How to cultivate actions for Soul-Nourishing Experiences?

After the Art of Hosting training, which happened in Bengaluru Dec’24; it was very important for the new practitioners to practice different learned methods under guidance and to keep the community grow organically. To keep above in mind, Art of Hosting Bengaluru community; under the guidance of Melinda, hosted its first Practice Day on 11th Jan’25 and the calling question was :-

 What soul-nourishing experiences does my heart yearn for in 2025, and how can I intentionally cultivate actions around them?

We started the discussion in last week of Dec’24 and finalised on the calling question, on the 31st night and within in a day poster, form and venue was set. It was a very quick planning.

Welcome, Ice-Breaker and Check-in Circle

On event day, we had 14 participants from a very diverse age group (22-60) and with different background. After the welcome note Malinda & Sunil, Kavitha and I did the Ice-Breaker. We had cards with some fun and personal questions, which participants need to pick up at random and share answers with at-least 4 others. Post that Melinda discussed about the 4 fold practice and then we had a circle check-in, in which we everyone answered which fold they are strong and on what they want to work on in 2025. The 4 folds of the practice are Host Yourself, Be Hosted, Host Others and Co-create. For more details about 4 fold practice, you can check out my previous blog.

World Cafe

After the energiser and having everyone’s attention we moved closer to answer our calling question and for that we decided to choose the World Cafe method. It is a method in which, we do a network of collective dialogue around that chosen questions.

We divided the participants in different groups and asked for the discussion on the following questions :-

•  How do I tend to my own nourishment ?
• What stopped me earlier providing soul-nourishing experiences for myself ?
• What actions can I take to overcome my own limiting beliefs ?

Above questions are part of the larger calling question. After the discussions following came out from the across the groups :-

• Set up mini-goals for the larger goal I am looking at and start taking actions.
• I am not alone and would start discussing/meeting with diverse set of people
• Don’t overthink and trust your gut feelings.

The way I look at that, what came out from the collective wisdom is something applicable to everyone and after giving it some personal Tadka (touch), we should just get going to for that soul-nourishing experience.

To know more about the World Cafe, checkout my other blog.

Open Space Technology & Marketplace

After the lunch, I along with Kavitha led the Open Space, in which participants can bring in the their own questions or projects they are working and looking to work on and get opinion from the others. Following are some of the questions hosted by participants :-

• How to define mini goals for self nourishment ?
• How do I overcome from my auto pilot mode ?
• How to build a community of like minded people.
• … and few more

After the allocated time, all hosts shared the key insights and next action items with the group. You can get more details about the Open Space here.

Checkout Circle

At the end, we did the checkout circle where everyone shared their experience of the day.

I think we did a good job to pull together our first AoH Practice Day and looking forward to co-host them on regular basis, on different topics. One of the topic which I am brainstorming is on How are you making yourself professionally ready for the upcoming AI wave?

Hosting for the non-tech scenarios is something new to me but I am enjoying to coming out of my comfort zone to have such open discussions. People come before technology and If I can work with them to create positive outcome, then I would prefer that over tech.