Group Spirituality

Group Spirituality is an increasingly popular area of focus, and working in groups

raises some very different and valuable consequences which wouldn’t
necessarily arise in a one-to-one encounter. In Group Spirituality, Roger Grainger,
an author already established as an authority on Dramatherapy, provides a
practical guide to group spirituality and workshops.
Derived from the author’s experiences of working with groups of people
interested in exploring their own and other people’s spirituality, Group
Spirituality turns an abstract idea into a practical and recognizable experience.
The nature of group work, the embodiment of ideas and feelings, and
circumstances aiding personal encounter are discussed. Workshop examples
aimed at establishing group identity and the introduction of the idea of the ‘safe
place’ are explained. The symbolism of spiritual awareness is approached, and a
firm distinction between spirituality and religion is made.
Group Spirituality’s approach to spirituality from a workshop focus,
successfully attempts to embody spirituality and provide a framework for
consciously examining and integrating spirituality within the rest of our lives.
Roger Grainger is a chartered counselling psychologist and parish minister,
who formerly worked as chaplain of Stanley Royd Psychiatric Hospital in
Wakefield. He combines professional theatre work with writing and teaching,
and is the author of several books about worship and therapy.
Group Spirituality
A Workshop Approach

Roger Grainger

HOVE AND NEW YORK

 First published 2003
by Brunner-Routledge
27 Church Road, Hove, East Sussex BN3 2FA
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Brunner-Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York NY 10001
Brunner-Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of
thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
© 2003 Roger Grainger
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Grainger, Roger.
Group spirituality: a workshop approach/Roger Grainger,
p. cm.
ISBN 1-58391-917-1 (pbk.: alk. paper)—ISBN 1-58391-916-3 (hbk :
alk. paper)
1. Small groups—Religious aspects. 2. Spiritual life. I. Title.
BL628.4.G73 2003
29l.4′46–dc2l
2002155881

ISBN 0-203-42035-7 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-63128-5 (Adobe eReader Format)

ISBN 1-58391-916-3 (hbk)
ISBN 1-58391-917-1 (pbk)
for Zoya Zuvcenko
 Contents

List of figures vii

Acknowledgement viii
Preface ix

Prologue 1
Introduction 3
1 The spirituality of groups 9
I, thou, we 11
2+2=? 12
Safety and danger 18
Bodies speak louder than words 22
Only a story 25
Cosmicisation 27
Group-building workshops 31
2 The space between 38
Winnicott and potential space 38
Therapeutic space—experience and image 40
Space as language 42
Learning to play again 43
Sacred space 46
Workshops about distance 48
3 Story into archetype 63
Spiritual versus religious 66
Implicit or explicit? 70
vi

Telling my story 71
The shape of a story 72
Narrative and world construction 76
Spirituality rituals 78
Spirituality workshops 84
Journey to the cross 87
4 Dreaming 94
Therapeutic ‘dream-time’ 96
Rite and dream 98
Theatre and dream 99
Dream workshops 100
5 Down to earth 112
Grounding 112
The meta-theme 114
Seeing things differently 117
Reaching and grasping 121
Recreation and re-creation 125
Creation workshops 128
Four creation myths 132
Appendix 135
Rites of passage 135

Epilogue 140
Bibliography 142
Afterword 147
Index 148
 Figures

3.1 Life journeys 64

3.2 Depths 79
3.3 Ascents 80
3.4 Vulnerability 81
3.5 Struggle 82
3.6 Eternity 83
5.1 Personal and transpersonal story 122
 Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Stanley and Elizabeth Baxter and the community of Holy
Rood House for all they have done to make the writing of this book possible.
 Preface

It may seem a little strange for an actor to be writing a preface for a book about
spirituality. When you think about it, however, it really isn’t strange at all. After
all, drama is about being human; about the ways in which we share thoughts,
feelings and experiences which concern us all. Some of these may be light
hearted, certainly. Others go deeper, some to the very roots of our humanness.
Roger Grainger’s book looks at ways in which groups of people can use drama
and the dramatic imagination to create scenarios in which people may explore
the things which concern us all very deeply, by giving themselves permission to
make real use of their ‘as if' abilities and benefit from the result.
You don’t have to be able to act in order to enjoy these workshops, although
you may find you’re more of an actor than you thought you were. They are what
they say they are — workshops, not performances. They come from Roger
Grainger’s experience over many years, working as a dramatherapist with groups
of people of all kinds, some of whom were completely new to ‘this sort of thing’,
and not a little scared by the prospect of being involved in it. They were
surprised by the way it helped them to get things into perspective with regard to
what being human actually meant to them in their life among other people,
sharing and growing in their company.
Which is what ‘spirituality’ means here.
Richard Briers
 Prologue

I asked the group what spirituality was. This is what they said.

• Something beyond.
• A source of wholeness.
• Something to hope for.
• Trusting it’s all worthwhile.
• Having faith when you can’t really prove things.
• Going deeper.
• Going home.
• Going there.

Tell me more, I said, go further, and they did.

• It’s belonging.
• Accepting.
• Blessing.
• Goodness.
• Being really fair.
• Trusting people.
• Something behind all this, able to make sense of it.
• Things adding up.
• The real meaning.
• Hope.
• Peace.
• Inner comfort.
• Innerness itself.
• Depth and height.

What does it feel like, then?

• Being involved in something that’s good in a way I can’t express.

• A sense of crossing a threshold.
2 GROUP SPIRITUALITY

• It’s a quality of height, breadth and depth which both contains and liberates. It
holds me safe and sets me free.
• What you don’t expect.

Can you feel it here? Is it the sort of thing that can happen in a group? Like this
one?

• Oh yes, they said.

 Introduction

This book arose from my experience of working with groups who were
interested in exploring their own and other people’s spirituality, either because
they sensed that it would be relevant to their work as nurses, teachers, social
workers, leaders of church congregations, etc., or because they felt personally
inspired to do so. It aims to show how members of a particular kind of group, the
Spirituality workshop, may work together. I begin by considering insights arising
from the nature of the group work itself, particularly the holistic experience of a
shared identity among group members. This part of the book (Chapter 1)
introduces some ideas and topics which will be expanded later (e.g. embodiment
of ideas and feelings, use of personal stories, need for and use of structure) and
ends with examples of workshops aimed at establishing group identity. The
following chapter (Chapter 2) probes more deeply into the circumstances which
permit personal encounter, and introduces the idea of a ‘safe place’ for exploring
the ways in which we interact with one another. The structure of the group
allows us to rediscover our ability to play together: important things about being
human—spiritual values—are approached and shared in ways experienced as
secure and unthreatening. The chapter ends as before, with examples of
workshops designed to explore this kind of ‘distancing’ effect.
Chapter 3 is concerned with the symbolism of spiritual awareness, and moves
into areas associated with experience that is avowedly spiritual (i.e. defined as
such). A distinction is made between spirituality and religion, while preserving
the understanding that both concern a quality of experience that is self-validating
and transpersonal—a shared journey, in fact—and this is the form taken by the
workshops at the end of the chapter.
The next chapter (Chapter 4) brings us back to the everyday experience of
otherness which we encounter in dreams. The workshops here are designed to
make an essentially individual and ‘private’ experience available for sharing,
concentrating on the frightening aspects of encounter with the unknown, and the
group’s ability to ‘take trauma into itself and contribute to the healing of
emotionally wounded people. The book ends with a return to the beginning—
Chapter 5 concentrates upon creation myths. Its workshops aim at restoring to us
a sense of the primal reality of being, thus bringing the wheel full circle.
4 GROUP SPIRITUALITY

Spirituality is often regarded as if it were exclusively individual, if not actually

a private concern, and a great deal has been written about it from this point of
view. Experience with groups shows that this is not necessarily the case (cf
Durkheim!). There is consequently a need to make the connection between the
transpersonal awareness of group experience, as this is understood by social
psychologists, psychotherapists and other specialists in group work, and the
overtly spiritual approach of religious people. This book approaches the idea of
spirituality from two directions—the spirituality of personal encounter and group
sharing, and the spirituality of inspired imagination. It is therefore particularly
relevant for professionals who have, up to now, been disposed by inclination or
training to discount spirituality, regarding it as irrelevant to their way of
working, but are now increasingly drawn to take account of its significance as a
vital part of the status quo with regard to almost every kind of human context.
Like it or not, spirituality is a fact of life.
I have to say at the very beginning, however, that this book is not about
spirituality as such. It doesn’t attempt to explain what spirituality is, for instance.
Spirituality is something experienced rather than described. That is why the kind
of group discussed here is more like a workshop than an ordinary learning group.
Nor is it a book about groups as such. The group exercises described here attempt
to provide a structure for personal encounter in which those taking part are
encouraged to relax their hold upon the urge to take up a defensive position with
regard to themselves and other people, and use their imagination to explore
alternative ways of relating to one another within a specially contrived
environment which is both psychologically safe and spiritually challenging. The
way they do this is much more like art than science; and the kind of art is an
improvised drama.
Each of the groups described here is different from the others. Each emerged
from a different set of circumstances. There is no set of rules with regard to the
number and duration of sessions, number or selection of members, choice of
subject matter, or style of leadership, although enthusiasm for what is going on in
the workshop is sine qua non for all of them. There is no scientifically acceptable
way of telling whether or not they have ‘worked’, or indeed what ‘working’
means under these circumstances. Perhaps the best way of doing this would be to
measure them against one or other of the statements included in the Prologue to
this book as attempts at defining spirituality.
The structural elements involved in this kind of workshop will, of course, be
described later. They are in fact very simple, so much so that workshops of this kind
can easily be put together and certainly require no special training. This is, in
fact, why the book was written— to demonstrate the simplicity and availability of
this kind of workshop approach, so that others might develop it in their own
way, to fit their own requirements. Once the reader has got the hang of this
approach, I recommend her or him to try it out. First of all, however, they would
need to understand the underlying principles of what is being done here. The idea
of exploring spirituality within a group setting suggests people turned outwards
 INTRODUCTION 5

from themselves towards one another. The idea of exploring spirituality in this way
suggests the experience of those engaged in searching for an answer to the
question ‘What does it mean to be human?’ These are not ‘just’ workshops, any
more than the groups involved are just groups. There is a key element involved
here, lying in the way that these workshops are put together—the way they are
structured.
The kind of structure used here is artistic rather than instrumental. That is, the
workshops do not consist of people doing and saying things connected with a
particular agenda which they have agreed together and know how to achieve.
They will not teach anyone here to ‘be spiritual’ or even, in precise terms, what
spirituality actually is. Instead, they move obliquely towards the meanings they
express. Those involved, including the leader, do not know what will emerge in
the way of feelings or ideas. In a sense they do not want to know this, being
content to set out in the direction of an answer to a question that has not yet been
asked, or not asked directly. As in drama (which sometimes comes into play
here), the real question emerges during the course of the action. Because it is a
fundamental question, one about what life and death really mean, it cannot be
asked in any other way without reducing its significance. Those taking part in the
workshop collude in order to ‘tell the story slant’, agreeing to use their
imagination and construct a shared world, one they have made up for
themselves, which could indeed be theirs but isn’t—or not in a way they will
usually acknowledge.
In the spirituality workshop, however, this dangerous story becomes our own.
The structure of the workshop makes it safe for us to inhabit it, bringing to it our
own personal reality, the things we would ordinarily keep hidden, or at least
shelve for the time being. I will suggest that it is the relationship between
structure and freedom that makes this kind of experience liberating, in the same
way that drama is liberating. The world we invent together, using our
imagination to do so, is safe enough for us to take some chances in. Because what
we have put together is ‘only imagination’, and not reality at all, we can bring our
own reality into it.
These workshops are usually constructed like stories or plays, with a
beginning, a middle and an end. The first part aims at establishing a sense of
security. It tells us the kind of thing we are in for while at the same time assuring
us of our safety, that it is not in fact a story specially made up about us however
much we may think it is; so that by the middle we have allowed ourselves to
become really involved and are caught up in its world, having to be brought back
in the final part into the world of our own everyday concerns. This use of shared
imagination makes it safe for us to get involved with the implications of being
human in a way we often avoid, consequently expanding our own humanness.
The workshops aim to do three things

1 to establish a feeling of safety, making it possible for those taking part

6 GROUP SPIRITUALITY

2 to move into the ‘as if mode in order to explore areas of experience which
would cause us to feel anxiety about ourselves and then
3 to bring us back home again by reflecting upon the significance of the world
we have been imagining with regard to our own every day lives.

‘Safe’—‘As if’—‘Reflection’. This experience of balanced danger and safety is,

of course, by no means confined to spirituality workshops. Its connection with
Aristotle’s theory of catharsis is obvious (Scheff 1979) and it is familiar to
students of group process. Oatley, for instance, reminds us that ‘One structure
which groups and individual therapy seeks to provide is a structure of
simultaneous support and challenge.’This, he tells us, is essential for ‘experiential
therapeutic learning’ (1984: 127). This experience of safety-in-danger defies
attempts at quantification. It is also extremely difficult (if not impossible) to
reproduce, except perhaps artistically—and art is well known for its ability to
speak to different people in different ways. If spirituality is characterised by its
elusiveness, both as concept and experience, then cathartic freedom to engage, in
the way revealed by these workshops, is genuinely spiritual.
The workshops themselves are definite enough, however. From one point of
view they are the most important part of the book, the rest of it providing
background material in the form of supportive theories which throw light on
their action. The first part of each chapter attempts to put the reader in touch with
some of the thinking that went into their design, or may, in some cases, have
emerged from it. These parts of the book tend, perhaps, to be a little abstract. If
they do, then by all means turn first to the workshops themselves, the records of
actual events, because it is the practicality of this approach that matters.
Spirituality is an experience, not a theoretical construct; sometimes
psychological theories and aesthetic doctrine are a not very convincing attempt to
explain the inexplicable.
A word of explanation may be called for about the connection between
spirituality itself, whatever that self may be, and the ‘existential therapeutic
learning’ associated with this kind of workshop approach. For the purpose of
these workshops, spirituality may be defined as the awareness of an existential
movement ‘between’ and ‘beyond’ which is experienced as self-transcendence,
the crossing of existential boundaries. These workshops represent a particular
way in which people become aware of this kind of experience. Obviously there
are other ways too, some of them involving the use of therapeutic groups.
Although this is not a book about spirituality as such, it may perhaps be seen as
providing evidence for one way of defining the spiritual. This is the
‘transpersonal’ approach which originated in the thought of C.G.Jung and was
developed by writers such as John Washburn (1995) and Stanislav Grof (1979).
According to transpersonal psychology, although human beings have this kind of
separate existence and can to some extent be studied as individuals, their
spiritual reality includes any form of separateness. ‘There is’ says Wilber, ‘but
one self, taking on these different outward forms, for every person has the
 INTRODUCTION 7

identical intuition of the same inner I-ness transcending the body’ (1985; 134).
This ‘intuition of the single Self is what we recognise as spirituality; in other
words a transcendental reality uniting all human beings and our yearning for the
spiritual. It is contacted via the imagination and expressed in the form of works of
art. Mythological thinking, which uses images and narratives rather than logical
argument, far from being ‘primitive’ and ‘anti-scientific’, is the most convincing
evidence about the human psyche’s growth towards a creative synthesis.
All this, of course, is highly synthetic. The significance of trans-personal
psychology for this book lies in the fact that it provides an explanation, in terms
of a recognizable tradition of psychological enquiry, of our awareness of truths
which lie beyond our intellectual grasp. From the point of view of spiritual
experience itself, however, it remains an attempt to explain the inexplicable.
Theory has certainly been extended but experience has not, and the more
inclusive the theoretical explanation of spiritual experience, the greater the gap
between the experience itself and our success in explaining it away. In group
situations such as those described here, those involved were engaged in the attempt
to explore ideas and feelings associated with our private strivings for answers to
questions that go on defying precise formulation, which have now become
identifiable moments within the histories of particular groups of people—
moments which, for those involved, possessed spiritual resonance.
The spirituality of workshops is implicit within their action. It is quite definite,
though, in the sense that the workshops are focused on particular ideas or themes
used as opportunities for spiritual experience. The workshops came first; the
chapter titles refer in the first place to them, and only secondarily to other things
mentioned within the chapters, which sometimes touch upon areas not obviously
connected with spirituality, but which are always enriched by being drawn into
its orbit.
This is not intended to be a systematic treatment of spirituality, which is
always to some extent a contradiction in terms. Nor is it intended to suggest that
the only way to approach the subject is via this kind of workshop. My intention
throughout has been to share some of the excitement I personally find in working
in this way. Wherever the subject matter is difficult, whenever it is painful or
elusive, whenever it concerns the inner life of individuals or groups, wherever it
is perceived as fundamentally important and demands special attention—to work
within this format is frequently to be both illuminated and spiritually enriched.
Nowadays there is a growing number of people who are searching for ways in
which to achieve genuine contact with their own and other people’s ideas and
feelings. Many well-established professions which are rooted in, and
consequently confined by, direct approaches to teaching and learning, and are
skilled in techniques of ‘dealing with’ situations involving people, are searching
for ways to bring life into old, dry bones by growth in spiritual awareness. They
are beginning to feel that the ways they go about explaining life may actually be
out of touch with the way people really think about its meaning and significance.
For generations, even centuries, they have left such things to others, content to
8 GROUP SPIRITUALITY

stick to their own last, and practise their own well-tried expertise. Now,
however, they are not so sure.
Rather than discussing specifically religious practices we are concerned here
with corporate adventures into spiritual experiences of all kinds. It certainly
speaks to religious people, both individuals and congregations, but not
exclusively to them. All who believe there to be a spiritual dimension to life, and
want to explore their perceptions with others, will find encouragement here. It is
not a textbook either, but rather a record of spiritual moments—a book of
inspirations in fact. The main contribution it sets out to make to the literature
about spirituality lies in the fact that the inspiration is structured within the
context of specific events with the life experiences of those taking part.
Thus the book is addressed to a range of people—doctors, teachers, social
workers, psychologists and psychotherapists, both students and practitioners;
people involved in business and administration; group workers of every kind. Its
obvious appeal is to leaders of church congregations; but it is open to other
professions too. Nurses in particular are becoming increasingly concerned about
the spiritual dimension of their work, as shown by the growing number of books
and articles on the subject which have been appearing over the last few years. The
aim of the workshop approach is to make exploration into spirituality available to
all, not simply to specialists in group work.
This, I think, is the thing about this book which distinguishes it from other
treatments of the subject. There are certainly books about spirituality, and there
may be some about the spirituality of groups (although I am not aware of them);
but I am reasonably sure that none of these is based on a workshop approach, and
certainly not one of the tried and tested kind presented here. In many trials taking
place over the years I have found the workshop approach to be flexible and
inclusive. It is specifically designed to promote spontaneity and to avoid
imposing any one point of view—even the leader’s!
 Chapter 1
The spirituality of groups

1 Sit or stand somewhere in the room. (Talk if you want!) When the leader
calls you, come and stand in a circle with the others.
2 Say who you are to the person on each side of you. Now say why you have
come to the workshop (just one of the reasons, please).
3 Listen to the leader as she/he reads Mary Coleridge’s poem Soul-Gibberish
(1908).

Many a flower have I seen blossom,

Many a bird for me will sing.
Never heard I so sweet a singer,
Never saw I so fair a thing.
She is a bird, a bird that blossoms,
She is a flower, a flower that sings;
And I a flower when I behold her,
And when I hear her, I have wings.

4 Explore the room by yourself. See what you can find that takes your eye. As
you go, try to remember the poem. What do you think it means? Does it
mean anything to you?
5 Come back to the circle again. Now follow the leader’s instructions. They
will start some simple group exercises to help you relax and ‘settle in’ to the
workshop.

Leader First of all, let’s stand (or sit) in as relaxed a way as we can. Now
imagine that it’s a lovely warm day. The sun is shining, and there’s just a
faint breath of a breeze, so relax as much as you can and enjoy it. Drink
the air, drink it in as deep as you can…. Begin to feel the first drops of
rain —warm rain falling gently on your forehead. Lift your face to meet
it. As it gets heavier, open yourself out to it. … Now you are drenched,
soaked to the skin. Take an imaginary towel and dry somebody with it.
Rub them down. Now let them do the same to you.
10 THE SPIRITUALITY OF GROUPS

6 When you feel warm and dry, sit in the circle and listen to the music.
Someone reads whilst you are listening

I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections

And it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly that I am ill.
I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self—
and the wounds to the soul take a long time,
only time can help, and patience
and a certain difficult repentance, a long difficult repentance,
realisation of life’s mistakes, and the freeing oneself
from the endless repetition of the mistake
which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.
‘Healing’, D.H.Lawrence by permission

7 Find yourself a partner; explore with them to discover a space where you
can sit or stand so you are facing each other. Make yourselves comfortable
in the space you have found. If you like you can sit on cushions. Spend some
time listening to the music. When you are ready

a say what it is like to be here, now go a bit deeper

b say what it is like to be a woman or a man (whichever you are)
c now say what it is like to be a person.

8 Light one of the small candles and place it on the floor between you.
9 Hold hands round your candle.
10 Rejoin the main group in a circle and hold hands. Gently squeeze the hand
of the person on your right. Do this in turn, so that the squeeze is passed
round the circle until it comes back to you.
11 Divide into two groups. If somebody asked you what ‘spirituality’ was, how
would you answer? Make a living picture of what ‘spirituality’ might be,
using everybody in your group. This can involve movement if you wish, or
it can be a kind of stillness—or it can be both. Here are some examples

a a rose (or another kind of flower)

b a river
c a pathway
d a mountain
e a forest, etc.

12 Show what you have made to the other group.

13 Sit in the circle again. After being quiet for a few moments, share some of
your thoughts with the group.
14 Say goodbye to everybody, spending a little time with your partner. Who’s
going to take the candle? (Who’s going to give it?)
 GROUP SPIRITUALITY 11

The above was a workshop that took place at the AGM Conference of the British
Association for Dramatherapists, York University, 1993. Participants were
drama and arts therapists from several parts of the world.

I, thou, we

Reflexivity and inter-relatedness as fundamental human experience.

Who am I? Who do you think I am?

As human beings we are characteristically unable to contemplate ourselves
without taking some account of other people—either their presence or absence.
At a basic level, to be human is to be in some way related. Human relationship
involves three dimensions of awareness

• I and my experience of everything (including myself)

• you and your experience of everything (including yourself)
• a dimension involving me-as-you (when I put myself in your shoes, as it
were) and you-as-me (when you do the same with regard to me), the two
processes being alternative aspects of the same shared experience of
personhood.

This latter dimension has been described in several ways, as ‘inter-subjective

reflexivity’, empathy, ‘shared imagination’ and ‘projective identification’, each
of which is a way of describing the experience of psychological sharing of
personhood. There are thus three complementary realms—mine, yours, ours—in
which the third aspect of humanness can be seen as binding the other two
together, while at the same time liberating them from captivity to themselves and
turning them outward towards otherness and one another.
Working in groups serves as a powerful reminder both of our corporality—the
things we share, both as bodies and as a body—and also our individuality, or
what we think of as being unique to ourselves. Logically speaking, of course,
this is a paradox, because we usually think of these things as opposites. In
practice, however, it turns out to be quite straightforward: when we are aware of
the presence of others we are also most conscious of ourselves as distinct from
the rest. Crowds tend to prevent people from speaking up for themselves.
Groups, on the other hand, encourage them to do so.
At a higher level of abstraction, groups can be seen as structures for extending
the kind of sharing which constitutes the primary condition of personal
relationship, so that its nature and effects can be explored and enjoyed by the
people taking part. To put this another way, the threefold experience of sharing—
mine, yours, ours—is the primary human group. This notion that fundamental
personal reality is threefold, and that in personal terms threeness is an ultimate
category of being, is established within the doctrinal structure of important world
12 THE SPIRITUALITY OF GROUPS

religions, notably Christianity and Hinduism (Pannikar 1973), a fact which has
important implications with regard to the spiritual nature of group experience.
The fact that, by definition, groups contain more than two people does not
necessarily make them less personal. The group is essentially a context for
sharing a structure for relationship. Just as actors require an audience of other
persons (and will actually imagine they have one if necessary) so human persons
of all kinds require the presence of others —or at least of an other—to reflect
their reality and give depth to their experience of themselves and each other.
Relationship and reflexivity go together; personal reality cannot exist out of
context.
The spirituality of a group can best be described as what it is that makes a
group able to communicate with itself in ways that defy analysis. Group
spirituality is the unseen presence within the group that makes it into a healing
context for relationship.

2+2=?

Group holisms.
Trust the group process, let it go on…in the group we’re wiser
than we know.
(Carl Rogers, video training seminar with counsellors, Illinois
University, 1973)

There’s something that rises up in me, and I’ve learned to trust it; my
behaviour is quite different when I’m in a group from the way it is in
individual therapy, and this is because of what I’ve learned on groups.
(ibid.)

We are wiser than we know. Talking spontaneously on a training video, Carl

Rogers reveals what is perhaps a basic truth about the experience of human
groups. It is part of his understanding of what he describes as ‘group process’. In
some way or other, the group is able to know things as a group. This group
wisdom is distinct from that of any single member. In fact, as Rogers implies, it
is a different kind of knowing. When we are in a group we both feel and act
differently from the way we do on other occasions and in other places. At least,
this is how it seems to us. Our experience of ourselves and of other people is
different within the group. It is not merely some kind of subtle difference, a slight
variation in atmosphere, calling for the simple adjustment of one’s state of mind.
Or at least, it may have subtle reasons, but its effects are certainly quite definite,
or even powerfully distinct.
Sometimes they are uncomfortably powerful, so that one’s psychological repose
is violently shattered, and with it one’s view of oneself as an experienced person,
well trained to deal with interpersonal events, even unexpected ones. Nothing
 GROUP SPIRITUALITY 13

very much seems to have happened to interfere with the normal course of events
in the exterior world—you are accustomed to sitting in an ordinary room, with a
group of people you’ve already met, some of whom you may actually know quite
well; indeed, the circumstances have a familiar air about them, carrying vague
memories of various kinds of social groups, relaxed occasions when you have
exchanged stories and swapped reminiscences. You know this is going to be
different, of course. What you don’t know is how different.
The following are extracts from a journal kept by a male member of a group
set up to explore its own members’ experience. A psychologist— the Process
Observer—was also present.

Week I Why isn’t anyone saying anything? Is this woman (i.e. the Process
Observer) a group member or not?… There’s a feeling of all being in the
same boat, of having similar feelings. It seems to be an ‘us-against-her’
feeling (referring to the PO). Being on the defensive seems to stop people
saying anything. She has drawn us together, I think. But I must do
something to contribute more.
Week II I began to enjoy the feeling of sharing the group’s discomfort.
Week IV During this session I was reminded of the very painful
experience I had had in a training group a year previously. Like the present
group, that one had also consisted entirely of women. This fact suddenly
came to me with great force—and I found myself telling the group about
it. No-one seemed to object. If somebody admits to being upset, the others
will be supportive.
Week V I was conscious of an anger I shared with the group. Nobody
seemed able to say anything. How much longer is this going on?
Week VI A group member said she felt we were all tied up in a game we
didn’t know the rules for. There was a lot of agreement, mainly unspoken.
The Process Observer said we were behaving like adolescents—immediate
outbursts of silent anger in the group. Suddenly it felt much easier to talk.
Even the Process Observer seemed more human.
Week VII I felt the group helped me face some things about the way I
relate to others. The group felt more fragmented this week.
Week IX A feeling of security, all in it together. PO drew attention to
dialogue between X (another group member) and me; perhaps the others
had felt left out? They said they hadn’t felt this. A member said she felt
‘maternal’ towards the group, and the Process Observer commented that
she thought the group was ‘inclusive, perhaps’.
Week X Self-pity, anger, frustration. I fell asleep halfway through— an
event later described by PO as expressing ‘a feeling of weariness in the
group’, of being ‘drained of energy’. She said I was acting this out on
behalf of everyone else. When I wakened up I felt something which I
experienced as portraying the feelings of the entire group against myself.
14 THE SPIRITUALITY OF GROUPS

This brought with it a powerful memory of the incident referred to in Week

IV. I felt rejected and hopeless.

The purpose of including this material is to draw attention to the relationship

between the feelings of an individual member of the group and the sense he had
of a shared ‘group feeling’. Most of the time he was involved in this shared
experience; sometimes, however, he was extremely conscious of being subjected
to it in the role of an outsider, almost a victim. There was a degree of objective,
circumstantial, justification for feeling this, of course, because of the actual
constitution of the group in which he was bound to be the ‘odd man out’; and at
this junction of his personal life he felt he had reasons for being wary of groups
consisting entirely of women. The victimisation he felt was the mirror image of
the acceptance he enjoyed earlier, however. In fact, the most outstanding feature
of this group was the extent to which feelings were shared.
The group took place during the first ten weeks of what was, to most of the
people taking part, a new course. Certainly, these six people had never worked
together before. It was customary for them to spend the first part of the afternoon
struggling with material that was difficult for them to understand, and certainly
made some, perhaps all, of them feel confused, and consequently inadequate.
The effect of this, I think, can be seen in a note jotted down by this particular
member:

We have a way of being together—close, sensing one another’s

defensiveness, hiding behind our anonymity as group members, glad when
one of us admits to being at a loss, and letting them speak for the group. In
this way individual competence need not be examined and our own
weakness exposed, (my italics)

What showed itself in the group was, at its worst, defensiveness and mutual
protection; at its best, what Tillich calls ‘the courage to be as a part’ (1962a, my
italics).
In his work on the group process, Carl Rogers expresses his faith in the
capacity of a group to move on its own initiative. The group process moves
towards a positive, therapeutic, outcome because human beings themselves
‘move towards wholeness and self-actualisation’ (Corey 2000). In other words,
therapeutic groups express and embody the underlying tendency towards
psychological wholeness present in each of the individuals that comprise them.
The movement is from non-being to being, from meaninglessness to meaning.
The experience of group membership helps us to question values we never
doubted before and to discover new aspects of ourselves, thus reconciling
conflicting elements in our understanding of life, so that we feel ourselves
engaged in a personal universe to which we contribute and by which we are
validated (cf. Corey 2000). The idea of a creative group process goes back to the
 GROUP SPIRITUALITY 15

beginning of the study of group psychology. It has always been recognised that
there is ‘a formative tendency’ in the process itself (Yalom et al. 1973).
For example, Tuckman describes stages (‘forming’, ‘storming’, ‘norming’ and
‘performing’)1 through which groups must pass on the way to working together
effectively and producing real changes within a shared environment (1965). At
each of these stages the group is affected in four areas: structure, task process,
leadership and interpersonal process. All develop in different ways as the group
itself gradually changes its overall identity. In this way a group moves from
being an ad hoc collection of individuals to ‘an entity capable of diagnosing and
solving problems and making decisions’ (Fay and Doyle 1982). In this condition
of interdependence and mutual support, the members use the sense of
achievement at having made the group ‘work’ to give themselves the courage
required finally to close it down.
The idea that therapeutic groups have a developing life of their own was
explored in depth by writers of the psychodynamic school of group therapy.
Freud himself had maintained that the psychology of individuals was a function
of the relationship between one person and another (1930). Foulkes, writing
more than thirty years later, saw group processes as ‘primary elements’ within
the experience of the group which could not be explained solely in terms of the
interaction taking place among individuals (1965). In this he differed from Bion,
who was not willing to go so far towards any suggestion that the whole was
‘greater than the sum of its parts’, and spoke instead of

valency—a spontaneous, unconscious function of the gregarious quality in

the personality of man. The apparent difference between group psychology
and individual psychology is an illusion produced by the fact that the group
brings into prominence phenomena that appear alien to an observer
unaccustomed to using the group.
(1961:169–170)

All the same, ideas of group holism, of an experience ‘greater than the sum of its
parts’ flourished in other branches of psychotherapy. I myself have been
conscious during experiential group sessions of a quality of an awareness which
was somehow brought about by belonging to the group, and yet was subtly
different from ideas and feelings I had about the group, even ones I had about
being a member of it myself. The best way I can describe this is as a sensation of
being in touch with a source of understanding of a kind that is experienced
without being actually understood. This acted as a kind of prompting presence, a
voice behind people’s voices, something which individuals spoke on behalf of
with a confidence beyond the scope of ordinary empathy. Being in a group
increases our awareness of shared ideas and feelings at the level described by

1 The model was later extended to take in a final stage, that of ‘adjourning’.
16 THE SPIRITUALITY OF GROUPS

Bion as ‘basic assumptions’. These are primitive techniques of self-preservation

working to simplify and exaggerate feelings in a way and to a degree unlikely to
be found in other kinds of social setting. Nevertheless, there is something else
too, something more generous, less driven than this. The group expands people’s
awareness, as well as exaggerating their basic needs for safety and libidinal
satisfaction.
This seems to me to be what Rogers means when he says that in the group ‘we’re
wiser than we know’ (1970). It is not always a comfortable kind of knowledge; it
doesn’t add up to the sort of thing you can easily describe either to your self or
anyone else. On the level of people’s ordinary ways of making sense of things,
there may seem to be a frustrating absence of progress. On another level,
however, something quite different is happening; the intensified awareness of
one another’s feelings gives a weird sense of movement taking place within the
group—a kind of corporate progress, not willed but certainly experienced.
Another member of the group already mentioned put it like this ‘It’s as if we’re all
on a journey together, but I don’t know where to’. Certainly it may never become
more explicit than this. All the same it is exploratory rather than simply
defensive; a journey towards. This kind of knowledge is learned through, and
transmitted by, the group. It is characterised by individual understanding which
is only available through group experience.
The development of psychodynamic theory, which has the most to contribute
so far as a theoretical understanding of this kind of group wisdom is concerned,
seems to have been not group analysis but psychodrama. Describing his work
with groups of patients, Moreno tells how he

began to emphasise the moment, the dynamics of the moment, the warming
up to the moment…not only from the point of view of philosophy and
phenomenology, but from the point of view of the therapeutic process as it
takes place in connection with patients and within patient groups.
(Moreno 1969, cited in Fox 1987:4)

Moreno calls the process of communication ‘tele’, ‘The fundamental process of

tele is reciprocity—reciprocity of action, reciprocity of rejection, reciprocity of
excitation, reciprocity of inhibition, reciprocity of indifference, reciprocity of
distortion.’ (ibid.) It is precisely because we find ourselves in the same close
psychodynamic situation as other people that this exchange of being takes place.

We must assume…that some real process in one person’s life situation is

sensitive and corresponds to some real process in another person’s life
situation, and that there are numerous degrees, positive and negative, of
these interpersonal sensitivities.
(Moreno 1937, quoted in Fox 1987:27)
 GROUP SPIRITUALITY 17

The structure of the group allows communication at a level deeper than

conscious thought and feeling. For human beings togetherness is at the heart of
things, not an optional extra or the by-product of the instinctual pleasure
principle. Group experience constitutes its own unique kind of purposeful action,
the creating of meaning from confusion, community from individual isolation.
This is not simply wisdom in the group, but the wisdom of the group; knowledge
that the group bestows and each member receives personally, as a gift from
elsewhere. One which is able to give us ‘wings’.
‘Something that rises up in me…that I’ve learned to trust. ‘Rogers is not as
explicit as Moreno, or as systematic as Tuckman or Bion. His usual concern was
always with counselling and psychotherapy on a one-to-one basis. When, later on
in life, he turned his attention to group methods he summarised his ideas about
the stages of intensive group experience in ‘The Process of the Basic Encounter
Group’, a paper published in 1967. This is intended ‘as a naturalistic,
observational picture’. It gives a blow-by-blow account of what it actually feels
like to be personally involved in an experiential group. Group experience, says
Rogers, makes individual awareness ever more personal; as

The expression of self by some members of the group has made it very
clear that a deeper and more basic encounter is possible, and the group
appears to strive instinctively and unconsciously towards this goal….
Group members move toward becoming more spontaneous, flexible,
closely related to their feelings, open to their experience, and closer and
more expressively intimate in their interpersonal relationships.
(Rogers 1967)

Like Moreno, Rogers lays stress on spontaneity, both of individuals within the
group and of the group itself. Indeed, groups actually resist attempts to plan their
progress in advance. ‘The group will move—of this I am confident—but it would
be presumptuous to think that I can or should direct that movement towards a
specific goal’ (1970:45). In other words, a group possesses its own kind of life,
and this is to be trusted and believed in, not tamed or directed—or interpreted in
terms of conscious, intellectual definition.
Rogers calls this quality of life ‘presence’. By this, he means an individual’s
awareness of other people’s experience as an enabling factor within the group as
a whole, the source of a new kind of life which is not to be lived or enjoyed apart
from this particular gathering of persons, a kind of communion of selves which
is not only consciously felt but registered and understood at a level which
remains unconscious. For Rogers, presence is perhaps even more important than
process. It is the group’s own wisdom ‘the wisdom of the organism, exhibited at
every level from cell to group’ (1970:44).
18 THE SPIRITUALITY OF GROUPS

Safety and danger

Experiencing security within the group structure.

