Good Endings and Being in the Empty Space of Not Knowing – 2nd conversation Friday 16th October and 3rd conversation Friday 20th November

Fri, 16th October, 2020 from 9:30 AM, in

Facilitated by Sue Holland and Alison Hogan.

How different the context for us human beings since we postponed this most appropriate Sadler Heath session due to Covid-19 lockdown. We would be hard pushed to imagine a more pertinent context as a backdrop for attending to the threads of endings and beginnings in our work and life. The human part of the natural world has rallied resources unseen in a generation during peacetime. With that, the idea and reality of endings and beginnings at personal, societal and global levels has been illuminated in very stark ways and has been noted by many commentators in recent months with the phrase ‘we may all be in the same storm, but we are in very different boats’

We have been in our own lockdowns, experiencing endings, reflecting in the fertile void, and living the unfolding life. We remain curious about how attending to endings well can support us in the liminal space / fertile void of ‘not knowing’ and the subsequent unfolding of the next beginning…..

“In order for something of quality to take place, an empty space needs to be created. An empty space makes it possible for a new phenomenon to come to life, for anything that touches on content, meaning, expression, language, and music can exist only if the experience is fresh and new. However, no fresh and new experience is possible if there isn’t pure, virgin space ready to receive it”.

 Peter Brook, There Are No Secrets

Our tendency is to move on rapidly, neither giving sufficient attention to ending something well nor dwelling in an empty space of uncertainty and ‘not knowing’ before beginning something else.

Yet, if we can attend to endings and unfinished business and allow ourselves to rest in the emerging, ‘liminal space’, it can be a creative space, rich in possibilities; what in Gestalt is described as the ‘fertile void’.

 “This lovely neutrality in which one no longer feels pulled towards one extreme or the other; no longer prisoner of one way of seeing the world which inevitably blinds one to possibilities.”

“If we are able to give up what is familiar to us, we may become anxious and uncertain but then we can enter a weighty world of nothingness from which infinite and surprising differentiations emerge.” (Nancy Amendt-Lyon)

 Whether it is in the external world of work, family and friends or the inner world of thoughts, sensations and feelings, the more able we are to attend to our own arcs of experience around endings and beginnings and the space in between, the more ‘complete’ and satisfying our sense of the lived experience can be.

 Sweet Darkness by David Whyte

 The dark will be your home tonight.

The dark will give you a horizon further than you can see.

You must learn one thing,
The world was made to be free in.

Give up all other worlds
except for the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn

anything or anyone that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

We invite you to join us for three online Zoom sessions where we explore these themes. Through questions, reflection, and conversation, we’ll explore the arc of experience around endings, the fertile void and beginnings. Where possible, we will use somatic and creative processes as well as cognitive meaning making.

This series of conversations is offered free of charge, however, please book a place online (see button below) so that we can manage the space appropriately for the numbers. You only need book once for all three sessions (even if you can’t make them all). Zoom links will be sent nearer the time.

Session 1             – Friday 25th September at 09.30 – 11.00 BST

Session 2             – Friday 16th October at 09.30 – 11.00 BST

Session 3             – Friday 20th November at 09.30 – 11.00 BST

 

 

Date, time and venue

When:
Date(s) - 16/10/2020
9:30 am - 11:00 am