Sublime

Once you have identified the parts at a trailhead, you choose one to focus on for the session. It is best to choose a protector to start with because it isn’t wise to work with an exile unless you first gain permission from any protectors of that exile.

When we’re at a distance from our bodies we become confused about how to live our lives. This leads to fear, which produces violence, inequitable rights, and self-isolation. The distance we live from our body is the distance we live from our self, from our emotional reality.

EFFECTIVE INTERVENTIONS MOBILIZE people to tackle an adaptive challenge. They may be designed to make progress at any point in the process:

The original innovators of somatics emerged in the climate of two World Wars, the Holocaust, and the residues of slavery in the United States and the devastations of our indigenous populations. Most of them were fully aware that personal and small-group healing, though necessary, was not enough to assure a truly human life within institutions that

In designing your workshops, you’re co-creating the conditions for self-discovery in a supportive community using liberating practices. You’re offering a safe space for individuals like Melanie to practice becoming choosers and deciders, and to realize that they have freedom in how to relate to themselves, others, and the world.

Ireland. She is moved by his conviction that a central piece of the practice of leadership is “helping people to see the contradictions in such a way that they can discover what is in everybody’s best interest”—what Heifetz describes as “recognizing the gap that signals adaptive work.”

Prepare. Before bringing your organization’s factions together and surfacing the conflict, do your homework. Where does each faction stand on the key elements of the conflict? What do they care about the most? What losses do they fear?

In the long and labored work of adaptive leadership, the artist-leader, like the potter, works in relationship to fire. Potter and clay are both tested in the risk and promise of a co-creative relationship with fire.

arguments. People felt very strongly about him and would remark that “Tuvia had charm. He gave us all strength, we felt more secure with him. He was very close to people, he loved them. . . . Tuvia was hard and soft at the same time. When any one of us was in trouble he was always there. He would always help. One felt safe with him.”38