Practices

Individual Practices

The Art of Inwardness

1. Pausing: Practice pausing, stepping off the train of incessant internal chattering and descending into the bodily experience of being alive. Pausing might be the last thing you think you have time and space for. However, our experience is that pausing creates more time and space. As German philosopher Martin Heidegger captured it, “We make a space inside ourselves, so that being can speak.”

2. Grounding and Sensing: Ground yourself in your body and your feet on the ground. Tune into the sensations in the body. Doing so helps slow the insistent yammering in the mind. For example, feel the length and breadth of your body, notice the sensations there, like the energy in the hands or the vibrations in the torso. Note the difference between thinking about your hands or torso and experiencing what’s alive in them. This step might be easier, more mundane, and more powerful than you think. When you pause and sense what’s going on with the body, you become more present to yourself, and you can ask or simply listen for any thoughts, emotions, or images arising with the sensations.

3. Noticing Thoughts and Images: Noticing thoughts and images as they arise is a corollary practice to pausing and slowing the mind. When we observe our thoughts and images, we are less likely to get lost in them. It’s like taking a step back to get a larger view of a work of art. This enables us to notice the pattern of what’s emerging inside and what the interiority is trying to tell us about what is occurring inside and around us.

4. Sensing into the Space: This fourth practice, sensing into the space around us, might be less familiar. Awareness is not confined to the body’s boundaries. It is possible to be aware of the space around us by expanding our attention to include it, noticing what it feels like. Does the space around you feel open or closed, spacious or constricted, narrow or wide? There is an uncanny synchronicity between.

5. Shifting Where You Perceive From: Russell Delman, founder of the Embodied Life School, suggests that you consider where you are perceiving from: the head, heart, torso, or the whole body? Experiment with shifting the location of where you are perceiving from, and notice whether there are differences in what you are perceiving and its impact on you.

6. Tending Your Relationship with Yourself: How we relate with ourselves and the space around us influences the personal field that in turn affects everything and everyone around us. Our relationship with ourselves changes in relation to what is going on inside us and the social field around us. However, there is often a foundational feel to this relationship that has a history and is influencing us in the present moment. What’s the foundation of your relationship with your interior world? Kind curiosity? Critical self-judgment? Ignorance or dismissal? Compassion for yourself and others? How does your relationship with yourself influence your relationship with others and the larger social field?

Practices for Embodiment1

1. Groundedness: Sense gravity and your connection to the earth throughout the body, particularly through the feet, legs, and bottom. Imagine sending roots down through your feet and bottom into the earth.

2. Sit or stand with a sense of vitality and dignity, with energy moving upwards and downwards, sensing the space above your head and downwards through the body, connecting to the earth.

3. Centeredness: Connect to a consciousness in the belly, known as hara or tanden in Japanese or dan tien in Chinese, which is located slightly below the belly button or, for some, the space below the belly button down to the perineum.

4. Breath: Pay attention to your breathing. Notice where you are experiencing the breath in the body. Doing this for three conscious breaths can help you get grounded and centered and become more aware of the space inside and around you.

5. Pay attention to inner and outer spaces, sensing how you are within the larger body of a social space through your individual body. Ask your body where it might need more space and invite that to occur. It could be you need more sense of space at the top of your head or in your shoulders. Notice how your sense of inner space and the space around seem similar. Ask yourself, how are they related? If you are feeling constricted inside, does the social space around you also feel constricted? Or, if you feel spacious, does the social space around you also feel more open, inviting your creativity to be expressed?

6. Integrative Knowing: Integrate what you are aware of along with the meanings, stories, and images attached to what you are aware of. Ask yourself, “Is this true?” Invite perceptions in your body, heart, mind, and spirit. Allow your body to resonate with what feels true and alive. Now ask yourself again, “Is this true?” Continue to sense into what feels most true and alive. Practice in different physical settings. For example, alone in a comfortable chair, sitting near a flowing body of water, or strolling in a natural setting.2

1 Adapted from an interview with Russell Delman, Alternative and Complementary Therapies, Vol. 24, No. 3, June 2018 https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/act.2018.29164.rde 2 You can learn more about this process by exploring the work of Eugene Gendlin in Focusing (1978); Ann Weiser Cornell in The Power of Focusing: A Practical Guide to Emotional Self-Healing (1990); and David Rome in Your Body Knows the Answer: Using Your Felt Sense to Solve Problems, Effect Change, and Liberate Creativity (2014).