A personal relationship is one in which individuals are related as
persons, not as complementary functions in an organic process, still
less as the instrument and its employer, as in the case of master and
servant.
(Macmurray 1933:155)

Because their meanings emerge inductively from a holism rather than being
deduced as a sum of parts, groups are kinetic icons of human relationship. There
is always movement within a group, a kind of toing and froing amongst its
members; that is why I say they are kinetic. Sometimes the movement is
embodied, sometimes it is invisible, a kind of spiritual interchange of
personhood. Sometimes, often, it is both. It is iconic because this movement
expresses a spiritual reality—between, among, around, through, across, beyond—
revealing itself in ways that are aural, visible, tactile, multisensorial, bringing
home the two interdependent realities we call presence and absence, distance and
contact. The group embodies what is mine, what belongs to you, and what is
shared between us. This sharedness is a distinct category—that which holds us
together while defining us as ourselves—so that the group itself is the
indispensable context of particular actions of sharing, and consequently a reality
which is both actual and spiritual.
As I write this I have a mental image of a group of boys, ages ranging from
seven to fifteen years, standing in a circle, each of them holding onto the
circumference of an open parachute. I see them considering all the things that
they can and will do with this marvellous expanse of white nylon, but most of all
I am aware of the parachute itself and all that it stands for, all that it allows in the
way of shared possibility and between-ness. The parachute symbolises the
tension identifying all genuine groups, the apartness which permits them to hold
together. This isn’t an invention but an actual memory; one that transformed my
experience of groups, not only ones I participated in afterwards but all the real
groups I had ever known in my life. If the group is an icon of relationship, the
children’s parachute is an icon of the group itself, wherever it may take place,
whoever is involved.
As Martin Buber (1966) brings home so unforgettably, the mutuality which
creates between-ness depends upon separation. A person cannot be in relation
with someone else either by being a part of them or making them a part of
themselves; and no one can be a person unless he or she is in relation. Being a
person is recognising the distance that exists between you and them, and
reaching out to them across it. We act as persons when we intend to make
contact with the other while respecting and preserving its otherness.
To put this in another way. There is something in our awareness of being
‘together’ which is always there and usually overlooked, in the sense of being
 GROUP SPIRITUALITY 19

taken for granted. It is there even when there are only two people involved, as a
presence we may either recognise or choose to neglect. It is, of course, what we
call ‘togetherness’, the primary contextual phenomenon, the ground or context of
relationship, the space in which we move with regard to each other. If we set out
to analyse our awareness of our own personhood we must include this in the data
available; and when we meet in groups with the intention of exploring what it is
like to be human, it is this ‘being separate/being together’ phenomenon which
provides us with most of our material.
In a group, self-identity is brought home by the concentration of other
identities—other presences—which the group represents, not as an
undifferentiated whole, but as an obvious interplay of relationships; not simply
‘you and I’ but you-and-I-ness present everywhere within the framework of the
group. This presence holds us together as a unity. It is not any kind of outside
force imposing an unwelcome conformity on us. On the contrary it springs to life
among us as a vivid sense of enlarged possibilities, ways of being ourselves
which are difficult to resist. Sustained by this we relax, abandoning our usual
defensiveness, showing signs of ourselves that we normally keep under wraps.
Suddenly it seems worth our while to be vulnerable.
This is one reason for the regressive behaviour psychoanalytic theory
associated with groups (Bion 1961). The feeling of relief and release afforded by
the opportunity to relax our inhibitions ‘in the safety of the group’ allows us to
escape from emotional pressures originating in the past which affect our ways of
relating to the present, defusing transference by allowing us to form alliances of
a supportive kind. At the same time, this emotional freedom makes it possible
for negative feelings to be shared among members of the group, instead of
focused upon one single person. When all such feelings are projected upon a
particular group member, however, the effect on her or him is devastating.
Groups may seem friendly enough on the surface. It has to be remembered,
however, that this veneer of civilisation may be uncomfortably thin. This is
particularly true of therapeutic groups. The release of inhibitions which comes
from a sense of belonging among people who are willing to confess to being, like
oneself, under a painful degree of psychological pressure represents the
temporary relinquishing of psychological defences. Suddenly, instead of feeling
happy and safe, secure in the presence of like-minded people, a group member may
feel emotionally naked, painfully vulnerable with no one to turn to—except, of
course, the group leader, who may have shown every sign of refusing to become
involved in whatever it is that is currently going on within the group so that they
can ‘work it all out for themselves’. (I have had extensive experience of
membership of therapeutic groups and I know that this is true!) Other kinds of
group approach take special precautions against this kind of ‘scapegoat effect’,
dramatherapy being a case in point.
At a basic level, though, the experience of sharing one’s thoughts and feelings
with a whole group of other people can be a scary business. It leaves one open to
all kinds of anxieties about whether or not one’s own ideas and impulses will be
20 THE SPIRITUALITY OF GROUPS

taken on board as acceptable, so that the implicit standards, which are sensed as
present in every social group, may not be offended against. This kind of ‘group
expectation' is always something that group members have to take account of,
and there will almost certainly be times when it may appear to be extremely
important, characterising people’s experience in ways which are restrictive rather
than enabling.
At the same time, it is this awareness of the reality of other people’s presence
which is the primary healing element in group therapy. Groups mediate the
otherness of other people in ways that permit contact by avoiding both rejection
and engulfment. They do this by creating an environment which allows a special
kind of interpersonal balance, one where the risk involved in being open towards
someone else is rewarded by the sense of personal validation gained from the
openness of their response towards us. So we receive blessing, exchanging gifts
of friendship and understanding which have been bought at the price of real
personal involvement.
This exchange of challenge and reassurance is at the very heart of any kind of
healing through group experience. Groups are designed to create the kind of
safety which encourages people to leave their self-protective isolation and join in
the common purpose of working to build group cohesion. ‘I surprised myself as
well as everybody else. I never thought I’d have the courage—but I suddenly felt
it was OK, that I was safe among friends, so I went ahead.’
It isn’t always as easy as this, of course. The achievement of a cathartic
balance between danger and safety can have many false starts. It is something
which we seem to have to ‘learn the hard way’. The presence of other people has
a tendency to put us on the defensive. We need to be reassured in ways which
will carry weight for us. Words are not enough; we have to find out for ourselves,
and learn to trust the group even when some members betray the trust we have in
the underlying mutuality of the group’s underlying intention.
What then is the group’s intention? What are the assumptions a group makes
about itself which make it into ‘a group’? Perhaps it is easier to answer this
question in the case of groups formed to bring about particular purposes—work-
orientated groups in which the members share their own individual skills and
experience in order to arrive at a solution to a particular problem; therapeutic
groups in which the problems are more personal and their nature less easily
grasped by the group as a whole; religious groups, perhaps the simplest and most
straightforward of all, meeting together simply to celebrate and remember, or to
contemplate a truth acknowledged by everybody present. These and other kinds
of groups conform to a single purpose: they are structures for sharing. What is
shared in groups concerned with exploring human personhood is not the
expertise or experience of its members but their vulnerability.
These are groups concerned with promoting psychological and spiritual
openness. In order to function as specifically therapeutic they depend upon a
unique quality of interpersonal sharing. This may be called cathartic sharing. In
other words, it depends upon the special kind of psychological reaction that gives
 GROUP SPIRITUALITY 21

rise to a powerful sense of emotional liberation concerning the way we are

towards other people; the barriers that I have erected between myself and the
people around me are suddenly removed and I reach out and touch the life that is
not me and yet calls out to me in a way I can no longer withstand. I find release
from my unacknowledged yearning for mutuality (c.f. Rose 2002).
At the same time, the conditions must be right for such a thing to happen. I
cannot just decide that it would be an enjoyable thing to do. For one thing, this is
not the kind of enjoyment I have trained myself to seek out in life. Quite the
opposite in fact. Powerful emotions of a personal kind may sometimes be
unavoidable, but generally speaking I don’t go looking for trouble; I would
mistrust anybody who did. Only under very special circumstances would I feel it
safe to drop my social mask and allow people to see how upset I am. By ‘people’
I mean myself as well as them, and particularly myself in my personal
involvement with them. Alienating feelings like anger, disgust, the need to reject
what I find shocking or distasteful, I seem to be able both to display in front of
others and acknowledge in myself. It is my capacity for feeling other people’s
emotions, for resuffering personal trauma as if it were mine not theirs—as in
some sense of course it both was and is —that seems to embarrass me so much.
The reason is obvious enough I suppose, anger, resentment, etc., afford release,
the relief of drawing away from unpleasantness whereas to allow oneself to be
brought into conflict with the actuality of suffering, whether one’s own or
someone else’s is instinctively aversive, something to be shied away from and if
at all possible avoided in future.
‘I would like do something to help, but I’m frightened to get involved. If there
was some way I could find the courage.’ The need to share is strong, almost as
powerful as the urge to protect oneself. We look for ways of coming to terms
with other emotions apart from fear. Not to do so is experienced as a kind of self-
rejection, a simple refusal to be a person at all. The organisation of therapeutic
groups, like the structure of drama and theatre, aims at balancing safety and
danger so that the fears which get in the way of our facing the reality of our
emotions can actually be tackled ‘with a little help from our friends’. In this way
we work towards findings ways in which we can make sense of things about
ourselves and other people which are just too painful to be thought about. Safety
itself is not enough. Fear must somehow be included in the equation or we will
be in danger of losing our sense of the reality of what we are trying to come to
terms with—which is the danger of unprotected self-exposure.
Thomas Scheff defines catharsis as a way of discharging repressed emotions
by manipulating different degrees of psychological pressure in the same way that
theatre uses aesthetic distance to involve audiences by protecting them: the fact
that the audience remain safely in their seats, distanced from the world of the
play, gives them the courage to participate in the characters’ emotions. ‘Crying,
shivering, laughing, etc. are cathartic to the extent that the individual is both
participant in and observer of his or her own distress’ (1979:67). In other words,
we recognise our own pain in that of another member of the group; seeing it
22 THE SPIRITUALITY OF GROUPS

distanced in this way, we can acknowledge it and the relationship we bear to it as

real. Once it has been seen for what it is it can then be discharged, and even, in
those cases where observation and identification balance each other, actually
enjoyed. ‘At exactly optimal distance, the process is not entirely unpleasant: at
the balance point one is both reliving the traumatic event and therefore feeling
the emotions associated with it, and at the same time observing the distressful
event from the safety of the present.’ (1979: 61, 67).
The spirituality groups described in this book move along ‘at the speed of the
slowest ship’, and their content is gauged in a way that hesitates to embark on
voyages of discovery that are likely to take the group itself, or any particularly
vulnerable member, out of their depth. Meanings are approached at an angle,
slantwise; psychologically sensitive areas are not directly probed. These groups
are therapeutic in outcome not through any specifically clinical intention. Thus
they manage to avoid the contraindications for group work listed by Yalom
(1970; Yalom et al. 1973).

Bodies speak louder than words

Things too difficult to be talked about may be shared without using

words.

The group’s spiritual values are not abstract but embodied. To use the traditional
theological term, they proceed from the actual presence of those involved. They
concern the way in which a group of real people experience their relationship
together, and are not to be reduced to an idea or set of ideas which the group has
thought out together. There is more to group spirituality than ‘brainstorming’.
Everyone involved contributes to the corporate wisdom simply by being part of
the group through his or her own psychophysical presence. Thus, groups
preserve the holistic nature of human experience—human reality—in the face of
our attempts at understanding-through-analysis. Human embodiment is an
irreducible part of our shared experience; on the other hand it is far from being
implied by the ways in which we think about things.
Because we are so adept at ‘thinking round’ the limitations belonging to having a
body we tend to neglect the opportunities for personal communication that our
physical presence provides us with—these do not need to be spelled out in any
detail here. The first few minutes of our actual involvement within a group of
our fellow human beings is enough to bring home the personal importance of tones
of voice, facial expressions, gestures and hand signals, body positions—even the
differences between people’s shapes and sizes, ages, social positions within the
wider society and in the group itself. At this ordinary, ‘hands on’ level we learn
about one another by being together—not consciously in the sense of drawing
conclusions about them, but immediately, in the moment of contact as this is
brought home to us within the little world of the group. Being brought together
 GROUP SPIRITUALITY 23

like this is to be in a position in which we can’t help making an impression on

one another. We see, we speak, we touch; sometimes we pause to make sense of
something said to us and work out what to say in reply, but these pauses for
thought are not really detachable from the precognitive experience of actual
contact with another person which gave rise to them, and from which they
rebound before bouncing back into the fray. In this way we know what people
mean without their actually having to tell us, picking it up in advance before
returning to our own message in exactly the same way. The philosopher-scientist
Merleau Ponty draws attention to the way in which our bodies pick up
information about the physical environment allowing us to sense situations
without actually examining them much as a motorist knows instinctively that the
car he or she is driving will actually have enough space to pass an approaching
vehicle even though at this distance it seems terrifyingly over-wide.
In fact, the group’s context provides a vivid illustration of Merleau Ponty’s
conviction that human bodies possess their own bodily kind of understanding
(1962). As part of physical nature they relate to their environment of things ‘as to
the manner born’, and it is this primal congruence between human nature and the
rest of creation that allows us to make our own kinds of sense out of the situations
in which we find ourselves. Our kinds of sense are not necessarily identical to
those that hold good in other sectors of the created universe, but because we
basically fit our environment—it being the one for which we were originally
intended—we at least possess the possibility of making sense, so long as we take
our bodies into account as well as our minds.
The basic structure of the group, which includes our own bodies and those of
our fellow group members and the actual physical and temporal circumstances
which affect everything that goes on in it, makes this kind of ‘contextual wisdom’
stand out as extremely relevant. Human groups consist of people, not simply
ideas. It is my body that earths all my thinking, continually testing it for realism,
the ability to be part of what Martin Buber calls ‘lived life’. Those ideas which
immediately influence our lives are not abstractions; or at least they do not
originate in any kind of theorising. They come from experience, and it is our
embodied experience which brings them alive for us.
Most of all, the fact of belonging together is brought home by bodies acting as
a group. Their physical presence demonstrates co-operation without confusion.
Just as bodies have the ability to receive understanding in the most direct and
immediate way, so they possess the power to communicate it in ways that are
striking and unforgettable. We sit, we stand; we walk away and come back; we
glance towards or look away from. Our position with regard to others
demonstrates an intention towards them, a relation that exists between them and
us; our feelings about them. These are things we know by looking. We are aware
of certain aspects of whatever it is that is taking place without having to be told.
This, of course, is a basic principle of acted drama, in which people move about
in a particular setting, demonstrating their relationship to it and the situation it
creates for them by the ways in which they move in it; using movement as a kind
24 THE SPIRITUALITY OF GROUPS

of language with which to communicate among themselves what it is that is

going on in this particular place and time. The space itself represents the context
of their communication. It is what the movement is about. Watching this
movement, in this space, we learn from what we see (or, in the case of radio
drama, what we imagine we are seeing).
As the French playwright Antonin Artaud points out, nothing is so eloquent as
the unambiguous human gesture; and when that gesture manages to make
physical contact and becomes touch, personal worlds are established or
destroyed, for ‘a touch is enough to let us know we’re not alone in the universe,
even in sleep’ (Rich 1978). Human touch, human gesture, the human body itself
as the instrument of a basic kind of communication promote and encourage what
Matthew Fox has called ‘an earthly spirituality’ (1983: 65), rooting us in the
holiness of the Creation to which we all belong and discouraging our persistent
attempts to deny or even denigrate our embodied condition.
My mind may think well of my neighbour, intending her or him all kinds of
goodness and personal fulfilment, but it is my body which I use to bestow
blessings, whether these are visible or invisible. As bride and groom say in the
Wedding Service ‘With this ring I thee wed: With my body I thee worship’ and
they underline the pledge they are making with gestures and bodily dispositions
which realise their intentions towards one another in a way that is totally beyond
the capability of the words alone. As Fox says ‘To make contact with wisdom is
to go beyond human words, which have, after all, existed for only about four
million years’ (1983: 37). The action of proclaiming love between living beings
goes back considerably further—to Creation itself, in fact.
Within our culture the bodily expression of feelings is hedged about with all
sorts of social regulations, so that even extremely positive impulses of affection
or sympathy must be handled with discretion. Therapeutic groups, however, set
out to create an environment which is more sympathetic to spontaneity and self-
disclosure. Group members are encouraged to feel safer within the group setting
than they do in other social gatherings, and this sense of security, of being in a
place where they can at last ‘afford to be themselves’ exposes them to the
possibility —or even likelihood—that sooner or later they will cause offence to
one or other fellow members of the group and be instantly shamed into retreating
into the shelter of the old defensive position, which now seems more welcoming
than ever before.
The following is an extract from the diary kept by a group member.

I’d been sitting there for a long time without saying anything. Not wanting
to say anything. Not daring to. I suppose I was listening to what people
were saying, but not very hard. Then something Clodagh said caught my
attention: I’ve been there, I thought. What Clodagh’s talking about
happened to me, I’ve been there too. I wasn’t going to say anything, but I
began to get the feeling that people didn’t really know what she was
talking about. Not really, like I did. So I couldn’t stop myself–I had to let
 GROUP SPIRITUALITY 25

her know I knew what she was talking about. I said, ‘I know what you
mean. Something just like that happened to me once.’ She just stared at me.
Then she turned away. I thought to myself, you’ve done it again. You’ve
blown it.
At the end of the session we all said goodbye and gave everybody gifts
to take away. Clodagh gave me a piece of paper, folded over. Inside she’d
written ‘Thanks’, and put a kiss after it.

Under such circumstances the need to reassure and reaffirm people is constantly
present. Reassurance must be communicated in ways that are unambiguous and
immediately acceptable. Words may be misconstrued in a way that gestures
cannot. Thus, the giving and receiving of all kinds of implicit actions of blessing
(verbally implicit that is, their actual meaning is explicit enough!) is a common
practice in group therapy. People reaffirm one another by exchanging tokens of
love and appreciation in a whole range of ways, some involving actual physical
contact, some not. A favourite kind of blessing behaviour concentrates upon the
giving and receiving of gifts, specially chosen by the donors in order to increase
the feeling of self-worth in those to whom they are given. Under such
circumstances, even the most concrete and prosaic offering gains spiritual
resonance.

Only a story

Groups create their own corporate history from the narrative of their
shared life as a group.

Groups are safe meeting places for vulnerable people—safe enough to encounter
one another and whatever we sense to be beckoning us from beyond. Whatever
is the Other. Because group sessions possess a certain structure, in so far as they
are defined by having a recognisable beginning and ending, and a space
dedicated to whatever will take place between these two points, they belong to
that class of human experience which is able to stand out from the ongoing
movement of time as a recognisable event—an occasion, in fact. Rites of
passage, ceremonial ways of marking particular stages in the lifetime of
individuals or communities, possess the same basic intention as a therapeutic
group. Such rituals are dictated by the need to create space for making real life
changes, important shifts in the direction in which life is felt and understood to
be going. There is absolutely no doubt that changes of this kind need space. They
cannot be allowed to remain simply ideas. Somehow they have to become actual
events. In other words they must leave the mode of thought and enter the world
of action—the things that happen between people.
One way in which ideas may express themselves as actual events is within the
realm of story. This is a comparatively safe way of ‘trying life out for size’
26 THE SPIRITUALITY OF GROUPS

before embarking on actual behaviour within the real world of people and things,
but this does not detract from its vital importance as a lead-in to such behaviour.
As we have seen, safety is one of the two elements to be taken into consideration
when we are dealing with meetings between and among people. We need to feel
secure enough to reach out towards the other person in the knowledge that we
may actually be rebuffed. The second element is more positive. It is the need to
celebrate life. To promote joy by opening ourselves out to God and other people.
It is a responsive movement and a very powerful one, which is why we may feel
the need to resist it, believing that if we surrender to its force it may take us over,
swallowing us up and depriving us of our precious autonomy, our right to make
up our own minds about ourselves. If we give ourselves to what we most want,
most need, we may find ourselves destroyed by it. Who will it leave us being?
This, then, is what the spiritual quest is actually about, coming to terms with
fear. Vulnerable people, who have been wounded by life, by the quest for
personal (i.e. spiritual) fulfilment know this best. Life is bringing it home to them.
A psychologist might say that their psychological defences are not proving
adequate to the task of protecting them from emotional challenges that they find
intolerable. We all have such defences, theirs are simply not doing the job that
they were designed for, and so their underlying vulnerability is beginning to
show. The cruelty of life is getting through to them, in fact, and this is why they
are coming forward for help wherever it may be offered.
Many of those who seek psychotherapy may be willing to accept this as a fair
description of what is happening to them. Not everyone, however; some feel that
to put it like this is to get the balance wrong in an important way.

I can’t say that what is happening to me is pleasant. A lot of the time it is

terrifying. When I can’t do the things I used to do so easily, when catching
a bus or getting in the car to take the kids to school is a mammoth task I
have such a sense of failure. Failure and futility. I sat down last week and
made myself have the courage to walk along to the supermarket, which is
two streets away. I managed to get as far as the corner by the post office, well
I didn’t really get that far even—I saw the corner coming up ahead, calling
me on, and I couldn’t manage it. I just couldn’t get myself round it. I
turned round and went back home. As I went I remember thinking to
myself, one day I’ll get round that corner and that got me thinking in terms
of corners, ones that I’d really like to get round.

This is an extract from a group member’s own story about herself, and it shows
something about the way such stories are used. Elizabeth, the woman talking
aloud about herself here is using the narrative form to say something she was not
yet ready to think about in any other way. She is using the story in order to
express an awareness, still exceedingly vague and fragile, that she is being called
beyond herself, not simply the wounded self she feels that she is now, but the
robust, capable person she used to be. She is now actually in the process of
 GROUP SPIRITUALITY 27

growing beyond the present into a future that will be more complete, more
satisfactory than she had at any time previously imagined for herself. This is a
bigger corner than those she has had to get round up to now, and she herself is
weaker than she ever used to be; but her lack of ability to cope will not, in the
event, stand in her way; somehow or other it will actually prove an asset.
In the meantime, Elizabeth is using her story as a way of getting round—
beginning to get round—this corner. Stories may be used in an explicitly
religious way to provide a narrative framework for religious teachings—as when
a particular life history is used as a way of inspiring devotion and strengthening
discipleship. The essential spirituality of story, however, subsists in its nature as
an art form, a way of making adventures into the unknown seem safe enough to
be embarked upon. Stories are spiritual because they encourage the meeting of
persons by providing circumstances in which we are willing to show ourselves to
one another as we are and would like to be. Although this takes place through an
action of imaginative sharing, its effects turn out to be real.
This is because we make use of human reality in order to live out our
imagination in corporate rituals and dramas in which people, places and times
are all equally real, equally concrete. The ‘place of sharing’ and the ‘space for
change’ are not simply ideas but actual locations made use of to produce the
living symbolism of human relatedness, the experience of individual personhood
without which there can be no reaching across, no sharing of life. Herein lies the
significance of the human body and the human group to express realities that are
both temporal and transcendent. Life ‘within the symbol’ reveals the ultimate
truth which gives meaning to our existence. This is the spirituality that the group
both participates in and embodies within itself. The-shape of story gives life
itself a symbolic dimension; the action of taking part in the structure of story
provides safety for encounters that happen within it.
Ways of working together, which in the first stages of group life seemed
artificial and restrictive, are humanised by the life developing among group
members. Thus the life histories of groups shows them taking on their own
corporate story, which is different from and more than the aggregate of the
individual narratives contained within it. This shared myth making gives shape
and content to people’s spiritual lives as, in Martin Buber’s words, ‘“It” becomes
“Thou”, inspiring and blessing’ (1966: 14).

Cosmicisation

What is felt to be true within the group becomes the symbol of a

wider truth.

Characteristically, the group meets in a circle. This itself is symbolic of Cosmos

and resonates with spiritual awareness of creation. Matthew Fox, writing about
‘Creation Spirituality’ has collated testimony from a range of world religions
28 THE SPIRITUALITY OF GROUPS

that ‘All things are inter-related because all things are microcosms of a
macrocosm’ (1983: 69). When the life of a group begins to penetrate all its
members it flows freely, binding individuals together so that everybody
participates in its freeness and life ‘It is all a blessing, an ongoing fertile
blessing, with a holy salvific history of about twenty billion years’ (ibid.). This is
strikingly illustrated by the games people play in groups. The games are
invariably arranged so that their organising principle is circulatory; the movements
involved are repetitive and interactive, and players move in and out among one
another in a succession of variations on a human ‘chain of being’ reproducing
the patterns associated with the idea of cosmic healing ‘and it is all in motion, it
is all en route, it is all moving, vibrant, dancing and full of surprises’ (ibid.).
Not all group games are as lively and inventive as this, but even when people
simply sit down together to exchange stories or pass things from hand to hand, or
sing together, the awareness of the cosmic remains. It is an inalienable part of the
significance attaching to the human body when we pay it proper attention and
see it as itself: a living person rather than a biological organism. ‘We were made
for something cosmic and will not fit peacefully into anything much smaller’
(Fox 1983: 72).
In group games, as in other expressions of the shared life of groups, the shape
of the group itself helps us to make this vital connection between macro–and
microcosms which, at the same time gives us confidence and excites us. It seems
that even in this very ordinary, improvised setting the imagery of wholeness and
perfection affects those taking part, as people find themselves touched by the
creative spirit and are continually surprised by what emerges within the group.
The idea of an enlivening and transforming presence who is both the centre
and at the centre of the circle of creation is a perennial theme of historians of
religion (Eliade 1958). For example, for Christians the cosmic person is Christ
who reconciles all things in heaven and upon earth, so that even though it may be
only two or three people who are gathered together, he is there in the middle of
them, as an axle on whom the wheel of life turns. In Hindu tradition it is
Narayana–Visnu; for Buddhists it is the Cosmic Buddha. The creativity of the
centre makes the circumference creative too. Certainly small groups are as
creative as larger ones; there is something about the experience of being centred
that turns us outwards towards life in a gesture of encouragement. There is a
dynamism here which seems to affect non-religious people as much as it does
believers.
Whether or not we perceive a personal presence at the centre we still share in
the symbolism of the circle itself. If three is the perfect number, having a
beginning a middle and an end, the circle is certainly the ideal figure, moving as
it does in all directions while staying immobile, or moving in its own sphere
alone—in all directions, yet only one direction. The religious significance of the
mandala, as C.G.Jung pointed out, is universal (1983). The nature of the divine
perfection, the ultimate wholeness, moves everything and yet remains still, in a
total union of inner and outer. The ‘square in the circle and circle in the square’
 GROUP SPIRITUALITY 29

challenges and comforts at one and the same time, calling on us to abandon our
existential isolation.

The session was about ‘coming in and going out’—being born and dying–
and we were standing in a circle looking inwards. The idea was for people
to think of something about saying hello and goodbye to someone, and
then to take it in turns to show the others, by going into the circle and
saying or doing something to do with whatever they’d been thinking about.
You didn’t have to do this if you didn’t want to and you could ask
someone in the group to help you. No way, I thought. There’s no way
you’ll get me doing that. So I just relaxed and settled down to enjoy the
show. Then, suddenly, I was there, right in the middle of the circle. This
was bad enough, but what I was actually doing was worse, even more
embarrassing. I showed them what it was like when I first said hello to
June. Of course, I had to show them what it was like saying goodbye, too.
(A group member who had recently lost his beloved wife in a road
accident.)

According to Otto Rank (1958), Freud’s former disciple, western society as a

whole suffers from the neurosis of having lost touch with the cosmos. Certainly,
those whose personal universes have been shattered by the death of someone
dearly loved may draw reassurance and hope from the symbolism of the group’s
healing embrace. This bereaved husband felt safe enough to share his feelings
with people who, until a few hours ago, had been complete strangers. His
thoughts warned him about the danger of becoming involved; what they were
really saying to him was, keep away, you may have to remember. At a more
feeling level, however, his heart drew him to respond to the group’s warmth
towards him. He found himself trusting the group.
Trust is a matter of body and soul, it is closely linked to the way in which we
see our place within the cosmos. Matthew Fox reminds us that ‘There is a
necessary connection between trust learned regarding our own body and our own
existence—original blessing and the blessing that earthiness is—and trust of
cosmos’ (1983: 83). We grow into personhood in so far as we learn to trust the
setting in which we find ourselves and the other people who inhabit it with us. So
far as our work with human groups is concerned, the building of trust is a
primary concern and an on-going task for everyone present.
The word most often used for ‘faith’ in the New Testament is pisteuein. This
actually means ‘trust’. ‘Your faith has healed you’ may thus be translated as
‘Your trust in God, the source of your life, has given you life.’ Building trust
within the group is a primary purpose of all group work, whether or not the
spiritual significance of such activity is actually recognised. The group process
described here was designed to allow members to find out for themselves the
quality of the support a group is willing to give. It was not devised in order to
30 THE SPIRITUALITY OF GROUPS

illustrate a specifically religious idea about ‘love casting out fear’, although it
certainly seems to do this very dramatically.
Nor was it thought up as any kind of test, either of courage or skill. An
important part of the spirituality of group work is the acceptance of imperfection.
At its most basic level this is Carl Rogers’s ‘positive regard’ (1967: 53), the state
of mind which refuses to entertain the impulse to feel morally superior to
somebody else. This is a degree of acceptance that non-professionals (and often
professionals too) find beyond their grasp, and even those who are sure they can
manage it may well be deceiving themselves at least some of the time. The
specifically work-shop application, however, is more practical. It is best
expressed in G.K. Chesterton’s dictum ‘If a thing is worth doing, it is worth
doing badly.’
Workshops make most of us anxious, at least to begin with. We know that we
are going to be required to take part in an active way, which may involve having
to do things in front of other people. The all too familiar element of competition
takes over. In practice this means our choice of behaviour is severely limited; we
either refuse to do whatever it is that is being suggested, or we try as hard as we
possibly can to do it better than anyone else. The workshop approach sets out to
avoid this kind of situation. Workshops must be designed to allow the people
taking part in them to escape from the competitiveness trap by finding out their
own personal ways of doing things, so that the element of individuality is
recognised as more important than the degree of skill. Very early in the session
people start forgetting to worry about whether they are looking clever or stupid.
In practice, timid and unsure people tend to work rather more creatively than
skilful and confident ones. For a group member, skill consists in the ability to
give other people confidence so that they can share in what Adler recognised as
the courage belonging to imperfection (1980: 49–70). This is the ability to trust
creation which lets us value other people’s contributions as part of a vocation that
can be genuinely shared. As Matthew Fox says ‘It is shared weakness and need
that draws from a group its gifts and powers of healing’ (1983: 111).
The group possesses its own spirituality. It is not simply a number of
spiritually aware people who meet together, or a seminar organised for the
discussion of a particularly fascinating aspect of life, although it may of course
take either or both of these forms, or any number of others including that of an
experiential workshop whose aim is exploration rather than instruction. This
latter option is most likely to take account of the actual phenomenon of group
spirituality, the spirituality possessed by groups simply by virtue of being
themselves. Spirituality in groups starts off with the advantage of the
predisposing factors glanced at in this chapter. The people involved in these
workshops had the following in common: they all started off with the same
advantage—that of working within a setting that is particularly sympathetic to
the study of human spiritual awareness.
 GROUP SPIRITUALITY 31

Group-building workshops
These workshops are intended to serve as examples of a particular way of
working, and not as blueprints to be slavishly copied. Each workshop emerged
from a different set of circumstances and was designed to meet the requirements
of a particular group of people coming together at a particular time and place. There
is a good deal of scope for varieties of approach, so long as a few fundamental
ground rules are observed. Apart from preserving the threefold shape of the
structure upon which its ability to symbolise personal change depends, special
attention should always be paid to

1 assuring group members of the confidential nature of everything that

happens during the workshop
2 calming any fears they may have that self-disclosure will expose them to
ridicule
3 establishing the fact that no one under any circumstances is to be allowed to
be, or feel, victimised by anybody else, or by anything that may happen
during the workshop.

If anybody wants to drop out at any time they certainly can do so— and rejoin if
and when they want to. If the whole group decides it would rather not do
something that has been suggested, but wants to do something else instead, they
are entirely free to do so (this rarely happens, but when it does it can turn out to
be the most exciting thing of all!). The leader goes along with the group, making
suggestions but not enforcing obedience. When people show signs of being upset
in any way the action of the workshop stops, so that the emergency can be dealt
with. Regrouping only happens when everyone present feels able to proceed.
The workshops were designed to be in three parts.

1 A beginning section aimed at reducing tensions and encouraging people to

enjoy the experience of being together. It involves a game or a group
exercise which is both interesting and funny, but is always highly structured,
so that those involved have to concentrate and there is opportunity to help
one another out as a group.
2 A middle section which is more reflective and less rigidly prescribed, and
sharing is of a more personal nature involving feelings which might not be
revealed except among friends and ‘people one can trust’. This part of the
workshop will explore a theme or enact a story, using the ‘group space’
prepared in the first part to go deeper into pain and joy than it is usually safe
to do in the presence of others.
3 A final closing section, in which the world outside the group is gently re-
introduced. Group members talk about what has been happening during the
workshop from the position of people looking back on something which has
now finished and drawing conclusions about it.
32 THE SPIRITUALITY OF GROUPS

A basic introductory workshop would be something like this.

1 Exploring the space provided, exchanging names with the group and/or
finding someone to say how you feel about being involved in a group like
this.
2 Finding a way to show the rest of the group what you and your partner have
come up with and/or joining with everyone else as a group to portray what
being a group feels like at this early stage.
3 Leaving your new group identity by ‘stepping out of the circle’ and saying
goodbye (‘de-roling’).

The following workshops have taken place in various places over the last five
years, with different groups, including members of varying ages and
backgrounds, and both sexes.

About workshops

a Say hello to people. Who is local? Who has come a long way to be here?
b Stand in the part of the room which corresponds to the distance you have
travelled (taking the centre of the room as your destination),
c Play a game in which people take turns to show how their journey was
(this can be as absurd and far-fetched as they want to make it),
d Form into a circle and take turns to say what your name is. Try to remember
people’s names so that you can name everyone else (don’t worry if you
can’t, they will help you by saying their name again!).

a Find a partner and talk to them. Does being here make you feel anxious?
What’s it all going to be about?
b Join up with another couple. Now take turns to tell the other three what
being in the workshop reminds you of—memories, fears, expectations,
hopes (you don’t have to say anything if you’d rather just listen).
c Come back into the circle. Can you think of a way of presenting the
feelings and ideas you have been sharing? Try to do this without actually
using words. You can stand or walk in an expressive way, or ‘borrow’
someone else and put them in a pose suggesting how you yourself feel.
Alternatively, you can use the paper, pins, finger paints, modelling clay
to transmit your reactions to the rest of the group.
 GROUP SPIRITUALITY 33

a Sit down in the circle. Take this opportunity to ask the group leader any
questions you may have about working in groups and to tell him/her
something about how you have felt during this one.
b Say goodbye to everybody and particularly to the three people you have
been working with.

About trust

a Move round the room saying hello to one another. Repeat this twice, the
first time trying to be as formal as you can, the second time as relaxed
and friendly as possible.
b Listen to the music and begin to move in time to it. Try to be as relaxed
about it as you can and not to bother about whether you think you’re a
good dancer or not! When the gong strikes, start to dance in a formal
way, until you hear it strike again, when you can relax again. Go on
doing this as long as the music lasts.
c Form a circle to play the game ‘still pond’. The leader allows her/himself
to be blindfolded and takes up a position in the centre of the circle. The
others walk around anywhere they like until the leader shouts ‘still
pond!’ whereupon they must stand completely still. Now it is the leader’s
task to identify someone in the group, moving from person to person
until he/she manages to do this. Then she/he exchanges roles with the
person identified, tying the blindfold round their eyes and guiding them
into the centre of the room. And so the game goes on, with the
blindfolded person shouting ‘still pond!’ and everybody freezes.

a Take up a position facing your partner, as if you were standing looking

at yourself in a full-length mirror. Now lift your palms up so that you
seem to be standing palm to palm with your mirror image. One of you
slowly begins to move her/his hands and the other follows, mirroring
every movement. Now swap over, so that the other leads. Practise going
faster and slower, fast one leading then the other, handing over to your
partner without stopping the motion; try moving round while you’re
doing this (you will find it easier if you concentrate on the other person’s
face instead of looking at their hands all the time).
b Take your partner on a ‘blind walk’ round the room. This means taking it
in turns to lead and be led. The person being led is first of all blindfolded,
34 THE SPIRITUALITY OF GROUPS

then he/she lays his/her hand on the other person’s arm and allows him/
herself to go wherever he/she is taken (before trying this make sure you
promise not to let your partner bump into any obstacles on the way).

a Sit next to your partner. How did you feel (a) leading, (b) being led? Stay
together for a few minutes talking about this.
b Move back into the circle. Share your experiences of the 'blind walk’
with the rest of the group (you can swap roles and each person talk as if
they were their partner if you want to).
c Say goodbye to your partner and then to the whole group.

About spirituality

Workshop I: the flight of the dove

a In a circle throw a ball to one another, saying what your name is as you
throw it (the ball can be real or imaginary).
b Take one of the feathers from the basket in the centre of the room. Let it
take an imaginary shape in your hands until it becomes a bird. Now pass
it to your neighbour.

a Spend some time looking at the bird you have just received. You may
talk to it or listen to what it is saying to you.
b All together, release the birds into the centre of the circle. Join hands and
watch the birds fly.
c Find a partner and a place to sit and talk. Tell your partner what it felt
like, both having the bird in your hands and then letting it go.
d With the materials provided, paint, draw or model the thoughts and
feelings you can remember having, when you had to say goodbye to
something—or someone—you treasured (you don’t have to be ‘good at
art’, you’ll come up with something!).
e Put what you have drawn, painted or made in the centre of the circle.
f Make a ‘group sculpt’ on the theme of ‘the bird’s flight’. This means that
each person in the group takes up a bodily position which expresses this
idea, and everyone joins up together in the middle of the circle to
produce a kind of living sculpture. When the leader gives the word,
 GROUP SPIRITUALITY 35

move your positions so that the sculpt changes its emphasis from ‘the
flight away from’ to ‘the flight towards’.

a Let go of the sculpt and turn towards the other group members. Say
goodbye to them, and particularly to your own partner.

Workshop II: the dove’s wandering

a Say hello to everybody as informally as you can.

b Wander round the room exploring it. Now fix your attention on
something at the other side of the room and make a beeline for it. When
you arrive at your destination do the same thing again—fix your eyes on
something and move straight across to it. Do this several times, taking care
not to let other people get in your way.
c You are in Alice’s garden (from Through the Looking Glass). Each time
you set out in one direction you end up where you started–but if you go
the opposite way it brings you where you wanted to go. Try this out and
see how it feels!

a Go for a walk outside the workshop building with another group

member. While you are walking, tell your partner about a poem (or a
book, a picture, a piece of music) that you like. If you see anything while
you are out together, remember it so you can share it with the others (it
can be anything that catches your eye).
b Come back inside and stand or sit in a circle. With your partner’s
permission, tell the group about their poem (or whatever) and about
anything that happened during your walk that you want to share.
c With the rest of the group, invent a creation myth involving the elements
—objects, people, incidents, poems, etc.—which people have brought
back from their journey outside the building.
d Use everybody in the group to dramatise the story, and when you have
rehearsed it amongst yourselves, act out your own version of ‘how things
began’.

a Sit in a circle and talk to one another about what you have been doing.
Spend a moment or two just thinking it over quietly,
36 THE SPIRITUALITY OF GROUPS

b Hold hands around the circle and say goodbye.

