Big Decisions and Ways of Knowing with Tenneson Woolf

Transcript (lightly edited for clarity)

Speakers
Beth Tener
Tenneson Woolf

Beth Tener: Today’s episode has the title Big Decisions and Ways of Knowing. So we’re going to be exploring those times in life where you get to a threshold or a crossroads and you have to make some decisions about what way you want your life to go.

The conversation starts with a personal story and it’s also relevant to relationships, teams, organizations, and communities as they encounter choice points. When we get to these decisions we need to make, what informs how we go about it? I’m continuing to unfold a personal story over the 10 episodes of season two, some stories from my own life when I was in my 30s and had some big changes happening.

The stories until now were changes that I was choosing to make, and that’s what we’ll talk about today. In the episodes to come, we’ll explore when life events happen and you have to adjust or adapt to transitions and changes you would never choose.

How do you decide when you’re at a crossroads. We’ll explore how this works both at the personal level and with groups. How do you decide when you see what’s changing or the options before you and how do we feel about them and what’s the right way to go when we don’t have a lot of clear information?

I’ll be exploring the power of kinship, of listening together, how you get clear inside, and what are ways in groups that we can help feel what’s happening and sense the best way to proceed and help us decide what path to take. I’m grateful today to have my friend Tenneson Woolf with me. Tenneson is someone I met quite a few years ago in a training workshop around a process called the Art of Hosting. That focuses on how to facilitate groups and create spaces where you can have conversations that matter.It’s a wonderful suite of practices as well as an international network of how to do that. Tenneson’s very involved in it.

Here are a few of his titles from his email. He’s a workshop design geek, an Art of Hosting steward, a hungry meaning maker, a decent bread baker, and a thoughtful human. He’s also a poet and a wonderful conversationalist, and he does coaching, helping people and groups move through change and choices. I thought he would be a great conversation partner for our conversations today. So I’ll open it up, Tenneson.

Tenneson Woolf: I appreciate that kind of invitation, Beth, and that kind of framing. It makes me smile and think of the many ways that we get to show up with each other to do some good. Perhaps have some joy along the way. Thanks for inviting me into this conversation and this set of questions

Beth Tener: Great, thank you and remind us where you are on this beautiful earth today.

Tenneson Woolf: In a geographical way, I live in Utah and I’m at a place that is about 30 minutes or so south of Salt Lake City and this is a high desert area. We are at elevation near 5,000 feet and yet we’re also at the foot of mountains.

There’s something in that geography that’s always been compelling to me. I come to you from a little corner of the house that I’m enjoying setting up here as new office for me and from the general state of Utah in a geographical way.

Beth Tener: As a reminder, I’m coming from on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean over in New Hampshire, at the edge of a tidal river. A couple of time zones away. I’m going to pick up the story from the previous episodes. Even if you haven’t listened, you can still pick it up today. This story takes place from about age 30 to 40.

The first episode we looked at, how do we think of moving through a calling for change? That was a story of leaving a corporate. consulting job and starting a sustainability non-profit. That shift was with to  an intention live a more simple, calm life. It didn’t quite work out that way because I got into a lot of patterns of overwork and burnout. That led me to look at how to find support and friendship through those challenging times, when things feel out of balance. What does it take to find our own path within cultures that don’t always support health and well being?

In the third episode, we talked about sources of connected strength with a healer named Greta Bro. How do we find resource in silence, in meditation, in connecting with empathic friends and therapists, healers who can guide us to refine our balance and finding those balance of action and rest.

The fourth episode was about love is listening. I had done a long meditation retreat where I did contemplative practices and really opened my heart. I came home and within a month had fallen in love with Rick. In that episode, I spoke with Bruce and Simon about what it means to fall in love and how to be in relationship that supports each other’s growth. We looked at how do we hold space and listen.
Then I had a reflection episode with Nancy Gabriel about those first four episodes, which brings us to today.

Picking up the story, it was three years later, and Rick and I were still very much in love – that quality of love that I talked about in our conversation last time had really not changed. It only deepened. At this point, I was in my mid 30s and Rick was about eight years older.

We were getting to that point of, okay, where might this go next? Should we get married? Should we move in together? My roommate in my apartment was moving out, so that was pushing along the issue of what are we going to do? Rick had his own apartment and was enjoying having his own space so he was concerned about how that would go if I moved in there. Or should we get a place together?

