IS: Information, and humanness
Upcoming open events:
- Friday, Jan 26 — IS informational call (for newcomers)
- Note: no public practice session this Sunday! Session #4 in the series is on February 4th.
all start times 1pm Pacific Time (4pm Eastern, 9pm UTC)
Hello! I feel some internal tension with the "sections and headers" style of the last two newsletters, so I'm going to write to you more conversationally today. Hello. I hope this moment, this hour, this day, this week is for you proceeding with awareness and peace and fire and flow.
I felt pretty satisfied with the improv/AR-style series of noticing games we practiced last Sunday in session #3 exploring our Interpersonal Gap awareness. Enabling constraints (ooh or Liberating Structures) help creativity even when it comes to ways of seeing and patterns of noticing. Some people called it "solid" and "wonderful" and "really insightful, well facilitated and structured session" and "these practices really help in my real communication with others" which, what else could a host-servant ask for?
This wraps up our first little three-part unit, itself the first of three in the nine-week overall practice series. Did you know there are not just one but two different themes weaving through the practice series? The first is "awareness, acceptance, integrity" — our model/mantra, as I've said, pointing to the motions of personal development. The second, a bit more hidden, is "I, we, world" aka "internal, relational, systemic". These two themes aren't the same kind-of-thing, but there is some kind of interesting "what and where" correspondence: It is easier to practice awareness/noticing inside the internal space, and it is easier to practice integrity in relationship to systems. They don't line up in strict buckets together: integrity happens internally also, and noticing happens in systems as well. But the three weeks we just finished were heavy on awareness/noticing, and mostly within the inner (and relational) scopes.
The practice series takes a week off now, so that IS members can congregate in that prime-time slot for our member meeting. If you're curious about that, you could come to the informational call linked above. (By the way, I'm now thinking that "informational call" versus "new member orientation" is already too much, too confusing, and that I'll likely re-merge them both into one flexible "office hours" thing.)
Otherwise, see y'all at the remainder of the practice series, during the first three weeks of February and of March. We move next into relational presence practices for the February unit, which provide generous space for (awareness, yes, still, and then) practicing welcoming and radical acceptance.
Hmm, the above still felt less conversational and more informational. What is it that I'm looking/longing for right now? There's a slippery feel to the question — I notice an impulse to pull my phone out and distract myself from it. The discomfort... it seems to be wanting something like honoring: like, wanting to meet each of you as a person, in my and your humanity, seeing and recognizing the treasure of your experience and consciousness and connecting it to mine and being seen and joined together in purpose and love and perspective.
Thus my felt resistance to... the "systematized" nature of doing the normal and useful thing above? Where I keep the system/engine going by clearly keeping people informed about what's going on and what the next step is for them. Aha, seeing the value and goodness there, I can bring them together: systematic competence is useful and absolutely worth doing, AND, the human and personal is the carrier wave of connection, without which the system becomes soulless. I can't see you through this newsletter interface, but these last two paragraphs are me letting you see me, in my processing of uncertainty, trying to embody a pointer to the thing that we together care about growing.
See you around,
James