The adult world can be really boring and meaningless.
Raise your hand if you ever had a moment where this statement happened to feel true in your life. Thankfully, there are ways out there that also prove the opposite - ways that invite us into play and meaning-making with each other. The Flowgame is one of those ways, and I'd love to share some of my experiences and stories of practice with you.
It's been 5 years now that I came across the game that invites individuals and groups into reflection about our most important questions in life - and what else can I say, it truly has grown into a dear companion on my journey. As with all theories, approaches, communities around the realm of a more participatory way of being together, a more living, organic, systemic way of perceiving & being in the world, there's many things that could be said about why or why not to stay close to this practice. To me, it is a sense of warmth that draws me in, and a deep resonance with many elements of the practice that align with how I want to be and evolve in the world.
The thing that comes up first: Play! The Flow Game is an invitation to lean into the bigger questions of life with the lightnes and joy of play, gathering around a game board. It invites everyone to start where they are, and open to a joint inquiry, exploring different contexts as we are navigating the rivers of life.
It gracefully weaves the unfolding intangible (meaning, connection, you call it) into a physical shape that allows us to rewire the rules we've been tought in our social environments for a lifetime. What happens if there's no competition, if the aim of a game is not winning but shared clarity, if rules appear malleable and increasingly fractal the further we travel? A rethinking, rewiring that is held in the safety of something you can touch & interact with. Something with a story, that invites your story to co-exist and evolve next to all others.
The game invites us to put our blue-yellow colored glasses on, to look at our questions not only from one direction, but step in and out of different rivers as we move, and combine travel directions as the game evolves. It is all about inviting different perspectives, adding vital context which will help us to dissolve the one or other stuckness as we navigate the complexity of our times. What resonates throughout the game: The joy of weaving clarity out of community. I am in awe about what happens when we make space to listen to each others quests, and generously offer our own stories, images, resonaces to enrichen the perspectives in the process. There's something abouth our shared indigenous heritage of sitting in circle and make meaning together which is at the core of the Flow Game, and I'm deeply grateful that it offers itself as a vessel for the magic that can emerge & submerge in this process. A process of learning in context that doesn't cease & keeps surprising me.
Earlier this year I had the great honour to invite for a wonderful learning journey, together with my dear friend Amanda Zamparo, hosting 8 incredible humans to join us around the Flow Game Table. Let me take you on this journey for a moment.
The journey of calling & organizing an online Flowgame training
For some time, Amanda and I had been coming together around how we could start intertwining our practices, bringing together several different and plenty of similar contexts and colors. We've been meeting in the stewarding circle of the Flow Game, and felt called to look into this practice together ever since. It was only when our first official participant approached my colleague and directly asked her to host a training, when it started to become really clear that hosting an online training would be ours to play with.
And so it took shape: for several month, we met on a weekly basis both, to play the game and to give shape to our learning journey. Using the game as an anchor point for our evolution as a team prooved incredibly helpful, and showed that we had another team player in the breakout room.
Both of us have extensive experience with hosting online and designing programs related to participatory leadership, and so the actual learning points for us very much revealed themselves around the topics of a more regenerative economy and the opportunity to directly speak to and look deeper into our own patterns, and their markings from cultural and relational backgrounds.
Slow growth relationships: prep work, training days & integration
A really rich part of the preparation, which in retrospective already appears as a part of the training itself, was the slow and carefully helt invitation to step into play together, and the induvidual processes of finding a resonant monetary offer together with all our participants. Asking for what we need, offering what we can, holding accessibility as a fluid, open, trust-fueled concept. An approach that made people step in fully, and with some first relationshiphs sprouting between the group an d the game.
We layed out our training in 3 days, from preparing the soil to planting seeds and finally celebrating a harvest, with the invitation to gather again in the following months so we could fully integrate the training. Our first day started with a wonderful exploration of our courage and the directions of the game, diving deep into our embodied wisdom of the perspectives the game opens to the players. Throughout the training, we used the game and a set of training cards tolean in as much as daringly & care-fully possible for all of us, trusting that the wisdom of the game would meet us best when being in practice together. Another important element of our journey was to hand over hosting responsibility to our participants from a very early stage, letting them explore the hosting role in a safe environment, where we could easily shift between gameboard and meta-layer. A highlight surely was when the group invited for their first community games, happening one month after the first two days of training. It's beautiful to witness hosts grow into their role, feel into their way of explaining the game and navigating the group through the rivers of the game. And it is so precious to have enough space to integrate and further explore our experiences hosting. Over the 4 months following the training, we will be having several encounters looking deeper into our practice and continue playing together. It's so beautiful to think of the group and feel a tightly woven web of evolving relationships, both between the people and the game.
Our learnings
One of our main learnings is that oline trainings need reinventing & lots of intimacy. We already went into designing the training under this premise - and yet we caught ourselves half way through, realizing that the sessions were a little too long and a tiny bit too dense to maintain the warmth we've been stewing together. A little more space over a little more time would give us the opportunity to delve even deeper and grow even more conscious about potential directions and turns towards possibility.
Cause if there is one thing this training reaffirmed, it would be that titual & magick are so possible even in an online space. Maybe they are even more accessible, as we are joining in from our (hopefully) safe environments, leaning in just as much as feels right in this moment. It's hard to describe & imagine the moment when a whole group starts to jam in the same resonance, allowing a deeper wisdom to come through & be channeled through our bodies, weaving us together as a group, planting seeds of trust in each of us. Yes, there are barriers to tend such environments online, and yes, there's still so much possibility to find each other with goosebumps and sparkling eyes. Last but not least, what I am observing is that our work attracts marvellous people, people who are not afraid to follow a calling when it's the right time, people who dare to ask challenging questions and stay together in the inquiry. I am so deeply grateful for each and every one of the beautiful women who joined our learning journey, and am so curiously excited to continue practicing with them.
If you've been reading until here, that means that you're either my mum (I love you, mum!) or a very good friend of mine - or that something in what I've shared tickled a curiosity in you which might be worth exploring further. Here are some options for doing so:
Let's have a chat & let's play!
love,
sophie
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