What It Means to Feel at Home Here with Bruce Nayowith

Transcript (lightly edited for clarity)

Beth Tener:
Welcome back to the Living Love Podcast. This is Beth Tener and I’m excited that you’re with us. This is the first episode of season three. The theme for season three is looking at belonging and what it means to feel at home here. Each season we take a theme and we do 10 episodes on that theme. Libby Hoffman, one of my previous guests, was talking about the podcast and said what she likes about it is that it reminds her that human relationships are the core of social change. She said the interviews and the conversations keep her hopeful and grounded, and it gives her permission to reground in relationships in her work and her priorities.

That’s a beautiful lead-in to our theme, which is that the social context and interactions greatly affect how people feel at home and how they feel safe. They affect whether they can spread their wings and be themselves; they can bring their creativity and learn together, or if they have to walk through the world feeling guarded and shut down (e.g., playing it safe, not speaking up.) Let alone the violence, war and all the horrendous things that we’re looking at in the world right now. This applies at the interpersonal, group, team, workplace, and community scales.)

This episode will be about what it means to feel at home here. I’m really happy to have my friend and learning partner in a lot of this work, Bruce Nayowith with me. Some of you might remember Bruce and Simon were guests on season two’s episode called “Love is Listening”. So (besides Nancy) Bruce is my first returning guest, so welcome back Bruce!

Bruce Nayowith: Thank you.

Beth Tener:
We’re going to be looking at this idea of feeling at home here and the bigger history as to why so many people don’t feel at home. As we think about these questions of: how does humanity in this moment find a way to find unity among difference; allow everyone to live in freedom; move beyond racism and all these other -isms that exclude and suppress people.

To me, a lot of it comes down to the fact that when community and connection get disrupted, then people are not themselves and not in a good place. That becomes that ground where a lot of awful stuff can grow when we don’t have that fundamental healthy community-family connection. We’re going to start exploring what it means to feel safely connected in groups. Bruce, please share some of your story of how you came to think about these topics and questions.

Bruce Nayowith:
There’s a couple of different threads. I was very science oriented when I was younger, really interested in aliveness, really interested in synergy. I liked mixing chemicals, I liked mixing things. When I got older, I liked mixing energies, but back then, it was very mental. I went to medical school, I did well as a physician.

A couple of years out, I started feeling pretty depressed even though I was quite successful. And after some soul searching on a three-week canoe trip, a lot of time by myself and some other things, I began to realize, “Oh crap, I have to learn that touchy feely stuff.” I thought feelings used to be things that other people had. Honestly, that’s kind of about the level that I was functioning at.

Also, I just want to say I did have community group experiences. I went to Quaker schools for seven years, which were very community oriented. My dad would have a summer camp and I loved that. I didn’t know how to do it, so I started exploring a lot of these things.

Beth Tener:
We’ll tell the audience a little later how we got to be friends, but when I met you, you’d been a practicing emergency room physician for many years. Then, in your free time you would be studying “how does therapy work”, how do other group processes work. You spent each year learning some new process. Is that right?

Bruce Nayowith:
Yeah, I’m really interested in aliveness. A lot of people who do spiritual practice are really interested in spaciousness and peace. I’m really interested in dynamic aliveness and what promotes aliveness.

So in the beginning it was all the sparkly stuff and then we start to realize that it emerges from a secure base, from being well-rooted. Otherwise, you get this really rapid growth like throwing a bunch of fertilizer but without a root system. I did a lot of different practices in a lot of different realms, including developmental theory, attachment theory, meditation, some group facilitation and some of the studies in terms of that. Each of them is looking at a different piece of the puzzle and it really does often come down to what are we connected with. How good’s “the soil”, how well are we rooted, and then also how well are we “fertilized” or supported? So it is kind of both.

Beth Tener:
Those two questions of:
– “what are we connected to — with each other, with place, with nature?”
– “how are we being fed and resourced”?
offer a different frame than focusing on fixing problems or being self-focused in an individualized way. If those are the questions that guided you, you got to different answers.