The bigger question of are we going to get married was there. I wanted to be married. His felt you can be completely happy and you don’t need a marriage certificate to do it. He’d seen a lot of unhappy marriages, including in his own family with his parents. He was questioning – he said “why do you have to do what society tells you? We know we want to spend our lives together.” It was a point of concern and conversation. Then we were considering whether we were going to have children.

Tenneson, thinking of a moment when you’re faced with different related big choices, and you have that underlying worry of – what if we can’t agree? –  and I really want to be with this person. I wondered if you have a similar choice point or you’ve coached people who are holding so many big questions.

Tenneson Woolf: First I’ll say, it’s good to come into your story that way, Beth. I love the personal touch of that, the belliness of that, the heartfeltness of that. I say that because it’s one of the primary orientations that I want to live or that I want to practice.

I want to be grounding and sometimes on fire aspects of what does it mean to love? And what does it mean to love ourselves? What does it mean to love others? These are all important things. As a primary narrative of life for me is that I want to hold my own work and relationships in a human way. You have participated on my podcast called Human to Human. I’ve used that language for a website and for a way of thinking about the many things humans try to do in the world.

Something about being good humans with one another  – something so simple like that. I find it is a compelling storyline. I appreciate the way that you’re bringing that in to the question of how to relate to big transitions.

I can find threads of that in work, I imagine in some overlapping ways with you. A lot of times the groups that I’m working with, or individual coaching, they’re on some kind of edge. They have a hunch that something else is possible and they’re a little nervous about it, a little scared, or a little beat up by systems. They want to lean into the possibility of the new and there is nervousness that comes with that or the reality of, “oh, this is going to take some serious letting go or the reality of grief.”

To me, these all take place in settings of organization and community and of course in the personal also. I shared with you before we started recording that I’m in a good transition into a sweetheart relationship. We have felt like, “well, we’re practically living together anyway, so what does it mean for us to come under the same roof?” How cool to be in that set of emotions and questions and invitations.

Beth Tener: I agree. It’s sweet that we’re talking about this part of my story just as you’re having that moment in your relationship.

Back to the story. One evening I sat with Rick talking about these questions. It was hard. I took a break and went to the bathroom. When I came back in, he looked up at me and he had two post it notes stuck on his chest. One said resistance to change and the other said conditioned response.

Tenneson Woolf: It’s good that we have post it notes, right?

Beth Tener: He’s was looking down. He’s said, “I’m sorry, this is what I’m in.” To be in it with humor, I think is also such a gift.

I have a question for you on sitting in the questions. I know you and I both love questions and we both do facilitating. When we are at a choice point, I see it as a tangle of yarn. There’s a lot of dimensions going on at the same time. They are like threads to pull apart. You mentioned grief: the sadness of letting go. In a previous episodes, we spoke of the loyalty to the employees you’re working with when you have to leave.

There’s also the emotions of the ones you tried before that didn’t work, that you have reasonable. inner parts saying, “don’t you dare try that again.” I feel that healing work or facilitation work is about  holding the space long enough for us to untangle each of those and honor them. When you do that, the clarity of what might come through this time has a space to move. How does that metaphor play out for you?

Tenneson Woolf: Holding a space long enough that we might untangle even just a little bit is an honest statement in a whole pile of complexities that people live and work in. All of that is going on. There’s multiple layers to it. More of us that are simply naming the complexity of things. I’d like something a little less cognitive, the fullness of things, the entangledness of things. There’s a lot of us that are pointing to that.

I’m drawn to that both in the practice way of coming from the field of organizational behavior, but also coming from it from a Zen like perspective. Everything’s connected. Everything changes, pay attention.  I’m really drawn into that way of thinking. In this relationship that I’m in, we’ve had great conversations, everything from sitting at the kitchen bar together as we discover more layers of each other to pillow talk where we’ve named, “I think there will always be something to discover here.” I lean into it that way.

When it comes to trying to see the bigger picture of things and not be afraid of the granular details, I think being in relationship with all of that matters.

When you’re describing this phase of relationship with Rick, fear can show up. We’re afraid of lots of important things. Fear of getting hurt, fear of hurting the other, fear of getting it wrong. And the fear of being afraid to get it right, even for that matter.

