Listening Circles: Interracial Relationships

Navigating Connection in Interracial Relationships

Join Kris in an intimate (<5 participants) Listening Circle to explore our experiences of navigating interracial relationships - wanting to hold space and respect the other while also learning the other's lived experience on our own. This space would be most supportive for those who are in interracial relationships and experience cultural differences and expectations.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:

“What my interracial marriage has taught me: ‘We would both know one of us was viewed as more worthwhile’ … My anger was targeted at racism, colourism, white supremacy in general, but it was spilling out on to my boyfriend” - Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

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/

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 and invite participants to reflect and share more freely, learning to connect authentically using their attunement skills. 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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