Preparing the faculty, the room, the materials, the orientation for the session

FOUNDATIONS: Ensuring all the materials are beautifully and symmetrically placed so the room radiates peace, beauty and order. Creating the right frame for the depth of the program (green yellow red).

MATURING: Helping the faculty to come together as a close connected unit and welcoming new faculty members effectively; inspiring the team; fostering energetic group coherence; enabling a personal dimension to the faculty process.

EVOLUTIONARY: Setting the program’s intention weeks ahead of the calendar date of the session and sending an energetic “ping” to the participants. Praying or blessing them by name or photo. Inducting a grace-filled field for the session.

Custodianship of the therapeutic aspect of the program (where relevant)

FOUNDATIONS: Can serve as liaison with therapeutic faculty to track and host the transformational work in 1:1 sessions in red programs

MATURING: Can track the themes of the earlier life narrative themes of the 1:1 as they enter and repeat in the plenary and weave the themes naturally into the live process work.

EVOLUTIONARY: Brings therapeutic and trauma expertise into the plenary facilitation including what they can observe, address and contain.

Opening a Container

FOUNDATIONS: Creating clear team agreements, roles and responsibilities. Establishing norms for in the room re-design. Design clear process for escalating concerns to lead faculty.

MATURING: Bring together the faculty into a sense of close community and manage the team process even as you manage the participant journey. Build warmth, trust and welcome to the participants arrival.

EVOLUTIONARY: Setting a matrix. Calling in ancestral and higher realm support for the journey ahead. Inspiring faculty members to bring their distinctive gifts. Inducting participants to grant authority to provoke real alchemical change.

Introducing the Program (transition from Real World into New World)

FOUNDATIONS: Have clear articulation of the program’s purpose in business terms and client customized context.

MATURING: Intersperse more transformational and psycho-spiritual or mythological/archetype language into an opening such as the Hero Journey or the movement from fear to love.

EVOLUTIONARY: Intervene to invite true healing and deep change to jump start through the quality of presence, pace of presentation, poetic language and energetic invitation on the opening evening.

Generating a daily rhythm for reliability and order

FOUNDATIONS: Hold the agenda and program flow and establish rituals that mark the different dimensions of the day and can serve as scaffolding.

MATURING: Builds in practices that deepen the container and allow groups to oscilate between engagement and integration. Include right brain methods for music, poetry, journaling, art/symbology.

EVOLUTIONARY: Create a Temple feeling that holds a quality of intentionality that pulls for greater presence, awareness, emotion and intimacy.

Holding the arc of the program

FOUNDATIONS: Understand the instructional design of the program and the rationale for exercise sequencing, placement and arc of the week.

MATURING: Understand the different phases of the week and the implications for facilitation in the entering, deepening and departing phases.

EVOLUTIONARY: Generate intensity and fire that allows participants to leave behind the “ordinary” world and enter a sacred process.

Revising the design moment to moment

FOUNDATIONS: Adjust agenda with respect to the envisioned flow in dialogue with what is emergent and needed.

MATURING: High degrees of attunement to group energy and group process and adjust the agenda in morning faculty meeting and as needed live in room. Can tolerate improvisational adjustments.

EVOLUTIONARY: Profound attunement to group energy and can make micro-adjustments to exercise design, sequence, and duration as needed to optimize and titrate engagement saturation and activation.

Embodying a heart centered environment through warmth and affection (Fear-Love)

FOUNDATIONS: Wide emotional range and access. Has a mature emotional resonance and can role model an open heart, affection for each individual, natural expression of appreciation.

MATURING: Is able to build sufficient psychologically safety to allow the boundaries of privacy and withholding in every day life to melt and yield to a much higher degree of openness. Embodies deep acceptance of people’s gifts, defenses, needs, and hurts.

EVOLUTIONARY: Can respond to people’s contractions and wounds with profound compassion, attunement and holding and transmit a welcome to who they are underneath their  trauma and welcome their divine/unharmed dimension. Can see the beauty in each person and lift it up in the session.

Embodying a candid and transparent and reliable environment through direct real time feedback and confrontation

FOUNDATIONS: Can name and engage in real time less functional behaviors and the unintended consequences. Can bring the reflection/confrontation in sideways if direct confrontation is too much.

MATURING: Ensures that elephants in the room either relationally or institutionally are well surfaced and addressed. Create an environment in which things get named and not swept under the rug. Readily admit facilitation mistakes or moments of reactivity.

EVOLUTIONARY:  Has subtle radar to pick up on anomalies in people’s relational routines and call refined attention to them and the function the serve. Honors the dysfunctional behavior for its original functional/heroic purpose.

Embodying an aspirational and imaginative environment through joy, play, creativity and artistic expression

FOUNDATIONS: Through their presence facilitators can bring a quality of playfulness, lightness, imagination into the group process both to balance the depth work but also as a critical leadership capacity needed for organizational fuel.

