The practices of Dynamic Peace help to develop a grounded, practical, body-based capacity to support others and be supported in manifesting our individual and collective gifts in the world. Our bodies are of nature and are already connected to harmonies intrinsic to this world in ways that our hearts and minds are still learning.
Focusing and other Practices of Presence
Group and individual Focusing serve as vehicles for opening the door to abiding in Dynamic Peace together and for continuing the inquiry as to its nature and process of embodiment.
By way of developing the bodily felt sense we can learn to know our place and our relations in ways that are sensitive to and in harmony with the whole.
Coming into bodily felt relationship with the whole is at the foundation of sustainability and is essential to developing the trust, on the individual and group levels, that we can naturally find our way forward.
Life-Nourishing Communication (LiNC)
Developing the bodily felt sense of one’s own needs—direct, nonjudgmental contact with our interdependent existence—can lead to a profound simplification and growing directness and effectiveness in getting these needs met.
In any group, it is the facile metabolizing of the tensions in the field that holds the key to allowing the group process to move forward efficiently, to having the group process be a living, intelligent, response to the needs of the group and its constituent individuals, moment-to-moment.
Using methods that have roots in Nonviolent Communication and in Open Space Technology and that look forward to practical application in a new generation of organizational structures, LiNC facilitates the processes of identifying needs and self-organizing to meet them.
Clarification and Simplification of Mental Models
Once Focusing and LiNC demonstrate and manifest the fluidity and intelligence of naturally emergent functioning, the intrusion of fixated, not-reality-based mental models, both in individuals and in groups, usually becomes clear.
In this set of practices, we take on the clarification and simplification of mental models (assumptions, beliefs, worldviews) using systems thinking and a variety of other specific tools chosen for specific situations, such as object-relations modeling, enneatypes and the enneagram of process, values and vision clarification.
Essential Integrity
While the structure of a group or organization can be powerful in bringing forth the capacities of its members to contribute in positive ways to each other and the overall intelligent functioning of the organization, the locus of fundamental transformation is in the individual consciousness. It is the will of the individual, the capacity to choose, to commit, to stay with one’s commitments and associated responsibilities, even through distractions and discomforts, that is the source of growth and transformation and staying power at the individual and the group level.
This set of practices work with individual and group integrity and responsibility. We work with the power of one’s word, the response-ability that comes with commitment, and ways of gauging how one is doing with regard to staying true to one’s commitments—both through a variety of types of supported self-reflection and training in using reflection in peer and coaching relationships.
