Service guidelines for hosts

Presence

Nervous system regulation

The state of your nervous system and consciousness affects everyone in the service. Pay attention to your state. If necessary, pause. Breathe, look around, or do whatever non-obtrusive practice works for you to center yourself.

Attentiveness

Skillful hosting means being continuously attentive to what's happening in the service. Hosts distracted from this by the details of their script miss important cues from the room.

Sensitivity

Along with attention, hosts should cultivate the inner stillness to be perceptive to what's happening in the room. How engaged are participants? How are they being affected by the process? What does it feel like? Sensitive hosting uses this information to adjust the script to serve the needs of the participants.

Humility

The hosting role is not for telling people what's true, what they should believe, or how things are. These are for participants to explore and discover for themselves.

Do:

Offer questions for participants to explore
Provide multiple perspectives on the theme, which they could choose to look at it from
Qualify truth claims by framing them as possibilities

Don't:

Speak from a specific world view or metaphysics as though it's the truth (even if you're sure it is).