Professionals in Training

We provide personal growth work for professionals requiring hours in professional therapy as part of training.

GROUP PROCESS

New order can always be discovered in apparent chaos if we have the tolerance and patience to follow instead of programming nature, if we learn to live with the moving ground instead of pressing for solutions.
Mindell ‘The Leader As Martial Artist’

Group Process is a skills based journey to explore how potentially challenging group dynamics can be a positive and joyful learning experience. We use group work to shine a light on our inner world in order to understand ourselves and our environment better. This way we can learn to navigate our way more skillfully through our relationships and communities, making them exciting and empowering for ourselves and everyone else in the group

Living in a group can be a painful experience and many of us may have wished from time to time that we could just withdraw from our relationships whether they be family, school, business, friends or even the world at large. There are many reasons for these difficulties, including a tendency for conflict to simply arise at some stage within groups.

Each group will have its own beliefs and behaviours that are approved and promoted, while others are disapproved and resisted. Thus, groups have edges that serve to limit or define their identities. When groups forbid their disavowed parts they tend towards rigidity and lifelessness. Even when things look like they are going well on the surface, background depressions, fears and conflicts may be happening underneath. The split-off and disavowed parts of the group come out in the group’s gossip, in teamwork tensions and when the world no longer supports them or buys their products.

Group work deals directly with these atmospheres its tensions and storms, much like a weather system. This atmosphere, or ‘field’, spans individuals, entire groups, organizations and the wider community. It expresses not only personal issues but also group and world problems. The field includes both overt, visible structures such as meetings, as well as more hidden emotional processes such as likes and dislikes. In any group, certain problems are solved in a linear, rational way, but these solutions will hold up only if the disturbances in the feeling atmosphere are also addressed.

Often the organization’s declared vision, structure and model are almost irrelevant compared to its ability to incorporate differences of opinion and diverse styles of communication. If a group succeeds at diversity, it is a successful community and will work. If it cannot do this, it fails at the deepest spiritual level of community, becomes unsustainable within itself and does little good for the world around it.
Mindell ‘Sitting in the Fire’

By allowing these atmospheres, tendencies and conflicts to come out in a non-judgemental way the group is able to expand its identity, bringing increased awareness and resolution to the group. What at first appeared to be conflict or chaos, once given the chance to express itself, allows an exciting new pattern that had not been used until now to emerge. If we are not prepared, these new patterns that are trying to emerge create pain and chaos rather than a new style of working and living. We need an appreciation for turbulence that may herald new emergent paradigms or else we may try to re-establish worn out and inefficient ways of doing things. Traditional models of organizational work tend to focus on the areas of conflict resolution. Organizational consultants are often invited to intervene in ‘crisis’ moments, in a troubleshooting paradigm, in an attempt to ‘solve’ the problem by removing the disturbance.

From a new and more global perspective, the very issues that are seen as problems within one framework offer the basis for new potential and creativity in another. The success of an organization often depends upon its ability to do group work and to process conflict. Thus conflict can also create community, to the extent that it is the group’s way to know and appreciate all of its parts.

The individual self cannot be differentiated from the community self; they are one spirit. Relationship – healing means getting to the bottom line, feeling that what we are experiencing belongs to the community.

The social sciences speak of ‘inner self’, ‘relationship’ and ‘group’ as if these were phenomena that could be separated. My heart is set on getting across the idea that the inner self, relationships and the world are all aspects of the same community process.

Mindell ‘Sitting in the Fire’

Each individual is an agent of change for the world, and the world is an agent of change for each individual. Every individual relationship issue within an organization also has a meaning and wisdom for the greater system; likewise, bigger systemic problems can be resolved if worked within the more individual, personal field. Within this framework, nothing happens ‘by accident’ and everything that happens has a potential benefit right through the system. It is a mutually beneficial relationship, between the individual and the wider community. The skill lies in identifying what the ‘real’ issues are and working with them on all levels so that they don’t need to re-cycle.

The individual is a microcosm of the macrocosm which includes the organization, the wider economic and cultural environment and the global community. Just as individuals strive towards awareness, including spiritual growth, consciousness and personal fulfillment so do organizations seek to realize themselves.

Organizations and communities are characterized not only by their overt structure, task and goals but also by their emotional features carried by the indiduals such as relationship conflicts, jealousy and envy as well as altruistic and spiritual initiatives. They are therefore not simple constructions but complex entities moved by dreams and undercurrents, feelings and atmospheres as well as by more mainstream goals such as money and success. The task or goal of the organization is important, as is the process by which the goal is achieved. The process will often highlight undercurrents and emotional disturbances, all of which need to be addressed.

Some of the methods used for organizational work:

• Communication Skills: Many people sit in groups not communicating what is really going on inside of them. How can an organization support individuals to communicate, so that meetings becoming energizing rather than exhausting or frustrating? We teach basic communication skills that help individuals and groups to have free and open communication.

• Multiplicity of roles: Learning to work with roles or time spirits is one way to facilitate open communication within organizations in a safe and contained way. Every potential difficulty can generally be identified within a small number of polarized roles. These roles belong simultaneously to individuals and global events (ie insider/outsider; worker/manager). A person will become identified in a particular role but, in truth, we are too complex and multifaceted to be only that.
Individuals and organizations run into difficulties when these roles become stuck to any one person or team. If the group processes these roles, by others consciously identifying with them, the message they contain can be expanded and understood by more people. This can defuse the relationship issue and the new information from the role can benefit the organisation at large.

• Deep Democracy: In addition to specific techniques and skills, there is also the need for the concept of Deep Democracy – a belief and practice that the world is here to help us to become more fully our entire selves, and that we are here to help the world become more whole. Our aim is to help the ‘unsaid’ and ‘unsay-able’ to be spoken rather than seeing these thoughts as unwelcome guests at the door. If we allow them in, they often bring surprising riches. Every experience, however disturbing on the surface, is potentially useful for increasing awareness provided it is worked with on a deeper level. Our greatest difficulties can reveal hidden and profound talents and treasures. In organizational work, we teach the skills to uncover these hidden treasures, rather than trying to ‘remove’ the disturbances or disturbers. An organization that can encourage diversity and individualism also hold the potential for greater richness and creativity.