Our weekly teleconference was rescheduled for Monday because of my retreat at the ARC. This is the first blog in real time, written the day of the meeting!
We start with a description of our experience, mine in this case, since Su was ill that day. I thought that in general the girls were quieter, and went deeper, but not perfect, in meditation. They participated when asked but there was less as the session went by.
Kr said it was a tumultuous week, after the Wed. session. In a group session, the girls complained about Ta while she was in the room. They said they were not able to concentrate with her interruptions and they thought it was disrespectful to the facilitator, myself. The scarves were more distracting. The discussion went south and she hit her hand against the wall, breaking her knuckle and she is now in a cast. Also, Au had some bad news and they found that she had cut herself 20 times. In general, the girls feel this program is too long and Ma was questioning the relevance to her life.
Kr said the practice of, “finding a behavior they would like to change,” would be just fine. I asked about using the verbiage, “teens” and she thought, “girls” was best. She will be checking to see if she can make the meditations available for the girls to work on. She did reinforce with them that they will find one or two that they like.
With that as a backdrop for the next session, we decided to go forward as follows:
- Keep Ta in circle, in hopes she will change. We as facilitators will pay close attention to how the others are reacting.
- Add the self-esteem vs self-kindness to a dialogue.
- Add Sponge-Bob nice and S-B mean to the dialogue.
- Add the reptile to the circle.
- Announce we will be having one on one meetings on Friday with each girl to discuss their practice.