Future Possibility of a Challenge Revealed

The Group Stuck is a mindful group embodiment and sensing exercise which makes visible the current reality and emerging future of an individual challenge. It is part of a series of Social Presencing practices.  The benefit of the exercise is to gain insight on the future possibility of this challenge.

In this article, I share a video that showcases a group stuck exercise I led. Find the explanation of how the group stuck exercise unfolds below the video.

Sensing Into The Emerging Future

Before the start of this video, Michelle Moore has embodied the felt sense of a personal challenge she is facing.  Note that the challenge is not articulated verbally to the rest of the group. She embodied the challenge by allowing a sculpture to arise in her body, representing the current reality of her challenge.

She then invited three people to physically exaggerate the felt sense of this challenge.  The challenge is referred to as a “Stuck”. Michelle invited them to physically exaggerate the sticking forces of the “Stuck”.  Sticking forces are physical parts of the Stuck (such as a lowered head) which are physically holding the body in its current state.  In the first video frame you can see the three people pushing down on a shoulder, the low back, stepping on one foot, etc.

The Collective Body Has Wisdom

The video begins with the three people sensing into the emerging future of Michelle’s stuck.  As a group, all four people collectively lean into the Stuck, allowing a felt sense of the emerging future state to arise in the collective body.  This happens when all participants are cultivating a mindful awareness of the Earth body, their own individual body and the social body (all four people together).  They allow movement to arise in the body, into the future state, without thinking or deciding what that future state should be. Here it is the collective body that has wisdom and reveals the future possibility of the Stuck.

Up until this point, the exercise is done in silence.  Once all participants have landed in the emerging future state, each person makes a statement from the “I” voice such as, “I can see the sky now” or “I am looking upwards and my feet feel strongly rooted to the Earth.”

The participants can further debrief on insights arising by journaling answers to questions such as, “What did you notice, what surprised you?”