Exploring Ourselves, February 18, 2024

Exploring Ourselves

With Jackie McInley

February 18, 2024

Zoom online

Jackie joined us online from the UK for this dialogue meeting attended by eleven people in total. The session began with some discussion of the previous meeting which had featured a newcomer to the group and had included some conflict as a result of differing ideas concerning how to go about engaging in a dialogue. It was suggested by a couple of participants in today’s group that we’d have more effective communication if we examined people’s actions while observing them as examples of universal human tendencies rather than idiosyncratic habits of separate individuals which can be judged as “right” or “wrong”, intelligent or otherwise, and so on. Also, it would be more useful to look at our own reactions rather than pointing out other persons’ reactions. This took us into a sharing of past experiences featuring fight, flight, and freeze responses and then into a discussion of our motivations in exploring the nature of our communications. We questioned if there is a possibility of healing when we explore difficult issues in our dialogues. The exploration moved into looking at our pain, with some arising of sadness and tears within the group. We questioned whether unfinished childhood experiences might carry old pain into the present moment and if there is still conflict in us at a deep level. Are we attempting to escape from old and deep levels of pain in ourselves? And how can we best deal with such energies? Can we stay with the pain, listening to it as if it were a child? It was suggested that, as human beings, we may often be open to the idea that there is something wrong with us. We may not have been properly loved as a child and may still be suffering the results of such treatment as a sense of sorrow as adults. Can the incomplete process of childhood be completed as adults? It was very interesting to probe into these issues and to investigate our conditioning in the complex world of emotional and psychological development from childhood forward to present experience.

DB