Welcome to Aletheia
I am excited to welcome you as a participant to our Aletheia Intensive.
Whether you are an ‘old hand’ or a ‘newbie’ to Relational Practice, this weekend provides tools to expand and evolve the way relationships occur and are experienced in your personal day to day life.
In support of you creating the most value you can, I encourage you to arrive Friday well rested, nourished, and as undistracted as possible. Consider taking especially good care of yourself the week before the course and remember that we’re about to take the art of relating with everyone in our lives to a whole new level of fulfillment.
You will find logistical information (lodging, what to bring, etc) as well as a pre-course practice below. Please do not hesitate to contact me with any questions.
Looking forward to diving into this deep practice with all of you.
Regards,
Kevin O’Malley
Aletheia Prime Course Leader
kevin.m.omalley@gmail.com
Pre-Aletheia Assignments
Hello everyone!
Preparing for this weekend…where to begin…
Part 1:
Investing an entire weekend towards having rewarding community & relationships can keep paying off for generations, no exaggeration. First of all, the profound gesture you’re making by spending an entire weekend in an advanced conversation with a group of similarly committed people, focusing three days on taking your interactions to deeper and deeper places – this alone provides an opportunity for new shifts in your life.
You are likely to be supported and even extraordinarily nourished in ways many people say they’ve never had the opportunity to experience. This weekend is designed to meet what are sometimes called ‘Actualization Needs’ (as opposed to ‘Deficiency Needs’).
Getting your basic needs met is essential for creating the community you would like to have in your life. This weekend’s primary focus goes beyond your need for food, shelter, money, social skills or emotional intelligence. The degree to which you already get your basic needs met is the degree to which you can go deeply into further levels of development.
So, your first assignment: Clear the Path
- Choose one action you’re avoiding in your life, one thing that could have you distracted in the weekend, one of the things in the back of your mind that you ‘ought to be handling instead of spending all this time doing some seminar’.
- Choose one person to speak to about your action. Tell them why it matters to you, and by when you’ll have it completed.
- Immediately take one step (perhaps one in a chain) towards completing it (if not completing it all together).
Part 2:
If we spend any amount of time practicing and exploring together – expectations and cultural norms will inevitably arise… given that we have only three days together I want us on the same page out of the gate. Let us create the foundation for how we are going to play together in service of making the very most of that time.
The cool thing about being in a limited timeframe…it encourages us to practice making explicit agreements of how we’re inspired to be with each other (as opposed to unconsciously expecting others to follow our implicit expectations while often feeling upset when they impose theirs on us!).
From our perspective, how we relate together isn’t bound by any one assumed form of relating, but it can be inspired by all cultures and ultimately can be co-created. More like a game we might play together, I don’t play chess because I ‘should’ but for the joy of the play.
If someone prefers shoots and ladders…well, the only thing that makes one game better than another is the degree to which it includes the perspectives and values of all the players.
To play any game together, as one community, we all either get really good at improvising OR stop and take the time to get on the same page about what game we most want to play and what rules we can all commit to that’ll most potently encourage it.
Your second assignment: Prepare the foundation
Read over The Agreements below. There will be time on Friday to ask any questions and make any additional requests of the group before we all explicitly agree to play by these ‘Rules of the Game’. Arrive prepared, having done any self exploration needed to feel in Integrity with yourself as you take on these agreements.
The Agreements
(consider these agreements to be in order of precedence)
1. Integrity
We each commit to doing what we say we will do, and in cases in which we have broken an agreement we commit to:
- Acknowledging the Agreement we broke, whether it be implicit or explicit, and how we broke it, with the people involved.
- Getting the Impact it had on those involved.
- Offering Amends, actively contributing to the relationship as a demonstration that you value it.
- Re-committing to or Re-negotiating that agreement.
2. Honor Self
We each commit to doing what we truly want to do & nothing that we don’t truly want to do.
By creating a space of ‘personal responsibility’, we can spontaneously play with larger groups knowing that our infinitely unique needs and preferences can be accounted for as they come up, by each individual speaking up, making requests, and in some cases getting support to benefit from sitting out on some activities all together.
