Log In

BANTL Meeting
Nov. 28, 2007
Flo and Jack's in Sausilito
Topic: The Future
Judith Noel, facilitator

Attending:
Flo
Jack
Yifat
Paula
MaryAnn
Scott
Collins
Judith

Eight of us met for a deeply individual and personal discussion of what the future holds for us, individually and as a group. We began with an extended and interactive check-in, guided by 4 questions:

               1. What is completed for you? What can you now let go of?
               2. What are you going toward?
               3. What are you doing now/what actions are you taking in service of that aspiration?
               4. What do you need from us here?

Given the personal nature of the sharing, I did not take notes on our content.

Looking at the Future of BANTL 2008 meetings, we discussed the following:

A. Our next date is Jan. 3 (Thursday), 2008. Maybe I have this wrong, and the date is Jan. 2 (Wednesday). Will someone please clarify. We are scheduled to meet 'down south', location to yet be determined or volunteered.

B. It is very helpful for the host(s) to receive confirmation on who will be attending. Let's be more considerate in communication this in the future.

C. It is worth our time at the onset on the New Year to review our purpose for our meetings, affirm or change the direction of our meetings, and assess the balance of informational/skills focus and personal/interpersonal relationship focus.

D. We discussed what draws people (the "regulars") to our meetings, and what keeps people coming. (It's the Heart, the honest sharing, the Intimacy, the friendship, the colleagueship -- as much as, or even more than, the intellectual stimulation).

E. Reminder to bring our calendars to the Jan. meeting so that we can schedule 2008.

F. Volunteers for next 2 meetings:

     1. Topic: Social Class (Jack)
     2. Topic: Generational Dynamics -- from the 20th to 21st Century, and how we renew ourselves      (Seniors, Boomers, Xers, Millennials) (Paula and Scott)

My sincere apologies for errors in the above. I wrote my notes on a little bitty paper, in pencil, and can't read much of it. Those who were present, please modify or correct misinformation.

With sincere gratitude for a Christmas-filled, Flo-inspired, home for our meeting; and a Happy Channukah (beginning Tuesday eve. 12/4) and a Happy Kwanza (12/26) to all.

Noel ;-)
Judith

Oct 3 (David's)

Aug 15 (Tracy's)

On Wednesday, August 15, nine of us met at Tracy Gibbons' house in Mountain View. Attending were David Bradford, Scott Bristol, Andrea Corney, Collins Dobbs, Tracy Gibbons, Mary Ann Huckabay, Yifat Levine, Lanz Lowen, Craig Schuler.

I (Craig Schuler) led a session on a here-and-now awareness and disclosure process. The gist of the exercise was to focus as much as possible on whatever you were experiencing in real-time, and to disclose parts of your experience that contained some import to you.

I tried to refocus comments from past (or future) tense to the immediate component of the experience. I also tried to refocus questions and other-oriented interventions to the speaker's own present experience.

In my view, the group was game for this experiment and some folks found it interesting and useful to let go of some of the group-tracking behaviors that we might sometimes over-use when we're group members (vs facilitators). Still, the process seemed to feel uncomfortably constraining to some folks at some points, and it didn't accommodate the fuller community connection that we usually include.

At the front end, we did a check-in that was more right-now focused, in step with the broader process. At the back end, we broke out some wine and talked about the experience, and gathered-up some community building elements that had gone unattended.

The October 3rd NTL Group

Although no one at the last meeting understood or agreed upon what I proposed, everyone was quite happy to let me facilitate. So here's the focus:

WHERE AM I? WHO AM I BECOMING?

INTENTION

§ To have the meeting be somewhat T-groupy - e.g. err on the side of more sharing of self and emotions and less sharing of stories from the past and/or trying to understand a conceptual construct (e.g what is SPIRITUALITY?)

§ To have the group serve as a container, support and mirror for who we are becoming at this point in our lives

PREWORK

Choose one or more of the questions below to reflect upon prior to the meeting:

§ What's the most important thing going on for me at this point in my life?

