(1)  I am writing this report two weeks after our meeting - the exigencies of the Xmas period intervened! The style of the report feels different in a number of ways. To begin with, it is unashamedly more subjective - I wrote the last one in a quasi-scientific report writing style in which I endeavoured to conceal not only my own subjective identity, but to anonomise all the participants. This was noted by the group, but the benefits of my attempt to maintain confidentiality were somewhat offset by the losing the opportunity of crediting someone with a ‘brilliant contribution.’ Moreover, misquotes are still attributable; Gina noted that in my report I had stated ‘someone said that it felt like being in a staff room at school’ whereas she had said she felt like she was in a staff meeting at school. (I’ve just checked that Gina and I did actually quote that ‘someone’ as referring to a staff meeting rather than a staff room.)

(2)  Another difference is that our record keeping was much smoother this time - thanks to Mary who kept notes on our ‘itinerary’, and to the practice we agreed upon of doing a recorded ‘gathering’ after important feedback rounds.

(3)  [The term GATHER, in co-counselling circles, refers to the contribution towards group clarity and understanding made by any member of the group who chooses to summarise and collate the various differing opinions and viewpoints expressed by group members during a discussion or feedback round.]
 

Saturday

(4) I had had a few cancellations - the last one I received at 8.45 that morning. There was some considerable disappointment about the missing people in the air as people began to arrive and we all felt that this needed to be processed in some way first of all. We sat in a circle holding hands to attune to each other. I stated that I had no specific agenda for the day. The group heard that with some amusement and there was discussion about how to proceed. We agreed to a 15min group meditation followed by a 10mins each way co-co mini-session. We came back together and out of a variety of suggestions created an experiential exercise with two stages. The first stage, proposed by Gina, required us to lie on the floor heads together in a star shape and hum for 10 mins. This was followed by a guided imagery exercise in which Mary talked us through the polar opposite outcome scenarios for the weekend, - the best and worst - and asked us to imagine how we would feel about those outcomes and how we would have contributed to them happening. There was appreciative laughter in the group as we noticed how our circle, as it reformed at the end of this joint exercise, was shuffling closer together! We then shared our hopes and fears for the day. I shared anxieties about record keeping, about my facilitation tending to err on the chaos side of balance! My hopes: that we would have a good discussion about the concept of validity, and that we would genuinely discover something new this weekend about the integration of meditation with co-counselling that we could usefully articulate to the wider co-counselling community. Jilly spoke of her feelings of frustration in an unstructured group environment and of her fear of being tempted to try to take control of a group in those circumstances. She’d had some thoughts on ‘culture setting’ which she’d noted down on the journey here and wanted to put that on the agenda for discussion. We had a useful discussion about our group culture - particularly around confidentiality. [In a co-counselling session absolute confidentiality is assumed - in group discussions it is less clear what our ground rules are - in fact they need to be agreed for each new group ] We agreed that if ,as individuals, we wanted something we shared to remain confidential then we would take responsibility to announce that to the group.Discussion continued in order to create our agenda for the rest of the day. We agreed that a priority was to report back on our individual research work at home.

(5)  There was an interesting and congruent encounter between Jilly and Mary at one point in this discussion about Jilly’s notes which remained within the seated circle. Mary said that she felt dominated by Jilly’s agenda and asked that they be removed. Jilly felt that she still needed these notes - a compromise was reached by Jilly tucking them under her cushion.

Report back

(6)  The agreed mechanism for this was a detailed sharing round followed by a recorded gather. The round took about an hour.

(7)  To write this up I first listened to the whole round - which was also recorded - and then I listened to the gather - to check on the efficiency of the gather method. There was too much in the first round to attempt to summarise . Though the gather left a good deal out, and there were the occasional new perspectives added at this stage, I am generally satisfied that the gather worked well as a summarising and collating tool.

(8) Gather: Quite a few instances of investigating order effects, Jilly clear that co-co preceding med. is beneficial, less certain about the other way round but concludes she needs to look into it more. Jilly & Mary arranged regular sessions between our meetings - also used a rating method for minds state before and after; this was useful for Jilly, less so for Mary. Another theme was the buddying - it didn’t work very well for many people and it was difficult to sustain the inquiry practice without some sort of continuity of group support. One or two mentions of med & co-co somehow combined - Julian using a co-co partner to try to monitor his lapses of mindfulness and finding a surprising level of correspondence, Chris using the question in Dyad work "What keeps you from being present?" Mary mentions the effect not only of integration but also of being with another person/persons who she trusts and respects - and the group setting somehow allowing her a better access to feelings which, if on her own, she would tend to simply dispassionately observe. There was more clarity around co-co’s ‘dealing with feelings through catharsis cf. med’s simply ‘being with.’ I spoke of how useful I had found my regular med/co sessions with a neighbour. One thing I want to add to that format is a brief period of ritual at the beginning and at the end of work together - a kind of mutual salute to each others inner wisdom and clarity. My other line of inquiry, the ‘meditation and awareness’ group which I attended for 6 weeks (2.5 hrs pw.) I was less enthusiastic about, though I did recognise that it is important for me to be more mindful on the ‘macro’ level of changing moods or mind states as well as on the ‘micro’ level of passing thoughts.

