Authentic Spiritual Conversations
Grants Pass, OR
Our Vision:
“Creating a safe space where everyone can talk authentically about their spiritual experiences, challenges and deepest longings, and feel honored and heard.”
Our Intentions and Values:
Some of the intentions and values that will help to create a safe space where everyone is heard and valued, and where everyone can experience being fully present in their SoulSelf & the flow of Now Presence are:
• Safety to allow people to express their vulnerability, doubts, challenges, frustrations and beliefs …without being given advice, preached at, condescended to or made wrong in any way;
• Speaking our truth, for our own benefit, to heal and dissolve any internal barriers we placed on ourselves in order to be safe and receive love, and to begin to allow the truth of who we are to show up in the world;
• Self-Responsibility for our own actions, reactions, beliefs, choices, development, and self-empowerment to meet our needs;
• Sharing what we have experienced and learned as an offering to each other when it comes from a sincere desire. Use “I” wording to share. To be heard, and to hear oneself, share what is truth for you, without needing to have others agree. Speak from personal experience (instead of concepts, generalizations, etc.);
• Listening. Really allow and be ‘present’ with others when they share. Also, be ‘present’ with your own sharing. Honor completed sharings with silence or acknowledgement before speaking of your own experiences. Create a listening space where people can try on ideas, feelings, and forms of self-expression without being concerned about having to take care of the listener;
• Respect and compassion for the right of each person to be exactly where they are and to have their own perspectives, beliefs, and experiences. Intend to stay in one’s own heart. Compassion for the challenges, difficulties, and ‘seeming failures’ that we all face;
• Trust in the process that each person is on their own sacred path and will receive, or be guided to, what they need. And, that their inner Self/Source knows better than anyone else what that is;
• Humility in accepting that we have limited knowledge of the Truth, other’s perspectives and other ways of being;
• Freedom to change our minds, choose our level of participation, and decline any suggestion that does not fit for us;
• Shared leadership, or “Leader-full Facilitation,” as an opportunity for everyone in the group who chooses it, to take a turn at trying on and standing in the role of self-empowered leader. At the same time, everyone is 100% responsible for themselves and for speaking up at any time when they feel so called.
Some additional ‘tools’ to help create safety and support one another might be by doing the following: Ask the speaker’s permission to share your own experience or thoughts on a subject. Ask a question for clarity like “What I heard you say is …. Is that right?” Reflect back to them what you think you heard. Ask if the group can support them in any way. And, if someone is talking on top of a person who is sharing, or interrupting them, make a gentle, compassionate request for them to hold the space for the person to complete their sharing. Other ways to give support: put a person in a group healing circle, put a person or even the whole group in the light, if it calls to you, in-between meetings.
It is very easy to slip into old patterns of expression and conversation in a group because these are what we learned growing up, and they are common and accepted ways of speaking. When we slip into old patterns of speaking, it is not a reason to chastise ourselves, or each other, but rather an opportunity to practice the Value of Compassion.