What if we could turn conflict into gold?
Conflict is everywhere – in our world, our institutions and communities, between people, and within our families and relationships. Conflict also lives within us: in our internal fights between parts of ourselves, day and night dreams, body experiences. Many of us already have frameworks and tools for working with conflict. But what to do when, under pressure, the toolkit disappears?
Mindell’s alchemical deep democracy conflict cycle uses disturbances themselves as “raw material” to uncover gold within the process structure of the conflict — just as the medieval alchemists worked with raw metal as already containing the essence of gold: latent, hidden, not yet released by fire. Nothing needed to be added from outside; the gold was already in the metal, just hidden. NLP practices are also present within the cycle.
In this seminar we view a disturbance the way the alchemists viewed raw metal. We will experience Mindell’s alchemical deep democracy conflict cycle to recognise the phases as they come and go within a conflict — ignore, fight, rotation between perspectives, drop into unity. The alchemical unfolding process follows energetic and tangible signals, starting with disturbance, to uncover intrinsic essences and spontaneous resources within the conflict itself as “gold” for a specific situation and energetic relief.
You will gain a multi-dimensional frame for tracking levels of power within a conflict:
Social power — contextual, built into systemic influences, privilege and marginalisation, and the paralysis in a victim identity imprisoned within immovable norms and expectations.
Relational power — beyond context, involving psychological fluidity between different perspectives, allowing each side of a conflict to be fully expressed. Here you may notice connections with NLP’s work on perceptual positions, reframing and different maps of reality.
Essence power — the power of the field, a spontaneous “new world” moment of dropping into unified wholeness where new and surprising insights and solutions pop up.
You may enjoy making connections with familiar NLP competencies as we work. The practice of tools supports a new patterning for when stress and pressure knock you off centre — precisely when familiar theories and techniques fly out the window and are harder to access.
This workshop offers a shift from seeing conflict as only something to eliminate, and to learn to love the “shit” of conflict as it reveals its intrinsic “gold,” for our inner and outer lives.
Format: Presentations, thought experiments, demonstrations, live practice, discussion. Individual work, small and large group work.
Workshop facilitator:
Dr. Julia Wolfson, faciliterer denne workshop på let forståeligt engelsk. Julia arbejder med Process Work og Deep Democracy i Arnold Mindells tradition med individuelle klienter, teams og hele systemer – som ledercoach, facilitator, konsulent og underviser internationalt.
Julia er co-leader af Training Council i International Association of Process Oriented Psychology (IAPOP) for Process Work-skoler verden over.
