Learning with Friends: Reflecting on Episodes 1-4, Season 3 with Nancy Gabriel and Bruce Nayowith

Transcript (lightly edited for clarity)

Beth Tener:

Welcome back to the Living Love podcast and we are about halfway through season three. My name is Beth Tener and we have a tradition here of doing an episode called Learning with Friends. Today, I have with me Bruce Nayowith and Nancy Gabriel. We will be reviewing the first four episodes of season three.

The theme of season three is called Belonging: What it Means to Feel At Home Here. I’m going to introduce Bruce and Nancy and recap the episodes. The idea behind this theme is that in a lot of workplaces, classrooms, communities, families, we have situations where people are feeling isolated or unsafe or not welcome. The individualism of our culture or breakdowns of healthy trust in communities can lead people to lack a feeling of warm connection with others or be in a state we might call ‘alarmed aloneness.’

How do we restore healthy social connections in a way that allows people to really think creatively learn, adapt, and be connected in whatever environment they’re in? We’ll be exploring that from a number of different dimensions.

We got a lot of great insights on these kind of questions from our guests and I look forward to talking with Nancy and Bruce today about that. So welcome Nancy and Bruce.

Bruce Nayowith:

Thank you. Good to be here again.

Nancy Gabriel:

Yeah, nice to be here with you both.

Beth Tener:

If you’re a regular listener, you will have heard about Nancy and Bruce before. Nancy Gabriel works with me in New Directions Collaborative. She’s a facilitator and has worked in the fields of social change and how groups interact, social equity and justice issues. She’s also currently the program director of the Albert Schweitzer Fellows Program, where graduate students work on projects working on social determinants of health.

Nancy Gabriel:

That’s right. And I’m the director of the New Hampshire/Vermont Program. It’s a national program.

Beth Tener:

Then Bruce Nayowith is a longtime friend and colleague and we’ve collaborated and worked together. Bruce practices and researches many different methods of how human beings are human together and connect and create good relational connections. He’s taken a lot of different courses and explored many fields of practice. He is a former emergency room doctor.

I value how he brings a biological, embodied perspective to these questions because, as we’ll explore today, a lot of what it means to feel safe isn’t just a cognitive intellectual thing, it’s a felt sense in our bodies.

I look forward to having both of you in the conversation today.

So just to recap the episodes that we’ll be talking about with Learning with Friends, the first episode “Belonging: What It Means Feel at Home Here” was with Bruce.

We were broadly looking at how do we create group experiences where people feel at home, what are the contexts that bring out the best in people? It might have been the longest show notes I had because Bruce dropped in many ideas and stories and things from neuroscience and all kinds of fields of practice. We were looking at relational connections and trust.

The second episode was with Ria Baeck, who is a facilitator and an author of a book, and a practice called Collective Presencing. She’s based in Belgium. We looked “At Home with Change: How Groups Co-Create” and Ria as someone who’s really experimenting with “how do we create ways that people feel safe to speak up in a group and what’s the leading edge of what’s possible when we take really fertile, trusting environments and how can groups really enter like a flow state where they’re tapping into a larger collective intelligence.” That was a great conversation.

The third episode was with Emily Daniels, who is the founder of The Regulated Classroom. And that one was called “Classrooms Where Students and Teachers Thrive”. Emily’s someone who’s a former school counselor and really took to heart a lot of the science and the understanding of the neuroscience of what’s called polyvagal theory, which is fight, flight, freeze and what’s happening in our body when we don’t feel safe. She really took that to heart and developed a whole framework and set of trainings to teach teachers how to take that information and create a classroom where the whole group’s nervous system could stay regulated, which allows there to be a fuller sense of community and safety. So it’s a better environment for learning, both for the students and the teachers.

The fourth episode was with Rosa Zubizarreta about “Transforming Conflict into Creative Responses” and recognizing that conflict is a part of life and we often try to avoid it or split into polarized sides where no one feels at home anymore because things are falling apart. That was a great conversation about what are models, both public engagement as well as at the citizen or the personal level, of how can we come together when we’re trying to make decisions together and figure things out. How can we do that in a way that creates psychological safety around the process so that we can get much higher levels of collective wisdom for the way we make decisions and think about how we deal with conflict? I know all of us facilitators and people who work with groups… that’s a huge question for a lot of us these days: how to hold the conflict piece.

