Global Forum 2021: a Collective Sensing Experience
Registered participants can still access all the Global Forum 2021 audio materials and video recordings, which will stay available until July 16th 2021.
Overview
As the year was nearing its halfway point, with summer in the North and winter in the South just beyond the horizon, this year’s Global Forum by the Presencing Institute offered itself as a moment of reflection and learning: the 2-day online collective sensing experience that unfolded 15–16 June 2021 was a chance to take a pause and gather our breath, to dive together into a deep sensing process towards the Decade of Transformation.
After a live Opening Session on Zoom with guest Faculty that included Melanie Goodchild, Thomas Huebl and Angel Acosta, participants were invited to step away from their desks for a personal Audio Journey of guided sense-making. As people moved through their solo listening experience, they also had the chance to connect with other members of the community by going on a virtual Dialogue Walk in a drop-in Zoom space managed by volunteers. Participants then returned together 24 hours later for a multilingual Global Resonance Session on Zoom, and as the learnings began to crystallize they took that experience into the Language Tracks and Hubs.
Over the course of the 48-hour event, over 700 people attended the Live Sessions, 4,000 Audio Garden tracks were downloaded, and countless insights emerged for our work in the coming weeks and months — individually and collectively.
Please note: the 🌹🌼 🌻 🌵 🎵 Audio Garden 🎶 🌼 🌺 💐🌷(with 80+ downloadable tracks) and the recordings of the two Global Sessions will remain available to registrants until July 16th 2021 on the password-protected event website.
Opening Session: “Who am I going to BE as we step into the Decade of Transformation together?” — Randi Kaeufer shares her experience
“During the opening session of the Presencing Institute’s Global Forum 2021, I found myself sitting at my desk, closing my eyes and listening to Melanie Goodchild who was inviting us into a circle. I imagined sitting in this circle with people from all over the world. The barrier of my computer screen faded away and I could sense everybody’s presence. More than that, I could sense them sensing me.
Since the moment of disruption posed by the Covid-19 pandemic, I have felt a calling to contribute towards societal transformation and planetary healing (even though I didn’t know these terms yet at the time). But what is my role in this? Where can I step in? And who do I have to be in order to achieve this goal? All of these questions were buzzing in my head as I stepped into the space of the Global Forum.
I can tell you right away: I do not have the answer yet. But my journey has started and the experience of the Global Forum has been blowing wind on the sails of my boat, helping me to depart on my quest of finding out.
Revelations in the Decade of Transformation
The conversation of the opening session on Tuesday, June 15th was guided by one question: if we look at the decade of transformation and 2020 as the first year in it, what was revealed in your perspective? The Presencing Institute had invited Melanie Goodchild, Thomas Huebl, and Dr. Angel Acosta as panelists to share their perspectives on this question.
Melanie Goodchild reminded us that “Decolonization is presencing what is absent”.
Thomas Hubl made us aware that “Absencing is self-protection” and that “the nature of trauma is being frozen”.
Dr. Angel Acosta shared that “this is a Decade of Transformation but it is also a Century of Recovery”
Listening to these three inspirational speakers, I felt a trembling of the earth, opening up a crack that provided me with a space for exploration of who I want to be in this Decade of Transformation. Personally, I was very struck by what Thomas said about the frozen nature of trauma. Change needs fluidity, but we are continuously freezing our traumas. I could identify very well with Thomas’ words, as I recognized frozen structures in my own life and environment. I felt the urge to start melting them… melting society’s frozen traumas in order to create space for collective healing. But how? Otto reflects that we have to start “by looking at our internal processes and addressing our blind spots”.
Other participants of the session also felt resonance with the reflections of the panelists. Different comments have been shared in the chat: “I feel shadows come out of the dark to dance with the light”, “I see frozen structures being able to become fluid again”, “I see the winds of change”, “for many of us, the wounds of the past 18 month have roused awareness of much older wounds, all of which ask to be honored and attended to in order to move toward wholeness.”
Moving into collective healing
What do I take away from this session? In Otto’s words: “the only way of achieving transformation is if we realize a relational shift”. We have to shift the quality of our relationships with nature and with each other. Therefore, we have to shift the inner place from which we operate by looking into the abyss of divides that add up to an architecture of separation.
During the upcoming exploration of the Audio Garden, this initial wind of change that started blowing on the sails of my boat during this session, now has the potential to evolve into a storm, moving me towards finding my calling in the Decade of Transformation. One thing I do know now is that I need to start addressing my blind spots and lean into them to melt some of the frozen water blocking my boat.
Finalizing the session, we all began to melt some of the frozen aspects with a ritual on water that connects us all, shared by Melanie Goodchild.”
Solo Time: Being with Self and Sound
Entering the Audio Garden…
Carrying what they heard from Thomas, Melanie and Angel, participants were then invited to make their way to the Audio Garden, select several pieces and download them to their phones, so that they could step away from their computer screens. The Audio Garden was rich with contributions not only from master facilitators and faculty like John Milton, Arawana Hayashi, Frederic Laloux, Melanie Goodchild, and Nora Bateson, but also with unique pieces curated by the international Presencing Institute community from all around the world. The offerings could be explored by category, and by language (Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese and French).
Remember: the 🌹🌼 🌻 🌵 🎵 Audio Garden 🎶 🌼 🌺 💐🌷 (with 80+ downloadable tracks) and the recordings of the two Global Sessions will remain available until July 16th 2021 to all ticket holders to the event.
