go deeper.”
Milling and dyad exercises are the simplest ways to interrupt familiar, predictable,
canned speech patterns so individuals can perceive outside their own stuck
habits.
The end game is meaningful, heartfelt encounters, people working on issues of
their own choosing, at a rate and depth of their own choosing.
Q: Wasn’t this all done in the 1960s? Haven’t we ‘been there, done that’?
A: No! Creating self-connection and heartfelt encounters was only hit-or-miss in
encounter groups in the 1960s and 1970s. Groups were much more issueoriented and leader-driven. Talk and personal charisma alone were their main
tools.
Large group awareness trainings (LGAT) beginning in the 1960s were focussed on
mind control, hypnosis and the power of the subconscious mind, as an end in
itself. After a healthy start in the Gestalt-Esalen-TA days, too many encounter
groups in the middle 1970s veered off into mere cults of personality.
In LGAT trainings of the 1970s, the harshness of est, Ehrhard Seminar Training,
was the relevant historical marker. est was about becoming a brilliant star in your
own mind, the seed of hundreds of later success trainings for extraverts.
Not until the 1980s did a kinder-gentler (heartfelt) style become a deliberate,
major focus. Lifespring pioneered this, then it was polished and given human
warmth by Insight Seminars.
When the kinder-gentler (heartfelt) style become a deliberate, major focus in the
1980s, this showed how to avoid the cultish errors of group process of the 1960s1970s.
Benefits of milling-dyad exercises
The magic of milling-dyad and related exercises is opportunity for people to work
on their own most-pressing personal-professional issues, at a rate and depth of
their own choosing.
Why is this genius? Where else are people invited to exercise can they do this?
This is the big hole in our culture, a time and place to process our life, in a safe,
social, fun context.
After a facilitator demo, participants pair up with someone they DO NOT KNOW
and cycle thru a set of questions until time is called; switch roles; continue until
time is called again.
In milling-dyad exercises, each partner has 4-10 minutes to respond to questions.
Facilitating group process is--and is not
Lecturing rarely if ever facilitates group process. If you want to get technical,
lecturing primarily facilitates time for a group, time structuring. Lecturing alone
rarely facilitates individual insight into individual personal and work concerns. This
is why there are not ‘personal growth lectures’ (sorry Alan Watts fans).
Processing exercises are needed for each person to make ideas applicable to their
own little universe.
YouTube videos are only “public speaking” the first time. After the first time,
viewers can only have a virtual experience.
Let’s also distinguish between “public speaking,” where audiences are primarily
passive; and, “facilitating group processes” where the audience are equally or
more active than facilitators. The two are related and often confused--I guarantee
you.
To be good at public speaking, simply requires courage. You can practice at
Toastmasters. If you’re lucky, you learn being self-connected so can you let
people in to who and what you are. You learn how to embody your topic and your
brand. This all helps.
To be good at facilitating group process with live audiences, requires becoming a
‘crowd whisperer,’ an ‘audience whisperer.’ This requires self-connection,
humility, empathy, expertise and almost always, prior experience, on top of
“courage.”
Successful group facilitators become students of the mostly unspoken, non-verbal
cues from audiences, informing you of the emotional temperature and rise and
fall of momentum of a live audience, minute to minute.
Leading closed-eye-visualizations is also NOT “facilitating group processes.”
Leading visualizations is closer to lecturing and sermonizing. Neither are
“facilitating” because you are reading a script.
Leading a group in yoga exercises is NOT facilitating group process. That’s
instruction. Yoga leaders can be good at facilitating group process--but in my
experience this is not common. The two skills are distinct. Teaching yoga poses
and facilitating group process sequences are not interchangeable.
One common entry into group facilitation skills is as a K-12 school teacher. If you
have an interest in classroom management and/or cooperative-collaborative
learning techniques, so much the better. Other ways to become a ‘crowd
whisperer’ are comedy improv and live theater acting. A very few people are
trainer alumni of 60-hour training orgs like http://insightseminars.org/
Q: Okay, I have practical background in facilitating live groups of adults. Now
what?
A: If you’ve taken Insight Training Seminar, the Awakening Heart, you know what
is possible.
Q: Facilitating live groups of adults isn’t part of my resume. What does this look
like?
A: Facilitating a variety of group process formats. Sequences of milling and dyad
exercises have to be composed, rehearsed and polished. Group process as an artform. This could be one of the art-forms of the Aquarian Age.
This often includes cooperative-collaborative learning exercises interspersed with
lecturettes. Lecturettes must connect with your theme, your brand and have a
consistent--conscious--look and feel.
For those interested, the most accessible books of exercises are Games Trainers
Play. Successful sequences for facilitating live groups of adults can be distilled
into a generic description:
Provide opportunity for participants to work on their own issues at a rate and
depth of their own choosing. Make it fun, make it social, make it interactive,
make it surprising.
The more benefit attendees perceive, the more money you can charge.
The Law of Rumi
Q: Why can’t we go directly at and for enlightenment?
A: Rumi says, we can’t go after more of a positive quality directly. We can only go
after more of a positive quality INdirectly.
What does this look like? It means acknowledging and going after blocks and
obstacles to perceiving Love, Relationship, Success, Abundance, etc.
At their best, personal growth trainings facilitate participants walking their own
Hero’s Journey towards more positive qualities, by inviting them to address
blocks and obstacles to perceiving our Beloved, as Life brings these to our
attention.
“Listening” for Group Facilitators
Listening: what is this audience ready for? Not ready for? “Listening” here means:
1) Gauging when and if attendees are ready to come up with their own personal
conflicts to work on. This requires participants to self-reflect and be objective
about the pluses and minuses of their own recent behavior. It also requires
courage to share with a stranger or an entire group. Listen for when you have
knit the group together, woven in enuf safety and trust, that they can share more
deeply what is unresolved in their lives.
2) Gauging when and if attendees are ready to manifest the courage to take
responsibility for their own self-healing.
Q: What level of personal responsibility is the average person at in 2017?
A: Diet, nutrition and sleep. What they WANT is personal growth. What they
NEED is to clean up their diet and get more regular sleep. Listen to what they
NEED under what they SAY they want.
Chapter 2 Best Practices for personal growth events
Cell phone G&G
Tell them to power off all digital devices. Demonstrate with your phone.
Short ecumenical prayer
Each and every group gathering of any kind, of any length, benefits from a quiet
moment, usually a short ecumenical prayer.
Why? Because I say so? No. The Earth’s rising frequency is urging 3D human
cultures to wake up and get with Her new vibration. To voice an ecumenical
prayer is practical. Inviting everyone into resonance and mutual harmony is
primarily done thru attention, intention and the willingness of the group to align
and resonate together. When this works, it means fewer problems down the line.
By being together physically, we honor each other’s Outer Form and individual
Outer Game. A short ecumenical prayer, acknowledge each person’s Inner Life,
each playing a unique Inner Game of Life as well.
Churches have largely stopped doing the work of supporting people to connect
with their own Divinity, each in their own unique way. Large group personal
growth events are virtually the only activities left where people can do this with
an independent spirit and a balance of right and left brain.
Participants are literally coming to us because they are not getting what they
need from their synagogues and churches.
Over-estimating audience capacity to do work
I was reading What We May Be for the second or third time today. I realized how
much in the 1970s we over-estimated people’s readiness to do the kind of work
outlined, work you and I may love. Some facilitators were asking people to be
more masterful than they were ready for. In my case for sure, a mild case of the
“holy man’s disease.”
Q: How can we avoid this error?
A: (1) Emphasize an ecumenical spiritual context: tolerance for diversity,
tolerance for ‘each person heals uniquely.’ This increases feelings of safety and
trust for participants. The ecumenical approach seems generally needed
everywhere now; if for no other reason, because the young expect it.
(2) Emphasize self-connection as the new “spiritual.” “Self-connection” is often
what we mean, may as well use it. Ask them, “What is your method of selfconnection? If they have none, asking this supports them tempering their growth
ambitions. Did I mention most need to work on clearing up heir diet and sleeping
more? If they press you, discussion of a poster of the Skill Ladder of Selfconnection methods may be warranted.
Two facilitators always better than one
Live events work best with two facilitators, one more expert, one in training. We
always want to be training someone to facilitate whenever possible. Why?
Because it shows potential new facilitator talent a training pipeline exists. Who
else wants to learn this?
