A Full Day of Life's Assignments

Life Launch started today with the same opening exercise: bouldering on the beach.  We are so lucky that the weather in Santa Barbara has been so beautiful these past few days, allowing us to enjoy not only bouldering but many other sessions outdoors.  Four members of our group experienced the bouldering exercise yesterday.  Today it was my turn to be one of the remaining three in our group to experience bouldering.  It was a workout in both a physical and a mental/emotional sense.  I will retain a strong memory of my bouldering for a long time to come. 

Balancing the roles and activities in life was the next thing we tackled.  We looked at six human systems: Work, Family, Couple Relationships, Friends, Personal, and Community.  Our task was to example how we have invested our time and energy into these six human systems in recent months and years, and how we want to schedule ourselves into these systems going forward.  In turn, each of us had a chance to experience our as-is and to-be systems map.  I assigned a member of the group to hold up a sign with the word "Friends" on it and told her where to stand in relation to me and what to say.  I did likewise with each of the six human systems.  The group then bombarded me with their messages until I called a timeout.  I then re-set their places and their messages and they bombarded me again.  We debriefed how that worked, what else to fine tune, etc.  It was fun and enlightening.  I enjoyed participating in this for myself and for each of the women in the group.  We all shared a commonality, in that involvement in community organizations was on the periphery compared to everything else.  Then we sat down and did some personal work on what to change, eliminate or start in order to realize the shift in the balance of our six systems.

Writing a letter from the "old sage" within me was the next activity.  Each of us projected ourselves 20-30 years into the future and wrote a letter from that point of view to the woman each of is today.  We had no idea while we were doing this that we would be asked to read our letter aloud.  When our facilitator showed up to let us know that time was up on letter writing, and she was holding a box of tissues, I had a feeling what was coming!  I'm looking forward to taking some of the advice that the "old sage" within me had to offer.

The afternoon sessions were intense.  We defined our purpose and found our richly detailed personal vision.  Doing this work allowed us to braid in all the insights we had developed up to this point.  Included in one group member's vision was a reunion next December.  I'll be looking forward to that.

It's break time now.  This has been a jam-packed, intense and very worthwhile day. I'm glad for the chance to reflect and regroup myself. 

Tonight we have a group dinner and parlor games.  It should be good fun.