Beth Tener: Oh yeah. That’s a thing.

Tenneson Woolf: All of those things are in play, right? Fear is always available or I’m a human being that relates to fear, generally being pretty ready to come play. I don’t often don’t want to play with fear that way. I want fear to go away.

I’m noticing that it takes some discipline, actually, to come into a relationship with those fears, so we’re not just in some grand denial of things, but come into relationship with those fears, but also not be driven by them. We can lead with love, yet many of us have times where we’re leading with fear and don’t even know it.

That’s something I hear in your voice and it seems like one of those really root kinds of beliefs –  what if we didn’t lead with fear? Knowing that fear is always available, that lends itself to some pretty disciplined ways of trying to be humans.

Beth Tener: Yes, I like that.

For me at that time, I interpreted the fear as “something is wrong.” It must be that the relationship isn’t right. Greta, who was a guide and healer for me, helped me feel the fear. She would resonate with the emotion and say the truth that “you’re holding so many big changes at the same time.”

When you’re within it, you can’t even see it. She said “it’s completely understandable that you would have a lot of fear and trepidation coming up, because you’re facing so many changes at once. That doesn’t mean it’s not the right choice.” I would go into self-doubt or  go into intellectual pros and cons.

That’s where the kinship comes in. I think of Clearness Committees that Quakers have, where you’ll have a choice and you have a small group that comes together and really sits with you in it. Together,  you can almost pull it apart. I’ve been doing a lot with a process called constellations where you can visualize, okay, there’s the fear of this, there’s the fear of that and even spreading them out and putting them on paper.

The value is that all the feelings and issues are not just held within you- there’s value in the space between us and someone else saying “oh I can feel that would be heavy” or “I could feel that would create anxiety.” It gets it out of our own inner tangle, so you can see it and hold it a little more easily.

Returning to the story. I want to bring in this question of how we know the right choice. What are ways of knowing? I grew up in a white European, a more academic intellectual culture, where the way you know is to read books. It is about science and intellect.

It has taken me decades to understand that you can know through your heart. You can know through your body. Those are ways to know something is true. That wasn’t a language I was taught early on. I remember making some big decisions and my stomach was absolutely in knots. Today, I would recognize that is information, I need to pause. But at the time I would just override the feelings with my head. Look away. Keep going.

When you’re coaching people in these big choice moments, how do you help them access more ways of knowing?

Tenneson Woolf: With some of the folks that I get to work with, I think we need to create permission to slow down. There’s so much pressure, that is centuries old, maybe longer than that, about what it means to be smart, what it means to be efficient, and what it means to do your job well.

Those are all like noble things, right? Often, I’m a person who’s saying “Maybe if we just looked at this from a few different vantage points.” Even that sounds a little too tactical. I continue to look for the right language. I hope the right language comes out that fits the spirit of the moment. It’s trying to give permission to slow down.

I want to say, “I bet there’s other ways that we might find intuition in around the things that we care about here or around the decisions we are making.” I have a part of me that just wants to move fast and wants to move quickly.  I can relate to some of those patterns, but I also relate to some lost arts of a slower discernment. Let’s take the language of ‘slow’ out and say perhaps a more multi-dimensional discernment.

Beth Tener: I like that.

Tenneson Woolf: A different kind of listening.

Beth Tener: I like how you said the multi-dimensional discerning. I think of the metaphor of getting out of the box. The box of what was acceptable, and particularly in a culture that’s so ‘go, go, go’, which  prizes getting stuff done. There’s an impatience if we’re just talking, it’s not getting us anywhere.

There are treasures in these other ways of knowing, that can help us gain insight or a sense of what to do next.  If we recognize that they are ways of knowing that are useful, there are gifts and treasures that we can explore, if we go outside that box,

Tenneson Woolf: Doesn’t it feel Beth, like we share some facilitation approaches and share some personal life also? We have stories to share with one another. It feels to me like so often my job, and my desire as a human being occupying a body and living on the planet at this moment, is that I want to expand the range of possibility. I get all grumpy and angry sometimes when I feel we’re just taking on something here in such a narrow way.

A couple of weeks ago, I worked with a group of pastors. Over the last five years, I have been faculty for a next generation leadership initiative. It’s a cohort group of 14 or so people and there’s four cohorts. Between 55 and 60 people participate in the program, and it’s a week-long.