Always prefer male-female co-facilitators
One problem we had in the 1970s in group therapy was ego-crazy guru-like
leaders. Co-facilitator teams really help to keep facilitators acting adult and
professional.
Male and female couples facilitating are now more common. Co-facilitators deemphasize individual leaders, helps facilitators not get swelled heads and models
something participants dearly want to see modeled: one man and one woman
getting along as an effective, functional team.
If you institute this pattern of one experienced facilitator and one apprentice,
then you model facilitations as a career path, giving potential leaders in your
audience a path forward to becoming a facilitator.
How to warm up a strange, skeptical or hostile crowd
After reciting why you are here and why they are here, flip to a blank easel page.
“With the time we have together, I probably can’t answer all your questions. If
you tell me your questions, I’ll do my best to address them in the course of our
time together, as best I can.”
They call out what they wish to know. You or a Scribe makes notes on the easel.
At the end tear this off and hang it up visibly. (From Chris Schaefer, Waldorf
expert)
Demo even simple exercises up front
Co-facilitators can and should demo even simple exercises from the front.
Q: Why?
A: You may think demo-ing a simple exercise is a waste of time. Here’s what you
overlook: You are demonstrating how deep to go emotionally-unconsciously.
Participants will only go as deep as they see demonstrated at front of the room. If
facilitators go deeply into their own life; guess what? Participants who feel safe
doing this will go deeply also.
Live demos at front of room also sets up the non-verbal norms: body language,
duration, length of response, how deep to go, how honest to be.
Superficially, facilitators demo chair placement, how close to sit, length of
responses, etc. Guess what else? You create safety, trust, social permission and
direction for participants for the 95% of communication and behavior which is
non-verbal. They will imitate you, “monkey-see-monkey-do.” Imitation is a good
thing here.
If you don’t demo exercises, attendees will default to their superficial cocktailparty-talk level, to mere casual conversation. Your example tells them they can
go deeper and how deep to go. They will only go as deep as you permit yourself
to go. This is the main thing participants want to know, “how deep is safe here?”
Emotional transparency determines depth. How emotionally transparent can yo
be with your dyad partner? Generally more transparency and self-honesty by
facilitators improves participant experience.
Q: Am I supposed to cry?
A: You don’t have to cry. I have seen facilitators cry spontaneously in dyad
demos. This has produced spectacular results with attendees each time. Why?
Because it demonstrates it’s safe to feel vulnerable and express deep feeling.
If you cry it also helps participants work thru their deepest fears of the worst that
could happen if they open up more. What’s the worst that could happen? As Amy
Scher of L.A. says, you cry for an hour; isn’t that better than crying for the next
50 years?
Counting off the room into pairs, triads, etc
Lead people in counting off 1-2-1-2..., remembering their number. Then each
even number has to find an odd number and vice versa. Thus, people pair up
randomly. Triads = 1-2-3... More creative ways to pair up exist such as counting
off “peaches” and “cream” and having people match-up.
Require them to work with strangers
If not counting off participants into pairs, ask them to work with strangers. Work
with people you don’t know, Each ex a new person, as much as possible.
Simply “forget” to say there is no penalty for failing to do this. Okay to keep them
guessing if an actual penalty exists.
After 30 years I suspect this works because it increases Angelic assistance. Think
about it. You’re an Angel; who do you most want to assist and support? people
timidly putting one toe in the water? Or, people DEMONSTRATING they are open
to new points of view and learning something outside their own familiar box?
Think about it.
‘Who goes first’ variations
Person with shortest hair goes first
Person with biggest ear lobes
Person with most children
3-10 minutes for each partner, to go thru all questions as many times as they
can. Listen for the energy in the room. When it fades, get them to switch or move
on.
If five or more questions or the easel is not clearly visible to all, use handouts.
Two copies may fit onto a page to be cut up.
After the dyad ~ Open mike sharing in the vein of, “Who learned something from
the exercise?” This gives extraverts time to integrate.
A few words on large group sharing
The extraverts will always monopolize every second of group sharing if you give
them half a chance. Why? Because they need to talk to hear their own thoughts.
Introverts are literally more evolved, already able to think and feel internally
without externalizing before they internalize.
A good way to frame open mic sharing so extraverts don’t take over is to pose a
question that requires inner reflection. This gives introverts an even chance to
volunteer to share.
One good sharing “frame” is: Who has something they wish to forgive themselves
for? It could be a bad habit, a missed opportunity, etc.
Successive rounds permit going deeper
Participants can go deeper in successive rounds by self-listening, listen for,
recognize and attend to what calls out for more light, more uncovery. Take the
time to slow down your own reflexes and trite language. Be curious. This is how
you can drill down into issues, peel back layers, delve further into underlying
dynamics or feelings―in search of your own deepest, innermost values, the crux
of what matters most to you.
Duration, how long exercises last?
For milling, the questions are shorter and fewer of them. So more repetitions per
the same amount of time, compared to dyads.
In dyads, the alpha person responds for 4-10 minutes to questions, as many
rounds as time permits. The more present Conscious Self is with Basic self and
trust exists, B/S will allow new new content to emerge in response to each new
prompt of the same question. This can be amazing to the isolated onlooker self,
from the neck-up--Magic. This is the phenomena of “going deeper.” Willingness to
heal and intention to heal help also.
Q: What if someone responds mechanically, like a broken record?
A: Be careful, this is likely someone afraid to look beyond their own boxes. Their
discomfort is NOT your problem. If they share with you their discomfort with
inability to go deeper, ask them what they are willing to work on to improve or
heal.
We can have ambition, want to heal ultimates, when what we need is much
simpler, more self-connection, self-empathy and to work on our negative selftalk. Much self-growth points us to quite ordinary concerns; “enlightenment” or
some other orgasm is rarely on the table today.
Chapter 3 Handouts, easels
You know about handouts. The main problem I see is handouts with dyad
questions printed on them, which were NOT LIVE TESTED before the event. The
worst which can happen is participants become confused. More commonly the
handouts are simply poorly written. This is a distraction and irritant to some. With
staff or assistants, DO LIVE TEST ALL DYAD HANDOUTS.
Slideshows and projectors
PC setups and projecting slides with a PC-projector hook-up ~ I have never seen
this work well in a personal growth event.
When people are around computers, they go up into their head, away from their
gut brain. Usually they have paid to attend to do just the opposite, get more
connected with their gut-brain.
I have seen PC slide, PowerPoint setups work well for delivering information, song
lyrics and for training employees.
Easels, paper, markers
Easels, pads and markers have the advantage of being low-tech-understandable.
Watch out for very smelly (toxic) markers and dry erase markers. Avoid using
them as many are allergic to petroleum solvents in the markers.
Easel pages can be used these main ways:
- You can write pages in front of an audience. Brainstorming with audiences is an
example of this.
- You can pre-prepare easel pages with points, topics, jokes. Often your assistant
are the most capable for making beautiful hand-printed pages.
- You can reveal pages dramatically-theatrically. Audiences love this, so DO make
it dramatic-theatrical if within your personal style. This is called an “easel reveal,”
used to make your point more emphatically and with added impact.
- You can tab easel pages in the side with index post-its to find pages if you have
20 pre-made pages.
- You can use TWO easels. See below.
Variation: Giant Post-It notes
You can buy easel pads which are giant post-it notes. In my experience, these
primarily become useful for short pieces of info audiences need to refer to five
minutes, later, ten minutes, later, an hour later, or a day or more later. Meal
break info and times is one good use.
Does a need to refer back to older content come up often in personal growth
trainings? Not often, in my experience. For purposes like business consulting and
in-services, sure this is often useful because the cognitive pieces to carry are
much more numerous, issues are more complex. In personal growth, simpler is
always better. You want co-learners to focus on their inner priority as it moves
inside them over time.
Duration of milling-dyad exercises
Milling interactions tend to be shorter, 10 seconds to 30 seconds per partner.
Milling questions are almost always conveyed by way of an easel and a demo up
front. If three or more questions or the easel is not clearly visible to all, use
handouts. Two copies may fit onto a page; cut them up.
Dyads tend to be longer, 3-10 minutes for each partner, to go thru all questions
one or more times, as many times as they can. Dyads are the place for more
questions and more complex questions than millings.
Listen for energy in the room. When it fades, switch partners, or move on. Listen
to how many are learning how much. Stop when most have learned most of what
they can learn in the current exercise. You have to guess.
