4. Metodología de trabajo
4.2. Análisis de los resultados de la evaluación
Devices were employed to stimulate self-reflection and encourage participants to challenge their assumptions. For instance, Richard would challenge us to interrogate a habitual behaviour or ask a series of questions that prompted self-examination in different ways. The disruptions were gentle, frequent and persistent rather than critical or confrontational, which may have served to reduce internal resistance36 (Kegan &
Lahey, 2001). Each activity had some element of self-exploration and discovery, by peeling back a layer, exploring or exposing some aspect of self.
Opportunities for acknowledging unhelpful or redundant aspects, patterns, and ways of being and letting them go were integral to some activities. There were many
opportunities for contemplation, which seemed to create space to acknowledge the previous usefulness of what now needed to be let go of, so that it could be detached from. Myers and Boyd (1991) stress that for new linkages to be established,
inappropriate existing linkages must be broken down. New ideas can be painful and difficult to accept, perhaps because a part of the identity must be given up to enable its reorganisation (Bowlby, 1961).
It felt as if we shifted in and out of liminal states throughout each day. The imaginal and generative activities in particular, provided opportunities for gaining self- knowledge, and the range of activities stimulating experiential and presentational knowing, combined with the reflective activities meant that novel meaning making was encouraged, and I would venture, likely to occur. Sense-making however, was, for the most part, discouraged by Richard, whose belief is that when working in the mythos, efforts to sense-make should be kept to a minimum. New meanings are generated, and sense-making, he says, can and should be left until after the experience to allow the psyche to integrate them. In addition, my guess is that it helps to keep conceptual thought and propositional knowing to a minimum at times when the focus is on directing awareness towards other ways of knowing.
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Rituals
Rituals took the form of guided activities in which participants were asked to engage in a set dramatic scene. For each ritual, we were guided to different areas of the garden and instructed to engage with the scene before us as directed, whilst contemplating questions posed prior to the ritual. The facilitators took on the roles of mythic characters from the story, and issued instructions, guidance, or posed questions that required answers from each participant as they proceeded one by one through the scene. The ritual structure and content were at the same time playful yet solemn. The playfulness came from our willingness to ‘make-believe’ and collude in the ludic
liminality of the mythos, and the solemnity from each ritual’s form and content and our individual intentions to gain self-knowledge. These seeming contradictions in
experience were disruptive, challenging habitual ways of thinking and behaving as well as social and cultural conventions (Sutton-Smith, 2001).
Langer describes rituals as, “a symbolic transformation of experiences that no other medium can adequately express” (1954, p. 39). In this way, the rituals served as
symbolic enactments (Romanoff, 1998) to facilitate the integration of the accumulated knowing generated by the various activities. The interplay of the body, psyche, and conscious contemplation seemed to foster their embodiment, enabling me to “body forth” (Seeley & Reason, 2008) further knowing through the sensory immersion of ‘acting’ in the scene. It seemed to me as if acting out the ritual caused it to become part of me somehow, my mind fooled by my intention and action into believing it to be a ‘real’ act. The liminal nature of the rituals meant that we existed within them in a kind of threshold zone between the conscious and unconscious (Sas & Coman, 2016). Perhaps the symbolic nature of the rituals touched a part of me beyond the rational mind to fully comprehend, rooted as they were in the symbolic language of the unconscious (Langer S. K., 1954) (Jung C. G., 1967; Hillman J. , 1965).
The content of the rituals, being determined by the facilitators, meant that not all aspects seemed wholly relevant to my personal intention for the activity. Nevertheless, overall they seemed to provide one way of embodying insights by transforming them into presentational knowing through the experiential knowing of enactment.
Storytelling
The myth itself provided the overall structural framework, or container, for the
programme. The story reading sections were interspersed throughout each day, driving the journey onward. Stories have long been used as vehicles for teaching, so there seems to be merits in using ‘wisdom stories’ for self-development purposes. Using a story imposes its themes onto participants. It may have many relevant elements but some, inevitably, will not fit or suit all the intentions of a programme or participant. Sufficient space within the framework of the story and workshop for participants to be able to relate metaphors, character situations, and ethical dilemmas to the context of their own lives may be key. Dirkx suggests texts that stimulate imaginative processes have the effect of transforming ordinary existence into ‘soul work’ by establishing meaningful connections between the text and our life experiences (Dirkx J. , 2001, p. 70).
Rachel Lovie May 2017 130 Referencing Hillman (1989/1991) he suggests that we “glimpse the nature of the soul through the work of the imagination” (Dirkx J. , 2001, p. 70).
Frequent poetry readings and quotes from Jung and post-Jungian texts kept
participants in the mythos through the evocative and emotive use of language. Richard kept propositional language to a minimum, only occasionally giving short explanations of Jungian and other concepts when participants were asked to suspend judgement and proceed ‘as if’ (Seligman, Weller, Puett, & Simon, 2008), those concepts were ‘real’. There was little sharing of personal stories with the group except for at the morning check-ins, although there was some in pairs and small groups. After experiencing the power of personal storytelling to generate an empathic field (Davis-Manigaulte, Yorks, & Kasl, 2006) on the ITD programme, the Mythodrama programme seemed oddly individually oriented by comparison. I wonder if this was, in part, an attempt to avoid crossing into a psychotherapeutic environment. Another explanation could be the influence from Olivier’s professional development work, where personal storytelling may be considered less acceptable, appropriate, or safe for participants due to issues of rank and power in organisations.
Most images, feelings and thoughts that arose concerning participants’ personal journeys were kept private, and in some ways this provided an assurance of safety and freedom, with the knowledge that we would not be asked to share intimate details of our inner worlds. As Dirkx (2001) advises, it can be important to avoid hasty disclosures that may be regretted. However, I feel that some opportunities for expanding insights and gaining different perspectives through the benefit of group interaction and learning may have been missed (Boyd, 1991).
We often moved directly on from activities into another story reading, which took us in a different direction. I felt at times I was on the cusp of grasping an insight, but had to leave it as my attention was needed for the next activity. Encouraged to trust the process, I surrendered to it, but on later reflection I felt as though some of those near- insights had been lost to me. One example of a missed opportunity for incorporation was after the activity of ‘Gathering Resources’, when participants arranged the objects they had gathered on their nature walk in the group room. These objects represented various resources that participants had identified as being needed to accomplish short and longer term goals. Nothing more, however, was said or made of this and eventually we all removed the objects and kept or discarded them.
It may have been helpful for people to share with the group what resource each of their found objects represented. Sharing those stories could have contributed to the sense of communitas by the group witnessing and acknowledging the fruits of each other’s ritual struggle (Clarkson, 2005). It may also have helped activate the power of those ‘resources’, to animate the symbolic objects and manifest them in the lives of the participants, bringing the stories to life in the world (McLean, Pasupathi, & Pals, 2007). Instead, the potential energy within them, and possible further insight through sharing (Aksana, Kısaca, Aydına, & Demirbuken, 2009), palpably dissipated when our attention was turned to the next activity.
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