It was originally a simple quest.  I was initiating a new group process and in my narrative, inviting those interested in group therapy to consider my new group, as well as providing a context for colleagues to offer appropriate referrals. Not untypical of me, this led me to a much more intricate experience which I am now transcribing in the hope that this depicted exploration is enriching  to my readers.   In my last post I went back to my own experience of a unique group process  in which the complexity of individual identity within a group collective was enacted and ritualized. This remarkable experience  was traversed by  a group of  creative art therapists in training who had already developed  the ground rules for safety and had secured enough  steps  to intimacy,  to take some risks.  We were in the process of  mutually creating an atmosphere  that could allow us to  relinquish our restrictive over-conscious controls.
        This  stimulated my association  to  the unique quality of experience I have shared with patients who are facing death and trust me to companion them. This has a  parallel  in  the shared  context  of relinquishment.   I have found that with patients that are facing their death  with me, we must  enter into an agreement that exists within so many layers of  a partially shared unknown.   My willingness is pale,  weak in contrast to the individual that is committing to  a exit passage full of life.  In this situation  when I have a patient who must surrender into their  soon to be inevitable ending, it is my obligation and bitter sweet, poignant, sad  pleasure,to open to a  sensitive attenuation and then to be willing to be moved, to be taken and  to follow them wherever they go as far as I am able.  Dying consciously is full of contradiction and  when I accompany someone it  gives me  more courage to be  fully engaged in being alive. How does this inform my groups?