Sharing, debriefing as ‘processing time’
After the dyad is often a good place to offer open mike sharing, in the vein of,
“Who learned something from the exercise?” Or, “One thing I can do differently
this coming week is ___.”
Support extraverts to process
Extraverts are the people who as soon as doors open, rush up to the front and
get possessive about seats up front. Why? They learn better from external
stimuli.
The introverts can learn as well or better from observation and inner processing.
The extraverts have less of this Inner Game capacity.
Extraverts especially enjoy talking so they can recognize what they have learned.
Give extraverts time to integrate. Extraverts need to hear themselves talk before
they know what they think (generalizing here). Introverts already know what they
think before they speak (generalizing here).
"Clearing the room" after group releasing
Not all processes release a lot of karma invisibly into the air. Many processes do.
Professional facilitators err on the side of when in doubt, clear the room (In PTS
live events, there is also never a bad time to ask for the Light and the Traveler be
present again).
Facilitators should agree, either of them can request a room clearing after any
exercise.
The following language won't be appropriate for Insight; yet, makes the
(unspoken) intention most clear. The goal is to “clear the room” to re-direct all
negativity released and set in motion, either down into the Earth; or, up into the
heart of the Traveler-Christ, up, up and away. Replace anything gone with loving,
caring sharing of equal or greater value.
Careful, if you over-use this, you make participants paranoid of invisible energy.
Be sensitive to all dynamics.
Clearing the room of drama
The idea of clearing the room is to release unnecessary drama. In Michael Hayes’
terms, we are each in the business of releasing identification with dramas no
longer necessary to our innermost goals and values. See also the topic of
“Trauma Bonding” in G&G.
Chapter 4 Crowd-sourcing Conflict Scenario Cards
Conflict Scenario Cards are printed, any size, paper or card stock. Probably half
sheet or three or four-to-a-page then cut up, are most convenient for facilitators.
Not all trainings have a use for Conflict Scenario Cards. They come into play
strongly for any in-depth presentation of Emotional Intelligence and/or
Compassionate (nonviolent) Communication (NVC).
How do I know this? In the 1990s I was a substitute teacher in K-12, mostly K-5.
7-8 classrooms I was in had large oversize photos interpersonal conflict situations
to show to young children. The idea was for them to recognize what was
happening as a real conflict; and then, to talk about the values and choices
involved.
If these cards were available, I would always make use of them. Sometimes I
could borrow and return them from another classroom. I found it very easy to
engage a room full of children in these issues, share and discuss what is
happening, what can be done, how to prevent conflict and so on.
Training groups in NVC-EI often hinges on having ready examples of
dysfunctional real-life behavior (conflicts) to work with. Typically these won’t be
photographs but will be a paragraph of words, a “scenario.”
In advanced NVC groups, participants readily bring up and share real-life
examples from their own life. This will NOT be the case with most beginning colearners. For them you will need example cards. No ready-made Conflict Cards
seem to exist anywhere as of Xmas 2016.
Q: What about the NVC “Dance Cards”?
A: I personally do NOT recommend the NVC “Dance Cards.” They promote a
head-felt mood, not a heartfelt mood.
To make more new cards, consider having your attendees handwrite scenarios
from their own life on blank cards. Collect them.
Prompts for generating personal incidents to work on:
Think of a situation where someone is behaving in a way you dislike.
Think of someone who is making life less wonderful for you now.
After, collect all their cards, save the best ones, type them up and use in next
training. Keep going until you have 100; then, sell sets of cards online to other
trainers.
If you try this, logistics: At start of an event where you need cards, while waiting
to begin, you ask attendees to reach under chair for blank Conflict Cards to write
down a conflict of any kind they have experienced, observed or made up. Write
legibly.
Do not add your name or the last name of real people. Someone else will be
reading your card aloud, not you.
If cards are needed immediately, for this event, during Guidelines and
Groundrules (G&G) and first exercises, assistants sort thru the cards, edit and fix
them up so they are usable as cards to be passed out for use in the immediate
training.
Chapter 5 Best Practices for small group exercises
Small groups means groups of five or more up to 20. Most triads do not need a
leader. Triad structure is handled by rotating roles.
Quaker Meeting Clerks facilitators
Groups of 5-20 often benefit from a Clerk, a temporary leader, sub-facilitator.
dg-clerk
When new to a group, please explain the Clerk leadership opportunity. Unless you
grew up Quaker, like Bruce did, most people are ignorant of clear, effective lowlevel group facilitation procedure was worked out in the 1600s.
The need for Clerks will come again every time your do a Tribes room divide. The
Clerk role is worth teaching and them learning for elsewhere in life outside of the
current training.
To outsiders, the Clerk appears to be a cross between a Chair and a secretary.
Clerks prepare the agenda, do the necessary administration and guide the
meeting through items of business.
The clerk needs to have a spiritual capacity for discernment and sensitivity to the
meeting as a whole. The Clerk has to discern the outcome, often called 'the sense
of the meeting.' These group consensus "conclusions" become a written minute of
the meeting and are published fro review. Final decision about whether the
minute represents the sense of the meeting is the responsibility of the meeting
itself, not of the Clerk.
https://www.quaker.org.uk/our-organisation/quaker-roles/clerks
http://marriage.about.com/cps/communication keys/a/lovelanguage.htm
http://www.quakercloud.org/cloud/new-haven-friendsmeeting/resources/quaker-business-meeting-practice-role-clerk
Chapter 6 Tracking Your Baby steps
How do you start walking a Hero’s Journey of personal, professional,
organizational transformation?
One step at a time. There is no other way to begin here on the 3D physicalmaterial level. The 3D Earth level is also set up to surface our unconscious blocks
to authentic transformation on every level, PACME+Soul. So your expectations
are best-served by taking persistent-consistent baby steps, as you are ready,
willing, able and wanting to take them.
The ‘baby steps strategy’ is solidly embodied in the tactic of “tracking.”
Tracking is done with paper and pencil, self-made charts, diagrams and/or these
in digital forms.
There is no one way to do tracking. Each tracker will track their own progress
somewhat uniquely. The only wrong way is not to try at all.
Tracking can be done by individuals or groups. The following applies to
individuals. How to scale this up to groups will be obvious.
WHAT is tracking ~ A specific target behavior, good or bad, is measured on a
daily basis. Desirable behaviors are tracked UP, to higher numbers, on your scale.
UNdesirable behaviors are tracked DOWN on your scale, to lower numbers.
Trackers have to pick:
1) One specific target behavior per tracking sheet, one target behavior they wish
to observe more closely,
2) A clear scale they will use to track it up or down,
3) How, when, where they will track it. For individuals, daily works best but is not
critical.
If trackers do the above; and, are ready, willing, able and wanting, they begin to
own the process and continue “doing their homework.”
Get them to own and be in charge of their process--not you, not any outside
authority. Tracking is a soul capacity, a function of clear intention applied
regularly and consistently. Tracking is NOT primarily a mental exercise. If it
becomes ONLY a mental exercise--who are you pleasing? Probably not you.
Tracking milling Qs:
Only one of these for each milling:
Milling Q: One behavior realistic for me to attend more closely to now is ___.
Milling Q: I can better my life if I made changes in the area of ___.
Milling Q: A behavior I wish to move away from is ___.
Milling Q: A behavior I wish to reduce or eliminate is ___.
Milling Q: A behavior I wish to increase and move towards is ___.
Milling Q: My life would be better if I took baby steps forward on ___.
Tracking dyad Qs:
Q1: What specific behavior could you track to improve your quality of life?
Q2: What is your scale for tracking your behavior? [10/10, 50/100 or 100/100]
Q3: What does your scale represent to you?
Q4: How many times a week are you willing to track your target behavior?
Q5: What time of day is tracking most convenient for you now?
Q6: How will your tracking appear physically? (paper, phone, PC, etc)
Scales for tracking
Q: My scale for tracking the behavior will be ___ (1-3, 1-10, 1-100, 50/100)
Open sharing: Who has a baby step tracking project they wish to share; or, to get
support on?
Tracking - another description
If you facilitate personal growth events, you are going to hear about "tracking."
Tracking is simply any way you TANGIBLY keep track of a behavior or experience
on a daily basis. Desirable behaviors can be tracked up; undesirable experiences
can be tracked down towards extinction.
