Welcome to Reaching Out
Joseph Tieger, Reaching Out Executive Producer
Recommendations for Viewing
The Wisdom Circles Format
Cindy Spring, Wisdom Circles Executive Director
The Seven Programs
Program One--We Come Together
Program Two--We Cross a Threshold
Program Three--We Care Together
Program Four--We Feel Together
Program Five--We Think Together
Program Six--We Heal Together
Program Seven--We Are Together
Linking Up
Special thanks to more than 1,500 individuals and organizations for financial contributions to the Reaching Out Project; Charles Garfield & Dennis Keane for the computers upon which this Viewer's Guide has been created; Shams Kairys, Johanna Luther, James O'Dea, and Roberto Vargas for editorial counsel; Wilbur Hot Springs for healing body and soul; and NKB for making it all happen.
Welcome to a very unusual television experience. The programs you're about to see are presented not just to inform, or to entertain, but to provide a way for people to come together--across barriers of race, class, and culture--in dialogue, as a community.
The Reaching Out television series is a sequence of seven 30-minute programs that are rich with insights, heartfelt expressions of feelings, and examples of compassion-in-action from ordinary people. The series addresses issues that matter to all of us who know that the time for racial and cross-cultural healing, ecological responsibility, and compassionate community, is long overdue.
Reaching Out models a process available to us all--a process of community healing where people, who meet as strangers, find deep connection with one another through the strength of their longing to heal that which keeps us separate. The television series, in combination with this Viewer's Guide, offers tools and practices for deepening our compassion and wisdom in responding to our own suffering and the suffering of those around us.
Reaching Out grows out of a course of ten community gatherings in Oakland, California where 1,000 people came together in weekly town-hall meetings and small-group "wisdom circle" dialogues. The course was hosted by Ram Dass, author of Be Here Now, How Can I Help?, and Compassion in Action, for many years a leading speaker and teacher on compassionate caring. The meetings included live and pre-recorded interviews with:
The meetings also featured presentations by:
as well as live performances by:
Course participants met in racially-diverse "wisdom circles," and shared their griefs, expressed their yearnings, built trust, and found common vision and purpose. The Reaching Out television series weaves highlights from the course sessions with this more intimate material from the small-group dialogues.
Reaching Out is designed to inspire and equip you to join in spirit with these thousand people you are now about to meet, and to carry forward, in your own life and your own community, the healing process depicted in the programs--to become a co-participant in our shared journey toward wholeness. Indeed, this is the whole point of the entire project.
It is our hope that this Viewer's Guide will provide you with orientation before you view each segment and then will help focus your reflection and discussion afterward. May you be inspired, as we are, to visualize us joining together in a "league of compassion" committed to the relief of suffering. This "league" already exists, and we invite you to assume your place in it, discover allies that you might not yet be aware of, and embark together upon this journey of our lifetime.
"We are called upon to find community, and to build it--even if it's with one other person...to find the place where the truth of our experience can get expressed."
Joanna Macy
We hope you will use the Reaching Out broadcasts as an opportunity "to communicate with at least one other person" about what you care about most deeply. The more you can share your thoughts and feelings with others, the more benefit you will derive personally, and the more you will, as a result, be able to give back to the larger community.
The programs will evoke powerful responses. We encourage you to take note of thoughts, emotions, images, and personal recollections that arise within you. And we invite you to share your responses with the Reaching Out viewer community by posting them in the "Community Journal" section of our website. If you do not have computer access to the Internet, you can send us your written reflections, and we will post them in the Community Journal for you.
If possible, try to watch Reaching Out with family or friends. You can either watch the actual broadcasts, or tape them for viewing later at times of your own choosing. If you do watch by yourself, please try to find a way to communicate after each viewing (perhaps simply by phone or by e-mail) with someone else who has been watching, or discuss your responses the following day with your colleagues at work or school.
But, if you can, do try to get together with others as a viewing group, so that you can share your experiences and reflections after each program. We strongly suggest that you utilize a format such as Wisdom Circles that facilitates a deep level of conscious reflection and sharing.
"I live my life in ever widening circles that reach out across the world"
Rainer Maria Rilke
The wisdom circles format is based on ten simple guidelines, or "Constants," that help provide a safe space--even for people who meet as strangers--to be authentic, receptive to their own deep truth, trusting, caring, and open to change.
We know that true change often begins within our our own hearts and minds. A wisdom circle gives us a way to share our efforts in self-discovery, social activism, and spiritual inquiry in the company of kindred spirits. What follows below is an abbreviated form of what is described in depth in Wisdom Circles: A Guide to Self-Discovery and Community Building in Small Groups, co-authored by Charles Garfield, Cindy Spring & Sedonia Cahill (Hyperion, 1998). Briefly, here are the wisdom circle guidelines.
