Brief Summary of the 2016 Social Alchemy Retreat

The 2016 Social Alchemy retreat was envisioned as a bold experiment in bringing constellators, intuitives, facilitators, and social change activists together to sense into the larger social field. Our hope was to discover unseen dynamics related to issues such as racism, collective trauma, environmental destruction, political division, and social transformation, then share those more widely to influence the understandings and conversations in the USA before the 2016 election.

What occurred was, unfortunately, very different from that hopeful vision.

While the event produced some meaningful insights, it generated considerable distress for many of the attendees.

The smaller constellations were generally more successful. Clear questions and smaller groups created greater focus, safety, and depth.

Several participants experienced powerful movements and insights, particularly around race, power, fear, grief, the sacred, feminine and masculine authority, and the ways collective trauma activates personal wounds.

However, the two large-group constellations became unusually intense and chaotic.

Confusing energies and representations arose that we were unable to make sense of. The space felt uncontained at times. (More on this later.)

Facilitators and participants were triggered, leadership and intentions were sometimes unclear, and the religious venue and altars activated unresolved personal and collective material.

Participants arrived with very different expectations: some were informed that they would have input in the design and ongoing process of the event; some wanted a more restful retreat; some wanted community; others wanted an intensive immersion in constellations.

Core Lessons

1. We received a deeper realization of ways that societal constellations differ from personal or family constellations.

   It can be a setup for complications when the facilitator cannot stand outside the social field being explored. In those situations, facilitators are participants in that same culture, carrying its conflicts, blind spots, privileges, traumas, and intentions. When the facilitators become triggered, their ability to perceive and hold the whole field diminishes.

2. Hosting teams need a great deal of preparation, rest, cohesion, and practice together.

   Future work of this type would benefit from—or require!—greater clarity and agreements about:

   • intentions;
   • leadership roles;
   • participant expectations; and
   • decision-making.

3. This work is better suited for participants who have experience working and holding intense systemic fields. Bringing in people with no experience in some kind of field work creates the conditions for potential disruption or inability to adequately hold the intensity in the container long enough for something to reveal itself or shift.

Some Considerations for Future Events

Reports from participants point to the need to balance two poles when exploring such intense fields:

1. Immersion in the field—sensing, representing, and allowing something unexpected to emerge.
2. Stepping back—reflecting, thinking, sharing personal experience, recognizing triggers, and seeing the system from some distance.

Pendulation—moving between intensity and resourcing, between in-the-field and out-of-the-field—is essential at times.

Constellations should be paused when necessary so people can differentiate their personal experience from what they are representing.

Reflecting teams, support pods, secondary facilitators, small-group sharing, clear time boundaries, and explicit permission to decline representation could help prevent overwhelm.

Harvesting should include more than recounting what happened; participants need opportunities to identify insights, acknowledge harm, share their internal experiences, and consider how the learning applies in the world.

Prophetic or Precognitive Material

One surprising realization, which could only happen in retrospect, is how prophetic certain aspects of this event turned out to be. The potential emergence of precognitive or prophetic material in these kinds of constellations is another factor to keep in mind when facilitating these processes. Had we considered that these might have been future representations rather than present or past ones, we may have related to them differently.

• The differences and dynamics within the Hosting Team and between it and the participants ended up being quite parallel with how party politics in the U.S. government—particularly the Republican Party—unfolded over the next few months.
• A very disruptive group emerged in the center of the circle talking about pedophiles and acting very emotionally dysregulated. There were qualities here that turned out to be very similar to QAnon beliefs and behavior—occurring before QAnon’s emergence in late 2017.
• Another occurrence in one of the large constellations happened around the same time as the people in the center of the field screaming about pedophiles.

Several representatives walked out of the circle and went near the back wall of the long hall. They began drumming by a “river,” as if they were representing Indigenous people. Several others, who appeared to be white people, were standing next to them, supporting them. We did not know how to relate to or make sense of this, and tried to get them to rejoin the main circle.