"Tangibly" means on a paper chart, phone or PC; or perhaps like I do, on quarter
sheets of 8.5 x 11" paper cut into quarters with scissors.
Each person who does tracking, does so in a somewhat unique way. As long as
your method works for you, keep doing it. When it stops working, try another
method.
Tracking makes most sense in the context of a Habit Body. Our Habit Body is all
our learned behaviors PACME. Yes, it’s both those workable for us and those no
longer working for us.
Conscious Waking Self has the job of Behavior Editor, Behavior Manager; as well
as, Initiator of New Habits.
From another angle, we have habits on all three levels, Talking, Feeling and
Needing.
You can tie this in with the Three Level iceberg model of our psyche:
dg-iceberg
Tie this in with the complexity of playing 3D Chess.
Tie this in with the need for self-empathy, self-compassion and taking baby steps
towards desired outcomes.
Q: Are there any dangers in tracking?
A: Yes, you can inadvertently set up a situation for co-learners to judge
themselves and their past expressions.
Most of our unresolved issues are sub- and unconscious. By definition they are
below the threshold of Conscious Waking Self. We cannot perceive them directly.
When co-learners cannot perceive a behavior directly, they may fall into
good~bad evaluations of their own behavior and/or tracking performance. The
sign will be negative self-talk.
This is why the most useful item to track is simply connection between ConsciousWaking Self and Immune System Self.
Most of our unresolved issues are sub- and unconscious, Their origin is in the
frequencies, tempos and domain of the Basic Self.
If Conscious Self and Basic Self are divorced, dissociated, tracking is more
challenging. In other words, connection between Conscious-Waking Self and
Immune System Self is the best pre-requisite for successful tracking.
Got self-connection? If not, then mindfulness, self-compassion and self-empathy
is the most useful thing for you to track. Why? These are the building blocks of
making Basic Self feel safe and trusting of Conscious Self so the two of you can
connect.
Q: How do I track unconscious behaviors?
A: What habit is no longer workable for you? Keep it on this level. If you can’t
perceive it as any kind of habit, it’s a poor target for tracking. You’ll only be
guessing if you are improving or not. You can fool yourself. Avoid this.
Attend to your habits (Habit Body). Your sub- and unconscious are always
expressing themselves while you are awake. You simply identify these behaviors
as you. If the habit is not working, this can be an error in identification. Conscious
Self has to wake up to behaviors not consciously and deliberately chosen. As Ram
Dass said, "My falling asleep wakes me up." Granted, these waters will be too
deep for many personal growth live events.
Q: How is the habit body organized?
A: Two books on this, Holistic Neurology, Our Two Nervous Systems, Head-spine
and enteric (gut) brains, Neurology for purposes of personal growth, Physiological
basis for Self-esteem and Self-concept
http://www.amazon.com/Holistic-Neurology-Our-Nervous-Systemsebook/dp/B01C6H83J4/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1459632575&sr=11&keywords=holistic+neurology+in+books
Your Habit Body; An Owner's Manual: Gut-brain Axis 2.0
https://www.amazon.com/Your-Habit-Body-Owners-Manualebook/dp/B071JMMCNG/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1513984314&sr=11&keywords=habit+body+dickson
Q: Which items can I as a facilitator ask participants to track?
A: You can't. Don't do this. This was the biggest learning of the early years of
PTSwisdom DSS. If you mandate one or more compulsory items for everyone to
track, this is control, the master addiction.
Enthusiasm for tracking can only come from people choosing their own items;
then, becoming responsible for them.
The power you want is to make them responsible for their choices. Offer milling
then dyad sharing towards what they will track and why. Let them pick two or
more things to track each month.
Participant enthusiasm for tracking, only comes when people choose their own
behaviors to track. They are only going to change as they take responsibility for
their actions on more levels. Facilitators cannot take responsibility for which
behaviors participants will track. Facilitators attempting to be responsible for
which behaviors people track and how they track behaviors violates the first rule
of Soul and Above: Soul is choice.
For more people to identify with Soul and Above, they have to choose which
behaviors to track and how to track them.
Q: Can I at least give them a menu-selection of things to track and a menuselection of tracking methods?
A: Absolutely--as long as you don't hold on too tightly. Your most experienced
and creative participants will innovate new categories of items and ways to track.
Get them to documents these in writing. If they can do this and it makes sense,
you are supporting them in being successful and breaking new ground. If you are
learning nothing useful from your most creative participants, I suggest you stop
facilitating live groups now.
Tracking: What fascinates you?
What are you interested in? You can invite them to choose two from column A
and one from Column B, like a Chinese menu.
What are your goals? What would you like to change for the better? What are the
steps you need to take? Can you chunk down your change process into do-able
small steps? That's tracking.
You can mandate the number of items they will track daily or weekly.
You can mandate a minimum number of days to track single items. 32 days is a
useful benchmark. Multiples of 32 are good too.
Tangible lifestyle behaviors are the best beginner behaviors to track: diet,
supplements, nutrition, sleep and exercise. Afterwards, for those more
advanced...
Connection between gut brain and head brain is ideal to track towards more
connection.
Connection between right~left head sides and top~bottom in gut brain are ideal
to track.
Tracking and how to benefit from it
The gap between what we DO and what we INTEND and VALUE--is often
considerable. Tracking bridges this gap. It gets the conscious self better data on
what we are and are not doing.
In personal-spiritual growth, tracking is the process of keeping a tally on each
behavior, on a scale, on a schedule. You can track as many target behaviors in
one day as you have time for.
A seven day food journal is one kind of tracking, where you write down the actual
items and actual amounts you eat in a list. Seven Day Food Journals appeal
primarily to left-brain dominant types.
The benefit of this is to dispel illusions about how we eat, to dispel our fuzzy and
self-serving notions of what we think we eat, replacing those with a more
objective record of behavior.
Tracking is a powerful tool because of this: if you want something new in your life
and you continue repeating the same old behaviors, you will get the same old
results.
Tracking is one of few ways you can manifest the soul capacity of intention in the
human experience. You can monitor and track if your behaviors are more aligned
with your goals--or not.
Value of microscopic steps
Creating a new business, a new house, a new relationship is a multi-step process.
It's easy to become overwhelmed by the steps required to get to your goal.
Chunk down your goal into small baby steps, microscopic steps, if necessary, so
you can increase your chance of being successful. this builds enthusiasm for
taking the next step and then, one more step...
Co-learners can be made accountable for their tracking in Dyads.
Some history of MSIA tracking
I believe the history of tracking goes back to Discourses, second edition, the 8.5 x
5” paperbacks. In the back of these were 10 to 30 copies of a tracking sheet. The
sheet was a grid or tiny boxes. No explanation at all. Boxes to track in of were
only 1/8 of an inch wide, very tiny, just good enuf for blacking in. The grid was
intended for us to black in a square when we performed a desired action and
leave it blank when we did not.
If we wished to extinguish a bad habit, we blacked in a box only on those days we
smoked, against our intention to stop.
The amount of room to write the topic you intended to track was one blank line.
Readers were supposed to come up with your own things to track.
I'm sure the original intention was in part to track things like:
- "Did my SEs today," check off one box for today,
- "I exercised today," check off one box for today,
- "Smoked zero cigarettes today," check off one box for today.
Maybe it won't surprise you to hear even living at Prana from 1978-1983 and
then next door for ten years, I can't recall a single conversation about anyone
tracking.
I'd love to tell you myself and everyone I knew used these tracking boxes a lot.
My experience was the form was not inviting. I can't recall a single person talking
about using them, tho I'm sure some did. Hence tracking was a big part of DSS.
Other relevant MSIA tracking history short of muscle testing?
Chapter 7 “Going deeper” for Group Facilitators
Cultural Creative Progressives are interested in “going deeper” to explore and
integrate on their own personal paths. They needs less lecture and more
interaction because they can learn more and faster from each other than from a
lecture, no matter how smart the talker is.
The best facilitators are ones most competent, skillful and artistic with arranging
other group process formats into a coherent and engaging tapestry.
What is “Going deeper”?
“Going deeper” was one of the values specifically cited as a perceived benefit
among “cultural creatives” from research in the early 2000s.
Enya as “going deeper”
Millions of people got a feel for “going deeper” in the music of Enya (1985-1995).
Millions responded to this three-person band, how neither lyrics, rhythms nor
melodies ignored standard and conventional pop music tropes and connected with
deeper feelings.
