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Individual and Group: the Challenge of our Age

When I work with people, once we’ve cleared or bypassed the fears, frustrations, and personal concerns, I find that most of us really want this to be a different world, one in which we can be happy, healthy, prosperous, and fulfilled. We also want to serve, to be part of creating that world. The ways and means in which individuals and most groups go about that don’t always add up to the world we actually want because we are trying to work within the parameters in which we grew up, the world we have been handed. After a lifetime of trying to fit in, make it work, and/or rebelling, some have given up those inner dreams of what our lives can be. But those dreams are not gone, just buried, and they are still eager to emerge.

With our infinite creativity, I know we can do more. It takes some attention, peeling away the ingrained habits and belief in limitations, setting the inner creativity and vision free.

And now there is a new idea that I’ve been practicing, that when a group of people comes together in group consciousness, in a very specific way, using the Laboratory of Life method that I’ve learned and developed for over 25 years, we can do things we’ve never been able to do as individuals — come up with new patterns of behavior, new relationships, new ideas and inspiration for creative courses of action, deep understanding of what is taking place and how it can be brought to health, or reconciliation, or peace, or harmony, or re-created completely in a new form never before imagined.

We know that group mind has caused terrible things to happen, especially when individuals give up their own authentic, sovereign selves to the group or to a charismatic leader. This group mind is easy to manipulate. But what we are doing is quite different because the Laboratory of Life method actually fosters each individual to stand up in her or his unique, masterful self, and to come into the group without sacrificing that. Indeed a group of people formed in this way cannot reach its full potential if any one gives themselves up. Maintaining one’s Self in a group is a skill and an art that takes exquisite attention and intention and that is what we practice and refine in myriad ways until we can stand forward and come ‘into harness’ with others.