notes on Zero Point Collaborative

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What is Zero Point collaborative? 

Zero Point Collaborative is many things, as it is not “something” per se, it is an opener, an activator, a container (without actually being something that contains, as in limits), it is a conscious field of awareness in which, continually or simultaneously whatever might be touched within and as this field returns to its most vital emptiness as the zero point of creation and perception both. It is a place to both begin (or resume) collaborating and to experience what serves the very heart of collaboration itself. I work with YOU and that is where the collaborative aspect arrives, as we work together in the zero point field. ~ Janice Sandeen

Zero Point Collaborative offers interactive, awareness-based collaborations, consultations, & co-creations of all different natures: practical, contemplative, relational, creational, organizational, developmental, trouble-shooting, improvisational, and more.
 
Zero Point Collaborative both informs and emerges out of my native impulse to dialogue/converse with, to embrace and recognize, to honor and encourage the fullest spectrum being of the individual or the group I am relating with. We relate within a new level of awareness or we activate, together, a process of cultivating new ways of entering different levels of awareness than those that we might lean to out of habit or familiarity.
  • Dialogue/converse: I love the underlying meaning of both of these words. Dialogue literally means to “speak through”. Converse means to “turn with” and also to live among or be familiar with.
  • Embrace and recognize: Embrace is the natural resonance we feel with others. There is almost always something we resonate with in another –even if it is the repressed or suppressed aspects of another. Usually we aren’t sharing their presence without some kind of resonance, such that embrace is a natural outcome of being with or listening to another. Recognition or recognizing, for me, is an acceptance of that shared resonance. It is a communing with another’s natural intelligence.
  • Honor and encourage: Honor, to me, has many subtle levels of meaning. I might say that mutual honoring is really what I am pointing to here. So in honoring another, there is a deep honoring of oneself. I cannot really honor you and your process, unless I honor myself and my own process of emerging and/or evolving. The encouragement aspect is to hold and honor that other’s very heart center –the courage. To me this is not a surface expression, it is being able to touch another at a deep level, where their courage and heart springs from.
  • Full spectrum being: Finally, what do I mean when I say “full spectrum being”? It is in each of our capacities to feel the rippling out of the energy and living expression of the other. That is literally how we come into contact with another and feel a connection. When there is a knowing of or meeting of the other that reverberates under our skin, the full spectrum being of that other is available and active in our experience, such that we are touched by that being. This is getting to be a long note, but what I sense is that sometimes we shudder and recoil when we are touched in this way, such that we might end up recoiling from our own full spectrum self. This is where projections can so easily come in and distort the field. But, even the projection is part of the full spectrum being. There are many disguises and masks that have an integral part of each of our full spectrum beingness. This conundrum and/or paradox is exactly why this terrain is exceptionally rich and also invigorating. I might ask you to consider: what kind of stimulation can you stand in and wake fully within?
• • • The zero point field is neutral & non-hierarchical. It neutralizes the dualities of overly polarized perspectives. • • •
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Sunset overlook from San Cristobal, NM ~ photo by Janice Sandeen, 2015

• From teaching to facilitating: I first thought I would be a teacher, at a younger age. When I was in my twenties, there was not much talk of facilitators, mostly only teachers and those who could impart something to their students. That dynamic of “those in know” to “those not in the know” sets up a classic hierarchical tension, one deeply polarized. As I came to experience, instead, that life and learning is a constant field of reciprocity and entanglement (to use a quantum physics term), I came to see how the field itself is in constant dialogue with All That Is. There is really nothing fixed, only fixed views and positions. To leave a role as teacher to step into this living, breathing field as a co-facilitator, that is one way to step out of polarization. It is a way I choose freshly each day and in each collaboration.

  • From training to un-training: Maybe you have some suggestions here as another way to speak of this notion of training; isn’t it something that most likely “an expert” does to another? I think of trainings as something taking something naturally fluid and creating something more restricted and fixed. Another non-polarized alternate to “training” could be “enhancement” or enhancing, but what I really see as an alternate here is instead of training, presumably making something more precise and controllable, I would say that I invite relaxation at every level possible, which is what I am calling un-training.
  • From assessing & analyzing to seeing & recognizing: I have, at other times than now, leaned toward meeting things through an abstract aspect of my own consciousness. I would, and thought I could, take things apart in order to be in relationship to them. I was borrowing a practice of relating to things and people in a way that I had been related to, both in my family and in my culture –the schools, the society, the institutions. It was my connection to animals and nature almost more than anything else, which taught me that there was another way of relating –relating through seeing, sensing, and essentially a primal way of relating to the energetic and emotional/intuitive aspects of one’s being. Being seen and recognized both was such a deep longing for me, such that when I do experience it (as with my relationship with animals and in nature), I do not overlook that experience, at all.
  • From directive to non-directive: And finally, I’ll touch on this piece, which became quite huge for me at one time in my soul’s journey. I’m not sure where I first used this term “directive”, but when I experienced another’s offering or support that was truly non-directive, it became clear to me how odd it was. Many people and organizations have built their supposed success on directing others, either directing their development (as do 1st World kinds of organizations to so-called 3rd World peoples and organizations) or directing their personal development or health to achieve a certain ends. —- I have come to deeply respect that there is no quantifiable ends and means, such that I no longer expect to have an authoritative knowing as to where someone else needs to go in their ever evolving journey to themselves or to their true home. So, non-directive work allows for that individual’s unique evolution, their unique timing, their unique complexity and/or simplification. Non-directive doesn’t suppose to know, to know what is right for another, to know what is is at the heart of something, but encourages and enhances that individual’s unique unfolding and flowering. Just think of how many thousands and millions of different flowering species we have on this planet. How did that bounty evolve that way!?