In the first episode with Bruce, we talked about this idea of creating pockets of a different experience. For example, the Pocket Project with Thomas Huebl that looks at how can we create little pods of people that are trying different ways of working together, holding a different sort of consciousness.

I remember one time doing a charity bike ride from Boston to New York for AIDS and it was three days. I’ve always remembered the opening speech by the guy who organized it. He said, “We have three days together. We can create, we’re a traveling community for three days. We can set this way of being kind to each other. We can set these values for these three days.” It’s so easy to kind of go through life critiquing the systems that exist or why are people this way. But I heard both in the Pocket Project, certainly in Ria’s experiment with trying different circles, Emily’s work and Rosa’s… they’re all people who are saying, “okay, what would work? How do we try a different way of being together.”

I’m curious for each of you, what did you hear about those pockets of trying something different? What inspired you in these episodes from those stories?

Bruce Nayowith:

First of all, it feels very evolutionary, right? Like novelty develops somewhere or something brilliant happens or a best practice comes out of somewhere. And then ideally by induction and you know, affinity, other people start to say, “Oh my God, that was brilliant, we want to do that too.” So the inspiration comes in through these little pockets and then ideally it spreads. You know, it’s almost like different kind of pockets for different things.

Ria’s work is “what’s possible in a group of people who have self-awareness?” “What can we create together as a space or as a presence?” She spoke of the magic in the middle.

Emily’s is the Regulated Classroom. “My school might be crazy, but in my classroom it is not like that. I’m going to take charge.” There’s a way of being with things, understanding the nervous system, the four categories she has: Connector, activators, settlers and affirmations. It’s a way that I can understand things.

Then in the Dynamic Facilitation space of 12 to 20 people where Rosa works, there’s a special container where people are listened to by a skilled facilitator in a special way. And that’s often used for impossible problems. That is the opposite of Ria’s work, where it’s like, “what’s possible if we don’t have any problems, we just drop a question in…“

Beth Tener:

With everyone who wants to be here.

Bruce Nayowith:

Yeah.

Emily says, “Well, we’re supposed to be learning something and so how can we be together in this way that maximizes learning?”

And Rosa’s work is we have some huge issue that’s going to be conflictual.

I liked that the structure of each is different.

I’ll say one more thing that was interesting. Emily has four categories in her work and in Dynamic Facilitation process, people’s contributions go in four different charts. They’re information, opinions, facts, solutions. And there’s a page for concerns about the solutions – why that won’t work.  You don’t put them together. You don’t put the jumper cables together and make sparks. You plug them into different ends of the light bulb and the light bulb goes off, right? There’s concerns and then there’s problem statements. What are we really exploring right now? What is the real question here? And that changes too.

Beth Tener:

Yeah. They can be a spiral and move between those different categories.

Bruce Nayowith:

All of these are ways of structuring experience to maximize what you get from it. It’s not just like, “let’s just all hang out together.” There’s a name for that. It’s called Lord of the Flies. There’s a book about that. There’s some intelligent design and skill even in the talking circle. The design is intelligent, even if you don’t have a facilitator.

Beth Tener:

It sounds like, in these pockets, they’re creating an expanded possibility space.

Bruce Nayowith:

They are. I mean, I’ll add one more thing since I was at a number of these with Rosa. I used to co-teach with her or assist her. She did business workshops. This one was teaching facilitators. About one third of the groups would have some kind of profound luminous experience because the quality of the space was so rich. There was a feeling of not “I”, but the spirit of “we” that emerged by this kind of space was so profound.

I remember at one workshop, this woman came in, and if I remember the details right, she said “I was a member of the council in my organization with the State of Washington, Department of Agriculture” and she said “that experience was so profound that I want to offer that to other people in my organization. That’s why I’m here for the training.” It’s like I want to be able to create these spaces so people know it’s possible. Once you know it’s possible it raises the bar.

Beth Tener:

Yeah. That’s the value of these pockets, right? And one of the values.

Any thoughts that you have Nancy on that? Thank you, Bruce, for that summary.

Nancy Gabriel:

I don’t think I have anything to add to that.

Beth Tener:

With that, I’m going to turn to Bruce since you know the first episode well (you were in it), you talked about the recognition that many of the systems we’re in affect us, the social environments we’re in, and that past trauma is kind of rippling through. And you said, “trauma often creates too much rigidity or too much chaos.”

