What Does Ally Work Feel Like? Reflections From Our Community
Ever wondered what it feels like to engage in ally work within a vibrant community?
In our group practice sessions, we experience both an interconnection between us as individuals, and an intraconnection within our shared being.
My mentor Dr. Dan Siegel writes of us as being, “connected within our relational worlds themselves,” in his new book Intraconnected.
When we reflect on our ally work practice together, what words come up for us?
In the below image, I’ve gathered some of the words shared in our community co-explorations over the last year or two.
And here are the words that most describe practice for us:
way
practice
love
ally
know
field
beyond
conscious
guidance
learn
life
What strikes me about these powerful words — and the experiences they reflect — is that they’ve emerged organically from our personal practice and our non-hierarchical peer-to-peer practice structure.
We’re experiencing deep learnings, but not from a human teacher — from the relationship with the ally — and the emergent field of our togetherness.
I believe that what we are exploring here, is not just of benefit to a small community, but has much larger potential for benefiting humankind as a whole.
Thank you for being part of the early development of the practice of ally work.
Inspired by the power of these words, I asked ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence program, to compose a contemplative poem inspired by them. Here’s the beautiful poem it made: