Step 2

Here childhood is at the centre, and you look at how things were at home and at how it goes on acting in you today, often in places where you would not expect it at all.

Much of it is about what was given room at home. Which feelings were welcome, which ones became uncomfortable, and what you did with them instead. Those solutions were wise when you were a child, because they carried you through, and the only real trouble is that they have stayed.

Part of the work is about reconciliation, though not in the sense of deciding that everything was fine. It is more about no longer paying for something that is not going on any more.

Before you come we ask you to bring a few photographs of yourself as a child. You do not need to prepare more than that, and the rest you do here, together with us and the others in the group.

Perhaps you think that Step 1 is shallower than the steps that follow, but it is in fact the other way round. Step 1 is the deepest week in one particular sense, because it touches your whole being at once, while Step 2 and Step 3 go deep into one theme each, your upbringing, adult relationships and existence.

Step 1 is about seeing how you work as a whole, which patterns you live in, where you withdraw, what you keep away from yourself and what that costs you. And about the most important thing of all, that the patterns are not you. You are the one who lives with them, and the one who can change them.

That is why we want you to take Step 1 first. Going into your childhood before you recognise your own patterns in the present easily becomes a story about what has been, rather than work with what is alive now. Step 1 gives you that contact, and without it there is no thread to follow back.

Most people find this week more intense than Step 1. We expect that, and we are prepared for it, with just as many of us around you and the same silence all week.

You decide for yourself what you share and at what pace, exactly as in Step 1, and perhaps there is something you would rather not share at all. We force no one into anything, and if you hesitate, that counts.