If you respond to Enya’s music, you understand “going deeper” in Cultural
Creative terms.
Joni Mitchell as “going deeper”
If you respond to Joni Mitchell’s songs, you understand “going deeper” in Cultural
Creative terms.
I first saw “going deeper” as a value mentioned in the Cultural Creatives book. It
sticks in my mind because it has many uses beyond marketing to hipsters.
Healthy “going deeper” is a primarily feminine value, as in connecting with
another person or loved one more deeply.
Robert Bly, Rumi, Kabir, Hafiz as “going deeper”
Men with a balance of introvert~extravert and an interest in personal-spiritual
growth responded too. A masculine “going deeper” was pioneered by Robert Bly.
Bly made the poet Rumi as popular in the West as he had always been in Iran.
Bly and others note “going deeper” is “the descent” mandated on every person’s
Hero’s Journey.
dg- Hero’s Journey cycle
Is “group therapy” “going deeper”?
It can be. Group therapy too has evolved. The shift is from “group therapy” to
“work on your own issues;” from, guru-worship of any kind, to self-connection
and face-to-face heartfelt connections with others. You can’t get these online.
The following dyad is in some ways THE classic dyad:
- What’s bothering you in your life now?
- What do you know to do, that you could be doing, that you are not doing now?
- What do you know not to do--that you are still doing?
- What do you want more of?
(I believe written by John-Roger and Pauli Sanderson, of MSIA.org)
Self-connection as going deeper
Q: Why is self-connection “going deeper”?
A: To have a conversation with your body, your immune system self, you have to
go deeper than Conscious Waking Self. You have to go ‘beneath the surface.’
What feels “off” will always be feelings and/or un-met needs. Once you cognize
them, you can do something about them.
Cultural Creative Progressives are interested in “going deeper” to explore and
integrate with their own personal paths. They needs less talk and more
interaction because they can learn more and faster from each other than from a
lecture, no matter how smart the taler is. So the best facilitators is the one most
competent, skillful and artistic with arranging dyads, milling and other group
process formats into a coherent and engaging tapestry.
To learn more
http://stanford.edu/dept/woods/ideas/collaboratory/PDF/facilitating_interdisciplin
ary_problem_solving_final.pdf
Our issues resemble a game of pick-up-sticks
Remember the game of pick-up sticks?
dg-pick-up sticks
This game characterizes how our issues are in our habit body. How do you get to
the red sticks giving you points, helping you win the game? It requires time,
intention, patience and gradualness, doesn’t it? In pick-up sticks, you see the red
stick worth 100 points on the bottom of the pile, beneath the rest of the sticks.
To go at it directly will disturb all the sticks above the red one. You forfeit a turn
when if you disturb-move other sticks above the red one. To get to the red stick
you have to take off the top one, the next top one, the next and the next.
Eventually the red one is un-emcumbered and lifts out easily.
There’s a saying in self-healing, “peel the artichoke until you get to the heart of
the matter.” Our issues are layered. One session is not going to remove a core
disturbance. A core issue is going to surface in layers.
I’m grateful for this. What if all the unresolved issues caused our diabetes or
arthritis surfaced all in one day? Instead Spirit gives us our healing in pieces, bite
sized chunks we can handle. Usually there are layers of self-healing actions to go
thru before a core issue can be cleared for the last time.
To switch metaphors, any chronic or serious physical illness is a diamond with
many facets, each illness a healing metaphor with many facets to it. Clear all the
facets, you clear the condition.
NLP by way of the Three Selves puts it this way, clear all the representations of
your disturbance in your basic self and you clear the disturbance.
You do not have to explore every facet explicitly. Your intention to heal is the
primary causative factor in your healing. The individual facets, the individual
leaves of the artichoke, commonly clear in related groups.
Core issues have many unconscious components to clear, by definition. Our
unconscious issues often look like this: problems we can’t solve--which everyone
else around us sees solutions for. Going deeper is about the only way to get
unstuck if unconscious dysfunctions keep hanging around. The language of the
Three Selves helps people go deeper. That’s why it’s so popular with counselors
and therapists of all kinds.
Chapter 8 Going Deeper as three levels,
Talking, Feeling, Needing
Q: Will I be sharing material in this section in live events I co-facilitate?
A: Probably not. This is Facilitator Orientation so YOU--if you wish it--can have a
background of understanding when people ask you challenging questions.
Consider some tough audience questions:
- Who am I?
- What’s the meaning of life?
- How does happiness work?
These are big questions many participants have in the back of their minds.
Facilitators do NOT have to answer these questions to their satisfaction. That’s
what John-Roger, John Morton and the other Travelers are for.
What you do have to do is stand your ground and not be bowled over by the
intensity of seeking your participants are shoving in your face.
The following is some understandings which will support you standing your
ground and speaking from your own experience.
Participants who throw the Big Questions at you, WANT you to be responsible for
their enlightenment.
What the NEED is to be returned to their own self-connection, to goal setting and
taking baby steps forward. If they do that, the rest comes.
So stand your ground, speak from your own experience. This tells them to return
to their ordinariness and look for their own majesty within their ordinariness.
Our waking psyche has three layers of meaning
Words - talk
Feelings
Needs, met and un-met
Each of these is its own range of frequencies. Each of the three layers feels
different.
When our needs are met, satisfaction and contentment comes up from inside,
from our lowest frequency, at the base of our psyche.
We call this “happiness.”
If we are self-connected, we feel happy consciously.
When too many needs are NOT met, many un-met needs preoccupy us,
satisfaction and contentment in the foundations of our psyche is replaced with
DISsatisfaction and DIScontentment.
If our feeling habits are towards heat and action (YANG), we feel angry,
frustrated, resentful.
If our feeling habits run towards coolness and meditation (yin), we feel
depressed.
The more self-connected we are, top and bottom, the more we we feel all of this
consciously.
Personal-spiritual growth is always towards expanding our capacity for selfconnection, supporting each other to have the courage to create new healthier
identifications to replace old identities we now realize are no longer workable for
us.
Creating new healthy habits requires courage to create something new.
To create something new requires self-confidence.
Self-confidence is the sum of our healthy self-esteem (CV) and healthy selfconcept (GV).
That’s how these things work together.
Q: What if I wish to facilitate the above wisdom?
A: If okay with your boss and your Board, fine with me. A full script for Emotional
Intelligence and NVC is also part of this series. Here are some notes towards an
easel lecturette which may be useful.
Three Layers of Meaning (easel chart page)
WORDS
FEELINGS
NEEDS
------Tell-show where these are located in our physical body:
WORDS neck-up mostly
FEELINGS heart-lungs and digestive organs right and left
NEEDS Hips to feet
------Tell, demonstrate, example, the purpose of each:
WORDS We use words for making and conveying observations and requests.
FEELINGS Our feelings come unbidden as they are telling us about our needs,
met and un-met. Inner child, Immune System Self is our Feeling Self. Feelings
are what drive our words. We clothe our feelings in words to share them.
NEEDS Needs met and un-met. Boundaries. Deep incompletions. Absolutes. Cell
Level Intelligence. Needs met and unmet produce pleasant and unpleasant
feelings, contented, discontented.
End chart talk.
------Tell-show where these are located in our physical body:
WORDS neck-up mostly
FEELINGS heart-lungs and digestive organs right and left
NEEDS Hips to feet
------Tell, demonstrate, example, the purpose of each:
WORDS We use words for making and conveying observations and requests.
FEELINGS Our feelings come unbidden as they are telling us about our needs,
met and un-met. Inner child, Immune System Self is our Feeling Self. Feelings
are what drive our words. We clothe our feelings in words to share them.
NEEDS Needs met and un-met. Boundaries. Deep incompletions. Absolutes. Cell
Level Intelligence. Needs met and unmet produce pleasant and unpleasant
feelings, contented, discontented.
End chart talk.
Inception movie model of our psyche
“Inception” is a heist movie set in the inner world of dreaming (Wikipedia). The
human psyche is pictured as a tri-level affair, more conscious, less conscious,
least conscious (most distant and obscure). Each level is mostly autonomous from
the other two.
The model is most associated with psychologists of the 1950s who imagined three
different levels of psychic activity:
Conscious mind
Subconscious mind
Unconscious mind
After the 1950s, the more useful version has been simply Conscious,
Subconscious and
Unconscious.
