Wellspring: inspiration and guidance for a spiritual journey

The art of facilitating, by Joy Collins

Like all of us Wellspring bloggers, I have a “day job” – mine being a professional facilitator and trainer in Corporate America. Last week at the end of a leadership series I was teaching, one of the leaders came up and told me a horror story about a previous, botched leadership series she had attended at her company. Apparently the trainer created an exercise where all the leaders shared private, very personal stories from their past.  This trainer then in subsequent sessions continued bringing up this woman’s story, to the point where the leader finally left the class in tears. My client was expressing relief and gratitude that my leadership series was so much more affirming, helpful and targeted.

I can sympathize with this leader, and also have an inkling of what that other trainer was trying (miserably) to accomplish. CONTACT. As the famous mother of the self-esteem movement, Virginia Satir, so eloquently wrote,

Contact
I believe
the greatest gift
I can conceive of having
from anyone
is
to be seen by them,
heard by them,
to be understood
and
touched by them.

The greatest gift
I can give
is
to see, hear, understand
and to touch
another person.

When this is done
I feel
contact has been made.

Who wouldn’t want this? How do we create this type of authentic connection in our Wellspring groups, while respecting people’s privacy and right to remain silent? Clearly that original trainer had attempted it in a terrible, nail-on-the-chalkboard way.

In one of our early Wellspring groups I took at risk, and it could have gone either way. I/we were fortunate. At the time, fairly early in the church year, a participant shared a great personal difficulty during the small group check-in. Our Parker Palmer inspired covenant would have suggested I nod in sympathy and move on. But my heart told me to do something different. As a liberal, I don’t usually take advice from my conservative Christian sister, but I could hear her voice in my head. I turned to our Wellspring participant and asked if she would be interested in the rest of us praying for her situation over the next two weeks? Now for my sister, this would have been a no-brainer, but for an intellectual group of Unitarians? I worried I had overstepped my bounds. Were those nails I was hearing on a chalkboard? After a very long moment, the participant said she might like that. And then offered to email us a photograph about her great difficulty. By the time we got around the room to listen to the rest of the check-in’s, two more participants asked for specific ways the group could hold them in their thoughts. It was a turning point for our group, and moved us beyond being primarily a study group - to that place of deep, Satir-like CONTACT. We all felt it.

In the other Wellspring and small church covenant groups I have facilitated, the “contact” came sooner or sometimes later. It never comes in quite the same way. Hence the “art” of facilitating. There are tips, but no formulae. If I go too far in pushing, I’d end up with a situation like the leader leaving the room in tears. If I don’t nudge slightly, that opportunity for deep human connecting might not happen, especially in our intellectually laden UU small groups. What has worked for you? When and how was that magic of “contact” created? How much of this can a facilitator influence? What is simply the universe at work?

The Wellspring Covenant, by Libby Moore

Our Friday morning Wellspring group met yesterday for the first regular session. The reading assignment was Parker Palmer's A Hidden Wholeness. I am so grateful for having this deep and wonderful book as the focus of our first meeting because it smoothes the way toward our being together with love and caring.

Palmer describes how to be intentional about developing a circle of trust, focusing on listening as much as speaking. He asks us to listen without planning what we're going to say next, to hold a moment of silence between speakers, to allow safe space for the "shy soul" to appear. He says, "… as we are liberated from adversarial speaking and listening, we are much more likely to hear and reflect on things we ourselves have said. Now we have the disarming experience of being taught by our own inner teacher." Operating this way in our circle means trusting that each of us will learn from our own inner teacher. It means no fixing, no advising, no setting the other straight. It means creating a safe space for each of us to hear our inner voice.

It's not an easy task, and the Wellspring covenant helps us create that safe space in our groups. At our opening retreat two weeks ago, we talked about the covenant briefly. Yesterday we talked about it in depth, and A Hidden Wholeness encouraged us to think about what the covenant means to us as individuals and as a group.

Here's what our covenant says:

 

• Ask for what we need
• Help Jen, Libby and Joy facilitate, as appropriate
• Begin and end on time
• Develop a personal covenant that will benefit the person who wrote it (and, we hope, the entire group)
• Do the pre-work
• Listen openly and humbly, not attempting to judge or fix others
• Speak from our own personal experience
• Maintain appropriate confidentiality by telling only our personal stories when speaking outside the group
• Respect and be attentive to Jen's time and role within the group
• Share the air time
• Welcome and encourage humor
• Revisit the covenant, as needed

 

In past years, I've given the covenant less attention, feeling that we would manage to get along fine without having to talk about it. But yesterday's conversation in our group gave me a new appreciation for the value in being explicit about how we are together, for our covenant with each other to do this work and to be together in a safe and loving way. May we continue to build a circle of trust where we can all feel safe and heard.

Babies, by Libby Moore

At the beginning of July, my husband and I came home from a few days away to discover that robins had built a nest in a hanging planter outside our garden room window. They seemed surprised to see us moving around on the other side of the glass, but the mother proceeded to lay an egg every day until there were four, and then she sat, and we watched. We went away again, for a couple of weeks, and when we came home there were four gaping mouths in the nest and two weary parents flying back and forth, feeding them tidbits of bugs and worms. They're growing fast, starting to jostle for space in the nest, getting ready to try their wings.

There have been a couple of human babies born this month, too. Last fall one of my Wellspring group discovered that she was pregnant and we all celebrated with her, relieved to discover why she'd been so tired. Her baby boy was born a month early, on July 13, and we're all thrilled. And Jen, our associate minister, Wellspring mentor and inspiration, is now a parent. Their Henry arrived, happily, on July 21, to much joy. The pictures of these two newborns make my newest granddaughter, now six months old, seem positively grown up – Evelyn moves herself around, burbles and laughs, eats cereal and bananas with gusto. Since the beginning, she's been her own person with distinctive characteristics and preferences, and I love watching her grow.

Our new Wellspring groups are about to hatch as well. We conceived a sizeable list of prospects through several orientation programs which generated a lot of interest, especially after Jen spoke about the program during Sunday morning worship. We're offering two groups this year, one morning and one evening, and people have sorted themselves out into one or the other. We're pretty well set with seven or eight people in each group, about the most we can have and still give everyone adequate time to speak and listen during the small group sessions. In September, we'll have our initial full-day retreat, when we find out what disctinctive characteristics these groups will have. We start with telling our stories, our spiritual histories, and begin to get to know each other. We'll continue developing through the year, building trust and appreciation for one another as we explore our spiritual journeys together. Each group takes on a unique personality and becomes its own entity, and I'm eager to see what develops this year. We'll grow together until it's time to fly out of the nest on our wings of faith. May we hold one another in love and respect through the process.