(9) After our gather, with a few minutes to go before our agreed tea break I reflected on our process and asked whether we thought there was any more meaning we could extract from the period of feedback and reflection we had just had. David spoke of ‘what to do with’ anger - that meditation doesn’t feel appropriate at that time, the catharsis of co-co satisfies the need to DO SOMETHING with a powerful feeling such as anger. Mary spoke of a fear of ‘losing’ her anger through meditation - being in touch with anger somehow feels rare and precious. This sparked off a discussion about the relevance of DOING SOMETHING with difficult feelings. I referred to our last meeting at which the most popular question, when we were fishing for propositions, was ‘what is the difference between Catharsis and Transmutation?’ I fell into thinking that Transmutation is something that happens during meditation but since realised transmutation implies a kind of willed activity which clashes with my perception of simply ‘being with’ in meditation. David recounted a time when he had severe appendicitis pain during a meditation retreat and explained that for him, the going away of the pain was a transmutation and that it was enabled by simply ‘being with’ and accepting his experience. As a group we became aware that we didn’t have a clear definition of transmutation - as David spoke of it it sounded like something that simply happens as a result of active awareness and acceptance of what is; yet the transmutation technique we used at the last meeting - visualising the lowering of a lamp into the darkness - seemed to have an active directive quality to it. Mary contrasted her experience of anger ‘going away again’ with David’s experience of pain/anger shifting. In her experience nothing shifted, nothing resolved. We discussed the difference between pushing back down and shifting. Jilly spoke of her anger, once, in a meditation gp. when a latecomer arrived very noisily. By simply focussing on her anger she felt it evaporate - I pointed out that on that occasion it was not necessary , as in co-co to focus on archeology of the distress feeling....ie ‘what does the situation remind you of? and when did you first feel like this? etc leading to a catharsis of the stuck feeling. Rather, on this occasion, it was sufficient simply to give full awareness to that feeling.

(10)  This seemed to lead on very well to our next chosen activity which centred around the simple proposition: Co-counselling and Meditation can be usefully combined in a single (reciprocal) turn-taking session. There was some brief discussion about how we were to define ‘useful’ - we concluded that it was tied in with our subjective experience. - part of our critical subjectivity.

(11)  We worked in 2*2’s and 1*3 - 10 mins each way for pairs and 7 mins each way for 3’s.we then came back together for a round in which we shared our experiences and reflections - this was summarised using the same, recorded ‘gather’ technique.

(12)  David simply reported that for him the proposition had been adequately supported - that he had been able to deal satisfactorily with whatever arose for him. I worked with Julian who chose to explore further the use of a co-counselling partner to detect when his attention was drifting. He reported that I was quite close to the mark - usually intervening (with Where’s your attention now? or Are you drifting ?) just moments after he had lost his awareness. In the gather I was asked how did I know?

(13) I don’t know that I did know! I reported feeling that I was on the track of something new - it is dynamic, shifting - it feels like being on the edge, a knife edge - the balance between experiencing my experience and talking about it. The session was definitely useful for me in that it gave me a new line of inquiry - until now all my investigation had centred on a sequential sandwich of the two - now I am on the trail of a dynamic balance of choice between the two ways. Jilly found that the quiet period she chose to take prior to clienting enabled her to be in touch with her body and less likely to ask herself the question, almost automatically, ‘what’s on top for me at the moment?’ She was left feeling more open to exploration - up until now she had recognised the usefulness of co-co before meditation but not vice-versa. Julian thoughts on the proposition were - ‘Not without practice!’ Gina, too, wanted to experiment with it a lot more. Her first thought was that she had failed to integrate but on listening to Jilly’s experiences, she realised that the few moments of silence which preceded her clienting work probably did make a qualitative difference.

(14) Validity Issues At the end of this gather I requested that we have a look at the factors which make it more or less likely that the decisions we make about any given proposition are valid or not.

