Hi friends,
Here’s a short post to get to the heart of what this is about and what I hope it can be.
The ordinary project of us all is to seek for status and belonging. We look for where we can feel bonded and belong. When we succeed in belonging to those who are important to us we feel good - we have a good conscience. When we feel insecure about our belonging we feel less good - we experience that as a bad conscience. We don’t usually make the connection to conscience of course (an idea from Bert Hellinger) but I find it extremely useful. It gets to the heart of what we don’t see.
But there is a higher conscience, a higher belonging.
We interrupt the search for ordinary belonging and status, we become available to serve something higher. A part of us, if you like. God.
This pretty much requires the help of others. Others inspire us to go beyond by their courage in doing so, by their truthfulness and recognition, the unfakeableness of which we immediately recognize. This rising above the ordinary looking-good, status-seeking mind is not easy. The pull of ordinary consciousness, the desire to feel safe in our belonging is extremely pervasive and hard to see through. There is a higher conscience though and a higher consciousness.
There are many ways to work together that are suggestive of that higher consciousness but of themselves, they don’t do it for us. We do it. Ways include Collective Presencing, Bohmian Dialogue, Peter Block’s asmallgroup methodology, Presencing in dyads/pairs and combinations of these and more. All of these are ways to practice what mere analysis can’t get at.
I think of this as a Mutual Wisdom School Project. It looks like group explorations to add to what we do privately. Anyone who’s interested can join in here and I’ll be offering most or all of these in the New Year. Some will be drop-in and some dedicated groups for more intense work. Some will be free and some paid There’s room to help out with all of this for anyone interested in this.
I’m doing a Connecting Seeds call on Ownership (as opposed to blame) in less than an hour (11am Eastern, 90 minutes) if you’d like to jump in, part of a series of weekly calls following a trail laid down by Peter Block. Come join in if you like. It’s free and you can pre-register here.
Andrew
The ability to tune in on an intuitive or psychic level with the emotions, moods and attitudes of a person, group of people or animals. Empathy is neither completely conscious nor completely unconscious. It apparently involves psi phenomena such as the telepathic transmission of feelings and thoughts, sometimes over long distances. Empathy in situations where individuals meet in person may be due in part to an unconscious reading of the other's muscle movements and tension.
People who manifest this phenomenon are particularly susceptible to suffering and pain. The other's physical illnesses can manifest themselves in their own body and in the same place as the sufferer, while emotional disturbances can manifest as depression. These conditions can be captured from both places and people. For example, a person can enter a church and feel the suffering of all those who have come there seeking comfort: the church itself can seem to cry. Some of those who experience empathy tend to feel the disease in the other even before he is aware of it. These experiences are not the same as psychometry, which requires touching objects to get impressions, nor with "Therapeutic Touch", a type of medical diagnosis that is done by exploring the aura with the hands.
Those who feel empathy can perceive death at a distance and sometimes before it occurs. The sensations may involve the affected body part; the person may feel chest pain in relation to someone who is going to die of a heart attack. Distance empathy occurs preferentially between people who have close emotional ties. The twins stand out for their empathic relationships and so do the mothers with their children. Some find that, in addition to feeling emotions, they absorb them like sponges. The impact can be devastating in the face of the encounter with pain and depression, sometimes being exhausted by it.
Evidence of cases of animals exhibiting empathy at a distance has been shown. Animals sense when their masters are in trouble or have been injured or killed, becoming agitated or depressed. They also sense when something happens to a family animal from a distance. Research shows that animals retain an empathic bond with their young, parents, and companions.
An interesting initiative. I have had the opportunity and pleasure to participate in and lead Improvement Teams and Quality Circles at the University aimed primarily at achieving excellence in learning and research.
This participation has been fundamental for my motivation at work and integration with teachers and other members of the university.
In fact staff involvement in evaluation and quality improvement stemmed mainly from W. Z Ouchi Theory, an attempt to bring "management" to the Japanese American model. Oriented organization model according to motivation theories, which conceived the organized system as a team in the spirit of cooperation, mutual trust and personal skills is essential.
Some conditions that must be met to form an improvement team or quality circle are:
• The objectives and tasks must be explained so that they are understood by all.
• Commitment with the team members with the objectives.
• Communication between team members must be open, accurate and efficient, the exchange of ideas and feelings.
• trust, acceptance and support among team members must be achieved.
• The team must use the skills, knowledge, experience and abilities of each of its members.
• Participation in work must be equitable.
• Faced with possible confrontations, they have to know the situation and promote constructive behavioral solutions.
• They must know and apply appropriate decision making and problem solving.
Teamwork implies certain inconveniences (loss of individuality, increased conformism, resignation to others, a groupthink phenomenon), but it brings richness in approaches, fosters innovation, represents groups, and legitimizes decisions.
This training also allowed me to be a member of teacher evaluation teams, allowing for greater support and advice to colleagues.