The Inception model portrays each deeper level not only looking different but also
having a different time-tempo signature, from fast to slow. Time moves slower on
each deeper level. Time difference between each of three levels is a plot point in
Phillip Nolan’s script.
Just as in Inception movie, each level may or may be aware of activity on the
other levels. As in the movie, the only one who can travel between the three
levels is Conscious Waking Self.
Three levels of our psyche as an iceberg
dg- Iceberg WDS
Excerpted from NEW Energy Anatomy: Depth of issue Iceberg map-model
Because we have three levels of creativity, we have three levels of potentially
unresolved issues.
Determining Depth of Issue early and often, can save you hundreds of hours of
time across many clients. With self-testing you can easily discern the depth a
target issue is active on.
Correctly identifying the depth of an issue is a major locational key for us blind
persons in the invisible world of the unconscious.
Even if you have no idea how to solve it, the more precisely you can locate it in
your body relative to your spine, the more likely you are to find the primary
causative factors—and therefore--solutions.
Our three levels as 3D chess (chart talk)
The three-level model of Talk, Feeling, Needs suggests a ready metaphor, threedimensional chess.
Wikipedia tells me actual 3D chess experiments are way beyond three parallel
levels. They also note the Star Trek version of 3D chess never had rules
connected with it.
3D chess is a wonderful, simple metaphor for the complexity Conscious Waking
Self experiences managing Talk, Feeling and Needs.
Yesterday a client told me sometimes she finds herself crying without
understanding what she is crying about. It helped her to hear the model of 3D
chess to recognize how commonly people are unaware of activity on one level
connecting with--or divorced from--activity on adjacent levels.
Indeed the 3D chess metaphor of our psyche antidotes the 1980s New Age idea
of "body-mind-spirit" as a kind of unified Oneness.
It is true "it's all One"--but not so much, or seldom, when we are awake in the
human body.
What's more true for us as Waking Conscious Self is the "work," the "challenge,"
the right and the privilege of managing a 3D chess board, keeping Talk, Feeling
and Needs connected and informed about each other's activity.
WHY go deeper?
It all starts with un-concealing - going deeper and discovering what’s blocking
you and interfering with your progress, and then taking ownership of it. Unconcealing allows you to see how patterns are specifically being played out in our
life, how we continue to participate in these patterns, and any attachment we
might have to emotions connected to these patterns, like fear, resentment,
anger.
Peeling the artichoke
The process of clearing our issues is analogous to peeling a cooked artichoke.
Keep peeling; leaf by leaf, work your way towards the heart of he matter.
3) Top leaves ~ conscious issues, you know what needs to change here or any
friend can tell you.
2) Middle leaves (subconscious issues) ~ you get to these thru communicating
with the inner child. Anyone who can talk with your inner child can assist you to
explore and redirect habits here.
1) Inner leaves ~ Core issues, unconscious. We are each blind and deaf tour own
issues here. Sometimes we can still feel them. You have to ask for assistance to
reach these. This is why we need each other to heal, a theme take further in SelfHealing 101! Awakening the Inner Healer.
Q: Can I simply guess?
A: Yes you can always guess. Take a “shot in the dark,” and see if you can locate
your target by luck or dead reckoning. It may work. A subjective of 1-10 (Likert
scale) is an under-used Tool That Heals; because, increased awareness alone
itself is healing. The more comfortable you are using your Intuition, the more
likely you can locate your target by dead reckoning.
For the many people who are kinesthetic dominant, who can navigate their inner
life by where they feel “well” and “not well,” they can feel out where their issue is
without “looking for it” or “locating it,” a visual strategy.
Debbie Ford on “going deeper”
What if you replaced...
resisting what is
denying what is
beating yourself up
making it wrong
making yourself wrong
making other people wrong
and the mantra “It shouldn’t be like this”
...with a new experience of acceptance?
(Adapted from Debbie Ford 1990, from an email series)
To learn more
http://stanford.edu/dept/woods/ideas/collaboratory/PDF/facilitating_interdisciplin
ary_problem_solving_final.pdf
Chapter 9 End-of-event activity, ending exercises
- Thank them for coming.
- ALWAYS ask them to invite and physically bring their friends and family to the
next event. Best Practices here seems to be:
1) Hand-raise question: How many people receiving value from tonight’s event?
(you raise your own hand to give them permission to raise their hand).
2) Hand-raise question: How many people can imagine friends and family
members benefitting from an event like this? Who knows one or more people
they could invite to the next month’s event? (fewer raise their hands)
3) Hand-raise question: How many people are willing to make a connection with a
friend or family member and invite them to the next event? (fewer hands). Praise
and celebrate those willing to do so.
Other things okay to do, just not too many things at any one event:
- Coupons and discounts for future events.
- Ask if they wish an email list of everyone in the training. This facilitates
community, dating, new friends, two for a special price deals, etc.
- Hand-raise question: Who can imagine themselves facilitating like I am? (these
are your up-sells and volunteers, the people looking for leadership development
opportunities)
- Ask for volunteers to assist at next training.
Have more time to fill?
A “sponge” is activity used to “sponge up” extra time, to fill a certain time frame.
A couple sponge exercise scripts are below.
Need to ask for most-desired topics for follow-up event?
Go down a short list of topics. Ask for raise of hands for each topic.
- Tell them how to give feedback to facilitators. Handout evaluation forms if you
do this. Half-sheet size is best, not too overwhelming. You might learn
something!
- Announce private sessions with facilitators.
- Tell them about next trainings on calendar, next event, day and time. They will
find the cost.
Ask for volunteers to help with the mailing list chores in exchange for free
admission to next event.
Finally have them say a goodbye to a completely new person in some structured
way. For instance, pair them up and have them share one or more new parts of
themselves they uncovered who are worthy of their love.
End of event sponge exercises
Closed eye process. Invite them to imagine themselves waking up the next
morning. Just before or just after they open their eyes, they recall the most
significant image or learning from the night before, this class. What is it?
Note to self exercise
Logistics ~ Short letters. They write two copies. They take their copy home with
them. The other they seal in an envelope, address to them self and give to
assistants.
Next week, they open their letter in a dyad. Partners then begin to be
accountable to each other on what they did and did not accomplish.
Facilitators also do this individually and visibly as participants do this.
This group of exercises above adapted from
http://www.slideshare.net/lamplightcoaching/14-and-a-half-workshopicebreakers-exercises-for-coaches
Dyad - One thing I learned was ___
Q: What’s one thing you learned from tonight you wish to put into practice?
Get them ready for traffic and driving
If you have led them deeply close to the end, be sure to get them back in their
body for driving and crossing streets. USM in all its years had only one person hit
by a car after a training. Once is too many times.
Then bring out the non-rug-staining drinks and chips.
Defining “Post-workshop letdown”
Let’s define “Post-workshop letdown” as your ‘new normal.’ If you do this, you
can avoid the negative self-talk about what you did wrong or incompletely, etc.
On the upward Path back to the Heart of God, our personal-spiritual growth is
permanent. You don’t lose it--but you can take it for granted. Practicing gratitude
is the antidote for ‘taking growth fro granted;’ celebrate how far you have come!
Another dynamic is on Earth, we live in a negative field compared to our own field
as soul. Because we are here, this is not a vacation. Individuals may imagine the
human experience is a vacation, that the “real work” occurs on higher levels for
one reason or another.
This is NOT what every channeled source I can think of says. All the higher
sources I’m aware of tell us the human experience is an active “workout.”
What’s getting worked out? Our unresolved sub- and unconscious disturbances
mostly.
What kind of “exercise” do we do here? Mostly making one more healthy choice
today than we made yesterday. Also, releasing new unnecessary disturbances as
they come into us daily.
Chapter 10 More tools for your Facilitator Toolbox
The Toolbox metaphor points to how many discrete group process formats you
are familiar with and can bring to bear, to flesh out a theme or topic.
The more group process formats you can bring to bear on a topic, the easier it
will be to write new scripts.
Conversely, the fastest way to get stuck on writing a script is to get bored using
only milling and dyad formats. The best facilitators have many more tricks up
their sleeve they can surprise and delight you with.
Do use Hand-raise questions (polls)
How many people have some thing they wish to share, raise your hand (facilitator
raises his-her hand demonstrating permission).
If a large fraction of the room has their hand raised, they need more time to
process. Open mic sharing is THE SLOWEST way to process. Better to pair them
up again with new partners. Ask them share about the topic at hand. This gives
the extraverts time to catch up with themselves.
