Facilitating Creating Space
The facilitator does not create the experience in the room. The facilitator makes room for it to be received.
A Creating Space facilitator prepares a hospitable setting, welcomes participants, and offers a completed contemplative experience without directing what should happen within it.
The work continues afterward through presence, listening, appropriate opportunities for reflection and sharing, and a gentle release.
Facilitating Creating Space is therefore less about presentation than about presence, hospitality, listening, and restraint.
What facilitating involves
Before the experience
Prepare the room, the media, and yourself. Welcome participants and offer only the orientation they need to enter the experience freely.
During the experience
Release the completed contemplative experience. Allow the witness, Scripture, prayer, and silence to do their own work. The facilitator does not interpret, explain, or intervene.
After the experience
Receive participants gently. Make room for reflection and, when appropriate, sharing without requiring either. Listen without correcting, interpreting, or trying to resolve what has emerged.
The facilitator holds the space. The experience belongs to those who enter it.
Preparing to facilitate
Facilitating Creating Space begins with experiencing it yourself. Before offering an experience to others, facilitators are encouraged to become familiar with the contemplative rhythm of Creating Space and with the particular experience they will be accompanying.
The Creating Space Facilitator’s Guide offers formation and practical guidance for preparing the space, welcoming participants, holding silence, inviting reflection and sharing, responding to difficult moments, and bringing an experience gently to a close.
Not yet familiar with Creating Space?
Come and See is a complete contemplative experience and a good place to begin.