Sitting in Circle

A scientist once told me that the most exciting phrase to hear in his lab was a kind of baffled ‘hmmm?..’ Not a high-wire gasp or a group high five, nope; the most exciting sound to hear in his lab was a kind of stumped silence with a slow, low whistled well-I-never exhale of breath. Like in 1928 when Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming spotted the bacteria on his petri dish had been wiped out by a hostile mould. Or when Jake closed the door on our climate circle last month and turned to me and said ‘um.. What just happened?’ 

Because knowing would be boring right? To hold an agenda and bias an outcome would be unscientific and kill the vitality of any enquiry.  Whereas not knowing, well that’s where the juicy stuff happens. The gestalt lens of creative indifference holds that, as therapists, we need to disinvest in any outcome as we sit with the big questions. Our job is to build the container, attend to the aliveness of the enquiry, buckle our seatbelts and make sure we hang in there with curiosity, compassion and companionship no matter what happens next.  Particularly when we’re punching in the big co-ordinates like the metacrisis. 

Human emotions, nearly without exception - apart from maybe fear - want to move and transform. And growth happens when we remain responsive to the unfolding of every minute, giving these the best possible chance for them to move through us – with others, in nature, in a ritual - without calcifying or fixating or metastasizing any one emotion so that once we close the door we do so a little more limber and a little more match ready from our what just happened…

It’s November, come and bring your continual flow of unfolding processes in person to the climate circle in Islington next Wednesday 5th or the woods on Hampstead Heath next Friday 7th and see what might just happen.