MO B I U S S T R I P | F ALL 2019
A Theory of Healing by Yotam Schachter, Mobius Transformational Faculty and Coach
This article was adapted from a letter written to the Rising Practitioners Circle, a community of early-career transformational coaches, consultants, mediators, and facilitators, founded by Yotam Schachter and Mobius CEO Amy Elizabeth Fox and sponsored by the Next Practice Institute.
What Is Healing? Healing lies at the heart of what we do as transformational practitioners, but what are we doing when we do healing work? I’ve attempted to set out here some principles at play in a variety of healing methodologies and at a variety of scales of operation, from healing an individual person to healing a wounded organization or a self-destructive society. At its heart, this article is a work of Thought Followership. It is attempt to describe a consensus emerging throughout the world of transformational development and particularly among the master practitioners of the Mobius community. The fingerprints most visible are those of Mobius Chief Thought Leader Erica Ariel Fox; Organizational Transformation pioneer and Mobius Transformational Faculty Member Robert Gass; Mobius Senior Expert, world-renowned therapist and founder of Internal Family Systems Dr. Richard Schwartz; the gifted master and energy teacher Lynda Caesara; and close Mobius friend, advisor, and spiritual teacher Thomas Huebl. I have also drawn a few ideas from my own experiences as a practitioner of healing, a wounded human in search of healing, and a devotee of brightly colored games one might play on an iPhone, each of which have influenced my thinking on this subject. In a word, when we offer healing to a human system – a civilization, a business, a family, a team, a single
person – we are inviting the system into presence. This is not to say that presence is fully equivalent to health, but that in most systems that need healing, presence is the missing ingredient. As practitioners, it’s enormously valuable to have an embodied sense of presence. Anything I say in writing is a poor substitute for that firsthand familiarity. Nevertheless, I hope here to enunciate what we all mean by it. What is Presence? In thinking about presence, it’s helpful to start with the notion of being here now. But presence isn’t a binary state or even a range (“I’m 72% present!”), it’s a quality of relationship. Rather than Are you present? we might ask What are you present to? Some examples: When I practice vipassana meditation, I am present to my breath. When I practice massage, I am present to my own body and to the body of my client. When I play Candy Crush – one of the aforementioned phone games, and one I play a bit too often for my own liking – I am present to the shiny blips on my screen and maybe whatever podcast I’m listening to. So perhaps “being present to” just means “giving attention to,” but it’s a particular kind of attention, given freely and without effort. Presence feels fluid, yet firm. Undefended, yet fundamentally safe.
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