Orientation

Partake of a visual feast. Look through pictures to find ones that speak to you. What are you drawn to? What gets evoked in you?

Spending time with the images and sharing about them with others is a time for connecting with yourself and connecting with others. The images and what we have to say about them provide windows into our worlds. Maybe we get to hear about how recent things are setting the stage for someone, or how important something from further back was, or how someone is seeing things connect, etc. The images, with their "a picture is worth a thousand words" quality, make it easy to quickly go somewhere with someone. They also lend themselves to going deeper.

Process

Pick a Picture is conducted in rounds. Each round has a reflecting individually phase and a sharing phase.

Reflecting individually phase
- In this phase, everyone will be looking through images and selecting 1 to 5 images that they each feel personally drawn to.
- While looking and selecting, participants may take time to pause and reflect on the images they've selected. Also, participants may choose to spend time rearranging the pictures in meaningful ways, though this is optional. Participants will be told when 2 minutes are left in the reflecting individually phase, so they can make time at the end for reflecting and rearranging if they want to.
Sharing phase
- In this phase, participants will take turns sharing some or all of the images they've selected. Participants can choose to just share about the images without having others in the group respond. Or, they can choose to have everyone participate in talking about the image they've shared and what they've said about it. Click here to read more about how we hold the space for the person who is taking a turn sharing.

Each round will include this process of selecting, reflecting, and sharing. What changes is the prompt to be used as a guide for selecting images. Examples of prompts can be found below.

Prompts

For each round, a prompt may be provided. You are invited to use the suggested prompt to guide which images you select for this round. Whatever the prompt is, we invite you to hold it lightly. The prompt is not a precise instruction to follow with a specific intention. The prompt just provides a suggested direction to head in, and if that leads you to a direction that holds more interest for you, that's great, too. Take it where you are drawn to go.

A default prompt you can always go with instead of the suggested prompt is to just see what images you are drawn to selecting, even if you don't know why you are drawn to them.

Examples of prompts:

Select images that speak to something that you'd like to envision for yourself in the future
Select images that make your nervous system say ahh
Select images that remind you of someone important to you
Select images that speak to where you are headed
Select images that connect with how you feel, or how you would like to feel
Select images that speak to something you're grappling with
Select images that speak to what you want more of in your life
Select images that speak to some aspect of _______( a current situation / a relationship / growth / love / work / caregiving / parenting ) that is alive for you

Holding the space with care

Upholding how someone experiences a picture

Something that Pick a Picture drives home to me is that we each can see a picture in so many different ways. Each person can see something different from another person, and the same person can see something different at different points in time. This is something that makes the Pick a Picture experience very rich and interesting to me. Given that there are multiple ways of seeing a picture, we want to take care when a sharer is sharing a picture with the group. We want to uphold the sharer's experience of the picture, and go with them to where they want to take us as they share. For example, when someone was talking about a picture of one seal lying against another seal, someone else said that it wasn't another seal, it was a rock. It doesn't matter what people would generally agree upon seeing in the picture. If the sharer sees another seal, then it's another seal.

(This doesn't mean that another person can't take a turn with the picture if they feel moved to talk about a different way of experiencing it that is meaningful to them. If they want to do so, they can become the sharer of the picture after the original sharer feels complete, and take their own turn with the picture.)

Owning what you say

Using "I statements" rather than "you or we statements" makes it clear that we are only speaking for ourselves, from our own perspective. As talked about above, there are so many different ways of seeing something. Avoiding "you or we statements" helps with avoiding implying that everyone one would see things the way you do or that everyone would agree with you. Rather than imposing anything, "I statements" help you own what you say and invite others in to hear what you have to share about yourself.

When offering reflections on what someone else has shared, one easy way to own what you have to say is to preface everything by saying "For me, ..." It can make a profound difference.

Windows into each other's worlds

We have the honor of getting glimpses through windows into each other's worlds, and we want to hold each other with care and curiosity. We can serve as witnesses with no agenda to the sharer, sharing reflections as offerings.