July 1, 2019

Arriving back home to Lyon…

"Yes, time to sleep in my bed at home. Yes, I start to feel at home after 3 years of being away from my homelands. Lands... How am I gonna fly again in 10 days and not return home again for 2 months? I am tired of the plane, hating the fact of being on it, knowing that I will be back on again very soon. Shall I cancel going to ECITE?  This is too much..."

July 11, 2019

Arriving to Kiev…

Having read the padlet of ECITE interests on the plane, I am with the ECITE 2019 organizers (Inna and Katya) and fascilitators (Arye and Anya). Having a soft tour around the city in a car – reconnecting with the ground, Anya, Arye and Inna; getting towards the countryside where the meeting is going to take place – with the nature, Katya and many others… Waiting in my water color world, visiting the lake and the farms around, asking myself:

What is my role, what is my strength within/for this dance form, for this community, for this meeting?

Pig ensemble answers with an incredible synchronicity of pausing to my calm deep quiet voice. (You can listen to this moment below attached as a voice recording.)

As if they tell me: “to make ease and make feel connected. Just like us - the pig ensemble - settling into your nervous system. You need to cultivate, continuously, this calm in you and invite others to attend and connect to this restful, deeply quiet place – even in joy and wild excitation”?

Keep on making meaning, at least as a tribute to Victor E. Frankl.

July 11, 2019

Initial meeting of the International Support Team and Organizers…

I feel very welcomed and at home in this team. There is great generosity and openness from the organizers. There is great attention and care around power dynamics and roles from the facilitators. I am present for supporting towards reflective documentation, ambassadoring for idocde.net.

The “how” seems very open for all of us here. However it is obvious that there is expertise on many levels ranging from attending to group dynamics, politics of everyday life to hosting skills, from self-reflectivity to creating frames. The common will is, clearly, to create a nice and sound frame for the coming days so that participants of the event can feel grounded and liberated at the same time. 

I go to bed with new questions. And following Arye’s proposition of giving way to dreams with the intention of finding answers, I sleep on these floating words:

“What kind of a gathering do we, as the team, wish to host? And what do we need in order to create that?

July 12, 2019

Waking up with the shadow of leaves on my cheeks…

I woke up with the clear memory of three dreams and few vague images around themes of responsibility and sexuality. This happens to me very very rarely that I recall pristine details of dreams… Today, one dream welcomes our young editor of idocde.net – my successor pavleheidler. He appears with a bag pack on his back and talks very clear, confident and decisive. He looks sharp and grounded as he leaves. Gives me confidence that he is going somewhere nice. The other dream welcomes my attentive and caring aunt in an elevator where I try to meet her and a small baby with the help of a very close friend of mine. Everybody is so calm and relaxed, the baby is small with a mature face and fast moving feet. The last one is with old friends from high school and university. I am moving home, there happens to be many obstacles and cumbersome events around a small chest and I get very upset. At the end I realize the misunderstandings and feel so bad and guilty about getting upset.

So, the dream ensemble answers my questions of the previous night. I hear: “Trust the new generation to take over and take things further with confidence and sharpness. Be calm and relaxed in dealing with the fastness of the young moving feet. Don’t make a big deal out of the obstacles, welcome them with gratitude so that your reactions do not hurt others and you do not feel regret later on. Be attentive to themes of responsibility and sexuality”. Frankl would be so proud of me now!

It feels fun/ny to give so clear meanings to dreams. In all the years of my therapy trainings my masters were telling me to pay attention to my dreams and I really did not get much in response… but today! Honestly and when I consider what unfolded in the coming days, I have to say, I am so impressed!

July 12, 2019

The meeting with the team…

I share my dream interpretations. We smile. Good start. In the flow of check-in Arye shares few insights for a “contract” that maybe helpful to share with the community of friends about to arrive the premises:

“Turn every complaint into a request”, “Do not blame anyone – dead or alive. It is not because of them.”

And he said let’s “seduce people into themselves” when we started to talk about what we are going to do.