I’m curious, what did you hear in these episodes about how you can work with groups or set the context where we can help a group move out of that “too rigid or chaotic space”?

Bruce Nayowith:

Wow, that’s a big question. Don Kalsched in his book Trauma and the Soul quotes somebody else with this lovely quote that says, “trauma collapses the transitional space.” And what does that mean? Anybody in transition needs a transitional space. But basically, it collapses the possibility field or “I’m here and I want to go there, but there’s this fuzzy place in between.” Trauma tends to collapse that.

Since we’re not going to be trauma therapists with the people that we’re working with, it’s not about trying to heal the trauma directly. But there’s things that groups can do or facilitators or people can do to make space for possibilities. One is simply pausing. Pausing and opening. Pausing and closing is called stonewalling. It’s one of the four apocalyptic things to do in a relationship if you want it to go badly.

The value pausing and opening is that a lot of trauma has to do with this reactivity. It’s either chaotic and crazy or it’s really rigid. So creating space, for example, making space between what somebody says and then by reflecting… it’s almost like it keeps the positive and negative jumper cables from shorting out.

But there’s a pausing and there’s a protecting that is helpful so that the trauma doesn’t get so activated, because in a system that’s crazy, people start to activate stuff for people. When people feel safer, it doesn’t push those buttons and you don’t have to worry about it so much in a work setting or some other setting.

Beth Tener:

Yeah. When I asked Ria Baeck what allows a group to be in a space where everyone feels at home and you can have an expansive conversation. She said it’s so important to keep judgment out of the space. When you sit in a circle and invite people to share and then it’s quiet and you go to the next person and you don’t crosstalk. She said “it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t all cohere in a sense, you just keep holding it, allow a lot of information and points of view and emotion to come in and you just hold it and then something, the field or the group, it somehow shifts and finds its way.”

Rosa was saying something similar about how you just keep hearing from every person, and you don’t always have to judge or put it in a box or say right or wrong. It allows something more to show up. Like the possibilities can expand rather than being shut down. Curious your thoughts on that, Nancy?

Nancy Gabriel:

The way I learned circle and how I practice it is you have the listening piece, it’s not a talking piece. And as it’s going around I might listen out loud, say what comes, and then I put it on the ground on the floor in between me and the other person. And that’s a pause. And it’s really a space for ‘other ways of knowing’ to come in. That’s how I’ve always thought about it. And then when that person’s ready, they pick it up and they speak or listen out loud.

I’m wondering, as I hear you talk, is that also kind of an example of what you just said and a way just having that pause in the circle that’s really structured a way to also help with the regulation?

Bruce Nayowith:

Hmm. I like that. It’s interesting.

One of the things that can happen in groups is that you’re not sure if you’re going to get a chance to talk. Feeling like “I’m not going to belong. I’m not going to be able to contribute.” Not just to be heard but also to offer, to contribute. And there’s often this kind of anxiety and you can feel the group speed up and so anything that kind of slows that down, but also reassures people, “you’ll get a chance, you’re going to have a turn.” And you know, that happens with the talking, with the listening piece in that work. In Dynamic Facilitation that happens because the facilitator listens to one person at a time and makes sure, “do I have this right? If it’s not right, let’s fix it.” And then somebody else wants to argue with them and they’re like, “okay, you’ll have a turn, but I want to make sure I have this and that’s honored and now we’ll come to you.” It’s almost like it keeps them from piling on top of each other.

Beth Tener:

I’ve been thinking about that. You said that trauma contracts the possibility space. I relate that to a story of when I decided to co-found a non-profit with a group of people. Some of founding board members who I didn’t know all that well, frankly. We just came together and said let’s do this together. I remember two people had pretty “difficult, traumatizing experiences” in previous nonprofits. I look back at it now with many more years of experience and I can see that the way that those past events, the way they were self-correcting for what happened before or their own fears or the, “Oh my god, this is going to go south again.” One of them kept saying she was going to get us our 501c3, but she didn’t for six months. She said she was doing it, and it was because of her past traumas. But because we hadn’t created the group environment with enough honesty and other things, certain things were going sideways but we couldn’t talk about it. To me that’s a perfect example of sometimes where the range of options personally or as a group gets narrow because of the past stuff that’s there but not processed. Does that sound right? I’m sure you’ve both probably had that experience.