Workshop III: in the labyrinth

a After saying hello to people, help build a circle of chairs in the middle of
the room so that they face outwards and have their backs towards the
centre. Leave one chair out of the circle. This is the only entrance (or
exit).
b Play ‘tube train’. To begin with everyone is standing inside the ‘train’.
They would like to get out and are pushing to get to the exit, moving
round and round the space. When the leader shouts ‘tube train’, one
person is allowed to get out. This person takes control until he or she
decides to shout ‘tube train’ and someone else escapes. The game
continues until only one person is left within the circle of chairs.
c Show sympathy for the group member left in the circle!
d Turn the circle of chairs inwards and widen it. Sit down on the chairs and
listen to the leader as she/he reads D.H.Lawrence’s poem Snake.

a Listen to the music and close your eyes. The leader takes you on an
imaginary journey involving a series of dangers to be faced and obstacles
to be overcome in order to win a very valuable prize—the ‘pearl of great
price’. Once this has been achieved, you are conducted back ‘home’
again and invited to open your eyes.
b With a partner, share some of the very difficult and painful life situations
you have been through.
c Your partner is a sculptor and you are the stone or wood on which he/she
is working. Let him/her make you into a statue of somebody who is
going through the things you have been telling him/her about. Now
reverse roles—you are the sculptor, they are the stone.
d Move into a circle outside the ring of chairs. Now adopt the position you
were placed in by your partner.

a At a sign from the leader, come back into your normal pose and sit down
or remain standing where you are.
b What do you think and feel about the things you have been doing in the
workshop? Listen to what people are saying and join in if you want to.
c Hold hands in order to say goodbye.
 GROUP SPIRITUALITY 37

Workshop IV: celebrate!

a Move briskly round the room, saying hello to people in passing. Now
begin to move more slowly, taking time to look at people. Don’t say
anything, just smile at them as you pass. What do you remember about
them?
b Find a place to sit by yourself. Write a word or a sentence about
everybody (this is for your sake—you’re not going to have to show
anybody else),
c Form a circle involving the whole group. The leader announces that there
is to be a celebration. Decide among yourselves what you will be
celebrating together.

a With three or four other people, decide how your small group will
contribute to the whole. Will you need to make, paint or draw things?
Spend some time preparing and practising. Try to use ideas and motifs
from your previous group workshops.
b Perform the ceremony you have all prepared.

a At the end of the ceremony, gather round an (imaginary) Christmas tree

in the centre of the room. Is there anything you want to say about this
workshop, or any other workshop you have been involved in with the
group? If so, now is the time to say it.
b Take an invisible gift from the tree and give it to another member of the
group. Try to think of something you feel will give them pleasure and
add to their sense of personal fulfilment. Give them time to thank you for
your gift.
c Say goodbye to everybody.
 Chapter 2
The space between

I want you to think of this room as if it were a football field. It’s a

proper field, with two sets of goal posts, one at each end—but there’s
only one team, and you’re all members of it. It’s time to get ready
for the big game. Who’s going to play where? That’s what the game
is about. It’s about choosing your position in the field. That end is
your goal (pointing to one end of the room). That is the goal you are
defending. The other end is your opponents’ goal, the one you are
attacking. You can stand still, but you have to do it in the part of the
field where you think you belong. So, if you’re feeling confident and
on top of things, you’ll be up there in the enemy’s half of the field,
right near their goal, the one you’re attacking. If you’re feeling less
sure of yourself, waiting to see how things turn out, then you’ll be
somewhere in mid-field. If you feel unsure or really anxious, then
find a place near your own goal. You have to use your own
judgement about this. Only you know how you feel about yourself.

Space—not ‘outer’ or even ‘inner’ but actual physical space—fascinates us. We

take it for granted that we must have room to move around in; but how much?
Those who have laboured to create a more or less private world tend to find the
close physical presence of other people threatening because it interferes with
what they are trying to do. On the other hand those who feel unsure of their
relationship with others, but can’t see themselves apart from that relationship, are
often reassured by the close physical presence of someone else. The space we
need to move around in is matter for continual negotiation and re-adjustment.

Winnicott and ‘potential space’

The space occupied by the group becomes a ‘transitional object’

enabling relationship.
 THE SPACE BETWEEN 39

If we want to find out how groups handle space, its challenges and terrors, we
need to have a look, first of all, at the connection between space and the origin of
our own experiences of personal relationship.

Now I was in the back part of the room, sitting on the floor playing with
the toys. I said to the Piggle (whom I could not actually see): ‘Bring teddy
over here, I want to show him the toys.’ She went immediately and
brought teddy over and helped me to show him the toys.
(Winnicott 1980: 9)

D.W.Winnicott describes the way he made space in what he was doing—in this
case his clinical practice—for a little girl, a procedure that he believed to be
fundamental to the business of healing her. Space is seen here as movement; a
way out of one thing and into something else, a gap made for filling. It has, of
course, to be a welcoming space, a container for good things; but they don't have
to be there already. They can be put there. Space can be opportunity. For
Winnicott, spaces in things were there to be explored, not simply closed up. He
saw our ability to ‘make space’ as the measure of capability for living in the real
world. Thus the creation of actual physical space symbolises our ability to
explore real problems. These ‘gaps for potentiality’ are practical signs of the
relationship of persons both to and with one another; practical in the ordinary
sense of the word, as things you can make, use, live with, not merely think
about; although thinking about them has its uses too.
Winnicott describes the significance of the spaces that we make and enjoy for
ourselves (and include other people and things in) in terms of his theory of
‘potential space’ (1971: 46, 106–110). This refers to a category of reality
representing a crucial stage in a child’s developing awareness of the relationship
between outer and inner reality. This vital discovery is centred upon the activity
of play, which itself depends on space to play in. This play space does not need
to be extensive, in physical terms, because imagination will extend it.
What it does have to be, however, is real; real in the sense of existing in the
world as an inhabitable place, an objectified idea. Winnicott was to move on
from here into his famous formulation of the ‘transitional object’. A transitional
object is a thing that permits the emergence of that most unthinglike of human
precepts, personal relationship. Looked at like this, the object itself, be it ‘a
bundle of wood or the corner of a blanket or eiderdown, or a word or a line, or a
mannerism’, is always a kind of place: ‘It is the place I have set out to examine:
the separation that is not a separation but is a form of union’ (1971: 115).
Obviously this is a very special kind of space in which the separateness of the
presences involved is not destroyed and they remain presences to each other
although held together by the space they share; contained in it but not restricted
by it.
For Winnicott, then, ‘space’ becomes ‘object’, because it is the occasion of
our becoming aware of another person. The experience of using space in this
40 GROUP SPIRITUALITY

way sheds a particularly vivid light on the union-in-separation that is human

relationship itself. Relationship comes into being in what happens between the
therapist and his young client who are playing in a space in which neither will
destroy or be swallowed up by, included in, or made to feel really unhappy by
the other, having decided by mutual arrangement what the rules of the game they
are playing should be. It is a game in which the expression of feelings is
permitted or even encouraged, but no one gets hurt. Elsewhere they might be
injured, even destroyed by such goings on, but not here; here people and things
can be both present and absent. Most important of all, they can be both attacked
and preserved at the same time. The game itself is an expression of love, but the
things played at are sometimes not loving at all.
He suggests that this kind of game playing is so powerful and so enjoyable
that it affects the way we construe whatever happens to us under the normal
circumstances of life. At some level of consciousness, we remember what it was
like ‘in the back of the room’, where concrete reality and fantasised experience
were equally true, equally salient; where we were free simply to be, established
as human by the confirming presence of somebody else, someone who quite
literally occupied the same space and enjoyed the same freedom as ourselves. It
was precisely in this experience, says Winnicott, that our understanding of
relationship was first conceived—in ‘the separation that is really a form of
union’ (1971: 115). Winnicott saw this kind of space—space ‘between’ —as
vulnerable, easily invaded and destroyed. Much distress and actual psychological
pathology was, he maintained, the result of not having known this space.
Because of parenting that was either neglectful or over invasive, or vacillated
disturbingly between the two extremes, the grieving child was psychologically
wounded at an early stage of her or his development by being deprived of the
space in which to form real relationships with other people.
In relational space, it is safe to leave the security of the known, of the self, and
re-voyage out towards the unknown other. Object relations theory, founded in
this practice, regards ways of being a person that are at present too frightening to
undertake in ‘real life’. Because the inhabitants of provisional space are
encountered within the sphere of embodied or concretised imagination—because
it happens ‘as if—they represent a fundamental fact about human awareness: the
ability to believe two contradictory things at once, so that both concrete reality
and fantasy, literal statements and the life of the imagination are equally true,
equally real ‘an intermediate area of experience that is not challenged’, the
epistemological authenticity of religion and art (Winnicott 1971: 13).

Therapeutic space—experience and image

There is individuality and fusion within the group, and this promotes
relationship and healing.
 THE SPACE BETWEEN 41

Basically, Winnicott is not dealing with ideas but actual experiences. What
happens in the ‘play room’ is real because this space is a real place, somewhere
that people inhabit. ‘The point of it is not so much its symbolic value as its
actuality’ (1971: 6). Perhaps, using Winnicott as a starting point, we can make
some suggestions as to what an ideally therapeutic space would be like, based on
two outstanding characteristics of the actual experience of being in such a
position: support and freedom. By doing this we will be a little nearer to
understanding how groups work and recognising the spiritual nature of the
interpersonal mechanisms which hold them together. (In order to bring home
something of what transitional space feels like I have used the first person.)
Support This is a place where I can express myself. I can do this even if it
involves infringing upon other people’s sense of order, the extent of my freedom
to express myself already having been negotiated. (A wooden plaque on a
bedroom door proclaims the fact that ‘This Mess Makes My Mum Mad’.)
Because I am supported here in being myself, so that I feel myself drawing self-
ness from being here, I can take chances here I could not do anywhere else. If the
idea of ‘letting myself go’ terrifies me because it seems to mean total
abandonment to forces I cannot control, whether these are within myself or
outside (or both), somehow this special space seems to make it less alarming.
Here, the idea of falling apart doesn’t seem quite so devastating, quite so
irrevocable. So long as I do it in terms of this space, I can make and unmake my
own chaos, a privilege which does not obtain in other places. In other words, as I
relax and reassert the way I organise my world, I can practise being myself. I can
be without anxiety as I play at being, enjoying the facilities provided by a place
specially appointed for activities of this kind. Because I feel supported in myself
I can lose myself in whatever engages me, not in obedience to outside pressures
but simply because I am engaged by it; and when I want to withdraw, to
remember and speculate, there is absolutely nothing to stop me doing this too. In
other words this space provides me with security to encounter its contents freely
and spontaneously, so that I may invent and re-invent myself in relation to what
is not me but is still my concern in being.l
Such is the ideal which to some extent inspires and sustains the actual
conditions which any therapist can provide for his clients; and in fact there is a
danger that, taken to these lengths, clients might feel abandoned by the therapist
and be more distressed than ever. The model of therapeutic freedom, however,
depends on a balance of freedom and control which would prevent this from
happening. Support leads to freedom in the sense of being delivered from
existential constraints which apply elsewhere.
Freedom This is the experience whereby I am set free from restrictions on
personal freedom that exert pressure on me in other life settings. In the
therapeutic space I may experience freedom from the crowding of purposes,
intentions and needs, my own and other people’s, so that, defended against the
demands of the environment, I can relax into a different way of being myself.
One way of putting this would be to say that it is possible to feel oneself
42 GROUP SPIRITUALITY

delivered both from stasis—the inability to move freely, to choose one’s own
way of acting and reacting, and more importantly one’s own view of oneself–and
process, in which we feel we are carried along and included in purposes not of
our making and experienced as completely outside our control. In the group
therapy setting, which provides me with ‘space to play’ I feel free to encounter
the other as the other, and to enjoy that experience of real personal awareness
that I believe to be the only genuine, authentically human contact between an
individual and the world he or she lives in.

Space as language

Understanding about relationships is transmitted in terms of the way

that space is used.

The sociologist Erving Goffman has explored the ways in which we construct
our social universes by carefully distinguishing the kinds of social interaction we
are engaged in at a particular time ‘My aim is to try to isolate some of the basic
frameworks of understanding available in our society for making sense out of
events’ (1986: 10). These are frameworks which, while they are in use, are a
dominating consideration in the way in which we interpret social life,
representing the agreement to separate different kinds of reality from one another
—he ‘world’ of business from that of the nursery school, for instance, or the
army from the theatre, and to give each its own interior organisation, language,
social goals, criteria for personal success or failure which will hold good in one
set of circumstances but not another. What is valid currency in the Cathedral
Close is rejected by the fruit machine in the pub, where it has to be turned into
exactly the right kind of tokens by the barman.
All this involves the systematic manipulation of space, sometimes invisible and
ideational, sometimes visible and geographical; often an idea clearly expressed in
geographical or spatial terms. You could say that in so far as we have a general
system for organising personal relationship throughout the world, this overall
system consists in the manipulation of social space. Some cultures and social
systems make more intricate and sophisticated use of it than others (there is, for
instance, a lot of difference between the Japanese culture and that of the

1 This ideal balance represents the experience described so eloquently by Martin Buber,
whose paradigm of ‘I-Thou/I-It’ enshrines a way of meeting another person that consists
precisely in not attempting to get too close to them; certainly not to dominate their
behaviour or invade their privacy. Contact (‘Thou’) and observation (‘It’) alternate in
those relationships we have with other people that allow them to be genuinely themselves;
and in fact, our own selfhood depends on our allowing this to happen (1966). Like
Winnicott, Buber reminds us that human truth abides in between-ness. In the group we
find ourselves supported in and as ourselves so that we no longer need to cling either to
someone else or ourselves.
 THE SPACE BETWEEN 43

Greenland Ainu). But everywhere the principle of the ‘ring-fencing’ of social

expectation holds good, because of the psychological need to express both
distance and sameness, and to demonstrate the particular kind of individuality
that comes from belonging to a group possessing an identity both within society
as a whole and also separate from it.
Perhaps this is the most important thing about the idea of social space: its
functional ambiguity. Space includes and excludes at the same time. It ‘looks
both ways’. It is this Janus-like quality that gives it the symbolic identity we use
in liturgy and theatre to express and allow relationship. In my own thinking I
associate dramatic space with a particularly vivid memory I have of an incident
which occurred at a Moscow railway station. Joan Littlewood’s Theatre
Workshop Company were leaving Russia on their way back to England. The
station platform was crowded with people saying goodbye. Suddenly a man in
soldier’s uniform pushed his way through the crowd. He announced that he was
‘Champion Dancer of the Red Army’ and that he intended to dance for us;
whereupon he spread his arms out, bent his knees, and moving in a circle,
pushing against the bodies, arms and legs that pushed in on him, cleared himself
a space. Space created both dancer and audience; without it they were a crowd
and a soldier. By quarrying an amphitheatre, he had completely transformed the
relationship.
Space is about relationship simply because it concerns between-ness. It
divides and unites, bringing things together and keeping them apart. Because we
depend on being together and apart, individual and corporate, in ourselves and
for others, and because these things depend on space— so that space is not only
where we live as bodies but how we live as souls —the quality of our relational
space is vital to our existence as people. Too little and we are engulfed and lose
our individuality. Too much and we are isolated and lose our terms of reference
as people.
Drama and ritual are both ways of exploring this vital engulfmentisolation
dimension in order to create a powerful symbol of relationship between oneself
and someone else, whoever they may be. We have seen that what
psychotherapists call therapeutic space is created to explore the relationship
between their clients and themselves: other focal points for the study of whatever
lies ‘between man and man’ are to be found in theatres, churches and all kinds of
working with groups—everywhere in fact that people have set about creating the
space for between-ness.

Learning to play again

Aesthetic distance allows group members to re-discover the freedom

of expression and the self-discipline which originally allowed them
to develop as persons.
44 GROUP SPIRITUALITY

In the darkened opera house there can be established between two of the
audience, who do not know one another, and who are listening with the
same purity and with the same intensity to the music of Mozart, a relation
which is scarcely perceptible and yet is one of elemental dialogue, and
which has long vanished when the lights blaze up again.
(Buber 1961: 245, 246)

In this passage from Between Man and Man, Martin Buber draws attention to the
way in which works of art provide space for ‘the eternal meeting of the One with
the Other’ (1961: 247). He is talking here about the relationship between fellow
members of a theatre audience. Elsewhere he concentrates on the significance of
the actual physical distance, exaggerated in the design of theatres since the very
earliest days, between the audience as a whole and the acting area set over
against them. To separate actors and audience in such a way, he says, brings home
‘the stern over-againstness of I and Thou’. Thus theatrical distance originates in
a consciously spiritual intention ‘The ancient stage…is thoroughly separated
(from the space of the spectator) through the cultic character that dwells in it and
shapes it’ (1957: 66, 68). The drama itself is framed by its own nature as drama;
that is, the intention to present a life-like imitation of the things that happen
between and among persons when they are not ‘doing drama’ (and sometimes, of
course, when they are!). The stage conditions simply clarify the terms of the
encounter, pointing us to where the meeting of audience and characters is to take
place—the separation that divides us and summons us into what Buber called
‘healing through meeting’ (1957: 95–97).
This between-ness of person and person, in which each reaches out to encounter
the other without engulfment or isolation, has to be learned. Not only this, the
capacity for it has to develop. Most psychologists are agreed that it has no place
in our original way of being in the world. In our earliest months, it would be
inaccurate to say that we were only aware of ourselves, because the idea of self
implies, as we saw, the notion of another. However, in the first months of my life
I was aware of perceiving, and what I perceived was mine. Things came and went
as part of me; I made the breast come when I was hungry and depart when I was
replete. It was only gradually that I became aware that what I controlled, I tried
to control: that in fact it had a life of its own and dealt with me as much as I with
it.
All this is well known and established. What is not always acknowledged is
the part space played in the discovery that the world was a world, something that
was inhabited by others and must be shared in order to be survived. Put like this,
even this discovery demands space for myself. In this context, space stands for
safety, a safe place for experiment. The degree of danger to be faced outside this
safe area dictates the extent to which its safety is valued and protected; the extent
to which it is an area specially set aside. Winnicott describes how, for a growing
child ‘outside’ reality, the realism of presences other than the self is gradually
imported into the safe area so that it too can be made safe, like a bomb that has to
 THE SPACE BETWEEN 45

be deactivated. ‘Potential space’ allows room for changes to be made in personal

reality. It is not yet actual space, because that requires an actual other. But
because the changes involved are not a simple defusing of dangerous elements
but a way of learning to live with them, potential space acts as an introduction to
real space, leading to the ability to allow other selves to exist and to draw oneself
out of one’s initial preoccupation with one’s own private world. In other words,
to become a person. A potential world acts as a prototype for a real one: we play
at being people in order to grow into personhood. As Winnicott put it ‘Cultural
experience begins with creative living first manifest in play’ (1971: 100).
It is important to recognise the experimental nature of this kind of playing.
Barriers are broken and territory gained in two crucial ways, one directly
connected with and leading into the other. Potential play is liminal and leads into
actual social experience because it is safe. What is being negotiated with, in this
safe space, is a very real threat to the self: at least that is how it is perceived. Our
reaching out to the other as a source of life is balanced with our fear of the other
as capable of actually destroying us. Rollo May describes how ‘all our lives we
oscillate between those two fears—life fear is fear of living autonomously, death
fear is fear of being totally absorbed by the other’ (1975: 19, original italics).
Not only this, however, our unconscious awareness provides evidence, via
psychoanalysis, of a profound fear of our own destructiveness, particularly
towards those to whom we are closest. According to Melanie Klein, the roots of
(Edipal jealousy run exceedingly deep, even into our first months of life (1997)
and Winnicott describes how children play ‘death and resurrection games’ with
toys and dolls in order to reassure themselves that Mother will in fact be able to
survive the murderous feelings that they sometimes have towards her.
Psychological events which revive or reproduce this conflict and its resolution
remain throughout our lives as some of the most vivid experiences we ever have.
Looking at the experience of theatrical catharsis, Thomas Scheff draws attention
to the balance between safety and danger which is able to act as a healing
emotional release, precisely because the nature of plays as ‘play’ allows us to
acknowledge the fears and frustrations we have simply through being alive—and
in so doing puts us in touch with feelings that may have lain dormant for years.
Drama, he says, is able to circumvent barriers that were carefully constructed a
long time ago—in our earliest months and years, and have been systematically
strengthened since then (1979). Cox and Theilgaard make a similar claim with
regard to metaphor in general, which they describe as ‘the optimal balancing of
imagery, emotion and thought’ (1987: 137). The secret lies in balance, the ‘trade-
off between safety and danger happening wherever a place has been made safe
for an encounter with the unknown, whether this is a theatre, a church or a group
workshop. Workshops are particularly safe, being specially structured as
‘protected space/time, where intragroup relationships may thrive without being
threatened by intergroup agression’ (Schechner 1988: 104). This workshop
format itself aims to preserve an equipoise of comradeship and rivalry, safety and
danger.
46 GROUP SPIRITUALITY

The confidence to create, first discovered in playing, heals wounds and

encourages growth. Play space is a kind of do-it-yourself clinic. It is also a social
laboratory, an environment specially designed for designing other environments.
Experiments in involving first playthings, then playmates, are developed,
expanded and realised in systems of social organisation. According to Erikson
‘The child’s play is the infantile form of the human ability to deal with
experience by creating model situations and to master reality by experiment and
planning’ (1965: 214). Clinic and social laboratory are, he says, indissolubly
linked; we have confidence in our adult experimentation because of the success
we once had in solving our emotional and intellectual problems by trial and error:
‘In the laboratory, on the stage and on the drawing-board (the adult) relives the
past and thus relieves left-over effects; in re-constructing the model situation, he
redeems his failures and strengthens his hopes’ (1965: 215). Any success which
adults have in solving problems of social living and societal organisation reflect
the valuable use they made of the space where, by themselves and with other
children, they spent so many, many hours in play.
The balance of safety and danger that allows us to acknowledge what we think
and feel, to know where we are, is the place where our personal life begins and to
which we return from time to time for renewal and refreshment during the course
of our journeying. It is both new and old, a place of beginnings and inheritances,
older than playing and planning —as old as life itself. It may be considered and
argued about, but it is in the immediacy of action and gesture that the space itself
speaks to us; it may be something we ourselves construct, but it reveals otherness
and allows us to encounter it. Seen like this, it is both problem and solution,
separation and union, question and answer, way out and way in.

Sacred space
This safe central place of restoration and out-reach is the place where we are
conscious of meeting God. It is the place of assignation where ‘journeys end in
lovers’ meeting’. To this extent it expresses a firm intention, because it is the
deliberate act of clearing a space, not for God to be in, but for us to meet him in.
As always, it is our own life that needs to be interrupted in this way. However
much we may feel ourselves to be led and inspired by God, it is we ourselves
who have to do the clearing, choose the setting, make the welcoming gesture. It
is his call and his empowering, but it has to be our intention, because
intentionality is its message and significance. Behold, Lord, thy family, gathered
here before you. Thus we set out to draw apart from ourselves and enter into his
presence.
This is why, from the beginning of recorded time, the place set aside for
worship in religions throughout the world is located spiritually ‘outside’ space
and time. It is a place of truth which precedes every other kind of knowing; the
manifestation of the Life which creates life. It depends on nothing human for its
real identity, because everything human depends on it. It is still ‘the still point of
 THE SPACE BETWEEN 47

the turning world’, while everything outside is caught up in motion; it is whole

and complete where everything else is in part or still unfinished; it is always
present, when everything else is involved in looking backwards to the past or
forward to the future; it is inconclusive and expansive, being timeless and
original. Thus it is perceived as central—all worlds and universes are arranged
around it, and were created from it ‘As the embryo proceeds from the navel
onwards, so God began to create the world from its navel onward, and from there
it was spread out in different directions’ (Eliade 1958: 376, 377).
Above all, it is a place of meeting: the mountain whose summit reaches to the
skies, the ladder set between earth and heaven, the cosmic tree whose feet are
embedded in the earth’s foundations and whose branches pierce the clouds, the
sacred city where gods and men meet and in which they walk together at ‘the
point of intersection of the cosmic spheres’ (Eliade 1958: 377). Sacred space is
all this. It is always real for ‘the source of all reality and consequently of energy
and life is to be found there’ (ibid.).
Put like this, sacred space-time sounds more strange and esoteric than it
actually is. Most people are willing to admit that this kind of thinking exists, and
that some people take it very seriously. Others, however, see it quite simply as a
poetic fantasy, a distortion of psychological reality or even an illness. However,
for all its set-apartness, it is perpetually at hand. We are put in touch with it,
welcomed into it as soon as we acknowledge it as sacred, other, set apart. From a
human point of view, it lives within our ‘experience of otherness’. Imagined as
far away, it makes itself present here and now. As with drama, the empty space
reserved for worship is a present waiting to be inhabited, an opportunity asking
to be taken up; the play and the liturgy focus our hearts and minds on which is
actually happening. Wherever there is space and time, drama and religious
worship are available to expand and realise life by focusing our attention on
what is spaceless and timeless.
The idea of focused attention leads into one final function of separated space—
its deictic nature, or its ability to give symbolic meaning to what it contains. This
is something that writers on theatre spend a long time examining and explaining.
As Peter Brook remarked, it only takes one man, walking across an empty space,
to provide theatre. Not only people, but animals, objects, colours, sounds, all take
on a kind of universal meaning when they become the objects of our
concentration by being islanded in, and underlined by, space. The empty table in
the empty place is at one and the same time a table and the table; it is all that
tables are, have been and could be, all that they imply or suggest. It is the
seriousness of study and the relief of a welcome meal; the loneliness of
imprisonment and the relaxed conviviality of a game of cards; the clamour of a
public meeting and the quietness of the classroom during playtime. Because it has
taken on a symbolic identity it is also the absence of all the things it stands for,
as symbols always point in both directions at once, forcing our minds to
contemplate the alternative of what they present, and then the alternative of the
alternative, and so on.
48 GROUP SPIRITUALITY

It is this that makes the actual physical distance between auditorium and stage
work. Theatrical distancing resides in the power of our symbolic awareness, the
way we regard the things we perceive because of our attitude towards them.
What they mean to us. This is most clearly seen in drama which is overtly
religious. Karla Poewe reminds us that in religion ‘intellectual surrender follows
emotional surrender…intellectualism has very little to do with the process of a
person’s being made in the image of God’ (1999: 198, 204). The worldwide
experience of religious people adds irresistible weight to a view of religion as
rooted in the actual experiences of life. Just as drama itself is a centring of
personal existence in the action of turning to the other in order to give and
receive life, so religious rituals direct our search for meaning to the source of all
truth, to be understood first of all in terms of the language of the heart. Des Pres
describes how in the active imagination of dramatic exploration, meaning is
disclosed to us as existing ‘no longer above and beyond the world; it re-enters
concrete experiences, becomes immanent and invests each act and moment with
urgent depth’ (1977: 77).

Workshops about distance

I
The island
The process of constructing a ‘safe place’ for self-disclosure involves that of
deconstructing some of the threatening aspects of current reality. Spirituality
workshops discount the force of depersonalisation in existing social rituals and
the neuroses which they give rise to, and substitute a new metaphoric space for
encounter. The socially contrived world which holds us fast in its grip is
dramatically transcended as our maps of personal reality are opened out to the
action of spirit.
The following is a brief description of a series of three spirituality workshops
which were designed to explore the expertise of imagining a special kind of safe
place away from the pressure and preoccupations of life in the ‘real world’. The
purpose here was to create conditions for reaching out to make contact with
other people in ways which would allow them to ‘be themselves’. In other
words, the project aimed at achieving a situation of shared safety—the kind of
thing that the existential psychologists refer to as a healing relationship. It took
place in a large, warm, comfortably furnished room, where there was plenty of
actual space to move about in, and enough privacy for the people, who were ‘all
in it together’ (whatever ‘it’ turned out to be), to develop a degree of intimacy as
a group. In other words, the safe-space metaphor could take on the reality of an
actual time and place in which real things could happen to real people and actual
personal changes could come about.
 THE SPACE BETWEEN 49

Those taking part met together at a Christian pastoral care centre in the last
month of the old millennium. There were eleven people in the group including
the leader, the only one professionally experienced in either liturgy or drama.
The oldest group member was in her late sixties and the youngest somewhere
between twenty and twenty-five years. The retreat centre is itself a place which
people think of as being set apart from the busy world, somewhere they can
afford to take time off to be themselves. All those present, including the group
leader, were involved in a process of rediscovering a sense of self, a measure of
spiritual repose prior to having to re-engage with the pressures of life ‘outside’.
The house itself was a zone of safety and peace focusing on the room in which
the sessions were held. At the heart of this was the dramatic structure of the
therapy, so that there were in fact three concentric circles of safety surrounding
the various activities in which people found themselves involved; each in its own
way underlining the message about emotional security. This sense of separation
was complemented by two other important factors, namely the presence of the
group, offering companionship and support, and the theme of the drama itself—
perhaps the most important factor of all.
In this case the plot of the dramatic action had been worked out in advance by
the leader. This is not the only way of doing things. Sometimes ideas about
storylines emerge from the group itself, and in some ways this is the most natural
and spontaneous way of doing things. On this occasion, however, the nature of
the occasion pointed to a particular kind of subject matter, one suggesting the
experience of becoming involved in a geographical location and timescale quite
different from one’s ordinary existence; which is why the leader seized on the
idea of an island—preferably one at a considerable distance from the mainland,
and separated from it by the kind of ocean which is subject to high winds and
frequent, dangerous storms.

Session one
The leader explains that this is an introductory session. Its purpose is to give the
group a chance to get used to the basic, underlying idea of using the imagination
to construct a world of places, people (and other kinds of creatures) and things
which can be shared. In other words, it is a session about rediscovering how to
play together in a way you may not have done since you were a child. The
instructions given to the leader are shown here in an abbreviated form. (In fact,
she spent some time explaining what she meant. Only the gist is given here, for
reasons of space.)

1 Stand in a circle. Each person catches a ball thrown to him/her by another

member of the group. Before throwing it to someone else, group members
say what their own names are. In this way each person learns the names of
some of the others and can then say the other person’s name before throwing
50 GROUP SPIRITUALITY

it to him/her. (This is designed to be complicated enough for the kind of

mild confusion that gives rise to laughter.)
2 Take a partner. The leader shows people how partners can mirror one
another’s actions by standing facing each other as if they were looking in a
mirror. One person ‘leads’ and the other ‘follows’, and they take it in turns
to do this. (People tend to find it easier if they concentrate on the other
person’s face, looking them in the eye instead of trying to work out which
way their hands are moving. The purpose of the exercise is to increase
awareness of the real presence of another person interacting with oneself,
which is why we find ourselves being first follower, then leader, then follower
again, moving backwards and forwards without ever consciously swapping
roles.)
3 Stay with your partner, but find a space in the room which you can claim for
yourselves as a pair. Partners take it in turns to tell each other the history of
the clothes that they themselves are wearing. (For example, where I bought
these shoes, who gave me this necklace, etc. You can go into as much detail
as you want, but try to make it interesting because your partner’s going to
have to remember what you said!)
4 Return to the circle. Everybody takes turns to tell the rest of the group the
story of their partners clothes. This is done by ‘reversing roles’ (i.e. I take on
the role of my partner and talk as if I were wearing the outfit he or she has
just been telling me about).
5 Find somewhere where you feel you have some personal space. On the piece
of paper provided, write or draw something that expresses something about
yourself–a word, a sentence, a symbol. Do this quite quickly.
6 Fold your paper and deposit it in the part of the room that feels safest to you,
or the part you like best. When you’ve done this, go and sit somewhere for a
minute or two. Take time to reflect on what you have written or drawn.
7 Sit in a circle. The leader suggests that people close their eyes (if this seems
a little frightening to anybody, it’s OK for them to leave theirs open). The
leader takes the group on an imaginary journey to an island many, many
miles away from the room they are sitting in, the house itself and the country
in which the house is situated; it involves journeying together to the
harbour, taking a ship and setting sail; running into stormy weather and
having to abandon ship and take to a raft; finding themselves becalmed after
the storm; finally being washed up on the beach.
8 Open your eyes. You have arrived at the island. The leader explains that this
is a welcoming island 'the island that loves to be visited’. From now on, and
throughout the next two sessions, this room will be their island. It will be a
place of opportunity and peace, to be explored and enjoyed. The leader
invites people to spend a few moments exploring the island/room. Is there
anything they would like to take away with them to remind them of it until
they come back tomorrow?
 THE SPACE BETWEEN 51

9 Say goodbye to the group, telling them what you’re going to carry away
with you. Then say a personal goodbye to everyone individually.

Session two
This and the following session make up the main part of the dramatherapy
process. Again, they start with some time spent establishing the experience of the
room as an island. Since session one, which took place yesterday evening, the
group have all been to bed, got up and had breakfast. Yesterday may seem
somewhat distanced from where they are this morning. They can’t simply jump
back twelve hours.

1 Stand in a circle. Greet everyone present by name (or ask them what their
name is, if you can’t remember, be sure to tell them yours).
2 Imagine you are standing on the beach. You can hear the roar of the surf in
the distance. Close your eyes. Can you feel the sun on your face? Can you
smell the breath of the sea in your nostrils? Try moving your feet in the sand.
Shift them until you feel you’re standing firm in the sunlight. Now there’s a
wind blowing from the sea. It’s blowing really strongly, so that it makes you
sway like a tree. There’s a storm blowing up, so that you can feel the first
drops of rain on your face and forehead. It’s heavier now; can you still stand
upright? (and so on, taking special care to bring people through the storm
and out into fairer weather).
3 Now imagine you are either (a) a wave of the sea, or (b) a strong tree at the
edge of the land. You can spend a few moments ‘getting into character’.
(Some may find they have to take positive action to suspend their sense of
the absurd at this point.) Join forces with the other waves and trees in the
group. Can the trees withstand the power of the waves or will they be swept
away by the storm-driven sea? (This is more of a ballet than a battle, as
people’s energies are directed towards ‘staying in character’. Alternatives to
trees versus waves are rain versus earth, rocks versus mountain torrent, etc.
It can be done to the right kind of atmospheric music.)
4 Find a partner and take a walk with them round the island. Show each other
what you find there. (Don’t forget you can touch, smell, feel things as well
as just seeing them.) Take your time; you have twenty minutes to do this.
5 Sit in a circle on the ground. With your partner tell the others what your
journey was like and what you found on the island. What sort of island is it?

The couples described the island in great detail. In a way that I can’t really
explain, the five island narratives seemed to resemble one another in the things
described—the settlement located by two pairs of partners would turn out to be
in the same corner of the island, near the same kind of beach (for instance) as the
ones mentioned by two other pairs; the dangerous, unexplored parts of the island
would similarly turn out to be in the same place, near the same mountain range
52 GROUP SPIRITUALITY

or patch of swampy ground: ‘over there’s dangerous,’ one person said ‘but it’s
valuable. There’s something worth having. Something precious.’

6 Still sitting in the circle. What sort of animals, birds, reptiles, fishes inhabit
this island? Write the name of one of them on a small piece of paper and put
it in the centre of the circle. When everyone has done this, look at all the
papers and make up your mind which of these creatures most resembles the
kind of person you think you are. Which of them is most like you?
7 With your partner again. Take on the character of your animal, bird, reptile,
fish (or whatever kind of creature you have chosen) and tell your partner
something about the way you pass your life. Then swap over so that she or he
can tell you, in character, about their experiences as the creature they have
chosen. When you have spent some time doing this, go and choose another
creature to ‘be’. This time, however, try to discover a creature who reminds
you of someone else, someone you know and maybe have strong feelings
about, one way or another. Go back to your partner and let your new
character speak to her or him. Let this creature talk to your partner about
you. What does it think about you? How does it feel with regard to you? Let
it talk quite freely because, when it has finished speaking about you, you are
going to have the chance to tell your partner about it! Everything you feel
about it. So do this…then let your partner go through the same routine with
the animal character they have chosen. Then go back to sitting in the circle.
8 Everybody sitting together in the circle. Going round the ring, people choose
one of the creatures that they would like to be and explain to the group why
they have chosen this particular animal, bird, fish or reptile. (They do this
without actually taking the role of the creature, for example ‘I’ve chosen an
eagle because I’d like to have that kind of freedom and strength.’ In this way
they de-role from the parts they have been playing and become group
members again, talking to each other about the animals they have chosen
and their reasons for choosing them.) The leader asks the group to imagine
that everyone is sitting round a camp fire at the end of a day on the island:
‘It’s getting towards turning-in time. Let’s say goodbye and go back to our
tents.’

Session three
The second session was before lunch. This one took place in the afternoon of the
same day. As with sessions one and two, session three is in three main parts—a
beginning, a middle and an end, with the most psychologically testing part in the
middle. At the same time, however, it forms a kind of climax to the process
people have been going through during the dramatherapy.

1 Stand in a circle so that you can say hello to the group. Then take some time
to greet individuals.
 THE SPACE BETWEEN 53

2 Walk round the room letting it become the island once more. Close your eyes
and imagine you are walking on the beach. Move your body, kicking your
feet through the dry sand; walking on sand that’s too hot for comfort;
running over the ridges that the waves have left behind in the sand; dabbling
your toes on the edge of the sea or dipping into rock pools; exploring caves
in the cliff edges, etc. Find your favourite spot on the island and spend some
time enjoying it. Take someone else—perhaps another pair of partners—
along to see it and enjoy it with you. If you and your partner actually built a
hut or a house, show this to them and let them explore it. Relax and listen to
the music.
3 Draw, paint or crayon a map with your partner, of the island as you and your
partner discovered it in session two. (You are allowed half an hour to do this
so you need not rush. It isn’t meant to be a work of art—unless you want to
make it one—simply a way of remembering the shape of the island and the
position of the things on it.) Do this as a pair, without consulting any of the
others.
4 Back in the circle again, show your map to the others and let them ask you
questions about it. What are the other maps like? How do they differ from
yours?

