Mirroring Workshop

Greetings All,
I just found a moment and thought I'd write.
We're having our minds expanded by the mirroring workshop that we've been attending in the past few days. A few have asked what "mirroring" is. In short, it's the practice of telling someone's story back to them. The gift for the person mirroring is the deep listening that must happen in order to do that. For the storyteller, the gift is feeling truly "seen" and they might find meaning or recognize patterns in their story through the lens of the person mirroring. Here's the description of the workshop from the School of Lost Borders:

Mirroring the Four Shields of Human Nature

The shields of human nature turn with the experiences of life, from the smallest cell to the great seamless whole of the biosphere called earth. It begins with the body (summer), turns into psyche (fall), becomes activated form (winter), which dissolves into spirit (spring) -- which is born again in the body (summer). The four seasonal directions of human nature, in their complex, yet simple, interaction, form the basis of an ecopsychology which redefines traditional psychologies based on human alone, apart from nature.

Telling one’s own story is an ancient art. Nowadays, we have forgotten how to listen and how to tell. Yet the very survival of our species depends on our ability to communicate with each other in such ways as to be mutually enriched by the telling and the listening. If we cannot tell with expression, our life is mute. If we cannot listen like a mirror, we cannot reflect back the wholeness of the four shields -- the body, soul, mind and spirit of the teller. The best stories are about human nature -- that is, the human of us which is, after all, nature in her basic manifestations as physical, psychical, rational, and spiritual. One of the best ways to create a four shields story, if not the best, is to put people in contact with nature in the raw.

What comes forth in the story is the stuff of self-transformation. Even as we “myth” ourselves into experience, so we express ourselves into existence. Our stories about our natural selves, and our means of expressing them, lead us to courage, determination, commitment, hope, wisdom, and the will to survive, to transcend the difficulty, to go beyond ourselves. Those of us who work with people must know how to listen and respond to the stories our people tell, so that we can help them create a life that is deeper, richer, and of greater benefit to our community and the earth.

Using the four shields provides a reference point for recognizing where you might be or where you might need to go in your own personal development and has become a valuable tool as well as a common "language" we can speak to explore transformation.