Twenty years ago, in June 1985 I remember listening to the CBC at a friend’s cottage north of Toronto when the news came that Air India flight 182 from Vancouver to Delhi had been bombed out of the sky near Ireland. Three hundred and twenty-nine people, most of them Canadians died that day, including my friend Sanjay Sakhawalkar, his whole family and four other kids from my school. The summer of 1985 was filled with grief and sadness at the loss. I sobbed far more than a 17 year-old boy is supposed to. My dreams were filled with terrible recurring …
A propos of my post on facilitation and authenticity, I am becoming more keenly aware of the ways in which artists have been describing the process of “hosting.” Today, my pal Andy Boprrows posts a set of poems that speak to me, including this one by Wendell Berry: The Real WorkIt may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is …
I’ve been facilitating groups for as long as I can remember, going back probably 20 years to high school when I ran both informal and organized youth groups with my peers. It has probably been about twelve or thirteen years ago that I started to actually pay attention to what I was doing. But only in the last five or six years, as I have been facilitating full time, have I noticed a deepening in my practice. Work as practice. And by practice I mean something akin to a spiritual practice, whereby one undertakes a life of value and meaning …
Lifting this right from Adam Kahane’s book Solving Tough Problems: We get stuck by holding on tightly to our opinions and plans and identities and truths. But when we relax and are present and open up our minds and hearts and wills, we get unstuck and we unstick the world around us. I have learned that the more open I am – the more authentic I am to the way things are and could be, around me and inside me; the less attached I am to way things ought to be – the more effective I am in helping to …
Every year I look back on all the work I have been a part of, and I like to publically thanks everyone who has invited me to be a part of their lives this year. It has been a busy one, with trips to New Zealand, the United States, and every Canadian province from British Columbia to Quebec. So thanks are due to the following groups who invited me to come work with them: Office of the Dean of Medicine, University of British Columbia Vancouver Aboriginal Child and Familiy Services Office for Accesa and Diversity, University of British Columbia The …