A small excerpt from Natasha’s time at Stone Circles (apologies for the late post!)

Stone Circles at Stone House- Facilitating Deeper Practices Training Retreat

Firstly, I want to express my gratitude to everyone who made a contribution in order to make it possible for me to attend the Training Retreat- THANK YOU, it was EXACTLY what I needed.

I entered Stone Circles the first day thinking that I was going to get a set of tools that I could use to make me a better facilitator, but quickly found out that it was not that type of training.
Sure, Claudia Horwitz, and Marian Urquilla presented us with tools and supplied us with handouts we should use when planning and facilitating meeting that I found extremely useful. But the deep thought and practice facilitated by Marian and Claudia was what enlightened me to why my meetings with my West Side leaders were not going as I wanted them to. So far, my takeaways from the trainings I have been to in the past are less tangible skills that I can place into my toolbox to use until they get rusty- they are more learnings about the inner workings of my persona. I find that even more relevant with Facilitating the Deeper Practices of Transformative Social Change Training Retreat (whew!) at Stone Circles where many of the activities involved meditation, reflection and journaling.

So if you’re wondering what it was that I learned whilst away- well it was simple: my group of dynamic, fearless woman warriors from the West Side is mirroring me and my behaviors all the time. Let me explain. More often than not it is far too easy to get lost in the day to day happenings of Clean Air and arrive to meetings frazzled, frustrated and far from composed and it turns out people can pick up on those feelings regardless of how well you think you are suppressing them. And I don’t mean simply “leaving your shit at the door”, but feelings of inadequacy I may be having with the work I’m doing that particular work- as you all know, it can be pretty daunting at times- gets thrown right back at me. My fearless ladies start asking me what the point of any of this is, and blame their neighbors of being apathetic when I know, they know that’s not true.

Amazing right?! Well I didn’t know these things were going on (and please pretend you didn’t either). If you are in need of a soul scrubbing, honest look into yourself that is agitational enough without being mean, I highly recommend Claudia and Marian’s work- they have a Soul Sanctuary coming up!

http://www.stonecircles.org/