Re: Swedish Network

[Kalle Grill]

Hi all!

Thank you Story for this year's camp and for your encouragement in keeping in touch!

Thank you Johan for organizing an affordable attentive listening camp!! The invitation sounds great, inspiring, inviting. 

I just want to remind everybody that there is a website on circleway.se that I pay for but that is intended for this community, the circle way community. Camilla and I recently started a reading circle there on Story's recent book "Have you lost your tribe?" It came to a halt after a few entries/chapters, but we are committed to it and will take it up again soon. The website can be used to advertise events for example, or advertisements for Skype counseling groups. I'd like to post your invitation to your camp there Johan.

Also, there is the mailing list Circle Way Europe  at circle-w...@googlegroups.com that is in the same way intended for the community. Membership is open, I moderate all postings to keep it clean from spam etc. It has very little activity but some 40 members, many of them Swedish. The description of the group is, currently: "For matters concerning living the circle way as described by Manitonquat: Events, books, ideas. Please use the list with consideration." Johan - please use this list to advertise your camp if you like. Others - please use it to for example ask for partners for Skype counseling. When I started this list I considered having one for Sweden only but decided against it. Since there is so little activity there seems little reason to divide it up by country, but if we do create a Swedish list, the European one can be used to invite people to it. A potential Swedish list could follow the same name format and be called circle-way-sweden. 

Hugs to all,

Kalle

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On Jul 15, 2012, at 9:27 AM, Medicine Story Manitonquat wrote:

Maria & Sara!  Hej! At the lovely Swedish camp in Mundekulla just now it was suggested that people in Sweden may want to make a network  to connect more closely and often, perhaps counsel by email or Skype and get together sometimes and, my great hope, try to move towards living together in community in the Circle Way.  So here are the names on my Swedish mailing list of Circle Way people.  I hope some of you take leadership in reaching out to connect folks. Here follows a response I made to someone asking about why love is so easy when we only meet once a year and so hard when we live closely with another.   Dear One, You are of course right about the things that get in the way of our love in close relationships.  Being close with another you want to be safe, be yourself, not hide behind masks, but these old hurts then come up (because they need to, your being wants to heal) and you start to feel re-stimulated by old recordings - things that remind you of early hurts.   The feelings seem to be caused by the present, but when you counsel and work back to the old hurts and start to discharge them, you begin to recover yourself - that is to become clear in your thinking about who you are, you power, your confidence, your beauty, your lovableness, your understanding of others' hurts.  You understand that when others say or do hurtful things to you it is their old distress, nothing to do with you except that they are also being re-stsimulated.  You can be understanding and compassionate about that --it is not your fault - but you are not responsible for it. With that understanding and compassion it is possible to counsel your partner - if you choose and you both understand that your distresses are not caused by each other.  It is best if you have regular sessions with someone else so you can gain some objectivity about what is happening with your partner and your relationship.  If you also can counsel with him, stay away from the current problems and just listen a lot to each others' life stories, to all the early memories, good and bad, so that you build up your understanding and compassion for each other and you can figure out ways to help each other when you get stuck.   If your partner criticizes and does not support you, you need to be able to find an understanding way to let him know that is not helpful, in some peaceful, neutral moment, because when no distress is operating of course he wants to be helpful.  See if you can find an agreed signal to give each other when patterns are getting in the way of you supporting each other.  For instance, Ellika may ask me "Can you give me five minutes?"  So I understand what she needs and flip my counselor switch on and just listen to her with total caring and compassion!  It's possible!  And after that she listens to me. I also long for community in the same way, but, having had a community in which all the people have learned at the beginning to counsel and help each other, and how beautifully that worked for all of us, I see how good and essential that is and I won't settle for anything less. I am thinking it may be easier to build such a community one person at a time by making counseling relationships than to try and convince a whole existing community to acquire this tool.  My recent readings in both psychology and economics emphasize how much inertia dictates to people, how hard it is for people to act and make changes for the better.  We all have worked to make our lives better in many ways, and at some point we give up and say - "okay that's good enough, this is better than I had before, better than most people have," and we just soldier on. Not good enough.  I want to keep going for all the love and the joy and the excitement and the fun and the creativity and the beauty and the wonder and the power and the courage I had when I came into this world, before this screwed-up society dumped all its garbage all over me.  I want to do that joyfully with others and stand with them to keep that garbage off of our children. There!   Now that I have said all that I realize I would like to say that to everyone - so I will. Manitonqua Manitonquat To be sure I get your answer, please send all replies not only to this address, but also to medici...@gmail.com

[Kalle Grill]

Dear maillist,

Dear list,

My mail the other day (below), though it did have some general interest, was not intended for this e-mail list, but only for selected people from the Swedish network, that Story wrote to. Apologies for spamming the list and apologies for exposing email addresses to the list - though the list is quite small so I do not think this will be a problem (and the addresses do not show in the archive).

I hope Johan will advertise his coming camp on this list so that you may learn more about that.

We did have a great camp in Mundekulla last week, thanks not only to Story, but also to Ellika, and to Maria and Sara who organized, and several others who supported in different ways.

/Kalle

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