(15) I had prepared a list earlier taken from ‘Human inquiry In Action’ (Rowan & Reason,1988) but before reading from it I asked whether anyone else had any expertise they would like to offer on the subject of validity. Julian had a ‘hot’ issue that he wanted us to discuss and that was "What do we mean by Meditation, are we talking about the same thing?" I was delighted to remark to the group that this issue happened to coincide with the first ‘balance’ of polarities I had on my list: the balance between convergence and divergence. Are we all doing the identical thing (and hence losing out on the benefit of breadth in co-op inquiry) or are we all doing very different things (and hence unable to be genuinely collaborative)? Julian pointed out that there are so many different styles of meditation; how communicable is what we are doing? And how repeatable would it be? Are our differing results attributable to the different meditation practices we are bringing to this inquiry? We moved spontaneously into a thorough examination of what we each meant when we said meditation. We had two rounds: in the first we described our practice, in the second we spoke about what was the aim of our practice. Both rounds were flip charted and in the group at the time there was relief to find a broad correspondence of contributions in both rounds. Looking at the flip charts again as I write it is clear that all of us practice styles of meditation which fall into the broad category of ‘Insight’ meditation also known as mindfulness, vipassasana etc. as opposed to the other broad category of absorption meditation. And the aim of our practice again coagulated around a single theme of ‘Awareness’ As these ideas were being flip charted we spontaneously fell into a playful acronymisation of the word awareness:

Affectionate
Warm
Attending
Real
Empty
Nice - ie =spot on!
Engaged
Study of.....
Suchness

(16)  We agreed that the discussion and sharing had demonstrated that there was a broad correspondence in what we were doing, individually, in meditation and then moved on to look at other validity issues.

(17)  I introduced the issues title by title - there was a group discussion about them, together with a checking against what our group practice had been so far and relevant issues were flip charted. Towards the end of this someone pointed out to me that an identical list was contained in the "Co-operative inquiry - a Layperson’s guide" which I had mailed out to everyone with the last meeting’s report!

(18)  So, in the balance between reflection and experience item we questioned our agenda for the next day - loaded, as it was, with experiential exercises. We decided that we had included enough time for reflection.

(19)  With falsifiable we familiarised ourselves with the concept of devil’s advocate and a biscuit packet wrapper emerged playfully from discussion as a "devil’s advocate hat" and was used henceforth for that purpose, the tradition continuing throughout the next day.

(20)  In balance between chaos and order we recalled the chaos of our lst meeting just after we lost a member of the group and noted how the seeds of a new order often lie within that chaos - as was demonstrated last time with that wonderfully creative exercise which emerged from the stress of that chaos. it was noted, too, that too much order often means that someone (not everyone) is doing too much ordering!

(21)  In reference to management of unaware projections we noted that we hoped that as co-counsellors we be more sensitive to this process and also have ways to deal with it when we notice it happening.

(22)  The issue of authentic collaboration was aired - I felt we are well along that path - as evidenced by the way different people are offering facilitation and exercises, note-taking, tea making, time watching and so on.

(23)  Coherence in action - not much discussion on this one; perhaps a bit of let’s wait and see, (though the commitment to practice which we made at the end of day two will doubtless contribute to this.)

(24) We finished the day by agreeing to an early start (9 for 9.15) at a new venue - my home (double booking at the Bonnington Centre) and as a result of the research of the day, we agreed to a new cycle of Inquiry with two side by side propositions giving us a chance to compare and contrast:

Proposition1: Co-counselling and meditation can be usefully combined in a sequential sandwich.

Proposition2: Co-counselling and meditation can be usefully integrated in a single turn taking session.

(25)  We concluded with a closing circle ritual in which we shared feelings about the day and sang a song. I felt warmth, closeness, appreciation and bonding with the group. There was general expression of satisfaction with the days events and anticipation of tomorrow’s itinerary.
 

Sunday

(26)  We started, on time, with a repeat of the humming exercise. As the volume levels rose I felt anxiety about the potential reaction of my neighbours - I noted to myself that I was unable to enjoy the exercise in the same way that I had the day before. I referred to this anxiety rather obliquely by requesting that we don’t stamp on the floor during our sessions. There were no complaints and my anxiety began to evaporate as the morning move towards lunch time.

(27)  Mary had worked heroically towards a formula which would enable us to work equally in some way as a group of seven but the solution, if indeed there was one, remained elusive so we decided to draw lots for working in a 2 or in a 3. The two pairs worked in the front room.

