Thank you Brigitt for mentioning the issue of touch. I like to hear any facilitator affirmatively mention that touching is not required. Mention it in passing, do not make it a major point. Just get the message to anyone who needs to hear it.
I participate in a monthly experiment in community building at the Whidbey Institute. The sessions started out being a basic open space. By the third month, a minister had stepped forward to do invocations and prayers. The community was not asked if they wanted a minister doing opening prayers: it was imposed. She did a "marketplace" offering but it became the closing circle. The law of two feet did not really apply because people had to do what she asked because she had co-opted the closing circle. I am an open minded gal. I can take a prayer or two outside my own spiritual path. But you start to lose me when you force anything on me. It really bugged me that someone had used the marketplace to 'steal' the closing circle. But that wasn't the worst of it. She had designed this process that involved forming many different smaller circles, linking with circles, linking with more circles and then bring us into one whole closing circle. She asked each person to hug everyone in each circle. I had to drop out after the first small circle. I can usually hold anyone's hand (altho sometimes it physically hurts to hold a hand for more than a few seconds) but I cannot hug twenty people I don't know unless I am in just the right place. I might not be in the right emotional place from a history of abuse. I might not be in the right physical place because all my joints are aching with arthritis. Sometimes it physically hurts to hug. My hands and arms might not be screaming with arthritic pain but sometimes a hug hurts my knees or a hip. I, basically, was not allowed to participate in the closing circle. It didn't feel very nice, standing on the sidelines, watching the process. Many times people made gestures to include me which reinforced my sense of exclusion. Having to remove myself from a process because of physical contact is a part of my life. It is quite commonplace for facilitators to ask participants to touch each other without giving permission to not touch. I am used to it. Afterwards, I went up to this minister, waited a long time for my turn to speak to her and I asked her if she would like my feedback on her design, She said she would like to hear my feedback but after I gave it I was pretty sure she did not, in fact, want to hear anything but positive feedback in the form of compliments. I followed the rules of feedback. I spoke about my experience. I told her that arthritis made it difficult for me to do the closing ceremony. I told her that a history of abuse is another reason some people have a hard time doing a lot of touching of strangers. I told her I had felt left out. I am pretty sure she didn't "GET IT" and it is probably why I didn't feel like going to the community gathering last month. There is one of these community gatherings tomorrow. I am thinking of going, I want to be part of a fine, ongoing experiment. But I am having some resistance because of that touchy hug ceremony. If that minister had thanked me for the feedback, if I had felt 'heard' when I reached out to touch her with my words, I'd feel completely accepted. As it is, I do not feel that my different abilities have been embraced by this particular ostensibly open space circle. I am glad if you are still reading this because I need to point out that I have not shared this story just to talk about myself. I am using my experience as a real life example of how easy it is to disengage people with different abilities. It is so easy to lose people. And a corrective measure can be simple. If I were to redesign that co-opted closing circle, I would think about having people bow to each other and that as they bowed, let the bow become a way of embracing and honoring the other person. Inner connections are, for me, much stronger than physical ones. A bow would do it for me. Since I have written this much, I will add a thought about hugs in general. People that like to do a lot of hugging are going to do it, usually as soon as the closing circle is finished. People that like to do a lot of hugging do not need to be given permission to do it. They seem to need no encouragement. It seems simple enough to leave the hugs to the people who want them and thus avoid excluding the differently abled. FYI, it always hurts me to link arms. I wish it didn't but it does. Thank you also, Brigitt, for using the phrase differently abled. I had slipped into 'disabled' because it was being used on the list serv. _________________________________________________________________ Add photos to your e-mail with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail * * ========================================================== [email protected] ------------------------------ To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of [email protected], Visit: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html
