20 Connection ANGEL/DEVIL/TRI NGLE By Patti Digh When I train groups of people in person, an exercise I sometimes use is called Angel/Devil/Triangle. Let me explain. You ask the group to form a circle. You ask each person to look around the circle and, to themselves, assign one person in the circle their “angel” and one person in the circle their “devil.” No one can know whose angel they are or whose devil they might be. When you say go, each person’s goal is to move around in the space and to always keep their “angel” between them and their “devil.” You say, “go.” Chaos ensues. It’s very fast-paced and frenetic. People move around in space, trying to keep their angels between themselves and their devils, and as people continue to move, the chaos grows. Finally, WITHOUT FAIL—regardless of the size of the group—everyone ends up stuck in one corner of the room, unable to move, not using the space (resources) available to them, but irrevocably twisted into a little knot of humanity, frozen in place. You call for them to stop and see what has happened. Anytime there is a binary (angel/ devil, conservative/liberal, up/down, black/white), this is what will happen. You ask them to describe the process and the product. It is clear that demonizing the devil and forcing the angel to protect you forces a bind that is constricting and destructive. You ask them to go back into another circle. This time, you ask them to choose two people in the group who are the other two points (with you) of an equilateral triangle (all sides remain the same size). So if the other two points of your triangle get close together, you must get close together with them; if they spread out, you must spread out so the sides of the triangle are the same length. You also tell them that at some point, you will touch one of them on the shoulder, and if that happens, the person touched should sit down on the floor. Then, “if one of the points of your triangle sits down,” you tell them, “you have to sit down too.” You say, “go,” and what happens is fundamentally different. The chaos is now a beautiful dance, and you can watch the flow of what now looks less chaotic and more poetic. People move in tandem to maintain the relationships between them—the sides of the triangle—and rather than stop as a twisted bunch in the corner, the flow continues, using all the space in the room. It is beautiful to watch, and the same is true if you have 50 people or 500 people in the room. It feels like watching a murmuration of birds. Then you touch one person’s shoulder, and they sit. As they do, others start to wordlessly sit until everyone is sitting in 10–15 seconds, no matter the group size. You notice that they all sit facing a central point, covering the whole space available (using all the resources), and quickly. It only takes one touch, and the whole group falls like beautiful dominoes into a gorgeous formation of mutuality. This is what happens when people are in relationship with one another. It also dramatizes how we are all interconnected. One touch, and everyone goes down. When we operate from this paradigm, you can intuit the differences in how we work together, how we interact, and what we can accomplish. The United States is now operating in Angel/Devil mode. We are demonizing each other (Fascists/ Far-Left, Conservatives/Liberals) and searching ways to protect ourselves from that devil. We will always ALWAYS end up dying in a corner, unable to move. This is where we are now in this country. We have forgotten how to be in relationship in order to keep thriving. At the end of this, we will—if we allow it—end up in one corner of the room, unable to move because rather than being in relationship (triangle), we have become a poster child for Angel/Devil thinking. I am frightened and heartsick, but heartened by this thought: “At the bottom of the ocean you might find a pearl Don’t let your heart get broken by this world.” In other words, this world always also holds beauty and truth, no matter how broken it seems. Sometimes we have to dive deeper and more to find the beauty of that poetry, to find the world’s transcendence, to shift the tides, to find comfort and strength to dance, to be in relationship with others like and unlike us. Love, Patti This post was originally posted on Facebook by Patti Digh, but she let me use it after I asked nicely.
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