Bowen Island is where I live and work. Since 2004 there has been an annual Art of Hosting learning event offered by a really solid team of my most deeply experienced and connected friends and colleagues. Last year Scott Macklin came and made a beautiful video capturing the experience we craft here. Enjoy it and if you would like to experience it for yourself, please join us this November.
Erich Fromm studied love and connection as his life’s work. Along the way he was able to study and learn about the art of some of the core capacities of loving. From a blog post today on Fromm’s work, comes this simple set of principles for deepening the art of listening (in his own words): The basic rule for practicing this art is the complete concentration of the listener. Nothing of importance must be on his mind, he must be optimally free from anxiety as well as from greed. He must possess a freely-working imagination which is sufficiently concrete to …
Over the past few years, I have been thinking a lot about what it means to develop artistic mastery in facilitation/hosting practice. It’s an important topic to me because I teach this work, and it’s not always easy to design deep learning when people are expecting to become instantly good at facilitation after a single workshop. The Art of Hosting is a practice founded on tools, rooted in theory. It takes time to understand and integrate this practice and become masterful at it. I often draw parallels between learning the practice and development of mastery in the arts. Today I …
I’ve been deeply influenced over the years by Christina Baldwin’s principle that “no one person can be responsible for the safety of the group, but a group can learn to take responsibility for it’s own safety.” I too think that the principles of Open Space allow for the right balance for individuals to take responsibility for co-creating group safety. What is remarkable is that safety is an emergent phenomenon in Open Space, a true artifact of a self-organizing system. Of course I have seen some real conflicts happen in Open Space, but what seems to mitigate them is the double …
We were working with a local government client last week in a meeting that had a very contentious subject matter focused on the return of land and uses of that land, to First Nations owners. There was an important conversation as a part of this work that involved removing a structure that had some historical significance to the community but was seen as a mark of an oppressive history by the First Nations owners who could not contemplate it remaining on their land. It is a wickedly complicated issue right at the heart of what reconciliation really means: returning land, …