TRUST as a Group Holder

A LESSON FROM INTERSPIRITUAL COUNSELING

Master Group Worker Priscilla Bright joined ISC in January as part of our Group Work Curriculum. She honored the fact that we, as spiritual companions, choose to move toward the suffering of others. A rare impulse in our world.

Groups are powerful medicine. Both triggering and sacred, re-wounding and healing, groups hold the potential for big transformational energy.

The main job in being a Group Holder is that of building TRUST. Participants need trust in you, trust in the process, and trust in each other. Instilling trust is not the same as caretaking. It’s being TRUSTWORTHY, through actions big and small. Being trustworthy even in our thoughts, and in the small negative jokes we may make. The group will know if the space is not safe. Your role is to be on their side.

Exercise: Set a timer to 3 minutes and EMBODY TRUSTWORTHINESS. (If you have a friend to do this with, start with “hello, friend,” and then take 3 minutes each to embody trustworthiness.) Don’t just “think it,” but embody it as a state of being. Explore what it is like to feel the quality of trustworthiness in your body, heart and soul.

Afterward, speak with your friend, journal or contemplate what this was like.

Bottom line – no one can be 100% trustworthy. But if we know where it is in our body, we know the way home. In a group we may experience “I don’t know what’s happening" or "I don’t know what to do right now…” In these moments, if we can come back to a place of trustworthiness and enter the unknown from this place … we are practicing being our best self. In this kind of safety, we all flourish.