Teams of Two – Page 1

Spiral Journey Teams of Two A New/Old Model for Citizen Activism

Dennis Rivers and the Spiral Journey Peer MentoringNetwork – January 8, 2014 revisionhttp://www.spiraljourney.org/teams-of-two-a-new-model-for-citizen-activism/

The Spiral Journey Peer Mentoring Network is onepossible vision of how to work on issues ofecological sustainability in ways that are alsoemotionally sustainable. The Spiral JourneyMandala (see last page) is a free, open-source,creative commons, twenty-four part, toolkit foremotional survival in a world that is comingunraveled through chronic war and ecologicalcatastrophes. A key element of the Spiral Journeyapproach is the recommendation that people pairup in mutual support teams of two to work on theecological and political crises of our time. Teamsof Two is an effort to carry forward the practice inrecent decades of forming “affinity groups,” but tocontinue that practice in a way that makes theteams easier to start, provides the participants withmore focused attention, and includes a consciouscommitment to personal development and peermentoring.

Emotional support in “enduring emergencies”

One of the fundamental principles at work in theSpiral Journey approach is that the deeper the taskyou ask a person to work on, the deeper thesupport you ought to offer that person. Therefore,for example, if we are going to appeal to people tomake strenuous efforts to keep the world frombeing poisoned by leaking nuclear power plants,then it seems reasonable that we should providesome opportunity for people to express thedistresses they might feel as they master the issuesassociated with the poison of nuclear waste. Manyantinuclear groups have not yet begun to operate atthis level, but it is greatly to be hoped that thislevel of support will emerge as ecologicaladvocacy groups evolve and mature. Eco-philosopher and anti-nuclear activist Joanna Macy

is an inspiring pioneer in this area, and much of theSpiral Journey model is drawn from her work.

A good deal of ecological activism follows what Ithink of as the “house on fire” model. Which is tosay, “drop whatever you’re doing right now andattend to this,” because this is the most importantemergency. In the case of a house being on fire,you don’t give much thought while fighting the fireto the kind of person you hope to become in thecourse of your lifetime. But the ecological crisesof our time, and the global economic inequalitythat kills millions of people year, may well lastlonger than our entire lives. They are what youmight call enduring emergencies. Global warmingand Chernobyl and Fukushima are processes ofinjury that will unfold over hundreds or eventhousands of years. In relation to those challenges,we can’t give up on our quest to become morefully realized persons while we attend to thesecrises. Because most of my life has been over-shadowed by issues involving nuclear weapons andnuclear waste, I am searching for a way to becomea more fully realized human being in the middle ofmy activities on behalf of the web of life. Thereare some existing examples of how this might bedone: Gandhi’s Karma Yoga, the engagedBuddhism of Thich Nhat Hanh and AungSan SuuKyi, the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius ofLoyola, the Quaker Book of Faith and Practice,and the life of Archbishop Oscar Romero of ElSalvador. As is so often the case, our task is to

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take something which is rare and beautiful and tryto make it a part of everyday living.

A twenty-four-part learning agenda

Affinity groups struggle to find a balance betweenanarchy and rigidity, between no guidance at alland a suffocating set of rules. The Spiral JourneyPeer Support Network seeks to operate in acreative middle ground between these twoextremes. On the one hand, from the experience ofmany activists and advocates over the past century,we have already identified many of the issues thatare going to come up in the course of working onextremely challenging issues, such as, for example,the ongoing killing of teenagers by Bay Area lawenforcement officers, or the betrayal of theJapanese population and the world by the ownersof the severely damaged Fukushima nuclear powerstation.

