One of my key learnings at The Art of Hosting on Bowen Island last week was from an Open Space session hosted by Annabelle Oakes. The focus was on the “Language of Resonance.” It was an invitation to explore additional words to describe the experience of resonance. It’s a lot more than academic exploration. Felt more like essential language and tuning for living in a more deliberate paradigm and medium of energetics.
The first part of our discussion was noticing some of what resonance is like. Falling in love, openness, flow, music. It is some of the bridging experiences that many people can relate to.
On resonance and falling in love, I later 
received an email from my hosting friend Simone Poutnik, in which she wrote this:
Sizzling resonance
falling in love with
not knowing
a possible future
so tender
yet so strong
Love opens my heart
true curiosity is born
exploration can begin
Let’s dance
with the unknown!
A huge gift in sitting with Annabelle and others was noticing that, for me, there are two core competencies or practices that working with resonance calls out.
1)Pointing to the Invisible — Helping to shine a little light on widely shared experiences that are often not seen or are left in a far more nebulous state. These would be the experiences that many people feel as energizing, yet are then often reduced to a background experience in attempts to “get back to the real world.” Ah, the fine art and commitment of daring to name what doesn’t quite fit normative experience. Just the simple pointing so that it can be attended to (and thus, brought into more tangible form).
2)Pointing to the Whole — Helping to see the bigger picture. This has always been a hunger for me. It comes with working from a living systems perspective, a self-organizing perspective, and working with emergence. In working with Margaret Wheatley much earlier in my life, we used to ask three questions that helped do this. First, what is the system? Second, does it know itself as a system? Third, what wants to happen? Replacing system with whole would work well also.
Thanks Annabelle, Teresa, Pam for such a rich learning space. Simone for sparking even more this morning.