Bruce Nayowith:
Yeah, it’s interesting. Sharing a quick story: At one point, I was doing a lot of meditation, mostly in a Zen tradition, which I found very helpful on one hand, but it felt too cool. Letting go of attachment is really great if you’re too close to something, but if you do that to a baby, it’s a still face experiment. They did an experiment with baby monkeys with mechanical mothers that they fed them, the babies died. For young places inside, when we are not feeling connected or nurtured, that is a trauma experience. It’s not nourishing.

I got a lot from it, but then I started doing warmer practices. I remember even then when I went to work at an HMO and I was doing all this meditation. I was really proud of my abilities and five minutes in a lousy situation where somebody was, pardon my language, somebody was screwed over or somebody was treated unfairly. I was like, in five minutes I could blow three hours of meditation, like boom!

I realized, “Whoa, systems have a really big effect on people.” I mean, God, that’s obvious now, but it’s like, “Wow, if the system isn’t functional, then even someone with some capacity can get really steer the beam in a bad direction.” So how do we create systems? Anyway, it’s probably right up your alley. That’s your work.

Beth Tener:
Thanks for sharing that story about learning these different practices. I’ll share some of my journey to some of these questions about creating environments where everyone feels safe.

I’ve spent a lot of time doing facilitation work with people, working in one way or another for the sustainability of the earth, human rights, community development, or other issues. People come into the work from different places, but the focus is on people trying to do good work together.

I often find places where groups get stuck, teams break down, or society overall is just resisting making the fundamental changes we need to make. I see that it’s fear and distrust and “ not enough.” You don’t have a whole solid group around you saying, “we’re all going to do this.” We’re trying to move people to make change. We expect people who are in hierarchy, or feeling too alone in the work, to make big, courageous, risky decisions without enough camaraderie, kinship, and sense of “Oh, we’re all doing this together.”
The experiences where we got a coherent group, where it felt like we were a much bigger team all working in a really aligned way to move something forward – those were the times when it was so exciting. It didn’t feel like I alone was the hero trying to do it, like a lone hero story. There’s a lot of risk and fear, and if you’re the lone hero, I can see why most people would be super afraid to actually do anything very bold, right?

That got me looking into understanding trauma. One way to describe trauma is events that happened to an individual or a community that were more than they could bear without enough resources and support at the time. Does that sound right, Bruce?

And to say, I’m not a trauma therapist, so I’m going to just be giving the basics and we’ll probably be drawing in more in future episodes about how all this works.

Bruce Nayowith:
That’s one of the beautiful definitions. I want to tell a story about that that I heard when I was in Rome at the Action Inquiry Fellowship gathering. There was a plane crash and there were a large number of casualties. Everybody who survived had PTSD except for one person. They asked the person why? There’s been these studies on resilience.
He said the plane was losing altitude, it was going down. There was a flight attendant who sat in front of me and she just kept saying, “Look at me. I’ve got you. Just look at me. I’m right here. Look at me. I’m right here.” And that’s what she did all the way down. And she died.

Beth Tener: Oh my God.

Bruce Nayowith:
I know. It’s really sad. She died. She basically saved his soul. Incredible. There’s an example that just supports that definition. Sorry, that’s a little…

Beth Tener:
Tender. In this moment we’re trying to move through really big changes, and we don’t have that kind of sensitivity, the companionship, the kinship alongside the change is what is crucial to be able to make those moves… in addition to dealing with some of the past traumas that are still…

Bruce Nayowith:
Stuck. Yes, you need a skill set, and you need a support set because the intensity of the stuff that is going to come up. I’m going to give a different definition of trauma now, which is more heady. Sorry, but I really like it.

Dr. Dan Siegel’s definition (neurobiologically) is trauma is unintegrated material characterized by excessive chaos, excessive rigidity, or both. What I always say to people is” you all know excessive chaos. You see that in a group, you see that, but excessive rigidity, fundamentalism, super strictness, you feel the fist behind the glove if you make a mistake, some of the language being said in some of the political climates today, you feel the rigidity. That’s a trauma response.