Nancy Gabriel:

Yeah. For me it’s making me think about some other practices that I do where we say, “when we’re acting from those past traumas, we’re not in current time.” We’re not in that past trauma right now. But it’s still influencing so much how we’re behaving or responding or reacting to a situation. And so, so much of the work can be getting ourselves in current time and reminding ourselves that this isn’t that.

Beth Tener:

I was helping a group that was coming together to do big work together. Often a lot of us had tried big work before and it didn’t work. So, you know, what I now do is early on say, “let’s put all the stories together of all the ones that didn’t work, and just tell the story and write down the pattern and just air that stuff out.” Or even, I think I got it from my friend Curtis Ogden put the question on the table like, “If we really wanted to make sure this one was to fail, what would we do?” Just get it out there. You know, so that it’s not kind of underneath in the stagnant waters creating the narrowing of possibilities.

Nancy Gabriel:

Yeah. I love that. As in a way to bring the group into current time.

Beth Tener:

Into current time. Exactly.

Beth Tener:

We were also hearing from Emily and Ria about kind of this need for self-awareness. In Emily’s training, that she’s really training people to notice in your own body, am I starting what she called it… defense mobilized. Am I shutting down? Am I dissociating? Am I not here? And that feels like a really important part of the personal part of a being in a group. Being aware of your own sense of safety and then also can you tune into what the group needs?

Any thoughts about the personal self-awareness practices around feeling at home in a group or creating space for groups to feel at home?

Bruce Nayowith:

In a way it’s like there’s self-awareness, there’s good structure, and there’s the facilitator skill and their awareness. And each of those are important.

It’s almost like whenever (I wish I could do this more often) I just catch myself saying, “Ooh, I’m speeding up. If I’m speeding up, I’m not in my most creative mode.” The Gottmans used to do this… very famous marriage counselors who’d video couples for 20 years and sometimes when they do therapy they’ll put pulse oximeters on the couples, each of the two partners’ fingers. And whenever the pulse rate goes above, I think it’s 90, maybe it’s a hundred, they pause and they say, “we’re just going to pause and breathe here because nothing constructive is going to happen if your pulse is higher than that.”

It’s really interesting. That’s of course the level of heart rate, but that’s associated with a brain state. And you know, you’re not going to be thinking while you’re in reactivity. Anything you say is going to just be like, throwing gas on a fire so we’re just going to wait.

So the self-awareness without the pulse oximeter… maybe we should just all have pulse oximeters in a group. But it’s like, “Oh, how am I feeling? What’s going on? Ooh, I’m talking too fast.” The more of that awareness we have, if we’re not too embarrassed and if the group culture allows it, pause and say, “I’m feeling a little jumpy here. Is it okay if we just pause?” Or something where it’s realized that actually is deepening the quality of the group experience.

Nancy Gabriel:

Man, if we could normalize that.

So a lot of it is our own ability to be self-aware and that’s a skill that can be cultivated over time. It can be helped if in the facilitation, there’s pause, there’s moments of saying, “okay, everybody just check-in right now. How’s your body? You know, what are you feeling?” And then normalizing, “well, oh man, my stomach, I got butterflies right now.” And then it’s like, “okay, well let’s stop now and give everybody a minute or take some breaths or walk around the block so we can just take a pause. And take some deep breaths or have some practices that the group agrees to, to do to help get everybody back into their bodies.”

For me, I disassociate when I get in those moments, and I can’t track, and I can’t respond.

Beth Tener:

Yeah. I loved, there was a part when Emily was talking about when they went down into the… I forget…. It was like the yuck zone or something where she gets the teachers talking about all the things in the system that make you crazy. And then she’s said,” and then we’ll just put on music and get on our rhythm sticks.” She would bring the whole group into an activity that would get them back into a better state of mind. Her approach offers a lot of practices that you can make part of your culture.

Nancy Gabriel:

Well and actually that’s an example of what you were saying that you asked the group if something was going to fail. What do we do? I mean in some ways she was bringing out all the things, right? In the same way, the challenges. But what she adds then is the rhythm piece and so she adds the thing to clear it in a way. Clear the energy. I’m fascinated by that.

