Interesting challenges...

I’ll give a little bit of context here about what I am attempting and trying.

I started over a year ago with an exercise called spotlight. It is very simple: everyone stands in a circle. One person enters the circle with a task, eg. to move to the music. They stay until someone else enters who then replaces them. It’s about connecting with yourself (moving to music) and also being seen (entering the circle you are in the spotlight!). It has an element of group feeling and decision making - one decides when to enter. There are many variations of the task, from the person being able to leave voluntarily, adding a second or 3rd person in the circle simultaneously, to specific tasks within the circle to do with movement and tasks for the circle itself. Each variation requires courage and vulnerability to differing degrees.

At the same time I have been also working on ideas to do with presence and connection. Here one task is to hold a dual focus. Explanation: we have both an inner and outer focus. An inner focus being our physical bodies, our emotions, how I feel in the moment and the impulses that arise. An outer focus is mindfully seeing and recognising people and things around us in the room. The combination of both is a dual focus, seeing something and being at the same time aware of how I feel/my reactions. It is always there, but mostly subconsciously.

So I have adapted/combined these exercises to work on presence and connection.

The task is to enter the circle and hold in ones focus a connection to the people around and move to ones own feeling. At the same time the people around are asked to hold the same focus to the person in the circle and in movement react.

Perhaps it is complex… And maybe that is where it is a struggle. Too many layers at once?

What I am surprised by as I set the exercise was the reluctance and the resistance to entering the circle. And I don’t put it in a way that entering the circle is a big deal. It is always a challenge for some, but as I stated above this process has been repeated many times in different variations and I use the experienced level of take-up as my baseline. The resistance I find is to this specific task. My feeling is it has to do with the connection and being seen expressed through a reluctance to enter this space, mentally and physically. It is as if the mindfulness awakens vulnerabilities that are always there, but are ignored and being in touch with them causes a form of social anxiety.

This brings me back to why I find it intriguing. We are actually seen everywhere we go simply by being present, whether it is conscious or not, be it in a cafe, walking down the street or in an interview. So it is intriguing to me, what the difference is…

In front of a peer group, focus on personal awareness, being seen, complexity? Possibly all of them at once? That can understandably be overwhelming.

And it is a divergence from my own feelings where I find the whole situation exciting and engaging. Of course, different people have different feelings and they are very much to be respected! My purpose here is not to overwhelm, but to find the edges. I am doing that, but wary.