Beth Tener:
That’s really helpful. So excessive rigidity, excessive chaos. In contrast, when you’re an environment where there isn’t so much trauma, where you’ve moved to a place where things are healed or the group space is so welcoming and everyone feels at home.

We will get into discussing workplaces, classrooms and communities where we’re trying to create a setting where everyone can feel at home. This applies to interpersonal levels and personal levels – it kind of all connects. It reminds me of one of the quotes from Simon in our conversation last time, he was talking about fight, flight, freeze response. Our bodies, at a subconscious level, are aiming to make sure we’re feeling safe. They’re always on guard for that and can get triggered pretty quickly out of that.

I’ve also learned there’s a state called “alarmed aloneness,” which is slightly different, but that’s like the bird and the nest. Where’s mom? That anxiousness. Simon explained how those states arise from the underlying state, which is healthy social connection. When we’re in healthy social, relaxed connection, we feel most safe. I think it’s so common to feel one of those other states that we don’t always focus on, “oh, if that’s the alternative, how do we really build up healthy social connection where everyone feels safe?”

Bruce Nayowith:
I’m always fascinated in looking into how some groups or experiences bring out the best in people, and some groups bring out the worst in people… I mean there’s got to be a science, there’s got to be a structure to that and starting to learn. Also, I’ll quote Peter Senge here in The Fifth Discipline: In his chapter on team learning, he says something like, if there’s a group of people with an IQ each over 120 you actually have a group IQ of 62. There is a “why” to that, and we know why. But it’s like, oh, what are the factors that they say that bring out the best and prevent the kind of interactions which have to do with shaming, safety, not belonging? That’s really the stuff: exclusion, punishment that bring out the worst in people.

Beth Tener:
One of the things I wanted to talk about is, if we’re curious about what brings out the best in people, any one of us can kind of create spaces for interaction, invite people to a gathering in your home, create a gathering, and certainly with Zoom now it’s happening all over the place. Anyone can convene a space and then design it and host it in certain ways that allow people to have a different quality of experience.

I know you’ve been involved in something called the Pocket Project as well as creating your own spaces. I don’t know if you want to talk about a couple of those examples and we’ll share some more about some work we did together. But what I’d love to do today is to share some stories and examples of what that looks like and then go underneath to the underlying theory of how would we create those spaces and what pieces are important.

Bruce Nayowith:
I’ll talk maybe about the Pocket Project. First Pocket Project was envisioned by Yehudit Sasportas, Thomas Huebl’s wife. She’s an artist, and the idea was to create little pockets of capacity that can digest trauma because when groups get stuck or when systems get stuck, sometimes you’re stuck in a pattern. Sometimes that pattern is habit, but sometimes that pattern is trauma and trauma doesn’t do well with education. Trauma needs to be healed. If people get told over and over again the right thing to do, and then nothing changes, and they can’t stop. That often indicates some kind of underlying trauma. Matter of fact, it’s a really good sign that it’s not a failure of education. That kind of education is not the right thing to do with that particular kind of situation.

Beth Tener:
You had mentioned the Pocket Project was the idea of Thomas Hubl’s wife. Could you explain who Thomas Huebl is? I know he’s written a book Healing Collective Trauma, and we’ll put that in the show notes, links to all these resources, but give us a little more of his story.

Bruce Nayowith:
Thomas Hubl is a spiritual teacher who’d become very interested in collective trauma. He had some experiences doing meditation and training, spiritual trainings with a hundred people there. He did a lot of stuff in Germany and all this stuff would erupt around the Holocaust on day 4 of trainings. Then it was like that was weird. Then at the next retreat a couple months later, with 10 or 20 people at once, and the same kind of thing would happen again. He started to realize, “Wait a second, this is not an aberration.” It’s almost like it’s a layer of a field that wasn’t visible, but when you get quiet enough or when things are invited in, this kind of stuff starts to come up, you’re creating open spaciousness. This place actually may have a chance to actually get seen or known.
So it shows itself like uninvited guests to the party. You could have a group of people, and something gets said, and all of a sudden let’s say the whole field of racism comes up. But also, which is especially important in intentional groups, intentional service groups.