We know that in the course of working on issueslike these, people will begin to wrestle with manyof the time-honored topics the Spiral Journey, suchas forgiveness, gratitude for life in the face oftragedy and betrayal, truthfulness, empathy, and soon. But we present the twenty-four part agenda ofthe Spiral Journey as a list of strongly suggestedtopics to explore rather than as a rigid curriculumthat must be completed in any particular order.There is no one best way for a given person orteam to work on these twenty-four topics, so we

leave it open for each person and each Team ofTwo to invent the way that they are going to makeuse of the learning agenda, which topics they aregoing to explore, and how they are going toexplore them. Our responsibility is to provide arich set of resources and inspiring stories insupport of each of those twenty-four steps. Weoperate from the perspective that the deeper levelsof human development cannot be required ofpeople, they can only be inspired in people.

Some models we are learning from, and somewe are struggling against

One challenge that we face in organizing a peersupport network is that in Western societies thepsychotherapy profession has come to dominatethe process of emotional support giving. In recentdecades psychologists in the United States evenmoved to classify all processes of emotionalsupport and discussions of personal developmentas the unique province of licensed professionals(themselves). (This effort failed because offreedom of speech and religious freedom issues.)For the most part, however, the gradualmonopolization of emotional support conversationsby psychotherapists has not been the result of aconscious plan on their part. It is much more anunfortunate byproduct of the process ofprofessionalization itself. Whenever one group insociety starts specializing in a particular activity(brain surgery, house wiring, shoe making), theygenerally do it better than every one else, and mostpeople stop doing it, leaving it to the experts.

This professionalization brings good results insome areas of life and terrible results in otherareas. Many of the challenges facing us today, suchas chronic war, climate change, nuclear waste, andglobal disease related to tobacco use, can’t besolved by experts alone. They involve society-wide consensus shifting and the participation of asmany people as possible. So we need to learn fromexamples of wide participation, such as 12-Stepgroups and the Civil Rights movement We mightalso learn from other examples, such as howspecific card games are played around the world

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with relatively little supervision, how popularsongs spread across the world, and the structure ofamateur sports, to understand more about how suchmovements and activities reach out to involve andempower new people.

There is a natural tension in human societiesbetween excellence and egalitarianism. For theirsurvival, societies need both inclusiveness andexcellence, but these two pull in differentdirections. Twelve-step groups admit practicallyeveryone who shows up, but they fail in a varietyof ways (lots of people drop out). Elite medicalschools graduate a high proportion of excellentdoctors, but exclude most applicants. Our slowlyevolving Spiral Journey peer mentoring and peersupport Network aspires to nurture bothinclusiveness and excellence, but that will requiredeep creativity on our part.

Three empowering ideas

In searching for resources that could empower awide range of people to live more courageously,compassionately and supportively, Spiral Journeybegins first with ideas from three inspiring“spiritual permission granters:” Mahatma Gandhi,the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the eco-philosopher Joanna Macy.

From Mahatma Gandhi we receive the idea that wehave the power to be the change we want to see. Iam convinced that this idea is rooted in Gandhi’sHinduism. Hinduism is based on the idea that yourindividual soul (Atman) is a wave in the ocean ofGod’s Being (Brahman). Therefore, you haveinfinite resources within you, although you may

not have learned how to mobilize them for thegood of everyone. It is possible to express thisvision of empowerment as based in nature, as well,for those of us who are not Hindus or are notparticularly religious. For example, one could say,following along the lines of Gandhi, that every cellin your body contains the five hundred million yearhistory of life, therefore you have within you awell of living intelligence to draw on inovercoming whatever obstacles your society faces.You have the power, in both these visions, to bethe change you want to see. And you have thepower to stand against the entire world in thosetimes when the world sinks into the confusion ofgreed and violence. In terms of a mutual supportnetwork, Gandhi’s vision allows us to see oneanother as partners in the mobilization of thatprofound compassionate intelligence, hidden, butyearning to be born, in every human being

From the Rev. Martin Luther King,Jr., we receivethe idea of the “Beloved Community,” a vision ofinclusiveness that grows out of the belief in onesupremely loving Creator, who has created us allas brothers and sisters. Because of that, our visionof the transformation of society must necessarilyinclude all those people with whom we disagree,all those people we see as creating society’sproblems. In Dr. King’s vision, the power of lovereaches out to include everyone, to transformunjust social arrangements, and to lift us up to bethe generous and noble human beings we wereintended to be by our Creator. In terms of a mutual

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support network, Dr. King’s vision allows us to seeone another as partners in the mobilization of thatdeep love, hidden, but yearning to be born, inevery human heart.

