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International
Festival of Symptoms
with Gena Corea and Helen Hawes
Existence
is so grim for our poor symptoms! We speak badly of them, try to banish
them, haul them off to the hospital where doctors and technicians poke,
prod, x-ray and subject them to scary, painful procedures. What a life!
This festival provides a happy excursion for our backaches, migraines,
tumors, eczema, irritable bowel syndromes, and heart conditions. It
gives them a break from being viewed always as a problem, an enemy,
something to be solved or conquered. At the festival, our symptoms can
have a good time. They can sing and dance under out music tent, play
in the game circle, draw and paint at the art booth, or eat bratwurst
and drink beer at one of our concession stands. They can express themselves
(maybe it's our symptoms who are "the artist within!") and
be listened to with interested curiosity. We'll hold them by the hand,
buy them cotton candy, and watch them as they ride the merry-go-round.
We can be with our symptoms in a gentle, loving, accepting way (or not),
develop a more complex relationship with them, and experience much from
the unseen reality.
Listening
Workshops
with Gena Corea and Helen Hawes
Have
you ever felt something strongly and no one would really listen? Being
unheard is a kind of suffering. Many of us have experienced it. While
we can't force others to listen to us, what we can do, at a time, ever
since September 11, when we are so aware of the travails people are
enduring in our own country and around the world, is address the suffering
of our neighbors who may be going unheard. In public meetings following
September 11, 2001, members of the Brattleboro, Vermont area community
expressed a need to hear each other well. One group set up a Listening
Booth outside the Post Office Saturday mornings. Ger Y U Nant offered
a free Listening Workshop to those who wanted to volunteer at the booth.
As long as a person is speaking from his or her felt experience, we
teach, the question of who's right and who's wrong, who should be blamed
and who praised, just doesn't fit. All we can do, as we hear that person
out, is honor her and her lived experience. This kind of listening is
an honoring of humanity. When we listen, we not only learn from our
community, but we also move towards the kind of world we want to live
in. Not a world of "others", of "them," but a world
of people like us, built to be heard. Ger Y U Nant now offers Listening
Workshops to facilitate community building, particularly in times of
stress and trauma. Corea and Hawes
Creating
a First Person Science of Criminology
with
Gena Corea
For the past seven years, Corea has been teaching Focusing and related
methods of inner awareness to male prisoners serving long terms in a
Massachusetts prison. Together we are developing a first person science
of criminology. In third person science, an outside observer studies
"the criminal". In first person science, the criminal himself
looks inward and contributes his own knowledge of what a human being
is, what leads a human being to commit crimes, and what helps a human
being to heal. We have completed the preliminary phase of work on violence
against women, with men who have beaten, raped or killed women investigating
themselves.
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