Group Dynamics

I sit in the living room of my bungalow with five young human beings who were strangers to me just two short months ago. But in those two short months, we have learned the expressions on each other’s faces better than we know our own. Isn’t it amazing—how once we get accustomed to people, they are so familiar to us. Yet before we know strangers, so much judgment is passed, so much unseen prejudice underlies every interaction we have with strangers. Strangers—what a strange concept, because most strangers never turn out to be strange once we know them. And how detrimental is that, to think of people we don’t know as strange or foreign, rather than knowing they are the same as all the people we already know. We’re all so damn similar, it is just our differences that are more susceptible to scrutiny.

I am falling in love with the vastness of human experience—people’s life stories. Everything that has led up to this moment in your life is so incredibly different than everything that has led up to this moment in my life. Something that a friend Emily said in class today was this: “Everyone has perfectly good reasons for believing the things they believe. It’s more interesting to try to figure out the reasons why they believe those ideas rather than attack those ideas from my own perspective on the world.”

We had a Group Dynamics class today and we talked about how our group sometimes shies away from speaking our minds because of the fear of hurtful opposition. Opinions are sometimes so deep-seated in us that we associate our opinions with our identity and sense of self. In turn, emotional pain is felt when an idea of ours is attacked. We talked today about how this is evident through our different communication styles. For instance, when an opinion is candy-coated with lots of precursors like “I’m not so sure but…” and “I don’t really know but…”, it is as if that person is trying to dissociate from what they’re saying in an attempt to protect themselves from a rebuttal. On the other hand, some people voice their opinions with strong conviction, perhaps to intimidate away any rebuttals or maybe because they identify strongly with that opinion.

Differing voices of rationality, spirituality, and skepticism are strong within our group of 13. We talked this through today and thought of some ways that we could communicate our own perspectives without feeling threatened. One solution we came up with is to reframe our opinions. If we just want to be heard, we’ll start by saying, for instance, “I would like to just be heard on this…I believe that the human race is rapidly changing and evolving.” On the other hand, if someone feels that they want to put an idea out for discussion, they will frame it as, “I’d like some feedback on this…I think religion is the root of all evil.”

Once a framework of tolerant discussion has been set up, the group feels safer to start delving into some really personal issues. Once this safe environment was set up, some amazing, beautiful and deeply personal confessions were voiced like, “I have a constant inner battle between optimism and extreme cynicism about our future” , “I wish I had more energy to have rage for the state of the world” and “Sometimes I think if I had a perfect body we’d have world peace” . Others said things like “I believe that people should be free”, “I believe in synchronicity”, “I believe most people are a disappointment”, “Sometimes I wish I didn’t have so much faith in the potential of people”, and “Sex is a really big deal.” All of us have deeply personal opinions that we protect most of the time. The creation of a safe space to release these vulnerabilities is one step closer to embodying them and feeling empowered by them, rather than letting them simmer in the boiling pot of inner confessions too raw to reveal to the world.

These were all thoughts about today and this was an afterthought to make this into a blog entry, but I hope something can be taken from these ideas. My mind is changing, rearranging. We process everything here and really dive into the deeper meanings, the realities, the confessions, the emotions. There is no bullshit. There is no separation between education and who we are as people, it’s all the same thing. I dig that.

(This is the nature sanctuary. The space is used for singing, meditating, hanging out, and whatever else you could think of. It's beautiful. Wow. There is a garden on the roof.)