After the Balancing Retreat in Late October 2010
Conrad Ho, (Hongkong, China)
February, 2011
I have a vision in my designing and facilitating the Balancing Retreat. I would like to demonstrate a belief of mine to the personal growth course participants and instructors in Mainland China. (1) Broadly speaking, everyone always has enough resources to deal with any problems in pursuit of any dreams at any time in any place under all circumstances. (2) Specifically, anyone in any time in any place always has enough resources to complete any balance using any techniques and procedures. In the caseworks in the Balancing Retreat, I would follow whatever forms and techniques as chosen by the subject to do their balances, with the basic five-step format as the framework.
Conceptually, this is a pure educational model; in an old Chinese saying, “teaching others fishing techniques is better than giving them a fish.” Let retreat participants experience said belief. Let them learn the process of getting hold of power in their own hands. As Ms. Zhang Jining from Beijing has put it after the retreat, “Learning this method of doing balances make me feel grounded and settled, because I know I can empower myself in face of all my problems through using it.”
In terms of contents, the Balancing Retreat is simply composed of 3 types of learning activities: (1) appropriate warm-up exercises designed for the theme of the workshop at the beginnings of the morning and afternoon sessions for all 5 days; (2) maximum 14 casework demonstrations; and (3) about two hours of practicing time prior to class dismissal for the day. New participants may be puzzled. There would be no new techniques taught in the class; and the balances were for the subjects themselves. What was the point of being there? It was the mirror reflection effect. If one was touched by what you have seen in the demonstration, it meant that you had similar issues. By watching several balances in a day, you would know what balancing goal to take during the practicing time. Proactively clearing issues off under such circumstances was better than reactively facing them in your own real world situations. Such learnings from fellow classmates would save you “wrong” turns in your respective life paths. Mr. Kris Huang from Shenzhen said, “Taking inspirations from caseworks and one’s own life experiences as well as balancing for them is what the Balancing Retreat is all about.”
The Balancing Retreat this time had an obvious common thread. It was the gender identity of the female participants. It was found out that many of the women students had rebellious sentiments about their female identity, the expressions being yang behaviours, neutral clothings, not wanting to bear children, impulses to compete with males and win, etc. There was an interesting phenomenon. As more and more of the women dealt with their gender identity issues, most of them were having their periods in the latter half of the retreat. I had done 4 Balancing Retreats in Mainland China. Ms. Zhao Jing had come to all 4. She had gone a long way to come to her current point and her efforts were well-rewarded. She had been tough and hard as steel, but had become a constant radiator of female yin beauty.
The most interesting case this time, in my eyes, was the couple balance. Before the balance, the husband was openly grunting about his wife being too controlling so that he could not play freely. During the process, the onlookers were all wearing smiles. In the simulation exercise in which they role-played their normal daily experiences with each other, it was the wife who was brushing the husband off when the wife was working and the husband was playing. When it was time for the wife to play with others and he was working, it was the husband who was constantly eyeing his wife in restlessness. In my casework experiences, this was very frequent – the plaintiff should, in fact, be the defendant. When one is dissatisfied with someone on a certain point, it is time for the complainant to reflect if they themselves are doing it.
That is the Balancing Retreat, always resorting eventually to the facts and not just staying at the theory level. No matter how good the logic is, without the support from the facts, we will not know if the theory is useful.