Looking back, this was a very clear representation of Standing Rock, which began later in 2016 and intensified into early 2017.

Summary and Implications 10 Years Later

In summary, this event was a great learning experience. Much of that learning involved lessons learned—what not to do in future events!

Many things did not go smoothly. More accurately, quite a few things “went off the rails”!

Along with this, significant insights, connection, and innovation emerged.

Besides several powerful insights from the smaller constellations, there emerged deeper recognition that working consciously within shared social fields requires combining field sensitivity with structure, reflection, trauma awareness, and humility.

To continue this work, it would be well to approach it with greater preparation, clearer containers, including smaller and more focused processes with larger group processes, honest recognition of limits, and respect for the powerful energies being invited.

I have a much deeper understanding of the importance of clarity, coherence, and communication of intention within the hosting and support team. Intense energies will amplify and intensify areas of difference or incoherence in those leading the process.

Historical and Narrative Details

• The idea originated after the 2015 West Hartford Intensive, when Bruce proposed staying several additional days for a peer-led exploration.
• The initial proposal was for a Social Alchemy track within the Intensive; when that was not agreed upon by the faculty, it was scheduled immediately to follow the Intensive.
• Dan Booth Cohen, Emily Volden, Alison Fornes, and Bruce Nayowith formed the original four-person planning group and began meeting in January or February.
• Social Alchemy created a meeting place for people interested in approaching social issues from a Field perspective.
• It experimented with connecting field-sensitive intuitives and social-change activists.
• The reasons for using the same venue and limiting the event to Sunday evening through Tuesday morning were ease of logistics. Unfortunately, this created its own set of challenges.
• The organizers offered their work without compensation, helping keep participant costs relatively low.
• Bruce’s vision and Alison’s vision were, in principle, harmonious:
  • Bruce wanted to bring activists and intuitives together to discover what was unseen and needed for social change.
  • Alison wanted facilitators to gain experience with social constellations.
• The evolution from a four-person design group to an eight-person hosting team occurred. In retrospect, the design and hosting teams should have remained distinct.
• Some of what happened during the event are in another file (to be uploaded later)
  • The Sunday evening opening and introductions. Approximately 38 people initially attended the July 17–19, 2016 event. Nearly one third of them left by the end of the first day!
  • The range of experience among participants, from highly experienced facilitators to people who had never participated in a constellation.
  • The intended First-, Second-, and Third-Dimension opening constellation.
  • The facilitators being delayed by critical conversations immediately before the first whole group constellation.
  • The contemporaneous news of the shooting of three police officers in Louisiana.
  • Detailed descriptions of the altar conflict and the unfinished first constellation.
  • The process through which participants’ questions formed three smaller constellation groups.
  • A more detailed account of the final Trump–Clinton–Sanders constellation.
• The Combined Summary gives more precise details about the hosting team’s internal constellation experiments:
  • Each of eight team members received approximately five minutes.
  • Sixteen to twenty mini-constellations were conducted in roughly forty minutes.
  • Physical, ancestral, and spiritual influences were represented.
  • The event mirrored the larger world: widespread chaos accompanied by “islands of connection and innovation.”

Material to be posted later includes more details about:

• The chaos and intensity of the large-group constellations.
• The greater effectiveness of the smaller constellations.
• Differences in participants’ expectations.
• Problems involving leadership, intentions, venue, altars, religion, and insufficient preparation.
• Facilitators being inside the social field rather than standing outside it.
• Facilitator triggering and loss of perspective.
• The need for pendulation, pausing, reflection, harvests, reflecting teams, support pods, and clearer boundaries.
• Confusion between one’s personal self and representational role.
• The tension between immersion in the field and stepping back to reflect.
• The hosting team’s use of constellations to examine its members’ fields and determine leadership order.
• The tensions involving changemaker intention, witnessing, agency, masculine and feminine authority, race, fear, rage, and collective trauma.
• Bruce’s reflections about leadership, disappointment, learning from failure, and the metaphor of the challenges of sensing a song he could neither compose nor conduct alone.