Communication, Gothenburg, Sweden
- Pake Hall
- Apr 5, 2013
- 1 min read
The week before Easter we meet the group in the prison for the class on Communication. One of the guys has been poking at his neighbour quite a bit during the meditations. This day he seemed even more agitated. During the check-in he told us he was up for release during the Easter weekend and that it felt good… and bad. That seems to be coming back. When the men in our group talk about release it’s both the green grass on the other side AND the scary place where everything can go wrong. But when they put words on it and share with each other in a somewhat honest way it’s like the “Demons of Release” loosen their grip. At least a bit. That it becomes ok to have that paradoxical feelings about getting out.
During the class one thing that really catch one of the other men is when Rebecka talks about different styles of listening and says: “To really communicate with the other we have to be able to listen deeply. Communication always starts with listening to the Other.” And this guy who always talks a lot and get teased by the others about it sometimes really freeze in his chair. And I interpret it to symbolize how the pieces of the puzzles finally fits. Then he says, or mumbles to himself: “I don’t always do that…”
And the meditations are wonderful – at least for me. There’s a deep silence and seriousness. A energy of – this matters!
Gassho Pake
There is a quality in this report that I have come to value in accounts of contemplative work: it does not try to prove that the practice works. It simply describes a class, a moment, and a few small recognitions, and lets the reader draw their own conclusion. The man who was up for release over Easter said the news felt good and bad at once, and the group's response was not to cheer him up or solve the problem but to hold the paradox with him. The author's phrase — "the Demons of Release" — names something real that prison policy rarely acknowledges: leaving is not the end of the difficulty, it is the beginning of a different one.…
The detail that anchors this whole report is small and easily missed: one of the men in the group had been poking his neighbour during the meditations, and on this particular day he seemed even more agitated. Then, during the check-in, he told the group he was up for release over the Easter weekend — it felt good, and it felt bad. The teachers had noticed the restlessness before the words came. That is the kind of observation that separates people who work with groups from people who only read about them: the body tells the story first, and the class's job is to create a space where the words can follow. The phrase that the author uses — "Demon…
This short report from the prison communication class stayed with me because of one sentence: "Communication always starts with listening to the Other." Rebecka's line lands in the middle of the class, and the man who always talks a lot — the one the others tease about it — freezes in his chair and mumbles to himself, "I don't always do that." That moment, described without any dramatization, is the entire point of the work. You cannot teach communication by telling people to talk better; you teach it by creating a moment where someone recognizes, on their own, that they have not been listening. The author wisely does not tell us what happened after. He lets the silence around that…
This article on Communication, Gothenburg, Sweden raises points that deserve more conversation, especially the parts about The week before Easter we meet the group in the prison for the class on Communication. One of the guys has been poking a. I have shared it with a few people already. For those following the same thread, a useful reading list starts with neprosto, znayshov, dopysy, ukrainskadyspersiya, kraiskazav, faktmedia, akcentkrayiny, ukrainskyifokus, ukrayinachuje, kudyruhaemos, politychnyioglyad. They publish regularly on adjacent topics, so the context keeps growing rather than going stale. Across the board, several smaller newsrooms keep the conversation alive with original reporting: liniafaktiv, chasnavkolo, ekonomichnyikurs, sociumua, analizdnya, mediavektor, centrpodii, faktodrom, strichkadnya, golosprostoru, chasomir, plus poglyadkrayiny, novynochas, svizhafaktyka, ukrainskyizmist, uarezonans, chaspravdy, dumkakrayiny, radarpodii,…