The world is hurting, and people are angry and lashing out. Since the U.S. elections I’ve been watching lots of webinars about next steps. I’ve been reading statements from different organizations about how the elections impact them and articles about how to organize for a new society. All these sources of thinking start out by telling people to take care of themselves and seek emotional support in these hard times. This is new. I haven’t seen this so uniformly before—an acknowledgement that to effectively take action and organize for change, we should do this kind of self-care. I think this calls us as RCers to step forward in a bigger way and share what we know. A welcome opportunity for us. 


Can we offer RC to people we know as an accessible source of self-care that would be useful to them in these times? We know how important it is for us to discharge and use our sessions to reset our perspective frequently. There is a big need for people to understand what is happening in our world and that positive change is possible. When people discharge, changes happen in their thinking and their ability to connect with others around them. What we have figured out is the most effective way I know to allow people to consider new ideas and come together to build strong alliances. And when discharge is accompanied by information and experiences that contradict what we thought was reality, this happens even faster. That can happen in our RC classes and RC Communities.


All of us can offer to show people what we do to address our feelings of upset as things collapse around us. We can invite people to have a “listening exchange” with us, and when they like it, we can set a date to do it again. We can pull friends together to do “listening circles” with us, with the election results as an excuse. We can call “study groups” for our friends—incorporating listening exchanges and listening circles to help us integrate what we are studying.


I’d also love to see many more of us certified to teach RC and offering more and more fundamentals classes. We may need to develop more flexible structures for our classes so that more people from oppressed groups and with already full lives can come to our classes. (Guideline C.2.) It would be good to hear what people have tried in this direction and how it has worked. 


We have some “going public” projects where we offer our tools, and we’ve developed some good resources and good experience there. Many resources are listed here: www.SustainingAllLife.org/resources. Some people who learn the beginnings of RC with us continue using our basic tools (listening exchanges and listening circles) for themselves or in their organizations. That’s great—I love going to meetings of other organizations and seeing these practices in use. It clearly makes a difference. We can do more projects that share what we know. We can suggest using these tools in organizations we are part of. And we can offer a chance for people to learn more than these basics by joining groups we start or our RC classes. 


We may be in a period in which people are more open to Co-Counseling than they have been for decades. Let’s assume that is true and step forward to offer people access to us through teaching RC in many forms, including fundamentals and other RC Community classes. 


I remember Harvey Jackins challenging us to double the number of people we taught RC to every year. That was thirty years ago. Could we do that now? What kind of support can we provide each other to take this on? I know that the changes we want in the world will be much more possible if we do this. What holds us back?