Support Group

At any time, but particularly after attending a Only Oneness is Real Weekend Seminar, you would probably like to organize, or become a member of, a SO Support Group.

This group meets periodically, at times the group agrees on, for the purpose of deepening everyone's mastery of the skills at the Elder and Mature Elder layers. Eventually, there will be materials on this website to assist you in these meetings. We are just beginning this organization and do not yet have those materials prepared.

Choose a Facilitator for the Meeting

One of the members whom the group judges to be good at facilitating is asked to facilitate the group each meeting. (Not everyone is good at facilitating. Be comfortable identifying those who are, and asking one of them to facilitate the evening. Everyone wants to learn through this process to become a good facilitator, but, in the beginning, it's good to have strong facilitation. The role can rotate among those the group judges to be good at it, and eventually include those who are still learning.)

Choose a timer other than the facilitator. This is the person who will put the agreed upon amount of time for each person to use on the timer on their phone as each person begins to speak. When the time is up, and the phone dings, the person speaking is given a minute or so to wind down what they are sharing. No one should be asked to suddenly stop.

Check-Ins

Each person has a few minutes to bring the group up to date on what's happening in their life, particularly around the smaller skills they're mastering at the Elder and Mature Elder layers. This allows everyone in the group to connect with each person before moving on to other activities.

The basic format we encourage for check-ins is the following:

"Check-Ins" are when each person takes a turn (2 to 3 minutes, or more if the group chooses) sharing with the entire group the significant experiences they've had since the last meeting related to the group's focus: getting better at mastering the smaller skills at the Elder and Mature Elder layers.

The group wants to become aware that there are different levels of depth inside them from which they can speak. They then want to learn to choose to speak from a deep place of candor about the issues they've experienced as significant to them.

Appreciations

It's always good to allow time for appreciations particularly sharing what people noticed and valued in others after listening to their check-ins. You'll be surprised how this brings the group to a deep place of feeling safe, trusting each other, and being fully present. That's what sharing appreciations accomplishes. No one needs to have an appreciation for everyone in the group or for anyone at all. But most people will find something to appreciate in at least some of the others. That's enough to accomplish the above.

Doing Work

When appreciations are done, the facilitator asks if anyone wants to do some work. "Work" is anything a person in the group would like the others in the group to assist them to understand better about something going on in their life. It could be anything, but the focus will always be to help from within the knowledge of the oneness of all.

What a person chooses to work on can be anything they judge is related to maturing into operating at the Elder and Mature Elder layers of maturity in the skill of self-consciousness or in the skill of Eldering. It could be something in one's relationship with their lover, a family member, friend, boss, or anyone else. It could be something in their relationship with themselves: an immature habit such as smoking, not eating well, or another immature habit from childhood or inherited from their parents or upbringing. It can be anything they identify as not operating at the highest two layers of human maturity in the skill of self-consciousness.

The only person we have the sole and complete ability to change is ourselves. We can't directly change another person. The group wants to always bring a person doing work back to focusing on the maturation they want to make in their behavior.

When the people who want to do work on something have identified themselves, the facilitator then asks how much time each person thinks they will need to work on it.

The facilitator makes sure there will be enough time for each person to do their work, or asks some people to volunteer to do their work at the next meeting instead. (The group wants to establish a tradition of always beginning on time and ending on time.)

The facilitator asks those doing work to indicate, on a scale of one to five, how badly they would like to do work at that meeting, then ranks them in order of who is most in need of help. The facilitator then makes sure everyone agrees with that order, or agrees on what changes should be made. (Good facilitation always takes the extra step of making sure that, at each moment, everyone is in consensual agreement on whatever is being done.)

The person doing work can choose one person to be the primary facilitator for their work, or, and this is usually best, allow the group to do the facilitating. The latter requires the group to know how to do that. Here are some of the skills they'll want to learn to do that well:

The person doing work begins by clearly stating what they want to get out of this time doing work on the concern. This is important. Otherwise, the interactions could go in many directions. The group then commits itself to making sure everyone remains focused only on that concern.

If appropriate, the facilitator can be watchful, lovingly redirecting the focus back to the person's concern.

The group learns to always be supportive of a person in the group who is being successful at assisting the person doing work and allows them to continue to lead until a person determines he or she is no longer being successful. At that point another person can come in and take the lead in assisting the person to do their work. The group learns to trust this process of unilateral decision making by each person in the group. If the person who has been leading with the person doing work wants more time to complete what they were doing, they state that and the group nearly always allows that person to complete what they were doing with the person doing work.

It is very easy to slide into giving advice to the person doing work. If at some point, usually later in the time of them doing work, they could ask for it, that can be fine then. However, the priority needs to always be having the person doing work discovering in their direct experience the facts they have been missing. What most of us are not aware of is that the habits, including the unconscious habits, of our mother and father are fully inside us. Our only option is to identify one of them, the skill and habit we want in its place, and to focus on mastering it because of the facts we identify that make it an obvious better choice. Then, and only then, without the need of effort, force, discipline, or will power, it will naturally, effortlessly, freely, and permanently become a new skill and habit that replaces the less mature one. Not focusing on getting rid of the immature habit we don't like will end it. What is important is where we focus our attention! Wherever it is focused is what either gets reinforced or matures. To mature we need to have our focus be on what has been identified as the new skill and habit based on the facts we identified for that maturation to naturally begin to happen. This is using mature free choice, not individual free choice. Mature free choice is keeping our power to choose inside our skin and solely using our ability to identify facts in our direct experiences to choose the new skill and habit we want to replace the immature (not bad) skill and habit.

As you can see, there are group facilitation skills the group wants to learn so the process is always orderly and loving.

At the end of the person's time, they are asked to state what they learned from the work they did and what, if anything, they can see the wisdom of making an agreement with themselves to do differently.

Closing the Meeting

When there is about five to ten minutes left in the group, the facilitator indicates that and facilitates the closing of the group's time together.

In a few words, each can share with the group what they valued from being in the group that time. That makes a good closure.

Some groups like to stand, form a circle with their arms around each other's shoulders so they are physically close together, in a circular group hug, and then take a turn sharing what they got of value from the group that night, or anything else they then feel moved to share. Physical closeness among people feeling love for each other is always enjoyable.

Then the group ends on time.