Gesundheit - Designing a Society

Thanks to the wonderful people at Gesundheit Institute and the School for Designing a Society I was able to travel to West Virginia to share the DPS process and appreciative imagery work with a wonderful group of people.

What I did – I led the group of SDS students through an image theatre process to explore pertinent issues facing our world. They formed groups that created forum theatre plays on Patriarchy, Violence, and, a new one for any DPS workshop to date – False Scarcity.

False Scarcity is a belief system that drives people into cycles of believing that they don’t have enough – this includes time, money, love, care, attention. Therefore they deny themselves and others these things.

The play on False Scarcity was put through the forum and some amazing interventions were tried with a powerful dialogue following. One major learning point was that we often spend more time trying to explain why we can’t do things due to a false scarcity than actually doing things. If we simply stop and do the thing asked of us, give, love, care, usually amazing amounts of time and unexpected results appear.

I also was able to be part of workshops led by Patch Adams and Susan Parenti.

Patch taught me, again, how important it is to “jump into the ocean of gratitude!” We learned to say I Love You and talk about our Joy for inordinate amounts of time. Dancing and hugging ensued! Patch also revealed his opinions on many important issues. He is a great mentor for me and I thank him for being in my life.

Susan Parenti, leader of the School for Designing a Society, led a great talk on the idea of “Perturbation.” These are acts that are designed to elicit a response, not to guide and move towards a specific end, but to elicit a response. Then to perturb again when the response happens. This reminded me of the million little things that Pete Seeger always speaks about, millions of perturbations resulting in a big change. South Africa’s shift was a result of millions of perturbations, from inside and outside.

Great Stuff.

Then we had a final night of exercises with DPS and Appreciative Imagery techniques. This was combined with the technique of anticommunication as we gave many of the discovered personal strengths and traits neologisms to protect them from being seen as something old and tried. Very fun. I will definitely include that part of the exercise in the process from now on. That is one of the best parts of this work, for me, being able to add on to the exercises, learn new things and adapt, adopt, and improve the model. In that way it remains dynamic, alive and growing with each group that brings it to life.

Then I took on leading a Cops in the Head workshop in which the topic of race and racism reared its ugly head. I made the statement that if you don’t admit that you are a racist then you are lying to yourself. A strong opinion that is true for me. However, this called up a good deal of anger and emotions for people including some cognitive dissonance, “How can I be what I am against?” The dialogue was at times heated and difficult but people listened well and it led into the Cop in the Head work. A young man shared his cops of “you’re not as smart as them” as an immigrant in a US university. Some people were focused and wanted to use the exercise to deepen our understanding and I had to call on a few people to not “chucklefuck” (a new word I learned that applies to so many people’s attempts to be funny when confronting an opportunity to go deep into something real). In the end the discourse was important and I think that I learned a lot as a facilitator from this group. It definitely reinforced what Marc Weinblatt told me that some of the hardest work is to work on racism with “non-racists” no one wants to look at their shit and realize that they are somehow aligned with the devil. Remember the lesson of the tree, it is Luke’s face behind Vader’s mask. You are your enemy, so love him or her. Only love moves hate.

Three Main Things I learned –

1 – Have strong beliefs and speak them for yourself only – Leave others to decide if and when that will be true for them

2. – Create False Statements that put into language the world and future you long for. I have done this with images but putting the words to it is great.

3. Don’t ask people to do what they have not practiced. Give them time and a liminal space (between rules and no-rules) to try things out in safety.

Oh, and I love clowning (still)!!!