Exercise: The emerging shape of the European Meeting

Dear all,

I'd like to share another important piece of our planning weekend in Dresden. It was Sunday morning during check-in when it became evident that we had to switch from diverging, brainstorming conversations that had produced a rich basket full of ideas to converging conversations that lead towards actionable ideas.

We used a body-centered mindfulness exercise to prepare the ground. After turning the awareness inwards and focusing on the momentary physical experience, we invited the unconscious into the conversation by asking the following question and listening to the resonance of the body: »What shape will the meeting take?« We explored this resonance, listened for a gesture or a movement that wanted to emerge, took another step in inquiring the possible meaning of this gesture/movement. After coming back with the consciousness in the room, we had a quick sharing. Later during the day, we translated this experience into pictures.

In brackets: Reframing this experience for myself, instead of calling it inviting the unconscious, one could describe it as well as: Presencing the emergent future, to use Otto Scharmers words. Letting go. Letting come. The core of innovative and creative processes.

Here is a brief summary of what we experienced.

John had the image of sitting in a sweat lodge. His words: Slowing down. He included this picture in his recording of Saturday/Sunday.
Chris' sentence was: From Me to We.
Petra had the inner picture of an egg, and the meaning turned out to be: Intimate space.
Sabine found a tree that was moving gently in the wind.
Amy's resonance was a fluid movement, like swimming. Her sentence was: Swimming in a sea of community.
My own movement was slowly swinging with my whole body from left to right and back. I imagined standing in a circle of friends that held each other by their hands. It was like cradling a baby. My words have been: A cradle for culture. When thinking about making this meaning visible, I discovered that I experienced our meeting itself being a cradle for culture. This is why I took a picture of our meeting space.

Here are our pictures.

In my humble opinion, these pictures point to different aspects of the essence of what we want to co-create. After this exercise we really switched into action mode and started to break things down to some actionable size (which took us Sunday afternoon and Monday morning).

Join the experience:

If you want to join in the exercise, take a moment of silence, check-in with yourself, and let the words that came up for us resonate in yourself. What is the physical response of your body? Can you feel an inner opening, a resonance, a gesture or a movement emerging? Don't try to force anything, just stay curious and see what is emerging by itself. If this gesture / movement could speak to you, what would it say? If you want to take it further, translate your experience into a drawing/picture/photograph and share it with us and write a comment including your »product«. This event is about co-creation!

Warm best wishes,

Ulrich

 

Comments

[Tom Hurley]

Ulrich and friends,

What a powerful exercise. The images do indeed convey qualities that the words alone do not. I hope you'll find a way to use similarly evocative imagery as part of your communications about...and invitations to...the meeting.

Warmly,
Tom