(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . The Flow in building a Culture of Empathy [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2024-07-15 Empathy Circle Café. Join us on Zoom every Thursday at 6PM PT for an opportunity to be heard, understood, and improve your listening skills. What is for dinner? How are you doing? What is on your mind. If you are new to Street Prophets please introduce yourself below in a comment. This is an Open Thread / Coffee Hour and all topics of conversation are welcome. Today the suggested topic is flow. I have found some refuge from politics in the timeless moments I spend in Empathy Circles while I’m facilitating each week at our Thursday Empathy Café and participating in one as a trainer each Saturday this month. I say timeless when describing my experience in the circles, because over the years I have been doing circles I have learned how to turn off my reactive mind and be with the flow. The flow is fully feeling the openness, care, and mutuality in the circle setting while the communications takes you on twists and unexpected turns. Please jump the fold for a bit more about the flow of Empathy Circle experience. The comments for this article are are after community links and its sub thread. Please limit community links to one per user because we want to encourage greater diversity of submissions of community links from different users. Enroll in our training course to learn mutualism, reflective listening, and empathy circle facilitation. August 17 and 18, 2024 at our Las Canoas Rd. campus. The flow experience has been written about extensively in Buddhist literature. And it has been studied by academic researchers. But, before I share some quotes from the “experts” let me tell you what I think it is. I link flow to the values taught in our empathy circle practice. The practice of the circle is such that each of the participants takes a turn to speak to the group while being reflected by one of the members of the group. The silent listeners are present waiting for their turn to speak and reflect. The most profound role is that of the reflective listener. By following the structure of the practice all the reflective listener has to do is convey back to the speaker the information offered. In other words simply demonstrate that they heard and understood the speaker. Now it takes a bit of practice for the speaker and reflective listener to learn how to do this. Speakers, just starting, often just pour out their thoughts without pausing. So, the first thing they learn is to just speak a few sentences or just one simple thought. And wait for the reflection. The reflection is important because it allows the Speaker to hear how the listener has heard them. The process encourages the speaker to acknowledge that they were accurately heard. Generally the speakers learn quickly to “chunk” out their thoughts in small utterances. And the speaker if not understood learns to restate their thoughts so the listener understands them. (Not necessarily agreeing with them or judging them.) The real learning challenge is with the reflective listener. If you think about most listeners are more engaged with thinking about what they want to say or how they will win the discussion than actually listening to the individual talking. I want to give you a real story from my life that illustrates this. At work I supervise a number of caregivers. One has been with me for six years and I consider her my friend. While I was studying to become a Empathy Circle Facilitator Trainer often I would randomly talk about my circle experience and practice with her. Now my friend’s love life is not the best and the guy she was seeing for the few years was difficult. It was almost normal for her to come into work and say, “We had another fight last night.” One day she came and said to me, “I tried reflection, and it worked.” She was amazed and happy about it. She elaborated that when her “boyfriend” started in about this and that rather than defending her actions, criticizing his actions, or giving advice she just reflected back in a sincere way. She said the “boyfriend” calmed down and after a few reflections said, “I’m hungry lets go out to dinner.” She said the remainder of the evening was positive. This is just one fragmented example of applying an empathy circle practice outside of an empathy circle, but for the individuals it was total change in their relationship dynamic. And yes this improvement was transitory for them. And that is why to make a permanent behavior change it takes immersion in the process repeatedly over time. And achieving the flow state also requires practice over time and being in a supportive circle for maybe upwards of 90 minutes. After participating in over 90 empathy circles over the last year both as a trainee and a facilitator I now automatically blend into the flow state when in Circles. As I said in my introduction it gives me a timeless feeling of just being present. For the time I’m in circles I forget my personal problems to deal with the future. I forget the past problems I might have had. I’m just there in the moment open to the flow of the group present. Open to caring enough to understand through reflection other people. Open to sharing what ever is on my heart. I have no burden to prove myself or argue back. This week I’m only including one reference on flow in order to keep this article brief. Next week I will share a number of diverse writings and videos on flow. So for today let me give you a few excerpts from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s academic study of flow. Mihaly Robert Csikszentmihalyi (29 September 1934 – 20 October 2021) was a Hungarian-American psychologist. He recognized and named the psychological concept of "flow", a highly focused mental state conducive to productivity. He was the Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Management at Claremont Graduate University. Earlier, he served as the head of the department of psychology at the University of Chicago and of the department of sociology and anthropology at Lake Forest College. Wikipedia: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi I would like to share a few quotes from Buddhist website called LION’S ROAR from an article about Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book called: Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. In Flow, Csikszentmihalyi describes eight “elements of enjoyment”-the factors that characterize or contribute to the flow experience. First, flow is likely to occur when one confronts a challenging task that requires skill. Here, there must be a balance between the demands of the activity and one’s ability to meet those demands. If the activity is too easy, boredom will result; if it is too hard, it will cause anxiety. From LION’S ROAR: The Man Who Found the Flow by Andrew Cooper — 7 May 2021 For me the challenge is to facilitate the circle. To do it without effort and ego. To gently guide and maintain the circle’s agreement of mutuality, openness, and care wile simultaneously participating in the circle as an equal with all present. The final element is an altered sense of time. Hours may seem like minutes, or conversely, one may experience a sense of what sports psychologists call “elongated time,” in which things seem to move in slow motion. Not all these elements need be present for flow to occur, but in the course of thousands of interviews, Csikszentmihalyi and his associates found that virtually every account included at least one of them, and often most. From LION’S ROAR: The Man Who Found the Flow by Andrew Cooper — 7 May 2021 So, above we have Csikszentmihalyi’s saying to me that my discovered feelings about time are not unique. Others have felt it. There is a lot to digest above so I will stop here and pick back up on this theme of flow next week. (For more information on Empathy Circles click here: https://www.empathycircle.com/what-is-an-empathy-circle) Please share your experience of flow in the comments below? [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/7/15/2254255/-The-Flow-in-building-a-Culture-of-Empathy?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/