In this particular year, there was some real grief in the room. Without going in the full story, it had just arisen from implementation of policy done with unintended disregard of humanity. There’s just a lot that was going on. The grief was strong enough in this group that it seemed like it was not possible, or it could even be harmful, to just continue on like, or to try and sweep it under the rug.

This particular cohort really needed some space so that they could be in a conversation about what’s happening here. What is ours to do about this or to not do about it?

For me and my colleague, we did our best to just adapt. We didn’t put up a wall and say, “well, that’s not the program.” We just rolled with it. We created a space where listening could begin or continue in another way. My colleague and I got the chairs in a circle, with a candle lit in the middle.

We’re set up for simple things, but it was really encouraging the space where we can not only hear each other, but also hear ourselves in a way that doesn’t feel like it’s combative. We are trying to be humans in a discerning way here. Why not offer space so that that’s more likely to happen?

We got to do some of that. The pastors that were there appreciated it. I think it changed how that week unfolded. It took it out of an either/or scenario. This program is going forward or this program is not going forward. It gave more room to flesh more of that out. People could come up with more thoughtful, more heartful, more belly-filled responses and that helped the situation.

Beth Tener: Thank you for sharing that. It reminds me of a story that Nancy Gabriel told in the very first episode of the Living Love podcast about a school where there had been a lot of conflict and tension. She held a circle and gave everyone time to talk and hear each other about the question, What did we learn here (from a difficult time they just came through)?

Like my tangled ball of yarn picture, it’s the space where all those threads can be seen. The hard things, the grief can be witnessed and felt. When we think we have to brush by all that, there is a harshness.

So I honor the way you could find the right timing and pace. The words coming up for me are “you let it breathe.”

Tenneson Woolf: Yeah, thank you. Some pattern of that is true in my personal life. When I’m working something and one of those inner fears comes knocking again,  I depend on some things. Sometimes  I need a friend. I just reached out to another colleague earlier this morning. It’s personal, but it’s a little professional too. It’s the instinct to reach out to a friend. Sometimes that’s a mentor and sometimes that’s an elder kind of person. Those are important for me.

When I’m working something, I need some quiet too. I need to get myself out of the noise. Sometimes that means just sit quietly for a while or go sit on the porch or go lay on the ground. I need those kinds of things. Go for a walk. Those are all parts of some collective, integrated ways to know.

Beth Tener: Let me circle back to the story. I was sitting with all these choices and not sure what to do and having a lot of fear about it. At that point, I was into the book, The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. She had this morning practice of writing three pages. I found that helpful. You write out all your worries and then it’s like a clear, pure stream comes in after you get all that busy mind part out. I feel like good listening can help you get to that as well. Brenda Ueland, who Simon quoted last time, said, “it’s only by expressing all that is inside that pure and purer streams come.”

For me, in all that discerning and talking with friends and talking with Greta, I got to the point of clarity that I loved him and I really wanted to be with him. Ultimately, that was more important than whether we were married, which was a really important thing to come to. And I did care about being married.

I had a good conversation with Greta about it, She suggested I state it to Rick this way, “I love you. It would mean a lot to be married and you know that’s important to me.” And then just leave it and let him rise to it, in a sense. But not say, if we don’t get married by this day…

Tenneson Woolf: Ultimatums don’t fly too well, do they?

Beth Tener: There was something in being able to see what was important. We have to do that personally and with groups – this sorting through the priorities and how they affect each other. I had that conversation with Rick and we kept moving forward on living together. Then we had this amazing opportunity that opened up with a friend of his who owns some land in New Hampshire. Rick really wanted to build a house. That had been his dream for a long time. I don’t have to go into all the details of the story, but it basically ended up that we had a chance to get this land and decided to start to build a green home together.

Not that building a house made it easier, because the stress of all that expense and decisions (and I am not a shopper.) When you build something, it’s like you’re buying the house in a zillion small decisions. They all involve your values and money and choices. So it was a lot to navigate.

But this idea of staying in the question and staying in the “not knowing” –  there’s a dance, right? “Okay, I got clarity on this part. But I still am not sure about those questions.” I remember Greta saying, “you have so many decisions stacked at the same time. With your lease is coming up, what if you moved up to the area near where you’re building the house, for example, get an apartment up there for a while?”

