Calendar
|
This adventure invites you to explore your inner and outer worlds! Camp, canoe and create community in some of the most beautiful wilderness in Quebec!
Meet the challenges within yourself & with the earth to expand awareness of your life! Learn communication skills to effectively create the quality of relationships you would enjoy!
We have Play in the Wild!s for teens planned in California and Alaska this summer too. For more information about these and our Quebec camps...
Click here to go to our Play in the Wild website
view entry
| permalink
|
|
|
After two days of integrating canoe skills, community life, and thunderstorms we finally landed at base camp on a small island in gorgeous Papineau-Labelle, a wilderness reserve in western Quebec.
Day Three with more rain we, a group of 7 adolescents and three adults, found ourselves circled in a tent made for four delving deeper into the meaning of our life’s journey.
In an exercise called, “Imagine Your Perfect Life”, we each wrote/drew what our “perfect” life would be like while in silence only broken by rain hitting the roof of the tent. With needs cards spread in the center of the circle we began to go around the circle one at time, sharing what we wrote or drew. On each person’s turn the rest of the group would reflect back what needs we heard alive in the person’s story. It seemed quite tangible as we deeply connected to each person’s needs we were beginning to melt the labels we came with: “problem child”, “good girl”, “teacher”, “adult”, “delayed learner”, “juvinile deliquent from a
group home”, “buddhist monk”, “NVC trainer”…we were starting to really see each other.
When it came time for the only adolescent boy on the trip to share he recoiled into the tent wall and shook his head back and forth in “No”. Jesse offered an empathic reflection that it might be scary to share in front of all these girls as tears began to leak out the boy’s eyes. Jesse reflected that it can be quite vulnerable for guys to share when it is so tender. The boy nodded in agreement. At this point I asked if he would enjoy for the group to make empathic guesses just simply based on what he had shared so far and for us to simply try to intuit what may be going for him about a “perfect life”. He said, “Yes” The amazing
thing to me is ‘yes’ is a very short word but I would swear that the group began moving with the needs card before he finished speaking. Everyone placed needs cards in front of him with great enthusiasm to connect.
He physically moved in towards the circle and the cards. Jesse asked him to check in and remove any cards that did not feel connected. He did just that. Sat, reflected, removed a few cards and said, “yep, that’s it.” Only sweet gentle rain patter could reflect the deep connected feeling in the group in that moment.
The delight of taking youth out into the wild for 7 days and 6 nights is that I get the opportunity to really live in an NVC community. The constant attention to what is alive leads us down many paths of learning that is deeply unifying, healing and full of pure joy! And the best part is that there is no agenda, no plan, and no idea of when the lessons will arrive. Living in the mystery we got to literally jump off cliffs, carry canoes on our back, make meals in the rain, giggle until it hurt, sit in silence on a quest for 7 hours, build fire in the rain, make friends with mosquitoes and leeches, and sustain ourselves by connecting interdependently with the earth.
Our last evening together by the fire we offered the campers an opportunity to role play a conversation they would like to have with a parent when they got home from this trip. We had a few takers and one was the boy on the trip. At first he wanted, Melanie to be his mom, Jesse to be his dad and me to be his sister. We simplified by figuring out he could have this conversation with just his dad. Jesse and he dropped into such a real conversation that Melanie and I both cried during the witnessing of the deep connection. After empathizing with the father’s busy life and imagining he would enjoy connection too, the boy requested for a “family night” where all cell phones, televisions and computers are turned off and the family engage with a game all together. After the role-play completed, the boy announced, “It’s like I have already had the conversation.” The sweetest part of this story is when he returned home he did have
this conversation with his father and Saturday is now the official Family Night in their house.
I find deep meaning in offering programs like these simply because it contributes to what I value most…peace in all relations. Oh yeah, and PLAY!
