Invocations for Peer Mutuality Circles
The Ashland, Oregon mutuality group used the following opening statement for several years when they first began meeting. The statement was written by Bob Valine in 2009, and is offered here as a model, with his permission. Bob is also the author and editor of “The Second Birth: Stories of Awakening within the Heart of Community,” and “Dancing in the Fire”
OPENING STATEMENT FOR TRILLIUM AWAKENING EVENT / MUTUALITY CIRCLE
Welcome to our Trillium Awakening sitting (group/event). Our purpose in coming together is to offer support to each other as we experience the stages of the awakening process and the integration, healing, self-exploration and growth that follow.
Everything that is shared in this group is confidential, including the names of those present. Do we all agree?
We are not here to fix or change anyone, including ourselves, offer advice or intellectualize. We are here in our hearts for ourselves and for each other. We are here to greenlight what is arising in the moment, however painful or joyful, honoring the individual process of the mysteries that we each are.
Please be yourself. There is no wrong way to be you. Sometimes when we don’t know what we’re doing, the unexpected blessings happen.
Much of our time will be reserved for sharing where you are in this moment in time. When you are done sharing you can request reflection from a teacher or mentor. You can also open up to reflection from others in the circle.
Reflections can be silence, a smile, a tear or a few words expressing how someone’s share impacted you. We offer each other compassion, acknowledgment, holding. We honor where every individual is in their process and recognize the innate wisdom of their being. If we give feedback, we don’t talk about ourselves and our experiences; we don’t shift the focus to ourselves; we focus on the person sharing.
Gazing and being immersed in the Trillium Awakening transmission can activate one’s awakening and deepen one’s process. Be aware that the Trillium Awakening path is a powerful process that can take us into unchartered and challenging parts of ourselves. Working with teachers, mentors and as appropriate, a therapist, is highly recommended.
I’m glad you’re here.
OPENING STATEMENT FOR TRILLIUM AWAKENING EVENT / MUTUALITY CIRCLE
Welcome to our Trillium Awakening sitting (group/event). Our purpose in coming together is to offer support to each other as we experience the stages of the awakening process and the integration, healing, self-exploration and growth that follow.
Everything that is shared in this group is confidential, including the names of those present. Do we all agree?
We are not here to fix or change anyone, including ourselves, offer advice or intellectualize. We are here in our hearts for ourselves and for each other. We are here to greenlight what is arising in the moment, however painful or joyful, honoring the individual process of the mysteries that we each are.
Please be yourself. There is no wrong way to be you. Sometimes when we don’t know what we’re doing, the unexpected blessings happen.
Much of our time will be reserved for sharing where you are in this moment in time. When you are done sharing you can request reflection from a teacher or mentor. You can also open up to reflection from others in the circle.
Reflections can be silence, a smile, a tear or a few words expressing how someone’s share impacted you. We offer each other compassion, acknowledgment, holding. We honor where every individual is in their process and recognize the innate wisdom of their being. If we give feedback, we don’t talk about ourselves and our experiences; we don’t shift the focus to ourselves; we focus on the person sharing.
Gazing and being immersed in the Trillium Awakening transmission can activate one’s awakening and deepen one’s process. Be aware that the Trillium Awakening path is a powerful process that can take us into unchartered and challenging parts of ourselves. Working with teachers, mentors and as appropriate, a therapist, is highly recommended.
I’m glad you’re here.
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There is a wild grace
that is everywhere There is no need to transcend anything here, for you have taken birth in a sacred world. Whatever arises in your immediate embodied experience is none other than the path itself, a gateway into the wild dimension of love. Even your despair, your confusion, your fear, your anger, and your sadness are revelations of intelligence, pouring into this reality to expose a secret place within you. From the perspective of awakened mind, there is no bias for wisdom over neurosis, divine over human, or clarity over confusion. For anything met with pure awareness and open warmth is self-liberated into the ground of being itself. This is a spirituality of intimacy, friends! of the breaking open of your naked, messy, vulnerable heart. Fall into the unknown and come closer, and even closer than that. There is a wild grace that is everywhere, that keeps the stars from falling out of the sky. It is this same grace that has assembled you as you are, cell by cell. Sylvia Woods shared this poem at a sitting in Olympia, on October 2013. She got it from Matt Licata's blog post: http://alovinghealingspace.blogspot.com/2013/09/there-is-wild-grace-this-is-everywhere.html |
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TO LISTEN
To listen is very hard, because it asks of us so much interior stability that we no longer need to prove ourselves by speeches, arguments, statements, or declarations. True listeners no longer have an inner need to make their presence known. They are free to receive, to welcome, to accept. Listening is much more than allowing another to talk while waiting for a chance to respond. Listening is paying full attention to others and welcoming them into our very beings. The beauty of listening is that, those who are listened to start feeling accepted, start taking their words more seriously and discovering their own true selves. Listening is a form of spiritual hospitality by which you invite strangers to become friends, to get to know their inner selves more fully, and even to dare to be silent with you. Henri Nouwen, a Dutch-born Catholic priest and psychology professor, taught psychology and theology at Harvard, Yale, and Notre Dame. Another lovely quote from Henri Nouwen
"When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares." [from his book Out Of Solitude ] |
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The jewels hidden in the dark soil of the body
At times, the greatest gift we can offer a friend in pain is to sit in the darkness with them, removing the burden that they change, ‘feel better,’ or ‘heal’ in order for us to stay close. It may feel like urgent action is being called for and that we must shift their depression to joy, their sadness to bliss, and their hopelessness to hope. But in doing so, we disavow the jewels that are hidden in the dark soil of the body.
Let us love the other so much that we refuse to pathologize their present, arising experience, and create with them a sanctuary in which their emotional world can unfold and illuminate. Let us honor the integration that is occurring and the raging wholeness that they are, in both its peaceful and its wrathful expressions.
Above all, to do whatever we can so that they know in their hearts that we will not remove our love, our attunement, and our presence simply because their experience is not conforming to our personal and collective fantasies of happiness and light.
As we weave a home for our own unmet sadness, disappointment, and despair, we withdraw the projection of our unlived lives from the environment around us. For it is to the degree that we can provide safe passage for the unwanted within that we can truly love another.
-- Matt Licata, Aug 21, 2015 blog post
At times, the greatest gift we can offer a friend in pain is to sit in the darkness with them, removing the burden that they change, ‘feel better,’ or ‘heal’ in order for us to stay close. It may feel like urgent action is being called for and that we must shift their depression to joy, their sadness to bliss, and their hopelessness to hope. But in doing so, we disavow the jewels that are hidden in the dark soil of the body.
Let us love the other so much that we refuse to pathologize their present, arising experience, and create with them a sanctuary in which their emotional world can unfold and illuminate. Let us honor the integration that is occurring and the raging wholeness that they are, in both its peaceful and its wrathful expressions.
Above all, to do whatever we can so that they know in their hearts that we will not remove our love, our attunement, and our presence simply because their experience is not conforming to our personal and collective fantasies of happiness and light.
As we weave a home for our own unmet sadness, disappointment, and despair, we withdraw the projection of our unlived lives from the environment around us. For it is to the degree that we can provide safe passage for the unwanted within that we can truly love another.
-- Matt Licata, Aug 21, 2015 blog post