Carl Jung in his book, The Psychology of the Transference said, I’m going to paraphrase: Whenever someone makes an intention to work on a problem or help a problem deal with something… let’s say here’s a group and we want to deal with injustice at the border. Let’s say the way the migrants are treated, what happens is that due to induction, that problem will constellate within the group itself and the same dynamics are going to show up.
Quick example, I was on an eight month march across the country for climate action, and I was there for just a month of it. So here are people wanting to make a difference with climate. All of the same issues came up: I want to do my own thing. We all have to work together. We’re using too much fossil fuel on the march, but we need to be able to bring people in. All the issues constellated. And that’s not a wrongness. What I’m realizing is that’s actually almost been invited in by the group.

Beth Tener:
Because you solve it at that scale. In a way we act like it’s all hypocritical, but it actually is…

Bruce Nayowith:
The opportunity to work on it. And because of that, groups who do this kind of work need specially to be well-resourced.

Beth Tener:
I want to share this quote from Thomas Huebl. He says, “Unresolved past is destiny. It repeats until we have the courage to work together to face it.”
So now let’s go back to the Pocket Project. So tell us more there.

Bruce Nayowith:
So the idea was there were originally about 150 to 160 of us from 30 some countries. It was a beginning of an experiment (which is continuing) to try to create these little pockets, try to understand trauma, using some ways of “presencing” the trauma, trying to feel if you feel numb, and just kind of being with what’s there in a safe, supported connected type of interaction. Some of the connection is healing and some of it would be that you have multiple people with different abilities so they can hold the space better.

Beth Tener:
So coming back to our theme today is how do we create spaces and environment where people feel at home, where there’s enough of a sense of belonging that they can stay in connection?

I’ve certainly been in those spaces you talk about where there’s a blow-up, the container cannot hold. I think what this speaks to is we need to rethink how we’re gathering, what we’re trying to do here. If it’s unhealed past trauma, then we don’t need more action plans and more programs and campaigns. We need these spaces like you’re doing with the Pocket Project where there’s more resources, more connection, more “fertilizer” as you said earlier.

I’d like to talk more about this resource idea. I have this vision for groups doing this kind of difficult work where everyone in the group has their own coach, having the group go forward, someone gets triggered in a meeting, something difficult happens. You have the time and space to take a pause. The people that were most activated can go to a place and get coaching or therapeutic support. So they process it outside the room. Asking “What’s my stuff?”, “What’s the group’s to work out”, or even a reconciling process or a mediation. Then they come back to the group that’s resourced for what’s needed. I think right now we’re doing a lot of very challenging work to change. It’s like a desert. So when those things come up, the groups split apart and often things fall apart, right?

Bruce Nayowith:
It’s like a desert and the technology is not always available if people aren’t aware of it, which is one of the things I have to say I love about your podcast. I’ll put a plug in for it, which is you’re bringing in people who are giving examples of “this is how it’s done well in this context”, “this is how it’s done well in this context.”

I’ll give you an example of how it’s not done well. You have a group and a couple of people have a disagreement and it’s a pretty intense disagreement and they decide to use the entire group space to work out this interpersonal difference between these two people. Then the group turns into judge and jury. It’s like “we want to compost our waste products, but you don’t compost your waste products on the picnic table in the center of town during a party. You take it out to the compost heap.” Like you just said, “you guys work it out, we’ll support you and then come back.” And when that’s done, the group does well. But it’s really a very un-evolutionary model of we all have to be together all the time and work everything out. It’s too slow and this is when you get these explosions.

Beth Tener:
That’s a great example. I’ve been thinking of a different story of this question about feeling at home here have led me is trying to say, “Why is it that there’s so many places and spaces where people don’t feel at home or that their homes aren’t safe?” As I started following that question more and more, I went way back in time and was thinking about if you take the Earth as this huge tree of life, and we have the common humanity and that for hundreds of thousands of years we have indigenous, place-based cultures. This is a very high-level summary, but I just want to see what you think of this, Bruce. You have that tree of life and then at certain points, different parts branched off. So we have this one branch that we’re a part of now, which is modern culture splitting off from indigenous rooted culture.