This training occurs in a culture of ‘Adult Play’ (vs ‘Therapeutic Space’). It’s designed for people who’ve cultivated enough agency to know what ‘honoring self’ means for them and to feel comfortable speaking up even with complete strangers. That said, even the most integrated of you are likely to discover various opportunities to more fully honor your self… in service of you growing from these situations (as opposed to feelings of regret or resentment). We all commit to honoring the safe word ‘Pepper’. Any time someone speaks the word ‘Pepper’, all formal activities and practices immediately cease while staff remain available for that person, to ensure they are honoring themselves while participating at any level they choose.
3. Honor Other
We agree to:
1 – Immediately honor the request of a fellow participant or staff member to cease any form of engagement. (verbal, emotional, physical)
You (we) may not be able to perceive what is happening internally or externally for the other person. We are asking that you honor any such request even if the reason is not immediately obvious.
2 – Support each other in Honoring Self by making no physical contact without explicit conversation and agreement.
3 – Do no damage to the physical building or furnishings.
4. Own Your Experience
Our bias is that no one is the authority on truth, and we are each the sole authorities on our own experience. This means that we can only speak definitively about what we ourselves are experiencing.
When in doubt, practice speaking only things that cannot be argued.
5. Hide Nothing
By “Hide Nothing” we mean this: any time you would hesitate to share something with someone, you are committed to acknowledging it — even if you only acknowledge it to yourself.
This is not the same as “Share Everything”! This is a practice of awareness of the content you might find yourself editing.
6. Confidentiality by Request
When requested as confidential, any specific personal expression or share is not spoken about to anyone other than who is in this course.
As soon as we begin the course on Friday afternoon, we all commit to honoring any request for this confidentiality, even when requested retroactively.
This agreement works in a unique way for our trainings, and can sometimes elicit questions and additional requests by participants (which are totally welcome).
The most black and white form of confidentiality is to say that everything is totally confidential. However, this makes it extremely difficult to share important insights and experiences that you may have.
If instead we say that nothing is confidential, then sharing becomes very easy, but many people would not feel safe to share in a vulnerable way.
It becomes too cumbersome to create a universal list of elements that are ok vs. not ok. What is ok to me may be nothing like what is ok to you. So we ask that you take ownership of your experience and request the specific things you want to be held as confidential. You decide for yourself if it is 1% or 100% of your experience.
Logistics
Course Location:
HOME on Treasure Island
Parking Lot Entrance: 900 Avenue D and 12th St., San Francisco, CA 94130
Arrival Time + Schedule:
Our course will begin at 1pm on Friday. Please arrive early enough to park, check-in, and settle. If you have any questions or issues on the day of, please feel free to call or message our Course Supervisor.
Schedule Overview:
Friday – 1pm (sharp) until approx 10pm
Saturday – 11am (sharp) until approx 8pm
Sunday– 11am (sharp) to 8pm
What to bring:
- Water Bottle
- $8-20 per meal – Although we have light snacks and drinks throughout the weekend, we will have formal breaks during the course to go out for meals.
- Journal + Pen (optional)
Meal breaks during course:
- Friday Dinner (eat light)
- Saturday Lunch & Dinner
- Sunday Lunch (course will complete by 8pm for a late Dinner)
Please arrive well fed at the beginning of each day!
Transportation from San Francisco to Treasure Island
To get around in San Francisco your best bets will be Lyft/Uber or the public transit system.
There is a bus that runs from SF to the Island: https://www.sfmta.com/getting-around/transit/routes-stops/25-treasure-island
But there is no bus coming from the East Bay.
Cameras – any footage being captured is either of the staff delivering content or for training purposes.
Any participant can request a camera that happens to be in their vicinity be turned off at any time, or that footage of them be deleted even after the fact.
No footage will be viewed by anyone other than those involved with the course without prior consent of all individuals in that footage.
Thanks for reading through this letter in preparation of our journey together. I’m looking forward to seeing you soon.
~ Kevin O’Malley, San Francisco CA