<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div>Bonjour Suzanne,</div><div><br></div><div>You really are a good example of the saying: Be the change you wish for. You really got it: what's important about Open Space is the spirit of it. No wonder you are finding so much openness around you. Using it invites it. Keep going! </div><div><br></div><div>I know form my own experience that you will find OSonOS to be a place of deep learning, connecting and joy. I'm sorry I have to miss it. Other events were already in the calendar for me on those dates. I can visualize it thought and that brings light to my heart. I'll have a special thought for you all and for our dear friend Brian Bainbridge whose memory, I'm sure, will be very present at this planetary gathering. </div><div><br></div><div>Amitié,</div><div>Diane </div><div><br></div>-----Original Message-----<br>From: OSLIST [mailto:OSLIST@LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU] On Behalf Of Suzanne<br>Daigle<br>Sent: Thursday, April 22, 2010 9:25 AM<br>To: <a href="mailto:OSLIST@LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU">OSLIST@LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU</a><br>Subject: Blissful journey in Open Space<br><br>Dear Open Space friends, I was going to send a personal thank you note<br>to Harrison (who I'm glad to say has become my friend as he is to all<br>of you and all of us). Instead I decided to just put myself out there<br>again in this community and send it to everyone.<br><br>As I prepare for my upcoming trip to Berlin, celebrating my first year<br>of Open Space following wonderful training by Diane Gibeault in Ottawa<br>in April last year, I just decided to share my story and my feelings<br>with all of you. I am truly in awe that Open Space is celebrating 25<br>years this year in the city where the Berlin Wall used to be. I<br>cannot help but feel it is significant -- significant thinking of all<br>the Berlin Walls that should fall in so many places in our world where<br>people feel overwhelmed by the things that seem to be crashing down<br>around them. Yet I feel that this deep pain is possibly the signal of<br>a collective and global rebirth. But to notice and see, we must open<br>up space in our lives. As we do, we realize that what matters most is<br>what's inside of us. It's why I am as drawn today to Open Space as I<br>was the first time I "met" OS a year ago. So today I decided to press<br>the "send button" ....thank you Michael Herman that it's working so<br>well allowing me to share how I'm feeling on the eve of my trip to<br>Berlin. I can't wait to meet so many that I have been reading here<br>and others who I know already. I feel such gratitude to have the<br>opportunity to be there. I've even decided to do a second training in<br>Open Space in Berlin to deepen my practice and learning with many from<br>other countries.<br><br>Now for my note that I had intended to send to Harrison:<br><br><br>Hi dear friend Harrison,<br><br>My < bliss > journey continues and I know you said Thank you not<br>required. But I still want to say thank you.<br><br>You see for me I've connected that the "song" (from mythology) leading<br>me here came from my first encounter of Open Space. It "caught me"<br>then and without knowing in the darkness of it all, I chose to make it<br>my life path. Hugely unsettling as it made me question so much of who<br>I was and had done in my career and in my life. It led me to a deep<br>searching, so much reading, throwing myself into Open Space as a<br>practice every chance I could finally leading me...inside myself. As<br>I started to go there and for me this is just the start, I realized<br>that by just 'being' instead of 'doing', life around me was changing!<br>My relationships with my mom, my dad, daughter and siblings, friends<br>and others are so much richer. I've met so many people this past year<br>leading to so many "big talk" conversations instead of small talk --<br>conversations where it feels like we're Expanding our Now. (a<br>Harrison book).<br><br>Often, I felt like I needed to go into my cave disconnecting, knowing<br>that I will be reconnecting with quiet purpose following my bliss in<br>the years ahead. Not easy to do in a society that expects us to do<br>more and more with less all the time. Plus there is this little thing<br>called paying your bills. Yes, it has been blissful, easy no!<br><br>As I have embarked on this journey, I read what you've and many others<br>have written, great thinkers and many authors you spoke of in your<br>books. Myth, philosophy, science, etc. Like a kid, reading Hardy Boy<br>mysteries, it's been magical. And through it all, I think of Open<br>Space, its principles, its law and what it awakens in many people<br>inviting them to Freedom and Choice, to the place inside of them that<br>makes you feel like a kid again that is your life..<br><br>Everywhere around me, I see people racing, running, worrying without<br>ever having time.or taking time. By opening space, wherever and<br>whenever I can, 24X7 (for me once a month participating or<br>facilitating: this weekend with the Girl Scouts), I feel I can do a<br>small part for people to perhaps discover as I did the magic that is<br>within them.<br><br>In my continuing words of thank you, a brief paragraph from one of<br>Joseph Campbell's writings captured in the book Pathway to Bliss<br>talking about Arthur's banquet hall with all the knights around the<br>Round Table. To me, it spoke Open Space.<br><br>"They thought it would be a disgrace to go forth in a group. Each<br>entered the Forest Adventurous at that point which he himself had<br>chosen, where it was darkest and there was no way or path." You enter<br>the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path. Where there's<br>a way or path, it is someone else's path; each human being is a unique<br>phenomenon. The idea is to find your own pathway to bliss.<br><br>Harrison when I sat in a circle for the first time, it felt like a<br>scary dark forest for me - someone who had lived in hierarchy all my<br>life, career and otherwise seeking to do what others defined to be<br>"living responsibly" in a command-control sort of way. I felt it then<br>and I feel it now that by opening space, there is a big chance that<br>Open Space will "catch others" too. I don't know if you can find this<br>place alone, by yourself. For me, I found it sitting there with others<br>in my first Open Space when I was in Canada. I believe with Open<br>Space, we can discover ourselves and what we're passionate about and<br>from that place, we create community, a new community where people can<br>just be themselves, give of their individual gifts, appreciate others<br>and create in a new way, paying attention and noticing what matters,<br>expanding their now.<br><br>So folks, now I press the send button feeling a bit vulnerable,<br>questioning as I always do if silence is not more effective because in<br>the end knowing our journeys are always unique and personal, I know<br>that it is not by "telling" that we find our journey but in<br>discovering it ourselves.<br><br>I know had I been reading this before I "met" Open Space leading me to<br>my path, it would have scared me to read this as if someone was<br>pushing a religion on me.<br><br>And yet here in this community which feels like home, I felt it was ok<br>to share especially now less than a month away from the Berlin WOSonOS<br>with OS happenings in Australia as well and Brian Bainbridge in our<br>thoughts.<br><br>Love to all, Suzanne<br><br><br>-- <br>Suzanne Daigle<br>NuFocus Strategic Group<br>7159 Victoria Circle<br>University Park, FL 34201<br>FL 941-359-8877;<br>CT 203-722-2009<br><a href="http://www.nufocusgroup.com/">www.nufocusgroup.com</a><br><a href="mailto:s.daigle@nufocusgroup.com">s.daigle@nufocusgroup.com</a><br><br>*<br>*<br>==========================================================<br><a href="mailto:OSLIST@LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU">OSLIST@LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU</a><br>------------------------------<br>To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options,<br>view the archives of <a href="mailto:oslist@listserv.boisestate.edu">oslist@listserv.boisestate.edu</a>:<br><a href="http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html">http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html</a><br><br>To learn about OpenSpaceEmailLists and OSLIST FAQs:<br><a href="http://www.openspaceworld.org/oslist">http://www.openspaceworld.org/oslist</a><br></body></html>*
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