SPT and Meditation

– Reconnecting to our collective source

The three SPT teachers Andrea Chlopczik, Liv Fabricius, and Anders Fabricius started collaborating through a shared interest around investigating and deepening the relation between SPT and meditation practice. In this article they will share some thoughts about SPT and meditation, as well as how they work together.

Like all SPT teachers we teach our basic SPT courses, based on our individual backgrounds, interests, and talents. So these programs will have slightly different approaches to SPT. During a SPT Research Gathering in Denmark we discovered our shared intention in exploring and deepening the connection between meditation and SPT practice.

Starting with our own experience we became especially interested in exploring the inner capacities, the life skills, that we can nourish through SPT practice. We had already noticed how our intentions, attentions, and awareness had changed by applying the perspectives and skills that we have acquired from our practice in different situations both privately and professionally.

What we often notice when doing SPT is how much information we get access to when we involve the body. But as Liv says: “You could say that we are all more or less doing Social Theater (without Presencing) all the time. During a day we constantly shift between movement and stillness and our body always have a shape and are always positioned somewhere in relation to other people and the environment we are in. The only thing missing from making any given moment a SPT practice session, is awareness.”

The awareness part of SPT, the “presencing”, is what makes the difference – by adding awareness to normal everyday movements, habits, and interactions these movements, habits, and interactions become a practice. Our own experience made us realise that awareness is really a key ingredient if you want to explore SPT deeper or if you want to develop your SPT practice further. We all have the ability to pay attention to our body or to expand our awareness to include other people that are present in the space we are in.  

If we want to utilize this potential, we get precious support from our mediation practice.  For cultivating full awareness, we have to integrate all three ways of knowing: Our sense perception, our relational sensing, and our awareness of the whole. The practices offered by different mediation traditions start with observing what we are seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching in the very moment; as a next step we are guided deeper into our relational sensing capacities by opening our heart in compassion with all beings; thus we are prepared to deep dive into our awareness of the whole to get in touch with our best future self and the higher collective self.

In our conversations in Denmark, we found that it might not be sufficient to cultivate an individual practice in order to train these skills. This is the reason why we have created the different SPT retreats that we are offering. We are inspired by the way meditation retreats are framed, as there is a lot of knowledge about how to create an environment that points the participants in the direction of deepening.

As Andrea expresses it: “I am thinking of the wish I have myself and I hear from other teachers and advanced practitioners – we feel a certain longing to practice from time to time together with other advanced practitioners, to reconnect to our collective source. To turn the camera back on ourselves without the burden of being responsible for the facilitation.”

SPT practice is simple and complex at the same time. To create a safe and trustful environment that supports the deep dive into the unknown the facilitator has to keep track of many dimensions so that different moves can happen in the same space and at the same time. For some practitioners the next step is to widen their movement repertoire, others in the same group might aim at improving their facilitation skills, and for others the next step would be to dig deeper into the potential of their inner self.

By combining our own meditation experience with our training as SPT teachers we want to provide retreat conditions that will allow participants to deepen their own practice and to sense into the relational structure of agendaless meditation, the felt sense of SPT practice, and the application of SPT practices in personal and professional contexts. Why do we think the retreat frame is important?

Anders experience from a long retreat was: “After 3 months of intense meditation retreat I waited for something to happen, waited for the fruit of the effort… I watched, waited, observed my everyday life after the retreat. After a while I discovered that what happened was that a little bit less happened. It was calmer inside me and around me, a more natural flow in life, less drama.”

As a professional, your communication will always be informed by who you are and what you have in your luggage, for better or worse. We believe that you can’t meet clients or fellow human beings deeper than you can meet yourself – so deeply knowing and accepting oneself is an essential perquisite for a flourishing personal and professional life. Retreats are meant to provide time and space to allow this introspection to happen.

This is one of the things that Liv stresses: “Many consultants talks about tools, tools to fix things, and many see the SPT methods as simple tools. But it is not enough to copy paste the instructions if you really want to benefit from the deeper possibilities that are in the SPT practice. Like most other things SPT is something that you need to practice, a lot, to master it. With time you build inner capacities from the practice, you start living SPT, being more authentic, more present, have more empathy and have a more complex understanding of what is happening around you. SPT turns from a tool into an ability or a capacity that you can always use, no matter if it is possible to use the actual tool in a given situation or not. This is at the core of Theory U; it touches upon the inner place where we are operating from. Starting to act from a more authentic place within yourself will be a much stronger source of change than any given tool, and SPT has the potential to make that shift in you.”

In our retreats we want to create a space that allows us to explore SPT behind the tool. Together we want to become more aware of the capacities and life skills that we can develop from SPT practice. And we want to experience the interrelatedness between meditation and SPT practice. Meditation can help us uncover the more subtle layers of the SPT practice – as it helps us notice more and more details in our sense perceptions and our relational sensing experiences.  SPT practice can benefit the meditation practice, as it lifts the meditative mind from the meditation cushion up into movement, action and interaction with others and with the environment.

We look forward to the further journey deepening our own practice – both meditation and SPT – as well as collectively holding the space for other practitioners to deepen their practices and to further detect, explore, and develop together our inner capacities and life skills.

Andrea Chlopczik, Anders Fabricius, and Liv Fabricius

SPT Summer Retreat, open for all practitioners both beginners and advanced, July 23-27 2021 in Sweden. Facilitated by Andrea, Anders and Liv.

SPT Deep Dive, open for experienced practitioners who already are familiar with the basic SPT exercises, August 6-10, 2021 in Sweden. Facilitated by Anders and Liv.