§ What's most significant about this stage in my life?

§ Who am I becoming? In what ways?

§ What behavioral, psychological, and/or emotional patterns am I modifying?

Or you might consider those maps on campus and elsewhere that have the big red X that says 'You Are Here'. How would you envision that map for yourself at this point in your life.

Still unclear of the concept? Think of the song, Once In a Lifetime, where David Bynre comments incredulously "This is not my life. This is not my wife. How did I get here?" And reflect on what's absurd, paradoxical, totally surprising about where you currently find yourself.

Our next Bay Area meeting is at Tracy Gibbons in Mountain View. We gather at 1:30 for coffee and cake and catching up with our session running from 2:00-5:30 and then wine and cheese.

* experiencing ourselves individually

* experiencing ourselves interpersonally

* experiencing ourselves as part of the group

I will facilitate this process as needed (less as time passes), redirecting questions or advice (or such) back to the speaker's own present experience. Beyond such refocusing, there will be no "performance" requirements - whatever is going on with you will be valid by definition, even if it's a total non-sequitur from previous comments.

One point of all of this is to get more to the layers below the words we usually speak. One view is that our words are means toward various ends, and this process gets more to our underlying experiences, motivations and intentions.

The final time will be spent on:

* a short break

* a debrief of our experiences with the previous process

* a discussion of it's potential application to t-groups

* some open time to wrap-up

June 3 - All day t-group (Jack and Flo's)

May 2 (Mary Ann's)

Mar 21 (Andrea's)

We met at Andrea's home - Andrea, Judith, David, Jack, Frank, Yifat, Flo and Lanz. Our topic was Spirituality and Religion. Flo started us off with ten minutes of 'shamanic' drumming - an insistent, hypnotic beat that is known to help people move to a more 'meditative' space. We let images and feelings about Spirit come to us during the drumming and shared these afterward.

Jack then, encouraged us to each share 'our story' about our own religious/spiritual upbringing. These stories were quite revealing. One of the strongest themes was the sense of betrayal that some of us experienced from our own religious community when we 'married outside our faith' or began to pursue divinity school ("women only come here to find a husband").

I personally, am less interested in religion than spirituality and feared and experienced to some degree that the conversation about religion took us more into our heads and out of the moment. However, hearing the more in-depth stories about our personal journeys proved to be quite revealing and intriguing. We didn't get stuck in the usual 'religion-bashing' that I find tedious. In fact, one of the final stories was a very affirmative embracing of religion (one of us adopted the faith of their partner, after rigorous reflection and study).

Next meeting is April 2nd at Mary Ann Huckabay's in Berkeley. Topic is: Lust, gluttony and addiction. Judith and David will co-facilitate. We also agreed to cancel the May 30th meeting and hold an all-day T-group on Saturday, June 2nd at Flo and Jack's. Put it on your calendar! This will be limited to 12 people so if you are interested, contact Jack [jjsherwood@aol.com]

Lanz

**************************

Our next Bay Area NTL meeting is next Wednesday, March 21st At Andrea Corney's home [803 Curtis Street, Menlo Park 94025. (650) 329-8923]

Feb 4 (Lanz's)

I was going to talk about grace and the slow process of making personal change. How, ironically, if we can accept that change doesn't happen overnight the process may actually speed up. Exploring the role of forgiveness, helping people to understand the non-linear, difficult nature of change. The fact that I use more spiritual, rather than corporate or psych-based language, to discuss changes in personal behavior with client systems at work. The question for ourselves: how do we help students/clients/ourselves manage expectations about how fast/how much we can change? What is our relationship to ourselves or others in the difficult (life-long?) period when we're "not there yet" and seem to be repeating the very behavior we've agreed to alter, despite our best intentions? In these situations how much grace do we extend to ourselves and others? Is there a need to repair damaged relationships in the room among us as friends/colleagues? Can we extend understanding, perhaps forgiveness if ready, acceptance of the process if not?

Notes from NTL Bay Area Meetings 2007