Thinking about thinking, tinkering with your mental and emotional algorithms, shaking up your worldview, adopting new perspectives and new strategies, spending a lot of time zeroing in and ruminating on your problems and goals and values and considering them in contact with other people and with suggestions about how to see them and think of them and change them. Setting aside your normal ways of doing things.
This is already inherently vulnerable, but it gets moreso when you’re doing it in an isolated retreat context surrounded by other people for multiple days in which there is a clear status differential between the instructors and the participants.
There are ways to do this that are more responsible and careful, and there are ways to do this that are less responsible and careful. Separately, a person or group can have the intent to do such a thing responsibly and carefully, and this is not the same as being able to do this responsibly and carefully.
(If you’ve seen a person or group try for X and fail repeatedly in multiple novel ways despite multiple rounds of figuring out what went wrong and fixing it in each specific case, it’s wise to be wary of their latest attempt at X. Sometimes people exhibit a curiously robust capacity to keep generating brand-new ways to get X wrong, and my desire to register a warning here is partially downstream of my belief that something like that is true, here.)
Thinking about thinking, tinkering with your mental and emotional algorithms, shaking up your worldview, adopting new perspectives and new strategies, spending a lot of time zeroing in and ruminating on your problems and goals and values and considering them in contact with other people and with suggestions about how to see them and think of them and change them. Setting aside your normal ways of doing things.
Becoming more mud, in other words.
This is already inherently vulnerable, but it gets moreso when you’re doing it in an isolated retreat context surrounded by other people for multiple days in which there is a clear status differential between the instructors and the participants.
There are ways to do this that are more responsible and careful, and there are ways to do this that are less responsible and careful. Separately, a person or group can have the intent to do such a thing responsibly and carefully, and this is not the same as being able to do this responsibly and carefully.
(If you’ve seen a person or group try for X and fail repeatedly in multiple novel ways despite multiple rounds of figuring out what went wrong and fixing it in each specific case, it’s wise to be wary of their latest attempt at X. Sometimes people exhibit a curiously robust capacity to keep generating brand-new ways to get X wrong, and my desire to register a warning here is partially downstream of my belief that something like that is true, here.)