"Another process which shook my increasingly fragile story world about why I can or cannot do things and my stories about why I need to be reasonable in this world was held by a women named Ana-Maria. It was a process called What Is - Happening.

The context for me about the exercise was how do you feel -In your body- NOT in your mind, and EXPRESS. How do you feel anger, sadness, fear, and joy and all the information that comes from these fountains of energy, from a neutral space and from what is real. AND when you judge yourself or other people, places, things, animals etc that you also do so from a place of neutrality and if you don’t that is it somehow possible to be neutral about that too!?
We sat on chairs in a circle and were invited to stand up into the circle the moment something was happening inside us and express it and/or act it out. And to only sit when we were a neutral observer.

I did not sit down very much!

I will use quotation marks to indicate what parts of my process were in my mind so that when I write about the emotions you can distinguish between mind and body, thoughts and what I was actually feeling in my body. And about what was neutral. I have a story that this way it will land in you what it is to be neutral.

This is the neutral description of how it started.
People began to lay in the middle of the floor, other people began to imagine cooking a soup and adding ingredients to it. Men started to jump up and down and dance. Women started to do the same. I was not able to be neutral in the way that I have just written what was happening. I was immediately hooked.
Emotional fear and anger started to rise in me, and stories based in judgements.

“What on earth were these grown adults doing? Acting like children”. I stood up. I felt fear “because this was not normal, they were not understanding the exercise and I was, because I had done it before”.
I felt anger “because they were being stupid, and they were not understanding the exercise”. “They were being disrespectful to Ana-Maria”. “My friend and I had a duty to protect her”.

I walked around telling people this, asking why they were doing what they were doing. Some people ignored me and so I walked away. Other people looked at me “hurt and confused”. The 2 people making the imaginary soup sat down again. So did I for a moment and stood straight back up again because when I looked at the soup people, they “looked sad”. Suddenly the fear amplified in me, “I had upset them”. No, no no I said aloud, “I am not allowed to upset people”. I am sorry, I am sorry I said from a distance, “too scared to go near them again”.

In the meantime, more people started dancing, some alone, some together talking with each other, making movements with their bodies.

No, no, no I said aloud again. Fear rising once more. “These unusual behaviours are not allowed from adults; these childish conversations are not allowed”. Suddenly the story that this was all out of control was taking over my mind and fear was taking over my body, I walked “frantically” around saying out loud, stop everyone stop, I feel fear this is going out of control. “I could not control anyone, the situation was out of control, and it seemed dangerous, scary”. (I have quoted the fear here because it was also a fear that was in my head).

Other people started to come to me and say that they felt scared too, “that it was all weird and scary and uncontrollable”. As we shared this with each other, we started in our “little” group to become angry. New stories formed, this time, collectively.

“Is this what human beings did with radical freedom? Were we not capable of being adults and speaking with each other being to being, and being real about what was happening? Why were we not in an archetypal space? Because acting like a child and being in a fantasy world was not archetypal, we declared together”.
There were more experiences created in this space, and I will not name more here.

What landed in me was that although what was happening was exaggerated from daily life, the feelings of anger and fear were underlying, this was how I lived every day, this fear of being out of control and this anger at not being able to do anything about it and blaming others by making up stories about them in which they are wrong and I am right.

Up until that point, I had a story that I was not a very controlling person, yet underneath that there was a huge fear to make sure everyone was okay and inner mission to not let any feelings get out of control. I also noticed how people expressing the same feelings tended to group together. After the exercise people were so liquid, transformation of what is happening was occurring for us individually and collectively. Some men were crying in such a vulnerable way because of what they had discovered about themselves. What a profound exercise that in reality rocked all those who participated in it.

As I write this more sadness stirs in me. A conscious sadness of compassion for humanity and myself. And a quest-ion, how can I stay in contact with reality, story less, unhookable?"

Charlotte Chalkley - Possibility Village Lab, Portugal 2025