Held in the Great Container of Love:
A Revisioning of Mid-Atlantic Pathwork/Sevenoaks
By Dan Iott
For those of you who haven’t heard, there’s palpable excitement around the “Revisioning” process currently going on in the Mid-Atlantic Pathwork Sevenoaks community. In a nutshell, our revisioning is a community-wide effort that is asking us all to feel deep down into our individual and collective bodies to again fully recognize the core values that move us. We are like busy bees gathering honey, capturing and documenting this “felt sense of our values” through an ongoing series of “appreciative inquiry” styled interviews with our founders, helpers, leaders and others. We are now in the process of distilling these results into a preliminary body of data that is comprehensive and representative of all our values and dreams. We will soon gather to define our “Vision for the Future”, an aspirational set of 15-20 goals that resonate with the value-informed data we’ve unearthed. This vision will then inform everything we set out to do at Sevenoaks in a cyclical, iterative process that will determine our destiny in the years to come.
Specifically, the revisioning process seeks to establish our “organizational architecture” for the future, and is based on Victor Pinedo’s methodology for creating organizations capable of handling great adversity. As we know, organizations the world over are finding themselves increasingly buffeted by man-made and natural events on a global scale - Covid-19 being the most vivid current example. To survive and prosper, organizations will need to more fully embody one key understanding necessary to respond to such major events in a sustainable way. And that is the idea that all facets of their organization must continuously operate out of their core values - rather than relying on monolithic, top-down plans and hierarchical governance structures.
Held in the Great Container of Love:
A Revisioning of Mid-Atlantic Pathwork/Sevenoaks By Dan Iott
Once they are identified and embodied in all decision making, core values become the guiding principles for a virtually unlimited universe of potential responses an organization can create to deal with tumultuous times.
My personal take on this as a participant in the Sevenoaks revisioning is that deep down, every decision and action we take is a manifestation of what we value most in that moment. If we are to be successful in manifesting what we seek, we must reflect upon our values first, and often before we decide anything. We must take a moment collectively to simply be, checking in with what we hold most dear - recognizing it for its clarity and power - before we make any plans. This is the way the Mid-Atlantic Pathwork and Sevenoaks will move from “strategic planning to strategic being” - a core principle we hope to make second nature.
What’s truly exciting is that this idea not only applies to the inner workings of the organization as a whole, but to each person who is called to participate and thus become a part of the whole. As our community members see where their own individual core values resonate with those of the organization and its goals, they understand that their stake in it is a personal one. They see that what they want for themselves can actually be fulfilled by becoming a participant. For me this was all about my longing for connection with others and being a part of what I feel and think of as the “Great Love” of the world. It took a little while for me to make the connection between my longing and what my purpose could be in the revisioning, but now I’m deep in it and it’s exciting (and sometimes scary) to let myself go into it and be held by it’s promise.
Held in the Great Container of Love:
A Revisioning of Mid-Atlantic Pathwork/Sevenoaks By Dan Iott
This is not to say that everything has been perfectly wonderful in the Sevenoaks Pathwork community. Our dire financial situation brought on by Covid’s forcing us to close, the systemic problems in our governance
(that Covid painfully laid bare) and the continuing stress has made for some difficult situations. As Pathworkers, we know that such stress has that divine tendency to bring our imperfections to the fore to give us an opportunity to work with them. The revisioning is creating a new playing field that’s allowing us to see how we can make the best of these opportunities. But even so, I am sure that many of us have found ourselves somewhere along the way wishing that “this cup be taken from me.” It is the most painful thing to be in conflict with one another over something we all care so deeply about.
The revisioning clearly holds the promise of an improved Sevenoaks, and it is the Pathwork that imbues it with its divine spark - our principles and values are entirely copacetic with the revisioning, so much so that some have taken to calling the revisioning “Pathwork for organizations”. As we embrace the methodology of the revisioning in the Mid-Atlantic Pathwork, we intend to be less encumbered by the constraints of the past, freeing valuable energy and resources to bring to the execution of our vision for the future. It is in this spirit of hope and faith that we look to bring our vision to fruition - and we are blessed to be in the midst of it no matter how messy it may seem to be.
Looking forward, sometime in late spring we hope to be far enough along in the revisioning process that we will have established a beginning set of goals which constitute our vision and that will give form to our potential destiny. It truly is an exciting time for Sevenoaks. We hope you will all join together with us in our ongoing prayer - that we be
Held in the Great Container of Love:
A Revisioning of Mid-Atlantic Pathwork/Sevenoaks By Dan Iott
held in the great container of Love as we move forward in rebirthing Sevenoaks, stronger and more resilient than ever before.