(28) Our idea was to immerse ourselves in the method - we would have a marathon. My regular practice in working this way is to have a 5 layer sandwich - or a triple decker if you think of meditation as the bread, with counsellor/client swapping over in the two fillings! We wanted to do two full med/co sessions - and so agreed to let the end meditation of the first session be the start meditation of the second.The 3 gp. would join the two 2gps. for this mid-sitting after which a new combination of 2’s and a 3 would separate for the second med/co session. 2gps had 15 mins a layer, 3gp had 10 mins - bread and filling got equal time! It all worked out quite elegantly; it’s actually harder to write it up! The only muddle we had, in practice, was to omit the very last sitting. We followed this exercise up with a period of reflection and evaluation using the ‘round and gather’ method again.

(29) Sadly, there was an inexplicably poor recording quality which has made the transcription a bit patchy. Chris said he needed some distance from it and the opportunity to repeat the experience before he could fully weigh it up but he had had some powerful experience and had worked, to his surprise, on the death of his mother. Gina said she had experienced a two way enhancement of both the counselling and the meditation. I reported that I thought I had somehow failed to allow them to interpenetrate; that although the first meditations had left me in a peaceful state of mind, instead of exploring/celebrating that, I had plucked, as it were, an item from my co-counselling agenda to work on. Chris wondered if working in my own home had had some affect on me. I conjectured that I need to have a willingness to work on whatever comes up in the meditation component in order for ‘interpenetration’ to occur. Even if, at the end of my sit, I’m not left with a ‘fireworks’ issue - well that’s OK work with that! Jilly points out that we all have quite different experiences and judgments about the exercise, that we don’t have a consensus - Chris points out that no-one has stated that it WAS NOT a useful combination - some people judged it to be useful, others were reserving judgment.

(30)  Jilly persists and says that it didn’t feel like integration to her - it felt bitty and she was aware of wanting more co-co in the formula. Chris points out that there are numerous ways in which the sandwich time share can be manipulated. Jilly wonders whether our integration could happen more in a single session and we flounder around before recognising that we had already tried that yesterday and that this pm. we were going to examine that in more detail. Chris reminds us of the contrast intention of having the 2 propositions side by side.

(31) Jilly makes the challenge that it may be that we don’t find that the two ways can be integrated. I acknowledge that we could find that they are like oil and water and that a co-operative inquiry which came to that conclusion would be just as worthy if we came to that consensus collaboratively and with due regard to validity issues. Jilly put on her Devil’s Advocate hat and challenges me by saying that that is what I am trying to do - with a proposed title of "Towards an Integration.......etc." am I not trying to drive the inquiry in that direction? I said I didn’t know, and joked that, with the tape recorder still on, I was a bit ‘on the spot’ Jilly said that was what she was trying to do - in a positive way - to put me on the spot. I respond by comparing our willingness, as a group, to engage in these mini-exercises and suggest that we probably wouldn’t be willing to do them if we didn’t think there was a likelihood that they would yield a useful outcome - similarly, in the larger sense , I acknowledged that I wouldn’t have proposed an inquiry about integration if I didn’t have a feeling that there could be a comfortable and beneficial merging of the two ways. I referred to the skill of ‘bracketing’ - I need to know that that is the proposition , or intention in a way, but at the same time to be able to stand back and be somewhat objective about what we are coming to as a whole group. And I need to be able to stand back and incorporate the fact that ‘the jury’s out’ as far as this exercise is concerned. Jilly said that she guessed she was resisting the idea that there could be an integration. I replied that I reckon that will help us to be more collaborative and will help us to have a more valid inquiry. And the opposite of jilly’s ‘resistance’ would be....collusion! Gina said that she felt that this exchange had been a very useful check on an as yet unexamined assumption about where the propositions may be leading us. Julian brought in the observation that ‘Integration’ could be considered along an axis of time scale - at the one end we may be talking about an ‘useful’ integration within a lifetime, at the other end, in an instant.

(32)  This felt like another of those ‘penny dropping moments’; on the tape the group begins to murmur with satisfaction as Julian continues to fill in this conceptual ‘time axis’ model with "....in a sequential sandwich, in a single session.."

(33)  Mary points out that we can perhaps take it as read that as a group of people who are together because of a shared interest in both ways of working we believe in this integration; it’s as if we’re looking here at how to do it most effectively. Jilly said that she felt she had more clarity now about her uneasiness about ‘integration’ - it was more to do with the co/med formula than ‘integration’ per se. The gather feeling almost complete and just a minute of our schedule to go, Jilly brought up the issue of group business - finishing times, next meeting etc. We dealt with some of that and I checked out is there any more gather to do. Mary reminded us that she had felt the lack of the last meditation session quite keenly - almost as if she had needed it to help her to ground herself. Chris asked if others who had experience of Dyad work (from Enlightenment Intensives) recognise the similarity in that with what we are doing - periods of meditation followed by periods of communication. Mary found that helpful - the use of the word communication somehow made it clearer than using the phrase co-counselling. I reminded the group of my original preferred (and as yet unagreed) title for the inquiry - ( there was a warning growl from Jilly (-; ) "Towards an integration of counselling, clienting and meditation" and spoke briefly about the unifying component of ‘attention’

(34)  We began to have, at this point, a fascinating and meandering group discussion - no longer a gather - about the interpersonal, the impersonal, the transpersonal, the blurring of boundaries which ended with a quote from the Indian sage Nigardatu:

(35)  "Wisdom tells me I am nothing; Love tells me I am everything - between the two my life flows" A good point at which to stop for lunch!

