Living into Belonging: Seeing through the Eyes of the Other

Participants will have opportunities to uncover and share current features of their spiritual journey and engage in practices promoting deep listening to Spirit within themselves and others. We will celebrate ubuntu — “I am because we are” — in our worship, conversation and interactions. “The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of…

Workshop Description

Participants will have opportunities to uncover and share current features of their spiritual journey and engage in practices promoting deep listening to Spirit within themselves and others. We will celebrate ubuntu — “I am because we are” — in our worship, conversation and interactions.

“The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we do, with great artists; with artists like these we do really fly from star to star.” 
– paraphrase from Proust, Remembrance of Things Past.

It is my belief that recovering the long-lost sense of kinship with all beings addresses a root aspect of my—and our—complicity in the culture of domination. In recognizing the kinship of all being, we free ourselves from the shackles of destructive judgment and competition, and become our best possible selves. 

In this workshop, we will practice receptive, centering silence in alternation with authentic sharing. Through deeply searching questions, small group listening, journaling, guided meditation, and conversation, participants will examine some relevant parts of their spiritual journeys, scrutinizing the fruit these experiences have borne. We may discover how the ways that Spiritual qualities we have identified as Gifts and those we have identified as Burdens have played out in our Spiritual leadings. We will practice listening underneath the words for the voice within each person in order to experience ubuntu — “I am because we are.”

My hope is that each participant makes some progress in deep listening and seeing through another’s eyes. As well, my hope is that the next step in each person’s own journey gains clarity. Participants should bring a notebook. There will be, for some of our exercises, the need to write down your ideas and observations.

Leader Experience

LVM Shelton, metaphysician, musician, mathophile, and current member of Plainfield, Vermont meeting, taught academic philosophy until 1996, and served as mental health counselor at Yahara House, Madison, Wisconsin 2002 – 2009. She served as Friend in Residence at Pendle Hill, 2010-11. Her ministry among Friends includes workshop offerings that nurture individual spiritual growth and diverse and transformative spiritual community. Her spiritual development over the past decade has been strongly influenced by writings of Toni Morrison, especially her insights on the systemic characteristics that give global racism its power; and of Valarie Kaur. Morrison’s The Origin of Others and Kaur’s See No Stranger are among the published works of these authors that have been influential. Also, the metaphor of the Divine Pattern of the Cosmos as fractal set, first encountered during Cherice Bock’s 2020 NEYM Bible Half Hour has been a treasure in LVM’s divining of paradigm-shifting practices.