In fact, the five maps turned out to have much in common with one another.
They were all much more rounded than angular, three of them being a shape
which corresponded more or less to an amoeba (or a foetus?). All three had a
semi-circular northern edge and a sandy bay scooped out of a southern coastline.
The other two maps were less regularly shaped; but they also resembled each other.
I don’t really know why this should have happened; there certainly wasn’t any
overt conferring between pairs. I simply thought it was worth recording.

5 Put the maps on one side and split into two groups. Working together as a
team, construct a creation myth for the island. How did the island come into
being? Who created it? Did it create itself? Show how the island was created
in a dance or drama you have worked out together. You’ll need to do this
somewhere where there is space to move about in and rehearse. If one group
stays here in this room, the other can use the room next door. When you are
ready, you can enact your creation ritual for the other group, using the island
space we have dreamed up for your stage.

One of the rites was accompanied by a narrative commentary which held the
action together. The movements of this group were focused on a still centre, so
that the impression given was of a flower uncurling outwards, then contracting in
on itself before spreading to its fullest extent and then clustering into separate
blossoms. It was most moving when it evolved spontaneously during rehearsal.
The other was more light hearted and also more dramatic, although at one point
it teetered on the edge of farce, one member of the group having discovered a
54 GROUP SPIRITUALITY

finger puppet inside one of the props provided by the leader. This seemed too
good an opportunity to miss. The knitted mannequin was brought right into the
heart of the action by being ‘born’ at the appropriate moment. Taken in context,
this touch of the ridiculous had the effect of making the rite more human and
consequently adding to its power rather than detracting from it. These rituals
took up a good deal of the group’s energy, emotional as well as physical. When
they had finished nobody said very much; there was a feeling of having shared
something valuable.

6 Sit in a circle on the ground. Take time to say anything you feel like saying.
Because we are going to say goodbye to the island for the last time you may
want to think about what you intend to carry away from your life here. You
may like to think of something from here you could give to somebody else
in the group for them to take away with them. Imagine that the island is
spread out here in the centre of the circle, as it appeared on your maps. If
you walk out into the centre, you can choose something.

Somebody pointed out a place on the imaginary map where there was the
remains of a camp fire in a clearing of the forest. One by one, in their own time,
people walked into the clearing, stayed for a moment, and then returned bearing
(imaginary) gifts. These were distributed and goodbyes were said.

II
‘All in it together’
The following is a series of three workshops which took place in the open air, in
a clearing at the edge of a forest. I have described them in greater detail, hoping
to give an impression of the way that a feeling of freedom and spontaneity can arise
among people who, in any other circumstances, would consider themselves to
have little in common.

Workshop I
Including Brian and Zoë, who are leading the session, there are eight people
present: Colin, Mavis, Jenny, Philip, Sandra and Pauline. Colin is a doctor,
working with elderly people; Mavis is a probation officer, married to Colin;
Jenny is a retired teacher whose husband died three years ago; Philip is the vicar
of a nearby church, and is a bachelor; Sandra is training to be a teacher; Pauline
is a computer programmer—both are unmarried; Brian has a small engineering
business and Zoë is his wife. Most of the group have met one another before, but
Philip and Pauline are strangers to everyone here. This is the first session and
people are subdued and rather nervous. Philip covers up his nervousness (or tries
to) by talking rather a lot, which has the effect of making everybody quieter than
they would normally be. To begin with Brian suggests that everybody stands in a
 THE SPACE BETWEEN 55

circle. He says that although some people may know some of the others, there
are some who don’t know anybody at all. He says that he knows a game which will
help people to learn one another’s names. This involves throwing and catching a
ball. It starts very simply and gets harder as people have more to remember. First
of all everybody throws the ball to everybody else, and when someone catches it
they say their own name.
Mavis I’m Mavis and I’m throwing this ball to you.
The next stage, when everyone has practised this for a bit, is to say your name,
along with the name of the person who has thrown the ball to you.
Mavis I’m Mavis and I’ve received this ball from Philip, I’m throwing it on to
you.
In the final stage of the game everybody says the name of all three people
involved in the transaction.
Mavis I’m Mavis and I’ve received this ball from Philip, I’m throwing it to Zoë.
This is a good way to remember people's names, as well as being fun. It’s
actually even more fun if you ‘forget’ to bring the ball and people have to mime
throwing and catching. This has a very definite advantage when there are people
in the group who are not expert at catching balls, or people who like to throw
them very hard!
Philip Do you mind if I sit down? I’ve not laughed so much for a very long
time.
Zoë Of course not, We’ll all sit down, shall we? (They sit down in a circle,
using camp stools, cushions, etc.) Right, then, off we go. Names. I’m
very lucky. I’ve got a splendid one. At least I think it’s splendid.
Pauline It’s a bit posh.
Brian It means ‘Life’, so that can’t be bad, can it? What does your name mean,
Pauline? Do you know? Let’s go round the group, each of us saying
something about our names. If we don’t know what they mean, we can
say something about them.
Zoë Whether we like them or not, for example.
They all do this. Mavis says she has no idea what her name means, although she
has always liked it. She is delighted when Jenny tells her it means ‘song thrush’.
Mavis I do a lot of singing.
Brian suggests that now they know a little bit about one another they might find
out about the place they are sitting in.
Brian It’s full of interest, this part of the forest. They used to burn wood for
charcoal here. You can see where the huts used to stand. Just walk round
and see what you can find that’s interesting. When I blow the whistle, stop
where you are and speak to the person nearest to you. You can tell them
what you’ve found. I’ll blow it again for you to move on. Then I’ll blow it
56 GROUP SPIRITUALITY

a third time and you can touch someone (ask permission if you feel you
need to). The fourth time I blow the whistle we all gather here again. Now
off you go, don’t hang about, find as many things as you can.
People start doing this with varying degrees of eagerness, Jenny showing the
most interest and Pauline and Sandra the least. Pauline and Sandra would prefer
to stay close to each other for mutual support. Nobody is sure what’s going to
happen next. After a few minutes interest begins to lag somewhat.
Brian Let’s take a break, shall we? We’ve got some orange juice, if anybody
would like some. We’ll sit down again for a few minutes.
They do this. Nobody says anything for a minute or two.
Philip That’s a lovely tree. I was looking at it. So was Jenny.
Jenny I think it’s beautiful.
Pauline We should have been further into the forest itself, not out here on the
edge, if we want to look at trees.
Zoë Perhaps we don’t always need real trees. We’ve all got forests in our
minds. Was there anything in this bit of the forest that brought back
memories? Did it remind you of anywhere you remember? Or perhaps it
contrasts with places you’ve know in the past or know now. Perhaps
there’s somewhere in particular, somewhere special?
Brian Let’s get as comfortable as we can and see what we can remember. If
you’re not comfy where you are, move around until you find the right
place to sit. You can lie on one of the big cushions. The main thing is to
feel as comfy as you can. That’s right, wriggle around; now try to relax.
Zoë We’ve all got forests in our minds.
Brian So close your eyes and let your mind wander. How deep is your forest?
During the pause for drinks he has put a tape on the tape recorder and turned it
down as low as possible. Now he turns up the volume so that it is playing very
quietly in the background. It is the slow movement of a Bruckner symphony—
real woodland music. The tape plays to the end and is gradually faded out.
Zoë (quietly) Did you find your forest? Was it still there? Was it as good to be in
as you hoped or as frightening as you feared? Look round. Find someone to
share this with.
What happens next might have been predicted. Colin and Mavis stay together, as
do Pauline and Sandra. Philip and Jenny look at each other with eyebrows raised,
and become the third couple.
Brian You and your partner are going to work on those memories for a bit. So
find yourselves part of the space where you won’t bump into anybody else,
because you may need a bit of space.
Philip Look, I’d rather…
Jenny Come on, Philip. In for a penny…
 THE SPACE BETWEEN 57

Zoë You’re going to have to use all of the space because you’re each going to
show your partner something about the forest you’ve been remembering.
You can use some words, but not many. Simply concentrate on showing
what it was like, what it felt like to be in it. How would you be feeling if
you were in it now? And so on. You can say what colour and texture things
were, or describe sounds and smells. Who lived there in the forest? When
each of you has finished you can say a bit about your connection with this
particular forest.
Brian When you’ve both had a go, come back and sit down.
He and Zoë sit in the centre of the clearing and wait for the others to join them.
The first to come back are Colin and his wife.
Colin You don’t expect us to say where we’ve been, I hope.
Mavis What do you mean? I don’t mind saying!
Colin Oh all right then. If you’ll describe mine, I’ll do yours.
Brian Hang on a bit, both of you. Let’s wait ’til the others get back.
Pauline and Sandra come and sit down. They don’t say anything. Jenny and
Philip are taking their time and are still deep in conversation. When everyone has
sat down in the circle Zoë says
Zoë First of all, Colin and Mavis, you needn’t worry. You’re not going to be
asked to describe the forests, neither your own nor your partner’s. You’re
quite safe!
Both appear to be relieved at this. Pauline seems a bit disappointed by it. Jenny
and Philip definitely want to talk to the others.
Zoë I’m sorry to disappoint those who want to tell everyone what they’ve been
doing; but this is our first session and we need to move slowly at first.
There may be some who don’t want to share everything with everyone
else.
Brian Getting to know one person is enough for session one.
Zoë But you can say anything you want about what it felt like doing it. How
did it make you feel? Did it make you feel sad or happy? Let’s talk about
that, shall we?
Mavis Well, it certainly brought things back to me.
Colin To both of us. It was something we both remember.
Brian You mean, you both thought of the same place?
Colin That’s right. We go back a long way, you know.
There is an amazed pause.
Philip No wonder you wanted to talk!
Mavis I suppose we do share a lot of things. All the same, it was strange, wasn’t
it?
58 GROUP SPIRITUALITY

Everyone else seems to think so, including the leaders. There is a pause, while
the others decide whether or not they want to say anything.
Jenny (tentatively) Mine was quite ordinary really.
Philip So was mine. I was moved by what Jenny showed me and what she said
about it. I don’t know why.
Jenny I suppose it’s one step at a time.
Zoë Moved. That’s what you said. Was anybody else moved?
Pauline Yes.
Sandra (after a pause) Yes.
Brian One step at a time.
Soon after this the group disperses, each person saying goodbye to everyone
else. They arrange to come to the next workshop.
This workshop was one way of making a ‘frame for story’, so that a living
symbol could be shared by the group in the form of an experience rather than an
idea. Zoë and Brian hoped that, as the course of workshops went on, a way of
thinking and feeling would emerge which was at once formal and expressive,
ordinary and poetic, immediate and symbolic of timelessness.
As the workshops continued they became slightly more self-conscious, as
people began to enjoy the experience of taking the unseen seriously and using it
as a way of getting closer to other people, a safe place for meeting and sharing.
The forest space became a symbol for this kind of sharing, and we watched the
weather reports anxiously—it wouldn’t be the same if we were rained off and
had to go somewhere else.

Workshop 2
The setting and cast are the same. Again, the weather was fine. The first thing to
notice about this session is that there is much less tension in the air than there
was at the beginning of Workshop 1. People are beginning to enjoy the approach
and to discover the effect that it can have on their state of mind during the week.
It is a bit more difficult to get things going today because people want to chat
together about things that have happened since they last met. Then Zoë starts this
week’s workshop.
Zoë Shall we find partners again? It’s easier to do now, when we know each
other better. So find a partner and give yourselves a bit of room. Now face
each other. We did a lot of sharing last week, didn’t we? So that’s where
we’ll start off today. I want one of you to be someone looking in one of
those full-length mirrors and the other to be their reflection. Mavis, Colin
and Pauline are ‘A’s and their partners are ‘B’s. If you put your hands up,
your mirror image almost touches you, palm to palm. See if you can put
your palms so close that you can feel the warmth coming from the other
person’s hand—but do this without actually touching. Shall we try this?
 THE SPACE BETWEEN 59

People experiment for a few moments, trying to sense each other’s warmth
without actually touching. This leads into the mirroring exercise described on
page 38. Pauline and Sandra start off skilfully, and the other two couples are
soon moving fluently in unison. Colin and Jenny start to move across the room,
Jenny taking over from Colin and leading the hand movements. Everybody is
laughing.
Brian Another minute doing this, then.
Colin Spoil sport! So what are we going to be doing this week?
Zoë Well, we thought we’d do something about stories this week.
Brian What do people feel about stories?
Pauline (after a pause) Some stories are true and some aren’t.
Philip That’s very true, (everybody laughs)
Zoë Yes, but what makes something into a story?
Philip It’s the way you tell it! (more laughter)
Brian Is it only that? I mean, things can happen one after another but it doesn’t
make a story, does it?
Jenny Well, it depends. It can be part of a story.
Zoë Yes, it can go into a story.
Brian Hang on a minute. Let’s try something out. We’ll work in pairs again, ‘A’s
and ‘B’s. Let’s see if this works. What about if ‘B’s invent a story and
tell it by using ‘A’s as a kind of visual aid? ‘B’s think of a very simple
story, a couple of minutes long, no more, about something happening to
somebody, and put ‘A’s into a series of positions which tell what the
story is. Let’s have a go at this—see if we can do it?
Zoë The first thing is for ‘B’s to think out their stories. Just a simple story
with a beginning, a middle and an end. Something that happened to
somebody, for example. You can put your partner into as many positions
as you want. If you make them play different parts, you must say ‘this is
somebody else’, otherwise try not to say anything. Just show us. When
the ‘B’s have finished, it’s the ‘A’s’ turn.
For a few moments there is hardly any reaction at all: everybody is waiting for
someone to make the first move. Couples simply stand and gaze at each other.
Then almost simultaneously, they begin to get down to work. Brian and Zoë
move among them, encouraging and giving advice. This goes on for about a
quarter of an hour, and when everyone is more or less ready, the ‘B’s present
their stories, one by one, to the rest of the group, followed by the ‘A’s. This is
‘done in the round’, the group forming a circle. Two of the stories are episodic
adventure sagas, but each of the other four revolves around a particular incident,
leading up to it and away from it with varying degrees of skill. Sandra and
Pauline show the greatest narrative ability, along with optimum hilarity. When
everybody has finished and people have been congratulated, Zoë asks everybody
to sit down and relax, still keeping in a circle.
60 GROUP SPIRITUALITY

Brian (appreciatively) Well, we’ve seen some pretty good stories, don’t you
think?
Zoë What’s the most important thing about a story, then?
Jenny Imagination?
Colin Shape.
Brian What do you think, Jenny? Imagination? Shape?
Jenny Well both, I think. But definitely shape.
Pauline That’s what we had to do. That's what makes it hard—getting the right
beginning, middle and end.
Sandra Colin’s story was two stories, put together. Mine was really three
stories.
Zoë Shall we think about this for a bit?
Brian Let’s think of some stories. Any kind of story—fairy stories, legends,
books you’ve read.
Zoë Bible stories, parables, anything you want. We’ll go round the circle,
saying the names of stories. Don’t think what you’re going to say, just
say the first story you think of, and we’ll pause for a second and think
about its shape. Has it got a beginning and an end? Does it come to a
climax in the middle? We’ll go round a couple of times, then we’ll say
goodbye to one another for this week.
Mavis This episode, you mean.
Led by Zoë and Brian, everyone holds hands.
Philip So let’s say goodbye. I’ll start—goodbye everyone.

Workshop 3
The same setting and cast. When everybody has arrived, Brian suggests that the
group should formally say hello to each other.
Brian Let’s all do it as ceremonially as possible.
He goes round the group, solemnly shaking hands and enquiring as to people’s
health. The others do the same. People begin to giggle. Zoë suggests that they go
round again: this time they should imagine that they haven’t seen the other
person for years and years, and are completely amazed to discover them. They do
it a third time, this time expressing shyness and timidity (Jenny’s suggestion).
Colin Well, we seem to know each other by now.
Zoë How well do we really know each other, I wonder? We try to be honest
with one another—but that depends on how honest we are with ourselves
about ourselves, doesn’t it? We can’t share things if we ourselves refuse
to recognise their existence, can we?
Philip I’ve thought of a game we could play about this.
Sandra You mean confessing things to one another? You can count me out, for a
start!
 THE SPACE BETWEEN 61

Philip No, I don’t mean big things. Anyway I think confessing big things is
quite easy for some people. I mean things about ourselves we’re not sure
someone else would understand. If we each chose a partner and said
something like ‘would you think less of me if I told you, etc. etc.’ it could
be anything at all, but it must be something a bit hard to admit. And you
don’t have to tell anyone else. Just your partner.
People try this out. Sandra moves immediately towards Pauline, but finds herself
intercepted by Jenny. Pauline and Colin form a second pair, and Mavis and
Philip a third one. Zoë and Brian hover on the edge of things, Brian looking
slightly anxious. People seem to enjoy the experience however, and after a few
minutes they come back into the centre of the clearing looking considerably
more cheerful than they did at the beginning of the workshop.
Zoë Well, then. Now let’s do some work with the group as a whole. We’re
going to make some ‘sculpts’. A sculpt means that you use your bodies
as if they were lumps of clay. For instance, if I wanted to do a sculpt
expressing joy I’d use Brian as my raw material and mould him like this,
(she demonstrates, putting Brian into an expressively joyful pose, arms
outstretched, head back, corners of mouth and eyebrows raised, etc.)
We’re not going to do individual sculpts, however, we’re going to
do group sculpts. Everyone here is going to do a sculpt of him or herself,
using everybody else as ‘clay’.
Jenny How on earth are we going to do that?
Pauline It’s going to take a long time, isn’t it? If we use you and Brian as well it’ll
mean making seven statues of ourselves!
Zoë explains that there will be only one statue of each person, but it will consist
of the whole group, because each one will have the opportunity to build up a
living image of her- or himself using the other group members to represent
different aspects of his or her character or personality.
Zoë For instance, if I were doing ‘me’, I could choose Pauline to stand in for me
—(I’d put her here, standing like this); then I’d have Colin to represent my
stubbornness (go on Colin, look stubborn and stand here by Pauline—fists
up and lean back from the chest); then Sandra to be my creativity (I’m not
sure how you show that: Oh yes, that’s marvellous!). And so on. Use as
many people as you want. Perhaps you’d like to think for a moment and look
back over your life. What sort of person do you think you really are?
This interests people, but takes some time to get going, because nobody wants to
take the plunge. Jenny is the first to complete her sculpt. When she has finished
Zoë invites people to alter it if they think she’s got it wrong in any way.
Pauline Yes, she hasn’t put her kindness in. Somebody’s got to be Jenny’s
kindness. Right in front, next to shyness!
62 GROUP SPIRITUALITY

People make this kind of adjustment to several of the sculpts, taking the
opportunity to express feelings about one another that they would have found
difficulty in communicating in any other way. These adjustments were all
appreciative (although Pauline adds ‘wicked sense of humour, worse luck’ to
Sandra’s sculpt).
After the final sculpt, the group sit down in a circle and share their reactions.
There is quite a lot of agreement that the sculpts were ‘pretty nerve racking’
(Colin), but people seem to feel that they have been a good way of exploring
their feelings about themselves. Those who have had their sculpts adjusted in a
favourable direction are particularly reassured by the experience. The group is a
good deal closer and more mutually supportive.
Before leaving they stand in a circle, with their arms around one another’s
shoulders. They sway first to the right, then to the left, letting the circle of arms
take the strain. (At this point it actually started to rain and everybody ran to take
shelter under the trees until the storm had passed over, before returning to the
space.) Everybody holds hands and remains silent for a few moments, enjoying
the sensation of being back. Then they say goodbye to each other.
Jenny We must come here again. It feels as if it’s our own space now.
 Chapter 3
Story into archetype

People in pairs, talking to their partners. They are not standing

around: this isn’t a party. Each individual is concerned almost
exclusively with the person they are with, either listening to them or
talking to them. The listener doesn’t interrupt at all, but simply
listens. The talkers talk to their partners, sometimes looking at them,
sometimes not, but always very much aware of them. Now and again
the partner replies, but not often and not for long. The couples move
in one direction only, down the length of the room. Some pairs are
moving faster than others. Two couples are standing quite still, one
pair close to the other, each completely engrossed in their own
business and oblivious of the other pair’s presence.

• I don’t want to talk about this bit, if you don’t mind. The next
thing was…
• Do you understand me? Do you know what I’m talking about? No,
but do you understand what I’m saying?
• That’s it. That’s what it was like.
• It was the usual stuff, I suppose. I wasn’t any different. I don’t
suppose they were either. I’m sure everybody goes through this,
don’t you think?
• I was OK. I had my friends. Time’s a great healer.
• Well, at least I knew where I was. That was something, I suppose.

Some of the people who have reached the other end of the room are
silent, some are still talking to their partner. They are waiting for
other couples to arrive. This isn’t a race, however. Nor is it what it most
closely resembles—a mobile counselling session with as many
counsellors as clients. In a moment, when everybody has arrived at
the end of the room each pair will set off again, now moving in the
other direction back up the room. This time, however, they will have
64 GROUP SPIRITUALITY

Figure 3.1 Life journeys

swapped roles, so that those who were talking so much before are
now concentrating on the business of listening.

• I wanted to say this before, but it wasn’t my turn. When you said
that about…
• Would you think less of me if I told you that I...
• I never had that you see. Never. Never.
• Thank you for telling me. I remembered, when you said. I’d
forgotten. How can you forget something like that? When it
happened to me...
• That’s when my world ended. Up until then…(see Figure 3.1)

‘Up until then’, ‘after that’, ‘all that time’, ‘a turning point’, ‘one of the
landmarks’, ‘like coming home again’. It is a symbolic journey we are
witnessing, as well as a geographical progression. People travel along the length
of the room as if they are retracing their steps through the things that have
happened to them in the entire course of their lives. It is part of a ‘liturgy
workshop’ involving people from several parish church congregations who are
keen to find out how life and liturgy interact, and how each gives its life to the
other. Up to now life has taken the initiative, as the people involved have offered
one another under-standing, support and love by talking and listening to each other.
They have done this in a special way, helped by the structure of their journey
which performs at least three functions.
 STORY INTO ARCHETYPE 65

1 It reminds them of their life as a ‘journey through time’ in which particular

events and situations form recognisable episodes, allowing them to perceive
relationships between episodes and to make story-sense of things that have
happened to them.
2 It gives them an opportunity to talk about themselves with the frankness we
can permit ourselves when we speak to people whom we don’t know and
who don’t know us, in the understanding that they are going to give us, or
have already given us, the same privilege.
3 It makes this kind of sharing easier by structuring the encounter so that those
taking part may attend to the way ahead, in both senses of the words, and
not have to look directly at each other. (If you have ever had a longish
journey either with or as a hitch-hiker, you will see the point of this.)

The process as described so far uses ritual structure to promote spontaneity. The
next part is more obviously liturgical, and depends less on words to
communicate its meaning. During this part there is no dialogue. At the side of the
room there is a trestle table on which rows of candles have been arranged—
small, free-standing candles, the kind used for night lights. People stay with their
partner and prepare to make the same journey that they made to begin with. This
time the one who was the listener to begin with guides his or her partner silently
through the same story. As they go, she or he places a candle on the floor at certain
points in the story. In this way significant places are marked by candles on the
floor. These are the points that the listener perceives to be the most important
stages in the speaker’s journey. Then the process is reversed; the original listener
is led back to the beginning by the original speaker who selects points at which
to position candles.
Described like this it seems ponderous and complicated. In fact, of course, ritual
and drama share the property of being better done than spoken about! The most
striking thing about this process is in fact its transparency. The meaning is
immediately clear, and even naturalistic movements have a significance that
evades description. The actions of ritual speak louder than words because they
have an immediacy which words can only signify. These movements, gestures,
looks are what they describe. They are the action of reliving. The spoken
dialogues in the first stage of this process of liturgical formation are given a kind
of gestural force by their use as liturgy: the acting out of meaning in a symbolic
journey allows these words and half-formed sentences, these whispered
confidences and passionate avowals to stand for themselves, rescued from the
contingency and provisional nature of things said in ordinary conversation.
These are statements made in a context of final shape and meaning—their
linguistic raggedness does not diminish their importance.
In the final stage of the process, the journey is undertaken for a third time.
This is a silent pilgrimage over places that have been lived and are now being
shared. Summing up the first two journeys, it is closer to liturgical action than
either of them as it is a seal of mutual acceptance, a corporate offering. It is
66 GROUP SPIRITUALITY

shared in a special sense, because one person’s story has been accepted and
validated by somebody else, not automatically or uncritically, but in a way that is
empathetic and intuitive, a mutual action of taking responsibility for another
person and for oneself.
Once this last part of the journey has been travelled the pairs form into a circle,
holding hands. They move inwards to the centre of the circle until they are
standing close together with their arms around each other’s shoulders. Slowly
they sway, first to the right, then left, then right, left, right, etc. They keep this up
for a moment or two until it feels right to break the circle. Some of the couples
go and sit somewhere by themselves until it is time to do something else.

Spiritual versus religious

There is a difference!

In the last chapter we were examining ideas about ‘sacred’ space— times and
places which may be called holy because they are set apart to encourage personal
relationship and promote a sense of wholeness which we recognise as spiritual.
In itself, sacredness is usually considered to be an explicitly religious category;
people who talk about it approvingly are those who hold certain religious beliefs
themselves or at least respect the integrity of those who do. The last of the
workshops described at the end of this chapter involved a group of church
members, and although they would not (and did not) regard all of the things they
did at it as being religious, they were always conscious that this was a ‘Lent
course’; in other words, that it had a definite religious purpose and always
implied religion even when it was not occupied in actually saying so.
The religiousness which we are concerned with in this book is not that associated
with, and taught by, theology, however. It may be the predisposition for divine
revelation but it is not that revelation itself. What we are describing here is a way
of answering a very obvious and well-documented need for the spiritual, which,
as we have seen, is a very different thing from the state of mind which can only
be satisfied by belonging to any one section of society categorisable by
subscribing to a commonly held system of religious beliefs. The spirituality we
are talking about here may easily be blocked, or actually destroyed, by too rigid a
way of thinking and feeling about itself and the things which may ‘officially'
(that is by religious authorities) be held to be its business. The element of
personal searching, which is a kind of spiritual hunger for a wholeness that is
always just beyond one’s grasp, is not exactly encouraged by those who are
convinced they already know the answers to life’s questions, whether their
answers are religious or secular.
And yet it is a spiritual search, a hunger for spirituality. In a sense it is
spirituality itself, what the word actually means. The Concise Theological
Dictionary (Rähner and Vorgrimler, 1965) defines it as ‘that which is
 STORY INTO ARCHETYPE 67

characterised by an openness towards being and at the same time by an

awareness of what itself is and is not. The two fundamental aspects of the
spiritual correspond to these two opennesses—to universal being and to itself.’
This is a long way from being told exactly what to believe and how to believe it,
which is the specific aim of most Lent courses.
The course of workshops described attempted to break through the barrier
between religion and spirituality by dealing with a religious theme in a way that
encouraged the people taking part to draw on their own spiritual awareness
rather than their, and their leader’s, ‘bible knowledge’. By spiritual awareness, I
mean their experience of their own searching for wholeness, the circumstances
affecting and the personal relationships which fed it and kept it alive. For us, ‘the
spiritual’ meant many things. It was the dimension of meaning, purpose and
fulfilment; the origin of an ultimate and fundamental hoping; a power beyond
self which called for a response which established selfhood; a trust in others.
This group of workshops represented an attempt to bypass the conflict between a
religiousness which is text bound and distrusts imagination and the spirit of
adventure into the unknown, and a spirituality which is too timid to allow itself
to be seen except when it can claim strict religious orthodoxy. In Brian Thorne’s
phrase, it represents ‘therapy as a spiritual vocation’ (1997: 207).
In fact, this distinction between religion and spirituality is currently being
threatened from two quite separate directions, sociology and depth psychology.
Both of these involve an attack on what might be called the special nature of
religiousness, religion regarded as a separable category, qualitatively distinct
from other kinds of human experience and behaviour. The phrase ‘implicit
religion’ was introduced by Edward Bailey (1997, 1998) to mean religion which
is not spoken about, or even actually thought about, in specifically religious
terms. It denotes an understanding or experience of a religious kind which is not
described in language usually associated with religion. Bailey himself describes
it in three ways: as ‘commitment’, as ‘integrating foci’ and as ‘intensive
concerns with extensive effects’ (Bailey 1998). There is a widespread tendency
of people and things to be or to behave in religious ways without belonging to
any category of religious things or people. For instance, sociologists may talk of
‘the implicit religion of football’ or ‘implicitly religious vegetarianism’; how
religious must something be, they ask, before qualifying as a religion?
The concept of implicit religion may be seen as an attempt to come to grips
with one of the most baffling and intransigent problems facing sociologists of
religion—secularisation. This is the name given to the social process which, it is
claimed, has somehow superseded religion as a significant factor in western
awareness and in the social life that affects and is affected by that awareness.
There is no disagreement about the fact that religious institutions no longer play
the part that they did in social life; and many people in the west assume that this
is the inevitable result of widespread education in scientific ways of explaining
the world and scientistic propaganda about superior epistemologies to traditional
religious ones. ‘Official’ religion itself has largely become the preoccupation of
68 GROUP SPIRITUALITY

enthusiasts, people who do not expect to be understood by the wider society and
take refuge in scriptural warnings that to be authentically religious is always to
be a minority. Nevertheless, genuine religious behaviour still exists on a
widespread scale as a social force. The only difference is that the objects of its
devotion have changed and it calls itself by different names. Worship itself, both
as a state of mind and a social activity, is far from being dead. It is simply that
the socio-formative functions of religion are being carried out by other social
institutions.
Implicit religion is not to be thought of as an ersatz form of ‘the real thing’. It
constitutes an alternative way of dealing with the same personal and social state
of affairs that gives rise to explicitly religious expression and belonging. For
Bailey, implicitness does not imply an abandoning of the central realities which
are the heart of religious behaviour, but a determination to express religious
commitment in a social and cultural climate that is constantly aversive to it. From
this point of view implicitness signifies a greater depth and toughness than
explicitness does, simply because it demonstrates the survival of attitudes and
behaviour characteristic of religious belonging within a culture that refuses to
consider them significant. ‘Implicit’ is not a disguise but a validation. What is
being validated is a dimension of humanness that is vitally important for any
kind of sociological account, particularly the kind that dismisses the importance
of religion as a structural factor in contemporary social consciousness.
Psychologically speaking there is no clear division between spirituality and
religion. The difference, as Durkheim (1915) recognised when he turned his
attention to Australian aboriginal societies, is one of organisation of thought.
Spirituality is essentially a shared experience. Even hermits pray for and
acknowledge the prayers of others, and C.G.Jung was convinced that our own
‘private’ spirituality is simply a personal manifestation of a shared dimension of
psychological co-inherence existing at the unconscious level among all human
beings and uniting them by means of the collective unconscious (1968). Even the
organisational difference between structure and informality is extremely blurred,
as ‘spontaneous’ spiritual awareness becomes institutionalised and religious
belonging erupts unexpectedly in outbursts of spiritual activity that surprise
everyone, particularly those involved.
Psychologists as a whole have tended to think of spiritual (and consequently
religious) experience as abnormal, something slightly apart from ordinary
psychological functioning. Freud, for instance, regarded it as an artefact, created
by the ego in order to make the pressure exerted by the superego more bearable;
on its own, however, as a definable psychic reality, it does not and cannot exist,
there being no room for it within the tightly organised economy of the individual
psyche, according to which everything that happens of a psychological nature
remains strictly ‘within the system’ and gains its psychological reality from this
fact.
The evidence produced by Jung as to the existence of a psychological
dimension, operating at the most fundamental level, which is actually shared—
 STORY INTO ARCHETYPE 69

the ‘collective unconscious’—has led psychologists of the transpersonal school

to think again about the possibility of regarding spirituality as a psychological
function in its own right, rather than as the by-product or epiphenomenon of
something else which is scientifically more ‘real’. Certainly spirituality is un-
analysable; but, says Ken Wilber, this is because human psychic structure has
not yet evolved to a point at which it is capable of comprehending its workings.
Even now, however, psychologists must learn to take account of ‘experiences
involving an expansion or extension of consciousness beyond the usual ego
boundaries and beyond the limitation of time and space’ (Grof 1979: 155). Such
experiences will in time become intelligible to men and women to the same
extent that ‘normal’ psychic experience is at our present level of evolution.
Transpersonal psychology points to a time when we will have evolved as far as
truth itself, and when psychology and religion will be recognisable as one and
the same. This, of course, cannot be assessed in the way that our current
psychological life may be understood, but like psychoanalysis itself, it may be
theorised about in advance, the only difference being that Wilber’s transpersonal
map of psychic development is considerably more ambitious than Freud’s
intrapsychic one, involving as it does the eventual divinisation of the entire
human race (Wilber 1981).
Psychology, then, need not be private in the sense of individualistic; it need not
reduce either personal spirituality or organised religion to a disguised form of
something entirely intra—rather than interpsychic. As we have already seen, the
psychology of groups must take account of the phenomenon of shared
spirituality. On the other hand, religion may be implicit rather than explicit, and
within a secular society often is so. Whether implicit or explicit, however, it
originates in spiritual awareness that is shared among groups of people: group
spirituality must take account of group psychology. The ritual experiences of
groups need not be considered to be explicitly religious, and this is not how they
are usually interpreted by the people taking part in them.

• It was a ritual, if you like, but not really a religious one. It was something we
shared as a group.
• It just seemed a good way of showing how important some things are in your
life without trying to find words for it.
• I suppose using candles made it all a bit like church, but that’s why they were
used, isn’t it, to help us see how important it was, what we were doing I
mean.
• Do you mean the candles? I don’t care, I love candles anyway. They show
you care about something.
• If you mean the kind of ritual which is just for show, it definitely wasn’t that.
70 GROUP SPIRITUALITY

Implicit or explicit?

There is a connection between spiritual awareness and the kind of

experience described as implicitly religious!

Ideas about ‘who we are’ and ‘who other people are’ belong closely together in
the way that we look at life. The question about ‘who God is’ is intrinsic to both.
As has been so often said, it is the matter that concerns us most in life—whether
or not we may actually believe we know who he is. People who believe in God
go so far as to define him in these terms, as ‘the most important thing in my life’.
Those who do not have this knowledge (or aren’t sure whether they have it or
not) are often conscious of having what has been called a ‘God-shaped gap’
which plays more or less the same part in their thinking. In other words, it acts as
the final authority so far as the value and importance of everything else is
concerned. What they think about the things that happen to them, the people they
meet, the purpose and importance of life itself is governed by this central
authority which, for them, takes the form of a question—or rather the question.
For still more people the central authority is only implicitly religious: they do not
affirm either God or what he would stand for if he existed. Nevertheless, if they
are examined closely, as in the studies in implicit religion carried out by Edward
Bailey, these people are willing to admit that there is something or someone who
plays this organising role in their personal view of life; an all-important factor in
their awareness that is able to draw from the kind of ‘ultimate concern’ that is
Paul Tillich’s definition of faith (1962b: 1 ff.). This central commitment may
take a whole range of forms in particular people—extreme devotion to a football
team, total identification with a political philosophy, an ideal of professional
conduct, responsibility to one’s own family as the source of all real value and
significance. However (or more precisely wherever) it is recognised, it provides
their life with the central focus it needs in order to make unified sense of all the
many things that happen in it.
The psychologist George Kelly called these foci of personal meaning ‘core
constructs’. They are the pegs on which our appreciation of life hangs. Because
of the intensity of the significance which belongs to them, our most critical
concerns affect all the interconnected parts of our life, growing less powerful and
less effective the more peripheral they are. These are the cords that bind our
individual worlds together. They may not seem to exert much influence over the
ordinary everyday things we feel, do and plan; nevertheless they remain the
psychological driving force that gives purpose to life, its actions, experiences and
intentions, allowing us to know who we are. Because we know where particular
factors in our world belong in our ‘personal construct system’, we know where
we ourselves belong, and are able therefore to ‘position’ other people in the
world as we see it. Kelly points out that because we have first-hand knowledge
of giving shape to our own worlds by ranking our experiences in order of their
relevance to what, for us, is really important, we can imagine the same sort of
 STORY INTO ARCHETYPE 71

thing going on for other people as well, and take this into account in the way we
act and react towards them. This kind of ‘sociality’ is demonstrated most clearly
in the inter-relatedness which binds together the individual members of a group.

Telling my story

The opportunity of ‘make spiritual sense’ of things that have

happened to you has a psychologically healing effect.

