Dr. Jean Houston

Dr. Jean Houston was a deeply caring and thoughtful person who worked with groups of people to reflect on their own lives and life itself.  She died in May this year, and this post is in memory of the profound influence she had on my life.

I didn’t have a lot to do directly with Jean, like some of my colleagues.  I attended a couple of weekend conferences that she led and participated in one year of her “Mystery School”.  The Mystery School was a series of retreats held over 9 weekends in a year with a break in the summer, and each had a theme.  The theme of each year was the catalyst for presentations, reflection, and activities that allowed profound reflection on one’s own life and life itself. 

The year I attended, 1988, the theme of the Mystery School was Cultures.  This appealed to me because of my study of anthropology, and the fact that just before we came to Canada Wayne and I had lived in 6 cultures in 10 years, mostly in villages where we were working shoulder to shoulder with community people to help them carry out the development they wanted to see in their village or community. We had continually explored what it meant to be a human being in each of those cultures.  

At the first session in January each year, Jean would take time individually with each participant to ask what results they wanted from that year’s activities.  When she asked me, my first response was “to let go of ego self”.  She gently but firmly informed me that I could not just say what I wanted to get rid of, but that I had to say what I wanted to replace it with.  I thought for a while and said “I want to replace it with receptive self.”   Then the sessions began, and my comment receded from my awareness. 

Just before the summer break, Jean announced that the culture we would explore in September was Aboriginal Australian culture.  She noted that she did not know a lot about this culture, and would be working on that over the summer.  This caught my attention, because our family had lived for 2 ½ years in an Australian Aboriginal community, where most of my work was with elders to listen to them and support them in bringing back their traditional culture and teach it to the children in the schools.  Whenever Wayne and I had run into questions about the language and the culture, we had talked with elders about the questions and had done lots of reading and research about cultural patterns and understandings which we verified and refined in our conversations.

Wayne was working that summer with Jean to set up a conference for her to hold in Canada in the fall, and he told her about our (and my particular) experience.  Jean asked if I would do the first lecture on Aboriginal culture.  Wayne told her I would, then worked with me on pulling together what we had learned in order to share it.  In my knowledge, this was the first time that Jean had asked anyone to do the lecture of a session, and I experienced it as a huge honour and responsibility. 

I made a mind map that put land (and particular land forms) at the centre, and then with the mind map showed the Aboriginal understanding of land at the centre of everything and its impact and relationships of everything in Aboriginal life, from rituals and beliefs, to language, to laws governing behaviour, to whom you could speak, to foods you could and couldn’t eat, etc. When the time to do the lecture came, I used the mind map to guide my presentation. 

As I was doing the presentation, suddenly I realized that every single person in the room had something profound, some important wisdom, that they could share with the world, given the kind of invitation, support, and audience that I had been given.  All of a sudden, I became extraordinarily curious to know what each person knew or had experienced, and the wisdom they had that no one knew about. 

By asking me to do her lecture, Jean had pushed my ego so far that it turned my ego inside out, and I became receptive at a level I had never experienced before. 

Those who know me, know that I have been a talker all my life. (I still am.) When I was a child, someone even asked my father if I was born of a talking machine!  In the entire 40 years of my life at that point, no one had ever said that I was a listener.  But within the next two weeks after that event, several clients said to me without prompting that I was a good listener! I found myself continuing to be very curious about the wisdom of every one of the participants in the room.

Becoming intensely curious about what wisdom others had made it possible for me to become a deeper group process facilitator, not just someone who did cute or interesting things with groups or even got good results: someone who could listen to each individual and to the whole group, making sure that everyone was heard and everyone heard others as well.  In this way, the group could create wiser results.

I think that being intensely curious about of all the hidden wisdom in the room is a foundation for authentic inclusion, a core value of powerful group process facilitation.