Quotes from the teens:
“I learned to have more understanding for people different from me, more than I’m used to”...“It doesn’t matter if the label is positive or negative – it really keeps you from seeing the person” (13 year old girl)
“I really like this camp because there’s no punishments” (13 year old boy who had a prior experience with a summer camp where he had been disciplined and sent home early)
“I came into this camp thinking of myself as a label and I’m going home as myself, not as a label” (16 year old girl diagnosed as having a Nonverbal Learning Disorder, convinced she was a slow-learner). During the week, she learned how to canoe, helped to carry a canoe across land, spent 7 hours alone questing and
supported another student to move through the pain of homesickness. She also role-played speaking to her mom: “I don’t want you to introduce me to your friends as having a learning disability”... “I want you to see me”
Day Three with more rain we, a group of 7 adolescents and three adults, found ourselves circled in a tent made for four delving deeper into the meaning of our life’s journey.
In an exercise called, “Imagine Your Perfect Life”, we each wrote/drew what our “perfect” life would be like while in silence only broken by rain hitting the roof of the tent. With needs cards spread in the center of the circle we began to go around the circle one at time, sharing what we wrote or drew. On each person’s turn the rest of the group would reflect back what needs we heard alive in the person’s story. It seemed quite tangible as we deeply connected to each person’s needs we were beginning to melt the labels we came with: “problem child”, “good girl”, “teacher”, “adult”, “delayed learner”, “juvinile deliquent from a
group home”, “buddhist monk”, “NVC trainer”…we were starting to really see each other.
When it came time for the only adolescent boy on the trip to share he recoiled into the tent wall and shook his head back and forth in “No”. Jesse offered an empathic reflection that it might be scary to share in front of all these girls as tears began to leak out the boy’s eyes. Jesse reflected that it can be quite vulnerable for guys to share when it is so tender. The boy nodded in agreement. At this point I asked if he would enjoy for the group to make empathic guesses just simply based on what he had shared so far and for us to simply try to intuit what may be going for him about a “perfect life”. He said, “Yes” The amazing
thing to me is ‘yes’ is a very short word but I would swear that the group began moving with the needs card before he finished speaking. Everyone placed needs cards in front of him with great enthusiasm to connect.
He physically moved in towards the circle and the cards. Jesse asked him to check in and remove any cards that did not feel connected. He did just that. Sat, reflected, removed a few cards and said, “yep, that’s it.” Only sweet gentle rain patter could reflect the deep connected feeling in the group in that moment.
The delight of taking youth out into the wild for 7 days and 6 nights is that I get the opportunity to really live in an NVC community. The constant attention to what is alive leads us down many paths of learning that is deeply unifying, healing and full of pure joy! And the best part is that there is no agenda, no plan, and no idea of when the lessons will arrive. Living in the mystery we got to literally jump off cliffs, carry canoes on our back, make meals in the rain, giggle until it hurt, sit in silence on a quest for 7 hours, build fire in the rain, make friends with mosquitoes and leeches, and sustain ourselves by connecting interdependently with the earth.
Our last evening together by the fire we offered the campers an opportunity to role play a conversation they would like to have with a parent when they got home from this trip. We had a few takers and one was the boy on the trip. At first he wanted, Melanie to be his mom, Jesse to be his dad and me to be his sister. We simplified by figuring out he could have this conversation with just his dad. Jesse and he dropped into such a real conversation that Melanie and I both cried during the witnessing of the deep connection. After empathizing with the father’s busy life and imagining he would enjoy connection too, the boy requested for a “family night” where all cell phones, televisions and computers are turned off and the family engage with a game all together. After the role-play completed, the boy announced, “It’s like I have already had the conversation.” The sweetest part of this story is when he returned home he did have
this conversation with his father and Saturday is now the official Family Night in their house.
I find deep meaning in offering programs like these simply because it contributes to what I value most…peace in all relations. Oh yeah, and PLAY!
Quotes from the teens:
“I learned to have more understanding for people different from me, more than I’m used to”...“It doesn’t matter if the label is positive or negative – it really keeps you from seeing the person” (13 year old girl)
“I really like this camp because there’s no punishments” (13 year old boy who had a prior experience with a summer camp where he had been disciplined and sent home early)
“I came into this camp thinking of myself as a label and I’m going home as myself, not as a label” (16 year old girl diagnosed as having a Nonverbal Learning Disorder, convinced she was a slow-learner). During the week, she learned how to canoe, helped to carry a canoe across land, spent 7 hours alone questing and
supported another student to move through the pain of homesickness. She also role-played speaking to her mom: “I don’t want you to introduce me to your friends as having a learning disability”... “I want you to see me”
|
|