It is immediately obvious how crucial imagination is in the process Kelly

describes. It is imagination that allows us to share our worlds and create a
construct system which is genuinely shared. In Kelly’s own words ‘To the extent
that one person construes the construction processes of another, he may play a
role in a social process involving the other person’ (1963:95). And so we return
to the construction of stories, this time at the most basic level of all.
The stories that people tell about themselves contain a good deal of information
that would be of interest to anybody who wanted to find out how they saw
themselves and their world. Although, when we are telling our life story to
someone else we try to be as objective as possible, the narrative which emerges
is always influenced by our views about the relative importance of the people
and events we describe and their significance to the story as a whole. From this
point of view our realism is, to say the least, selective. We use our dramatic
sense to choose what to put in and leave out, even sometimes to rearrange the
order in which things actually happened. In fact, our sense of personal drama
acknowledges a higher order than that required by historical accuracy, namely
the demand of a kind of meaning we ourselves recognise as inclusive. The ruling
principle of the life story turns out to be a certain kind of relationship among the
things that happen to us, one that can only be described as ‘personal
significance’.
Life stories are put together in order to draw attention to that relationship. Our
personal sense of the significance of these things is the reason why they are
included in the story we tell about ourselves. And this is a reflexive process, one
which goes on increasing the meaning of the tale we are telling simply by the
action of telling it. This is what the anthropologist Edmund Leach refers to as
‘metonymy’ (1976). It happens when we become aware of the symbolic content
of things we are talking (or even thinking) about; their reference to a meaning
which we perceive to be over-arching and inclusive. Thinking and talking about
these matters tends to make them more tangible to us. The process is a reflexive
one because the authority of what the symbol refers to feeds back to the events
perceived as symbolic, making them more real and authentic—more historically
valid in fact.
The essential thing to recognise is that these symbols are not ideas that have
been devised in accordance with a ready made ‘plan of reality’, but events, things
72 GROUP SPIRITUALITY

that have happened to people in their own lives and those of the people who are
important to them. Ideas, cultural codes designed for the interpretation of life, are
obviously important to us, governing the ways in which our experience is
expressed and communicated, but the subject matter, the thing remembered and
relived is the substance of our past life as we perceive it here and now in the part
it is playing within our experience of the present. This is the human thing that
provides a stepping stone into the unknown: the unknown past, influencing as it
does both present and future. What we know and can remember, and the form in
which we are able to remember it, carries us nearer to realities we are not yet
ready to envisage. It is a powerful token of those realities.
Those whose job involves listening to other people give an account of their
lives—psychotherapists, clergy, policemen and doctors for example—are often
conscious of the way the stories that they hear from clients, parishioners,
suspects and patients change the more they are repeated. This is not so surprising
in the case of people suspected of a crime; but what is noticeable is the degree to
which it happens with those who are not really conscious that they are doing it.
Sometimes stories become more confused as the narrator’s grasp on their own
sense of identity has grown looser over time. Sometimes they improve greatly,
and their improvement as stories reflects a personality that is rediscovering its
integrity. When someone says 'It has helped me to talk about this. Thank you for
listening!’, the listener knows that an important process has been taking place
within the speaker’s construct system towards greater flexibility of thought
processes, a more highly integrated and more organised view of the world. There
has been a change towards a greater awareness of, and a more positive
relationship with, something or someone whose presence at the centre of this
person’s life has given it new meaning, making it a proper life with a proper life
story.

The shape of a story

The significance of a story is inherent in its shape. This is an

archetype of meaning which gives weight to our attempts to order
our perception of the world we live in.

It is important to recognise that the shape of a story reflects the urgency of the
meaning it communicates. It also contributes to the clarity with which meanings
are held, affecting their ability to direct our lives, and giving our stories even
more significance, so that as time goes on they need less and less editing.
Psychotherapists report that patients whose narratives are jumbled and
incoherent are able to tell their life story much more succinctly and powerfully
when their state of mind has improved. Some of them point to the therapeutic
effect of encouraging unhappy and anxious people to spend their time thinking
 STORY INTO ARCHETYPE 73

about what has been creative and valuable in their lives and to try to tell their
stories from that point of view.
This is easier said than done, of course: in a sense this suggestion represents the
problem rather than the solution. It is precisely because we find ourselves unable
to lay hold of life in this way that we feel anxious and unhappy. Because we
have lost hold of the reality of what we have done and suffered we seem to have
lost our sense of who we really are, we can no longer say with any certainty, I am
the one who achieved, discovered, completed, went through, whatever it was we
did in the past. We have no sense of having managed to get where we are.
Something prevents us from making the past our past.
There are, of course, things we have done, and that have been done to us, that
we try to forget. This would appear to be true of everybody. Because it is too
painful to remember these things and the feelings they give rise to, we
acknowledge their presence reluctantly, taking care not to think about them very
much, or ever if we can help it. Other things, however, get wiped out altogether,
and any systematic attempt we make to remember them simply has the effect of
strengthening our resistance against them. In Freudian language they represent
material that has been efficiently repressed, completely removed from our
conscious awareness. However they are regarded, they constitute areas of life on
which we have managed to turn our backs.
This is, however, material of the very greatest importance for constructing our
‘house of life’. It consists of words, discoveries, experiences, judgements,
relating to the very source of life’s meaning and purpose. It cannot be blotted out
without affecting things that draw meaning and significance from their
association with it. These ‘lower level constructs’ may be allowed to remain
within the system, as they had no immediate reference to whatever has been
taken out—indeed their association may be at second, third or fourth hand.
Nevertheless, they constitute knowledge, understanding, a particular way of
perceiving reality which belongs to our personal construct system; which in a
sense is the system, because, understood from this point of view, the way in
which we make sense of what happens to us is itself an interchange between
meaning and experience, the first moving downwards to the business of living,
the second upwards to the source of value.
No wonder, then, that emotionally destructive experiences and events have a
draining effect on our sense of the world’s reality, seeing that the ways in which
we ourselves manage to make it real have been cut off at source; when for us,
love, joy, belonging, fulfilment, the peace of mind that comes with security, have
been ruled out of court because of their association with events that life has made
unthinkable. According to Marcuse (1984), Freud drew attention to the
disorganised, incoherent stories told him by his patients before he began treating
them. These stories had somehow to be given the kind of coherence that could
only come when those patients were willing and able to take responsibility for
them. ‘At the end—at the successful end—one has come into possession of one’s
own story’ (quoted by Cox and Theilgaard 1987: 60). This can involve an
74 GROUP SPIRITUALITY

immense amount of work as ‘Psychotherapy is concerned with a story which is

so disturbing that however painful the telling may be, it must be attempted’ (Cox
and Theilgaard 1987: 59). Until we have managed to restore contact with what
has been quite systematically forgotten, our original sense of things belonging
together, of having something of the greatest importance to refer to and be
connected with, will remain beyond our grasp.
Sometimes this is a relatively short-lived experience. In some cases things
seem to come back of their own accord, as if the organism had taken steps to
defend itself against the impact of intolerable events by simply suspending its
awareness until it can tolerate something of the actuality of whatever has
happened without too great an emotional reaction, too much pain, in fact.
Sometimes it takes a more sustained effort, although not necessarily one that
involves a head-on approach. Again, this is something that professional listeners
learn to recognise.

I can remember one young woman who came to see me in hospital because
she wanted someone to listen to her story. Her marriage had broken down
and her two small children taken into care: ‘I just want you to listen
because so many things have been happening. I can’t make sense of my
life, and I want you to help me.’ I couldn’t help her. I couldn’t make any
sense of it either. She was only young, in her late thirties, but more things
seemed to have happened to her than most people experience in an entire
life-time. Some of what had happened to her, an isolated incident which
had occurred some weeks after disaster had struck, had stuck in her mind
and she kept repeating it as if it somehow held the key to everything else. I
could see that there was a connection between this and the main incidents
in her story; but I couldn’t really see how it could be anything like so
important, so vital for her story, as she obviously thought it was. I said I
was puzzled about this; why did she lay such stress on it? It couldn't have
caused the marital breakdown, could it? I was sorry, but I didn’t really
understand what she was getting at. I’d like to help, of course, but...
The look she gave me held both frustration and contempt. At least, that
is how I received it; it may have only been pity for my obtuseness. She got
up and left the room without saying a word. I didn’t expect to see her again.
Perhaps it really had been pity, however, because eventually she did come
back to see me; but not yet.
At last, six months after the original interview, she felt she was ready to
answer my question. She sat down, had a cup of coffee, and proceeded to
put me in the picture. This time things were much clearer, much more
identifiable as a story. The incident which had stood out so clearly because
it was so extremely significant to her, while seeming unconnected with the
other events she had described, had fallen into place with quite remarkable
effect as the keystone of the narrative, the factor that enabled it to function
properly as a story. For weeks after the events she had described, she had
 STORY INTO ARCHETYPE 75

been carrying all the parts of her puzzle around with her and not known
how to begin the task of putting them all together. One thing she did know,
however. In trying to ‘take it all in’, she ran the risk of coming up against a
good deal of psychological conflict. The connections were difficult
because they were connections with pain. The incident stood out because
its meaning was too painful to be clearly presented, and had to take on some
kind of disguise. The incoherence and confusion were not only caused by
pain, that of the breakdown in her family relationships, they were also a
way of protecting herself from pain—the agony she was bound to feel once
she clearly understood all that had actually happened.
(Hospital chaplain, personal communication)

Why had this woman struggled so hard to get her meaning—or lack of meaning
—across to the chaplain? Why, considering the pain involved in remembering, was
she so relieved when things became clearer and she could remember again? The
answer, of course, lies in the fact that the need to understand is so fundamental to
human experience that it takes priority over almost every other human need, even
that of avoiding discomfort. Avoidance of pain is of course an immediate
response, and if meaning is too painful, measures will be taken to change it and
make it less so. Sooner or later, however, it will find expression and fulfilment.
Within the sphere of human meaning, these two things belong together, so that
to express a need to understand already implies a conscious effort towards
understanding, and at a lower level of awareness a process of cognitive
construction which will eventually come up with an answer to the problem, a
resolution of the ‘cognitive dissonance’ caused by the disturbing pressure exerted
by the presence of unanswered questions. The brain is a problem-solving
mechanism; and one of the ways it solves problems concerning the meaning of
life involves the creation and reformulation of stories.
This is not to say that these stories are simply fantasy and have no basis in
actual events in their historical order. Nevertheless we are the ones who put them
together, we are masters of our stories, not they of us. This is reasonable enough.
The underlying meaning of life is not entirely dependent upon the order in which
things happen to us—as Kierkegaard says ‘Life is lived in the future and
understood in the past’ (1959). In a sense, events are the raw material out of
which we create our own meaning—with a little guidance from the stories of
others, whatever form these may take—as theories, doctrines, political
manifestos, etc. The Christian gospels are examples of stories which have this
guiding and shaping effect upon our own self-accounting.

The young woman came back to me to celebrate the fact that instead of a
jumble of memories and feelings, she now had a story she could tell
herself. The incident she had told me about in such a frantic way to begin
with turned out to be the heart of the matter, as she had sensed all along. With
the passage of time, she had felt able to look closely at its meaning and
76 GROUP SPIRITUALITY

implications, instead of simply turning the event itself over and over in her
mind. When she could bear to probe further, the solution came quite
easily. With it came the possibility of meaning for the whole series of
events which had stunned and bewildered her. It was the presence of
something that didn’t ‘fit’ and had to be worked on that enabled her to
identify her pain and eventually come to terms with it.

In this case the process of reorganisation of meaning seems to have simply

involved the passage of time. Perhaps it could have been assisted in some way;
perhaps it was. In some cases, certainly, it needs special encouragement. This
woman had gone a lot of the way by herself, working hard to arrive at a past she
could make sense of and learn to live with. Stephen Crites calls this ‘approaching
a past’. He says it is the way in which an individual becomes a self. Selfhood is
not something given from the beginning. It is something we achieve by
interpreting our experience and building on our interpretations. Thus, ‘Self is a
kind of aesthetic construct, recollected in and with the life of experience in
narrative fashion…and the more complete the story, the more integrated the
self.’ He goes on to comment that ‘The poignant search for roots that is such a
prominent feature of our rootless age testifies to the acute unease a human being
can feel without a coherent story of a personal past.’ He contrasts contemporary
western society with times and places where ‘a person’s life-story is so
powerfully supported by the ethos and mythos of the community’ that people
think of themselves ‘as if they were as highly defined and constant in time as the
house they have always lived in’ (1986: 162).
This is not in any way to suggest that experience of actual events is not
important for the self s understanding of itself. However it is how the self uses
this essential raw material that determines the kind of story we tell ourselves
about ourselves. We can use our story-telling skill to convince ourselves of the
truth of things we are really aware of being untrue. In a sense we have to do this
in order to clear the story space we need of all the material that is irrelevant ‘All
storytelling tries to deny and be silent about just as much as it strains to convey’
(Wyatt cited by Sarbin 1986:208). As in all art, the realism of the personal story
is selective; but, as in all art, its truth is emotional or aesthetic rather than literal,
and self stories which are to be convincing must somehow reflect emotional
truthfulness if they are to possess the sincerity they need to convince their listeners
and, of course, the speakers themselves.

Narrative and world construction

From a therapeutic point of view the most important characteristic of the personal
story is in fact its nature as a construct. At one level, the basic one, it is always
ritualised—in other words presented in a form in which the underlying message
may be presented as graphically as possible, because it represents a personal view
of the meaning and significance of human experience. If the meaning and
 STORY INTO ARCHETYPE 77

significance can be modified in any way, the experience will change

retrospectively; and this entire equation depends upon a view that is personal and
can consequently be changed. Personal stories are modifiable rituals. Certainly
facts which cannot be changed lie at the root of many, if not most, of our
anxieties about life; we are aware that things exist which govern our experience
in ways we have no control over at all. And so we tell ourselves that we live in
‘the real world’ and must suffer the consequences of the fact.
This is true, of course, but this real world is one in which our happiness is not,
in the final analysis, a matter of fact (or ‘the facts’) but of interpretation. The
state of mind in which we approach life depends upon how we construe the truth
about what has happened to us. If the realism of these events is too great for us to
bear, we need to convince ourselves of the specious nature of their ability to
control the way we look at life. Somehow or other they must not be allowed to
impose on us a single inflexible interpretation of their meaning and significance.
The way we do this is by subjecting the facts, whatever they may be, to the
authority even greater than theirs, some kind of transcendent truthfulness that can
only be portrayed symbolically.
The fact that we can so often bring this off is actually a sign of strength, not
weakness. Human beings are creatures who are able to change the world for
themselves by altering their attitude towards it. ‘To the living creature’, says
George Kelly, ‘the universe is real, but it is not inexorable, unless he chooses to
construe it that way’ (1963: 8). As Epictetus, the stoic philosopher put it, ‘Men
are not disturbed by things but by the view they take of them’ (1983, para. 5).
Quite early in our life experience, we discover that we can change the way things
are for us by locating them in a revised version of our life narrative by expanding
the narrative to accommodate them. This does not mean that we have to deny their
importance in any way—quite the opposite, because we have to take proper
account of them in order to move on from them into a new stage in the story.
Events that are so traumatic that our current arrangements for living, and dying,
are completely shattered by them, and we are stopped short in our tracks, can
come to signify in retrospect not the end of our story but simply the culmination
of a stage in its plot. Without this the story cannot continue and develop. What
once appeared to make nonsense of the whole enterprise of story telling turns out
to be the necessary condition for a new and better story, in which genuine
endings allowed beginnings which were really new, not merely an extension of
the former state of affairs, and old questions received new answers. We develop
a sense of what Havens has called our ‘history-laden present’ (cited by Cox and
Theilgaard 1987).
This, of course, is the shape of the stories we tell as well as those we live. It is
the shape of folk tales, myths and fairy stories, as well as novels, short stories
and epic poems. As we have seen, it is the basic order of events contained in
religious rituals of all kinds. Experiences of disintegration are contained by the
imagery of wholeness; questions about the meaning of life and the
78 GROUP SPIRITUALITY

unintelligibility of human experience are answered in the light of a greater

understanding, a wider view.
As we have seen, in dramatherapy this kind of healing by story provides
opportunities for the healing of stories. In these workshops vivid experiences of
encounter with meaning are the building blocks for new stories and the
reconstruction of old ones. They were devised as a way of deconstructing self-
narratives which had become rigidly attached to particular interpretations of
what had happened to the narrators. The past can hang as heavily round our
necks as the Ancient Mariner’s albatross.

Spirituality rituals
At the beginning of this chapter we were looking at a group exercise to explore
the experience of exchanging personal narratives. This took the form of a
‘spirituality ritual’. It was a ceremony performed in order to represent a spiritual
reality—that of the meaning of human lives expressed in personal stories.
Because life is a historical process this ceremony embodied a linear movement
through space. It was described at this point in the book because the chapter as a
whole is about the way we are conscious of our lives as moving through time. This
rite uses the language of space to present the language of time.
Ritual itself, however, is not time-bound; the significance of using movement
and gesture to express shared meaning transcends limitations of time and space.
Spirituality rituals do not concern themselves solely with historical time or
geographical space.
Here are some ‘meaningful ceremonies’ which use different kinds of ordinary
human experience to embody a sense of extraordinary significances:

Depth (moving inwards to the centre)

1 Stand in as wide a circle as possible, leaving as much space as you can

between yourself and whoever is standing to your left and right. Hold a
baton in your hand.
2 Turn left or right to face one of the people next to you. (This means that
successive people have to turn alternative ways, so that you end up with a
circle consisting of pairs of people who are now face to face, while
remaining some distance from each other.)
3 Take it in turns to speak to your partner, saying who you are and why you
have come to the workshop. When you have both done this exchange your
batons.
4 Take two paces sideways towards the centre of the circle, thus making it
smaller. Now tell your partner something else about yourself—the kind of
person you think you are, the kind of people you like being with. When you
 STORY INTO ARCHETYPE 79

Figure 3.2 Depths

have done this, let your partner tell you about him or herself in the same
way. Exchange batons again.
5 Take two more paces sideways. Tell your partner something about yourself
which you feel is more personal. Then listen to your partner and exchange
batons.
6 Take the necessary number of sideways steps until everyone in the group is
within touching distance of everyone else.
7 Turn to the person behind you and look at each other. You needn’t speak but
give them your baton.
8 Stand as closely to everyone as you can, with your arms round one another.
Sway to the music.
9 At a signal (a gong?) move backwards into the positions occupied at the
beginning, when you were standing ‘alone’ in the wider circle.
10 A candle is placed in the centre. Spend a few minutes looking at it and
thinking about the rite you have been involved in. What name would you
give it? Share your ideas with the group.

Ascents (the cliff face)

1 Stand in a line along one wall of the room, facing into the room. If you are
at one of the two ends of the row, take a candle and hold it.
80 GROUP SPIRITUALITY

Figure 3.3 Ascents

2 When you hear the signal, move forward a pace (or two according to the size
of the room), leaving the two who are holding candles standing in the same
place.
3 If you are now at one or other end of the row, take a candle and light it from
the person behind you who blows his or her candle out.
4 When you hear the signal again, move forward once more, leaving the two
people with candles behind you.
5 If you are now at one or other end of the row, take a candle and light it from
the person behind you who will now blow their candle out.
6 Continue in this way until there are only three people in the row. If you are
the one in the middle wait for the signal and move to the apex of the triangle,
lighting your candle from one of the two people below you, both of whom
now blow their candles out.
7 Stand silently for a few moments listening to the music, everybody facing up
to the apex, where the one with the lighted candle stands facing outward as
the spearhead of the group.
8 Starting from the two people next to the candle bearer, light your candle
from the person next in line above you.
9 When all the candles are lit, place yours on the spot where you are standing
and go and sit in a circle round the flaming pyramid you have made.

Vulnerability (Scylla and Charybdis)

1 Divide into two tightly knit groups in which people have their arms round
one another's shoulders or waists.
2 As a group, take possession of your half of the room by moving round it to
stake your claim to it.
 STORY INTO ARCHETYPE 81

Figure 3.4 Vulnerability

3 As a group, come to the edge of your territory opposite the other group and
stand there swaying, almost but not quite touching their group.
4 One person at a time, leave your group and join up with your opposite
number from the other group.
5 As a pair, make your way between the two groups.
6 When you have managed to ‘thread the needle’, join the other couples who
have made the journey and form a ring round the space where the rival
groups were opposed to each other.
7 Hold hands in the ring. Sway gently one way and then the other. Do this
gently so that you can find the point of balance for the group.

Struggle (the tree and the stream, the rock and the sea)

1 Divide into two groups, one holding hands and standing in a line, the other
standing together in a tight circle, each person holding on to the two
adjacent people.
82 GROUP SPIRITUALITY

2 If you are a member of the first group, follow your leader as she/he leads
you round the room, gradually moving closer to the second group who are
standing together in the middle of the room without moving.
3 If you are a member of the second group, try to stand your ground as the
first group pushes against you. Tighten your hold on one another. Now try to
stretch your arms out to include as many people as you can reach and hug
them to yourself as the first group surrounds your group and tries to uproot
you. They will struggle with you. Hold your ground and when you are all
ready, hold out your hands to them and welcome them into your group.
4 Absorb the ring of people around you.
5 Take somebody’s hand and lead them out away from the knot of people. As
they come out they will lead someone else out, and so on, until there is a
string of people, all holding hands.
6 Follow the line of people round the room as it forms into a circle. You are
all still holding hands.
7 Squeeze the hand of the person on your left; wait until the squeeze returns to
you from the right. Repeat this, going in the other direction.

Figure 3.5 Struggle

 STORY INTO ARCHETYPE 83

Eternity (‘I saw Eternity the other night . . .’)

1 Form two concentric rings of people, the inner containing fewer people than
the outer and holding lighted candles in their hands.
2 Members of the inner group turn outwards to face the outer circle. Begin to
move in a clockwise direction.
3 Members of the outer group hold hands and move round in the other
direction, facing inwards.
4 Move round in concentric circles, in opposite directions but at the same
speed.
5 Vary the speeds at which the two circles are revolving. (This is done by the
outer circle going faster or slower while the inner one continues to move at
the speed it began with.)
6 Members of the inner group—as the outer group moves round you, start to
give them your candles. Go on doing this until you have given them all
away.
7 Members of the outer group—take the hand of the person who has given you
their candle and draw them into the outer circle, to dance round it with you.

Figure 3.6 Eternity

These are a few examples of the kind of ritual movement that are the staple of
the ‘spirituality workshops’ described in the next section. They are not workshops,
simply expressive ceremonies which form part of a larger and less formal
occasion, one which is more exploratory and spontaneous, and less focused.
84 GROUP SPIRITUALITY

These rites are, in fact, a vivid way of encapsulating something diffuse and
evasive which somehow escapes literal description. They are, in fact, acted
symbols. They take the form of stories without words; only the one described at
the beginning of this chapter actually involves any kind of spoken
autobiographical material. The focusing effect of ritual provides a way of
clearing a space for the meaning which inspires both personal stories and the
self-awareness of the group as a whole—in other words, its own story. Things
are encompassed here which cannot adequately be described. Life is rescued
from contingency and incompleteness and becomes a formal expression of the
principle of meaning, which is actually the underlying form of things, the
fundamental presence of shape in both ideas and words. Here, the formal is used
to express form. It does so by embodying it—which is precisely how it occurs in
life.
These ceremonies, and every imaginable rite of such a kind, are ways of
presenting prototypical themes by embodying them in meaningful action and
movement. In effect rituals like these interrupt the flow of time in order to
introduce at least the idea, and sometimes the experience, of eternity. In this
way, the progression, which is our life story as this is spread over so many
months, years and decades, becomes a single unitary experience—an event in
depth. This imaged ‘meaning of life’ is shared because it corresponds to the life
experience of women and men throughout the world.
One way of expressing this fundamental recognition of the kind of truth which
belongs to simply being human is to say that it is archetypal. Archetypes are
picture stories dealing with experiences, awarenesses, kinds of understanding
which are essentially shared by the entire human race. In archetypes this
understanding is revealed as corporate. The aim of ritual is to take this
unconscious knowledge and incorporate it within the conscious awareness of
individuals and groups, and individuals through groups.

Spirituality workshops
Three workshops about animals, birds, fish and insects.

I
What shall we do with people?

1 Circle the space, saying hello to people as you move round.

2 Still moving round, take on the role of an insect, bird, fish or animal.
3 Find your special 'habitat', then join up with the others in the centre of the
room.
4 Form a circle and play the following game. Take turns to say what kind of
creature you are and show the gesture by which you can be recognised. Now
 STORY INTO ARCHETYPE 85

go round the ring, beginning with the first creature and ending with the last
one, taking turns to show your ‘call sign’ (identifying gesture). The game
itself begins when somebody makes someone else’s call sign. If you see
your sign being made you first of all answer by making it yourself, and then
make someone else’s; they have to reply with theirs before making someone
else’s —and so it goes on for as long as you like.
5 The leader reads a story about a bird, fish, animal or insect. 6 Join up with
three or four others and take some time creating a short drama (two to three
minutes) which includes three main characters: the Lawgiver (male), the
Wise Creature (female), the Trickster (a player of games), and which is about
a problem concerning the relationship between people and creatures of other
kinds.
7 Appoint a spokescreature to share the drama with the others or, better still,
act it for them. When you have done this, place a token from your drama in
the centre of the room.
8 Compose a group rhythm and stand round the pile of tokens, beating your
rhythm out in unison.
9 Write a joint letter to the human race, summoning it to appear before the
Court of Creatures on such and such a date. Give one of the creatures
represented the job of delivering this. He or she will be the Messenger.
10 Use your call signs to signal farewell to everyone.

II
The trial

1 Say hello to people ‘as yourself.

2 Move round the room as the creature you are impersonating and greet the
other creatures as you meet them.
3 Pay attention as the Messenger calls you to order. The Messenger gives each
of the four kinds of creature—animals, birds, fish and insects—its own
‘group call’.
4 Start making your own call and gather up together with your own group, so
that there are four groups of creatures, each occupying a different part of the
room.
5 Work with the other members of your group to develop a characteristic
dance, using the various percussion and wind instruments available. When
you are ready, perform your dance for the other creatures, who will stand in
a circle around you.
6 Clear the circle, the trial is about to begin. The Messenger tells everybody
that the human being has refused to appear before them. She/he places four
representative objects in the centre of the circle: a briefcase, a teapot, a
mobile phone and a driving licence (for instance).
86 GROUP SPIRITUALITY

7 Join with everybody present, apart from the Messenger, in taking on the
following personae in succession: the Lawgiver (pronouncing on right and
wrong), the Wise Creature (possessing insight and knowledge of life), the
Trickster (an anarchic character, with street wisdom).
8 Speak to humanity from the point of view of these three archetypes, waiting
for people to finish talking as the first of them before moving on to the
second and then the third. When you have finished, the Messenger will
attempt to reply for humanity.
9 Decide with your group whether you are willing or able to forgive the
human race. Show the degree of your acceptance by placing a candle at the
appropriate distance from the representative objects in the centre of the room.
10 Sit silently and listen to the music.
11 Say goodbye, first to your group members, then to everyone.

III
The parliament of creatures

1 When you have said hello to people, take on your role as a non-human
creature.
2 Sit in a wide circle, as you were doing in the last workshop.
3 Take turns to say your name and the creature whose part you are playing.
4 Shout your group call. Which group shouts loudest?
5 Start to move round the room in character. Use your group call to find your
fellow group members and settle with them in the part of the room you selected
in the first of these workshops.
6 As a group, prepare your message for the whole assembly about what you
consider is your contribution to life and the universe.
7 Write your joint message down in large letters on a piece of card. Use the
materials provided—finger paints, crayons, modelling clay, coloured paper
etc.—to illustrate what you have written.
8 Place your card in the centre of the room.
9 Walk round, looking at the cards and reading the messages presented on
them.
10 Go back to the circle and start to dance round as the creatures you represent.
Begin slowly and simply so that everyone can join in.
11 Sit down and listen to a story read by the leader.
12 Say goodbye to everybody.

The following is a more explicitly religious workshop format (i.e. a series of

workshops organised around a single, explicitly religious theme).
 STORY INTO ARCHETYPE 87

Journey to the cross

The six workshops briefly described here represent a series of Lent meetings
shared by four local churches (Anglican, Baptist, Methodist and Roman
Catholic). They concentrate on exploring people’s consciousness of eternity
within the present moment, using the power of metaphor to ‘touch the heart and
awaken the emotions’. Although taking place more than two years ago, I still
experience them extremely vividly, mainly because they concentrate on
experience and not argument, registering at the level of feeling rather than
intellect. They were happenings that involved me before I was able to draw
conclusions from them.
Although I myself acted as leader, I designed the sessions to depend on the
imagination and creativity of the people taking part, most of whom were, to
begin with, slightly startled by this approach to setting up a Lent course. I had
carefully let it be known that things would be arranged rather differently from
usual; for one thing, there certainly wouldn’t be rows of chairs facing a lectern.
This being the case, would anyone actually come? As it turned out an average of
forty people attended all six sessions.

Session one: ‘wells of living water’

People sat on chairs arranged in a wide circle, taking in the whole floor space at
a church community centre. The leader explained the idea behind the sessions,
which were to be about personal discovery rather than instruction. This didn't
mean that people were going to be expected to do or say things they were
uncomfortable with. It wouldn’t be embarrassing. It would be fun. He said a
short extempore prayer, asking God to bless the session.

1 Stay sitting in a circle. Each person says his or her name, plus two other
words—one describing what it feels like to be here, and one characterising
Lent. Somebody, a volunteer, reads the story about Jesus and the Samaritan
woman, from John 4.5–20 (‘You haven’t got a bucket’).
2 Walk round the room finding as many different places to go as you can.
Imagine that somewhere in this room there is water. So go and find it for
yourself. What kind of water is it? A river, a well, the sea itself? What’s it
like there? Are there waves, rocks, strong currents? Is it a deep well, hewn
out of the rock? Have a good look. What would you like to do with it, do
you think? It welcomes you to make contact with it. So why not do that…
dabble your toes or cup your hands; plunge in and swim around. What does
it feel like? How does it taste? Why don’t you try splashing somebody?
(After all, you can’t hurt them.)
3 Form into a small group with four other people. Tell the others in your group
about the water you have been imagining. Did it remind you of anything in
your life? If it did, you can share some of your water with them. Mime doing
88 GROUP SPIRITUALITY

this by taking them to the place in the room where the water is and showing
it to them. Let them lead you to the parts of the room where they, too,
discovered water.
4 Move back into the large circle. There’s some music playing, so listen to it
quietly for a moment or two. Does it sound like water at all? (Actually it was
the waterfall scherzo from the ‘Manfred’ Symphony by Tchaikovsky.) Have
you anything you feel you would like to share with the whole group? Any
memories or reflections? How did the water make you feel?
5 Mime something about water, using the space in the centre of the group to
do this. (It was some time before anybody summoned up the courage to do
this.) Join up with the other people’s mimes, so that you create a moving
picture of what water can be like.
6 Move round in a circle, each person following their partner. After you have
completed the circuit of the room twice, stand still. Everybody in the circle
takes one step sideways towards the centre, turns to his or her neighbour,
saying goodbye to them. You can hug them if they don’t mind. Otherwise be
sure to shake their hand.

Session two: the living past

There was less movement in this session, which tended to be quieter and more
reflective. Perhaps people were still thinking about last week’s session, or the
sight of the other members of the group reminded them of things they had been
feeling then. The leader started things off with a short prayer.

1 Sitting in the large circle turn to the people on both sides of you and say
hello to them. Then find somebody you haven't met properly and go across
and greet them, telling them your name and asking them theirs.
2 Still in the large circle join in the game explained to you by the leader. It is
called ‘Indian Chief’.

This game involves everybody present. Each person takes it in turn to adopt the
name of an imaginary chieftain which is immediately recognisable by her or his
title. (In other words, you have to behave in a way that suggests the name you
have chosen—e.g. ‘Big Chief Throwing Spear’ throws an imaginary spear at the
same time as mentioning her or his name.) After everybody has decided who
they are going to ‘be’ (which isn’t really very hard to do, because you can choose
to be ‘Big Chief Doing Nothing’ or even ‘Big Chief I’m Off Home’ if you
want!) the game itself can begin. In this people communicate with one another
across the circle by miming their own adopted name, following this by imitating
someone else’s. When the other person sees their own ‘name’ being mimed, they
answer by repeating it to show they’ve received the message. Then they
themselves imitate another person’s ‘call sign’ —and so on. It is a game that
seems simple, but causes a good deal of hilarity because no one ever gets it quite
 STORY INTO ARCHETYPE 89

right. It was designed to be about identity, role playing and fun—mainly fun.
When everybody is tired of it, the leader asks for a volunteer to read the Bible
passage, which is Ecclesiastes 3.

3 Find a partner and get them to promise to keep their eyes shut (if they’re not
sure they can do this, use a handkerchief or a scarf to blindfold them). Take
their arm and lead them around the room, in and out of other people (who
are also leading or being led). When you have spent three or four minutes
doing this, swap roles so that ‘leaders’ are now ‘led’, and continue for the
same amount of time. Then go and sit down somewhere with your partner.
What did it feel like to be led? To lead?
4 With your partner follow an imaginary path across the room. As you walk
along, tell them the story of your own life journey, using the markers
provided (small candles or pebbles) to indicate staging posts—crucial
changes of direction—along the way. On your way back, give your partner
permission to alter the position or order of your markers to show how she/he
sees your story. Then reverse the process. Sit down and talk to each other
about what came out of this for you.
5 Sitting in the main circle listen to the music (in this case Bruckner’s Sixth
Symphony, second movement). When it has finished say whether or not it
reminded you of anything. Give your partner permission to tell the others
anything about the session you would like to share with them.
6 Turn to your partner and say goodbye in a way that suits you both. Is there a
word or a phrase you’d like to give them to take away with them? Then say
goodbye to everybody else.

Session three: here and now

We are moving into the central part of the course now. In this and the next
session the action concentrates more on the present experience of those taking part.
People become more conscious of who they are and what they are taking part in.
As before, the leader begins with a short extempore prayer.

1 Standing in a circle throw an imaginary ball across the space to someone on

the other side. As you throw it say what your name is. When they catch it
they will throw it on to someone else, saying who they received it from but
not who they are throwing it to: ‘My name is Andrew. I received this ball
from Joan and I’m throwing it to you.’ (at this stage you don’t need to know
the name of the person you’re throwing the ball to, only who it was you
‘caught’ it from —and they’ve just told you that!). After a while you will
have remembered enough names to carry out the whole process: ‘My name
is Andrew. I received this ball from Joan and I’m throwing it to Tracy.’
2 Move about in the room finding your own position in it. You are all
members of one football team. (Yes, it’s a very big team!) Move about in
90 GROUP SPIRITUALITY

different directions, passing the ball between you. You can shout directions
to other players, telling them where you want them to go. Enjoy the field,
the space, the weather, which is just right for the game—fresh and bright,
with a slight nip in the air. It’s your field, so show off a bit, practise your
skills as a footballer—or simply wander about, calling to your friends! Now
the game’s going to start, so take up your position. How confident do you
feel? If you’re on top form, put yourself in an ‘attack’ part of the field, as far
away from the safety of your own goal as you can get. If you don’t feel as
confident as that, find a part of the field suitable for the degree of confidence
you are feeling. When you’ve done this stand there for a moment. Is this
where you’d really like to be standing?
3 Sitting in the circle listen to the Bible reading from Luke 14.7–34. Listen to
the music. This time it is piano music by Erik Satie, followed by Fauré’s
Pavane.
4 In groups of five or six people make ‘living pictures’ which represent the
way your life is organised at the moment. Each person in the group takes it
in turn to cast the others in roles embodying the most important
relationships, concerns, joys and sorrows in their life as they themselves see
it. (Because you only have four or five people to work with, you must
choose very carefully what you want to include in your picture.) Tell the
others what it is you want each of them to represent for you and get them to
arrange themselves around you to form a living sculpture with you in the
centre. Go on to place each person at a degree of distance from yourself
corresponding to the relative value and significance of these vitally
important persons within your life.
5 In the large circle again. If you want to you can say something about what it
was like to do this. As long as you have their permission you may try
swapping roles with one of the people you have just been working with so
that each of you can address the group as if you were the other person.
(People who are really shy sometimes appreciate having someone ‘stand in’
for them like this!) Now begin to say goodbye to everybody, taking care to
let them know that you appreciate their willingness to share with you.
6 Somebody leads off in the conga, dancing round the room in an ever-
decreasing circle and ending up with people hugging one another in the
crush.

Session four: into the valley

As Easter draws nearer, the feelings and thoughts presented begin to reflect more
and more the imagery of the Cross and Resurrection. People’s awareness of the
liturgical significance of Lent, which has been more or less implicit in the
preceding sessions starts to come out into the open. By now, everybody is getting
used to a medium that depends on images rather than explanations; acted ideas
which take a paragraph to describe in writing but are realised in a few minutes or
 STORY INTO ARCHETYPE 91

even seconds in action— ‘don’t tell me, show me’. Again, the session begins
with a prayer, this time the 1662 Book of Common Prayer’s Collect for the
Second Sunday in Lent.

1 Sitting in a circle ask your neighbours on each side how they have been
doing during the week since you last met.
2 Standing in a circle refresh your memory of people’s names, using the
following game format. You can say the name of the person who is standing
either on your right or your left, and they have to answer by saying either
your name or that of whoever is standing next to them on the other side. In
this way, the succession of names can move either right or left around the
circle. In fact, of course it never gets far before someone sends it in the
opposite direction by answering their neighbour back (e.g. Gillian, Mary,
Gary, Tony, Ikbal, Tony, Gary, Mary, Gillian, etc.). This happens very often,
as people soon get tired of simply passing names on and try out various
ways of getting their neighbour to reverse order by saying his or her name in
a range of different tones of voice—pleadingly, seductively, impatiently,
etc. It’s a game which provides quite a few opportunities for acting various
emotions in ways that invariably cause laughter. If you’re not careful it can
go on too long.
3 Everybody walks anywhere they want to, taking up all the available space. Try
to walk as far away from anybody else as you can manage. Then gradually
begin to walk just a little nearer…and nearer… until you are actually quite
close to the rest.
4 Stand in a straight line with everybody else. You are all standing on the bank
of an imaginary river. When the leader shouts ‘river!’, everyone jumps one
pace forward; on the command ‘bank!’, you all jump back. (Your object is
to do exactly as the leader says; his (or hers) is to catch you out by giving
the same command twice running.)
5 Somebody reads from Mark 8.31–38, 9.1 (The Prophecy of the Passion).
6 Back in the circle sway gently from side to side with your arms round one
another’s shoulders. Try to find a balance so that you can feel safe doing this
and enjoy the gentle motion and the safety of being connected with the
group.
7 In small groups talk to the others about a time in your life when you felt
weak and discouraged. When everybody has shared, go round the group
talking about how it feels to be courageous and strong. Choose two of the
stories you’ve just heard—one about weakness and one about strength—and
act these within the group, making sure that nobody feels pressurised to take
part if they’d rather just sit and watch. Take time to de-role from the dramas
by speaking to the others in the group as themselves rather than the roles
they have just been playing.
8 Sitting all together in one circle. Have you anything you would like to share
with the whole group? Try to look back on the whole session. Recall it so
92 GROUP SPIRITUALITY

that you can say goodbye to it and the things that happened in it, until you
want to remember them again. So say goodbye to everybody in your own
way.

