Bay Area T-Group Community Gathering in Berkeley
T-Group is a practice of radical authenticity, skillful vulnerability, and profound connection. It’s a place to develop your powers of self-awareness, communication, and relationship - skills that will serve you in every arena of your life.
Working intimately with your small group, you'll drop deeply into the present moment and into your experience of connecting with one another. You'll practice an unconventional method of speaking the truth of whatever is happening within you and between you, right here and now. As your group leans further and further into the vulnerable risk of self-revealing, exploring deeper and deeper regions of self and relationship, you find a bottomless well of aliveness, freedom, and healing. Find the full description below :)
All first-time participants are kindly asked to watch the Training Video before joining us.
T-Group is potent medicine for...
Unraveling patterns of insecurity, shame, and self-aggression
Learning how to connect with others as who you actually are instead of who you were trained to be
Connecting more deeply with your body, gaining greater access to your feelings and needs (and the wisdom and clarity they offer)
Expanding your vocabulary for expressing your feelings and needs
Overcoming the fear and cultural conditioning that tells you to hide the emotions that are tender and vulnerable, messy and wild, shocking and taboo, etc.
Finding the pathway to a deeper, more authentic, and more nourishing experience of connection
Overcoming the social anxiety or awkwardness that results in loneliness and isolation
Growing your ability to establish new connections with confidence and ease
Expanding your capacity to receive the emotional nourishment of connection, love, and belonging (and to give it)
Strengthening your capacity to be with other's confusion, sadness, anger, or any other difficult emotion (and your own)
Discovering more effective ways to navigate differences and conflict
Learning to defuse your own triggers and back yourself out of habitual defensiveness and reactivity
Location
Green Yogi is located at 1642 Martin Luther King Jr. Way in Berkeley. All logistical details will be provided in your confirmation email.
What’s T-Group?
If meditation is a mindfulness practice that you do with yourself, T-Group is a mindfulness practice that you do in relationship with other people. It's an opportunity to step outside the norms of ordinary conversation and drop into something much more deep and real. It's a laboratory where you can make discoveries about your habitual ways of showing up in connection with others and experiment with new ways of being and relating. It's a living mirror that can offer real-time feedback and reflection about the impact you have on the world.
This practice will deepen your self-awareness, because it's only when you see yourself more clearly that you can begin to make new choices and generate new experiences. It will invite you into greater levels of transparency than most of us are accustomed to, revealing the connective and healing powers of authenticity, vulnerability, and intimacy. And it will teach you new ways to work with the obstacles to connection, equipping you to navigate differences, conflict, and your own triggers with both heart and skill.
Finally, this practice also teaches us how to transform a collection of separate individuals into a truly cohesive, synergistic group that is greater than the sum of its parts. It is a place where we come together to learn how to re-weave the fabric of our human community in a way that honors and includes all our differences and diversity. And in so doing, we wind up co-creating the experience of belonging to something larger than ourselves, which is something we need now more than ever.
The power of T-Group comes from our collective willingness to Reveal. In group, we take the risk of sharing who we really are, what we’re actually experiencing, and what’s truly happening in the space between us. We step out of our habits of avoidance and performance, and make the discovery that even difficult truths can connect us to ourselves and each other in a powerful way. And yet, authenticity alone isn’t enough - there are ways to be “authentic” that aren’t particularly skillful. So in the version of T-Group that we practice at our gatherings, we place equal emphasis on truth and skill.
The evening begins when we meet in the large group for a brief, silent meditation and a round of sharing that allows us to arrive and get grounded together. We will then break off into small groups of 5-7 for our first round of T-Group. After a short break, the same small groups reconvene for the second round of T-Group. The evening ends with a large-group closing exercise.