I could see how I liked the area. That was one choice. That’s what I decided to do. It helped a lot because, thankfully, I loved living in that area. Instead of what you’re about to step into being conceptual, I lived into an action that embodied what the next phase of my life would be. I could see how I liked it.

There’s a model from Berkana Institute called the Two Loops model of change. One loop is the current status quo you’re in, or the current system that’s fading, and then the other loop rising up is the next chapter or the new system that’s growing. There’s a whole lot involved in stepping between them. In this example, I took a small step that gave me more information from a lived experience rather than just weighing it in my worried mind. Curious what you think about that.

Tenneson Woolf: In the Two Loops model, what runs on the bottom curve of the new system growing, is some steps, including: Name, Connect, Nurture, Illuminate. Those are a progression, but the Naming part is an experiment – people, in other words, taking a step.

Sometimes we need to do things that have a grand plan. And that’s been well used in some places and overused also. So we encourage the freedom to just take a step, just try the apartment up in New Hampshire. I think is a really important piece of it. I have found it useful and freeing.

I want to say freeing, freeing within my own constitution, my own soul to say, “I don’t know about the whole of everything here.” I guess that reveals that I have some voice in me that says, “you should know the whole of everything here,” right?  But to just have the freedom to say, just take a step.

I loved it when you said in your own discovery “I love him.” That’s what was the centering thing. If that meant marriage, if that meant an apartment,  like identfying that, oh my gosh, that’s potent and powerful.

When you talked about the Artists Way and the journaling that you were doing. three pages and, oh, how do I feel about this move? Where you can scribble freely or type freely, however you chose to do it. To me, what’s behind that, Beth, is that it matters. I would name this as principle. That’s been fruitful to me, right? It matters that we have relationship with our inner.

That doesn’t mean resolve everything, right? In your example there, you were just finding it as a medium to be able to maybe get some of that inner out onto a page. It matters that we have awareness, some level of awareness and some level of relationship with our inner.  As a journaler, I also find that to be immensely valuable. It sometimes gives me a place to park a thought or wander through a thought, wander through a feeling, and let it live there on the page for a little while.

Going back in your story to some of the worries, to me it feels incredibly natural. To have worries like, is this the right relationship? Is this the right one? Are we making a move too fast? Or is this too much? Or any of those things. And it might be that the answer to some of those questions is, yes, you are, or no, you shouldn’t do this. But I think, not only are we having a relationship with our inner, or part of the relationship with the inner is, to worry.

To me, it’s not surprising that a worry would exist. I think part of my learning is to recognize, of course, there’s going to be those worries. But then also distinguishing, is this a 99 percent of the time worry, or is it a 3 percent of the time worry. Coming into relationship with the worries that we hold, I have found to be a whole lot healthier way to not feel like I have to suppress a bunch of stuff.

Beth Tener: It’s really true. We keep bouncing between the personal and the group work, but that’s life. And that’s partly what I love in this podcast is a lot of the conversations can go between those levels.

There’s a method that Nancy and I use with groups when we’re facilitating. It comes out of a tradition called Deep Democracy and it’s called the Soft Shoe Shuffle, if you’ve done this one.

We were working with a collaborative network and you could tell there was a lot of different issues going on and some tension. Things weren’t really moving forward because there was a lot going on underneath the surface. We had been with the group long enough that we had some trust.

We invited people to stand in the room and one person will say, “I sense a tension in the group about [this]…” and they will name it. Then if anyone else feels that too, they shuffle slowly over and stand near the person. It’s in your body. No one has to say anything, but you get a sense of the group and who else feels the tension. Then sometimes someone would name something they felt was really concerning and very few people were feeling it. They see, “oh, I guess that’s not in the group.” We had one where there was a lot of concern that there wasn’t a lot of communication between the young people and the older folks in the network. I think that was news to a bunch of people, but a third of the group was concerned about it.

That could then be something we go talk about, but that idea of making it visible physically allows you to sense what is the worry in the room, right? The classic idea that, once it’s named, I think you were saying this earlier, once, the loop as we go towards the new is ‘name.’

Tenneson Woolf: Name, connect, nurture, illuminate. It’s really about how to be with other people and go together.

Beth Tener: At least name it and then you’re connecting to others. So that feels right as we move into the choice, right?

Tenneson Woolf:  I like the Soft Shoe Shuffle because I feel it in my feet, sort of involuntarily rubbing them on the floor here where I’m sitting. We did something like that with this group of pastors where I think the common part is there’s a pressure valve release, That can come from just the honest speaking of the phrase, I sense: attention, shuffle, shuffle, shuffle, right?  In our version of something like that, we actually used a World Cafe format, which is small table conversations that you then mix, sharing the same question with one another. One of the questions was about, he burdens of being a pastor. So this is a space amongst pastors, nobody needs to hold up a public persona or the way that that tends to happen, but just have a little voice of: here’s what’s hard.

The other part of that Cafe, because we can shift the questions a little bit, was: what’s the blessing of being a pastor? Some of those things could come out, but I think being given the invitation to honestly speak and witness what are some of the things that are challenging and know that in a World Cafe formula, that’s bounded a little bit.

It’s not going to be a three hour conversation that runs that long. It’s going to be, oh, we’ve got 15, 20 minutes for this. I think that folks found it helpful to be able to just have that kind of honest speak. Again, pressure valve relief of something that already exists. It just needs a little release.

Beth Tener: That’s a good way to say it. The pressure valve relief. I had an image the other day with a project that I’m working on with a group that has a lot of big decisions to make and it’s a new group and there’s a timeline. Remember a parachute? Did you ever do that thing in gym where you all the kids circle around one side of a parachute and you’ve like lifted up and down? In this case, it felt like the group was under a big blanket of pressure and we’d like to just  lift the parachute up over the group. We were thinking of creating an exercise where we invite the six core team members to each name the unique pressures they were under.

Tenneson Woolf: Beautiful.

Beth Tener: We just get them out and put them on a piece of paper, a little rock towards the center of the table. They all get named because when they’re not named, they’re just there on us. Right? Sometimes when we name things like that example in the Soft Shoe Shuffle, you have an assumption.

Something’s a big concern. Then you talk it through and actually turns out not to be right. But until you really have the space and the time, as you said, to unfold all the dimensions of a decision, we can’t get there.

Tenneson Woolf: Yeah, and, I think you might be looping back to that, Beth, because you framed this as something around big decisions and ways of knowing. We’re both speaking to a few examples of something different than calling for a vote or much more rigid way of saying, well, what are we doing so that we can move on and get on to the next hundred things?

I think that we’re talking about ways that invite a bit more humanity, not less, and a bit more truth telling, not less. With this group of pastors, one of the principles that I ended up speaking to them was this notion of if you want a system to be healthy, including people systems, connect it to more of itself.

Beth Tener: Love it.

Tenneson Woolf: That has a way of reframing, like, why are we doing these partner conversations? Or why are we doing the Soft Shoe Shuffle? Or why are we doing this World Cafe format now? It’s all about creating more connection, not less.

Then let’s go back to the alchemize, because that’s just a fun word to work with. Right? The alchemy of things. I’m drawn to it because I think there is a kind of magic that can happen. A kind of foundational change that can happen when we create even just the tiniest conditions for people to be in relationship together. That has a way of changing how we go about big decisions together and individually, and it has a way of changing about how we come to claim our knowing, claim our wisdom with one another.
That feels exciting to me.

Beth Tener: I want to pick up on your connection because it’s also in my head what Simon was saying. We have the fight, flight, freeze response as human beings when we don’t feel safe or where we’re triggered. The foundation is healthy social engagement. Healthy social connection is also what builds trust and relaxes everybody’s nervous systems and gets their higher functioning brain freely working rather than back in yes/no, or it’s either one or the other.

If we have the time and space to use multiple ways of knowing to get at something. In some processes I love, we do all this thinking and learning together, interview people, go see stuff, and then we stop altogether and have a day or two of silence or take a break and then come back in a week.

A friend of mine calls it titration. Like we’re going to go and work it for a while and then we’re just going to take a pause. That’s what Rick and I did. We had some heavy conversations around – are we going to get married or not? We worked it for a little while. I knew I loved him and I’m just going to set it aside for a while and see.

As we think of how we create cultures and ways of living together and making collective decisions, we have to strip away this pressure filled–yes/no–we have to decide in very low trust environments.
Trying to make big decisions in low trust environments quickly is just a bad idea. That is the way we design a lot of things.

Tenneson Woolf: I know some people use this more, I’ve been resistant to use this kind of phrase, but it amplifies harm. It does. There’s a truth telling in that also, that is not to complain about every other thing that’s done.

Maybe there’s some ways that in contemporary society, in the great changes, in the navigating transitions that we’re in, it’s important to name that kind of truth. Wait a minute, what we’ve been up to has caused a lot of harm. I’m not one who believes that we can live in a harmless world. Harm happens, and we have to develop some ability to be with all of that.

I do feel like we’re, this is a little bit soapbox, I feel like we’re in, and in contemporary times here, we’re actually getting more visibility on some of the bigger term harms that have happened that include colonization, slavery, imposition of only the capitalist model, any of the things that have been imposed that heavily, and that includes on lots of groups that have been oppressed also.

I feel like we’re living in a time where revolution has helped to create some starts, so that we can be in a different kind of truth telling and honesty with one another. I feel like this is where people like you, and people like me, and many others, we bring some formats so that we can hold ourselves to that accountability with one another in an interactive way, rather than just an imposing way. Something feels important in that.

Beth Tener: If we care to honor the needs of everybody, which, of course, those horrendously oppressive systems really didn’t care about how they were harming a lot of people… I think of it as, we can take the time to ask and listen to hear what the potential consequences might be and talk through them rather than live through them. If we care to prevent them and redesign and say, “Oh, if we were to do this and it would harm you that way, let’s say, Well, what if we did it this way?”

Tenneson Woolf: It links back into both the personal story that you’re weaving into multiple episodes here. And some of that personal current life experience that I’m naming with a sweetheart. Whenever we are able to loop into another layer of what centers us here. What do we think that means or looks like? Ah, love centers us here. Kinship for that matter. I’m really drawn to your use of that word, but love centers us here. Could we even just be the tiniest amounts of deliberate around what we think that means and what we think that looks like with one another and within ourselves? It feels to me like something important and really helpful is happening.

Beth Tener: Yeah, it’s beautiful. I call that also like the rituals of relationship. What do we keep coming back to?

Well, we are coming to the end of our time so I want to wrap up the story of what we decided at that point. So we did decide to move to New Hampshire, I moved up to Exeter, and we we stepped into what I call the Year of Big Checks (back when you used to write checks.) We hired an architect and a builder and started going in together to build this house and got the foundation in the ground in the fall.
That upped my angst of not being married because it was so much tension.

On October 20th, Rick picked the time at 10:20 in the morning, 10:20 on 10/20 (October 20th). I had this funny thing that I would always look at my watch at 10:20. I didn’t know why. He knew that so he orchestrated for me to be standing with him next to the foundation hole in the ground and asked me to marry him.

Tenneson Woolf: Oh my gosh.

Beth Tener: 10:20 on 10/20. It was really sweet. I did not see it coming. It was this beautiful thing because he knew how much it mattered to me. So that’s where that story ends for today. We’ll see what happens next. I want to thank you again, Tenneson. It’s been just a real pleasure and insightful time to be talking with you about this topic. It’s near and dear to both our hearts.

Tenneson Woolf: Thanks, Beth. I appreciate it. It’s fun to go into the humanness of it all and that is in friendship. That is sometimes the deeply personal, it turns out to be more of the universal kind of stuff. Thanks for the ways that you invite such a depth and such an inquiry in such a personal way.

Beth Tener: Thank you and do you have any upcoming events or books or anything you’d like to share with our listeners?

Tenneson Woolf: I do. Thank you for that. There’s oodles of things that you can find on my website, Tennesonwoolf.com. There’s two books of poetry in particular that I find lift my heart, and oh my gosh, they bring me alive. They are some of that artistic expression and, and navigation that I use. So you can find them on Amazon. One is called Most Mornings and the other is called In My Nature. If you search my name on Amazon, it’ll show up that way.

I do workshops and things also announce those on my website. Currently, I’m doing this little series of pop up workshops that are the topic is not known until about three weeks in advance or maybe a month in advance. There are things that I want to bring forward that I hope contribute to the field of facilitation, as well as like the deep humanness that is part of that. If folks are interested, that would give them a little place to come explore. Thanks for letting me name those.

Beth Tener: I’ve come to those on Zoom and they’re wonderful. Thank you again, Tenneson and thank you all the listeners for being here.