Why is any or all of this important to us as lightworkers?
It’s important because we have a very large and important task ahead of us – building Nova Earth. And what I’m noticing from my vantage point is that as we go forward matters proceed well enough until a situation of conflict arises.
When that happens, what’s revealed is that we have surprisingly few tools and almost no personnel devoted to reducing and resolving conflict.
And our knowledge differs from person to person. Very, very few of us have gone through the kind of training that used to be available from the Growth Movement. Very few of us know enough to talk about how we’re feeling at the moment. None of us know the lengths we can go to with one another.
Very few teams consent to be tutored by other members of the team. Very few team members know what is being pointed at when notions of becoming aware of our own modes of behavior that can bring about conflict in cooperative effort.
And meanwhile members of the team conduct their affairs by the same methods that prevail in the outside society – through influencing, impressing, making treaties, and so on.
Many of us handle our difficulties by sidebarring or gossiping about others. Many are still mired in looking outwards and blaming rather than looking inwards and revealing our own investments and agenda.
None of these ways of dealing with matters works in the end. They don’t go far enough now and they never have.
Many lightworker projects start out as an ad hoc team and then begin a process of mitosis. At the first sign of conflict, the teams divide and divide and divide. And this incessant loss of personnel denies us progress and expansion.
What do we need? We need training in the basic subjects of awareness, responsibility, and communication.
We need to understand how awareness works and what the benefit is of raising as many matters about ourselves to awareness as possible.
We need to learn how to practice being responsible for our own participation or “owning our stuff,” as a colleague says.
And we need to find out and agree on how to communicate our upsets and disagreements.
As matters stand, lightworkers initially take an initiative but their efforts only forge ahead through the honeymoon period of group development, get shaky or fall apart during the tug-of-war phase or hit a rock afterwards and founder.
In many ways, we’re cannon fodder. We don’t stand a chance as groups as soon as conflict arises.
We need anyone who’s trained in running groups beginning immediately to teach our teams the basics of group communication and conflict resolution. We need professionals who will make themselves available on a volunteer basis (because very few lightworker teams have financial resources) to assist a team that finds itself in conflict.
If we cannot learn the skills of conflict resolution, it’ll be impossible to plan events for down the road and many teams will have a short life span. This is a missing piece in lightwork as it’s progressing today. It’s a piece that someone will have to come forward to fill if we’re to take up the part of the work of building Nova Earth that falls to us.