From the nourishing sensing journeys teeming with sounds of nature and invitations to listen, sing along, and be surprised; to personal sense-making stories of collective healing with Nature and the Social Field as our teachers; to short, simple, everyday practices of meditation, awareness, writing exploration; to universal soundscapes — ranging from the Amazonian rainforest to morning birdsong in Japan; not to mention the arrays of melodies and intonations of the many languages in which these sound parcels were offered — the Audio Garden was a multi-colored, kaleidoscopic explosion of mini-universes of sensorial experience.
Randi recounts her Journey through the Audio Garden
“If you have ever been to Amsterdam, you may have noticed that big parts of the city are not very green. Nevertheless, as I walked along the canals, my eyes fixed on the grey road stones, trying to blend out the many metallic bikes that were heaped along my way, and all at once it felt as if I was walking in the jungle. I had the sound of a croaking frog in my ears, I heard a howling bird and, in the distance, there was some running water. I was being transferred into another environment, one in which nature is still growing in all its glory without any interference by us humans. I was listening to the sounds of the Amazon, provided by Janine Saponara in the Audio Garden. It is a world so different from mine, where I was seeing more buildings than trees. Listening to this soundscape, I felt the urge to step into action towards planetary healing. We need to stop the pain that we are inflicting on Mother Earth and move beyond seeing nature as a mere resource. The world’s environment should experience the same peace that is being transmitted to me as I was listening to the sounds of the Amazon.
As I continued my walk through the city, being so grateful for not having to sit behind my computer screen for once, I stopped at a bench. I sat down for a moment and tried to be present in the moment. The sun in my face, I moved on to explore the next section of the Audio Garden. I pressed on a file with the name “Collective Healing For Our Community”. I listened to Liz Moyer Benferhat exploring the question: what can we take from what we know about individual healing, and apply it to the collective? “None of us has all of the answers”, she stressed “but we all have wisdom to offer”. This sentence echoed in my head as I was still on my quest to find out who I am going to be in this Decade of Transformation. I am often struggling with seeing the added value of myself. Do I have anything to offer? Liz’s words encouraged me that I do have an added value. I just have to find out what this is.
In pursuit of this journey, I spent the next afternoon going through the section of audio practices. I went from an awareness practice, through some meditation, to a social poetics session. I spent several hours reflecting on all kind of issues related to the Decade of Transformation, always with my own question in mind. This is what I liked the most about this whole experience: all sensing journeys, stories, and practices are suitable to be applied to one’s own situation and context. This makes the experience a very personal one.
One of the audio stories that has touched me the most was “Warrior of Light” by Uri Noy Meir. He dedicated a poem to the people of Palestine and Israel, and others in the world seeking justice for all. I will not try to put this listening experience into words as this seems impossible to me. I can only say that it moved my heart and evoked deep feelings of empathy. Perhaps you should listen to it for yourself?
Inter-connecting via Dialogue Walks — Iti Patak shares her experience
A drop-in Zoom lounge held by multiple volunteers over a 23-hour time span was made available for participants to come by at any time to find a partner for a Dialogue Walk, and to share with one another as they went about their own unique listening journeys.
Says Iti: “The batons passed from one to the next every 2 hours to allow people from multiple time zones to participate. I dropped into the space at various times throughout and was in awe at the depth of sharing and holding that was being done. Dropping into a space and hearing languages spoken I would otherwise not get to, seeing so many animated conversations about the topics brought up during the forum. At one point, I was in a 45 minute breakout with someone from Australia and another from Hong Kong and with my home country being India, we had a spirited conversation about colonization and the effects and how we could see changes happening in our own arenas. It was a deconstruction by all of us as to the effects the colonization had on our lives and it brought us together even so far apart geographically. We sensed into the collective and as we did, our new friend in Australia was taking a walk on the beach and we got to be there and listen to the waves, see the sky and the water along with her. As an experiment in connection, it was beyond my wildest dreams to have that experience and I knew it was timing and chance as much as it was anything else. The synchronicity of that moment, what we came away with from having been there together was unforgettable.
While our experience was ours, it was not unique to those of others. Many others were also able to drop in and out of breakout spaces as they chose and we often found the synchronicity to be across all time zones and languages, that the things that stayed heavy on our minds felt lighter after connecting in that space. What came forward for me was how deeply we held each other, and how expansive that container of collective holding really is.”
Sharing insights on Padlet
People narrated, wrote, drew, and photographed their experiences to share with other participants on the Padlet board about what they had taken away from the Opening Session, and what they were discovering on their respective Audio Journeys.
Global Resonance Session: Coming Back Together
On the next day, after having had time to wander around and explore the Audio Garden at will, the community came back together in a Global Resonance session to look at what had come up, individually and collectively. Antoinette led participants through a short journaling practice revolving around the questions:
- What have you been noticing?
- What messages do you feel Earth is trying to tell us now?
- What new organ of perception is opening, for you and for us, now?
Kelvy then guided everyone through a Visual practice: “Take all that we’ve experienced, and try to integrate it into a visual map that you can use almost like a chart for going forward from the Forum.”
Language Tracks and Hubs — Self-Organized Sessions
To crystallize what emerged from the Global Resonance session, Language Tracks and Hubs facilitated their own sessions — activating locally what we had been experiencing together as a global community, and addressing topics such as: prototyping, waste water, re-storying, de-colonising the future, storytelling, resonance and more.
As the curtain falls on the 2021 edition of the Global Forum, where an entirely new virtual journey was prototyped, we warmly invite our readers to continue visiting the Global Forum event page, which will remain accessible until July 17th. Below are the details on how to do this.
The 🌹🌼 🌻 🌵 🎵 Audio Garden 🎶 🌼 🌺 💐🌷 (with 80+ downloadable audio tracks) and the recordings of the two Global Sessions remain available to registrants until July 16th 2021.
If you’d like to contribute to the public conversation on social media, you can use the hashtag #GlobalForum2021