We started out with the question of “What is ECITE?” and wished to reflect on the identity of ECITE. Who goes to ECITEs lately? What does European in ECITE mean? Given the fact that Anya is from USA, Arye from Israel, me from Turkey we were quite willing to deconstruct this and understand the initial thoughts of the organizers on this aspect and contribute with ours. Moreover we reflected on what is the difference of other teachers meetings (like Freiburg) and ECITE. We also talked about different structures, procedures and organizations of ECITE back in the years – ranging from selecting teachers based on references and motivation letters to accepting all the ones who claim themselves to be teachers; from having very clear structure for labs and events to free flow organization of participants etc. We also shared insights about CI teaching and researching as part of recognized jobs, them being an “occupation” versus CI being a marginal, under the radar practice and the teachers, facilitators falling short of resources to move on in their career in and around CI.

Followingly, narrowing down our discussions back to this very meeting and bringing the focus on my role in this group, we started to discuss about function of reflective documentation for deepening the research processes. I have been asking myself, since Katya invited me to support with documentation, “What kind of structure and facilitation in relation to documentation could be helpful for this meeting?” In order to think further on this with the team we started to ask more questions together and I already started to feel that this team is really a collaborative, open hearted and minded team that gives space and time to hear the voices of all of its participants. And I talk about the team as an agency on purpose here. I do think that the meeting of the 5 of us created this incredible agent and this gave me great hope and trust for the coming days.

On researching and questions, “What is the research that needs to happen in this world, today in and around this form we practice?” was the question that we were riding on… What would be the levels of research – somatic, social relational, physiological, sportive, communal, ideological, … – in and around the form and the teaching of it? Another aspect of this inquiry was how to facilitate the researching together, organizing of the working groups, labs, etc.? 

Personally I had one very important issue along these lines of inquiry. That was “to not only focus on holding and creating a prosperous space but also helping people to follow their individual unique inquiries”. Attending many research and teachers meeting in the last decade and falling into the trap of the richness and abundance of the propositions of others to the expanse of loosing my own center and my line of thread; I suffered to the point of not being able to appreciate the rich encounters and my own potentials at the end. I am a very good example of someone who could have benefited from good frames and suggestive environments and facilitators for deepening my own stance better. So, learning that the majority of the participants will be young generation CI teachers I had this assumption and urgency in me that this may be relevant and important here. I shared my experience and concern with the team. I shared my wish and need for a structure and facilitation that would support the individuals for keeping up with different tracks of the collective and the individual, and my hope that the documentation focus could serve this.

It was welcomed with creative and complementary propositions. Arye cited Dany Lepkoff in “asking provocative questions” reflecting on the fact that I was asking a lot of questions to figure out the pathways we could take. And that lead to the idea of having the documentation venture start with inviting people to post individual questions.

At this point, trusting that "our practice is the research", Anja brought in her strong desire to start the coming days with dancing and not talking much at the beginning. Agreed by all of us and supported by Katya and Inna strongly Anja’s wish turned into a collective decision that first meetings shall be through the dance and non-verbal. I proposed to have a little corner in the first night’s jam that suggest to write questions if/when they arise during the dance. This way before any verbal sharing happened within the group, people could start posting their own individual questions in and of the dance.

Leaving open questions in the air, believing that dancing will help us define what our priorities will be – individually and as a community in the coming days… 

At the end of this first meeting we came to define our stance - as I understood it -  as “creating a physical force field and let those forces happen (let them play their gravitational game) and than observe and “post-rationalize” if/when needed” and as Katya clearly stood up for “let the group self-organize and figure things out within this frame we will suggest at the very beginning”.

Of course more questions on different levels immediately started to arise in me, in us to further our discussions:

How to be part of the field? What are the gravitational forces in this field (physical, emotional; conscious, unconscious; personal, collective; …)? How do we track our own attention, our own research? What skills do we need to have to post questions, to track our personal inquiry and others inquiry and relate them to each other – if /when needed or possible? What resources do we have? What is collaboration? What is exchange? 

July 12, 2019

Checking out from the team meeting…

I already feel enriched and empowered by this meeting. I am happy that I did not cancel my attendance to ECITE 2019... What is to come is already very welcome!