A Year of Yellow
A year of Yellow
A year ago, with Alex Carabi, I started Yellow.
It was, in part, a response to the pandemic. We asked ourselves what people needed — to keep learning and growing, and to cope with the uncertainty, anxiety and stress of these new circumstances.
We listened to what we were hearing from clients and colleagues. We spoke about what we wanted for ourselves. We set ourselves the challenge of creating a virtual experience that was enlivening, not deadening.
Yellow is the result.
A year later we have run over seventy small group sessions, no two of them the same. We have used a panoply of different stimuli, including art, poetry, film, movement, food, embroidery and sock puppets — to name but a few. We have explored subjects such as time, trauma, truthfulness and self. We have worked with the mind, the hand, the heart, the senses and the breath.
We have had inputs from more than twenty collaborators — including philosophers, photographers, farmers and futurists. Participants have come from many different countries and walks of life; from massive multinationals and companies of one.
We started with plenty of curiosity and some strong intuitions but neither Alex or I anticipated how powerful or how moving people’s responses would be. The impact has been remarkable.
Why is this?
What we are doing (or not doing) is only part of it. We are tapping into an important need which isn’t being met. People are only dimly aware of this need and cannot easily articulate what it is, but it is powerful nonetheless. It may have come to the fore in the last year, but it isn’t a result of the pandemic, it goes deeper than that.
As one participant put it, reflecting on her experience six months later: “Yellow is the only place where I am not expected to perform or meet goals”. To which another added: “I don’t think about my problems in Yellow, and yet it helps me transcend them”. For another “it is a home for the questions that don’t fit anywhere else” or “a space that keeps me sane”.
Yellow gives people the chance to experience a way of being and relating that is unusually gentle, open, oblique and unstructured. It allows things (and people) to unfold; in their own time and their own way. It is not a static thing. Each group is different and changes over time. This is very nourishing.
Our job is to take care of the people and then get out of the way, not try to direct. We have to trust our intuitions and feelings, as well as our thoughts and ideas. And, most of all, trust the people who participate to know what they need. We need to hold it lightly because we do not completely understand it. We probably never will.
Alex and I often laugh about this: so little of the conventional kind of effort is required — so little pushing or controlling — that it can feel as if we are cheating; as if the less we do, the better it works. But why does work have to feel like effort? As footballer Zinedine Zidane once said: “sometimes magic is almost nothing.”
For more information, see: www.yellowlearning.com
If you are interested in participating in Yellow see: https://www.yellowlearning.org/apply-to-join
To want to follow what we are up to, sign up for our learning journal here: https://www.yellowlearning.org/learning-journal
