Community building/connection processes!
My (Rachael) biggest interest is CONNECTION. Connection to the environment & all living beings within it. This of course involves humans! In fact if an eco-village is to persist the human foundation, PEOPLE (in permaculture terms) is the most important element. Without this, eco-villages don’t last, no matter how many vegetables you plant! 😉 if ppl aren’t happy things fall apart. My favourite permaculture quote is, “if it’s not fun it’s not sustainable”.
So I got talking to this wondrous & beautiful human called Fran, who happened to be the communication co-ordinator at sunseed,
and she really wanted to develop this aspect of sunseed’s community. I hadn’t really found my place at sunseed til Fran & I hatched a plan to run a meeting for all those interested & then do a community processes experiment during their usual weekly seminar time.
Brian helped out loads by supporting me in leading energising & trust games & activities to develop cohesion, including the invaluable tool of “Attunement ” which we learned at Findhorn eco-village in Scotland last year. Everyone comes together in a circle before & after any activity to tune in & then tune out after. It’s a really simple process that lasts about 30-60 secs. Everyone holds hands, one person is chosen to make us aware of sensory things to bring us into the present together (eg. Birds or warm sun), an intention is set, and then a squeeze is sent round the circle & ppl let go hands. The brilliant thing is anyone can start the squeeze so that if the person leading the Attunement is going on, no one knows who started the squeeze, so the group has power to finish it! It seems to create this magical connection that makes the activity ahead, & communication, flow really easily.
We then used three different approaches to deal with some problems at Sunseed. We didn’t have much time but gave tasters of each for the community members to bring into their meetings & problem solving moments in their own way. I introduced dyads, where we get in pairs & one person is the speaker & one the benevolent, non judgemental, listener. The listener doesnt react at all, but keeps encouraging, energetic eye contact throughout. The speaker contemplates & speaks alternately, on a topic during 5 mins. The pairs then swap over roles without discussion. In the classical format the question is “tell me who you are” but we used it for “what are your unmet needs at sunseed” (we used non violent communication to transform problems into identifying the unmet needs behind them). Also normally each person has 4 turns as speaker/listener. So it’s not about dialogue or agreement but rather allowing & supporting the other to become more connected & clear about the topic before they try to dialogue about it. Everything spoken is confidential & we only spoke about our OWN experience in the larger group or outside the session. We also used some non-violent communication skills in a check in round before hand – really quick round of how everyone feels, making clear that we wanted feelings (because that connect us to the present moment) rather than thoughts & judgements,  which can creep in when we use phrases like “I feel LIKE/THAT…something’s wrong  etc”. Thoughts & judgement can be useful for some things but take us always into the past or future, not what’s alive in us right now.
We also used FORUM theatre, Â which gets people to act out the problems, & audience can tap an “actor” at any point & take their place if they have something to contribute. We had really great discussions after & how we would like to try it again.
Lastly we looked at 6 THINKING HATS. Brian led this one & we took one problem & made mind maps for each hat. This was to give equal priority to each way of thinking. We only had 1 min per hat & yet the info that came out of the group was amazing. The 6 hats are: black – negatives/dangers, white – verifiable facts, yellow – positivity/benefits, Â blue – organisational, green – creativity, red – emotions.
And the outcome of the sessions was great. key co-ordinators took on the Attunements that very day, & others were trying to figure out how they could apply other techniques in their meetings etc! It was an amazing experience to get to experiment like this with such open supportive people. And I’d have to say I think this is one of Sunseed’s biggest strengths. There’s a real sense of experimentation & peer to peer learning-teaching that feels much more natural & fulfilling to me. Getting to contribute in a meaningful way is something I believe everyone yearns for 🙂
THANK YOU SUNSEED!!!
Also above everyone was super supportive, curious & positive about watching my movie, Surreal Circus, that I made this year. It had the the biggest ever turn out for movie night apparently! 🙂
including this cat that stole the limelight during the credits! Can you spot it? Haha! How perfect?!
