The last few months have been a period of intense learning1 and I am reflecting on what I am learning and remembering (integrating it all).

1. The role of community

While I always valued community, its role in my growth and the possibilities it holds are becoming clearer. There are communities all over the world engaged in radical experiments and have created new pathways of how human beings can come together. I am inspired by them and with BRM also becoming a community at its core, I look forward to manifesting some of these possibilities here.

Specifically, communities can

• Engage constructively with difficult questions like money and value flows
• Are a response to the capitalist system’s fragmentation and its effects (including war)
• Have some structures and processes that are similar across communities and can be co-created
• Be very difficult places and failure is way more common than success (in fact survival is success!)

1. The power of the unconscious

A lot of Group Relations and Process Work was about tapping into what is unconscious. It is always present and impacting how we are showing up in the world, both individually and as groups. The unconscious is mostly unknowable and always in a flux i.e. we can never ever fully know it, only wonder about it. It is fascinating and non-rational.

I realised that my own life has a lot of unconscious material that is suppressed and that shapes me in how I look at myself. My childhood, while an amazing experience was not without its difficult experiences. Erasing them, treating myself as privileged and giving from that space created a dynamic that was unhealthy in many ways. I could come to grip with some of this and deal with it through the work.

1. The possibility of equity

That equity is good and ideal wasn’t new information. But how much I was embedded in hierarchy was. In my head there was up and down, constantly comparing and placing myself vis-a-vis others. This denied the true intimacy that comes from valuing each person, and the possible learnings that each person carries.

In working with Mohanbhai I worked through my own issues around “up-and-down” and how I give up my agency to others (who I consider are ‘better’). It also helped me understand how my feeling “up” vis-a-vis others was not helpful in my ability to truly value them as equals.

How does one hold this with the reality that each of us is on a spectrum on every parameter? How does one become connected to the oneness that is innate to us all?

1. Understanding myself as a hero

Some work in this phase restored my own confidence in being a hero. At the same time it revealed that the people around me are also equally strong energies. My heroism exists in a context, and that to be truly brave is to know when to ask for help.