love is a mystical force

I just went to a 3.5 day training. It was a t-group.  A t-group is, mostly but not entirely, about love. More boringly, it is about learning how to communicate more effectively, to ask for your needs, to believe that you are entitled to have your needs met.

I don't really like the t-group model. I went from personal curiosity. I was trained in tgroup by an NTL tgroup facilitator trainer, a world reknown consultant but a former friend sees himself as a tgroup professional par excellance and he put me down for not 'getting' tgroup. I've been curious to see if how tgroup is done in California were meaningfully different. It is not.

I get tgroup.

Lots of folks fake in tgroup. Our group talked about that. One of the benefits, hopefully, one gets from tgroup is to stop faking. Or fake less, to show up more authentically and more lovingly.

Interesting weekend. T-group is not my thing. I rejected it fourteen years ago as a component of my work life. I used to facilitated far more awesome training groups. And I am hoping to get back to that work.

But not tgroup.

Most in the weekend group, with two different tgroups, were all eager to come back for a longer five day tgroup.

Me?  I was screaming silently to get the heck out of there after less than 24 hours. Not having a car, I was dependent on my ride home.  All that head stuff just doesn't mean much to me. The love part I got.

I loved everybody. I was in a group with more men than women and it was a great joy to find myself loving each of the very different men.

There was a young, fiery, feminist lesbian who kicked off the first tgroup session by rushing to protect me when a rich, entitled, elitist white male jumped on me.  He turned out to be rich, entitled, elitist but also loving, deeply full of feeling and he worked so hard to show up with feelings instead of talking at folks. I am proud of him. He and I became  friends. There was a process where we had to pair up with a partner and I ended up paired with him.  We were also the geezers of our group, the only sixty-somethings, with most being twenty, thirty and forty something.

At one point, the group pushed me to share my heartache, which they all sensed -- the loss of my daughter. It seemed cathartic for the group. They seemed to think I had made some big leap but I don't really hold back who I am in any situation. I try to only talk about my sadness in moderation so as not to bring others done. It was not particularly cathartic to have a group of strangers empathize but it seemed to please the group. Geez, I am open and authentic all the time.

I need loving, intimate friends in my life to be kind toi me regularly, not a group of folks I likely will not see again to empathically hold space for my heartache.

Interesting. More reflection. Now off to Fort Mason for a full week of events.

Unusually busy for me. Conference work all week and a retreat at Stanford next weekend.