How Bohmian Dialogue has shaped my intentional community
What is Bohmian Dialogue?
Bohmian Dialogue is an experiment in shared mindfulness, an exploration of what’s going on inside each other when we sit in a group together — a social psychology experiment in which each person is both subject and researcher.
It was created by David Bohm, a physicist, but others have written about David and it’s history so I won’t delve into that in this article. You can find more info on the Bohm Dialogue website. I would like to delve into the ideological lineage of Bohmian Dialogue and explore what inspired it and what it has inspired. This is briefly mentioned on the wiki page. You can find the 10 principles of Bohmian Dialogue here.
This article is based on my experiences of using Bohmian Dialogue within my intentional community. We use it as a group bonding exercise meets tension and conflict process. The way we do it may be quite unique to my community; I don’t know because we’ve only discovered in the last year and I have only attended a Bohmian Dialogue outside my community online which was quite a different experience; it was less interpersonal and more people sharing philosophical musings. I can imagine doing it with a group of people who know each other vs those that don’t would change the nature of interactions.
“One of the first notions I ever had of Dialogue was many years ago when I read about an anthropologist who visited a North American Indian tribe, probably hunter-gatherers, of about 20 to 40 people. He saw that they frequently gathered together in a circle, and they talked and talked. Nobody seemed to be in authority, and they didn’t have any particular agenda or any particular purpose. They made no decisions — they just talked. But at the end they separated and seemed to know what to do. They had established a relationship with each other so that they could then deal with their practical problems and really communicate, and not get into the state we are often in where we are fighting over the problems and not communicating.” — David Bohm
This highlights the often ineffective ways we communicate within our organisational lives, and how gaining a deeper understanding of each other can transform your interactions, from you play to how you engage in conflict. I’m not suggesting this process replaces your regular scrum meetings or whatever, but that it might be worth getting to know your colleagues a bit better by holding a Bohmian Dialogue, perhaps on a monthly basis.
What are the key aspects of this process?
To open a Bohmian Dialogue, read out the 10 principles. Here I’ll say a bit more about what I think is the key aspects of Bohmian Dialogue.
Being present
The primary thing is to be present. The idea is to stay present with what’s happening in the group. You are training your ability to notice what’s actually happening, to notice the raw sensations you are experiencing in yourself and to observe what is going on for others.
The emphasis is on listening and observing and so there are some similarities to mindfulness and meditation. It is a practice of creating mindfulness in our interactions with others. And then the magical thing that happens is that I feel this practice of being attentive to each other spilling over in everyday interactions within our community.
To give you a more concrete idea of what we actually say, it’s about creating a space in which we ask ourselves “Who needs to speak in this moment?” Or we may choose to reflect back what someone has said as this helps to slow the conversation down and helps that person feel heard.
Ultimately it helps us acknowledge that we can all get triggered by each other, and asks us to sit in the fire of conflict and talk through it. Other members of the circle can help in intense conflict situations by asking for more silence in between people speaking, or asking those who are triggered to explain what they feel in their body. It allows people to go deeper into the blocks they have because, although you don’t have to speak about something you don’t want to, often a following question will be, “why don’t you want to talk about that?” which can be a very useful question to explore the blocks or resistance to certain topics. It can feel a bit prying at times, so obviously we use our own judgement not to pressure people, and only commend and celebrate people when it feels true to us.
Vulnerability
Vulnerability is key. This manifests in committing to saying things because they are true for you, even when you don’t know how it will be received by the group. This is a leap of faith that others will see that you are sharing something that is true for you and be curious enough to want to help you explore where its coming from.
Another really key aspect is caring for the whole. In respect it is similar to methods such as Matrix Leadership and circling. Looking around the circle, it’s important to pay attention to who has spoken, who looks actively engaged, who is burning with something to say, and who is bored out of their tree.
Upon noticing someone you may decide to ask them a question: “Are you engaged in this conversation? If not, what would you like to talk about?” You can also state “I’m not interested in this topic, can we talk about something else?” Given that the aim is for the whole group to be connected, I try to meet such questions not with offence, but with curiosity. If it does cause offence, then you explore that; what that sparked in someone, why have they been triggered.
Naming what’s true for you
Another reason to speak your mind is that this practice is about making the implicit explicit; naming what’s happening while it is happening. For example, in one of our first Bohmian Dialogues, I stated that I felt like one of the men in the group was only looking at the other men in the circle while talking. This opened up a space for us to talk about whether that was happening and why. Making things explicit means we’re all aware of it, that is, it’s in the group consciousness, a similar related to Lewis Deep Democracy. Naming something helps those who are currently holding a tension to share it with the group so it can be held by everyone not just the person who notices it.
This approach draws on the idea that what is causing the crises we face today is the unwillingness to engage with what is arising in our bodies, what our bodies are communicating to use. In this respect, it may have some similarities with process work.
“Dialogue is really aimed at going into the whole thought process and changing the way the thought process occurs collectively. We haven’t really paid much attention to thought as a process. We have engaged in thoughts, but we have only paid attention to the content, not to the process.” — David Bohm
This quote sums up the process quite nicely. It explains the idea that our thinking and feeling is shaped by others, and ours in turn shapes others. Our reality is co-created. When we sit together we commit to being open to being changed and shaped by others in the circle. And then those cumulative changes are how the group grows and a new collective being emerges.
How has it shaped my community?
After experiencing it at Nowhere festival in northeastern Spain, my housemate, Julyan, shared it with our community in March 2020. Our seedling community only formed two months previously and so it was in the early days of us getting to know each other.
Bohmian Dialogue has become an important process in my communal life, one I always look forward to. And if I was to sum it up in one word — juicy. It helps you get to the heart of what is burning in your group. In my community, we’ve tried tension and conflict processes mainly centred around transformative conflict. Now we usually use Bohmian Dialogue for group wide tensions. The principles permeate our lives and makes us more aware of how each other is doing in each moment. This in combination with being able to ask “Do you have a tension with me?”. If you deal with tensions as they come up, even if it’s small, it means it doesn’t fester.
Although it may seem very vague or wishy-washy, this process has had a profound impact on my life via how my community and I interact with each other. It almost always feels us feeling more connected to each other. It allows for a greater understanding of what’s going on for each other because it gives space for small tensions and big conflicts, but also minute behaviours that can also trigger each other. By creating a safe container to hold what is burning (i.e., someone being triggered or needing to express something) and allow it to be expressed without judgement and with spaciousness, it can be a really powerful experience. I’ve also found non-violent communication very helpful, but sometimes it can stifle our speech, while within a Bohmian Dialogue, I know we can express freely and if that triggers someone else, we can talk about it.
Bohmian Dialogue has been a key aspects of how we create a culture of care within our community. A friend of the community shared their noticing that look after each other and seem to have an implicit understanding between us. Not in a spooky way but I think this is what happens when you get to know people very well — a type of closeness you might have with family. Bohmian Dialogue has definitely played a role in that because it has ‘trained’ us to notice when each other isn’t doing well, to name it and to try help each other verbalise what’s going on.
“It is proposed that a form of free Dialogue may well be one of the most effective ways of investigating the crisis which faces society, and indeed the whole of human nature and consciousness today. Moreover, it may turn out that such a form of free exchange of ideas and information is of fundamental relevance for transforming culture and freeing it of destructive misinformation, so that creativity can be liberated.” — David Bohm
Open and honest dialogue is essential to creating the culture of care our world so desperately needs. I believe Bohmian Dialogue will be a really useful tool in building the world we want to see— the regenerative renaissance.
PS. I highly recommend participating in The Tools for the Regenerative Renaissance course; the course that prompted me to write this blog.
