To
ask your question: please follow this link
What is Emptying? Is it really
the only route towards being in
Community?
This is not a simple
question. There are divergent beliefs that you will find amongst the
international Community Building network. Mike Roth prefers to say: if
we define "emptying" as the gateway into
community then we still have 2 whole questions to answer: (1) how do we
recognize this gateway? and (2)what kinds of things lead us towards
this gateway?
It is not a simple
question, because we have no concensus, within our extended network of
"Community Building" even towards the broad principles of answers to
these 2 questions. (If any readers think they do, could you please
kindly put your answer in an e-mail, and send to the address below.)
One account is to be found
elsewhere on our site (it stays on this site, in spite of the fact that
the current WebMaster - Mike - is strongly critical of it. Mike thinks
it is typical of the kind of things that get said about "emptying" and
is probably typical of the kind of things that Scott Peck used to say -
and therefore it needs to stay up here):-
"Emptying happens when
individuals begin to notice what they are carrying within themselves
that prevents them from being authentically present with the group and
fully accepting others. As people begin to share what is real for
them - personal experience of the present moment in the group,
prejudices, stories of past pain or joy, unfulfilled expectations -
group members begin to come together in a new way. In this stage,
a group will often feel like it is dying but, in the painfu struggle to
let go of the barriers to relationship, there is opportunity for
something new to emerge. The process of emptying provides room
for a group to receive the gift of COMMUNITY."
Mike Roth thinks this is a
mixture of rhetoric (in other words:
language designed for particular purposes, rather than to communicate
knowledge). he claims that this kind of talk is essentially
manipulative: to make us feel how nice it is (even though it is not
actually telling us how to recognize emptiness, or to encourage it), but also to
pretend that we know the answers to questions (1) and (2)
above - when actually we don't have any consensus about them at all.
Mike would argue that
phrases like "being authentically present" "what
is real for them" and "personal experience of the present moment" are
so vague that they can mean pretty well anything, to whoever is reading
them: therefore they provide a pretense at being a sort of guideline,
when what they really do is to envelop speaker and listener alike, in a
fog of pseudo-understanding.
So Mike prefers that we leave those crucial questions (1) and (2) open,
and that we look upon the quest for building community - in workshops
and in our lives - as a piece of open research. In this spirit of
openness and exploration, Mike and Tracy penned the following
impressionistic account, for the recent facilitator training
(October-November 2008) in Oxfordshire:-
Experiences of emptiness
I am falling into a swirly
pit of despair. I feel my energy draining
away, I am giving up on it all, I can't do any more.
Everything is starting to feel slowed down; time is dragging along, but
then I feel there is plenty of time... I
have a feeling of time and space opening up.
And in that opening is a place for individuals to show aspects of
themselves that they've previously kept hidden. (People may start to
share feelings of shame, anxiety, previous burdens, any kind of sorrow
or difficulty - where previously it had felt there really wasn't any
space for....)
Somewhere in this process I find I am able to see people in a different
light. Usually it starts with one person: the person who was irritating
becomes lovable. It spreads to a a change of feeling about other
people: I see their frailty and vulnerability and lostness.... maybe
it's because I'm also able to recognize my own. This is a change that
creeps up on me, until suddenly I see and feel that the whole group is
different from how it was. Who has been transformed: them, or me?
At first, it may seem that I have done nothing - the change
has come about without any conscious participation from me. But at some
level of me, I have allowed myself to be open to this change. At some
level, I have let go of something I was previously hanging on to.
Other experiences of emptiness, that seem like a more active engagement
with myself:-
"I am struggling with these negative feelings: (despair, lost, alone).
I don't know what to do about them. Or there are the scary things I do
know what to do about (things I am almost ready to reveal.... but I
feel ashamed). But I don't know the right way to go about it. Oh shit I
am moved to speak, but its terribly hard...."
Or the realization that something I have taken for granted without even
thinking, is something I can perfectly well do without; some examples:
wanting to be liked and accepted... or that sense that I always know
what to do... or that "yearning in my heart" to reach community... or
even the sense of knowing anything at all.... Who really
needs any of this?
 |
Please send or e-mail your questions to Mike Roth,
who will
share them out amongst the CBiB community
and paste up answers on this
page:
Mike Roth (CBiB)
3 Florence Villas
Milton Road
London SE24 0NN
Tel: 0707 188 0858 |
|