Group: Touches in Stillness
Touches in Stillness
Some things cannot be practiced alone. Being there, for instance, without doing anything. For that you need someone sitting across from you.
In this group, this is what we explore together. Not a course where one person stands at the front and the others learn. A group where we take turns giving and receiving, and where nobody knows more than anyone else.
The empty chair
The form comes from Mike Boxhall (1930–2019) and his book The Empty Chair.
The title means just that: a chair with nobody on it. Boxhall taught for forty years and came to find that it works best when he, as the teacher, is out of the way. “When from time to time the teacher is fully present, we all hear the teaching, not the teacher, and we symbolise that by the empty chair.”
With us the chair stays empty from the start. Nobody sits down in it.
The subtitle is “The Teaching not the T-Shirt”. It is not about something you can show afterwards. No certificate, no diploma, no level you have reached. There is nothing to acquire.
How a day goes
Boxhall describes the course of a day in his book. Roughly like this is how I imagine ours:
Sitting in silence. Perhaps half an hour. Nobody leads anything, nobody speaks, there is nothing to achieve.
Speaking. Then there is time for whatever is present: a question, a thought, something from one’s own life. With Boxhall the teacher spoke at this point. With us, whoever has brought something speaks.
Break. There are many of them. They are not incidental. They give room for whatever has come up to settle — and an opportunity to eat cake. Breaks are also where a subject changes, when it needs to.
In pairs, about an hour. One person lies down, the other sits or stands alongside and rests their hands on them. Both fully clothed. The touch is very light, the contact as gentle as possible. Some like the head, others prefer the feet, others simply a hand on the chest or the back. It does not much matter: to touch one place is to touch the whole.
After about 30 minutes, the places are switched.
Lunch. A long one. Eating, walking, resting.
Sitting in silence again.
In pairs again. Same partner as before lunch, or a different one.
The circle. At the end everyone says how it was, from both roles. In case we want to share something. At first it is hard to stay attentive. At some point it turns: you notice that what you are hearing is not only the story of one particular person, but also your own.
The times are loose guides. The sequence stays; the lengths shift to wherever they are needed.
What there is to do
Nothing. That is the hard part.
Boxhall gives a few pointers for it. Here in my own words:
- Listen to what the person tells you. Then set it aside.
- Make sure they are lying comfortably.
- Sit down beside them.
- Take the time to arrive yourself. Can you feel the chair, your feet, your hands?
- Only then the touch, wherever it feels right for both of you. If no touch is wanted, that too is a contact.
- And then: nothing. Take in whatever comes — without comment, including the silent one in your own head. Do not assess it. Do not interpret it. Do not try to know what it means.
- Thoughts, images and explanations will come up. If you follow them, that is where you will stay.
- If you stay open, returning again and again to simply sensing the inside of your own body, there comes a point where something settles. Then the work is done — for today, at least.
Not: “How can I help this person?” But: becoming still, and then going over. Without any additional intention.
Charles Ridley, who has worked and taught this way for over forty years, begins at exactly this point. He thinks little of establishing something about the other person in order to then put it right. For him what matters is not what someone does with their hands, but the state they are in while doing it. There is nothing to assess and nothing to apply.
Hence the eighth point above. Back again and again to the inside of your own body — not to find something in the other person, but to become still enough yourself that there is room.
Who it is for
You need no training, no prior knowledge and no professional connection. Boxhall lists who has sat with him: bank clerks, psychologists, teachers, doctors, farmers, students, poets, dancers, priests, tailors, rich and poor. “But then, as you see, I do not teach professions. I walk the path together with people, as well as I can.”
What it takes is a willingness not to know. That asks more than it sounds. “All knowledge is a limitation,” Boxhall writes. “Not knowing offers infinite possibilities.”
It helps if you expect little to happen. From the outside this work looks like almost nothing. How I understand the same attitude in one-to-one sessions is on the Principles page.
How it starts
When and where we meet and how often we decide together. The group carries itself; then the calendar belongs to it too.
If you would like to be part of it, get in touch. You’re welcome to share what led you here.
»The flowers bloom. The flowers wither. The seeds fall. The end is the beginning. Let us greet today.« — Mike Boxhall
Mike Boxhall: The Empty Chair. The Teaching not the T-Shirt