Facilitating Toolbox, basic tools
Milling with sentence completion prompts
Dyads with paper handouts or easel scripts
Trios with rotating roles
Small group with or without a Clerk
Lecturettes
Role plays
Jokes
Large group sharing-debriefing
Room divide into clear Tribes
Puzzle tasks with handouts
Games with toothpicks and popsicle sticks
What else?
Facilitating Toolbox tools from J. William Pfeiffer
One of very few lists of Facilitator Tools known to me, here excerpted and in list
form only:
Ask your audience to paraphrase what you just said
Assigned listening
Plus-minus-question mark
Self-assessment
Spontaneous lecture
T-charts, what happens if X does happen? Does NOT happen?
Asking for examples
Checking for understanding
Advanced Facilitating Toolbox tools
Puzzles made with human bodies (not for people over 45)
Service projects
Games with money to address values
Gut-brain Head-brain Balance analysis with paper-pencil
Sensory games
Body language games
Authentic Relating Games
Room divide into four archetypes of Inner Family
PACME (a major Unconscious Pattern)
Self, Others, World, God (a major Unconscious Pattern)
Four hurts, one for each member of Inner Family (a major Unconscious Pattern)
Slow-Motion Self-Forgiveness
Chapter 11 Difference between
wants, goals, needs and dreams
In speaking with a client the other day, I realized many people struggle, confused
about wants, goals, projects, needs and dreams. The average person assumes
these are all the same. My experience is they are NOT inter-changeable. We gain
inner clarity by making distinctions about each.
Wants vs. needs
“Wants” connote a target or goal known to our conscious Chooser self.
“Needs” tend to be less conscious. I need air-oxygen. I don’t have to think about
this often, so it’s more in the background of my awareness. “Getting enuf air” is
not on most people’s To Do list for today.
Often “wants” especially “I want it,” comes from higher in our body, not always
from the neck-up, but usually so.
Needs, “I need air to survive,” arise lower in our body, from our belly button
down to our feet. Consider:
If I don’t get my wants met, I won’t die.
If I don’t get my needs met, I may die.
“Goals” and “needs” not the same
“Goals” need no discussion. Every red-blooded American has goals, what they are
conscious of wanting, more of or less of, in the 3D world.
In body-based terms, our goals arise in us from:
- the neck-up,
- in our left head quadrants,
- in our Governing Vessel.
Everyone is more challenged to perceive and articulate their needs. The bodybased reference points here are more commonly our left yin side; and, from our
neck-down.
North American culture thru Spring 2018 remains way out of balance, heavily
skewed towards RIGHT-YANG and away from left-yin.
What this means in language is we have lots of language-images for goals; yet,
many fewer and weaker language-images for needs.
More detail if useful in “The Magic of Right & left sides of the body” chapter of The
NEW Energy Anatomy: Nine new views of human energy That don?t require any
clairvoyance,
http://www.amazon.com/The-NEW-Energy-Anatomyrequire/dp/1456517554/ref=la_B007SNVG46_1_2?
ie=UTF8&qid=1346197322&sr=1-2
Dreams vs. goals-projects
Dreams and goals-projects are not the same. The better use of the word “dream”
is to point to wishes, desires and needs in our Inner Game of Life on our left
side from the neck-down--all yin.
The better use of the words “goals” and “projects” is to point to Outer Game of
Life aims, on the RIGHT side of our body and YANG from the neck-down.
To Learn More
Values, Needs, Wants, and Goal Setting Essentials [this is not a body-based
approach but has attractive diagrams and brings in values]
http://cbirgen.wikispaces.com/file/view/Values_Needs_Wants_and_Goal_Setting_
Essentials_Advanced_Info_Sheet_7.17.2.F1.pdf
3) MuseInks: Goals vs. Needs [for novelists and scriptwriters to compose
character and craft motivation]
museinks.blogspot.com/2008/09/goals-vs-needs.html
Chapter 12 Self-interest alone
vs. Service to self, service to others
Some of the good aliens have been sharing the Law of One with humans since the
1980s. The clearer rhetorical polarity to assist humans to process and integrate
this wonderful wisdom, goes like this:
Service to self AND service to others ~ Take care of yourself FIRST so your needs
are met; then, use your talents to support and assist others; versus,
Self-interest alone and above all else ~ Service to self, first, last and always,
tolerate no opposition; “either you are for me or against me;” intimidate first, ask
questions later.
Mr. Google has about 400,000 pages on this polarity.
Q: What are the good aliens saying about humanity?
A: They say we are in the throes of INDIVIDUALLY choosing if our values are
service to self and others; or, merely, service to self.
In my personal opinion, Trump does many a service by clearly polarizing issues
and inviting people to side with him (selfishness, againstness, intolerance,
patriarchy) or against him (service, empathy, compassion, tolerance and healthy
boundaries). Given a clear choice supports people clarifying their own values.
“Towards” and “away” preferences
People are motivated to move either towards or away from things, people,
situations. People who only motivate themselves with “toward” (goals) may never
get around to doing the nagging unpleasant things necessary to make their life
better.
People who only motivate themselves with “away” thinking (avoiding pain), may
never set new goals for themselves until their life is in a negative crisis.
The above yields many useful insights. Most people do not need help in doing
things that are pleasant. Believe it or not; tho, some people experience setting
goals and making To Do lists as extremely painful, fearful and overwhelming.
Towards and away expanded for clarity from
http://www.transformdestiny.com/nlp-guide/nlp-motivation-strategies.asp
“Towards” and “away” figure into the present discussion this way. It’s very
common to have towards goals on the right side of your body: I want a million
dollars, I want a spouse, write a book, etc. BUT to have only away goals on the
left side of the body: a pain-free life, no debts, less stress.
The problem with this split is even if you get all your away goals met, you only
have nothing, you still have no personal, unique-to-you, creative fulfillment. This
takes us back to dreams and is why so many goal-setting processes begin with
giving people permission to dream and get in touch with their inner inner six year
old who had a dream of becoming a fireman or a nurse.
Difference between priests and priestesses
This issue points to the invisible polarity of male~female. In the role as facilitator,
what might be the consequential differences of each gender?
While it is true in esoteric studies, male and female auras differ significantly, The
big difference between male priests and female priestesses, is not the gender
attributes and strengths your personality can use and build on. Rather, it's more
about how Spirit can flow thru your body and expression, when your ego can get
out of the way.
In a male priest, when his ego can get out of the way; and, his atunement is to
the highest good of all attending, he has possibility to become an "open door"
thru which the mystery of Spirit, and healthy awe about it, can flow thru, as
possible, permitted, timely and spiritually clear, for all concerned.
This won't surprise anyone who has been lifted by the Sufi poetry channeled by
Rumi, Kabir and a few others; also, The Prophet by Kalil Gibran. What the male
priest can do which female priestesses rarely do, is lift audiences with the truth
and insights of Soul and Above.
In a female priestess, when her ego can get out of the way; and, her atunement
is to the highest good of all attending, she has possibility to lift audiences by
connecting with them as people with her extraverted feeling (Fe) and extraverted
iNtuition (Ne), what we often call "expression."
This won't surprise anyone who has been lifted by the performance of female
ballerinas, female singer-song-writers and female poets. What the female
priestess can do which male priests do more poorly, is lift audiences with the best
Creation has to offer souls touring here in the human form.
The unique genius of priests is to become empty, an open door, thru which
audiences perceive the potent qualities of Soul and Above.
The unique genius of priestesses is to manifest the potency and abundance of
learning experiences available to us here in Creation: physical, imaginal, mental,
and mythological.
Comments invited.
Bibliography
Trainer vs. Facilitator infographic; Comparing two types of skills
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/whos-side-you-trainers-vs-facilitators-jessica-lferrandiz
Games Trainers Play books on Amazon
Q: Where are more simple group process exercises like dyads and milling?
A: Five volumes of Games Trainers Play can be found at the lowest prices at
AllBookStores.com and on Amazon. Perhaps the only two ways to learn the tricks
of structuring time and insight for groups of people is (1) participate in well-led
groups; (2) lead your own groups.
Growth Games, an early 1970s paperback, is one of the earliest books of group
exercises for insight and growth, the antidote to boring meetings, what most
boring meeting desperately need to add.