Beth Tener:

You can just hear the spirit of it because it’s like, “oh yeah, we’re all in this together and we’re all going to smile and laugh and go back to music and like bringing in also these other elements.”

You talked about ways of knowing Nancy, but I also think it’s ways of moving energy in a group, right? Our music, nature, breathing, you know, all these other things that often when we think we’re doing “work”, we can only be in our heads like a “brain on a stick.”

Nancy Gabriel:

Right. Those are all other ways of knowing what you’ve just listed.

Beth Tener:

I wanted to bring in as another topic that Ria said… She was talking about “how do we create the conditions for people to work together in these sorts of collaborations to cohere and people to stick with it?”

One of the things she said is in all the collaboratives and networks she’s seen, what most activates that to happen is when we put collaborative learning at the center when people are coming together to be learning and trying things. I’ve really been thinking about that in my own work because so often we’re in a space that’s very project-oriented and you know, we’re here to get things done and we have grant proposals or we have business objectives and we’re here to do, do, do. And then as soon as we’re done with that project, the community kind of falls apart. We don’t always put learning at the center.

I’ve been taking that to heart and trying to think of, “how would we craft a different way of going about change where we put learning at the center?” I’m curious, in your own experience with communities that learn, and Nancy, that’s primarily what you’re focused on with graduate students, so how did that idea resonate for you?

Nancy Gabriel:

It’s funny because I was just reading a final report of two medical students at the University of Vermont, on the project they did. One of the things they said was, “I came to understand that just hanging out and connecting is valuable and impactful” and out of this whole report, I pulled that out and I said exactly what you just said, Beth… “of all my years of doing social change work, the doing without the connecting and the relational piece means that when you leave, very likely the thing you were doing goes with you.”

But the way that they approach this project by spending the time to build relationships and connect and they were intentional about leaving a structure for it to continue… those things together, it will continue. So I think it’s putting learning at the center, I think it’s also putting connecting at the center. If we focused our work now in the relational field and relationship and have it be relationally oriented, I think there’s a field of possibility there that would be fun to explore.

Beth Tener:

Welcome your thoughts, Bruce. That’s a great example, Nancy, thank you.

Bruce Nayowith:

I like that. I’ve heard of like single loop, double loop, and triple loop learning. Single loop learning is “how do we get this done?” And you know, then there’s another level of like, “how are we working together?” But also like “what are we learning about ourselves and each other”, you know? And kind of asking that reflexive question along the way, if that’s valued. What do we learn about working together? This is different from what you’re saying with the connecting part. I’m just going to go to the mindfulness. That is a separate thing. But what are we learning about working together? Like you said earlier, I think Nancy you said like “just kind of taking your temperature, how’s everybody doing here? Let’s check in.” And building that into the process.

Nancy Gabriel:

I so agree. And in the fellowship program, they do monthly reports which are reflection-oriented, asking the kinds of questions you were just sharing, Bruce. When I have to do that reflection, I can feel “what I having to do this for, you know?” But when you’re done and you can see the learning through those reflections, that’s where a lot of the magic happens.

Beth Tener:

There’s something to the mirroring and having someone deeply listen to you as you’re learning. We talk about kind of “learning out loud” or bringing the learning back to the center. And I think of Bruce and I, my friendship with Simon, some of you might have heard our episode called Love Is Listening. The three of us were interested in learning similar things about how change happens and systemic approaches. We kept a weekly space to hold that learning space together and it was always like, “oh, you went and did this experience, tell us about it.” Just last week I was debriefing a whole intense trip, and you were listening and linking it back to things we’d talked about before. Other times someone else might have something or we just get going on a topic.

So to me, back to my bigger theme here of kinship and “how do we rebuild kinship and collaboration and community”, the space for reflection and meaning making and sharing stories… like that’s fundamental DNA of human community that we often bypass, right? I mean that’s what we need more pockets for, I guess. Right?

Bruce Nayowith:

It really is very evolutionary. I mean at least if you believe the evolutionary theory, right? Like, you know, whatever it was that came together and then it started to form little pockets and then these became those and then those became… or it’s like you’ve quoted, it was Elizabet Sahtouris, I think, with the butterfly, with the imaginal cells, you have these little discs and then they become cells as the…

Beth Tener:

Caterpillar breaks down. I guess it’s the imaginal cells are the beginnings of the butterfly and the caterpillar’s DNA is fighting them in the soup of the breaking down caterpillar until the cells of the butterfly start linking up and getting stronger and stronger. It’s a great metaphor for it, these learning communities.