Western civilization is one branch of that, you have Eastern, you have all these other ones, but you think about going out one branch and then I think of the European branch. And so a lot of what was happening in that part of the world, and Riane Eisler has some really fascinating books and research about this. A lot of indigenous cultures have partnership basis rooted in place, in connected to land, you’re on the place of your ancestors, you have ritual, you have community, you have a lot of common practices, which as we move to more warring cultures, if you think about war and you think about enslavement and colonization and these pretty horrible patterns that got seeded, those have this life of trauma that lives on where the families are disrupted, broken apart, the kinds of personal interpersonal traumas that happen. And even in war, you’re trying to divide and conquer.

So you actually are very intentionally trying to break down the kinship bonds within a people and a culture because that will weaken them. So if you think of centuries of war in Europe and then colonization going and spreading those kind of violent patterns all around the world. I’m in the United States where you have all these people in a sense coming out of that cooking of centuries of trauma in Europe with also all the practices to survive that, but that there starts to be this fundamental movement towards individualism. You hear so many stories of those who landed in America, if you were those coming from Europe, so little family networks, all those got so disrupted and then disrupting the native people, horrendous genocide here, which uproot the native people and then the enslaved Africans coming here. And then what happened with the Mexicans and those already here.

But you just look in the history of all of the ancestral lineages, the kinship rooted in community, connected to nature practices, through all that trauma got very disrupted and broken down. So as I’ve been thinking about what we need to heal now, if we realize “Oh, if that’s something missing that’s now become normal.” So individualism has become like this thing we prize, but it’s actually a coping strategy if you lost your community. But I also look at that as the lack of community and all that connectedness is what gives rise to a lot of the addiction, the mental illness, so many of the problems is we’re missing those fundamental primary community ways of living.

So I started to say, well, if there’s one thing we could focus on, let’s rebuild those kinship networks. Let’s rebuild the connection to our ancestors, to that sense of lineage and our connection to our place, whether it’s where our ancestors are from or the history of the place we’re in, which a lot of the kind of white supremacy history told by the ones who won the war makes us ignore those. It’s like we’re closed off from that. We’re closed off from our connection with the living Earth, closed off from our connection with deep solidarity with lots of people across class and race. There’s just these ways you realize a lot of the broken kinship bonds were broken pretty intentionally by others in the past. So I’d love your take on that way of thinking about history.

Bruce Nayowith:
I think you described the trauma and the effect of trauma well. Twice when I was in Scotland and just sitting on a couch and laying back, I had this kind of an imaginal experience of living a couple hundred years ago. And what I felt was that nowhere was safe. There’d either be marauders or there’d be the English or there’d be the this or there’d be that. And it was just like nowhere was safe. And that’s what it was like. I mean, it’s almost like this feeling that we actually feel relatively safe is lovely and it wasn’t always like this. It’s easy to forget that.

It’s interesting. I’ve recently read Ernest Becker’s Escape From Evil, where he talks about “where does social evil come from?” When he looks back and describes other people describing a lot of the cultures back in the day, everybody in the community had a role. They were all involved in basically sacred rituals and ceremonies of keeping the Earth and keeping life alive. They felt like they had a part so that everybody mattered, and everybody was actually part of and contributed to the running of the Universe. I mean, that is a very profound sense of belonging. Way beyond just tribe. And then as that wasn’t so necessary and people started accumulating wealth, and then you started to have some of these things happen where, “Oh, I can actually protect myself from nature and now nature is something I want to avoid.” So then there’s a cut and then there becomes something else there becomes another cut.

I remember went to a workshop at Omega Institute. Mary Pipher, who had written Reviving Ophelia, talked about maybe 60, 70, 80 years ago, she said families were dysfunctional and communities were functional. She said, if something happened, your mother knew about it before you got home. All the neighbors knew each other. You knew your children’s friends’, parents and vice versa. She said that community was built into the fabric. It was just unconscious and then with every… let’s say labor saving device, for example, air conditioning (beautiful thing), except now everybody didn’t sit on the porch. So you didn’t have that and then a dishwasher (beautiful thing), except now you didn’t have three people doing dishes and talking every night and three cooked meals.