1. Honor the circle as sacred time and space with a simple ritual to mark the circle's opening and closing. For instance, you might light a candle in the center of the circle, or take a few moments to breathe deeply and meditate together.
2. Create a collective center where there is a commitment to the growth of each individual and to the group as a whole. To focus your dialogue, suggestions are offered, in the pages that follow, of questions you might address after each program.
3. Ask to be informed and inspired by our highest human values such as compassion and truth, by the wisdom of those who have gone before us, and by the needs of those yet to be born. One person can speak for the group, or each member can do a personal invocation. (This can be an opening ritual.)
4. Express gratitude for the blessings and teachings of life. In silence, or by taking turns, give thanks for those people and those things great and small whose gifts enrich and nourish you. (This makes a fine closing ritual.)
5. Create an environment for full participation and deep truth telling. Allow each person to speak without interruption or cross-talk. Use a 'talking stick' or any object that has symbolic significance. Pass it around the circle, or keep returning it to the center, until everyone has had the opportunity to participate. Respect each member's right to silence. And agree to keep everything confidential.
6. Listen from the heart and serve as compassionate witness for one another. Pay attention to what is being said without interrupting or judging or giving advice or trying to 'fix' or rescue the person speaking. Be willing to discover something about yourself in the stories of other people. Offer advice only when it is solicited.
7. Speak from the heart and from direct experience. When you are moved to speak, do so thoughtfully and with care. Avoid abstract or dogmatic language, and stay in touch with your feelings as deeply as possible. As trust within the circle deepens, the capacity will develop to share those feelings without blame or self-judgment.
8. Make room for silence to enter. Allow time for reflection and quiet contemplation, so that deeper feelings and insights can surface.
9. Empower each person as a co-facilitator. Encourage everyone to give voice to feelings of satisfaction or discomfort about the group's process. Rotate the role of 'circle-maker' among the entire group. (This person readies the physical setting, initiates the opening and closing ritual, and poses the questions from the Viewer's Guide.)
10. Commit to staying together as a viewing group for the entire series. This will engender trust and caring within the circle. And then extend your group commitment by taking the capacities developed within the circle out into your daily lives.
The most important constant of a wisdom circle is listening from the heart. Members may choose simply to listen, and not speak, throughout the circle process. Use one question for each "round" of the discussion, making sure that everyone who wishes to speak has had the opportunity to do so, before posing the next question. The talking object may be passed around the circle, or put in the center and picked up by the next person who is moved to speak.
We suggest that you also meet together once as a group before starting to watch the Reaching Out programs. Taking the time to get acquainted--practicing conocimiento, as Roberto Vargas describes it in Program 7--will create the familiarity and trust to explore deeper levels of truth together. For this initial meeting Cindy Spring (co-author of Wisdom Circles) suggests the following questions that you can use to "break the ice" and prepare to enter together into the Reaching Out process:
Click for verbatim transcript
"I think we're here to see if we can grow in the way we respond to suffering."
Ram Dass
The Reaching Out process begins, in this first program, by looking to see how things really are in the world around us, and listening within to our own thoughts and feelings in response to what we see--and then talking, with at least one other person, about what touches us most deeply.
Program One addresses the interplay among racial, cultural, environmental, and spiritual issues that will be developed in depth throughout the series. The program begins with the challenge we all face to relate in a healthy and healing way across the racial and ethnic barriers that divide us.
Core Issue: What keeps us separate--and what can we do about it?
Key Concept: "Reaching Out" includes both listening deeply to others, and listening deeply to our own innermost selves.
"We're invisible here. And we're invisible throughout the United States. People don't know we exist yet."
Martín Cano
After seeing this program, one Latino viewer said: "It makes me proud to see Latinos and Latinas speak forthrightly and intelligently about our culture and concerns--something I have never seen before on television."
Program Two comes from a meeting where Ram Dass, Reaching Out Course Host, and Joseph Tieger, Reaching Out Executive Producer, met with a group of Latino/Chicano community leaders to invite their participation in the upcoming Reaching Out town-hall meetings. This was the actual starting point for the process of reconciliation and healing that will unfold throughout the remainder of the series. For viewers who are European-American in background, this program opens a window to see and hear a cultural perspective they may never have had the opportunity to experience, either on television or in everyday life.
Core Issue: Bridging the racial and ethnic divide.
Key Concept: Conocimiento--the process of creating knowledge of each other, and beginning to develop mutual understanding with each other, by talking together.
"What people are most grateful for...is not that you're alleviating their pain, but that you're noticing it, or that you're receiving it, or that you're being there with them."
For those of us viewing this television series, just as for those who attended the original Reaching Out town-hall gatherings, many are seeking a way to help relieve suffering in our world. And many are feeling a sense of isolation and despair, and are seeking to regain the capacity to feel and care and act.
