Harvest from our first gathering - 2 April 2011

[Helen Titchen Beeth]

It was a gorgeous day - and we chose to spend it inside. The Brussels Hub is a great space for this kind of gathering, if only because it is so hospitable. I love the decor - all sorts of evidence of creativity in the details - even down to the sign on the door of the utility cupboard in the toilet (so intriguing that I had to open the door, even though the sign was expressly telling me I didn't want to! :-))

 

So, I guess about 20 of us turned up in all, and we did circle, café, Open Space. I was so enamoured of the conversation at my table in the Café that I stayed to host it - something I rarely do, cuz I'm a traveller at heart. Just look at the gorgeous tablecloth:

Lunch co-created  and consumed itself in a record half an hour, because we really wanted to get into Open Space and still be released out into nature by 16.00 in order to catch the last rays of the spring sunshine.

And it all came undone because we were invited to present the harvest of our Open Space sessions in a creative way. Two sessions had been about constellations, and the two hosts decided to offer each other a constellation as their harvest back to the group. With 20 minutes left until 16.00, that was a recipe for seriously overshooting the declared end of the day.

And of course, in the space that we had already opened up throughout the day, what started out as an innocent exploration of one person's small issue around a political constellations workshop planned for June this year exploded out into an incredibly powerful - and to some people frightening - experience, where Mother Earth showed up and powerfully shook our paltry assumptions about the game we are playing, facilitating 'solutions' to issues we can get our heads around, when the issue is one of understanding our absolute powerless in the face of the enormous scale and power of a planet we are abusing and a global civilisation gone haywire.

The greatest learning in there for me, as an experienced host AND someone who is familiar with constellation processes, was the importance of FRAMING. This genie was unleashed from the bottle with no explanation to those in the room who had never heard of systemic constellations. This resulted in unnecessary distress in the 'audience' on behalf of some of the representatives in the field, who's bodies were undergoing the forces of the systemic phenomena they were expressing, and some feeling of 'unsafeness' for those who didn't understand what was going on.

All in all, I found it a thoroughly positive and valuable experience. You can see my photos here:

AoH Practitioners' day - Brussels

[Olivier Chaput]

I am sorry I missed it, I still have to improve in the Art of Managing my agenda. Hope to make it for next time :)