MATURING: Embodies a personal fullness having practices in their own life that bring them into the domain of imagination/joy/Eros.

EVOLUTIONARY:  Through their presence and orientation can ensure the container balances light and dark aspects of life and is rife with beauty, play, dance, music, poetry and other
artistic dimensions.

Embodying a multi-stakeholder environment through listening to multiple narratives

FOUNDATIONS: Can welcome each participants’ individuality and enable a container capable of holding plurality of view points. Role models curiosity and intellectual flexibility. Resists temptation to defend models.

MATURING: Can create sufficient psychological safety that marginalized voices or difficult to raise themes get naturally surfaced and confidently addressed.

EVOLUTIONARY:  Expansive holding that allows people to share stories and often privatized dimensions of family, culture and faith can enter the container.

Inviting and hosting powerful emotional expression

FOUNDATIONS: Can comfortably welcome and host emotional expression and invite greater emotional self-contact.

MATURING: Can comfortably welcome and facilitate high heat conversations and even deeper emotional expression (grief, fear, hurt).

EVOLUTIONARY:  Can allow for momentary regression to younger states to enter the plenary process and be well met and contained and welcomed in the group process.

Welcoming silence

FOUNDATIONS: Fostering a quietude in the group process through journaling, meditation, contemplative and somatic practices.

MATURING: Understand the use of silence moment by moment in the group process.

EVOLUTIONARY:  Silence becomes an asset in the program design and profundity.

Slowing down the pace of exchange

FOUNDATIONS: Through their own presence and explicit invitation can allow for greater time between comments to allow less deflection/numbness and more accessibility to the impact of the group process.

MATURING: Can facilitate so that the time between comments expands to a quality of group coherence in which more rich and relational content naturally occurs.

EVOLUTIONARY:  Can facilitate so that the quality of spaciousness and presence begins to tap into people’s inherent intuitive capacity to listen to the whisper of higher intelligence, wisdom and lyricism.

Inviting self-reflection and deeper self-contact

FOUNDATIONS: Can credibly encourage self-exploration and enable greater self-connection and self-understanding.

MATURING: Can foster significant individual insights about habits, behaviors, core fears (personal operating system) and help someone.

EVOLUTIONARY:  Through your interventions you elicit unconscious trauma memories, feelings and unprocessed material to surface and be metabolized.

Inviting self-expression and finding one’s voice in the container

FOUNDATIONS: You welcome the unique footprint, style and self-expression of participants.

MATURING: You invite participants to experiment with new aspects of their personality and persona for example stretching to embrace their feminine essence or their stretch corner archetype.

EVOLUTIONARY:  You create interventions designed to provoke and evoke lesser expressed facets of the psyche of the participant and widen the degree of self-inhabiting.

Binding the participants thru mutual disclosure

FOUNDATIONS: You can create a container for authentic and vulnerable sharing.

MATURING: You can create a container where the boundaries between personal and professional life blur and people can talk about what really matters to them.

EVOLUTIONARY:  You can create an environment in which anything can be spoken, heard and received.

Binding the participants thru mutual support

FOUNDATIONS: You can create a container for mutual acceptance.

MATURING: You can help people to access the more compassionate and forgiving aspects of human nature towards their fellow participants.

EVOLUTIONARY:  You can generate a radically loving context in the container where people give, receive and extend love fully to each other. Provide people a felt sense of a true community.

Binding the participants thru mutual generosity and caring

FOUNDATIONS: You can create a container for gestures of deep listening, mutual interest and kindness.

MATURING: You can help people to, through lowering fear and guarding, begin to drop their self-orientation and place their attention on others.

EVOLUTIONARY:  You can tap into the field intelligence of inter-dependence and mutuality as the natural state of relationship.

Inviting self-compassion and forgiveness

FOUNDATIONS: Your actions as a facilitator appreciate participants strengths, build self-esteem and mature Identity.

MATURING: Your actions as a facilitator increase self-esteem, encourage self-expression, quiet the inner critic and foster self-acceptance.

EVOLUTIONARY:  You can create rituals for profound expressions of self-blessing, self-forgiveness and reconciliation with the narrative of one’s past.

Balancing Masculine and Feminine elements of the container

FOUNDATIONS: You can balance being directive with being facilitative and have prepared thru inner work to balance your expression, as a facilitator, of the masculine and feminine polarities.

MATURING: You embrace equally the mature qualities of masculinity and femininity in each participant and cultivate them.

EVOLUTIONARY:  You can help participants to excavate the missing or less mature facet of their own fluid expression of the gender polarities (or other relevant polarities) for their fuller freedom.

Laser Coaching
(oscillating between broad and narrow banding)

FOUNDATIONS: Can shift from whole group facilitation to offer coaching to individuals in the circle as needed.

MATURING: Can invite the group to shift its focus from content to supporting individual or small group work.

