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200 people from across the UK, as well as from Australia, the US, Sweden, Japan, Ireland and France gathered together near Cirencester for the second Transition Network conference, an uplifting and inspiring day bringing together of the experience and stories of those catalysing Transition projects in their very diverse cultures and settings.
Use this tool when you want to have a deep exploration of an issue. It allows an open forum while keeping a focused discussion. Use this for groups of minimum 10 – maybe 100, perhaps even more. The question is important – keep it open, non-judgemental and non-directive. Set a time limit – about 1.5 hours is usually plenty. Set up five or six chairs in the centre of the room in a circle, facing inwards towards each other. Arrange further seating around this central circle, also facing inwards. Everyone starts sitting on the outer chairs.
Richard Olivier is the founding voice within Mythodrama and he works at the leading edge of bringing theatre and the arts into the development of authentic leaders. He has been a leading theatre director for over 10 years. His workshop was called the Journey of Renewal in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. For Richard the play has many parallels with Great Turning and the times in which we live. The play is about leaving a Garden of Eden and then returning to it.
The afternoon session focused on Seeing with New Eyes. For this session, Joanna gave an overview of systems thinking, arguing that the time of the Great Turning will be a time of a return to a deep understanding, to what Tich Naht Hanh calls ‘Interbeing’. When we go out into the world to take our part in the Great Turning, we need more than just our feelings, they come and go, we also need a grounding in the new comprehension of the world that is emerging in systems thinking.
Session Two began with a very moving piece where four people read out a list of endangered or extinct species while Joanna played a drum slowly. This then led into an extraordinarily powerful exercise called The Bowl of Tears. Three large bowls of water were placed in the middle of the floor, representing the tears of Gaia, and a musical lament was played to accompany a slide show of images of social and ecological breakdown, deforestation, pollution and so on.
