Raw (4:46)

So the plan for today's talk, so just to get it down quickly while I remember what I thought about in the car. So first was the idea of me making a salad when I was a kid, and I put in all the things I liked. I put potatoes in, I put bananas, I put apples, I even made, I added lemon juice and some sugar, and I also added cream, and my God, it was disgusting. It was inedible. So what it teaches us is that to put together an ecology of practices, to put together different practices from different domains, for example, in an ecology that works takes some real thought and skill. It isn't a question of just we pick something from here, we pick something there, and we put them together. That may not work. That's point one. So in terms of designing a deliberately developmental space there that and there obviously you know the environment as Mark pointed out yesterday it not just the practices we do it the physical environment we in it the pictures that are around the sculptures the feel of the place are we in nature or in the center of the city etc etc you know, or where, you know, are we situated high up in the mountains in a remote place? All of these aspects come together to make a deliberately developmental space. Now, the other example I want to mention here, as an interesting example I think is, again, Jeffrey Martin, who's doing it in this, that's a slightly empirical way. And I just want to give one example of a design, I think, that was quite interesting from his approach, which is that he combined, he's got these waking up practices. And what he's seen from, he knows from talking to people and from reading the literature and reading stories, he knows about what's called the dark night. of the soul. So this is a term that comes originally from St. John of the Cross in the Christian tradition where apparently he experienced this for 40 years of feeling abandoned by God and lost and so on before finally discovering being feeling in God love again Generally describes this experience where people doing relatively intense practices can have quite a significant breakdown in a sense because what you're doing is where maybe taking one is taking away, a lot of the classic ego supports and other things that give us our sense of identity, and that can be initially very, very destabilizing and scary, potentially. Not always, but potentially. And so one of the things I just want to emphasize, as Marta did when he designed his finest program, was he particularly added, along with the waking up practices that were going on, he added a bunch of, I guess, positive psychology practices and even had those right at the beginning. So initially there's the positive psych, where this is like gratitude practices, kinds of journaling, he does what's called a Lester Levinson love practice where you just go through everyone, in your life, you just make a list of everyone you've ever known and you systematically seek to send love to that person if you have negative emotions to acknowledge those but try to transmute them into love and so on and so forth and that so he kind of really had right at the beginning this intensive set up which then continues through the course but is intensively at the beginning to essentially prime you and deal with maybe some of the negative material that might arise so that then when you come you come to into the waking up practice and especially the more intensive ones with this existing positive psychology framing, which reduces the chance of dark nights of the soul. That was the intention. And I think was quite effective. And then I think we come to Valerie in the design of the practice of psychology at the Bergerac hub and some of the constraints of that. And then we can talk about maybe the more of the actual like financing constraints, material constraints that you maybe need space and so on. and maybe this can segue towards the end to why this can be a growing field. Maybe I've been careful a little longer walk. Just a second. Just won't. So there's the aspect, this can be a separate thing that we can come into.