In a fundamental way, we all hurt. And, equally fundamentally, we all are capable of caring about one another. Suffering is a part of each of our lives, something we all have in common. The question isn't whether suffering exists, but whether we'll turn away from it, and let it divide us from one another and alienate us from our own selves. Or whether we will acknowledge it--together--and let it open our hearts to ourselves and to one another.
Core Issue: Finding our compassionate hearts.
Key Concept: We all hurt--and we all are capable of caring.
"To invite the despair and to invite the rage and the sorrow, and to feel the pain of the earth....without that pain, our ideas aren't enough motivation to do anything."
John Seed
This program brings us to the greatest challenge we must face together: the very real possibility that, as a species, we are rapidly undermining the earth's capacity to sustain us. The threshold issue--for each of us--is to open to the painful emotions this realization brings.
When we explore together our feelings of rage, sorrow, and despair--and grieve together--we allow a shared awareness to arise. This is the necessary preliminary to a shared response in which we can bring the sum of our compassion and wisdom and ingenuity to the task before us all.
Core Issue: Awakening into Ecological Reality.
Key Concept: To avert eco-catastrophe, a simple miracle is required: that we "wake up one day different"--as a species--and assume our proper relationship within the larger ecosystem of which we are but a part.
"We will either destroy ourselves--or we will go forward and be able to transform into a partnership society and a partnership world where we work cooperatively."
Carolyn Cottom
Given what we are all now called upon to do, how can we do it together--as allies--across all the barriers that for so long have divided us? Are we ready, at last, to talk together about what is most vital for our mutual survival? Can we begin to come together in council to hear each other's needs, and think together how we can sustainably provide for us all?
Core Issue: Coming to council, as a species-at-risk.
Key Concept: Living simply, that others might simply live.
"We have to talk about the divisions. We have to talk about the barriers."
This program brings us once again to the issue of racial and ethnic healing, now within the larger ecological awareness that we must learn to collaborate as allies, and develop compassionate global community, if we are to survive at all.
Core Issue: Building trust by facing the hard issues.
Key Concept: We have much to learn about being together, which we can only learn by being together.
"In our culture it's called conocimiento. You begin by doing conocimiento, the process of sharing knowledge of each other, with each other. The more we share community, conocimiento, we begin to develop trust. The more trust, the more unity; the more unity, the more power."
Roberto Vargas
With this program, we reach the conclusion of the seven-part Reaching Out television series, and arrive at the current threshold of opportunity and challenge: to carry this process forward in our own communities and lives.
Program Seven gives us a glimpse of the boon that awaits us when we can find the essential vision that we all share, and then move together toward a future we can all embrace, with care for one another--and for all the generations that are yet to come.
Core Issue: Finding a vision of a future we all can embrace.
Key Concept: When we open to ourselves and to one another in our fullness, we receive the gift of solidarity and common purpose, and the grace of vision.
To Visit the Reaching Out Website...
The Reaching Out Web-site (www.reachingout.org) gives you access to resources, including materials that supplement this Viewer's Guide, and direct links to other "viewers like you." You'll find:
To Purchase Video-Cassettes of the Reaching Out Series...
Total price for the seven Reaching Out programs is $100 plus $8 for shipping & handling. (CA residents only, please add $8.25 for state tax.)
To Contact Reaching Out...
To Support This Reaching Out Initiative...
Reaching Out began with an initial vision in January of 1989. Financial support from more than 1,500 individuals and organizations since that time has enabled us to stage and video-tape the Reaching Out course (the ten Oakland town-hall gatherings and the related meetings and interviews), to produce the seven-part Reaching Out television series, to arrange for broadcast over PBS stations, and to develop the Reaching Out website, this Reaching Out Viewer's Guide, and the model for wisdom circle viewing groups and interactive dialogue.
Now, we reach the stage toward which we've been striving since the original vision--the emergence of an interactive Reaching Out viewer community.
Your support will help bring the Reaching Out television series to millions of additional viewers, both throughout the United States and around the world, and enable us to maintain the website as "resource center" and "meeting place" where our "league of compassion" can sustain itself and grow.
Please join us, by making your tax-deductible contribution to Reaching Out, at whatever level of support you comfortably can.
"Project Participant" $20 to $50 "Project Contributor" $50+ to $100 "Project Sustainer" $100+ to $200 "Project Benefactor" $200+ to $500 "Project Angel" $500+ to $2,000 "Major Donor" $2,000+
"Project Participant"
$20 to $50
"Project Contributor"
$50+ to $100
"Project Sustainer"
$100+ to $200
"Project Benefactor"
$200+ to $500
"Project Angel"
$500+ to $2,000
"Major Donor"
$2,000+