Group Practices

You can adapt many of the practices described above to work with groups, making them part of any group’s practices, conversation guidelines, or ground rules. Below are some additional practices to support field awareness of every group participant and the group as a whole.

1. Agree on conversation guidelines or ground rules. You can develop these beforehand and propose them to a group, allowing for additions from the group and building agreement on them. You could also develop them with a group by asking questions such as, “What guidelines or ground rules have helped other groups in which you have participated be effective?” We recommend when people propose ones that are more conceptual than behavioral, like “Act with respect,” ask, “What would we be doing or saying if we were acting with respect?” Here are some of our favorites:

Listen to understand with respect for all the voices without advice-giving, problem-solving, or fixing.
Let people complete their thoughts. Avoid interrupting.
Encourage everyone to participate.
Speak from your own experience. Speak from your body, heart, and mind.
Be succinct. Share the airtime.
Slow down the conversation; allow pauses.
Invite yourself and others to stay in not knowing, accepting the discomfort of not knowing. Live with the questions and the inquiry.
Notice your assumptions; inquire into those of others.
Pay attention to the group field emerging. (See process observations below.)

2. Take periodic process pauses. It’s easy, as well as tempting, to get so engaged in a conversation that you lose track of what you are trying to accomplish along with how the process is working for everyone. Periodic pauses invite people to slow down, observe their own personal fields, and become aware of the group field. To help bring attention to both these fields is to invite people to check into their bodies, hearts, and minds. How is it in there? And how is it among us? What is emerging?

3. Process observations. Because most people pay more attention to the content of an interaction than they do to the process of an interaction, process observations are an invaluable practice to bring to any group. They are powerful ways to influence a social field. We shared a story about this in Chapter 7 when Wendy described the pace of a women’s dialogue. Her observation changed the group’s social field.

Process observations help a group make conscious decisions about not only what they are talking about but also how they want to talk about it. Observations can be made about:

What is being talked about and how. For example, “We seem to be blaming other people for this issue.” Or, “We are starting to interrupt one another.”
Communication patterns. This refers to who talks, who is silent, who interrupts, who is never interrupted, etc. For instance, “John and Lisa have spoken several times while others are silent. I wonder what’s going on?”
Decision-making processes. Decisions in groups are often made unconsciously. Are members participating in decisions or going along for the ride? What often occurs is that a member suggests a direction for discussion and immediately begins the discussion without confirming the direction with the group. When others do the same, pandemonium arises in the social field. For example, “Darlene suggested that the group get agreement on allocation of funds for the 2025 budget. Joe expressed concern about the 2024 budget, and now we’re talking about that.” This is a process observation about a group’s unconscious decision-making and the multiple directions to explore.
Group norms. Norms are unwritten rules about appropriate behavior in a group. They are often the hidden aspects of a social field. Some of these the group makes up and documents in the guidelines or ground rules. Some norms come from the social field of the organization or community in which the group is operating. You can consciously or unconsciously be influenced by them. When the norms prevent groups from getting done what they want to get done, process observations or questions can bring destructive norms to light so the group can decide what to do. Examples of norms that are destructive to groups include not raising difficult questions, not providing feedback to other members on the impact of their words or tone, or not expressing emotions to or appreciation of one another.

4. Pay attention to pacing. When the pace in a conversation quickens, it is more difficult for people to pay attention to what is going on inside their personal field or the group field. Invite people to slow things down. Invite a few moments of silence before asking people to consider the topics at hand so people can collect their thoughts before speaking. Moments of silence are particularly important for introverted thinkers so they—along with others—can offer more considered contributions.

5. Highest and deepest intentions. It is helpful to start important conversations or meetings with a few moments of silence, inviting people to show up fully—body, heart, mind, and spirit—and to ask them to clarify their highest and deepest intentions. Members can be asked to hold these silently or to share them with the whole group. One important intention could be to describe the social field they intend to engender. Sometimes these intentions can be translated into guidelines or ground rules for the whole group. For example, your intention might be to stay fully present with yourself and with the group, not checking your phone or thinking about your To Do list.

6. Clear purpose and process. Feeling safe and included are foundational for people to stay aware of their personal fields and the social field of which they are a part. Understanding, and ideally agreeing on, the purpose and how to achieve that purpose for any group or team gathering helps everyone feel included and more at ease in the setting. This supports people’s ability to listen to one another and to make meaningful contributions in line with the agreed-on purpose and processes.