Beginning of 2021 reserved for Dialogue Evenings: We will talk about migration, community and belonging
Therefore, we invite the representatives of the BH diaspora to Dialogue Evenings where they will discuss migration, community and its affiliation. The sessions, which will last about 90 minutes, will be held in three terms, via the Zoom platform, as follows:
February 4. 2021, 19h - 20.30h - Dialogue 1. Leaving
March 4. 2021, 19h - 20.30h - Dialogue 2. Arriving
April 1. 2021, 19h - 20.30h - Dialogue 3. Belonging
Dialogue evenings will be moderated and held in English.
What is dialogue?
There is not much that counts as work happens on a Dialogue Evening. Newcomers often note at the end - "But we haven’t even started" although we actually just spent 3 hours together. There is a luxurious laziness in taking time to experience small and intimate interactions, and then simply reflect on them, without trying to achieve anything.
The Dialogue Evenings combine two awareness based change management methodologies – dialogue, and theory U – in order to create a space for a deeper conversation, often between strangers, about topics that are notoriously difficult to address. These are not expert discussions: the emphasis is on the personal journey of each participant.
The dialogue walks, which are an essential part of these evenings, simply invite two people to take turns in sharing and listening to personal experiences in response to a specific question. We don’t actually try to solve or even directly address the problems around sustainable living. We share experiences instead.
In-person dialogue evenings also include an invitation to participate in small contact improvisation and mindfulness exercises - because we all forgot how to think with, rather than think about, each other and our environment, and these experimental interactions offer ways to relearn to connect using empathy, feeling gravity and weight, or sensing with our skin.
We propose a focus question for each gathering. Finding the right question for each evening is the best way to facilitate people’s curiosity and engagement, and balance the impact of feeling interconnected by touch and the sharing of intimate experiences through dialogue and reflection.
I think of Dialogue as a practice, not an event. We do things together and then we talk about how that made us feel. Three hours to practice to be patient, to stay with uncertainty, to try to accept impermanence. To stay with the trouble.
Will it change the world? We sit with each other and try to be present for the people around us. Let them to change us, instead of us trying to change the world. Once we learn to listen and to allow ourselves to be transformed by other people’s experiences and stories, we will change – our interests, perspectives, goals, our path will be altered, and this will allow for the shift that needs to happen, either to avoid a breakdown of civilisation, or to deal with it together.
If you are willing to join us at this unique event, you can sign up via email info [at] idijaspora.ch.
"My guess is that the kind of thinking we are, at last, beginning to do about how to change the goals of human domination and unlimited growth to those of human adaptability and long-term survival is a shift from yang to yin, and so involves acceptance of impermanence and imperfection, a patience with uncertainty and the makeshift, a friendship with water, darkness, and the earth." (Ursula Le Guin)