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Let’s Dance! Julian & Hannes reflect on Brixen/Bressanone AR+ Gathering

AR+ Members and guests gathered in Brixen/Bressanone,  Italy November 9 – 12, 2023. The theme for our Dolomite-Alpine Gathering 2023 was Nourishing Ourselves and the Soil.

The original invitation had been extended by Dr. Alessandra Piccoli of the Free University of Bolzano. Because Alessandra’s action research highlights bio-social farming, we organized most of our meetings at a local bio-social farm-monastery near the university campus of bilingual (German/Italian) Brixen/Bressanone. 

Julian Hauer’s reflections follow with video footage by Hannes Sullman below. The dance photo features Julian Hauer and Hannes Sullmann with Carol Gorelick.  They’re practicing inter-generational action research for transformations 🙂

Reflections

by Julian Hauer

I can truly only apply a personal lens to what happened, and to what I experienced, at physical and collective, visible and subtle dimensions during and since our Gathering.

My authentic reflection is informed, now that it’s a few weeks later, through the ongoing impressions, insights, and healings that I experienced.

I’m grateful. I listen(ed), I learn(ed), I feel (felt) and my consciousness expanded – now, I’m becoming more aware of wholeness, the healing, and the proliferation which at times – and writing this reflection helps – I could not so easily grasp in mentally understanding.

The healing part, the self-development component is now most present for me. I experienced it through my own and others being together consciously. It emerges from our reflection and action sessions together. For me this was initially mostly untouched terrain  – within and with others – until very recently. I want to direct the focus to what now seems to matter most: being authentic Selves, alone and together.

Myself, I’m a student in Innsbruck, combining focus on outdoor extreme sports with the school of life as well as, though a bit less focal, my studying. My perception of our experience was most familiar to me as like riding a steep, deeply snow-filled mountain crest for the first time. It required artistry to which I brought fully focus in drawing a unique line into the shared landscape. I felt excited, vibrating high on joy and gratitude. While at the same time still being unable to process the magnitude and vastness of the surroundings and the energetic impact of those present.  All this I have been resonating with on all levels during and afterward.

To think I started into a Gathering-retreat with almost strangers and ended up feeling like I’ve known them forever.  How does that happen? And in such a short amount of time. It was something so special it’s still a bit hard for me to make meaning. Magic happened, and it’s still proliferating. But today I got an email from Hilary asking for my reflections. I realize it’s been a month! While I am just starting to cognitively integrate and understand what is going on in and around me…here goes:

If there is one thing that I take with me, that fascinates me, that is, that there is so much more, far more, to communicating, interacting, and developing (conversations) than just spoken words.

On a cognitive level, I have known this for quite a while now, however, it was only as I experienced the Brixen Gathering with my whole being, mind, and matter, that I truly began to integrate what it is like to enter and morph through a transformative space.

What is that…it’s a holding spaces, filled with the qualities of Love, Appreciation, Trust, Care, and Humility. In it we could have – and facilitate – authentic communication in full presence. I felt a potent alchemy of regeneration and healing happens.

Not too long ago, I became aware that there is infinite potential around us, in how the universe holds everything and which we can touch into, within. This new awareness meant I have embarked on a new journey of actively seeking new perceptions of the world, and of life itself, and of myself.

I came to the Gathering as I was also entering a new sphere, one in which I am looking at so much in a more whole, integral, systemic manner. I have expanded my explicit knowledge as well as thinking and thus I am changing, as is my life. On this journey with my buddy Hannes, we miraculously ended up, becoming part of the ARt community. We had reached out before folks arrived to ask how we might be involved.  We offered to guide people on the land (Hannes is an Alpine guide) and to encourage people to dance together on out last evening.  We called it “Game Night.” In the meantime, we got to sit in on everything – discussions, constellations, meals, and share our generational perspective.  Having started from a place of feeling (presuming?) our generation’s needs and views are ignored, we found we were most welcome.

The real growth and expansion in consciousness, however, came with the physical and mental experience of being fully present in deep conversations (among many good role models of this) and being consciously interactive with one another, and nature. It is in those moments, or shall I say, spaces – where time did not exist, and where space I becomes We. In this we become Potential together. That We offers a taste of the ultimate healing unity, as we alchemically leap into more wholeness together.

This requires synergies of Love and Care.  Nothing emerges out of nothing. Instead it was a combined effort of various members who carry the signature of this community.  There is even the whole (system) present, e.g., in eating organiz food from the land we were meeting on, in a theme of nourishing self and soil.

I sense that these spaces and transformations, like we experienced them at Vintlerhof – the bio-social-farm-monastery are a product of at least lifelong, if not evolutionary long learning processes of individual and collective consciousness.

Feeling the proliferating ripples during the weeks thereafter, integrating these experiences and writing these words, I also notice how grateful we can be, to live in an epoch of human and earthly species developing more of their potential.

Then, I’m reminded that this experience that Hannes and I lived, is not at all to be taken for granted – AND it should be available, for anyone – dot.

This embodied wholeness was carried by the people who mutually allowed themselves to enter into the emerging new, by giving up their a fixed identity (who is leading/following), transforming egoic thought structures and old habits, vulnerably cracking open hearts.

I could now start to call out names in honor, however, there is no way that I could do justice to the authentic individuals who co-created the alchemical “theater premiere” in Brixen. We all have been and are here for a reason, nothing happens based just on coincidence. So, I choose to believe, that this is just the prelude of our authentic collective dance of life.

Now, what’s emerging out of all this?

I, you, me construct the world! Not only AR+ future is to be shaped, but the planet’s and all in between.

I recall especially the words proliferation, legacy, and lifelong cross-cultural/generational learning. My thinking mind continues to mull these over. When we transform them directly into our intentions for what’s coming, I sense, that nourishment in a community is always possible, that diversity can be in harmony with unity.

We know that we are not only a few anymore, we are many. We know that we are connected underneath the surface, and, that what’s missing are the new structures above the waterline. I’m more curious what will allow us to relax ourselves and our tensions, and to step out of the old with ease. How to practice, how to enable us to constantly reinvent and evolve ourselves?

We now know how to communicate and interact consciously. How do we open up and hold this for collective evolution? So that is now my question, the inquiry with which I walk out of the gathering and into my life.  It’s rather an invitation that boggles my mind.

Why don’t we try to unite all the already existing communities or islands of coherence around one “fireplace” (in Zoom calls!) to collectively find solutions for the proliferation of those transformative spaces and put them into practice locally?

Behold, I am, to a certain extent, as much as one can be, aware of the complexity of the world we are living in. AND there’s infinite potential. So I say let’s try; let’s dance.

With Gratitude, Peace, and Love to all of YOU

Julian