It’s interesting and very timely because I was just in a meeting this morning about creating a local collaborative project where we put collaborative learning at the center to get many different organizations who work in a similar location to work together. Instead of starting with meetings going, “what are we going to do together?” we’re asking, “what if we did a bunch of learning together about how to do good process, how to deal with conflict and start with building the field of connection via learning and then see what happens?”

At the end of our meeting, I asked what was a highlight for today, to reflect on our process together. I appreciated it when one of the people said, “we had a lot of honest feedback on some of the ideas presented and I don’t always hear people in meetings being that honest about what works.” And this comes back to the safety and whether you feel at home in a group. If they don’t, people just say, “yeah, it’s fine.” But no one’s really speaking what’s true. So, I felt really good about that in terms of what we’d already created, that people could speak up, raise concerns, question timing, and it was received well. We evolved the idea. So that is another piece to what it means to feel safe in a group.

Nancy Gabriel:

I can’t remember if we’ve talked about this before, but one of the teams that I was a part of that was one of my most magical team experiences. We always ended every meeting with a checkout and it was about processing content. So it could be process or content. If you had anything to say about processing content or content so that you had a space, if somebody said something that was kind of “ouchie” in the meeting but you weren’t able to respond right in that moment, it was a container and there was an agreement. The group agreed that it would say positive things, easy things, and hard things to each other. I make an agreement with you that if you do something that upsets me, I am going to tell you and you make an agreement with me that if I tell you that you will take it in as best you can. And so really it was amazing because you could at the end say, “Ugh, you know, Beth, when you said such and such, I felt like you dismissed or you were whatever, you know?” There’s so much safety and honesty developed in that group because we had just a simple little structure and if you didn’t have anything to say, there was nothing to say.

Beth Tener:

But you held a space for it. Rosa had mentioned that idea of having a conflict management system that you’ve agreed very much like what you’re saying Nancy, that we will agree. Yeah, you may go vent and process with someone else, but you agree you’ll go back and talk to the person, right? Yeah.

Nancy Gabriel:

Yeah. That is different than this, but yes, it is.

Beth Tener:

Reminded structure.

Nancy Gabriel:

Yep. And this was also a place where you could say appreciation too. A structure for appreciation   is super important for feeling seen and safe in a group. Oh, they saw that and they, valued that, you know?

Beth Tener:

Because the norm in many European descent cultures is conflict avoidance. The norm becomes, “don’t mention it”, but then it just festers, right?

Nancy Gabriel:

Yeah. It ends up at the water cooler as we used to say or in the cliques and the corners. People are like, “can you believe he said that during the meeting?”

Beth Tener:

Yeah. What I’ve found too is sometimes when you say what you were upset by, it’s often like, “this is why I said it. And I was upset about that.” Oh okay. You know, it hit my tender spot but it actually wasn’t about this, it was about that. So sometimes so often you can clear things up that were a misfire you know, your interpretation wasn’t even accurate. Right?

Nancy Gabriel:

Right. You go up your “ladder of inference” as we say, and what the conclusion you come to about what just happened isn’t at all what was just happening for the other person. And here you have a structure to actually identify that pretty close to the moment.

Beth Tener:

Yeah. I heard at one point about a group that had a norm, they called it “Truth Over Harmony.” It was like, ooh, that’s good.

Nancy Gabriel:

Yeah. What I like about what you were just saying, Beth, about this new group you’re working with is that, at least if I understood it correctly, part of the work will be learning and developing some of those skills and processes together before you get into the kind conversations or the situations that might get challenging or where you really do need to say, “I don’t think that will, you know, say something or give some feedback that maybe feels a little uncomfortable.”

Beth Tener:

Yeah. Building the collaborative muscles together, building the individual muscles of doing this kind of collective work together but doing it without anything big on the line. Not with a rush to get something produced just saying for its sake we’re going to do this well and we’ll talk about the stuff we’re dealing with, but it’s kind of switching it in the order. I’ll report back how it goes. I’m excited to have the chance to try this.

