E&Q — Encountering Our Questions

If Q&E invites us to question our encounters, E&Q turns the movement around and invites us to encounter our questions.

Once a month, we’ll take one of the themes that shapes our sangha and spend some time with it—not primarily as something to discuss or understand conceptually, but as something to encounter within our own lives.

Four times within our gathering, we’ll meet in pairs for ten-minutes in which each person has a different role, and then we exchange them.

• One listens inwardly for what wants to emerge.
• The other holds the space, offering the quality of presence that helps make that discovery possible.
• Nobody has five minutes to fill. Both people have ten minutes in which to be present.
• We aren’t simply delivering thoughts we already have; we’re giving ourselves time to discover them. Perhaps something comes immediately. Perhaps our first response gives way to something underneath it. Perhaps a memory surfaces, a certainty becomes less certain, or we discover that we don’t yet know what we think. Silence, too, can be part of the encounter.
• While one person is discovering, the other is accompanying that discovery. Then the roles reverse.

In this way, E&Q is both personal and communal: we encounter our own questions, accompany one another in that encounter, and gradually deepen our capacity to be present with one another as a community.

When we come back together, there will also be some space to reflect on how we experienced the encounter itself—not to report what another person shared, but to notice what the experience opened, challenged, or revealed for us. Perhaps it felt surprisingly easy to listen without responding. Perhaps silence felt uncomfortable. Perhaps being given uninterrupted attention felt unfamiliar. Perhaps something another person shared helped us recognize something in ourselves.

There is nothing to prepare, no right answer to arrive at, and no need to teach, advise, debate, or respond to what the other person has shared. It is simply an opportunity to practice presence—to our own experience, to another person, and perhaps to something that has not yet found words.

For our first four months, our questions will emerge from some of the pillars of Tadatmya: Vulnerability, Individuation, Students Forever & Divine Ignorance, and the Sacredness of the Material World.

We bring the questions.
The questions bring us.