I Am Because You Are - Focusing Oriented Ubuntu Empowerment

How Arts in Focusing Promote Acts of Relational Empathy

Ubuntu-Based Community Building - The FOUR Project

In 2008, while teaching Focusing to a group of professionals, I had a dream that revealed my understanding of Focusing at that point in my life. The dream was very short with no imaginative imagery except for some open space, like the sky. There was a voice saying, 'Focusing is ecumenism.'

I used Self-Focusing to explore the meaning of the word 'ecumenism.' I ultimately understood it to mean 'bringing together groups or people with highly differentiated beliefs to share a sacred space.'

The result from that was reading the Books 'God Is Not a Christian: And Other Provocations' and 'Made for Goodness. And why this makes all the difference' by Desmond Tutu. I also undertook an in-depth study of the Pan-African concept of Ubuntu under the mentorship of Prof. Dr. Workineh Kelbessa from Addis Abeba University, in Ethopia. My studies finally led to workshops on Ubuntu-Focusing at the International TIFI Focusing Conference 2013, in Switzerland, and at the European Focusing Association's Focusing Fair 2014, in Germany.

At the 2016 International TIFI Focusing Conference in the UK, I presented a poster session on the Ubuntu-Focusing project named 'FOUR' (Focusing Oriented Ubuntu Repair) which I ran in Tübingen for two years

The FOUR project meetings were free of charge and held monthly in the first year, and quarterly in the second year. The meetings were open to everyone, regardless of Focusing experience. Each FOUR meeting was held in person and lasted three hours.

The FOUR workshop concept was based on Focusing and Felt Sense–based arts engagement. Participants were encouraged to explore what community and interconnectedness meant to them and express their Felt Sense through visual art, writing, movement or sound, depending on their preferred modalities. 

What made these FOUR workshops special was the integration of the Ubuntu spirit into group interactions. Participants identified the person in greatest emotional need in the meeting from their sense of interconnectedness. They adressed their Felt Sense with the question if it was okay to give their painting or write-up to the person they felt needed it most. The participants gave their personal contributions as gifts to the person they had chosen. Sometimes, most of the group members gave their gift to the same person. At other times, the person in most need from Felt Sense was more than one person. This part of the workshop was done in silence.

The most intense feeling for everyone was that those who gave their gift, felt enriched, more connected, and more at peace with themselves and the group after doing this act of Ubuntu, which in Western terms, is about living in accordance with Relational Empathy (Maureen O'Hara). The next part of the group process was a sharing activity, during which participants could reflect on and discuss their inner processes. They especially took their lived act of expressing Relational Empathy into conscious reflection. To dive deeper into into Ubuntu-informed Relational Empathy, participants were invited to challenge themselves by practicing Ubuntu prompts in their daily lives during the meetings.

After two years, I closed the FOUR project because I felt the participants had become too comfortable with the free workshop offer. They seemed to enjoy the cozy atmosphere of the Ubuntu group very much, but they did not find the time or energy to bring the Ubuntu spirit into their daily lives. This became evident when we reflected on the participants' experiences with the Ubuntu prompts for daily life. Reflecting on these was part of the opening at each meeting.

I myself began reflecting on what had prevented the project from building the kind of community I wanted to see. When I started the FOUR project, I had planned to build a strong community in my area that would encourage people to take the risk of detaching from an ego-centric worldview. However, I helped build a community that resembled general community life in my area. Regional community life was conservative rather than experimental. It was characterized by sticking together and enjoying repetitive rituals with only like-minded people. Newcomers who were not born here were kept out. As my mentor, Workineh Kelbessa, said, the general community life was driven by tribalism. Focusing in combination with the arts was not powerful enough to alter the influence of these cultural norms or encourage people to act in ways that embodied the Ubuntu spirit beyond their reference groups.

I also reflected on my role as a facilitator. Clearly, guiding a group through the different phases of a workshop caused participants to become consumers, even though the program was part of Focusing oriented transformative adult learning. However, it seemed that the longer the project, the more emotional consumerism there was. What could I have done differently?

Although I saw myself as someone in service to others, I realized that my intention to bring Ubuntu into the daily lives of my group participants was an expression of imposing my worldview on them. Despite the deep emotional connection to the Ubuntu spirit experienced by the group participants during the FOUR meetings, I had not fully embodied the true nature of Ubuntu myself.

Years later, I realized that I could have participated in the artistic activities of the Ubuntu meetings as part of a co-creative group, rather than taking on the roles of group leader and facilitator. This choice would have prevented me from acting as an expert assigning Ubuntu 'homework' between group meetings. At the time FOUR was running, I was still identified with my professional background as a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist, which demanded abstinence from participatory group activities. But when I as a group leader and fascilitator was artistically participating, the group members got space to interact with their pictures implicitely and beyond the scope of Focusing didactics. Their paintings might have served as their most effective inner guide and perhaps even creative mentor when it came to transferring art-based Ubuntu-Focusing experiences into social life.

Participating as an artist while facilitating a co-creative process same time is a big challenge. Maybe I had just lacked the courage to try doing my art while holding the space. But knowing when to offer a Focusing invitation that might reveal the artistic process of the participants while staying connected with my inner artist, is exactly what the art of Relational Empathy suggests. It's about the pendulation between the needs of the group and the needs of the individual, depending on the situation. It means giving up the advantages associated with an ego-centered worldview (sticking to the role of a group leader) and committing to being an equal among equals throughout the process (social-centered worldview). In retrospect, I realized that I had asked my participants to do something that I had not done myself—incorporeiting Ubuntu into the understanding of my social identity. A more co-creative approach to facilitation would have prooven that.

Today, I would change the way to fascilitate the art-making part of a FOUR workshop. Taking a fresh look at the FOUR project, the best way to create a natural flow of interconnectedness and a strong Ubuntu spirit that may ripple out would be to have a high level of trust in the healing and self-actualizing power of Felt Sense-based arts. This implies to offer fewer Focusing oriented art invitations. All that is needed for the group participants is to be invited to pause during the art-making process every once in a while, reconnect with their Felt Sense, and take their time sensing the unknown that is evolving beyond what can be seen in their art. This style of facilitation, dedicated to studio art, has proven highly effective during our monthly online FOCUSZART studio sessions, which have been running for five years since the pandemic.

In evaluating my new perspective on Ubuntu-based community building through arts in Focusing, I would like to offer the following statement: It's all about engaging in less Focusing and more Felt Sense-based arts.

Appendix

FOUR Project Questions That Help Coming to Community and Building Relational Empathy:

How would you like to join in and participate? 

What does it need for you to feel connected here?

What makes you participate at your best? 

What do you miss here that could help balance things out?

What does your body know is missing for the whole?

What's missing here to make it complete?

What does the whole need to be contributed?

What does it want you to contribute?

What makes a difference to fulfillment for all of us?

How does your body feel our WE-ness?