IS: Focusing and affordances
Upcoming open events:
- Saturday, June 22: Exploratory Series session #6 — Gendlin Focusing with Jessica Fan
all start @ 1pm Pacific Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC). S14 Core Calls on Sundays for members run every week through June 23.
We're wrapping up our (14th) season! You're all invited to join us Saturday for Gendlin Focusing with Jessica Fan, who shares:
Many of us are drifting through the world as floating heads. Gendlin Focusing is a simple yet powerful technique to help us reconnect with the wisdom within our bodies - teaching us how to uncover emotions and yearnings that are often hidden or repressed.
Focusing has been a life-changing tool for me, my partner, and my coaching clients - helping us connect with our higher Self, repair relationships, understand our true needs, and heal unhealthy patterns.
As usual in the Practice Dojo, we will learn it and experience it, practicing with each other.
As the Core/Community season also ticks over... well, I plan to share some overview reflections from what we've done this season. Next week seems like a good time for that. What's on my mind today, though, is the upcoming liminal space between seasons. It's typically where I spot the opportunity (or get the itch?) to "make a move" or two in service of the continuous long-term evolution of Intentional Society.
There's a frame on the "founder-sourced to community-self-ownership" path that (incorrectly, I want to telegraph) rhymes it with a "hierarchical to flat" movement. It pops up with a voice like "maybe I should stop making so many leadership moves, 'cause that's (BDFL?) dictator-like and we should be moving from command-and-control to egalitarian leadership".
However, that frame is a memory of a previous developmental transition (a salient, sticky memory from the corporate world, in my story) and is almost the opposite of what I/we are really looking for! I don't want to make fewer moves — but I do want my moves to interplay with others' moves, and for the total number of moves to increase. I want to get away from the either-or frame of "power is fixed, whoever gets more exerts it over others with less." The whole point of recognizing power-with over power-over is that expandable power, agency, the ability to make moves, is really the way we want to relate to power.
Now this gets messy and disorganized as I'm out on the edge of my perceiving (and it's late and I'm tired too):
"Affordances for contribution" points at the move I want to make, then. Enabling handle/grip mechanisms that allow people's aliveness and energy to flow out and enliven the group field/space/ecosystem! (Structure that makes space for emergence, the infinity symbol keeps tracing itself...)
The recently-formed Stewardship Circle is aimed in this direction as well — my "move" contemplation is definitely connected to those conversations.
What are "affordances for service"? (Service is leadership and vice versa, there's just a bit of a maintenence-vs-innovation connotation difference?) There is something here about exposing opportunity... I almost said "needs"? Not neediness, but impact. Calling, but not coercing. The resource constraints and limitations that others' service could liberate.
...Welp, haven't solved much, but this is it for today. Cheers,
James