Emotional Development — Day 3 — Maya Tulum 2012
Jake Eagle — Tuesday, February 7th, 2012
During the third day of this lab we dove deeply into the arena of our emotional development. I reviewed the first five stages of development that we grow through from birth to age twenty. Later in the lab I’ll review the stages covering our growth from twenty to the end of our lives.
The model is extremely helpful because participants can identify the gaps in their own emotional development, as well as come to better understand other people. We all have gaps in our emotional development. The key thing to distinguish is whether our gaps are ones that we can fill now, or are they indicative of “holes” within us that we must accept and live with. People don’t like hearing me suggest that not everything can be repaired, fixed, or healed—but there are certain things that we should have gotten as children, and if didn’t, we can’t get it now.
This doesn’t mean we at a total loss. Actually, just accepting our “holes” can radically alter our relationship to our “holes” and the people who participated in creating them. And sometimes, there are things we can do that are helpful. The first step is recognizing whether a “hole” can be healed or not. If not, we don’t want to waste our personal energy going around and around in self-indulgent dramas.
It is this work—as well as helping people identify their core limiting pattern—that encourages lab participants to go deeper, exploring their emotional development. Not everyone is happy today. But that’s just fodder, giving them a chance to learn and practice maturely expressing themselves. As they do so, they heal themselves. They break out of their patterns of immaturely reacting to events and people, and instead they start to maturely respond to events and people.
For many of the couples who are attending the lab this is a revelation—finding ways to express themselves that allow them to stay connected. Two individual “me’s” creating a “we.”
At the end of the third day, one of our participants lead the group in a movement process known as the “five-rhythms wave.” Then we ended the night with a full-moon beach walk. On the beach, in the moonlight, we could still see the magnificent and creative sculptures that we built earlier in the afternoon.
But that’s another story . . .
Related posts:
- Communication Skills —Day 1 — Maya Tulum 2012
- Sensory Awareness — Day 2 — Maya Tulum 2012
- Maya Tulum Retreat—Day 6
- Maya Tulum Retreat—Day 8
- Maya Tulum Retreat—Day 4
Tags: Communications, Intimacy, Self discovery, Workshops