So now you don’t have people all together. Each of these things had a value, but the connectivity was lost. Now as you’re saying, we have to consciously weave networks because so many of them were unconsciously discarded because of what looked like it was a step forward (and maybe it was), but we didn’t recognize what was lost and now we’re feeling it.

Beth Tener:
I totally agree, Bruce. When I was talking about kinship and the importance of that and thinking that’s what I really want to focus on next, I was sharing that with a friend of mine and right away she said, “My grandmother and mother, everyone would do the ironing on Sunday morning, and that’s where all the generations would interconnect.” You’d hear about, so-and-so’s son is struggling, and this happened over there, the gossip and the coaching and the intergenerational mentoring was because they had to sit there for a long time ironing sheets. So your story about Scotland, just to also recognize there’s lots of places where people feel that way all the time, whether it’s in a family.

Bruce Nayowith:
Still unfortunately. Yes.

Beth Tener:
So the work ahead is how does every space (we have enough control over) … how do we design it and be intentional so that we use the practices that most can help people feel safe and feel kind of calm and connected. There’s a lot happening, which I’ll be getting into in future episodes here around understanding trauma research and what that means.
There’s as much as that story, I talked about how the kinship bonds were broken. We also have all the stories of how people survived and kept continuity and kept the love going through those lineages in the horrendous conditions that a lot of people lived through. So, what were those practices that allow people to survive and stay in community and stay strong? I think that of all the things that we can look at and work on at this time, that’s exciting to me.

It’s also this time think of people out that branch of western civilization when you actually can let go of the supremacy and the bias. The story I was told is that my culture is the pinnacle of every civilization there’s ever been, and humans are more superior to everybody. So there’s nothing to learn here, folks, from anyone beyond our evolved place. As we can discard that concept, I feel like there’s so much to learn really from Africa, from indigenous cultures in North America, from so many other lineages and practices that are right alongside other branches of the tree or go back down the branch and there’s all these practices that are here.

These are potentials in humanity. They are tested. Of course, we need to be sensitive about cultural appropriation. We cannot just go take stuff. But the time of the supremacy needs to end. We need to drop the blinders to recognize that there’s a whole lot of understandings we thought we were progressing from as opposed to realizing, oh, wait a minute, we left a whole lot that’s critical behind … let’s go back down the branch.

Bruce Nayowith:
Another piece of this is evolutionary: growing a sense of a separate self is actually a step forward (and I don’t mean that in a negative way, we can call it individuation.) Unfortunately, it also can be a step into disconnection.

So Dan Siegel’s neurobiological definition of integration is “the linkage of differentiated parts.” He uses this example: we are all going to get up on stage and everybody sings what they want. So you have this cacophony and he says, “okay, that’s differentiation without linkage.”

He says, “now you’re all going to sing what I sing,” and you have this one monotonal choral. And he says, “great. That is linkage without differentiation.” And then he encourages different kinds of harmonics. And then you have the ultimate: the maximum differentiation and linkage occurs when things are in harmonies. They’re each their own, but they’re still linked. And that’s the ideal in a way, this differentiation into separation was an evolutionary growth step, but now it’s of course polluting itself way too much. And this is why I appreciate what you’re trying to do here with all this and what you’ve been doing professionally as well with all your work.

Beth Tener:
You’ve mentioned his work to me, that there is a movement to be individual, to be yourself, to be fully yourself, but then you want to integrate back into a larger whole. And I feel like in this moment in time and the way things have evolved in the culture I’m in… it’s all about individuation and completely losing sight that you are a part of something larger. The metaphor I’ve learned from Tom Atlee of the Co-Intelligence Institute is you’re the pinky finger and you’re part of a hand, and the hand is part of an arm and part of a body. And we have the individual saying, “I’m for what works for me, and if it doesn’t work for the hand, I don’t care.” That’s what we’re at.

