What a facilitator does when she holds space

Raffi Aftandelian raffi at bk.ru
Mon Apr 25 13:20:24 PDT 2005


This weekend I was at a Moscow conference of trainers and consultants.

There was a "demonstration" OST in the middle of it, to show how OST
works. And curiously it worked pretty ok despite some of my concern that by
announcing the topic only at the opening of the event it might flop...

After the end of the mini-OST meeting, there was a debrief on OST. One
participant who does lots of martial arts, holotropic breathing, and
other assorted goodies/practices wondered what does the OST
facilitator "do"? THe OST facilitators present tried explaining to no
avail.

He simply couldn't understand. He explained that he needs a visual
model to "get it."

And later it dawned on me: I have for a while thought of OST being a
very fast means of humans consciously recreating all of nature's
processes in a bounded environment (think the biosphere experiment).
And this led me on to the aha...if the facilitator is opening a space
for nature to happen, then the facilitator is...God!

What does God do to make grass grow? Nothing.

I am curious what others think of this God model of facilitation. I
almost shared this "model" with this participant, but my instinct got
the better of me. That is not the thing you should EVER, probably,
tell someone interested in OST.

That realization is something people need to come to themselves. It's
just downright scary for one thing.

And this brings me to the how of holding space. Of course, for each
person God is/acts/is called something different, so the nature of
that held space will be different.

People's thoughts?

Raffi


                          mailto:raffi at bk.ru

*
*
==========================================================
OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
------------------------------
To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options,
view the archives of oslist at listserv.boisestate.edu:
http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html

To learn about OpenSpaceEmailLists and OSLIST FAQs:
http://www.openspaceworld.org/oslist



More information about the OSList mailing list