[video transcript - edited for clarity]
The Beauty of Small Groups - Our Tangible Interdependence
I want to come back to one element of what I'm calling our embodied non-duality. I want to speak here to the specific beauty of small groups. When I say this I'm thinking of groups with about 8-12 or maybe 14 participants; I'm not saying there's a magic number. But in a small group, particularly if we are working online, our screen allows us to feel each other intimately to sense 'the whole' simultaneously. One of the really precious elements here is that in a small group. it's very tangible how we affect each other.
Contrast with Larger, More Diffused Presences
In a small group, we may experience a heightened aliveness and awareness of our interdependence in the field itself. (I find by contrast, when I'm in a very large group, invariably there are people who are a little bit zoned out, disconnected, doing something else, or off-screen; there's a diffusion of presence that is almost inevitable in a larger group, even when there is a deep intention or presence).
Our Quality of Availability
But in a small group, disengagement is more obvious and our interdependence is more tangible. If a few people are taking notes or disconnected in some way, that tangibly alters the quality of containment and holding for all of us. I'm not trying to make distraction or disengagement wrong, (it also has its place in our processes), but more to illustrate how it highlights and makes obvious our interdependence. It is clear that every person's presence and quality of availability contributes to what is possible for those who are speaking and for the quality of the space as a whole.
Our Container alters what is Possible
When we are in a field that is really with us, we can travel places and speak from parts of ourselves that are profound and can be very fresh and emergent. Our fullness of availability enables a deeper self-contact than is possible when we are in a more diffused or ambivalent environment.
When we speak and see and feel other beings with us who are porous and available to us in what we are saying and how we are, we have a very intimate experience of our mutual aliveness and impact. We are literally watching our non-duality and our co-regulation arise in a visual way. We can see and feel how we affect each other by our words, our body language, our forms of expression. Thomas Hubl speaks of this when he says the field is a 'resonance body'; we observe the energies of the speaker by how the group receives, reflects and absorbs them, and by what unfolds subsequently.
Embodying our Sensitivity and Mutuality, Being Received
In this, we are experiencing how we effect each other in our unfolding moments of self-expression. It also reminds us how precious we are to each other. There is something very beautiful in our sensitivity, our capacity to savour each other, and to allow ourselves to be taken in and received. And for most of us in these spaces, we grow more comfortable with 'feeling felt' by others; as we relax a little bit, and as we learn to be connected to ourselves while feeling others, we are having experiences of mutuality, receptivity and intimacy which are just really nourishing for humans to have, and that's lovely.
The Basic Goodness of Feeling Felt
It's not that it always feels smooth; we're not just trying to have lovely experiences. But there is something very healing of the isolation and the loneliness of the self when we are able to share from more intimate places in us. When we do share from our depths, and we are in a receptive, sensitive system, it really, really nourishes us. It also bonds us, and creates a natural, organic gratitude with these others with whom we've been able to be so open.
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