Before the circle begins to break up, the leader reminds people that there are two
more sessions to go before Good Friday and Easter. Could everybody bring
something next week that reminds them in a personal way of the Easter story?
Something they could give to the person sitting next to them?

Session five: supper

1 Walking round the room say hello to all the people you meet.
2 All sitting in a large circle make yourself as comfortable as you can. Form a
‘prayer circle’ by mentioning someone’s name and offering this up to God,
along with everyone else. Think of them sitting in the circle with you all and
praying with you. The leader announces that there is going to be ‘a kind of
supper’. Meanwhile have people remembered to bring a gift for their
neighbour? If not, they’ll have to use their imagination. Certainly everybody
present is going to have something to take away with them when they leave.
Turn to your neighbour and explain what it is that you have brought him or
her. (If it is something tangible you can present it to them; you can still do this
even if it isn’t.)
3 Somebody reads the story of the Last Supper (Matthew 26.26–29).
4 There is music (the Love Scene from Berlioz’s Romeo and Juliet).
5 In small groups The cup of blessing which we bless’. What do these words
mean to you? What is it like for you to give things? How do you feel
receiving them? If you had a very important gift to give someone, how
would you present it? Try some of these ceremonies out among yourselves.
6 Working all together, put together a ceremony symbolising the search for
and eventual discovery of the Holy Grail. (You might want to set up two or
more groups to discuss how you are going to do this. Remember, however,
that in drama people tend not to know how to do things until they actually
find themselves doing them. The courage, and the reward, is in actually
taking the plunge.)
7 Back in the large circle take hands and pray together about sharing what we
have with others; pray for the hungry people of the world; for those who are
sick and in pain; for those who are abandoned and homeless; for any who
feel excluded from God’s love. In the glory of the Grail pray for a world
coming home, a creation restored in Christ. Offer these sessions to God and
pray for the continuing guidance of His Holy Spirit. Squeeze hands and
shout, in unison ‘Goodbye. Go in Peace.’ (The rest is up to you.)
 STORY INTO ARCHETYPE 93

Session six: the garden

This final session remembers and also partly represents the garden of Gethsemane.
It has a quietness which goes with the idea of a garden— even a so-called
‘pleasure garden’. By now these sessions are almost running themselves and the
leader’s guidance is called on much less than it used to be. This week people
tend not to talk very much. They simply enjoy being together and sharing their
sadness and hopefulness.

1 In the circle greet one another as warmly as you can, without speaking aloud.
2 One by one walk into the centre where a bowl of water has been placed. Put
a pebble into the water and offer a silent prayer.
3 Somebody reads the story of Gethsemane (Matthew 26.36–46).
4 Find a partner (perhaps the person you originally teamed up with in session
one). Go with them to a place in the room where you can be more or less by
yourselves. Take it in turns to ask each other this question ‘would you think
less of me if I told you…’. Tell them something you have done in your life
that you feel ashamed about. Speak as honestly as you can and then listen to
what they say. They don’t need to say anything at all until you’ve finished
speaking. Now listen carefully as they tell you ‘No, I don’t think any less of
you. Thank you for sharing it with me.’ Then you can reverse roles and
listen to what they will say to you.
5 In the main circle listen to the Adagio of Mozart’s Twenty-first Piano
Concerto as you join silently in a meditation guided by the leader. (This is
about the experience of feeling alone and isolated, drawing on Donne’s
poem ‘To Christ’ Wilt thou forgive…).
6 Another reading from the New Testament, this time about a different garden
(John 20.10–17).
7 In the circle, say a word or a short phrase leading on from what the last
person said, to build up a chain of prayer which eventually includes
everybody in the group. Then move into the centre of the circle and take up
a position showing by means of gesture, bodily position and facial
expression, an idea or a feeling drawn from one of the two Bible readings—
loneliness and pain for Gethsemane, joy for the other Garden. Join up with
the other people to form a ‘living picture or group sculpt’ expressing both
defeat and victory, suffering and deliverance.
8 Move back to the chairs. Sit silently for a few moments. The leader says the
First Collect for Good Friday: ‘we beseech thee graciously to behold this thy
family’.
9 Say goodbye to one another before leaving silently, in the same way that you
came.
 Chapter 4
Dreaming

I’m climbing the staircase. It’s one of the kind that sweeps round like
the ones you used to see in Hollywood films, with a great curving
banister rail. The stairs are wide and shallow, and there’s a fancy
candlestick at the top on a plinth. The trouble is, these steps aren’t
stable, I can’t trust them not to give way and land me at the bottom,
so I dare not go up any further. Then a voice says keep in at the side.
Walk on the shiny part next to the banister. I look up and there’s this
very old lady standing at the top of the stairs, by the candles. She’s
really old and her voice is very calm.

This is how C.G.Jung describes archetypes:

Then there is another class of contents [apart from those of personal

unconscious] of an origin which cannot be ascribed to individual
acquisition. These contents have one outstanding peculiarity, and that is
their mythological character. It is as if they belong to a pattern not peculiar
to any particular mind or person, but rather to a pattern peculiar to mankind
in general. … These collective patterns I have called archetypes, using an
expression of St Augustine’s.
(1968: 41)

Jung goes on to say that ‘An archetype means a typos (imprint), a definite
grouping of archaic character.’ He explains that he first became aware of their
existence when he was carrying out a cross-cultural study of dreams and
dreaming. Archetypes are usually associated with the personages who inhabit
fairy tales, myths, legends and folklore throughout the world: ‘the Hero, the
Redeemer, the Dragon (always connected with the Hero, who has to overcome
him), the Whale or Monster who swallows the Hero’ (1968: 41).
The connection between ritual and dream is a close one; so close in fact, that the
species of teaching embodied in the action of corporate ritual ‘is like a dream,
reflecting the spontaneous and autonomous activity of the objective psyche, the
 GROUP SPIRITUALITY 95

unconscious’ (1938: 57). When we are dreaming we are more closely in contact
with our spiritual natures than at any other time. In our dreams, as in our rituals,
we are lifted outside our ordinary everyday preoccupation with engaging with
life in ways that are limited to some practical purpose or other, and are given the
opportunity to catch a glimpse of our true selves, and our real objective, the life
of spirit.
‘It’s only a dream.’ Only a dream: in other words, vague, insubstantial, over
before you have really had time to take it in. In dream workshops we can use ritual
as a way of embodying dreams. In other words, we create the special
circumstances in which people feel safe enough to explore things about life and
death which can be potentially threatening to them.
Dreams need to be embodied rather than simply thought about and
‘interpreted’. This is because they are about place as well as time; they present us
with a world, not simply an argument, or even just a message. We visit ‘the
world of the dream’. In rituals this dream world is an actual physical (or even
geographical) location that we move into and out of. It is what we experience while
we are there that affects our life ‘in the real world’; so that, even though we may
use the opportunity of being there to act out or stay in narrative which is so
important to us, it is the fact of being there that makes it so important—the vision
of reality we have that we are there. As James Hillman says ‘The primary datum
is the image’ (1983: 47). It is where our thinking and feeling starts from.
This is why dreams need to be relived; and why we use dramatic and
theatrical structure to create a safe place for the encounter with dream reality.
Because the most obvious thing about dreams is their fictional nature, the
unlifelike quality (‘only a dream’), the danger is that we should interpret them by
translating what they are saying into a more familiar language, using ideas that
are logical and prosaic in order to try to understand them. Presenting them in
dream workshops avoids doing this because the experience mirrors the dream
experience itself. As Jung pointed out, dreams demonstrate the theatrical nature
of human truth, its ‘as if’ pictorial quality; and they do it by inclusion rather than
reasoning. All the workshops described up to now have a dream quality, so that
what is said about dream workshops is true to a great extent of group spirituality
itself.
In this chapter I shall be giving some examples of workshops designed to
provide the structure needed in order to be able to let dreams speak for
themselves. In Chapter 1 we were looking at groups themselves, their own native
spirituality, going on from there to examine in Chapter 2 the particular
circumstances in which they function, the safe space. Chapter 3 was concerned
with the task they take on, their purpose and process. Now we will be looking at
their underlying subject matter in the dream life of the people involved.
96 DREAMING

Therapeutic ‘dream-time’

Dreams possess a purpose which is psycho-spiritually healing.

In my work as a group therapist I aim to provide the kind of setting in which we

can feel safe, both with one another and in the business of being alive together in
a shared world. I believe that we need this kind of permission to ‘be ourselves’.
In most cases, certainly the group members are likely to be feeling more nervous
than I am; but professionalism too has its own kind of self-protectiveness, its
own wariness about moments of real encounter. So I spend some time making
space for us all so that the distance we can establish between us and the world
outside may help to reduce the distance that separates us from each other —or at
least change its quality so that it becomes less threatening and more interesting’,
the fascinating awareness of individuality which draws people into relationship.
These are places and times, set free from the urgent demands made on us by
ordinary schedules and locations, in which we can learn to play, practising the
real skills we need in order to be a person among persons, in the dream time we
have made together.
We have seen in Chapter 2 how the psychologist Donald Winnicott set room
aside to play imaginative games with his small client. For her and him,
somewhere else, ‘the back of the room’, became a specially privileged location
defined by a different kind of awareness—neglected and usually discounted by
adults, but as familiar to children as the world in which they are expected to
make ‘grown-up’ sense of life—a place and time which they are only too willing
to share with the rest of us so that we may enjoy it too.
We tend to think of this kind of exercise as ‘meeting children on their own
ground’, as if using imagination to expand the boundaries of self-awareness were
somehow the prerogative of children, something which represents a necessary
stage in their psychological development (which I’m sure it is and does),
implying that they will soon grow out of it and be like us, practical and prosaic,
with no time for nonsense. Thankfully, however, this is not really the case, or at
least not all of it. It was no hardship for the learned psychiatrist to enjoy the
freedom and relaxation afforded by the Piggle. Quite the opposite, in fact, the
experience calls out to something fundamental to his humanness and which he is
only too delighted to celebrate, not only with Piggle and friends, but with us too.
The world of shared imaginative play is a dream world, not because it is
substantial and vanishes away when we ‘wake up to the realities of life’, but
because the realities it involves us in are as transparent as dreams. We enjoy them
because they give us something denied by our waking world. Something that we
really need.
It isn’t easy to be precise about what this is, unless you are actually involved
in enjoying it, and not even then perhaps. The furniture of this playground world
can seem absurdly unrealistic. They are made like this on purpose, in order to
suggest the idea of adventure rather than its overtly challenging presence. They are
 GROUP SPIRITUALITY 97

metaphors, aimed at leading us beyond the immediate into the otherwise

unmediated. I asked one of my groups to jot down some of the benefits of taking
time off to visit such a world and go there as adults.

• In these games you have to have rules, but this is to make it fair. Besides they
aren’t like the rules you have in life, because they only refer to the game itself.
(Rules in real life seem to take you back to being a child, when people had a
hold over you and used it.)
• It doesn’t matter if you lose, it’s only a game: on the other hand it’s good to win.
It makes you feel better, even though it’s only a game.
• Silly games are best. Sometimes we play some kind of board game, which is a
challenge. It’s OK but it makes me think too hard.
• Games are for all of us who are there. The game is between us. You play it
your way, I play it mine, it’s the same thing.
• People show what they are really like in a game. I get to know you in a game.

Other things which are the essential characteristics of games are as follows:

• Acceptance and enjoyment of the other person as themselves, the conscious

appreciation of their ‘otherness’.
• Ability to leave aside the need to understand in terms of one’s own
preconceived ideas and assumptions (including the carefully constructed,
painstakingly referenced impression of myself that I am trying to give).
• Permission to be aware of things one would not ordinarily be allowed to see,
or allow oneself to see. Revealing oneself to another person without
embarrassment.
• Having something to focus on, a shared experience to refer to during the rest
of the time you are together; metaphorically speaking, a place that you have
both visited.

This is not a time and space without rules or structure. Each game must have its
own rules. It can’t be a game without having them— but they are its own rules,
constituting its own space. In short, the business of playing games is like that of
dreaming. It involves changing the frame of one’s mind: I have a conscious
intention to break the rules of perception, the reality structure of the waking
world. Like dreams, games help us to distance ourselves from a literal
interpretation, in which the unbroken succession of events which constitutes our
waking lives constitute actual reality and precise truthfulness, and there is ‘no
room for dreams’.
In the dreamlike circumstances of therapeutic playing, people tell their stories
in new ways, not by consciously remembering and recounting the things that
happened in an historically accurate way. Here and now they are taken up with
what they are playing at, with the special world created by it, in which they can
allow the creations of imagination to speak and act on their behalf, not planning
98 DREAMING

beforehand what these people and things will say; by addressing ourselves to the
persons in the play, we speak to and about ourselves. What we say may be
expounded more or less clearly, in terms of arguments about the meaning of a
course of events in the past or the present. It is more likely, however, to be
shown in a fascinating, enigmatic way as a transformed and transforming image,
something startling which has the power to seize our attention before it clouds
over and eventually disappears.
It is this spontaneous improvisatory quality that gives our group sessions their
dreamlike nature. It is also, of course, precisely what makes them safe. They are
real but not permanent, habitable but not restricting. You can be sad without
undertaking the burden of an ongoing depression. You can be angry without
cutting yourself off from relationship. You can even be violent without
endangering the foundations of your safety. Most important of all, you can hold
past and future together in the image of a present which is inclusive and sufficient.
The image contains and embodies the journey.

Rite and dream

Ritual may be seen as an enacted dream.

It is the fact of embodiment, essential to games which are lived rather than
simply thought about that makes the spirituality workshop approach relevant for
dreams and dreaming; this and the fact that both workshops and dreams ‘speak
their own language’ in the sense that they create their own formal structures of
meaning—their own rules. In the world of dreams, these rules are self-
consistent, but out of line with the thought procedures of scientific method. This
is because their purpose is to describe qualities rather than measure quantities.
As we saw earlier, rule systems which are expressive rather than reasonable are
characterised as rituals.
In corporate rituals the action itself articulates a developing argument about the
mystical significance of life and death in the form of an image of movement and
rest. The gestures and movements of ritual constitute a special language for
reliving a special kind of history, one that is both shared and endured and
expresses a sense of meaning of things past within the context of their future
fulfilment. Carried out in the right spirit, they do not simply remind us of what was
done and said in the past, they open our hearts and minds—and consequently our
lives—to the promise of transformation. In corporate religious ritual, memory is
consummated in the experience of renewal, so that to take part in it involves us
more thoroughly and completely in the present. We are enmeshed in the kind of
shared world that constitutes real human belonging.
In such a way, by commemorating the past and celebrating the future, the
shared rituals which play a central part in these spirituality workshops enrich
experience of present reality, just as dreams give resonance to our waking life.
 GROUP SPIRITUALITY 99

They speak the language of embodied human experience, rather than simply
requiring an intellectual assent to ideas about the relationship between people
and a source of spiritual wholeness. We regard them as basically concerned with
our own sense of being alive. In fact, they are not so much states of mind as
places we live in.
This makes them extremely powerful. It has been said that ‘A ceremonial
affirmation, no matter how small seems to carry an indelible and resonant quality
into the heart which the intellect is incapable of carrying’ (Leunig 1991: 2).
Rituals are not ideas we entertain or even truths we assert, but conditions of
existence we enter, stay in for a short time and then leave, carrying the
experience within ourselves. We regard them as a special way of ‘framing’ life;
and because they are staged in this way they are essentially dramatic; they are
public ways of proclaiming human truth in action, little dramas of immense
purpose and significance. As dramas, they call upon a parallel rather than an
alternative way of construing the world, because they require disbelief to be
suspended, not abolished or totally superseded, so that when we take part in them
we are actually in two states of mind at once—a perfectly proper place for
human beings, because by acting as if our fantasy world were real we give it the
truth of our emotional reality and spiritual intention. This is the reality which ‘as
if’ would have if it were really the case; the action of imagining it and living it
out in the shared drama imparts this awareness as an emotional reality into our
waking experience (Grainger 1995).

Theatre and dream

The dramatic form assumed by these workshops lends itself to the

exploration of dreams, and has a healing effect on traumas sustained
in our waking lives.

In plays, audience and actors reach out to one another across the frontier between
stage and auditorium. In ritual the meeting is primarily between people and
Spirit. In both cases two things mediate the encounter —structure and
involvement. As Aristotle pointed out so long ago, the second of these depends
on the first, because it is structure that allows us to see beyond ourselves as
individuals so that we may distinguish our own personal life from someone
else’s, the essential prerequisite for being able to form a relationship with them.
This is not an easy transaction; it involves moving out from the safety of what is
known— and can to that extent be controlled—into what is, as yet, not known,
and consequently may turn out to be dangerous. It is the confidence gained from
familiar things in life, from the structures we erect and inhabit, that allows us to
venture outwards, away from ourselves, in order to make contact with other
persons, just as it is their structures, their carefully erected and preserved worlds
100 DREAMING

that stop us from simply taking them over, the place that we think we are safe in,
having carefully removed all alien presences, every suggestion of ‘otherness’.
The space between these two constructions, our own and the other person’s, is
demonstrated in drama and theatre, where the gulf is bridged by the agreement to
create a new structure, a shared world of embodied imagination. Because the
play is safe, because it is and always will be essentially a game, like the therapy
games we have just been considering, we can use it as a place in which to unite
our personal worlds, turning to one another for comfort, mingling our tears
instead of keeping them to ourselves (Duggan and Grainger 1997).
This is how drama uses the human imagination to explore the world of
relationship. In dreamlike fashion it allows us to free ourselves from the literal
interpretation of life. The absence of any sense of specific instruction—or
instructions—being given is basic to drama, which approaches life at an angle,
pretending to be talking about somebody else. We are invited to become
involved in what is happening and to draw our own conclusions, if they seem to
us to be applicable to ourselves. We are engaged in the investigation if we want
to be, but we can also remain aloof if we want to. In much the same way we are
left free to make sense of our dreams.
To sum up then, both ritual and theatre function by means of the
communication of understanding through the transference of feelings. Both are
concerned with images of a personal kind which encourage argument and
discussion without themselves actually being these things, and are thus
dreamlike. Drama, rite and dream work on the same principle, encouraging us to
listen without forcing us to listen to what they are saying: they are about life
without being part of it in the sense of being subject to the purposes, our own and
other people’s, which govern our lives. Both ritual and drama serve their own
purpose of making dream available, not so much for interpreting as for exploring
and living.
In the next section we shall be looking at workshops designed to explore the
connection ritual-drama-dream.

Dream workshops

Exploring the dream world

Mythology narrative and dream can be regarded as ways in which we may make
contact with psychological realities—psychic presences— that our conscious
awareness is directed towards protecting us against or shielding us from. In
group spirituality workshops the safe space envisaged in theatre and
psychotherapy is realised within a structure that has been specifically devised in
order to contain painful meetings of this kind and to embody them in a personal
symbolism that we can use to confront the realities of daily life. This is the place
 GROUP SPIRITUALITY 101

and time that we have been describing in this book, the territory which these
workshops set out to explore. Here are two basic ‘dream workshops’.

I
Moving in

1 Walk; don’t talk; look; remember. Travel around the room without talking.
Acknowledge one another’s presence without engaging in any kind of
personal contact. Take note of your surroundings— the furniture,
decorations, shape of the room, materials used in its construction.
2 Listen to the reading. This is the most flexible part of the workshop. Sit or
stand wherever you want in the room and listen to what is being read. (This
has been chosen for its evocative and imaginative quality, suggesting the
action of leaving one kind of reality for another.)
3 Find a partner and some space where you can be together. Make yourselves
as comfortable as possible.
4 Listen to the music together, without speaking. (This has been chosen for the
vividness of the images it conjures up and its ability to create a world of its
own.)
5 Reflect on dreams you yourself have had—or think you have had— while
listening to the music.
6 With your partner, move into a dream either remembered or imagined. Do
this in turn, each of you reversing roles with your partner in each dream, and
taking a few moments to ‘change gear’ and come out of role before moving
on to the other dream.
7 Sit all together in a circle. Say anything you want about what you’ve just
been doing. (Not everyone needs to speak. People should not feel they are
expected to interpret their dreams in any way, but simply to share any insights
they would like to put into words. Alternative ways of communicating
meaning—drawing, painting, miming, making ‘human sculptures’—may be
used.)

II
Dream-space

1 Explore the space. Discover what it looks, feels, smells like. What does it
remind you of? Now encounter the other people in it. What are they like? Do
they remind you of anything or anybody?
2 Share these memories with a partner. When you have done this find another
pair of people to exchange memories with.
3 When you hear the gong, scatter to different points in the room.
102 DREAMING

4 Settle down wherever you are. Make yourself comfortable and close your
eyes. Think about dreaming and listen to the music and the poetry. Don’t
listen too hard; let your mind wander.
5 Open your eyes now. Can you remember a dream you would like to share
with the rest of the group?
6 Take turns to show what your dream was about. You can use the various
things we have brought along to do this, or you can show us by re-enacting
it. If you want us to help, we’ll join in and act the parts for you.
7 Form a circle in the centre of the room and hold one another’s hands.
8 Leave your dream behind by telling people who you are. What was the first
thing you thought of when you ‘woke up’? Share this with the others.
9 Take turns to say what you will take away from the workshop when you
leave.
10 Say goodbye to everybody.

That dream again

This is a series of three linked workshops designed to use the safe space afforded
by dramatherapy as a way of exploring a particular kind of dream—the recurring
nightmare. They took place in a large, warm, comfortably furnished room, where
there was plenty of space in which to move around and enough privacy for the
people taking part to begin to develop a degree of intimacy as a group who were
‘all in it together’ (whatever ‘it’ turned out to be!). In this way, the safe-place
metaphor could take on the reality of an actual time and place in which real
things could happen to real people, and actual personal changes come about.
In the kind of workshop described here a feeling of safety, of being securely
held, is vital. In a dream we may come to a point of extreme terror, a place we
cannot think or imagine beyond; but what we actually dream about is the fear of
this place, not the place itself, which is hidden from us—what lies round the
corner, beyond the doorway, within the cave, etc. What acting out the dream
encompasses is the opportunity to confront the fear itself and to do so in a safe
environment which will provide us with the ability to do this. The improvised
drama provides a framework of conscious make-believe to contain real
emotions, allowing them to be lived through ‘at one remove’.
This, of course, is the way that drama and theatre work, by catharsis. The
release of traumatic feelings which are recognised unconsciously as being too
painful and destructive to be consciously registered, by expressing them in ways
felt to be safe and non-threatening lies at the very heart of theatre (Scheff 1979;
Duggan and Grainger 1997; Andersen-Warren and Grainger 2000). Trauma is
German for ‘dream’: we are released from the power of dreams that haunt us,
persistently recurring traumas that revive times and places we thought we had
forgotten about, whose power to disturb us we imagined had long since faded
away, by acting them through as consciously constructed drama so that they can
find their own resolution—in their own language but subject to our power to
 GROUP SPIRITUALITY 103

locate them. This is not a ‘fantasy solution’ on the part of the individual
concerned but a real, social, interpersonal event.
In the workshops that follow, the dream-stories were presented without
endings. This is because the dreams themselves had no conclusions, except the
obvious one in which the dreamer wakes up in terror or despair. The dream
itself, however, finished at this point—the point of waking. Thus, the stories
themselves had no ending because it was the ending itself —the true ending
which lies beyond the closed door, the cliff edge, the blazing spotlight, the empty
living room, the telephone hanging loose on its cord—which cannot be
contemplated. Like the awareness that it represents, the dream itself dare not
come to its own conclusion. The object of terror, whatever it is that lies beyond,
is still being feared within the dream. This, the inhibiting fear, is what the dream
is about. We do not dream about what has happened but about what hasn’t
happened yet.
Spirituality groups aim at providing a time in which it can happen in a way that
can be tolerated and assimilated. The dream, as we have said, is not the traumatic
event itself, or even a picture of that event, but the symbolisation of the fear
attaching to it; drama helps these truncated happenings find resolution by
reducing the inhibiting tension caused by fears of unimaginable events, thus
allowing them to achieve catharsis, or ‘emotional purging’.
As we said at the beginning, drama is designed to allow us to be, at one and
the same time, observers of and participants in our own personal traumas. The
underlying concept is one of balance or emotional symmetry; involvement in the
reality of pain is balanced against the distancing effect of imaginative structure.
What terrifies me in a dream, giving me no means of escape other than jolting
myself back into the waking world, becomes tolerable within the acted scenario,
thus allowing me to relax the efforts I have been making to keep it at bay. No
wonder I find the experience a peaceful emotional release.
The following three workshops took place on two successive days, Friday
evening and Saturday morning and afternoon. There was thus a gap between
workshops I and II. This was intentional. Twelve people took part, members of a
group of men and women of all ages, 25 years to over 70 years, at a weekend
spirituality conference.

I
Dream worlds
The leader explains that this is an introductory workshop aimed at giving the
group a chance to get used to the basic idea of experimenting with the evocation
of a ‘dream world’ which can be entered and lived in, in company with others.
Her instructions are included in abbreviated form. In fact she spent some time
explaining exactly what she meant.
104 DREAMING

1 Find somewhere where you feel you have some personal space. Sit as
comfortably as you can. Where would you really like to be? Imagine you're
in that special place, wherever it is—in or out of the world—and listen to the
music I’m going to put on. Now imagine that you have returned to your
place in this room. You have brought something with you to remind you of
where you’ve been. What is it? Place it in the basket in the middle of the
room.
2 Choose the nearest person to you in the room to be your partner. Tell them
what you have put in the basket and why you decided to bring that particular
thing back.

The leader speaks about dreams and dreaming. She reminds everyone that
dreams are precious and personal. ‘It was your dream and you had it. In this
workshop and the two following ones we shall be exploring this idea together
and trying to get inside what it means for us.’

3 With your partner, work out a dream sequence, either actual or invented.
Concentrate on how the dream begins and ends.
4 Show the rest of the group what happens in the sequence you have created
together. How did you go into the dream? How did you come out of it?
5 Find a piece of paper and something to write with and write down a precious
dream that you have had or would like to have. Fold your paper over and put
it in the middle of the room so that we have a pile of papers.

The leader asks somebody to make a ring of papers and to leave spaces in
between wide enough for people to walk through.

6 Form a circle round the ring of papers and hold hands. Start to dance in time
to the music, first in a circle and then in and out of the spaces between the
papers. When the dance is over,
7 Find your partner’s paper and return their dreams to them. Say ‘It was your
dream and you had it.’
8 Say goodbye, first to your partner and then to everyone else.

The leader sets the group an overnight task: they are to prepare for the work they
are going to do the next day by trying to remember any dreams they have had which
kept coming back from time to time. ‘Have you ever been haunted by a dream?’

II
Dream-narratives

1 Stand together in a circle. Tell the others what your name is (whether they
know or not). Play a game among yourselves in which when the person next
 GROUP SPIRITUALITY 105

to you says your name you have to decide whether to say their name or turn
to the person next to you on your other side and say theirs instead. You can
only say one of two names, that of the person on your left or on your right.

The ensuing name-battle, as people refuse to break the deadlock between

themselves and the person on one side by turning to the person on the other,
always makes people laugh and lessens tension within the group. The leader
suggests different ways in which people’s names can be said: angrily, lovingly,
nervously, coyly, etc.

2 Watch and imitate. The leader stands in the centre of the circle and starts to
pretend to make herself up, as if for a play. This is done without actual
make-up, by miming the various actions as slowly and clearly as possible,
and describing what you are doing as you do it. Group members imitate this,
making-up the person next to them and then being made-up by them.
3 Divide into groups of four to six people. Choose one from a list of fairy tales
prepared by the leader (or decide on one of your own). How does the story
go? Work it out amongst yourselves so that you can agree about the plot and
characters. Then decide who is going to play what. Leave one person to be
the narrator. It doesn’t matter how many different parts you have to play;
some stories have more people in them than others. Imagine the characters
as they will appear when properly made up and in costume.
4 In the group, prepare each person for the part they will play when you
present your fairy story to the other groups. Do the same for the narrator,
who will need make-up and costume to fit in with the drama.

The groups spend some time doing this. Because they are using imaginary
materials, they need to do it as systematically as possible in order not to rush the
vital period of preparation.

5 Now present your story to the other groups, acting as audience to them when
it’s their turn.
6 In your own group, de-role from the character you have been playing. Do
this by letting the other group members remove your makeup and help you
to exchange the character’s clothes for your own again.
7 Find a piece of paper. Write a short letter to the character you have been
playing. You can keep this as a memento.
8 Standing in the original circle, talk about what you’ve just been doing. What
did it feel like? Say whatever you want about it.
9 Say goodbye, first to your fellow group members and then to everyone else.
106 DREAMING

III
Dream-meetings

1 Explore the room, making use of all the space it provides. What are its limits
—look at walls, ceiling, any nooks and crannies there may be. What kind of
furniture is there? What do the windows look out on? Remember what
happened here this morning, before you broke for lunch.
2 Journey round the room, imagining different kinds of countryside and terrain
that you are traversing. Listen to the leader as she describes the kind of
things you have to climb over, push through, wade across, etc. What does it
feel like? Use your imagination.
3 Gradually draw closer to the others until you are almost touching, ending up
in a tight knot at the centre of the room. Now turn the knot into a hug.
4 Go back into the same groups as this morning. Listen to the music. Is there a
dream that you have had several times or keep on having so that you are
haunted by it? Talk about it to the others.
5 Choose a dream from the ones described in your group. Now cast the dream
using the members of your own group. (Don’t forget to choose a narrator!)
6 Dress and make up the cast and the narrator, as you did in this morning’s
workshop.
7 Act the dream for the members of the other groups, and be the audience for
other people’s performances.
8 Remove your fellow group members’ make-up and help them put their
ordinary clothes back on again.
9 Write a letter to a dream person. This can be someone you yourself have
been playing or any of the characters in any of the dreams. Then write a
letter to a dream of your own which has been troubling you.
10 Sitting in a circle with everyone else, talk together about the performances
you have been taking part in as actors or audience. If you want to you can
read your letters out aloud, but you certainly don’t have to do this.
11 Listen to the music again.
12 Say goodbye to everybody in your own time. If you want to mention any of
the dreams feel free to do so.

This cycle of workshops was specially designed to move slowly and gradually,
edging people away from the safety of dreams which they felt they own and are
willing to take responsibility for, into nightmares which they cannot get rid of—
terrifying implosions of an alien, uncontrollable reality into the fabric of
ordinary, everyday living. The dreams as they are acted out go beyond the
material presented to become part of a corporate dream experience. In the final
workshop described above individuals presented the material as they had
experienced it, stopping short at the point of terror when they themselves woke
up, terrified into wakefulness by whatever it was that was on the edge of
happening to them. At this point, however, the safety of the workshop setting
 GROUP SPIRITUALITY 107

encouraged them to go on, penetrating more deeply into the territory of the dream
in order to allow it to reach a tolerable conclusion—tolerable because it was
arrived at within the framework of a group game called ‘let’s play at nightmares’.
There was no attempt on the part of the others present to tell the dreamer how to
finish the dream. Instead, individual and group moved together to help it achieve
its own resolution as something which could be experienced without fear, a
whole message instead of a terrifying chaotic fragment.
Nightmares are stories which are too awful for us to finish telling ourselves; and
so in our desperation to avoid whatever it is that is coming next we drag
ourselves back into the waking world. This, however, is one of the reasons why
they are so terrifying, for our peace of mind depends on the things we can make
sense of—things with endings in fact. A nightmare is an incomplete message, a
sentence without grammar, and as such is already halfway to being a message of
doom. Let its subject matter concern the things we all try to defend ourselves
against, ideas and experiences which remind us of the vulnerability of life and
the certainty of death, and the end result is pain and confusion, partly because it
isn’t the real end but is simply just as much as we can stand. Nightmares, as we
saw earlier on, are not about the thing we fear, but the experience of fearing it.
When this becomes too intense, we wake ourselves up.
I have kept hold of the notes I made about the first occasion when these three
workshops were used. The people taking part had come together for a weekend of
dramatherapy. There were nine women and three men, aged between 25 and 70
years. None of them had done this kind of thing before, so that to begin with
everybody was nervous and apprehensive. I mention them now simply to give an
example of the way recurrent nightmares can be helped to find their own
resolution within the special, protected world of the dramatic scenario. Here are
four of their dreams.

The actress
Stage fright is a crippling, mind-numbing terror. All actors suffer from it some
times and some well-established performers have sought psychological help in
dealing with it (Hamilton 1997). Whether or not it is encountered consciously, it
certainly haunts every actor’s unconscious as a major trauma.
Actress I can’t go on. I shall forget my lines in front of all those people.
Another actor You must go on. (He starts to push her onto the stage.)
Actress It’s no good. I'll die. (As she is pushed on, she wakes up in terror.)
This scenario was carried onwards in two alternative versions.
Actress I can’t go on. I shall forget my lines in front of all those people.
Another actress Never mind—I can’t remember mine either.
and
108 DREAMING

Actress I can’t go on, etc. (Finding herself pushed on stage, she

addresses the audience) I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten my
lines.
Members of the audience Never mind, love, you can always make them up!
The latter response, coming from members of the audience who were also fellow
members of the group, proved cathartic for the protagonist.

The noughty child amuses itself

The main character in this dream-drama was haunted by the presence of herself
as a small child. In her dreams she found herself continually being placed at the
mercy of this anarchic intruder who was always on the point of breaking in at the
crucial point in an adult relationship and destroying it. Then she wakes up.
SCENE I The child plays by herself, weaving in and out of the path-ways in an
old-fashioned formal garden. As she plays she talks to herself about
the patterns she is weaving.
SCENE II The adult is talking intimately to her lover. As she moves into his
arms, the child bursts in and the moment is irrevocably lost.
This scenario was developed by a scene in which the adult finally takes the
initiative.
Adult Go away—get out of my life forever.
In retrospect it would have been a better solution of the dream problem if she had
used the corporate strength of the group to welcome the child in rather than
sending it on its way like that. The most important thing, however, is that for the
first time in her life she felt able to address the child face to face, and this was
obviously a great relief to her.

In the telephone box

The heroine of this drama has a repetitive nightmare in which she finds a
telephone box and puts the right money in the phone, but can’t get through. She
keeps trying, knowing that soon she will have used up all her money. Finally she
has to hang up, all her money used and no way of getting through. There is
nothing she can do but wake up in distress.
SCENE A street with a telephone box in it. A woman approaches the box and
goes into it. She tries to use the phone, lifting the receiver and putting
money in the box, but she obviously gets no reply. She repeats this
several times, growing more desperate all the time. Finally she slams
down the receiver and bursts out of the phone box in despair.
Woman I can’t get through. They don’t answer. I can never get through.
 GROUP SPIRITUALITY 109

The group carried the scene onwards by ringing her up in the phone box, so that
the sound of the bell would draw her back into the box, then, one by one, people
spoke to her, thanking her for her efforts to get in touch and saying ‘Don’t hang
up, so and so here wants to have a word with you.’ She was overcome with
emotion and sank to the floor of the phone box, still holding the phone in her
hand. The last group member opened the door of her box and knelt by her,
putting her arm round her shoulders.

