Strand Report

Our strand was about deep sharing among communities. Elders of three lively, important communities held it: Sabine Lichtenfels from Tamera, Achim Ecker from Zegg, and Craig Gibsone from Findhorn. It is also worth remarking the presence of Vera Kleinhammes, from Tamera, and Ina Meyer-Stoll, from Zegg, who also brought their experience to the circle. Report by Filipe Freitas and Karsten Petersen

We started around the fire, sharing a strong field of energy nourished by ancestors’ presence, in the powerful-grounded Earth Lodge.
Chinese, Hungarian, Australian, German, Brazilian, American, Danish, Swiss, Korean, Greek, Estonian, French, English, Libyan, and others, contributed to an amazing diversity of experiences, cultural inheritances, worldviews, and creating a strong group of beautiful seekers, gardeners of a new coherent, non-violent, holistic world.
The following days were co-created in the Forum, a community tool developed to build trust and bring the co-existent truth of each one to be shared in a circle of human beings who create life together. In spite of most of us just having met each other, a subtle and powerful force surrounded us to create a surprising depth that arose from each voice.
As Sabine said, “the more we trust the circle, the more we dare to share”.

Forum is somehow a simple process, but it’s impressive how it can be intense and profound. Nothing is more touching than real life, the life of the universe within each one of us.
Being invited to completely take the moment, the whole space and time, becoming vulnerable to receive support from the group we stepped onto a world stage to bring not only our own experiences, but also the human experience, the ancestor nature that comes through each one of us throughout our common evolutionary path.
By sharing deeply from the essence, community spirit arises. And the more community evolves, the more a deep listening and a genuine feeling expression is needed. There is nothing inside us that essentially must be hidden.

Uncovering the hidden feelings we realize that there is no reason to be afraid to expose them. In Forum, we explored our capacity to embrace all life, even the anger, the frustration, the suffering.

Creating trust in community we dare to step into deep questions, being transparent with ourselves and with the others. Community spirit potentializes real life, the presence and the affection. In community we can investigate ways to strengthen open hearted listening and speaking. The more hidden feelings emerge, the more fears disappear.
Towards this, we acted mirroring the others in order to enhance their power to be themselves, bringing out their virtues and allowing our blind self to be nourished with clarity, enlightening what was not seen.

To be seen, fully, is to be loved. Love and trust walk together through the path of life.

I like to give you a very small insight to the hidden feelings that came up in our space. We discovered the shadows of the achievements that we are so proud of. And sometimes, we had an idea of the messages these shadows give to us. We are proud of our marvelous communities, but there are shadows falling behind them: feelings of tiredness and exhaustion, desperation about immobility and strong egos in the community, feelings of helplessness in face to the problems of our planet. We witnessed a large lake of tears.
The message to us all could be: let’s celebrate together, but let’s also cry together – we need time and a place for crying.
We are proud to be a true global family, protecting and supporting the weaker members. But right in the middle of this attitude can survive a vivid echo of the white man’s arrogance. The message of our sisters from Greece and Libya was: perceive the whole of our feelings and longings, carefully, respectfully, humbly. – be aware of the presence of the colonial DNA in yourself.

We are proud of creating a new culture and new relationships.

In the forum space we heard a lot of voices, struggling with themselves: how to handle love, sexuality and truth in a concrete conflict.
The message, whispering in these experiences could be: don’t trust in recipes but in true connectedness with your partners and your higher self, God, or whatever.
The encouraging experience in our forum process was that the sun marches on and her light falls down every moment from a different direction, so that the shadows are moving and always in transformation.