The Journey Towards Peace
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Charles writes: “How can Focusing be used in the workplace to foster creative changes–and more broadly what are the implications of Focusing for social change (changes in the structure and functioning of organizations–how we cooperate to meet needs peacefully in our planet).”
Dear Charles,
Your question is dear to my heart, and it contains an assumption that I share with you: that we on this little planet could meet all our needs peacefully if we would cooperate to do so.
2007 is going to be a special year for me because I’ll fulfill a long-held dream of going to Israel. I’ll be attending the Focusing International Conference there, and also the Post- Conference Peace Dialogue with Israelis and Palestinians in a Focusing space.
When I stop and get a felt sense of the situation in Israel, I have to acknowledge feelings of overwhelm and helplessness– This is just too painful and too entangled to ever change! But then I recognize that I have had something like those same feelings about all the close relationships in my life… and especially about the entangled and embattled places inside of me.
And I know, from my own life, that once I can get into Presence, once I can hold a large and accepting space for everything inside me to be as it is, then creativity starts to flow and solutions pop up that I couldn’t even see when I was identified with one side or the other of the battle.
More about the International Conference in Israel
Creative Changes in the Workplace
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So, Charles, back to your question, which I’ll rephrase this way: What gets in the way of creative changes in the workplace, or in any of our institutions?
I phrase the question that way because it’s my sense that Gene Gendlin sees living processes– which include us humans– as infinitely creative and capable of novel and fresh approaches to our problems. So the question becomes, what’s stopping us from finding that creativity everywhere we live and interact with each other?
My answer is that we don’t have much access to creative options when we are identified with sides or parts of ourselves that are locked in conflict, fearful, protective and unaware of it. That’s when we get defensive, act out, go on automatic and shut down. Remind you of co-workers you know?
The first and primary contribution that I can make to a more peaceful and creative world is to do my own Focusing: get into Presence and listen deeply to my felt senses. Having done that, I can usually see past the defensiveness of other people to their “best selves,” and speak to that largeness in them. When spoken to, it tends to come out. I’ve seen it happen more times than I can count.
One thing I learned from Marshall Rosenberg and Non-Violent Communication is that everyone is just trying to meet their needs, and we all have the same needs. It’s just that some methods for trying to meet needs are tragically unlikely to succeed.
So when I can see the other person in the room with me as someone who is trying to meet needs that anyone would have, needs for safety, for connection, for expression… then our meeting is likely to be peaceful, and lead to creative solutions that neither of us could have predicted.