The Art of Falling Well

The Facilitator's Guide to Transformation

The monk asked his master “What is the way?”

The master replied, “An open-eyed man falling into the well.”

This is a Koan, part of traditional Zen practice. Short tales, questions, and statements like these are included in Zen because they point to the ironies of living. Questions are not as black and white as we often look at them. The Koan is designed and presented to Zen students to help them break away from logical, reductionist contemplation. Through which, a state of open awareness can emerge and they can be “taken” by the intuition. Perhaps becoming available enough to receive insight into the nature of Things.

I receive from this particular Koan that awakening is not that we avoid “falling into the well” but that we can see exactly how we fall. In other words, perfection is not the goal. The one who falls open-eyed into the well is someone who accepts their humanity. They don’t live above the mundane and earthly. Through the fallibility of their own humanity, they see clearly, awaken. This is mastery.

This has everything to do with facilitation because it’s all about getting someone to expand their perspective on their experience. When we’re consumed with the content of our experience, we fall into the well and wonder how we ended up there.

Think about a critical point in your life — maybe you had a health crisis, some betrayal from a loved one, got burned out from work, etc. — where you thought something to the extent of “How did I get here?” This is being consumed in the content. Where life seems to happen to you and you are unaware of your choices that led to the personal crisis.

What we call transformation could be defined as taking greater responsibility for our lives. With eyes wide open, we are more aware of how we are agents in life and what we do/can do to create our experience. Which doesn’t mean we never fall. But we have the capacity and create space to look at the happenings in our lives, which decreases the impact and frequency of the fall.

In order to facilitate such an experience, the facilitator needs to embody specific qualities. Which is what we’ll explore here.

Teaching and Facilitating: There’s a Difference

A Facilitator is someone who can provide enough space and clarity for people to step back from the content of their experience. Therefore, the person becomes less defined by what has happened to them and more in touch and responsive to the moment, as it arises. This is important because when we are more “in the moment”, we have access to the intelligence and creativity of life. Less habit drives our behavior. More flow seeps its way into our lives.

There’s a saying that goes “You can’t lead anyone further than you have gone.” Although I believe this is an accurate statement, I don’t like it. If we take it at face value, it communicates a leader who “knows” where they are going, taking a group of people to a destination. That’s a teacher. Which also has its place, but we have to make the distinction here.

Transformation happens through facilitation, learning happens through teaching. We can learn something but that does not necessitate a behavior change. Indeed, the confluence of transformation and teaching is essential for development.

A facilitator, however, embodies the quality of openness to the moment, constantly exchanging what they may know or have experienced before for what’s happening now. Past experience and training certainly inform how they show up moment-to-moment but they regard each individual as unique in an ecosystem. Therefore, they don’t impose their will on the person or group to transform. So, a good facilitator also always stays curious and listens deeply to what’s being said beyond words.

In regards to facilitation, I would trade the above statement for “we can’t take people beyond our own reactive states.” This essentially communicates the same thing but the distinction is that the implicit destination is removed. The facilitator does not know where their client or group may end up, which again is different than the outcome-based approach of teaching.

Again, both aspects are needed in terms of development and a good facilitator is also able to oscillate to teaching.

Fighting Symptoms with Symptoms

Much of the facilitation we see today is focused on defeating symptoms — the tensions that make life difficult. The facilitator’s main role, however, is to locate the root function that is “limiting” or “problematic” and help redirect that intelligence into a new choice. This happens directly through the felt sense of the relationship between the facilitator and participant, the facilitator’s self-contact, and the participant’s self-contact, within a container of intention (the field).

Humans have become experts at pushing past our limitations. A flow of resilience is passed down the evolutionary line from these acts of overcoming. However, we are less skilled at meeting perceived limitations and harvesting the resources within them. Instead, we tend to deny or resist our limitations and push our gifts to the extreme. Thus, we end up overusing the gift until it becomes a habit.

While overcoming is resilience-building, we rarely get to learn from what we have stepped over. In other words, we miss the integration and therefore a huge asset in forward steps. History then has the potential to repeat itself.

Beyond that, in trying to overcome we typically use the same strategies or mechanisms that are surfaced through the symptom (e.g. being afraid of fear). Fighting resistance with more resistance, more tension.

For example, we may think that fear is in the way of someone taking action. So we make the mistake of going to war with that fear in the client. However, the client is already doing that themselves, so now we’re simply enrolled in the same process that brought them to our practice anyhow.

The holistic facilitator meets any defenses that come up in their participants. They accept them because they are what the participants deny in themselves already. Through this, the defenses are neutralized and there’s space for what was underneath the defense to emerge. Maybe for the first time in their life, the participant’s guard comes down and they can be witnessed in a past vulnerability.

When is a Facilitator Needed?

Facilitation is often looked at as something done — an action. There’s usually more credit attributed to what is seen that overlooks the effects that inhibition, ambiguity, negotiations with uncertainty, and spaciousness, give in the process.

The facilitator, then, is skilled in their ability to be rinsed of what they know. They’re immersed in the process of finding out, with the participant(s). They follow the first and encompassing principle that healing naturally occurs when the conditions are ripe. They are skilled in creating spaces with such conditions — some of which are safety, transparency, integrity, non-violence, holism, and inclusivity.

Facilitators are invited into the picture when symptoms become overbearing for the person, group, or organization. When incongruence is realized as destructive to an ecosystem, but there’s little or no understanding of how to change. In other words, people often solicit facilitation when there’s a question. Commonly people may not even know what the question is, so a part of the facilitator’s role is to tease that out as well. They midwife a future through the development of conscious awareness in the system.

How Good Facilitation Works…

First and foremost, no transformation happens from outside the environment that changes. The intelligence of life is that the potentiality exists here and now — there’s nothing “out there”. Therefore, the facilitator can spot what seems hidden but is alive, significant, and included in experience. Alluding to the fact that a facilitator is only teasing out what’s already here but lying dormant in the client or group’s awareness.

Someone who takes on this responsibility needs enough space themselves, from the belief system, narrative, and tension, in the group or person they are working with. The ecosystem learns from the transmission that comes as an update through the space a facilitator hosts. This does not mean, however, that the facilitator knows where the group is going or how the process will unfold. They only hold the competence and objectivity necessary to negotiate the discomfort and tension of change.

Good facilitation carries the underlying assumption that life is self-regulating. It would not, in its origin, create a function that has no specific use. So it works through the acceptance of the functions that may have become “outdated” in the ecosystems they work with.

Crisis usually includes that a formerly functional strategy or compensation collapses in the face of an overwhelming life experience and the unknown is met. Good facilitation works similar to an application update. Before the update, the app may be laggy, shut down frequently, or be completely unusable. After the update, the application responds to quick commands and flows seamlessly in interaction. The update a person or group gets from facilitation helps people respond to life appropriately, rather than a response that may have been created in the past.

A facilitator is one who becomes obsolete through the process. The client’s or participant’s eyes are opened and they are prepared to fall into the well. They can respond to life from the newfound centeredness and poise. Even if things get shaky they can work with them through the resources that were built in the space the facilitator hosted.

Consciously Falling

Life includes falling into the well. We’re human. As facilitators, we meet people in the well and tread water with them until they discover how they got there. It requires patience, commitment, and a deeply known and felt sense that we can trust in life.

I’ll leave you with this quote from Alexander Lowen, someone who practiced and studied change facilitation for over 50 years:

“It is only by making the past alive again for a person that a true growth in the present is facilitated. If the past is cut off, the future does not exist.”

What’s possible when we deeply meet someone in their experience?

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