Notes from Alastair Farrugia (pdf) Alastair’s text is also in our texr box below!
Focusing on what is going well with Alastair Farrugia, Help for Helpers September 18, 2023
Format of the meeting
Listed in New York Time
08:15 – Greetings and Settling in;
Letting participants know that we plan for breakout rooms from roughly 08:45 to 09:25
08:20 – Attunement, for all of us to connect to our bodies
08:25 – Reading the contents of the pdf slowly
Alastair and perhaps others reading
08:30 – Space for Reflections and Questions
a reminder that the rooms will be open for 40 minutes so that people may focus for 10 or 15 minutes each
08:45 – open the rooms
09:25 – close the rooms
space for reflections, feedback
09:40 – Closing comments by Lynn Preston
Poem read by Dorothy Marks
In focusing, I almost always pay attention to what is not going well, to the problems and the issues.
I imagine that it can be beneficial to sometimes deliberately pay attention to what IS going well; and to the issues that may come up around *that*.
We’ll take some time to reflect on:
- appreciating what is good in our world;
- what is good in our own personal life;
- things that we’ve achieved and that we’re proud of;
- expressing gratitude (NVC has a practice for doing that); there is some science about the benefits of gratitude practices (even if you just express gratitude in your journal)
We may have also had negative experiences tied up with the positive, such as:
- toxic positivity, a push to only express or experience what is positive and ignore or suppress everything else;
- unwanted pressure to use certain talents and gifts;
- pressure not to use certain talents and gifts (or we may have something that we enjoy and cherish, but we feel that it is unappreciated or unwanted by other people);
- lessons from childhood that we should never show off, that success is unsafe, or that making money is always immoral;
- maybe we do want to share our gifts with others, but the culturally accepted ways of doing that do not resonate with us (e.g. because they feel fake or exploitative) – can we forge our own path, our own way of sharing our gifts in a way that feels fresh and alive?
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