Listening Circles: Cultural Inheritance

Cultural Inheritance: Creating Home

Join Kris in an intimate (<5 participants) Listening Circle to explore our experiences of creating home, experiencing belonging, and the yearning of ancestral connections. This space would be most supportive for those who experience cultural disconnection, wanting to understand their diaspora and displacement, and/or have a complicated relationship with cultural identity and belonging.

This group would be a good group for you if you resonate with the following quote and need a space to share your experience, validate, and be validated:

"Being surrounded by other Chinese people had become so strange. In high school, kids said they never thought of him as Asian or Roland as Mexican, like it was a compliment.” - Lisa Ko from The Leavers

"For Indigenous peoples , the impact of separating us from our heritage goes directly to the heart that pumps life through our peoples. To expect a people to be able to enjoy their culture without their cultural heritage and their sacred belongings is equivalent to amputating their legs and digging up the ground and asking them to run a marathon." Mick Dodson

What is a Listening Circle?

Listening Circles are spaces for participants to develop understanding and appreciation of one another’s experiences and perspectives by listening carefully to both the ideas and the feelings that each holds concerning a topic. It is a dialogue instead of a debate, with respect and humanity at the center.

Further, Listening Circles aim at creating community and strengthening our humanity through simple acts of gathering, focusing, reflecting, speaking and listening to strengthen and deepen us, individually and collectively.

What is Attunement?

One could say it is our ability to be present to, and with, another’s expression of their experience. Through attunement we learn to listen while noticing multiple cues of communication: the stated verbal, the unstated verbal, body language, and the strength of the relationship. Attunement in Listening Circles can mirror back to the Speaker that the Speaker's experiences matters to the Listener and everyone else where. The Speaker can lean in and give voice to their experience and show up authentically. When the experience is seen as valuable and impactful, it creates a foundation of safety, allowing all participants to learn to create safety and experience safety. Attunement is that ability to See the individual and let the individual know they are Seen.

Art Credit: https://www.lesliebarlowartist.com/projects-forte-1/within-between-and-beyond-5mzxc

Info: Welcoming and introducing all participants. We review Space Agreements and invite additional agreements from participants. Review format of Listening Circle learn how to attune to others.

Info: Everyone reflects on the Unison Reading, writing down thoughts, emotional responses, experiences, etc that the reading elicited. Kris will assign pairs to all participants to practice attunement when their partner shares and reflect back what they heard.

Info: Kris will read the closing reading. This is a time to share what insights you have gained from listening in round one (these insights are the “gifts"). There is no respondent in this round. Again, this is not a time to try to convince someone to believe differently, but to speak of thought-gifts you have received from someone in the group. The facilitator and assistant facilitator may take part in the gift sharing time after allowing all participants who wish to speak to do so. This is a time when you might ask for clarification concerning something you did not

understand. Speak only if you want to.

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