Its been four months now that I have been in India and China with the intention of “preparing the field” and it feels like it is time to be harvesting some learnings from this journey. My hesitance and procrastination suggest something different and I realize that I have more questions than learnings. If I wait for the answers, I may not ever write anything. So, maybe now is the time for identifying questions and setting an intention to write more about each of them.
So far, my experience is that this work is much harder than I had anticipated but I am also discovering that my knowledge and experience base is much deeper than I realized. Over and over, it feels like I am stewarding and being an elder in ways that surprise me. And I am definitely living on my learning edge, wondering what I am doing and wishing that I had someone more experienced to support me.
For what am I preparing the field? What shifts if we focus on developing a community of practitioners instead of offering an AoH training? A training for the sake of what? What am I trying to accomplish at a personal and systemic level? Is the vision of an Art of Hosting training too small and too rooted in Global North experiences? If not preparing for a training, how do we set an intention and a shared vision to work toward? How to engage and sustain a core team without a training event to focus on?
Is it time? What is time anyway? What does time mean in the Global South? Is there a commonality in how time is experienced in the Global South or is it much more specific to each culture? What can I learn from the cultural differences in how time is experienced and how do I work with these differences? How does my personal experience of time affect how I work and what is possible? How does the shortness of my time here feed the intensity and how can it be sustained over the long term?
What is my work? What does it mean to be a Sacred Outsider? How do I stay clear with what is my work and what is not, what is my role to play and what I need to allow others to do? How to live my work in every moment seeing every interaction as the real work – living for the journey and not focused on the destination? How much responsibility to take for tasks and processes and how much to allow others to learn by doing? Do I add any value by planting seeds over a couple of months and then leaving an area?
What does it mean to be called or invited? How to discern between what I want to do and what is really calling to me? Is it necessary for the call to be deep and strong or can I work to amplify and strengthen the caller and the call? How to distinguish between old protective patterns of saying “no” and the wisdom of knowing when conditions are not conducive and wisely saying “no”?
How do I sustain myself in this work? Practices that I can integrate into my nomadic life? Finding mates in faraway places? An economic model to support the work of a Sacred Outsider? Who is my wisdom circle and how do I learn to access them?
What is me and what is not? When I notice emotional reactions in myself, how do i tell if these are personal issues or they are disturbances in the field that I am sensing? How to compassionately and effectively deal with disturbances in the field?
How much is my world view is integral to the work that I do? Is it possible to train people in the processes and practices without also imparting an integral world view? How do I love and accept people at whatever their developmental and experience level? How do I respond to people who seem to only want to learn to imitate the methodologies? If the culture really values keeping one’s emotions private and avoiding “negative” emotions, is there a place for a conversational approach based upon acceptance and expression authentic emotion?
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