I’m early in the journey of building relationship and learning from people who grew up in an indigenous way, ingrained through everything is that sense of community and you are part of a larger whole and you rely on the Sun, you rely on your sisters and brothers that all the parts that you’re related to. In my culture growing up, that was never emphasized. It was just so self-focused almost like a self-floating. It’s invisible: everything you rely on, right? It’s just you.

Bruce Nayowith:
It’s invisible and it’s not spoken and it’s not built into a structure. I’m thinking for example, how Native Americans honor the Four Directions, that’s just how they open a gathering. We are part this part of the Earth, we’re part of this part of the sky, we’re part of our ancestors. It’s built in. It’s a remembrance of where you come from.

There’s the Orthodox Jewish tradition of saying Berakhah, a blessing. There’s a lot of them before almost everything. “Thank you that when I went to the bathroom, everything worked.” People say, “Oh my God, that’s so silly.” But if you ever had to pee and you couldn’t pee, and you come to the ER screaming, I’ll tell you what: you would say the blessing. We take stuff for granted. It drops out of awareness. And when you build structures, then you don’t have to think about it because it brings you back into connection rather than, oh my God, I have to remember to be connected. I have to, it’s so hard with the pressure of the society.

Beth Tener:
Beautifully said, and that’s a nice segue to what I wanted to talk about in the last part of our time. When you and I met, it was a summer quite a while back. We were both part of different communities at that point. We have all kinds of good practices like facilitation approaches and you often have these communities that come together around learning how this best practice works in groups. So the summer we met, we were both in different communities who were coming together with the idea of to take the best thinking and try something. I was working with a group exploring “how do you create spaces where collective healing can happen?” We were talking about the bigger things in society that need to heal.

There was a small group of us, and we’d sat in circle on a Zoom calls talking about that and bringing our ideas and our curiosity to it for a while. And then that group said, “We should really just get together in person and try some things and take the best practices we know and create a group experience for that.” The same summer you were sitting in a similar question. So basically, I ended up becoming part of your conference team and then you came to the event that I was involved in and they ended up being a month apart, right?

Bruce Nayowith:
I came in as a participant to yours. In our event, I was hoping to bring a number of people together who had experience to try to get some insights and truth that might change the conversation before the 2016 election when it was Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump running. So that was the intention of that gathering. It was an experimental gathering to try to find insights as a group, some kind of group wisdom that then could be shared more wisely. That is not what happened. What happened was actually what’s happened the next four years after. But at the time we thought it was a failure. We couldn’t believe anything like that was going to happen in the United States. So we just thought that it was a total failed experiment. And then your event where you were one of the hosts of went really well. I mean, that was just magnificent.

Beth Tener:
So maybe in the spirit of getting to the brass tacks of “how do you do this, how do you create spaces where people feel at home here”, I’d love to just share some examples of some of the practices that I’ve found to work. Working with that team was such a gift. We had a pretty big team hosting the event with some people who are very experienced with a whole suite of practices called the Art of Hosting, which I love. I’ll put that in the show notes. Those are about “how do you create gatherings where people can have conversations about things that matter?” There’s a lot of wisdom in that tradition.

Part of that model is that if you’re going to create a gathering, you have a design team ahead of time that really thinks through: What’s the gathering going to be about? What is the question we’re asking? How can we design the space, send out the invitations, who do we want to come? We think through what it’s all about in a collaborative way. Now I do this with every kind of gathering I host. The team thinks together and gets to a quality of coherence. There’s agreement and clarity about what is the space you’re inviting people into and what are we going to do in that time and space? You have enough structure, but you’re going to leave it a little open so things can change and shift in the event. You have the feeling of that coherence when you walk in the door, it’s not chaos and it’s not too rigid, you feel held.

Bruce Nayowith:
I want to use your event as an example. There were 11 of you who were hosts. The team met for almost a year, and it creates a clarity when you’re building something mechanically, you do it one way when you’re building something emergently, whatever you start with is going to expand in the container. So if you have things that are off, that aren’t quite right, that are mixed agendas, conflicts, that’s also going to grow. It’s almost like you turn the volume up. So taking that amount of time to almost have a refined crystal and then you drop that into a container that acts like an orienting structure. The preparation, especially with emergent process, especially with the kind of intense fields that we work in. I mean, that was just brilliant.