From the eco-philosopher Joanna Macy, wereceive a profound idea that changes ourrelationship to the crises of our time. Our pain forthe world, she insists, is not a problem that weshould try to be getting rid of. Our society,obsessed with success, views every discomfort is asign of failure, which must be medicated ortherapized out of existence.

To the contrary, Joanna Macy insists, our pain forthe world bears a secret witness to our love for theworld. Our pain for the world is not a failure, it isthe best part of us yearning to be expressed. Evenmore, our pain for the Web of Life and theobliteration of countless species is the Web of Lifespeaking through us, moving through us, andcalling us to a life of heroic service. The wayforward, in Joanna Macy’s vision, is not to avoidour pain but to enter into it fully and consciously,and to find the love that is hidden within it.Empowered by that love we can go forth andparticipate in the healing of the world. In terms ofa mutual support network, Joanna Macy’s visionallows us to see one another as partners andcompanions in the radical transformation ofpersonal pain into courageous love.

Three visionaries of peer support

Another strong source of inspiration for the SpiralJourney Peer Support Network is the work of CarlRogers, a 20th-century psychologist, universityprofessor and scholar of human development. Inthe course of analyzing hundreds of psychotherapytranscripts, Rogers discovered that there were threeunderlying attitudes on the part of the therapist thatseem to help the client take the next step in theirdevelopmental journey. These three attitudes werecaring, sincerity, and an actively voiced empathy,a nonjudgmental effort to see the world through theeyes of the client, and reflect that world back to theclient.

Rogers built on his experience to propose thatthese three attitudes are the universal ingredients ofdevelopmental encouragement, whether betweentherapist and client, teacher and student, parent andchild, minister and parishioner, spouse and spouse,or friend and friend. Rogers’ discovery offered thepossibility that we might grow toward becoming amore empathic civilization, because these attitudescould be adopted, with conscious effort, byeveryone. The developmental problems ofindividuals become the developmental problems ofentire societies: a society permanently at war, suchas the one I live in, becomes a society which iscruel and deceitful. As we work to steer our livestoward kindness and truthfulness, we work notonly to improve our own lives, but also to tilt thescales of the world.

Rogers’ discovery about caring, sincerity andempathy collided with the needs of the emergingpsychotherapy profession, which needed, in orderto justify its professional existence, to have accessto specific tools and techniques that were bydefinition beyond the reach of the “unlicensed”laypeople. Although Carl Rogers lost thatparticular struggle, it is not too late to develop thelife-enhancing implications of his work. A smallbut steady stream of writers have been doing soover the past forty years, while mainstreampsychology and psychiatry have becomepreoccupied with medication as an alternative to

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developmental encouragement and support.

Additional writers who have encouraged me withmaterials for a mutual support community includethe following:

Gerald Goodman, now emeritus Professor ofPsychology at UCLA, did research in the 1960sthat led to his 1972 book, Companionship Therapy,which focused on the beneficial effects on troubledten- and eleven-year-old boys of being in theregular presence of a “supportive other,” in thiscase a university student. Goodman went on towrite The Talk Book, a communication skills self-help book intended to empower us all to become“supportive others” in one another’s lives.

Lawrence Brammer, a professor at the Universityof Washington, and author of The HelpingRelationship: Process and Skills (2002). Brammerpoints out that most people who are experiencingdistress in life are not mentally ill. They simplyneed the presence of a supportive other in order tohelp them mobilize their coping resources. Wecould all learn specific skills and attitudes thatwould allow us to be more supportive of oneanother in times of acute distress anddisorientation. Brammer documents these skills ingreat detail. What I would add to Brammer’sanalysis is that widespread knowledge of how to bea supportive presence does not fit well into thedominant script of professional success in oursociety, which requires that we master a rarespecialty, and focus on people with spectaculardistresses.