EVOLUTIONARY:  Can use someone’s individual work to surface a wider mystical principal for the entire group to work with (belonging versus becoming, space versus structure, past versus future etc)

Keeping the container grounded and connected to higher intelligence(s)

FOUNDATIONS: Have daily practices for yourself, the faculty and the group for centering and cultivating equanimity/peace and grounding as well as bringing in new understandings and wise insights.

MATURING: Have daily practices for creating a sense of the preciousness of the time together and the momentous nature of what is happening.

EVOLUTIONARY:  Have inner spaciousness sufficient to allow field intelligence to guide you thru psychic, intuitive and metaphoric information. Can tap into the implicate order to create a sense of harmony, right timing and synchronization.

Mediating dyadic conflict

FOUNDATIONS: Can help two or more participants work through a conflict and know when to take an issue off line from the program flow and manage it privately.

MATURING: Can help build a container that can tolerate the intensity of mediating conflict in real time with the group support (dyadic or sub-groups)

EVOLUTIONARY:  Can serve as a beacon of embrace, acceptance and hope that doors previously closed by stuck history and resentment soften for reconciliation.

Managing the energy from high to low as needed

FOUNDATIONS: Can read the room and introduce energy boosters or calming exercises to keep the group engaged.

MATURING: Can calibrate the right pressure for inner cooking and titrate pressure as needed so as not to overwhelm or destabilize. Tracking both the full group and the red flag participants for this calibration.

EVOLUTIONARY:  Constantly adjusting the collective heat in the container and can intervene on the collective psyche through a variety of techniques and moves.

Ensuring integration time for participants

FOUNDATIONS: Has the sophistication to know the importance of white space, play and recreation, and self-expression as outlets for managing the programs intensity.

MATURING: Has matured to the point where their ego does not require or unconsciously elicit intensity as a sign of facilitation potency. Has no preference other than to follow the group emergently.

EVOLUTIONARY:  The facilitator embodies and can sense in the group the need to metabolize and digest intense experiences and can pace everything from an in the moment pause, a conscious group reflection, a moment for journaling or paired sharing, a need to change the energy, a need to take a partner walk to a need to re-ochestrate the session based on the primacy of the need for this integration/processing time. Action in the room is motivated by the need for action and not an inner restlessness or impatience with stagnancy or pregnancy of group process.

Leaving the Ego at the Door

FOUNDATIONS: There in a spirit of service and learning.

MATURING: There in a spirit of guiding and gifting.

EVOLUTIONARY:  There in a stance of mastery and blessing. Can tolerate the different stages of group development and the relative needs and resistance patterns in each. Disidentified with being liked by the group or the overt efficacy of an intervention.

Tracking the Unconscious dimension of the journey

EVOLUTIONARY:  Understands and orchestrates/relates to the underlying unconscious dynamics of the participant process including reading the narrative text for relational patterns, awareness gaps and personal and family trauma.
Can work with the mythic structure to elevate from the personal to the transpersonal. Can also attune to the participants’ time and place of injury in their development/nervous system and offer a reparative reexperience of the event(s).

Can formulate and conduct healing rituals for individuals and groups

EVOLUTIONARY:  Can crystallize personalized healing rituals for an individual, a subset of the group or the entire group as needed.

You Belong to Them Forever

EVOLUTIONARY:  You understand the contract between you and anyone doing deep healing in a circle you are leading is forever. You welcome them as old friends and take leave of them with an open invitation for future support.

Working in Chronos

EVOLUTIONARY:  Understands how to shift people from ordinary consciousness to magical dimensions and move from the daily to the holy and back. Can alter time/space dimension so miraculous healing can happen in rapid timeframes. Understands how to decompress and create a safe period for re-entry and integration before the program closes.

Transitioning the Participants from Sacred Space (Chronos) back to Real Life

Can bring program to a cohesive close and help participants consolidate insights, celebrate group experience, and concretize action planning and embedding commitments.
Can offer best practice advice for moving from a program back to every day work life and can help participants to turn the insights from the program into daily practices, practices for intense meaningful conversations, and practices for renewal and restoration.

MATURING: Can create closing for a group’s deeper experiences that includes an emotional touching in of the terrain covered, a personalized acknowledgement for each person, a chance to practice gratitude and affirmation, and an inspirational, lyrical chord into the group field.
Is sophisticated about titrating the activation of participants in the final days of the program to lower the evolutionary heat and ensure readiness for re-entry.

EVOLUTIONARY:  Can create a ritualized closing that uses the depth of the field that has been created to meaningfully elevate each person’s possibilities and potential expansion and freedom in this lifetime. Can include forgiveness rituals, constellations, Voyager theatre, affirmation circles, feedback souks, hands on healing etc.
Knows how to deconstruct a matrix and close the sanctified space of a program.
Can help people transition well from the “enchanted forest” state back to their lives.