I wrote yesterday about "The fourth morning: honouring my mother". Now at home again. Lying in bed this morning feeling happy. Warm and content.
The last morning of the group. I wake a bit "troubled". This is the ebb and flow of the group. Feelings tend to be more intense here. As the "group river" flows its four day course, I know that I'm likely to move through a series of different emotional states. I lie in bed for a bit sensing what I'm feeling. What's it about. The overall "smell/flavour" of my mood seems contributed to by a mix of things. One factor is that I feel, what seems to me, a low key grumbling unease going on between me and one of the other people in the group. A second factor is a discomfort I have about how another person expressed themselves for a while in the group yesterday. A third is a concern I'm feeling about another person seeming to get too "isolated" in the group. And there's something too about the group ending - both saying goodbye to the people and saying goodbye to this
Third morning. It's after 7.00am. Yesterday I wrote on "Authenticity & feedback". The group seems to be "speeding up" now. That's partly because I've got less time this morning. Fairly typically at home, I try to have my light off by 10.15pm and get up by 5.15am. Last night we were dancing till about midnight. Brilliant. Such great fun, but not a big encouragement to be up only a few hours later. And partly the group feels it's speeding up because, like being away on a few days holiday, experiences start to blur together. And partly I feel it's because the river of emotion and openness is running more strongly. As happens so often, many of us - me included - seem more fluid, more easily touched by strong feeling, more easily "triggered" by the depth of what others express.
Yesterday in "A 3 layer view of intrapersonal & interpersonal judgement" I wrote about the first morning of this four day residential group. Now it's the start of the second day. What happened yesterday? I began in that "on-my-own" familiar way - getting up quite early, washing, writing, meditating, plunging in the stream. I tried running up the Drove Road, but slightly pulled my calf muscle again - a recurrence of a strain from earlier in the week. I walked/hobbled back down through the fields. Lambs, cowslips, beautiful hares, calls from the curlews.
Nearly every year for the last twenty years I've come down to a four day Spring residential "Mixed Group" in Cumbria. I wrote about this group last year and the year before, and I'm also involved with a similar pattern of autumn "Men's Groups".
I'm woken by a particularly loud owl hoot close by. "HOOO. HER-HOOO". And again. And again. Becoming more distant. I lie listening to the dawn chorus. There are voices in it that we don't get at home. It's a bit after five in the morning and I feel I've slept well. Content. Lovely down sleeping bag and a sleeping mat. Gosh camping can be a lot more easy than when I was a kid.
In yesterday's post I talked generally about the presentations at the BABCP spring conference. Today I'd like to look more closely at what for me was the day's highlight - Willem Kuyken's talk on "Compassion in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy: therapist embodiment and client change". One reason I liked the talk a lot was that it was a good example of how painstaking research gradually adds stepping stones of knowledge across the swamp of our ignorance. There's so much to learn. As Ralph Sockman put it "The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder". And it's true. The more I know, the more questions come up about what I realize I still don't know.