The dream of the chair-bound man

This is a man who is always very much aware of being the object of other people’s
attention. When he is in bed at night, however, he feels relieved of the
responsibility to play the role of a disabled person. ‘Now I can relax and be
myself.’ At this point, however, he is brought face to face with what ‘being
himself’ means. He dreams that his arm has turned septic; it is gradually getting
worse and worse, so that eventually he will develop gangrene and have to have it
amputated.
SCENE I A man is lying on a bed. There is nobody near him, the other people
in his life having withdrawn from his presence. The group members
are standing as far away from the bed as they can get, and have
turned their backs towards it.
SCENE II The man glances at his arm and looks away again. Then he looks
back at it, his attention caught by what he sees. His stare becomes
fixed as his horror at what is happening to his arm grows. … At this
point in the original scenario he jerks himself back to consciousness.
In the drama, however, there is more to come.
SCENE III Seeing their friend's distress, the group members begin to move
inwards towards the centre of the room until they are finally
surrounding the bed where he is lying. Each of them touches the arm
to show him that it is still whole, then they lay their hands gently but
firmly on his head. The man lies back and relaxes.
This is what I wrote at the time, trying to recapture the impact of that particular
dream workshop. I hope it gives some idea of the kind of thing that happens in
workshops like this one, which are real events, integral parts of the lives of the
people concerned.
A great many things happen in these workshops which cannot be contained in
the descriptions given here. In a way, these are the most important things, the
heart of the matter. Like dreaming itself, the workshop is a theatre of the
unexpected, which is why it turns out to be so suitable a way of exploring this
kind of material. But the discovery is in the doing of it, not the description,
which turns out to be much like any other description—the shadow of a reality
not the reality itself. Not only its content of images and ideas but the way it works
is dreamlike. People say things, do things they literally would not dream of
110 DREAMING

elsewhere. In these workshops the spiritual nature of the relationships involved

and of the group itself is dramatically revealed.
The spiritual does not need to be translated or explained any more than dreams
do. Because words are incapable of expressing our longing for fulfilment and
serenity we turn to our spiritual awareness as to a genuine aspect of our
humanity, directing us towards the source of a more complete wholeness. Even
though our workshops are not consciously religious they embody states of mind
pointing towards religion. To be involved in one of them is to be reminded of
humanity’s search for truth about life and death, and the closer the involvement
the more this search becomes a presence. However game-like they may seem to
be, the workshops are concerned with living and dying and with the dream of
transcending the limitations imposed by them. Both chaos and order, symbol and
narrative embody the struggle for a meaning that is personal and also purposeful.
The dreamlike quality of the approach, in which commonplace ideas and
actions carry a significance which continually contradicts their limited everyday
usage, is a vital part of their healing power. As with a play, the meaning of a
workshop may be taken personally or not, and it is likely to influence the way we
think and feel just the same. Through its reverence for natural rhythms it
embodies experiences of wholeness in the language of our relationship with
other people. Thus, it says things that cannot be said any other way, as gesture
and movement pre-empt description, changing human reality in ways that cannot
be denied or negated. In the words of Richard Grimes ‘The body often
understands even against our own desires and thoughts’ (1982: 99). This does
have to be taken into account even before things that are said. Because it uses
people in order to express itself the group workshop is capable of the utmost
subtlety of meaning. We learn by involvement with our fellow women and men,
and are healed in the event itself, where the drama’s ability to bypass our
psychological defensiveness and bring us face to face with our own hidden pain
is contained within the affirming presence of an accepting wholeness, so that we
are caught unawares by the Spirit.
Because its intention is to affect the way individuals and groups experience
life in the direction of an enhanced wholeness which is registered as a greater
sense of well-being, the spirituality workshop is available as a pastoral resource
in all kinds of circumstances. It is personal, flexible, specific; it is also quite
easily constructed. This does not mean it can be rapidly assembled or used in a
clumsy and absent-minded way. A good deal of investigation must first of all be
carried out into the kind of situation it will be used in, which means developing a
sense of the kind of material and approach which will fit the needs of individual
group members. Every workshop has to be carefully devised in order to address a
specific context, with specially chosen music and readings; the only inflexible
rule being that the threefold shape of the event must be preserved.
The central section is the hardest part to get right. Here symbols have to be
simple yet powerful. Their meaning should be striking in impact without being
obvious or trite. This demands a combination of boldness and sensitivity and a
 GROUP SPIRITUALITY 111

genuine concern for the feelings of everybody who will be taking part. Most of
all, it depends on openness to inspiration, whatever direction it may come from.
If the structure of the happening is preserved, so that the appropriate type of
action may take place in each of the three sections of the workshop—setting the
scene, working through the drama, de-roling from it—then there is always room
for flexibility in the workshop itself; other people’s ideas, apart from those of the
leader, can bring freshness and spontaneity to the proceedings. You will be
surprised at the originality of the things that come out of the workshop—and of
course, you will also find yourself knowing the people involved so much better
in the process, as you begin to share your own dream-time with theirs.
 Chapter 5
Down to earth

Grounding

Life versus dream. The need to establish landmarks.

What the groups aim for is a common place spiritually, one that refers to, and
belongs in our ordinary life. In the last two chapters we may appear to have come
quite a long way from the place we started off, which was the simple and
straightforward idea of a group of people meeting to develop ways of being
aware of one another which arise from this kind of shared focusing of attention.
We seem to have gone some way towards making the idea of a ‘transitional
relationship’, such as that suggested by Winnicott, appear less ordinary and more
exotic than its originator intended. For example, the dream landscapes
reproduced in the last chapter represent the furthest point of our journeying
inward into the kind of subjectivity which excludes an awareness of others as
people who possess the same kind of reality as ourselves, and concerns itself
with ideas and figures whose actuality is entirely symbolic—a long way,
certainly, from the select human universes we are used to colliding with and
rebounding from in any group we can remember belonging to.
At the same time the dream is relevant. Without always knowing exactly what is
being said, we do know that this dream is speaking to us about ourselves and the
world we really inhabit—the real world in fact. The hard work consists of
translating it into the terms which apply to our living reality—the reality of
separate persons and shared concerns. The workshop approach lends itself to
working with dreams because it allows us to tie them down and share them with
others. It is dramatically structured, even when the role we are playing is
actually our own, and this, of course, means that it involves us in an
interpersonal reality located outside ourselves, in the intervening space our bodies
automatically create among us. This is something that cannot be achieved simply
by talking about dreams; it belongs exclusively to acting them.
 GROUP SPIRITUALITY 113

In these workshops, then, we transform the invisible by making it a visible

part of the social situation. Just as plays are about ideas and feelings, these
workshops are about spiritual experience; and they participate in the power of
theatre even though they do not involve learning lines or rehearsing roles. The
format of the workshop is designed for flexibility and spontaneity. Typically the
aim is simply to bring people together in ways that will encourage them to make
their feelings, ideas and attitudes available for interchange in ways that will
avoid the inhibiting effects of direct confrontation, at least in the first stages of
the exercise. This is why subjects of intense personal concern are dealt with by
projective means involving drawing, painting or clay modelling, or acted out in
the guise of somebody else, or simply danced, mimed or even written about.
This indirect approach makes these things available for sharing with others,
whereas more orthodox ways of exploring relationships within a group of
individuals may not really penetrate to the level at which they could be said to be
making real contact with the people concerned. Chapter 1 of this book contains
an extract from a ‘group member’s diary’ which mentions some of the emotional
difficulties involved in taking part in unstructured groups. Reactions to the dream
workshops described in Chapter 4 are very different indeed.

I admit to being worried about taking part in something I didn’t know

anything at all about, particularly some thing about ‘spirituality’, a subject
I certainly don’t claim to be any kind of expert on. I was also a bit cautious
about the ‘workshop’ too, because it didn’t seem to fit the idea of
‘spiritual’ (not that I’m quite sure what that means). I needn’t have worried,
though, because the workshop part was really aimed at gently getting us
involved in something interesting—I mean, that we were all interested in—
and no-one actually mentioned spirituality at all (at least, I don’t think they
did). Some things we did were extremely interesting, although I couldn’t
actually tell you what they were. I can remember that people got very
involved and moved by things. Perhaps I did too—but it wasn’t a problem,
as it turned out.
(David, 35–year-old chartered accountant)
I remember more about the workshop as time goes on, as a matter of
fact I particularly remember some of the things that other people did and
said. (I can’t remember what I actually said to them, only what they said to
me in reply—so I must have talked quite a bit, too). There are some things
that happened which I will never forget, one thing in particular—but I
couldn’t tell you what it was, not in so many words.
(Julie, 17–year-old sixth-form student)
It was all about dreams, but it was very real A lot of it came to life for me,
as if they were my own dreams, not someone else’s. Perhaps they were, if
you see what I mean. The best way I can put it is that I felt included in a part
of myself I don’t usually bother about much, don’t think really important,
not when I'm going about my ordinary life. I usually put dreams and stuff
114 DOWN TO EARTH

firmly to one side, out of the way. Not necessary; not real. Perhaps I shall
have to put dreaming back in its proper place again.
(Enid, 60–year-old retired teacher)
I did what I usually do when anyone starts talking about dreams, I
suddenly find myself having them, so I couldn’t wait to have a go at acting
them out. We did actually manage one of mine. It was like receiving a
blessing; if you can understand what I mean by that.
(Lisa, 30–year-old actress)

The first thing that comes across from these testimonies is perhaps their
vagueness. They are positive, but imprecise. This is because the experience was
one of feeling rather than thinking: ‘something happened to me during the
workshop, but I don’t know what it was. I can’t tell you exactly because I can’t
find words for it; but you have to believe me when I tell you that it left its mark
in some way or other’. This is because the workshops themselves are thematic
rather than propositional; they don’t tell us what to think, but whereabouts to
think it, sketching out a general area of experience for us to wander about in, in
search of our own meanings and giving us permission to bring back whatever is
of interest—whatever it is about our journey that we want to share with others.
This is likely to be a feeling rather than a thought; however, in the sharing it may
well become a thought, something ready to take its place in the whole network of
thoughts and feelings which we use to understand the world (Kelly 1963).
The presence of a theme is a crucial factor in this process of translating
emotional experience into personal meaning. Themes may be chosen in advance
by whomever it is who has organised a particular workshop or series of
workshops, or they may be left in abeyance so that the group can come to its own
decision about the subject matter to be worked on. Once chosen, however, they
should be faithfully followed through so that their presence is felt at every stage
of the workshop process. In a sense, they are that process, because they both
originate the movement of the group and define its activity during the period of
its corporate life. The group exists to develop its theme, using it not simply as an
idea to hang other ideas from, but an experiential focus, in workshop terms, a
place to revisit, an area to be re-explored.

The meta-theme

Dreams filter fundamental truths, offering us chances for change in

our attitude to life. These workshops have a similar effect.

There is, however, a propositional dimension to the workshops, and a very

important one too. It is that the action of embodying spirituality in this dramatic,
experiential way allows us to symbolise the most important human themes of all,
those concerning the very terms upon which we are human. Spirituality
 GROUP SPIRITUALITY 115

workshops provide an arena for presenting a vision of life and death. Not simply
our ideas about these things but our perception of the qualities they possess. I do
not make this claim easily, and I realise that by making it at all I run the risk of
appearing facile or insincere. Life, yes perhaps—but death? How can I possibly
justify such a thing?
An anonymous contributor to a symposium on ‘Spirituality and Healthcare’ at
Leeds University writes as follows.

I can no more reflect on the experience of my birth through the conscious

recall or memory than I can, at least in the context of this lived life, reflect
upon the actual experience of my own death (though most of us will
speculate about both of these events at some time or other in our lives).

He (or she) goes on to say that despite this well-established fact, it is possible to
dwell on the actuality of other people’s dying, and draw ‘tentative conclusions’
about our own beginnings and endings.
Without any doubt, it is certainly the latter which causes us the most trouble.
As La Rochefoucauld said (Maximés, Paris, 1665), contemplating one’s own
death is like trying to look directly at the sun. In spirituality workshops, dramatic
identification and symbolic use of people, objects and situations allow us to
approach realities projectively, using the medium of the workshop itself to
protect us from the immediate pain of presences—and what is more to the point,
absences—which would otherwise cause us to look away.
It is amazing, however, the degree of light actually admitted by the dark
glasses we put on in order to enter this special world. Generally speaking it is not
the intensity of our experience but its quality; our imaginations respond more
readily to what is being presented to us because we have been convinced of its
harmless nature—harmless to us, that is. We are wrong, of course. Once we have
been drawn in we are perfectly capable of perceiving things as if they were
happening to us. We see ourselves in someone else’s pain and participate in the
quality of whatever it is they are imagined to be experiencing, even if it should
involve the final abandonment of life. To a greater or lesser degree these shared
deaths affect us. They make ‘an unspeakable’ thing less terrifying by providing
us with imaginative experience of dying.
By presenting us with the possibility of personal change and obtaining our
conditional assent to the idea, these workshops never fail to bring up the fact of
loss, if only the loss of the place we occupy at present, wherever that may be.
Loss and change are discovered to be partners— not only of death itself but all
the lesser deaths strung out along the road that leads to it. In the workshop these
ideas become experiences to be lived and shared—shared in and lived through;
an idea of survival which has, through the power of shared imagination, now
become an actual experience of life.
Work which touches on such levels needs some kind of preparation, and the
need to become really focused on the business of looking at these fundamentals
116 DOWN TO EARTH

of humanness requires us to take thought about how we are going to ‘move into
the right gear’ for doing so. As we said earlier, anxiety and tension increase
defensiveness. The games and exercises which make up the first part of these
workshops are designed specifically to overcome the barriers which tend to snap
into place when we sense the slightest possibility of anything that might turn out
to be emotionally disturbing. The idea is not to deceive but to placate, when we
feel comfortable in the presence of the other group members, recognising them
as people basically very like ourselves—just as nervous, equally likely to get
things a bit wrong and be embarrassed out of all proportion by their own mistakes
—an important shift occurs in our feelings towards them. Instead of rivals we
recognise them as potential allies, and this is a much more robust frame of mind
to be in when it comes to facing up to any emotional challenges that occur during
the main body of the workshop.1 When you have to summon the particular kind
of strength we need to allow ourselves to think deeply about our own mortality,
or even to be strongly reminded of it, it is a very great advantage to be among
friends, people we feel we can trust because we know they share precisely the
same group solidarity we were talking about in Chapter 1: it lies at the root of all
successful group work and is its most significant contribution to therapy.
Work like this makes use of a variety of different kinds of media, providing
opportunities for expressiveness, ranging from structured conversation (‘find a
partner and spend a few minutes simply talking about such and such a subject’),
to role play (‘spend a minute or two pretending to be your boss at work’), and
actual role reversal (‘swap over with your partner so that he/she is you and you
are her/him’), to writing letters to imaginary people or receiving phone calls from
them and the creation of special environments within the main framework of the
workshop as a frame for mime, dance, expressive movement, etc.
These are all ways of encouraging us to ‘suspend’ our characteristic
preoccupation with the outward forms of objects and events—the way things
work, what they are used for, the actions they lend themselves to, our reaction to
and feelings about these actions, etc. The workshop approach allows us to use our
imagination and see the world in a different way. In other words, it encourages
us to experiment with rebuilding the world. These experimental worlds may not
be real in the actual sense. Indeed, we know very well they are not but the ideas
they represent are really ours, and so are the emotions they give rise to, both in
ourselves and other people. More importantly still, this action of experiment at
reconstruction is in itself a real action. It affects our relationships with other
people, the way we and they interact. It is a genuine action affecting reality and
is consequently part of it.
And at the same time it affects ourselves, the nature and quality of our own
personal reality. The way we see ourselves. We can now see ourselves in a new
role, that of co-creator. This is not the way most of us regard ourselves most of
the time, as Jonathan Fox points out. It is nevertheless the key to our very
existence: we are co-creators of reality in co-operation with one another and with
God. Much of the time we see ourselves in an entirely different way, as restricted
 GROUP SPIRITUALITY 117

and conditioned, forced into a particular mould by the pressures of life or swept
along by a range of dynamisms that we cannot control, either as puppets or
victims. Spirituality workshops are one way of countering ideas and feelings like
these; they are designed to encourage a sense of creativity, of structures that can
be changed and revolutionised, reversed, rebuilt, renewed, and of a self that can
be seen to be a participant in the action of changing them. The changes may be
temporary, and the reality affected one specially constructed for the purpose, but
that is not the point. For an hour and a half or two hours a deeper reality has been
revealed,—that of creativity itself, and the stranglehold of the merely factual
loosened by debunking things that only seem to be factual, laying claim to a
finality which they do not and cannot possess. Only a workshop, only a dream,
but the point has been made.
The factor of imaginative participation in group experience, the reflexivity
that reinforces selfhood, establishes the understanding that spirituality is now part
of ‘lived life’ and not just a good idea about final meanings. Spirituality
workshops open a window into a wider universe than the one which presses
down so unremittingly upon us; and they do so by giving us space in which to
look at ourselves— at what we are giving and taking; what is between us; what
we are co-creating. This in itself gives us something of the courage we need to
begin changing our private worlds. As Bruce Wilshire says ‘To come to see
oneself is to effect change in oneself in the very act of seeing’ (1982: 5). In this kind
of workshop we are presented with the opportunity to reclaim our identity as
relational beings. We ‘stand in’, and yet also ‘keep our distance’. We can do this
because of the structure of the group itself; the presence of other people with
whom we choose to become involved.

Seeing things differently

We look back on the experience of taking part in the workshops.

What resistances did we encounter?

To return to where we started from. We have covered a good deal of territory

during the last four chapters, and in doing so we have, to some extent,
reproduced the experience of members of the kind of group workshop described
in this book. The workshop experience is essentially one of change and progress.
We pass through and move beyond. Every time we genuinely move into
something new we have to leave something behind—something of the old reality
in which we had invested. When the change involved concerns our spirited
identity rather than merely the way we are accustomed to presenting ourselves—
our ‘worldly’ self in fact—it involves a special kind of dying, one willing to take

1 It is always necessary to achieve the right degree of distance, balancing the emotional
impact of the material with the feelings of the people involved within the group.
118 DOWN TO EARTH

the fact of our own death seriously. This is a dying of self-confidence and
defensiveness which opens us up to the challenges of genuine self-awareness; the
promise of a more authentic kind of living.
T.S.Eliot captures the emotional paradox involved when he makes his Magi ask
if the long painful visit to bear witness to the Messiah’s birth had not, in fact,
created more problems than it had solved in the way of making any ordinary kind
of sense of things.

were we led all that way for

Birth or Death? There was a birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
(‘Journey of the Magi’ 1927)

For the Wise Men, the long awaited birth showed itself as an experience of dying
that made ordinary living seem insupportable because it could no longer be
regarded as in any way enough. Some of those who became involved in the
spiritual workshops described here have also received more than they had in fact
bargained for.

This is something I dreamt last night which really belongs with yesterday’s
workshop. I was on the island again, my part of the island. (I know it was
mine because I recognised the little bush and the place where the little
stream was swallowed by the sand—but mainly because I felt it was
somehow special to me. This came first —it felt familiar, then I began to
recognise the landscape features.) I started to walk into the middle of the
island. I felt I’d never really been there, and I had this urge to find out
what it was like. The feeling I had to begin with, that it was somehow
special, my place, stayed with me all the way. In the centre there was a
kind of statue—tree— it grew out of the earth like a tree, but it was really a
statue, or a kind of monolith. I think it was made out of white stone. It was
built over a sort of hole in the ground—actually a crevasse in the white
rock under the sand, with its roots clinging to the edge of the space
and some lodged in the side of the crevasse. It was holding on, but only just...
I knew what to do. I picked up the spade (writing about it now I wonder
how the spade got there, I certainly wasn’t carrying it when I set out.) Now
I just picked it up from under the bush and started to fill up the hole. I
wasn’t frightened or anything although I knew the hole was terrifyingly
deep—it seemed to go down forever. I looked over the edge and started to
shovel away so that the statue would have somewhere to stand. I was still
shovelling when I woke up, so there isn’t really a proper ending to the
dream. Unless, of course, the shovelling is the ending.
 GROUP SPIRITUALITY 119

I have to admit that my main reason for coming along was curiosity.
When things started to get a bit personal, and we were getting into the sort
of areas one doesn’t usually mention in public, particularly with a group of
strangers—(and I don’t mean sex, which actually isn’t all that difficult to
talk about anyway), things like loneliness and times when you feel really
hopeless, as if no-one in the world really gives a damn whether you live or
die—and old age and being totally dependent etc., I thought what the hell
am I doing here, this isn’t my scene at all. It wasn't that anyone was forcing
me to talk about this kind of thing, just that the tendency behind some of
the stuff that was going on was towards subjects that everybody is a bit
frightened of, aren’t they? They say that ‘when the going gets tough, the
tough get going’. I suppose I wasn’t tough enough, not for this anyway,
and so I got going—in the opposite direction! (If you remember I tried to
leave, but the woman I’d been talking to called me back, so I did what she
said.) Actually I came back because I didn’t want to walk out on her, not
because I wanted to put myself through any more of what we all seemed to
be getting into. I feel I should be honest about this—it wasn’t the things
we’d been doing that put me off but the thought of where it all might be
leading, and whether I would be able to cope. I wasn’t keen to put it to the
test! When I got back into the group things did get better. I stuck close to
this lady and did what she did more or less, even to the extent of playing a
part in a play we made up about a teenager leaving home, and the effect
this had on her mother (I played her father!). It was very rough and ready,
and somebody watching would have thought it pretty daft, I suppose, but I
can see the point of it now. It was certainly something different as far as I
was concerned, and I shall certainly remember it for a very long time. And
not just for the embarrassment, either.

I wrote these two accounts down from memory, so that they represent the kind of
thing these two people said rather than a word-by-word record. They are
representative of verbal testimonies I have received over the years from a wide
range of people who have made contact with the pain at the heart of spiritual
transformations and been somehow translated by the experience. The third
example, however, is an actual letter received from a group member concerning
the group of workshops described on pp. 39–42.

I’m writing to say thank you for the ‘spirituality’ workshops. I came to all
of them, as you probably realise, and I think I gained something from all
four—I certainly enjoyed the last one (Workshop IV: Celebrate, p. 42).
More than the individual workshops, however, I benefited from the impact
of the whole series. You may have noticed that I didn’t take a very active
part round about the middle of the course. The third workshop, about the
labyrinth, was particularly difficult for me. I think this is to do with my
having passed through a hard and painful time recently in my own life; I
120 DOWN TO EARTH

didn’t realise exactly how painful it had actually been until I found myself
suddenly weeping…right there in the middle of everybody. I remember
you asking me what was the matter—I think I mumbled something about it
being very moving. That is all I said; I was too embarrassed to elaborate.
Well, now I realise, a fortnight and one-and-a-half workshops later,
what it was that moved me so much. In one way or another what we were
doing reminded me of what life had been like recently for me. I had had to
move house and find a new job. It hadn’t been easy, and in the middle of it
all my Grannie died. Actually I didn’t think all that much about it at the
time. After all, we were never very close and had more or less drifted apart
during the last few years. It was a shock, certainly, and I remember
thinking so at the time, but there was just so much going on, so many things
I had to do.
One of these, of course, was to let myself shed a tear for Grannie. Let
myself feel sad at having neglected her so much recently. Remind myself
about her. Just think a bit about her. Well that’s what I’ve been doing. I feel
better about her because I have been able to talk to her in my mind. You
know that we can do that; now I’m finding out how to do it, too. It’s
something I came face to face with in that labyrinth, I know that. I
certainly could never have done it before; but then, I never really felt the
need, did I? So—many, many, thanks.

The youngest of these three people was in her late twenties and the oldest
approaching seventy years old. Most of the workshops, and workshop series,
described in the book involved people of various ages ranging from teenagers to
octogenarians. Generally speaking this is not an age-specific approach,
depending only on the individual’s ability and willingness to see her—or himself
as a member of a group. Obviously age has to be taken into account with regard
to the kind of group envisaged: experimental groups of this kind depend on
members’ interest in attending to how they and the other members of the group
are reacting at any given time to whatever it is that is going on amongst them. In
other words, they must be capable of seeing themselves as real members of the
group. This means that the factor holding everyone together, a sense of
commonality within the group situation is at least as powerful as the tendency to
stereotype those who belong to another age group, either resenting or patronising
them—certainly refusing to associate oneself with anything they happen to be
involved in. The action of identifying a number of people as a social unit
bestowing on them a new corporate identity as a group, or even the group, does a
great deal to defuse the defensively heightened self-consciousness that people of
all ages tend to feel when thrown among strangers. Some of the workshops
described in Chapter 2 are designed to encourage the change in attitude which
must take place before a group of people begins to acquire a new identity as
fellow members of a recognisable group.
 GROUP SPIRITUALITY 121

In my experience, sooner or later the method works even in the most varied
and disparate groupings. Individuals who are particularly conscious of ‘not
belonging’ hang back to begin with, but before very long they find themselves
drawn further in by the sheer force of wanting to make their personal viewpoint
heard by the rest of those present, from which it is only a short step from seeing
themselves as a kind of group member—different, individual, but a part of what
is going on. As someone said

I suppose you could say I was never a real group member. I don’t think
people ever actually saw me as one, either. When I first came, during the
first session I thought, what the hell are you doing here with this lot? I just
hadn’t anything in common with them. I stayed because I was determined
not to quit—after all, why should I? I’d as much right there as anyone, and
what I wanted to say was at least as important as what they had to offer.
Perhaps they’d never come across anybody like me before.

Most groups contain people who feel, or have felt, rather like this. Individuals
make their own contribution, however unexpectedly and awkwardly; and it is
this awkwardness—and the individuality it expresses —which contributes to
group spirituality. The emergence of the spirit in group life does not take place in
any straightforward linear way. It involves the coming together of two very
distinct kinds of story, the first individual and personal, the second corporate and
cosmic. It is out of this meeting that the group’s spirituality emerges, giving it its
own special liveliness, invigorating its members and pointing beyond itself
towards a higher source of unity. We may intend a relationship between these
two ‘narrative realities’, but they are very separate, in the sense of being entirely
distinguishable from each other. They never simply merge and become a single
identity. In group experience, however, they meet, or at least draw close to each
other; just as the naturally clubbable people and the stubbornly individual relate
with the group structure, so the group’s own individuality is drawn into a wider,
deeper solidarity than it would enjoy on its own.

Reaching and grasping

Spirituality workshops transmit transpersonal awareness via content

and structure.

In Figure 5.1 ‘story’ stands for the personal life narratives of individuals, and
STORY for an overarching meaning which belongs to shared, corporate
narratives and transpersonal truths.
The structure of personal interaction gives a timeless significance to time-bound
experiences and the narratives we use to articulate them. The group itself is
symbolic of a wider truth, in the sense that by structuring itself for the express
122 DOWN TO EARTH

Figure 5.1 Personal and transpersonal story

purpose of sharing experience it becomes a spiritual organism, a ‘body with

many parts’. Having an identity and purpose inseparable from those possessed by
its members but brought nearer to the source of its spiritual life by its willingness
to participate in the action of sharing. The good of its spirituality is a wholeness
and unity in which individuality and self-expression achieve their ultimate
transformation in what might be described as a condition of mutual inclusivity
(Wilber 1981).
The most striking visualisation of this kind of unity of selfhood is the Jungian
archetype, the transpersonal symbolism of aspects of life and death which are
intensely personal in the sense of being communicated to individuals in ways
that correspond to their own unique selfhood, while resonating with a truth which
applies to the entire human race. The archetype which corresponds most closely
to the kind of group holism we have been talking about is the mandala, the
‘primordial image of psychic totality’. This is the pictorial form taken by the
coincidentia oppositorum, involving the transformation of opposites into a
higher synthesis—not merely personal differences or expressions of individuality
but actual opposites! In the words of Joland Jacobi ‘Whenever this symbol,
which can manifest itself in the most divergent forms, makes its appearance the
balance between the ego and the unconscious is restored’ (1962: 131).
As the archetypes of order, mandalas represent the relationship between two
unities, the human and the divine by including them in the image of a
superordinate unity. Jung himself spoke of the mandala as appearing
spontaneously in dreams and works of art ‘as a compensatory archetype,
 GROUP SPIRITUALITY 123

bringing order, showing the possibility of order’ (Jung, cited by McGuire and Hull
1978: 328).
No wonder then that workshops of this kind contain so many invitations to the
people taking part to ‘form a ring in the centre of the room’ or ‘go back to the
wider circle’. In these workshops the image of a superordinate unity is
continually invoked, and done so without any conscious awareness of the
spiritual significance of things which are really quite ordinary. The symmetrical
shape of the workshop itself, arranged as it is around a central phase of
heightened emotional involvement which serves as a point of balance for the
structure as a whole; the use of stories which have a beginning, a middle and an
end; expressive or ritualised movement and dance; carefully chosen music of a
rhythmic or formal kind—all of these are ways of symbolising an ideal heaven
or perfection which is able to speak the language of the soul. To this extent,
spirituality workshops are acted mandalas, symbols of a perfection which,
however expertly we may realise its imagery, will always be outside our reach
and yet never cease to refresh us in the action of reaching for it.
The sense of meaningful form transmitted by, and embodied in, the workshop
itself not only expresses a yearning for wholeness and spiritual fulfilment, it also
reveals an awareness of the actual presence of spiritual truth. In this way the
workshop is a genuine symbol of the perfection it has to mirror. It is vitally
important however, to stress that this does not depend on how well it is carried
out. The value of the play as a play in no way depends on the skill of the actors
performing it. In one way our expertise may actually get in the way. We are
concerned here with a fundamentally unactable drama, a perfection which may
be reached after but never grasped. It is vitally important that this should never
be forgotten, even for a moment; the authenticity of what we are setting out to do
depends on it. In reproducing the imagery of a transcendent perfection we are
not trying to conjure it up. There is no idea of control here, no element of
manipulation. Our spirituality as human beings consists in our need to draw near
to the source of our life which is also our hope of perfection.
Marie-Louise von Franz describes the mandala as ‘a symbolic representation
of the nuclear atom of the human psyche, whose essence we do not know’ (Jung
1964: 213), any more than we possess intellectual understanding of the Being of
God. This psychic imagery mediates kinship, not identity, and the danger is that
we might, in our own cleverness, confuse the two things, ending up with a form
of magical thinking which is at the opposite pole to spirituality. It is the
beyondness of God, the reaching out to the transcendent which is vital, for it is in
searching for, rather than capturing, that our authentic spirituality is revealed.
The congruence between earth and heaven is symbolic, never literal —but the
symbolism is of wholeness, a state of affairs in which the two realities can
somehow meet and mingle. Mandalas are about the interpersonal situation here
on earth. The imagery of the wholly related serves to focus the relationship
between people within the group. In ‘the quadratura circuli’, the square on the
circle or the circle in the square, the imagery of separation and the imagery of
124 DOWN TO EARTH

mutuality are combined to make up ‘the symbolism of wholeness’ (Jung, cited by

McGuire and Hull 1978: 327).
It is the experience of similarity-in-difference that characterises real group
belonging. From inside the group our awareness is expressed as ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘we’,
‘they’, but never simply ‘us’. To this extent the differentiated solidarity of the
group brings the transcendent home to those taking part at every stage of the
workshop. Certainly at some level, conscious or unconscious, every group does
this, because each of them is both an image and example of shared personhood.
Groups that come together to explore their sense of spiritual values certainly
‘have heaven in view’, that is, the achievement of a heightened sensitivity
towards ‘the Other’ however they may actually describe it. The spirituality work-
shops described here are designed to focus a very positive yearning for
transcendence, which can be powerfully disruptive of ordinary attitudes about
acceptable ways of behaving in the company of others.
In religious ritual the mandala symbolism acts as a shield as well as a mirror
reflecting transcendence and at the same time protecting us from its full,
intolerable impact (Jung 1983). Real inspiration seems to demand this kind of
caution, being quite able to override our ordinary civilised—in the sense of
restrained—behaviour, a fact that the uninspired find disconcerting or even
downright alarming. In these workshops we dance in circles, avoiding
undisciplined movement, and present our drama safely in role, our intention
being to draw near to the presence of joy with some respect for our own human
vulnerability and weakness.
And yes, of course, people do become excited and enthusiastic; and other
people are put off by their enthusiasm. The connection between the excitability of
social gatherings which so impressed Durkheim (1915) and the tendency of
therapeutic groups to regress into ‘childlike and primitive behaviour’ noted by
Bion (1961), is explained by the heightened emotional impact of group structure,
in other words the combination of formalised procedure and highly emotional
content that allows people taking part to give vent to feelings which are usually
kept under rigid control. The discovery that these feelings are shared by other
people within a structure which has actually been designed for their expression
can lead to vivid experiences of empowerment!

I shall never forget being on that island with everybody. I don’t know how
to describe what it felt like. I was entirely alone and yet totally joined with
everyone else. It was like freedom happening in a game with rules—like
things should be.
I’ve felt peaceful before of course, now and again, and sometimes it has
happened with one particular person, now and again. But never with a
whole group, nine or ten other people. Somehow you feel very strong when
that happens, very confident.
At first I just stood on the edge and looked in. I could see what people were
doing, but not why they were doing it. They were all very involved, and
 GROUP SPIRITUALITY 125

that put me off, of course. At the time I remember, I wasn’t very keen on
getting involved with anything, particularly anything new. So you could
say I was resisting this—I couldn’t see the point. Later on, though, after I’d
done the mime about the dove (I did it because no-one else seemed willing
to try) I felt entirely different, and then I began to see the point—or what
might possibly be the point. It’s something about actually doing things and
not just thinking about them with your imagination; actually getting inside
things and doing them. Quite simple, really.
I can’t really dance, you know, and I don’t think there were all that
many of us who could—especially the men—but it felt as though we were
dancing on the floor of heaven.
People tell me I’m an intellectual, perhaps because of my scientific
background. Anyway I just think of myself as a logical thinker. I like
things to add up. So what happened over this weekend has left me almost
completely wordless. I can’t analyse what was going on, but something
certainly was, and I feel quite differently about things because of it.
Differently about myself, differently about other people. I’m still thinking
it out, puzzling over what actually happened. Was it helpful? Yes it was.
How? I don’t know— ask me later, will you.

Recreation and re-creation. Working with creation stories

Spirituality workshops are vehicles for creativity as well as messages

about it. This is demonstrated in the experience of working with
certain myths.

In Chapter 1 we looked briefly at the psychoformative effect of simply playing,

and particularly of playing together. We saw that dramatic play, depending on as
if reality, proceeds directly out of this, because of the impulse to explore the
experience of living together with our fellow human beings by trying life out for
size in the safe space of shared imagination. Some kinds of psychotherapy are
inherently dramatic, for example psychodrama (Moreno 1969; Blatner 1997),
dramatherapy (Jennings 1987, 1992; Jones 1996; Andersen-Warren and Grainger
2000) and gestalt therapy (Peris, Hefferline and Goodman, 1973), none of which
can really be understood except by reference to what happens in drama and
theatre. According to Antonucci-Mark, psychoanalysis itself functions within a
fictionalised frame in which therapist and client join in ‘an interplay of fantasy
and reality, past, present and future thoughts, feelings and emotions’ (1986: 14;
cf. also McDougall 1986). Psychological theories whose exploration of life takes
account of the category of the spiritual—post-Jungian transpersonal psychology
(Hillman 1983; Grof 1979; Wilber 1981) and psychosynthesis (Assagioli 1975)
for example —see imaginative playing as a way of bringing the human soul and
spirit into communion with the creative forces of the universe.
126 DOWN TO EARTH

The theme of creation, both human and divine, and the relationship between the
two, constitutes the fundamental subject matter of spirituality workshops. In so
far as these workshops are concerned to make the unseen seen, embodying the
imagery of between-ness and beyondness, they are symbolic of the original
creative action whereby the universe itself came into being. Our creative
imagination does more than simply imitate the divine action, it actually
participates in it, as the essential characteristic of our createdness. This means
that to imagine is, for us, to be real. As Jean-Paul Sartre says ‘The imagination is
not a contingent and super-added power of consciousness, it is the whole
consciousness as it realises its freedom’ (1972: 217). To create is to experience
the freedom of being. ‘It is because he is transcendentally free that man can
imagine’ (Sartre 1972: 216). No wonder those whose imaginations became
engaged in the workshops described here, report a feeling of authenticity. The
things imagined were real enough, because the imaginary is ‘the “something”
concrete toward which the existent is surpassed’ (Sartre 1972: 217).
In the language of religions these imagined experiences are real because they
participate in the original creativity of God. The Deus Faber of ancient Egypt
was believed to dwell in the myth-creating faculty of human beings. Marie-
Louise von Franz (1995) records a creation myth of the African Basonge,
according to which the highest God, Mwile, quarrels with Kolumbo mui fange
‘the one who made himself’, he who has been created now demands the right to
be in charge of creation himself. Similarly, an African Basonge creation story
describes an argument between the originator of life and the son he has made for
himself: ‘N’kolle said “I have created everything!” Fidi Mkullu said “No, I have
created everything!’” (1995:134, 100). The similarity of such myths to the
biblical story of Adam and Eve is obvious.
It is a question of a series of genuine new beginnings. Imaginative creativeness
—creation in the image of God—is not limited to whatever may have already
happened. In the world’s creation myths we are concerned with the renewal of
life not by modification or even restoration, but actual re-creation. Mircea Eliade
quotes M.S.Stevenson’s The Rites of the Twice-Born, with regard to the Fijians.

Each time that life is threatened and the cosmos, in their eyes, is exhausted
and empty, the Fijians feel the need for a return in principilo. Hence the
essential importance in rituals and myths, of anything which can signify
the ‘beginning’, the original, the primordial.
(1971:19)

The instinct to create, then, is actually the need to re-create or at least become
involved in a process of re-creation.
Wherever these creation stories originate they tend to reveal these two
characteristics.
 GROUP SPIRITUALITY 127

1 The idea of total newness and originality. An example of this would be the
Apatak myth in which the creator of all life, Tulungersaq, or Father Raven,
first of all actually creates himself ‘He sat crouching in the darkness when
he suddenly woke to consciousness and discovered himself (von Franz
1995: 29). In this way, to use Sartre’s phrase, his ‘existence was surpassed’
in an action of freedom and self-expression that was both infinite and total.
2 The theme of ‘creation’, our co-operation with the source of life; the human
and the divine working together for the perfection of a shared reality.

The creation myths of the world offer many opportunities to explore this theme
to benefit from its power to revive the ‘imagination that makes us free’. This is
not simply a rethinking about life but a rebuilding of a world; and we, as men
and women, are involved in it, in the action of re-creation itself.

There is a beautiful tale among the Australian aborigines which says that
the bow and arrow were not man’s invention, but an ancestor. God turned
himself into a bow and his wife became the bow-string, for she constantly
has her hands around his neck, as the bow-string embraces the bow. So the
couple came down to earth and appeared to a man, revealing themselves as
bow and bow-string, and from that the man understood how to construct a
bow. The bow ancestor and his wife then disappeared again into a hole in
the earth. So man, like an ape, only copied but did not invent, the bow and
arrow. And so the smiths originally…did not feel that they had invented
metallurgy; rather, they learned how to transform metals on the basis of
how God made the world.
(von Franz 1995:141)

Creation myths and stories tend to follow a pattern which is probably as ancient
as the human race itself, that of ‘a triple statement, in the form of a repetitive
rhythm within the narrative’, three sisters, three caskets, three wishes, followed
climactically with a fourth event which performs the function of a final, decisive,
hammer blow, transforming a thrice-told tale into the mandala of a perfect action;
story; truth. Among the Maidu ‘Earth Initiate’ is held to create the world using
earth fished up by the tortoise. He grasps this in his hand

and rolls it about until he has a lump as big as a little stone, which he puts
on his raft. From time to time he looks at it, but it does not get bigger until
he looks at it the fourth time. Suddenly, it becomes as big as the world.
(von Franz 1995:249)

The hammer blow is not just decisive, it is in fact conclusive. Creation myths do
not simply tell us how a particular story ended, they signify the final destination
of all stories, and story tellers, too, leaving us full of awe at the significance of a
creation which calls for such an ending as this.
128 DOWN TO EARTH

These stories of the beginning and end of all things have left their mark—their
structural imprint—on all kinds of stories, everywhere in the world. As we saw
earlier, the action of organising the things that have happened to you, and that
you yourself have done, into the form of a connected narrative is a spiritual
action in itself, expressive as it is of your own personal reaching out towards
meaning and significance for your life. The form your action takes relates
directly to the underlying shape of these creation myths, as this has been
conceived as the archetype of meaningfulness, the order of things, whether they
are sounds, colours, shapes, textures or events in a story, which will provide us with
a material symbol of ultimate perfection.
In some way these stories stand out as subjects for the kind of spirituality
workshops described in this book. It would be hard to imagine better ones, in
fact. They must, however, be allowed to speak for themselves, without
adaptation or distortion, because as we have seen, their unique expressiveness,
their message, in fact subsists in the characteristic of interior balance. They need
to be enjoyed with respect for their true nature as spiritual truth. Movement, mime
and dance may be used in order to convey the sense of symmetry which
characterises the narrative; but there is no way of revealing the living spontaneity
of the Spirit’s presence by skill alone. What these workshops must depend on —
the only things they can depend on—are the creativity and freedom whose
message they are transmitting.