Any thoughts You have Bruce on this topic?

Bruce Nayowith:

No, I’m good. I like what you both said.

Beth Tener:

I would just say one other part that I loved about Emily’s was the focus on the teachers. The years of focus on the students and the students’ behavior… I mean we were going through punishing teachers and giving them pay for performance and all these things as opposed to… you know, no one was looking at the nervous systems of the teachers. It was an invisible area to focus on, with our support and then that made all the difference. So that to me is another useful way of thinking about change is when you look at “where do we usually put all our focus and attention” and “what if we provided resources and support to a different part of the school or the community, what could happen?”

Nancy Gabriel:

Well and it makes me think of that trauma tenant, right? “Nothing about us without us.” That is trauma-informed. So much about what teachers are asked to do is decided without them… they are not part of the decision making or the creation of it. And so, I think that the way she approached that… she was doing trauma-informed work in a trauma-informed way.

Beth Tener:

And it really sounds like it’s going incredibly well, really being received well.

Well, that brings us I think to the end of our time, I want to thank you both. I’ve got thunder and rain happening outside my window. I wonder if you have any final thoughts on what you’ve learned about belonging and what it means to feel at home here from our first four episodes.

Nancy Gabriel:

I think about the themes that run through circle: connection and making space for people to be heard. It’s so simple on one level and yet it just seems so hard. So, it’s just interesting to me that the systems that we’re working within… so often that isn’t at the center. I think that’s the challenging part. We’re all trying to shift so that that is at the center and when it becomes the focus, I feel heartened about the different possibilities that are there. I appreciated the different episodes and what I learned from everyone about what it might mean to shift what’s at the center there.

Beth Tener:

Thank you Nancy. I love this idea of… if you think of a continuum from toxic group environments, up through good enough environments, up through day to day, but the upper realm of what is possible in groups. To me that’s where I get excited about these methods. If we can try more pockets and bring more of the physiological understanding… to me that just feels so radical, the way we understand how important that is that your body is feeling safe, not just cognitively, but just seeing where that science and the creativity around it, that people like Emily and Ria and others are bringing, it really is then what’s the upside potential for healthy groups in community that left me very inspired and wanting to go out and try more stuff, which is the spirit of living love.

So I hope that that’s true for the listeners as well.

And I loved how Emily said that the fields of psychotherapy and therapy have all kinds of tools for this, but most of that has never been brought over into classrooms, right? Or same with us with facilitation. I mean there’s this bridging between fields because, you know, someone right down the street as a therapist might know exactly what to do and you’re stuck in a classroom asking, “how do I handle this?” Right? So that’s the other part that felt really hopeful in in these conversations.

Well, we had a technical glitch and the last little part with Bruce with his final comment didn’t record. Sorry about that!

But I do want to thank the listeners for being here and if you are enjoying these episodes, I would really appreciate it if you could share them and tell friends and colleagues about them. I love recording these conversations and these ideas. I’m not as big on trying to promote them, so would really appreciate if you, the listeners, could do some word of mouth about the podcast if you’re enjoying it.

I also wanted to say I’m on LinkedIn for Beth Tener. Find me there and I am posting a lot of good content and articles and things related to these topics week by week. So hopefully you’ll connect with me there.

In the next episode continuing our theme of “Belonging and What It Means To Feel At Home Here.” We are going to get very practical into homes where people live and in many communities in the US and I think other places we’re in this time where homes are commodities and become like things we buy and sell, and the housing prices are out of control and many people are struggling with being able to afford a home afford rent. And so I’m going to have with me two people who work with that in that area.

Janne Flisrand is someone I worked with in Minneapolis, where there’s been a lot of innovation at the community level about what to do about housing, how to engage a lot more voices in the dialogue about it, including renters, people with lower incomes, and people of color. They aimed to get voices who don’t usually get represented in housing debates, engaged and passing innovative legislation that has actually helped keep the prices more stable compared to other parts of the country. Janne will be with us sharing what they did in Minneapolis.

My other guest will be Andrea Pickett who works locally at the city/town level on housing and sees firsthand what’s happening with people. So, I’m excited to like have this dialogue with all of them about homes and housing and affordability and how we go about really at such a fundamental thing of belonging is making sure everyone has a home. I look forward to that conversation next time and hope you’ll join us then. Thank you.