Greetings!
I'm excited about our recent trip to South Korea for 9 days of NVC mediation training, and also about our upcoming 5-day retreat and year immersion program on the East Coast (Boston and NY). We have an informational telecall on Tues Dec 28 12:30 EST about the retreat/program.
NEW email: john@johnkinyon.com |
| South Korea Trainings
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Ike and I just returned from Seoul and I'm feeling quite excited and encouraged by a number of things that happened there. We did a 4-day workshop with 60 people from the NVC community there and a 5-day workshop with 40 people involved in Restorative Justice. I was surprised to find that our NVC mediation processes worked as well as they seemed to in Korean culture, and hopefully in East Asian culture more generally. This strengthens my hope and confidence that mediating conflict this way transcends cultural differences. I have the image of decoding and mapping the DNA of how humans go from conflict to connection and compassionate, collaborative resolution.
I was also surprised and quite moved by the willingness I saw of the Korean participants to share deeply of themselves and their experiences, and to work with real and emotionally charged issues from their personal and professional lives, even in front of the whole group.
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| | Healing and Reconciliation Role Play |
One experience stands out for me as particularly moving and powerful. A woman came up to the front of the group to do a "healing & reconciliation" role play process with me. I played the role of a husband who was hitting his wife, and she played the wife. In the role play she yelled at me, stomped her feet, and at times sobbed with rage and pain, saying things like, "You didn't even treat me as human" and "How could you do it!?" In my role as husband I empathized with her until she felt fully heard. I then deeply mourned my actions and the impact on her and the children, and then expressed the needs I was trying to meet for love and respect but in a way I was so sad and regretting the hurt and pain it led to.
We ended the role play in a place of peaceful connection, talking together about what actions I as the husband could take that would further contribute to trust and healing. After the role play this woman said she was playing the role of someone she knew, and that she was mourning how she had responded to the real woman in this situation, and also that she now felt a great amount of compassion for both the wife and the husband. She also said that she experienced a kind of healing within herself by going through this process.
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| | Even Through Translation!
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A man watching our role play reported to the group that he was relating to the husband's role and had experienced some powerful learning and changes inside himself as he watched. Others who were watching shared that the experience was deeply moving and healing for them. What is even more miraculous to me is that this entire role play (and the whole 9 days of training!) happened while being translated. This kind of moving experience and sharing of inner shifts and changes in the group happened a number of times through the trainings.
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| East Coast Retreat & Immersion Program
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I'm particularly excited about this Jan retreat because I feel Ike and I are now crossing over a threshold into a new level understanding about how to present and structure our training. I see us now more clearly conceptualizing and articulating how conflict and the language that disconnects us arise out of the biological "fight-flight-freeze" reaction. The exercises we call "self-connection practice" and "intensity practice" are templates for training ourselves to return more quickly and easily to an inner state of connection that is a physiological as well as an emotional and cognitive shift. This is now an organizing principle for our larger integral framework of internal, interpersonal and formal/informal mediation across the contexts of before, during and after mediation conversations. With this structure I believe we are entering a new level of learning how to train ourselves to use the language and communication skills we have to actually respond more consistently to intensity and conflict situations with effectiveness, grace and care.
With about 15 people coming back for a second year of training, as well as a whole new group of people starting, the retreat and the immersion program should be a tremendously rich learning experience.
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