Exercise 3 – Stop the World
- Take time and recall a luminous breathtaking experience that you had in nature. A moment of a nature experience, where you felt the world had stopped. It can be long time ago or recent. For some it is known space that they get back to, for some it is a moment today on a walk. For some it can be a small daisy in the rubbles of a building, for others it can be an entire island with beaches and a sunset.
- Hold that experience, and allow yourself to take the whole image in, just reveling in the beauty. Then put it aside for now.
- Take a breath to shift your focus. Now recall a personal moment when you felt marginalized in terms of your role identity. (Skin color, ethnicity, (binary) gender, class, age, health, family role, mainstream “ableness”, etc.)
- Try to detach a little from the painful moment. (Breathe ❤️) Now imagine, you as a facilitator would have to set this up as a beginning role play with two polarized roles. Play out these roles till you can frame them as the identities that you perceive. (If it turns out to be too painful, or too hard, just drop it and go back to step 1 and use the “the stop the world” experience to center yourself.)
- If you have managed to set up a role play, bravo and now go back to step 1. You should be able to discover the two essences in “your stop the world”.
- Dream how the nature part that holds your role creates the beauty of the moment, and how in nature these two roles naturally form an ecological unit that creates the beauty that “stopped your world”.
- If nature would have agency and used beauty to reach out to you (quantum flirt) with a message, what would that message be? Would it be able to change your painful experience and grow beyond it, without abandoning the truth of the power issues in consensus reality.