See 550 more results on Amazon, in books, for the search string: games trainers
play
Boring business meetings are a choice, not a necessity
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias
%3Dgrocery&field-keywords=games+trainers+play+in+books
We've known since the 1980s how to make biz meetings engaging and healthy
group processes in and of themselves. (This was worked out in five places:
- Growth Games (1972),
- New Games (1976, 1981), PlayFair (1980), et al,
- in Insight Seminars, Awakening Heart and related 60-hour group process
sequences,
- business meetings in teacher-run Waldorf schools,
- cooperative-collaborative classroom group process methods,
Facilitator resources, free and online
http://users.rider.edu/~suler/inclassex.html
http://www.fuddwhacker.com/seminar-exercises.html
Alternatives to Violence [100+ pages of training and milling, dyad, small group
exercises]
The original 145 p. version is online here: http://www.avpav.org/files/res-avprpteval-uganda-2006.pdf
A 189 p. 2007 version used to be online. Not sue where it is now. From the
cover: "AVP Alternatives to Violence Manual Basic Course Uganda Version Revised
2007" From the 2007 version:
International School for Humanities and Social Sciences
Prins Hendrikkade 189-B
1011 TD Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Masters Thesis for the MSc Programme
International Development Studies
Field Research carried out in Uganda
30th January - 27th May 2006
Teaching Peace – Transforming Conflict?
Exploring Participants’ Perceptions of the Impact of Informal Peace Education
Training
http://www1.umn.edu/ohr/prod/groups/ohr/@pub/@ohr/documents/asset/ohr_8
9185.pdf COOPERATIVE LEARNING GROUP ACTIVITIES FOR COLLEGE COURSES
A GUIDE FOR INSTRUCTORS Prepared by Alice Macpherson Kwantlen University
College
Presenting Magically: Transforming Your Stage Presence with NLP by Tad James
and David Shephard (2001)
Pfeiffer & Company Library, of Presentation and Discussion Resources: Training
Technologies (Volume 23) J. William Pfeiffer, 1994
Free online under this name: A BACKGROUND FOR USING LECTURETTES IN
HUMAN RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT (292 page PDF)
The Pfeiffer Library Volume 23, 2nd Edition. Copyright © 1998 JosseyBass/Pfeiffer
http://home.snu.edu/~jsmith/library/body/v23.pdf
Mr. Google has 260,000 pages under the search string: booklist games
"icebreakers"
Example of results: Fun Games, Icebreakers and Group Activities
(icebreakers.ws)
https://sao.nd.edu/studentgroups/groupresources/halls/fyo/FunGames.pdf
Look at these on Amazon. Be sure to scroll down to "Customers Who Bought This
Item Also Bought" so you can see what else exists.
Great Group Games: 175 Boredom-Busting, Zero-Prep Team Builders for All Ages
Paperback 2007
Big Book of Icebreakers: Quick, Fun Activities for Energizing Meetings and
Workshops Paperback 1999
4,000 results for the search: theater games in books
If Viola Spolin is new to you, start here:
Theater Games for the Classroom: A Teacher's Handbook by Viola Spolin
InnerSunshine Press book titles
Resources for the Hero’s Journey of Self-healing;
Self-healing as if soul & spirit mattered
All books below available in PAPER with diagrams-charts; or, eBook without most
images. All written with humor by a Waldorf-trained, practicing Health Intuitive.
New Directions in Holistic Brain Balance
All are new, many are shorter booklets
1) Holistic Neurology, Our Two Nervous Systems, Head-spine and enteric (gut)
brains, Neurology for purposes of personal growth, Physiological basis for Selfesteem and Self-concept
2) Our Four Brain Quadrants
3) Reactivity Is Our Best Friend
4) Forgive from Your Soul, Slow-Motion Self-Forgiveness, the Missing Manual
5) Inner Sunshine and How to Make More; Assessing neurotransmitter
production with self-testing; The simple complexity of our unconscious
6) Practical Epigenetics, Best Practices in Belief Change Work,
7) Self, Others, World, God, Our Four Categories of Relationship and Support
Support
Balance on All Levels PACME+Soul
Finally, a comprehensive holistic theory; and, general holistic experimental
method; The Three Sciences we use everyday; Holistic Psychology 2.0. Available
as one giant book (paper, eBook), or divided into ten chunks of about equal size,
one to four chapters each (eBook only).
Best Sellers
Meridian Metaphors, Psychology of the Meridians and Major Organs (a best
selling title in this series).
The NEW Energy Anatomy: Nine new views of human energy; No clairvoyance
required (a best selling title in this series).
Smaller Booklets
Breast Cancer & Over-giving; Therapeutic Metaphors for Women’s Issues
Your Symbol of Peace and How to Use It 5,600 words
VAKOG to KAVOG, NLP Senses Updated in Light of the Inner Child 7,032 words
From 5 to 12 Senses, How We Use Multiple Senses to Triangulate, Multiple
Intelligences 2.0 10,875 words
How We Heal; and, Why do we get sick? Including 35 more precise Q&A on
wellness.
You have FIVE bodies, PACME, Spiritual Geography 101
Best Practices in Energy Medicine Series
Rudolf Steiner’s Fifth Gospel in Story Form Topics include the TWO Jesus
children and the active participation of the Buddha in the Christ event.
Self-Healing 101! Seven Experiments in Self-healing, You Can Do at Home to
Awaken the Inner Healer, 2nd edition.
Shadow Hero Workbook, Lessons to purify the Hero archetype in you; Healthy
vs. Unhealthy Hero behavior; Unconscious Patterns 201
Adequate and Sufficient Psychic Self-protection; For Healers and Energy
Medicine Practitioners
Expanding Human Senses from 5 to 12; Rudolf Steiner’s 12 Senses to VAKOG
to KAVOG
Unconscious Patterns in the Light of the Inner Child and NLP - Most readers
grew up learning our psyche is a locked “black box.” We were taught the contents
of our psyche are unknown, probably unknowable. Now we know better. The big
Aha! is our unconscious is highly patterned. You can understand and learn these
patterns. Up to 95% of our psyche is is patterned. Only 5% of us is NOT
patterned, the 5% of us where active, deliberate, conscious choice occurs. Soul is
choice. The more aware you are of UNconsicous patterns, the less likely you are
to be run by them.
Inner Family + Inner Court, The Four Archetypes of Our Gut and Head
Builds on and expands the work of Paul Dennison, Ned Herrmann, Katherine
Benziger and Bertrand Babinet’s Babinetics. Along with ecumenical spirituality,
“God is my Partner,” all of these together, give us adequate and sufficient
complexity to model our psyche and personality. The intelligence of our Habit
Body is here. Your Habit Body, An Owner’s Manual, is useful preparation for the
current volume.
Muscle Testing as Spiritual Exercise; Building a Bridge to Your Body’s
Wisdom. Muscle testing training redesigned with ‘God as your Partner’
Breast Cancer & Over-giving; Therapeutic Metaphors for Women’s Issues (99
cent long article)
Your Habit Body, An Owner’s Manual Our habits are our best friends; why
then, do we make the same errors over and over again?
“Willingness to heal is the pre-requisite for all healing” revised edition coming
2014
Radical Cell Wellness—Especially for women! Cell psychology for everyone;
A coherent theory of illness and wellness
The Five Puberties, Growing new eyes to see children afresh
How We Heal; and, Why do we get sick? Including 35 better, more precise
questions on wellness and healing, answered by a Medical Intuitive
You have FIVE bodies PACME; Spiritual Geography 101
The Meaning of Illness is Now an Open Book, Cross-referencing illness and
issues
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Other CLASSICS of self-healing & Health Intuition
MSIA Discourses http://www.msia.org/discourses
Forgiveness, Key to the Kingdom, by John-Roger
The Emotion Code, by Bradley Nelson
Messages From the Body, by Michael Lincoln
Touch for Health, 2nd Ed, by Mathew Thie
Changing Lives Through Redecision Therapy, by Goulding & Goulding
Scripts People Live: Transactional Analysis of Life Scripts by Claude Steiner
Core Transformation, by Connierae Andreas
Your Body Speaks Your Mind, 2nd ed. by Deb Shapiro (junior version of Messages
from the Body)
The best solution is always loving
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If you get stuck, give me a call.
What if a fraction of the new replacement culture, you and I are creating now, will
begin around self-healing and training activity as the cultural benefit of the hard
work of building new, sustainable, intentional community?