Creation workshops
The following workshops leave more room for imagination than some of those
described earlier. Their main outline, however, remains the same.

I Introduction—preparation. We explore ways of making ourselves feel

relaxed and alert.
II Action—the myth itself. This, the main business of the session, will develop
as it goes along. We listen to the story and then portray its meaning.
III Closure—de-roling. We stand back from the actions performed and parts
played within the symbolic world of the story. Is there anything we would
like to share with the others? We meditate for a minute or two, then say
goodbye.

I
Introduction
There are no instructions for these workshops, not, at least, at this stage of the
proceedings. It is impossible to provide a blueprint for something which is meant
to turn out differently on every occasion. The aim here is to present a story in
ways that express its meaning to those presenting it; and the only way to do this
is by discovering what that meaning is! The only thing that can be done in
 GROUP SPIRITUALITY 129

advance is to make some attempt to prepare the ground for the kind of soul
exploring which is going to take place here, no one yet knows how; and this is
the purpose for the section I have called introduction.

II
Action
The action part is yet to be revealed, however. This is the part which, every time
it happens, does so for the first time. This could be said about all the workshops
in this book of course, but up to now I have sketched in various bits of
supportive framework in order to provide a platform for people’s imaginations to
take off from. Not with these workshops though.
These are workshops about creation itself. We are looking at the way things
are created and, by implication, our own share in creating them. In other words,
if we plan them out in advance we have already created something, if only a plan
of some kind; but isn’t the planning an important part of what we want to
explore? What we do have already, however, is ourselves, one another, and
whatever it may be that is happening among us. We are, after all, searching for a
way in which we ourselves can present the idea, experience, event of
creativeness. We may as well start where we are. Talking to someone is a
creative act, maybe the creative act in some ways, so is touching them or even
simply looking at them.
People work on this in pairs or small groups, or all together in the larger group.
They also work by themselves, and on how it feels to be alone. There are no
rules for working in this way so long as what is happening feels free to those
concerned, thus expressing the creativity which is the message of the story. The
story’s theme is ultimate creativity, and this is the inspiration for the workshop.
This is why this approach—in which all sorts of new ideas are tried out and
old ones adapted to fit—is the only practicable way of demonstrating the reality
it describes. Creativity allows itself to ‘take several bites at the same cherry’. It is
willing to make mistakes and to pass through stages of indecision and
uncertainty (see Workshop I, p. 36), when it doesn’t know which way to turn.
Creativity dares to lose itself in chaos, only to re-invent itself there. In a story
about invention, the workshop approach could scarcely be improved on.
In these workshops, things can be used as themselves or made to stand in for
something else; space is allowed to become flexible, stretched out or collapsing
in on itself, likewise time; horizontal planes may be used to signify vertical ones,
so that climbing is demonstrated by walking. Anything in the room is available
for transformation, or just for ordinary construction purposes. The visible can be
drawn, painted, modelled; invisible things can be described, shown by gesture or
expressive movement, or sung about.
Most important of all, people can exchange roles and the illusion accepted as
an important, perhaps crucial, reality. Actions and incidents can be rehearsed or
performed spontaneously, included in a presentation for other people, or
130 DOWN TO EARTH

experienced as part of a drama in which everyone in the workshop is an actor and

all share in a liturgy that all have helped to create.
The thing to be avoided is any suggestion of trying to produce a slavish copy
of the original, although this would be a temptation. It would certainly be a move
in the wrong direction so far as encouraging creativity is concerned. Enjoyment,
interest, fun are all more objective than copying. The way we arrive at original
insights, ideas that are new to us, is certainly not by concentrating as hard as we
can on the task of thinking them up. Quite the reverse. In fact it turns out to be
better to think in terms of Alice’s garden, a mandala designed precisely to
illustrate this point—that the only way to reach the centre of things is by walking
outwards towards the circumference! Linear thinking and creature discovery are
in fact poles apart, the latter depending, in Koestler’s words, on ‘a de-
differentiation of thought’s matrices, a dismantling of its axioms, a new
innocence of the eye, followed by liberation from restraints “in order to allow” a
re-integration in a new synthesis’ (1977: 5). Our thinking needs to be loosened so
that it can be constructively refocused elsewhere (cf. Kelly: 1963).
When they are confronted by something as carefully designed and perfectly
balanced as a creation myth, group members need encouragement to persist in
following their own ideas and feelings, even if what they produce may appear to
be a good way away from the myth as this was read out to them. This indirect
approach allows the symbolism of ‘original creativity’ to work away behind
scenes until it is ready to reveal itself to the group as an authentically new
version of itself, to be compared with and enjoyed alongside the other one.

Finally, overall advice for this part of the workshop would be to allow
yourself to relax into it. Try to immerse yourself in the creative process so
that the workshop itself begins to work for you. There is no right or wrong
way of doing the things suggested here; although it should be said at once
that trying too hard is certainly wrong, whereas accepting absence of
inspiration usually turns out—in the end—to be temporarily right. Once
you start enjoying what you find yourself doing you warm up, and the
ideas start to emerge, heaven knows where from!

III
Closure
The content of this will, of course, depend on what has been happening during
the main ‘myth making’ section. Its main business concerns the need to allow
ourselves to return home from the journey we have been making together. When
we explore ideas and feelings in this dramatic way we exchange aspects of
ourselves—joys and sorrows, frustrations and satisfactions, strengths and
weaknesses—with the roles we take on in the story we are allowing ourselves to
become involved in. This section is intended to be an opportunity to draw
conclusions from the difference between the role being played and the person
 GROUP SPIRITUALITY 131

who is playing it: and for the person themselves to share her or his experience of
the drama with everyone else involved in it. The whole workshop ends with a
short time spent silently together.
These workshops are instances of the group’s use of what Jung calls ‘active
imagination’

He who speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he

lifts the idea he is trying to express out of the occasional and transitory into
the realm of the ever-enduring…. That is the secret of effective art.
(‘Contributions to Analytical Psychology’, 1928, cited by Jacobi 1962: 24)

‘Creative power’, Jung says, is mightier than its possessor. Its mightiness comes
primarily from the images it invokes and realises. Spirituality workshops of this
myth-based kind bring us into contact with this primal imagining and enlist our
own creativity in active ways in its service. We are involved in order to be used,
as creators of spiritual truth not merely creatures from it; although it is because
we do draw our wisdom as human beings from this great well of archetypal
understanding that we are able to contribute to it, as we use our knowledge of the
world we inhabit to transmit our awareness of a deeper reality. Spirituality
workshops are rarely presented as works of art; but because this kind of approach
permits people to experience their own and others’ creativity, they may be
regarded as active promoters of spiritual truth.
 Four creation myths

Hupi (North American Indian)

Begochiddy, the earth god, created the world. First he made four mountain
below the world, with four different kinds of ants (and also some bugs), and
planted bamboo in the mountain of the esat. This was the first world.
When the bamboo had grown up, a holw was made and all the inhabitants of
the first world climbed up and throght the hole. When they had gone Begochiddy
pulled the bamboo up into the second world, and Hashjesjin blew into the hole
four timmes to make it close up. The first world burned up after them (and is still
burning). Begochiddy created new mountains in the second world just like the
ones in the first one. He planted white cotton in the East, blue in the South and so
on. The men women and creatures then went on to climb into the third world.
Here Begochiddy and the other gods created another world for people animals
and insects to live in, again the inhabitants leave, en route for world number
four. This however is entirely for people animals and insects to live in, again the
inhabitants leave, en route for world number four. This however is entirely
covered with water, and so is inhospitable. With the aid of the locust, who has
broken up through the croust covering the people come into the fourth world and
settle there.
(Adapted from franz 1995:54, 55)

Hindu
The God Vishnu once took the form of a tiny minnow. The minuscule
glimmer of the swimming god caught Manu’s eye. Instantly, the First Man
scooped it up in one hand.
To save the divine fish from predators larger than itself Manu kept it alone in a
water dish. When it outgrew the dish he transferred it to a jar, then to a barrel,
then to a pool, then to a pond, then to a like and finally to the ocean, since by that
time Vishnu had grown sufficiently great in girth to swallow any other fish.
Long afterwards a great flood arose, inundating the shores of the world. As
Manu ran away inland, the billowing surge overtook him and swept him far
 FOUR CREATION MYTHS 133

backwards down the watery abyss. He would. As Manu ran away inland, the
billowing surge overtook him and swept him far backwards down the watery
abyss. He would have drowned, but Vishnu—who was now Leviathan—arrived
in time to save him. So Manu rode out the flood in comfort on Vishnu’s back,
which seemed a sizeable floating island, a paradise, or a New World rising when
the old had disappeared.
(Eliot 1993)

Maori (New Zealand)

lo dwelt within breathing-space of immensity.
The Universe was in darkness, with water everywhere.
There was no glimmer of dawn, no darkness, no light.
And he began by saying these words,—
That he might cease remaining inactive;
‘Darkness, become a light- possessing darkness.’
And at once light appeared.
He then repeated these self-same words in this manner,—
That he might cease remaining inactive;
‘Light, become a darkness- possessing light.’
And again an intense darkness supervened.
Then a third time he spake, saying:
‘Let there be one darkness above,
Let there be one darkness below (alternate).
Let there be a darkness unto Tupoa,
Let there be darkness unto Tawhito;
It is darkness overcome and dispelled.
Let there be one light above.
Let there be one light below (alternate)
Let there be light unto Tupoa,
Let there be light unto Tawhito.
A dominion of light,
A bright light.’
And now a great light prevailed
lo then looked to the waters which compassed him about,
and spake a fourth time, saying;
‘Ye waters of Tai-kama, be be separate,
Heaven, be formed’ Then the sky became suspended.
‘Bring forth thou Tupua-hero-nuku.’
And at once the moving earth lay stretched abroad.
(translation in Sproul 1991)
134 GROUP SPIRITUALITY

Salinan Indian (North American)

The Old woman of the Sea was jealous of Eagle and wished to be more
powerful than he. So she came towards him with her basket in which she carried
the sea. Continually she poured the water out of the basket until it co ered all the
land. It rose nearly to the top of the mountain where were gathered Eagle and the
other animals. Then Eagle said to Puma, ‘Lend me your whiskers of Puma and
lassoed the basket. Then the sea ceased rising and sdthe old woman died.
Then said Eagle to Dove, ‘Fetch some earth!’ Then Eagle made the world of
the mud brought by the dove. Then he took three sticks of elder and formed from
these a woman and two men. But still they had no life. They all entered the
sweat-house. Then said Prairie-Falcon, ‘Fetch my barsalilo!’, Coyote went to
bring it, but brought a load of different wood. ‘No!’said Prairiew-Falcon. ‘That is
not my barsalilo,’ and Coyote had to go again. Then they all sweated. After
sweating, the eagle blew on the elder-wood people and they lived. Then they
made a bower of branches and held a great fiesta.
(J.N.Mason, from sproul 1991)
 Appendix

Rites of passage
The spiritual workshops described in this book follow a pattern characterising
ceremonies of change and renewal throughout the world. Everywhere, corporate
ritual expresses our sense of moving through life in terms of actual physical
movement. In rites of passage ‘The passage from one social position to another
is identified with a territorial passage, such as the entrance into a village, the
movement from one room into another or the crossing of streets and squares’
(Hamelin 1972). This is the essence of drama, involving us in actual personal
experience and not simply informing us about abstract truths—however
important they may be. It is also the essence of ritual, as we offer the terms of
our daily existence to the divine course and completion of life. It takes place in a
human setting, but its purpose is to embody our experience of God. Because it
concerns the whole person in an inclusive way, its ability to change exceeds that
of any argument.
Certainly the most vivid illustration of this is the rite of passage. Here a
religious doctrine concerning the emergence of life from death is presented as a
dramatic narrative which initiates those taking part into a new, higher condition
of life. In cultures throughout the world, liturgies of transformation are used to
crystallise our human perception of the significance of every development,
expected or unexpected, which occurs to us in the course of our lives, using the
shape of events to move us into the presence of God. Such rituals give shape to
our stories by presenting them in terms of a final story, one which embodies
divine perfection. In the actions used to bring this about we are spiritually
transformed—conformed to the divine image. In other words these rituals speak
to us in a highly personal way, using our own imagery to reveal what lies on the
other side of the final threshold, where the flux of becoming is the perfection of
Being. We are conscious of ‘leaving’ the world in one state of personal being and
‘rejoining’ it in another, having been changed by our journey.
Rites of this kind may be used to bestow a special kind of significance on
events and situations, contact with the source and goal of life giving rise to an
136 GROUP SPIRITUALITY

experience of newness which inspires those taking part to embark on a new stage
in their journey. This is the initiatory action which Eliade distinguishes in all
corporate ritual. The need for it is ‘co-existent with any and every human
condition’ (1965: 128). From time immemorial it has given shape to human life,
modelling its own interior and exterior organisation on biological, psychological
and social changes occurring within life, and acting as a kind of midwife to states
of affairs which need the type of public recognition and divine authority that it
alone can give. Such rituals are particularly useful with regard to states of affairs
which involve pain and suffering; when the present is unacceptable to us and we
would like to ignore it completely or pass over it quickly and move into a more
acceptable future. Rites help us to ‘grasp the nettle’ of change.
The phrase ‘rites of passage’ was first used by the Dutch anthropologist,
Arnold van Gennep. He describes them in this way: ‘A complete scheme of rites
of passage theoretically includes pre-liminal rites (rites of separation), liminal
rites (rites of transition) and post-liminal rites (rites of incorporation). …To cross
the threshold is to unite oneself with a new world’ (1960: 10). By a process
which depends on an experience of separation from the rest of society, a
consequent period of isolation and disorganisation, and a final time of
incorporation within a new personal and social world, candidates for social and
religious change are delivered from their old way of being into one which is
experienced as authentically new. In order to understand how this can be done
we need to remember some of the things we mentioned in Chapter 3, when we
were looking at stories and story telling.
In any story there must be some kind of climax, an event that encapsulates the
action simply because the story pivots on it. It is in fact the principal reason for
telling the story at all, in the sense that the conflict brought about by the need for
change of some kind has created a situation which must somehow be resolved.
There must of course also be a starting point, both in order to locate the story in
the ordinary course of events, and to signal the point at which it departs from
this. And there must be an ending; without a consummation there is no point in
bringing up the subject in the first place.
However, in sophisticated story telling, these three elements do not necessarily
follow each other in the order followed by the original events on which the story
is based; part of the skill of story telling consists in the way events are presented,
so that frequently we have stories-within-stories —‘flash-backs’, false climaxes
and ambiguous conclusions. The fact remains, however, that virtuosity of this
kind is only effective because it is not really successful. These things work
because we are never fully convinced by them. They keep us searching for the
underlying order by which the story’s message is communicated, a course of
events which has a real beginning, middle and end.
It is the rite’s triple shape that brings its message home. This is the inalienable
shape of transformations that are not simply thought about but experienced. Real
change is never a simple distinction between old and new, former and latter. For
real change to take place, the old situation must really end, and the new one
 APPENDIX 137

really begin, which means that there must be an element which is neither old nor
new, but different from both. This point between is difficult to envisage with any
clarity, so long as we content ourselves with simply thinking about it. It is how
things are after the old state of affairs has ended, and before the new one has
begun. Thus, the outer movements of the rite frame the central section which,
like the centre of the turning wheel, produces and receives movement without
getting anywhere itself. How can it if it is the epicentre of the conflict which lies
at the heart of every real change, and the motive power which drives the
workshops described in this book.
At the same time we have to take account of the fact that this moment of
between-ness is in fact always the present moment. Our hope for the future is not
in ‘before’ or ‘after’, but in ‘now’. Because we are always engaged in
remembering the past and anticipating the future we have no real psychological
grasp upon the present, which is the point at which we actually live. In fact,
however, the future does not come to us from the past. It comes from now, the
experience which eludes us, yet is nevertheless where we are, the space we inhabit.
1

In ritual of any kind, and most dramatically in rites of passage, we arrive at the
true threshold only in the middle of the rite, not a moment before. Real
thresholds are always difficult, even painful. In the language of religious ritual,
the pain is inherent in the process of dying and rising again, leaving behind all
that is known and loved and trusted, in order to face things that can only be
thought about in terms of an insupportable absence.
In passage rituals of the kind described by A.van Gennep (1960) and V.Turner
(1974), this inevitability of pain is brought home by experiences deliberately
intended to reveal it by externalising and amplifying its presence. For the
initiand, past and future are abolished by the urgency of what is going on here
and now. This agony is contrived, like everything else in the rite; it has been
systematically rendered unforgettable.
In fact, the rite functions to make us aware of what is really involved in
change for human beings, with their tendency to cling to the vain belief that they
can somehow switch from a totally familiar state of affairs to one that is
completely strange without having to go through anything at all in between,

1 We are tempted to think dyadically about the things we experience because our mental
comfort seems to require us to classify all we perceive in terms of discernible differences.
Our way of arranging what we experience into manageable, assimilable groups depends
on the action of separating this from that. There are some things we cannot do this with,
however. From time to time the threeness of things demands attention. Perhaps it is worth
taking a little time to consider the significance in human thought of things that are
threefold. For the Greeks, three was the perfect number; more than this, it represented the
invariable number of components necessary for an action that would be perfect or express
perfection. This was quite a practical consideration; because it had a beginning, a middle
and an end, such an action would possess its own integrity, and could stand
138 GROUP SPIRITUALITY

changing their lives with the same facility that they can change their minds. Even
when, perhaps particularly when, the change is one that concerns our life at a
deep level, we would rather get on with the business of getting used to the new
state of affairs before we have any real knowledge of what it consists of; before
it has come into existence in fact. Stranded between a world that has died and
one that has not yet been born we are lost and dismayed. In the state of mind
which is neither one thing nor another we do not know what to think, how to feel.
We try to bypass our own pain by moving into a fantasy future, which has all the
naturalness and familiarity of the world we are used to, being in reality only an
ersatz extension of that world. Thus, by imagining we can move from one thing
straight into another, we are defeated by the process we thought we were
mastering.
There is, then, a vital stage in human change that we prefer to ignore and
consistently try to avoid. Change is always a process rather than a unitary event,
revolving round a central experience of very great significance, which we may
choose to ignore but whose action we cannot escape. The effectiveness of any
kind of ritual in realising this stage and overcoming our tendency to elude it,
governs its effectiveness as an instrument facilitating change. In threefold rituals
of transformation, the facts about human change are articulated within a
recognisable human happening, defined by a beginning, a middle and an end, in
which the two outer movements draw attention to the importance of the central
section by ‘framing’ it. There is no glossing over of the crucial centre ground,
which is the psychological reality of change itself as distinct from mere wishful
thinking. By involving us in an experience which conforms to the preconditions
of a real-life transition, ritual educates us about our own personal growth, which
necessarily involves pain and which we would rather avoid.

for itself. Thus all authentic propositions, every opinion that its proposer would be willing
to vouch for and able to defend, would be of this kind. Synthetic propositions, in which
the opposition of the first two parts are triumphantly resolved in the third one, are more
powerful than ever. Even if we content ourselves with saying the same thing three times
over the effect is considerable, however, ‘Like the computing machine, the brain probably
works on a variety of the famous principle expounded by Lewis Carroll in The Hunting of
the Snark—“What I tell you three times is true”.’ (Weiner 1961: 154) The cumulative
effect of triplicity is apparent everywhere, not only in literature—where the simple
threefold story provides the basic narrative foundation of novels and plays, and folk tales
and fairy stories depend on three wishes, three suitors, three dangers or perils to be faced,
three brothers or sisters competing to face them—but in ordinary life, where entertainers
receive a round of applause the third time they say something, which, when said for the
first time was greeted with almost complete silence, and teachers and politicians get their
message across by remembering the time-honoured advice ‘Tell them you’re going to do
it, do it, and tell them you’ve done it.’ The doing is the most difficult, of course, just as
the second delivery of a running gag, receiving the least response, provokes the most
anxiety. In these threefold forms the central section bears the weight of meaning because
it has to come to grips with the problem, embrace the agony of change and cast loose from
its supporting structure.
 APPENDIX 139

Ritual takes us into a place and time we cannot sustain, and then leads —or
carries—us out again. This is a place we hardly dare contemplate because its
demand is so extreme. To describe the tendency to avoid taking it into account as
leaping over the grave is no exaggeration. Every real human change involves,
and must in some way have been recognised as, a genuine dying experience. So
that the new may live, the old must really be known to have died. Rites of
passage exist in order to help us take account of this vital fact.
Thus, in rites of passage throughout the world the median ‘liminal’ phase
makes extensive use of the symbolism of death as an effective way of putting
pressure on life as we are used to living it. Such rituals aim at changing the way
in which individuals perceive the world itself. Even though they are experienced
in concrete ways, their message draws its power from religious metaphor rather
than literal statement, as physical movement and bodily gesture point away from
themselves to what is, apart from the use of symbolism, inexpressible. The action
does not have to be as violent nor the experiences involved so painful as they are
in the ceremonies described by cultural anthropologists and historians of religion
(cf. Eliade 1965; Turner 1974). People involved in spiritual workshops do not
have to endure actual bodily mutilation or sensory deprivation designed to sever
their links with the past by flooding their awareness with the pain of an
insupportable present. The underlying principle, however, remains the same.
Fears that are not normally faced, ideas and feelings that tend to give us pause
are more powerful in their effect, more real in their significance, than we assume
them to be. For those personally involved, the presence of things that summon up
realities which they would prefer not to contemplate renders the liminal phase a
challenging place, a time of trial to be undergone. Which is why the final part of
the workshop is designed with the specific purpose of invoking the symbolism of
reassurance and belonging.
 Epilogue

Once upon a time a group of people met together in order to try to explore what
it really meant to be human. Once upon a time…
In these workshops we start with a story, not as an idea or an argument, but as
a place to move about in. We move into the space it makes and find out what
happens in it. The room where we are becomes the place where it lives.
It may be a school room or a village hall, it may even be a church. But
whatever or wherever it is, it is inhabited by the story, a beckoning presence in a
world as wide and deep as our imagination. Normally, of course, we make sure it
will know its place by imprisoning it in our notebooks or nailing it to a clipboard
so it may have no chance of escaping our critical intellect or expository fervour.
No chance at all. The stories we hear and read in church, sitting quietly and
obediently in our pews or standing perched behind the lectern, appeal to our
church selves. They communicate with the church side of our awareness. We tell
ourselves how very much we love them—but one way or another we still
manage to emasculate them.
Spirituality workshops give them room to breathe. In the liturgical space that
we allow ourselves they come and live amongst us, reaching out to us and
inviting us to take a walk in their world and see how readily it becomes our own.
In a sense they create this space for us and in us, as they expand our imagination
to meet their world. In the workshop we do not simply encounter this
imaginative reality, we are able to move into it and explore it in the way we
make sense of the world we live in. In other words, we embody it. We talk about
making sense of what we hear, but we usually take this to mean that we interpret
them, organising them into ideas we can assimilate. In this case, however, we
mean something different. To embody is to make bodily sense of an experience
not simply perform a cognitive operation upon it; to move into it; to inhabit it.
You use your imagination. Nobody tells you what to do. You listen to the
story, imagine the space and move in. Whatever liturgy emerges from this kind
of experiential workshop is a liturgy of movement. In the most immediate way of
all it is story-become-liturgical action. Theological reflection follows this instead
of preceding it. People who take part have a feeling of discovery, of having
actually been somewhere. Perhaps this is because they haven’t been given any
 141

idea about what they will find (or, in the case of normal church procedures, what
they have expected, what they must find).
The people who have been coming to these workshops have something of a
problem describing them to their friends. They say they can’t forget them, and
yet somehow they can’t remember them either.

Someone asked me what it was like, what we did, and do you know I
couldn’t tell him. And it’s been like that all along, ever since the first
session ten weeks ago. I can never remember what we actually do at all.
All I know is that when I leave I seem to carry away with me a great sense
of peace.

And isn’t that a kind of knowledge? A very deep kind?

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 Afterword

Our selfhood can be, by turns, both citadel and prison. Secure within its walls we
perceive ourselves to be protected from that which might seem to threaten our
identity. At the same time, those walls can so easily close upon us, inhibiting the
full discovery of that identity.
And yet, as the author reminds us, our true spiritual reality transcends this kind
of separate identity. ‘No man is an island’ and so, in the mutually agreed
suspension of reality which the group dynamic permits, members are—by happy
paradox—set free to venture beyond the walls of self to risk a deeper exploration
of reality: free to encounter the Beyond in their midst; and free to experience the
creative embrace of the God in whom we live and move and have our being.
Archbishop of York
 Index

figures are denoted in bold type catharsis 6;

active imagination 143, 144 shared 23, 24, 25;
‘the actress’ 123–4 theatrical 51, 117, 118, 124
age range, groups 138 ‘celebrate’ 42
‘all in it together’ 62–72 centring 32–3
Antonucci-Mark, G. 144 ceremony see rites of passage
anxiety, group members 34, 37, 132; changes, psychological see transformation
see also fear Charybdis, Scylla and 93
archetypes 96, 108, 140; Chesterton, G. K. 34
see also collective unconscious; Christ 32
mythology circle, symbolism of 32, 33
Aristotle 6, 114 closure, workshop 36, 147, 149–50
art: as expression of spirituality 7, 150; coincidentia oppositorum 140
therapy 12 collective unconscious 79, 108
Artaud, A. 27 communication: non-verbal 25–9, 37;
‘ascents’ 92 and space 48–9;
‘as if mode 6, 18 unconscious 18, 19
assumptions, basic 18 competitiveness, group 34, 35
awareness: expansion of 18, 19; confidentiality 36
self 110, 111; consciousness, expansion of 79
symbolic 54, 141–2 contact see distance/contact
core constructs 81
Bailey, E. 77, 78, 81 cosmicisation 32–5
basic assumptions 18 creation myths 4, 144–7;
belonging, symbolism of 160 Hindu 152;
bereavement 33, 34 Hupi 151;
Between Man and Man 49, 50 Maori 153;
Bion,W. R. 17, 18, 19, 142 Salinan
body language 25–9 Indian 154
Briers, Richard xi creation stories, working with 143–7
British Association for Drama creation workshops 147–50;
Therapists 12 action 147–9;
Buber, M 21, 27, 31, 47, 50 closure 147, 149–50;
Buddha 33 introduction 147
Crites, S. 88

148
 INDEX 149

dance/movement 143, 147 Easter 105–7

danger/safety dynamic 6, 20–25, 51, 52; Eliot, T. S. 135, 152
see also anxiety; embodiment 25–9, 131
fear death, contemplating 51, 131, 132, empathy 12, 18
133 engulfment/isolation dimension 49
defences 4; Epictetus 89
inadequate 30; Erikson, E. 52
lowering, within group 21, 22, 23 ‘eternity’ 95, 96, 99
defensiveness 14, 16, 138; examples see workshop examples
and anxiety 132 excitability 142
depth psychology 77 expectation, group 22
‘depths’ 90, 91 experiential therapeutic learning 6, 7
de-roling 37, 60 explicit/implicit religion 77, 78, 80–82
Deus Faber 144
‘disabled man’ 125–6 faith, definition of 81
distance fear: life/death 51;
distance/contact 20, 21; of ridicule 36;
workshops about 55–72 symbolic 118;
‘dove’s wandering’ 40 see also anxiety;
drama 4, 5, 6, 49; safety
and dreaming 114–15, 129; feelings, group 15
and playing 51, 52 ‘flight of the dove’ 39–40
dramatherapy 22, 114–15, 144; Foulkes, S. H. 17
and catharsis 51, 117, 118, 124; Fox, J. 133
workshop 10–12, 55–62; Fox, M. 27, 28, 32, 34, 35
see also psychodrama Franz, M.-L. 141, 144, 151
dramatic space 50, 54 freedom 46, 47–8
dream-meetings 121–3 Freud, S. 17, 79, 80, 85
dream-narratives 120–21
dream-space 116–17 games see playing ‘the garden’ 106–7
dream worlds 119–20 gestalt therapy 144
dream workshops 109, 115–26; God 141, 144
the actress 123–4; Goffman, E. 48
disabled man 125–6; Grimes, R. L. 127
moving in 116; Grof, S. 7
naughty child 124; grounding 128–31
reactions to 129–30; group: building 35–7;
telephone box 124–5 feelings 15;
dreaming 3, 108–27, 128; as icon of relationship 20, 21;
and drama 114–15, 129; identity 3, 133, 138, 139, 142;
recurring nightmares 117–19, 122–6; kinetic nature of 20;
reliving 109; psychology 17, 80;
and ritual 109, 113–14; sharing 13;
and the spiritual 109, 135–6; spirituality 4, 25, 35, 80, 139;
symbolism 118, 127; wisdom 14, 18, 19,20
therapeutic 110–13 group processes, creative 14, 16, 17;
Durkheim, E. 79, 142 stages of 16–17;
150 INDEX

tension 21 Jung, C. G. 7, 33, 79, 150;

archetypes 108, 140;
healing 4, 13, 22, 23; dreams 109
relationship 55;
through meeting 50; Kelly, G. A. 81, 82, 89
through play 110–13; Kierkegaard, S. 87
through stories 82–6, 90; kinetic nature of groups 20
towards 13, 16, 141 Klein, M. 51
Healing poem by D.H.Lawrence 11 knowledge 162
‘here and now’ 102–3
Hillman,J. 109 language, body 25–9
Hindu creation myths 152 Leach, E. 82
holism, group 17, 18, 20; Lent meetings 76, 99–107
archetypes of 140 life and death, contemplating 51, 131, 132,
Holy Grail, quest for 106 133
humanness, expanding 6 life stories: 82–3;
Hupi creation myths 151 archetypal 96;
finding meaning in 86, 87, 90, 96;
I and thou 31, 50 healing nature of 82–6, 90;
I-thou/I-it 47 and myth 90;
I, thou, we 12–13 and psychotherapy 83, 84, 85;
identity: of group 3, 133, 138, 139, 142; reformulation 83, 87, 88, 89;
threefold 13; repression 84, 85;
within group 21 ritualisation 88–90;
illness 11; and self 88;
see also healing shape of 83–8, 89;
imagination: active 143, 144; see also story/narrative
inspired 4; liturgy workshop example 73–6, 99
and relationship 115; ‘the living past’ 101–2
and self-awareness 110, 111;
shared 6, 7, 12, 143 magical thinking 141
imperfection, accepting 34, 35 mandala symbol 33, 140, 141, 142
implicit/explicit religion 77, 78, 80–82 Maori creation myths 153
‘in the labyrinth’ 41 Marcuse, S. 85
individuality 35 May, R. 51
inhibitions, release of 21, 22, 23 meaning of life 86, 87, 90, 96;
inspired imagination 4 quest for 106
intersubjective reflexivity 12, 13 Merleau Ponty, M. 26
‘into the valley’ 103–5 meta-theme 131–4
intuition of the single self 7 metaphor, safe-space 52, 55
‘the island’ 55–62 metonymy 82
isolation/engulfment dimension 49 Moreno, J.L. 18, 19
movement/dance 143, 147
Jacobi, J. 140 ‘moving in’ 116
Jesus Christ 32 mutual inclusivity 140
journal extracts 14–15 mutuality, yearning for 24
‘journey to the cross’ 99–107 mythology 7, 90, 115;
 INDEX 151

and archetypes 108; reflexivity, intersubjective 12, 13

creation 61 regressive behaviour, in groups 22, 142
relational space 45, 46
Narayana-Visnu 33 relationship: and imagination 115;
narrative see dream-narratives; nature of 12, 13, 20, 21;
story/narrative union-in-separation 45
‘naughty child’ 124 religion 53–5, 144;
nightmares, recurring 117–19, 122–6; Christianity 13;
see also dreams explicit/implicit 77, 78, 80–82;
Hinduism 13;
object relations theory 44–6 and spirituality 3, 9, 76–80
repression 84, 85
‘parliament of creatures’ 98–9 rites of passage 29, 155–60;
peace 162 incorporation 156;
perceptions, changed 134–9 separation 156;
personhood, sharing 12, 142 transition 156
playing 3; The Rites of the Twice-Born 145
drama as 51, 52; ritual 49;
relearning 49–53; dreams 109, 113–14;
rules 111, 112, 113; introducing 74;
space 44, 45, 46, 47; religious 55;
therapeutic 110–13; use in workshops 74, 75, 80;
workshop games 36, 37, 41 see also spirituality rituals
positive regard 34 ritualisation, of life stories 88–90
potentiality 44–6 Rogers, C. 13, 14, 16, 18, 19, 20;
presence 20 positive regard 34
‘The Process of the Basic Encounter
Group’ paper 19 sacred space 53–5
projective identification 12 safety, establishing 3, 5, 6, 28, 29, 52
psychodrama 143 safety-in-danger 6, 20–25, 51, 52;
psychodynamic theory 18 see also fear
psychology: group/individual 17, 80; Salinan Indian creation myths 154
and spirituality 79, 80; Sartre, J.-P. 144
transpersonal 7, 79, 80, 144 scapegoating 22
psychosynthesis 144 Scheff, T. J. 24, 51
psychotherapy 83, 84, 85 Scylla and Charybdis 93
secularisation 78
quadratura circuit 141 security, emotional 56;
quest, spiritual 30, 106 see also safety
self-awareness 110, 111
Rank, O. 33 self-hood 77, 88
reaching out 139–43 self-transcendence 7, 133, 134–9, 141,
reaffirmance see validation 142, 157, 158;
reassurance 28; rituals of 159–60
symbolism of 160 separateness/togetherness 21
reciprocity 18, 19 separation ceremonies 156
reflection 6 shared: imagination 6, 7, 12, 143;
152 INDEX

personhood 12, 142; vulnerability (Scylla and Charybdis) 93

spirituality 4, 25, 35, 80, 139; spirituality workshops 73–6, 96, 97, 99;
see also group sharing 4, 20, 140; the garden 106–7;
cathartic 23, 24, 25; here and now 102–3;
group 13; into the valley 103–5;
needs 24 journey to the cross 99–107;
Snake poem by D.H.Lawrence 41 the living past 101–2;
sociology 77, 78 parliament of creatures 98–9;
soul, wounded 11 supper 105–6;
Soul-Gibberish poem by Mary Coleridge the trial 97–8;
10 wells of living water 99–100
space: between 45; spontaneity, group 19
deictic nature 54; Stevenson, M. S. 145
dramatic 50, 54; story/narrative 29–31;
dream 116–17; personal and transpersonal 139;
as language 48–9; safety of 29;
physical 43, 44; spirituality of 31, 161;
play 44, 45, 46; see also life stories
potential 44–6, 51; strangers, speaking to 75
provisional 46; ‘struggle’ 94, 95
relational 45, 46; ‘supper’ 105–6
sacred 53–5; support, group 46–7
and safety 51, 52; symbolism 3, 54, 141–2;
social 48, 49; of belonging 160;
therapeutic 46–8, 49 of circle 32, 33;
spiritual awareness: growth of 8; dream 118, 127;
search for 77 mandala 33, 140, 141, 142;
spiritual values 3 of reassurance 160
spirituality: defining 1–2, 4, 5, 7, 11;
and dreams 109, 135–6; ‘tele’ 18
embodied 131; ‘telephone box’ 124–5
group 4, 25, 35, 80, 139; theatrical catharsis 51, 117, 118, 124;
inspired imagination 4; see also drama
need for 76; themes 131;
personal encounter 4; meta-theme 131–4
and psychology 79, 80; therapy see healing;
and religion 3, 9, 76–80; psychotherapy therapeutic: dreams
and story 31, 161 110–13;
spirituality exercises 39–42; space 46–8, 49
celebrate 42; Thorne, B. 77
dove’s wandering 40; Tillich, P. 81
flight of the dove 39–40; transformation of self 7, 133, 134–9, 141,
in the labyrinth 41 142, 157, 158;
spirituality rituals 73, 74, 75; rituals 159–60
ascents 92; transition ceremonies 156
depths 90, 91; transitional object 128;
eternity 95, 96; space as 44, 45
struggle 94, 95;
 INDEX 153

transpersonal psychology 7, 79, 80, 144

trauma, dealing with 4
‘the trial’ 97–8
trust, building 34, 35, 38–9
trust exercises 38–9
Tuckman, B. W. 16, 19
two plus two equals? 13–20

unconscious: collective 79, 108;

communication 18, 19
union-in-separation 45
universal being 77

valency 17
validation 29, 76;
group 23;
of religion 78
‘vulnerability’ (Scylla and Charybdis) 93

Washburn, J. 7
weakness, shared 35
‘wells of living water’ 99–100
wholeness, move towards 13, 16, 141;
see also healing
Wilber, K. 79, 80
Wilshire, B. 134
Winnicott, D. W. 44–6, 47, 51, 110, 128
wisdom, group 14, 18, 19, 20
workshop approach 9
workshop examples 14–15, 28, 33;
see also creation;
distance/contact;
dreams;
liturgy;
spirituality exercises/workshops;
trust 38–9
workshop structure 4, 5, 6, 36, 37–8;
beginning 36–7;
closure 36, 147, 149–50;
de-roling 37, 60;
games 36, 37, 41;
group building 35–7;
middle 36