why prepare for Contemplative Adventures?

A foundational intention on Contemplative Adventures is to create and maintain a container of safety before and during our travels together.  This includes physical safety but also emotional and greater psychological safety.  Our group participants need to develop a certain level of skill before our departure on a number of items to help contribute to this felt sense of safety for all involved.

Teammates need to know that they can trust one another to a certain degree to help put up or take down a tent in the rain, operate a cook stove without blowing up the camp, and to potentially help treat minor injuries if necessary with basic first aid (or at least not make things worse).  These are just examples to illustrate the point.

On these trips, there will also be exploration of and dialogue on what could be very hot topics at times with potential for conflict that might trigger volatile emotional reactivity.  While the intent is to keep emotional hyper or hypo arousal with a certain manageable range, these boundaries differ for each person depending upon situation, and we often don't know it until we touch it.  This makes all of us potentially very vulnerable.  Participants in preparation - through mindfulness tools and the art of council - will begin exploring self awareness and practicing self-regulation which will help our capacity to do the same while on our trip together.  Also - we are asking people to drop down their guards and communicate honestly their viewpoints on certain subjects and most people, to their credit, won't do this until they feel safe enough and even then only incrementally.

To help us create a safe container, Third Force uses an application process to help put groups of people together who we sense might work well together as we explore and dialogue around hot topics.  That being said, there are no guarantees.  This is an adventure by the way.