Another writer who has done a wonderful job ofcarrying forward the work of Carl Rogers and hisassociates, is Jacqueline Small. Her book,Becoming Naturally Therapeutic: A Return To TheTrue Essence Of Helping, is a kind of universalguide to being a helpful companion on the bumpyroad of life.

The strength of all three of these books is that theyunfold the process of being a supportivecompanion in great detail. The limitation of thesethree books is that they generally conceive of the

helping relationship as being primarily between askilled helper and a person in need. My challengeis to translate these ideas into a vocabulary ofmutual support rather than one-way helping.

An Open Learning/Teaching Model

The Spiral Journey Peer Support Network isseeking to make use of a three-part understandingof what it means to be on an equal footing withothers.

The co-arising of human personhood

Within the Spiral Journey Peer Support Networkeveryone is empowered to teach the day they showup. We may as well accept that responsibility,because we are already teaching all the time. Imay not be teaching algebra all the time, but everywaking moment that I’m in the presence of otherpeople I am teaching by example how to be aperson. So in relation to the basic qualities ofbeing a person, the division of any human groupinto teachers and learners is total bunk! We maynot be teaching particularly inspiring lessons,but we are all teaching each other and all learningfrom each other all the time. We are already fullyon the stage of the world, so we may as well learnto sing better. This is the message of the discoveryof “mirror neurons.” (I invite you to read up onthem.)

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Of course, you can only really teach as much asyou have lived. The goal of the Spiral Journeymovement is not to set standards, test people anddiscover who has failed the test. Instead, it is aboutunderstanding human development more deeply,and encouraging people to grow from whereverthey are in their developmental journey. Thefurther you go along the path of human unfolding,the more you realize that at any given moment achallenge could come along that would be so largethat it would cause you to fail. So at a deeperlevel, all the beginners and all the experts in thisworld are really in the same human boat. We areall perpetual beginners. That is why we havechosen the Chambered Nautilus as one of ourguiding images. We are never finished evolving.Each of the 24 dimensions in the Spiral Journeycalls us toward an open horizon.

Teams of Two as Three-Part Learning Companions

In my experience, it seems that we have at leastthree different relationships with every person wemeet. And those three relationships call to us toplay three different roles, somewhat like a chord ofthree notes played on the piano. There are someareas and topics in life where you know more thanI do and you've lived more than I have lived. Inrelation to those areas I am your student. There aresome areas and topics in life where we knowroughly the same amount and we've had roughlythe same amount of experience. In relation to thoseareas, I am your companion. And there might besome areas and topics in life where I know morethan you do, or have had more experience than youhave had. In relation to those areas, life calls me tobe your servant-mentor. My task is to support youand encourage you in your learning andexploration. In a society based on competition andmerit examinations, there is a powerful focus onknowing more than other people know. To thedegree that I succumb to that influence, I wouldtend to focus almost entirely on the areas where Iknow more than you do. But if I do that, not onlywill I become an unpleasant person to be around, Iwill also be seriously out of touch with people,

missing two thirds of the creative possibilities inevery encounter. In relation to the twenty-foursteps of the Spiral Journey, you already have muchto share, much to teach me. You have had manylife experiences that I have not had, and you havestruggled through many situations that I have notyet encountered.

Co-mentoring: A Different Way of Teaching

Life would be a whole lot easier and simpler, if wecould just take all the important lessons of alifetime, turn them into simple declarativesentences, and get people to memorize and affirmthem. But the truth is that people have been tryingto do that for a long time; and it doesn't work. (Inthe wars of the past hundred years you can see ourverbal wisdom failing us in a catastrophic way.)

