Smartview Conversations

Each of us lives in community. Our family is our first one. In Focusing, we learn to create a space of radical acceptance for our inner community. During our time together, we will create a safe, playful environment to explore how we show up for the communities outside of us. For 2024, we will particularly explore developing our "Power of And" skills. 

Our one hour together will be heavily experiential. We’ll often utilize universal themes and prompts from adventures in Smartview Stories. Smartview Stories is a series of family books that explore living a Focusing way of life in community. The stories illustrate both what is going on outside of us as well as inside of us via three Inner Companions based on neuroscience concepts. We’ll become familiar here with how these Inner Companions function within our own lives.

Attending these will be very helpful if you are an educator supporting social and emotional literacy with groups of children or adults.

There will be whole group invitations and discussions. We'll use writing, art, role play and movement to support process. We’ll have pair and small group breakout spaces. . Expect to laugh here, humor seems to be an essential quality of being when we invite our fears around holding our own sense of self in the world.

An aspect we practice in this community is both presuming welcome (I belong) and extending welcome (you belong). From here, a We Space between naturally forms. 

We welcome any threads you’d like to add during your time with us here!

We meet at two times on Tuesdays. 2024 dates are October 22, November 19 and December 17

2025 Dates: Jan 28, Feb 25, March 25, April 29, May 27, June 24, July 22, August 26, Sept 23, Oct 28, Nov 25

For November, let's spend this hour doing body awareness exercises to explore the perspectives of the left and right sides of our body. Most of us will be able to tell how we are wired from this time. 

Skills you can grow during our time together:

* learn to utilize the three Inner Companions from Smartview Stories to make valuable aspects of Gendlin's philosophy and our body/brain neuroscience easy to understand.

*learn to discern when you are living from a partial view and when you are holding space for the whole of your body's wisdom in this situation.

* our mind is 'sticky', it likes to hold on to patterns it knows from the past. We will become more efficient at recognizing these sticky strategies and gain insight into moving beyond them in this playful community environment. 

* the ability to pause and move into your body, into the present moment, or over to your right hemisphere to access a bigger picture and potentially do something new here. Each time we do this rewires our brain toward a sense of working together around future similar situations. 

* practice resilience in rolling with what is here now.

* improve your ability to interact with others with kindness and clarity that everyone and everything is safe and with a sense of we're in this together.

* develop more ways to support yourself and those around you in processing challenging interactions. 

* become aware of embodiment techniques that you can incorporate into your daily life to encourage holding on to new patterns that are emerging for you. 

* receive neuroscience related handouts to support you in practicing these concepts in your daily life.