COURAGEOUS HOSPITALITY

“In any group mediation process there’s always a point where someone in the room — with courage, with worry, with anxiety — names something they’ve been carrying for a while: an insight, an experience. That moment is always important. Sometimes others, when they hear this insight, experience a palpable sense of relief; other times the response is more complex. 

What you’re trained to do, in group mediation, is to help people continue to practice the art of staying in the room with each other: in listening, in understanding, in going deeper. Broadly, it’s called containment: a word that some misunderstand, thinking it means stifling, or shutting down, or controlling; but the clue is in the word contain. If someone in a mediation says something that I found difficult, a response of shock would not help; it’d imply that I couldn’t contain their experience. The process of a group engaging in deep conversation is one that requires courageous hospitality: hospitality to the hope that can support insight, change, and moral reckoning, as well as hospitality to the demanding ways of conversations, which invite learning. I don’t do many mediations anymore. Holding this space isn’t for everyone, and it’s also not for all time. But I’m glad for those bridge-building people who hold tension, truth, and communication together.”
Pádraig Ó Tuama from ‘The On Being Project’

Me too.

“So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.” Jesus