Walk With Me is an ongoing video series where I invite you to join me while I take some time to check in with myself. It’s all spontaneous, just like Somatic Experiencing — I like to slow down and see where my mind and body take me. I hope you enjoy watching the video or reading the transcript below, and thanks for spending a moment of your day with me.
Hi. I’m back. I’m back on the trail, the rail trail again today. I like to be out here when there’s nobody else out here. It doesn’t always happen. So there’s a person up ahead of me. I’ll turn the camera around a little bit.
I was thinking, Well, I’ll wait and see if they turn around and go back the other way, and then there won’t be a person in my video. And, I finally decided that that’s ridiculous. There are humans in this world. There just are.
So, there’s a human in this video. If they come anywhere near close enough that their identity might be possibly, notable, then I will move the move the camera so that that is not a thing that’ll happen. But, yeah. So, hi.
And let’s watch what I’m watching. Like, for instance, I’m walking along a beautiful little river, and it’s low. I don’t know if you can see how low it is right now, but it’s really low. I’ll try to keep this as level as possible, but I like to actually walk instead of poking along.
Happily, the person head is blending into the shadows at the moment, but it’s definitely beginning to look like fall. I showed a little bit of, I showed a little bit of colored leaves last… 2 weeks ago, I guess. And the equinox is in 3 or 4 days, so it’s still a thing that’s gonna happen pretty soon. But as I’m walking along, I’m smelling the difference.
I love how the ferns along the edges are starting to turn this bronzy color. And the ferns, especially, but all the trees, everything, as they start to turn colors, they give off this, like, musty scent, but not– well, to me, it’s not in an unpleasant way.
There’s also a bunch– there’s oaks above me. So I’m looking at the ground right now as I’m talking, and there’s a bunch of oak galls that are from these little wasps that lay eggs inside stems, I think, stems and leaves of the oak trees.
But then they fall and they get squished. Oak acorns have not started falling yet. So, all the little things that I’m trying not to step on are little egg cases made by a tree. It’s kinda cool.
So I’m guessing that the blue jays, the birds, you can hear…I’m also hearing a weed whacker or something, because this this trail kind of parallels on the other side of that little river, human habitation. So that’s the setting, and I hope that you can continue to enjoy this as I babble.
I was thinking today that I would talk about groups, and becoming or being part of a group or part of a community. I’ve started working with groups more. I still work one on one with people and love it, but I’ve been deeply enjoying and finding great fulfillment working with small groups of people too. I suspect, eventually, I’ll work with large groups, but right now, it’s small groups.
And, you know, when I first started, my hope, the plan if you will, was to make sure that everybody in the groups felt that they could be safe and entirely open and vulnerable within the groups, because that’s the work I do.
And, you know, that’s not always what happens. You know, we can set up– as facilitators, as group leaders, we can set up the best possible circumstances for people to feel safe and able to be open and vulnerable. But in reality, each of us are so, so, so very different.
And we all have our own mixture of life experiences and traumas, if you will, that sometimes that’s not actually possible. You know? Feeling safe in a group, feeling safe alone, feeling safe with somebody that is your closest person may not actually be possible.
And so my goal is to create a container that has the potential to feel safe. And then the rest is up to each individual nervous system and the composition of the group, of individual nervous systems all coming together to create an entirely different organism, if you will.
Each group ends up being its own entity. Sure. Made up of specific individuals, but really each group has its own flavor. I have a couple groups right now who have overlap of people. Two of my groups have two of the same people in both of them, and each group is very different.
And so it got me thinking. It got me realizing that it’s the group. It’s not the individuals that make it up. I mean, certainly, it’s the individuals that make it up, but each group is its own entity. It also provides the experience for the participants and me as the facilitator.
It provides the experience that is conducive to learning new stuff. Right? We– let’s make this very specifically about me, because I don’t know about you. But my… let’s see. My ideal, my image of groups going in was that we could just create, like, a little paradise. Right?
Like, a community of people who are like minded in whatever way would then all get along and all contribute the same amount. And I was a little naive. That’s not how it works. Instead, everybody’s different and every group is different.
And even if you want to feel safe and open and vulnerable within a group setting, you may not be able to. There may be a certain person that makes you feel uncomfortable and so you clam up.
Or it may be the topic that makes you feel uncomfortable and you clam up, or it could be the rapid fire group dynamics, which can be changed to a degree. But sometimes, that’s not even, you know, that’s not completely possible.
And so there’s this: do you clam up and close down completely? Because you can’t have full safety and openness and vulnerability. It’s like a light switch. Is it one or the other? Or can you learn within a safe-ish, safe-enough container? To be–I’m gonna use that word boundaried–and let some in and not let everything in, and let some of you out, but not let everything out.
My other word is titrated. Right? So boundaries and a titrated amount of openness and vulnerability. What happens if that’s what community is? What if community is not about merging? It’s not about just being completely open to everything and feeling safe to everything possible.
But instead, community is about being united, but also being individual. So having a kind of gray line, thick gray line, I guess, between this single group entity and you as an individual. So, I mean, it seems to me like that’s life. Right?
Here in the woods, we have single trees that couldn’t make it alone. We have all these ferns that are gonna turn really soon, and they couldn’t make it alone. They need the entire ecosystem.
We need other people. We need the forest. We need the entire ecosystem as well. But each of these trees has to… let me see if I can find one. These little shrubs are grabbing for light. Right?
And we think of it as an arms race because we come from the westernized, some of us, westernized idea that everything is a war. Everything is a fight.
But in reality, these trees are also supporting each other. And if there weren’t shrubs and ferns and ground cover, then the trees wouldn’t be able to stay up because here, anyway, the different forest ecosystems are different.
But if there wasn’t ground cover, the topsoil would wash away, and there would be nothing for the roots of the trees to hold on to. And if there wasn’t the fungal layer, they now call it the “wood wide web,” underneath the ground connecting everybody, the entire plant kingdom, then all the trees, all the plants would be far more susceptible to disease.
I’m not gonna go off on that because it’s another tangent that could take me a very long time, and we are already at, like, 14 minutes. So I won’t go there.
But each of these organisms need all the others, and they need the variety. And so sure. Yeah. Absolutely. Each one wants to grow. Not “wants,” right? Each one has the potential to grow tall and straight and strong and fast towards the sky. And in reality, if everybody did that, it would be a plantation.
And, okay, so I read a lot of, natural history stuff, and tree plantations are awful. They’re awful. The trees are not strong because they grow so fast. The wood that is being produced now is weak and breaks and, doesn’t last as long.
And there’s no– they’re also really susceptible, those plantations are really susceptible to disease. So if we bring together a group of humans who are all the same and we can all just grow straight and tall and fast. Right?
Then the first hint of something to make a challenge, we all get knocked down. Instead, if we have diversity and adversity within the group, then there is the potential for understanding and strengths and boundaries and love of people who are not just like you.
And, it can actually make us much stronger. It can make the community infinitely stronger than if everybody was just the same. And so this is what I’m learning while facilitating groups, and it’s something that I am deeply interested in exploring.
While at the same time, offering as safe a container to the various nervous systems and the collective nervous system that I can. And on that note, look at this beautiful Virginia creeper just turning bright red there. So thanks for walking along with me, and I’ll see you next time.
Thanks for stopping by! If you enjoyed this post, you can get on my mailing list and learn more about working with me, or you can subscribe to my YouTube channel to get notified about new videos.