As wonderful as it is, human language is reallylimited. We know much, much, more than we cansay. So the best that words can do is to point us ina good direction, up the mountain, as it were. Theycan't carry us up the mountain. We have to hike upthe mountain ourselves. The best wisdom that canbe expressed in words sets the stage for us to growinto something much larger than words. If Isqueeze an orange, I will actually get orange juice.But if I repeat the word, "lovingkindness" (whichis one of my favorite words), over and over again,that repetition by itself will not automatically makeme kinder. In the course of my life I have becomeconvinced that in order to know the meaning of theword, "lovingkindness," I must actually try topractice it, I must go outside of my wordy comfortzone and find new ways of interacting with people,and I can't be sure how things will work out.

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All of this has deep implications for teaching thetwenty-four steps of the Spiral Journey. It suggeststhat however inspired a person’s discoveries aboutlife might be, there are severe limits as to howmuch of those discoveries can be transferred withwords into the minds of others. (Songs andpictures increase that transferability a bit, but notnearly as much as I would hope.) What we can dois to walk along beside one another in a journey ofexploration and discovery. And that walking-along-beside can be a powerful, life-giving form ofencouragement, even though it tends to unfold inquiet ways and focuses on deep questions ratherthan dramatic answers. An analogy from sportswould be to say, I can’t run for you, nor you forme, but running together we can encourage eachother to run further than either of us would haverun alone. We are co-mentors.

Interwoven to form a new pattern --a crop circle reportedly from extraterrestrial intelligences

Coming back to the theme of lovingkindness, itmay be true that lovingkindness is THE answer toall personal and global crises. But it won’t beOUR answer until we have learned to cultivate it.We invite you to explore the radical view that weneed to hold the classics of compassion in onehand and our own tentative learning processes inthe other, as messy as they may be. The ordinaryview is that the classics are all important and yourparticular learning processes hardly matter at all. Inthe Spiral Journey model, our learning processes

are in the foreground. No matter how greatlovingkindness may have been in the hearts of thebeautiful saints and teachers who have gone beforeus, lovingkindness will only live in the world todayto the degree that we make it our own. So we areas important as all those beautiful saints andteachers! We are not merely passive observers ofother people’s greatness, we are active participantsin the evolution of humanity, however much of abeginner each one of us may feel ourselves to be.

Summary

The purpose of the Spiral Journey Mandala is tosupport people in “running further” with thedifficult issues of our time. Working together inteams of two, and larger groups, we can encourageeach other to do more, to carry more, and tobecome more, than would be possible if we wereacting alone.

Most of the topics included in the Spiral JourneyMandala have been around for centuries. We arehappy to be one possible affirmation of them, butonly one of many. Because each person includesunique elements of temperament and experience,no one model will work well for everyone, just asno one shoe will fit all feet equally well. That leadsus to adopt a walking-along-beside style of co-learning and co-mentoring focused on an agenda ofdeep questions rather than a creed of stronganswers.1 Because the world is so focused onanswer-giving rather than on question-exploring,we describe the Spiral Journey in a variety ofways, over and over again, in an effort to helppeople stay focused on the open-ended question-exploring approach.

twenty-four beautiful possibilities,

twenty-four starting places,

twenty-four evocative questions,

twenty-four topics to explore,

twenty-four dimensions to develop, (continued on next page)

1 Even an agenda of questions is a creed of sorts; we can’t get away from that. Every choice to pay attention to a particular thing implies to me an affirmation that that thing is worthy of attention.

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twenty-four ears with which to listen, ways ofpaying attention,

twenty-four abilities to unfold and co-mentor,

twenty-four ways in which to be present forone another,

twenty-four ways to nurture the unfolding ofanother human being,

twenty-four ways of being a friend, companion,coworker, spouse, citizen.

The twenty-four challenges of the Spiral Journeyare much more like a pile of cooking ingredientsthan they are like a finished meal. And theingredients have more of a chance of becoming thefinished meal when we look at everyone we meetas a three-part learning companion, and when welook at our own messy, 24-part learning processesas the growing edges of the world’s difficultpilgrimage toward love, wisdom and creativity.

Please see the Spiral Journey Mandala on the next page and visit http://www.SpiralJourney.org for more information.

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