Community E-News

"The next Buddha may take the form of a community - a community practicing understanding and loving kindness, a community practicing mindful living. This may be the most important thing we can do for the survival of the Earth."
--Thich Nhat Hanh

As IONS Community Group Coordinators, you are all unsung heroes and heroines. You are doing great work for your community in a vital sense. It's time for a little inspiration regarding our IONS Community Groups. We have great resources and experiential wisdom in each other and can learn from each other. 

We have stories to offer, resources to share, and questions of importance. They need to be exchanged.

This is the beginning of a web page newsletter for those unshared stories in the IONS Community Group Network.  We hope you will report on what you are doing for the next newsletter. We are a large learning community that circles the globe.

This newsletter includes the following:

1) Notes from an LA IONS Council Meeting. Often, the IONS ~ LA Council - the leaders of the various IONS community groups in L.A.- gather at someone's home. In her notes from a recent meeting, hostess, Nancy Weiss, shares quotes from the gathered leaders on what IONS means to them. 

Southwest region coordinator, and IONS World Council member, Tahdi Blackstone, shares some initial reactions from her first board meeting as representative of North American community groups is here as well.

And follow this link to see photos of some of the Stewardship Council members at a meeting in Memphis before the Council regrouped to form: Elder, World, Network, and Youth Councils on the Community Network Summit Page. Find a link there to the International Day of Peace, September 21, 2006, which our IONS Community Groups will be celebrating.

2) News and Updates about what is happening with the IONS Board of Directors and the strategic plan of IONS.

3) The Noetics Group in Helena, Montana just hosted IONS President James O'Dea for a 4 day workshop on 360 Degrees of Transformation with group member, Patrick Marsolek in remote Boulder Hot Springs, July 13-16, 2006. The retreat group delved deep into collective field work and their own internal processes, healing deep trauma as well as celebrating the joy of transformation. In this meeting, James conducted an exercise called Psycho Synthesis. The description of the process is listed in the Circle Processes section. There are also audio tapes that were used for trance work featured in the Featured Audio Section.

4) Also in the Circle Processes section, you will find a write up of the Somoan Circle Process, used in Seattle last May during a community building workshop called Sacred Activism, which sponsored IONS luminaries and activists Robert Kennedy Jr., Jean Houston, Carolyn Myss, Marianne Williamson, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Paul Ray, Michael Lerner among others and brought together local Sacred Activists. Some panel work with others on Engaging the Common Wisdom modeled a community dialogue process called the Somoan Method.

5) The White Fish, Montana IONS Community Group led by Gerald Askevold has requested some assistance with learning the protocol for Bohmian Dialogue. So we feature in the Circle Processes Section The Guidelines for Bohmian Dialogue from Christian de Quincey, former editor of IONS magazine (formerly The Review), from his visit to Seattle where he coached a group of 75 in practice. If you look at the Shift n Action I-News this month, there is a wonderful article by Christian called Cosmos and Communication, a very different form of community which shares subtle communication within a mind field. You will find a link to the article in the newsletter.

6) Next month, IONS President James O' Dea travels to Rhinebeck, New York to support leaders in putting on a week long multi-generational Conference for co-leadership at Omega Institute called Gathering of Emerging Leaders of All Ages: Transformational Activism to Birth A New Paradigm: An Intergenerational Collaboration. These young activists are learning about conscious community building in an experiential way that is so exciting! It's a delight to see how inspired they are! Watch their flash movie here.

Reading Alpha Lo's letter you will see that he is describing experiential summaries of common group processes. You can find this description with a link to the group's short movie--a must to see. Both Alpha Lo and Matthew Edwards, representatives of this young network of leaders, are joining with other groups, including inter-generational to create new forms of communication across groups.

7) Long time IONS colleague, Peter Russell offered a 30 minute movie to our group for viewing and discussion called From Science to God. This followed the viewing of The Secret, the month before, which proved to be very popular with the community. Both movies are reviewed in At The Movies Section with directions on how to get them. And other movie suggestions are offered.

There is much more in this newsletter to browse around and discover. Take a look at the Peace Pole Ceremony as well as the introduction to Seattle IONS Community's recent speaker Victoria Castle whose book Trance of Scarcity was just reviewed in IONS I-Shift Magazine. And this is only the beginning! This prototype needs your input. On behalf of all the community group councils, we welcome your contributions of best stories, practices, media, speakers, topics, and your ideas.

Send submissions to Susan Burns at sburns@ionsnw.org

And by the way check out September 21, 2006, International Day of Peace

Blessings and Peace,

Susan Burns
Seattle IONS Community
Network Council
Elder Council

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Link to Issue #2