(36)  After lunch we went straight into our next experiential exercise which had already been planned but had, in some way, acquired an additional justification from Julian’s ‘time axis’ concept. We were now examining integration within a single session and, from the morning, we had a sequential sandwich with which to compare it. Again we worked in 2*2’s and 1*3. The 2’s had 30 mins each way, the 3’s had 20. We followed up he exercise with the now familiar format of sharing circle and gather.

(37)  A silence preceded the commencement of the gather after the tape recorder was switched on. Jilly started by saying she perceived a sense of conclusion - not sure whether it was because the w/e was coming to a close or that we were coming to some conclusions about our work. Chris said it was ‘too much.’ I remarked that from the earlier sharing it appeared that Gina and I had used the session in quite similar ways: a kind of weaving , short periods of each one and using the co-co bit to actually verbalise what the experience was. And three of us had felt that co-co had helped us to share with each other the experience of meditation. Gina added - both verbally and simply by being in each others’ presence. Julian said that he had a sense of developing a new way of working, a new practice. Murmurs of thoughtful agreement from the group. Julian adds that he has a sense that this form of integration has been more fruitful than the sequential sandwich. Gina reminded us that she had a question about the order of the day. Though she concurred with the general feeling that the ‘in one session’ style integration had been more fruitful, she was wondering whether that more ‘pedestrian’ work earlier in the day helped as a kind of practice run for doing what we did this pm. So she would like to experiment with repeating with reverse order - or trying the second style ‘cold’ David said he welcomed the flexibility of the second style - he was able to get his needs met in the moment rather than having to go into a structure (as in the sandwich style|) Yet, whilst honouring the self-directing principle he also sees the value of agreeing and going along with a proposed structure and that, taking the weekend as a whole, this in itself has emerged as an interesting dynamic. And he feels now that he needs time to reflect and step back from it.

(38) One thing Jilly recognised,she said, is that she works best when she is with someone else - whether it’s co-co or meditation. Chris adds that there’s something very big in there for him about - ‘I need other people’ - Jilly continues this theme and reminds us that in the Buddhist world it is said that it is very difficult to maintain a practice without a sangha. Mary feels excited by this - it helps to explain to her why she finds meditation so much more productive in group and with others. She spoke of having had very powerful experience to take away with her. David shared that he didn’t feel in accord with Julian about discovering a new form. Gina clarified that for her she felt near a breakthrough - not necessarily to a new form but to ‘newness.’ I said that my first thought in trying to describe it (my excitement expressed in the earlier sharing about feeling on the trail of something new) was coming from a clienting angle, but it’s a meditating client(struggles)...clienting on my meditation! So would that be different, asks David, from meditating in a group where some people are giving support perhaps on a one to one basis? I continue to explain by coming back to the idea of weaving:

"it’s finding something in the introspective bit and then, and then, in some way, making a choice - OK, instead of just watching this pass, I’m going to process this in a clienting way and that may well mean acting into it, exaggerating it, it may well mean verbalising it... for a while until I reach a point at which there’s some kind of release of tension, and then going back into introspection.... to watch some more flotsam and jetsam, and then seize on another piece to make big - until it just pops."

(40)  Our last bit of business was a mutual commitment we made to each other that we would have at least three sessions independently before our next meeting and that if any absentees wished to rejoin we would require the same commitment from them!

(41)  Our closing circle was very warm,close and mutually appreciative. Most people recalled the opening exercise - most reported that the weekend had exceeded their expectations. I felt very happy and also very in the moment - particularly remarkable considering that I had a pub gig due to start in 20mins.

(42) My thanks and appreciation to all of us in the group. It’s not possible to transcribe the atmosphere of the last ‘gather’ from the tape but it is clear to me - I don’t know how - or quite what I base this on other than tone of voices, spaciousness - or perhaps it’s personal subjective memory - that we were in an altered state of (group) consciousness. I know that I felt inspired.

Updated 16 June 99
by Martin Wilks