Facing Each Other and Ourselves by Patti Smith and Chris Burke Immediately following the end of World War I, Rudolf Steiner spoke about the importance of developing new forms of social connection in our individualistic age. In “Social and Anti-Social Forces in the Human Being” (Bern, 12/12/1918), he stated: It is possible for human beings to meet one another for years and not know each other better at the end than they did at the beginning. The precise need of the future is that the social shall be brought to meet the anti-social in a systematic way. For this there are various inner soul methods. One is that we frequently attempt to look back over our present incarnation to survey what has happened to us in this life through our relations with others. If we are honest in this, most of us will say: Nowadays we generally regard the entrance of many people into our life in such a way that we see ourselves, our own personalities, as the center of the review. What have we gained from this or that person who has come into our life? This is our natural way of feeling. It is exactly this which we must try to combat. We should try in our souls to think of others, such as teachers, friends, those who have helped us and also those who have injured us (to whom we often owe more than to those who, from a certain point of view, have been of use to us). We should try to allow these pictures to pass before our souls as vividly as possible in order to see what each has done. We shall see, if we proceed in this way, that by degrees we learn to forget ourselves, that in reality we find that almost everything which forms part of us could not be there at all unless this or that person had affected our lives, helping us on or teaching us something.
At the Center for Biography and Social Art, we use social activities to support individuals in better understanding themselves and the roles other people have played in shaping their biographies. The October national conference in Atlanta, “Facing Each Other: Freedom, Responsibility, Love,” was therefore a perfect opportunity to introduce this way of working to a broad audience. We were invited to lead a short activity following each keynote lecture and in the final plenum. We led the participants in an effort to connect them with each other in a meaningful, participatory manner, and to relate the conference themes to people’s life experience. Attendees sat at assigned tables during these sessions, so they were able to work on each exercise with the same partner, fostering a deeper connection between them.
Vivid Images Our first exercise followed Patrick Kennedy’s inspiring keynote, “How Practicing Spiritual Science Means Becoming Truly Human.” We invited each participant to reflect back to the beginning of their journey with anthroposophy and to find a person who played an important role in taking that first step. We asked each participant to sketch a memory of that relationship and then to share the story with their partner. In asking participants to draw the memory, we are following Rudolf Steiner’s recommendation that we train ourselves to let images pass over us as vividly as possible. In these short exercises, each participant has an opportunity to practice reaching into their soul for meaningful memories. Expressing
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