Empowerment Environment vs. Therapeutic Environment
Therapeutic Environment:
The priority is on safety and being careful. The focus is on going back
into the past and healing old wounds.
Empowerment Environment:
The focus is on creating an environment that maximizes people's creativity
and freedom around being fully expressed. We practice leaning into our edge and building our ability to be even
more effective, open and loving in the face of life's challenges.
The game we want to play is a fun, intense contact sport. And if one
has an active acute injury it is important that individuals take
themselves out of the game while they’re healing their injury. This would
include acute or delicate physiological, emotional or spiritual wounds.
The community understanding is that playing full out is an assumed risk
activity.
The empowerment environment is not primarily oriented toward healing --
but towards enabling you to be more open and alive in more parts of your
life. The environment that best creates empowerment is very different from
the environment that is necessary for healing delicate wounds.
Our goal is that individual's fears or wounds not limit the group for
this can lead to the "lowest common denominator" phenomenon.
If you're feeling like you
require safety around a given wound then a therapeutic environment would
be best. Or, if you're participating with us and a "therapeutic moment"
happens, then sit out the exercise and/or ask for extra support from an
assistant.
Generally, we practice creating an atmosphere of great love and presence –
where it is easier for people to express the fullness of their creativity and
love instead of toning down their passion to protect others from their
reactions to that expression.
We want to be in the game of empowering people for their juicy future
versus protecting people from their painful past.
"Security is mostly a superstition. It does
not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it.
Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life
is either a daring adventure, or nothing."
-- Helen Keller "Live to be in the
present. Safety, security, knowing and being right are all synonyms for
death."
-- Cheri Huber |