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Welcome & Terms of Service

Our practices involve looking at and being intimate with the structures of one’s personal reality, including how we make sense of experience, individually and collectively. Carrying over assumptions from other practices can lead to misunderstandings. Read over the following statements to determine whether or not our practice will be a good fit for you.

Self-Responsibility
We see you as a free agent capable of honest self-assessment and responsible choice. This is an invitation to take responsibility for yourself and your experience, including a willingness to set and maintain appropriate boundaries. By attending our events you take responsibility for your own safety and comfort, choosing to leave the practice or participate in any given moment. 

Not Psychotherapy
We do not follow a therapeutic model of diagnosis and treatment. Our method is educational. Our emphasis is relating. Our facilitators and coaches are guides. Our practices are practices of connection and meditation whose aim is to reveal more presence. We do not prescribe choices or actions. We are not psychotherapists; we do not see you as being in a therapeutic relationship with our facilitators. Participants are welcome to speak and explore developmental intentions such as “getting somewhere,” growing, and evolving, but we do not presume these are the drivers of experience. We work in the present moment, assuming wholeness moving to greater wholeness. 

The Expectations of Leadership
Our facilitators act in service of better relating through bringing more presence to what’s happening in the here and now. This may not follow typical expectations of a “group leader,” such as telling people the “right way” to act or making sure everyone gets along. We include the internal experiences of the leaders as part of the process. We invite you to listen to your own inner direction for leadership, and consider others’ responses as feedback to you in the context of the moment.

Is this Right for You?
Our workshops can be intense. We explore the unknown, the volatile, the ambiguous, as well as welcome emotions many deem as “negative” or “inappropriate” such as feelings of inadequacy, anger, sexuality, and joy. We often explore multiple sides of seeming opposites at once, and believe this can reveal an underlying unity of the immediacy of experience. We see bringing awareness to intense feelings as distinct from acting upon these feelings—we may ask you to pause or leave if we determine certain expressions risk leaving the practice of relational presence.

If the above description of our workshops sounds potentially overwhelming or destabilizing for you, if you have mental illness or significant emotional challenges that you feel may be exacerbated by this type of transformational environment, or if you are not sure that you can be self-directed in taking care of your needs during the event, then we advise you not to enroll. Finally, you must be at least 18 years old to attend.

By participating you acknowledge that you have read and agree to abide by these Terms of Service.



Loving Words: A Poetry and Presence Group

 

I know you have your shadows,

The parts you think I would not love

And could not love and should not love,

Yet here I am, so full of love. 

 

This May, you are warmly invited to join a six-week journey into the poetry of love.

For millennia, poets have honoured, expressed and summoned love in all its bewildering and magnificent forms. They have found words for that which is so often beyond the frontier of our understanding and even, perhaps, beyond the reach of all words. 

 

The course will run online, for 6 x 2 hour sessions, taking place on Tuesdays. 

  • We start on Tuesday 20 May and meet weekly through to Tuesday 24 June.
  • The sessions will take place at 12-2pm US Central Time (6-8pm UK time, 7-9pm Central European Time).
  • Group size is capped at 10.

 

In each of our six meetings, we will take up a fresh perspective on love. Each session will be inspired by what has come before, and some possible themes include: Falling in love, love and heartbreak, love for animals, love for parents, love for children, divine love, erotic love, love and fantasy, love in politics, love and forgiveness, and self love.

We embark upon this journey to fall in love, ever more deeply, with language, and with our own unique ways of harnessing language as an instrument of beauty and connection. We journey to discover the love that is already here, a love that honours the full difficulties of life and still rejoices, a love of friend, a love of family, a love of lover. We journey to fall in love with love itself.

Each session will include a mixture of responding to carefully chosen poems, invitations to play with writing and sharing your own poems, and experiments in spontaneously creating poems together.

All that we do will be inspired by practices of relational mindfulness (Relatefulness). As we dance with love and language, we will continually ask: What are we experiencing as we are here with each other? How is love moving here and now? What different experiences and perspectives are arising in us as a group? What common themes and threads are emerging?

This group is open to all, regardless of your prior experience with either relational mindfulness (Relatefulness) or with the reading and writing of poetry. If you find writing poetry daunting, you are not alone, and you are especially encouraged to attend. You are welcome to write and share poems in a language other than English. 

 

What people are saying about previous Poetry and Presence groups:

  • “Will's poetry sessions were a cauldron of inspiration, surrender and trust. The other participants were wondrous and every session brought more love and magic out of us. I'm infatuated and I want more!”
    - Elsa May

  • "I enjoyed Will's Poetry & Presence group immensely. It felt like a luxury and a blessing to have two hours of time devoted to creative exploration each week. Will brings a lot of playfulness and heart which creates an inclusive and powerful container.”
    - Alex

  • “Poetry came alive in the six weeks I spent with this beautiful group. It became so clear that poetry and refined attention are the same thing. I experienced deep connection with the group, but also with my writing, and with my reading. Will's leadership was perfect. He dove into the deep end with us and revealed his own process while holding and guiding the space.”
    - Shimanto

 

 

About the facilitator:


Will Jefferson is a philosopher, a facilitator and a lover of poetry. He leads Relational Mindfulness (Relatefulness) with The Relateful Company, and offers 1:1 sessions to individuals to develop their skills in mindfulness, communication and creativity. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Oxford, and wrote his dissertation on the moral significance of empathy. His love for poetry was ignited during a month walking the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route, in which he spent his evenings reading and memorising the 40 poems that friends had given him for the journey. After that journey, he wrote the following poem, called Be Longing. 



My love for you is total.

I feel it, pouring, pulsing,

even roaring.

 

It’s a brilliant purple-golden flow.
 

Creatively, intellectually,

Playfully and dialectically,

You turn me on.

 

You know how to wonder,

To live growing younger,

So cast this fear asunder

And hear these words like thunder,

 

I know you have your shadows,

The parts you think I would not love

And could not love, and should not love,

Yet here I am, so full of love.

 

I've seen you cross a country for a dream,

Walk five hundred miles despite the scream

Of a leg unprepared for this life-saving scheme,

 

And I know, it wasn't always sweet with you

The way it was when we were new,

That it’s true we had an hour or two,

Of highly emotional kung-fu.

 

But we always found the words to break through, 

A please, a sorry, a willingness to adjust,

Building something more robust,

A deepening foundation of deepening trust.

 

You're a companion, a friend,

A heart-opening god-send,

And side-by-side we did ascend, descend,

And comprehend

 

That life is for a love like this,

This ever-expanding field of bliss.