Beth Tener:
And in contrast, the one I was part of with you, it didn’t have a very big team and we only had a couple meetings. So when we walked in there, I didn’t even know who I was working with and I had no trust with them.

Our design team had been in this inquiry circle for a long time, and then when we committed to doing the actual event, it was just remarkable to me because we just had such trust and respect for each other. It was one of the best teamwork experiences I’ve ever been part of. We split into natural sub-teams, where people said I’m happy to put a website together and I’ll work on the flyer. And I knew a lot of people, so I was inviting people personally to be attending and someone else got working on the logistics and the budgets. It was a joy.
It was like this fluid teamwork. We’d come back to the whole and then go into our sub teams. And so out of nothing we got a gathering together for four days in Florida at this beautiful place. We helped raise some money for it. Got an amazing group of 25 people to show up. I mean, it’s remarkable when I look back on it.

One of the people from Florida who lives there, she took the time to create this beautiful PowerPoint all about the history of Florida back to the environment, the ecology, the native tribes. We asked everyone to watch that before they arrived. We were trying intentionally to change the pattern that you just swoop into a place and you don’t have any grounding or connection to the stories of what’s happened in the place before you arrived, which that’s pretty much what Florida’s about as a tourism place. We were intentional in every step of the gathering. If we’re talking about understanding what needs to be healed and longer term patterns, we’re going to try and embody that through the whole thing. Anything you want to add, Bruce, from attending that event?

Bruce Nayowith:
I think you said it pretty well. I mean it ran well, it flowed nicely and… it was funny. Something I said earlier, I just want to refer back to it. I remember when we went around the first time, there were five things I said. All of them were important, but somebody said, “everything’s welcome in the circle.” And I said, “no, it’s not.” I said, “you feel what feels okay and some things need to be handled outside the circle.” A bunch of people came up and thanked me for that, and that is actually what we did. There were a couple of things that could have exploded. I was one of the listeners for one of these. When the person processed it, what she came in with was her passion, but not her sharpness, so what she brought in was a gift. It was a lovely example of outside processing, bring it in, share it, let it carry the group even further.

Beth Tener:
In those three days together, I felt like we were in a learning village. Things happened when talking in the whole group about our big questions around spaces for collective healing. We’d weave different people’s community experiences from a lot of places. Then you’d go to lunch and we’d get talking, a little group four of us, and that would spark something and then we’d come back. There was this weaving of experiences, and we were kind of cooking in the same pot long enough for all of that to find its place. For a lot of people, it was a pretty profound experience of what’s possible, which is a different thing than just theoretically talking about it.

I go back and think about those two events that summer a lot and the differences between them. I see the value of that hosting team that was providing enough structure and coherence for people to be in the space. Things could arise and they could be held so that people could feel at home in the space. And it felt like a time where we had a container strong enough to hold things, comparing it to the one before where our team hadn’t really gelled yet. I remember talking with Ria Baeck, who was part of the Florida team, she’s actually going to be on my next podcast episode. She listened to everything that went down at the previous one. We were all needing to process it. Her conclusion was simply that “your team didn’t have the capacity to co-create,” which was so right. We hadn’t spent enough time together. So when things were moving in the space and shifting and changing, it was like there wasn’t enough structure to hold it in the moment.

That feels like a good ending point. There’s so much more to this topic. I’m glad you are with me for the first episode and that we’re going to do a whole season on this because as I’m sitting here, I’m like, “Oh, we could have talked about this and that.” But the good news is there will be many more episodes to explore this. We’re planning to have you come back for the “Learning with Friends” episode in about four episodes to build on what we started with and see where the other guests take us.

Thank you again, Bruce, for being here and taking this in all the directions we did today. I really appreciate it.

Bruce Nayowith:
Thank you. I mean, it is good to be here and I’m really looking forward to hear kind of the lived experience. I talk a lot of theory here, but these people are coming in actually lived it, and you see what it’s like in real life in these different settings. There’s just a richness to that that’s really inspiring. So thank you for doing this.

Beth Tener:
You’re welcome.