Ella’s Experience (Facilitator) [she/her]

Facilitation doesn’t come easy to me. It felt like trudging through mud, sticky and viscous, clinging right onto your calves. There are so many new energies around, which is both really exciting and terrifying at the same time. Facilitation is very foreign to me, and I was really scared that I would fuck things up – fuck the programme up, fuck the participants up, fuck everything up really. 

There is a strange desire to not disappoint the participants, to be ‘worthy’, but I suppose. This made me think a lot about expectations, and the reasons behind this urge. I decided that I should simply resign, and just trust that everyone will walk away with something. 

It is very interesting each week, to see how each participant interacts with the work, to watch them discover, question, search. To listen to all the different perspectives. I learn something new from the participants each week. In many ways, I too, am still a participant.

I am still learning, myself. 

I struggle a lot each week actually. I get very drained, to be extremely honest. As I wrote, facilitation really doesn’t come easy to me. Funny, because the word facilitation comes from the word facile, which means easy. Well. It is to “make things easy”, which is difficult, for such a complex work that I, myself, am still in the midst of understanding, learning, embodying. 

During facilitation, i had to constantly remind myself to resign, to let go of all my expectations, especially with regards to the participants. It is also a lot about learning how to connect, and relate to them. How to share the space with them without being a blockage, without being a hindrance. To become a point of care in a way. 

I can only hope, and only trust that I have done my best by caring, resigning, and that the participants have found their spaces to explore and discover. 

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