I cannot recall another time in my life when I have felt more tired, except in my early weeks of pregnancy. What was growing inside of me? Where was my energy being expended at such a high rate? Was it the focus and concentration required to make sense of the near 1000 pages of thesis, aka composite submission, which was using all of my bodily being?

Or was it the 6 other different individuals with whom I was interacting 14 hours a day for those 7 days? Or was it all the other things we were self-organising – like meals and day-to-day living, which all needed to be attended to in a different context and in a new PIAC family-like dynamic?

Our final PIAC family meal at Dodmill.

Whatever the multiple factors, I felt absolutely shattered. Oops! That is not an emotion in our Emotions Palette! I am believing I’m shattered – a belief I’m holding onto at the end of the 7 days of mutual context learning, after which I felt exhausted.

I embarked on something similar some 5 years before, in March 2020, just before COVID-19 swept our shores and trapped us in our houses over the following 18 months. I remember back then that this time together in community resourced me for what would be one of the hardest times my family would endure.

Figure 3: First Learning retreat focused on  Louie’s PhD (pre-submission 2020)

I had also forgotten that in 2022, we hosted another learning retreat. It seemed like such a different experience back then, or maybe my memory is inaccurate?

Figure 4:Picture: Notes and emotions from 2022

This 2025 immersion seemed so much more. Perhaps the anticipation of taking a more active role in the future of Presence In Action training had me pay greater attention to the content and meaning of each theoretic model and framework I was rigorously investigating? Or was it that I had a basic knowledge and experience of what was in those pages and could now start to question and delve deeper into this work, and therefore myself, and with each other?

By 2016, Presence in Action (PIA) had become a way of life as I moved between ‘using it’ to support sensemaking with clients as well as with myself in my own life. Since then, I have also been learning through the other ‘Abductive Fruits’ of Louie’s doctoral enquiry, all of which have delivered new ways to understand and navigate what it is to be a human being on my own and with others. I finally got that all this was available to me and for me.

But before I could access the sweet nectar of such fertile fruits, I had to meet the protective thorns that had grown around my delicate inner being.

Thanks to regular troweling and soil-sifting during monthly supervision, along with supervision training itself, alongside my PIA practice partnering on other learning events, I have kept well-cultivated soils in which to seed new learning and sensemaking over the last few years. However, I had never physically experienced being in a group for this extensive period of time.

Thinking back to other group experiences, I remembered my online group supervision training, which extended over 9 months for a few hours a week. Often, not everyone was there. Nevertheless, these 20+ workshops did stretch every sinew of my being.  There were times I cracked open when legacies from my past came into the present in the most unexpected ways. I repeated this training programme as a learning partner, over 3 consecutive years, and, each time, something different was illuminated in me.

This PIAC TTT was an in-person, residential learning retreat alongside my peers and my supervisor/trainer/facilitator/PIA founder – Dr Louie J. N. Gardiner. Perhaps that is a difference that has made a difference.

Returning home from these 7 days, I felt physically sick as I began to let go of all that I had been holding whilst re-entering a seemingly parallel universe.

Maybe it was the sheer enormity of what Louie has made sense of in her PhD: the expanse of different work covered by such different schools of thought from cybernetics to evolutionary biology; attempting to keep abreast of her discoveries and seemingly dead-end diversions; digesting morsels that crept up from my own past which I excavated while consuming the experiences Louie shared; and being witness to her life, whilst witnessing the other seven mortal human beings alongside me, whilst they too ate and transformed before my very eyes.

Who knows what was going on within me, but I was aware of a familiar feeling of disorientation as I got home. Like my tummy had moved from the roller coaster of Dodmill and my body was spinning, degenerating, and enforming in a whirlwind of words, emotions, and experiences.

I went to bed believing this paradigm-shifting within me would be akin to jet lag and would fade after a good sleep. And so it did. Something had reconfigured. Another metamorphosis, from being completely confused and in a sticky mess, to feeling energised and seeming like I was able to fly in a satisfyingly full but light state.

Random clarity reconfigured and realigned in dreams, putting to bed matters which had been left undone in my 50 years of living. Times of experiencing fear in my infancy to love in my teenage years. Where the past tumbled into the present to be re-consumed and digested rather than left like a rotten apple core under my metaphorical sofa (it’s a thing that happens in my home all too often!).

And what I witness and recognise is that my life is different and yet no different. That everyone has things that I don’t recognise playing non-consciously, including me. That by engaging with the multiple ways Louie’s research helps us to make sense and to return us to that state of curiosity we are born with, before the institutions and systems ‘told’ us we were wrong. Why would I want not want to engage myself if love, acceptance, and joy were on the other side – as I discover when I gain the freedom to fly from the net of the past.

I will continue to access these ways to be fully present to me, my family and my friends, and my clients, and to follow the smell of decaying fruit by moving these heavy pieces of furniture to uncover another rotting core! At times, it is not something I easily choose to do, but curiosity and following my senses serve me well.

It has me move into learning.

Here lies the joy of learning together, where I can witness things I had no idea were lurking beneath, for me and for others. To be alongside others who want to show up, share, and bear witness is truly remarkable, particularly as we keep going there together over many years. That I am not alone, but practising in a community whose members care about me, each other, and our wider world, is a gift. Perhaps this is what James Carse calls “playing the infinite game of life”?