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Climb up wherever you are. Your path is like a scrapbook, a handful of pages to revisit, decisions made, inadvertent high scores and lucky mistakes. What factors have brought you to where you are?

Orbital Logbooks allows you to browse through a collage of impressions that ten professionals from the field of education have collected over the course of a year in their field journals.

The journey is an infinite, circular itinerary, which we encourage you to follow as you like so that you lose yourself in the different stages that make up the landscape of empowerment.

Orbital logbooks
Empowerment is a continuous, infinite journey. The circle you will see next aims to be its representation. In it are situated, in the form of coloured circumferences, the different stages of the empowerment process that ten professionals in the field of education have defined with their thoughts and reflections. By selecting them, you will be able to see what stage they refer to and you will discover the materials made to describe it.

The different colours correspond to three types of resources:
The green circumferences contain pages from field journals.
The orange ones, audio-visual pieces on specific topics, recorded by the educators themselves.
The yellow ones contain fragments of four focus groups where participants shared experiences.

Through these materials, you will be able to delve into the meaning of a term as abstract and multifaceted as that of youth empowerment; circulating through its stages, from prior reflection to the evaluation of the results obtained.

In the menu on the top right, you can learn more about the project and also access an archive of the materials, where you can filter them by specific concepts and interests.
This page has been elaborated following the recommendations of the use of non-sexist language. Therefore, as far as possible, we have used generic expressions that include gender diversity.
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"My name is Rafa Cortés. I have been working with young people since I was young, for over twenty years. I have always been linked to the field of education and associationism and, for the past 8 years, also, in the field of psychotherapy. I currently work as a therapist specializing in youth and as a teacher in the Axioma Association, of which I am a founding member, and in the leisure time education school Escola Lliure el Sol.

I have a degree in sociology from the UAB (Autonomous University of Barcelona), I have a Master's degree in Youth and Society from the UdG (University of Girona) and training in Axiometry with Janine Rodiles, Family Constellations with Marta Albadalejo Mur, Music Therapy with Jordi Delclós and Theatre-Clowning with Pau Rosell.

Being able to accompany young people in their growth and healing processes fills me with satisfaction."

November 5th 2018
The Guest House. Who am I?

 

        Today, I share with you a tool I improvised with a 24-year-old patient. She lives in Berlin. She told me today that she felt uneasy because she wanted to start two work projects within her professional field: investigative journalism. She told me that she was scared to take that leap of faith.

When I asked her about this fear she was feeling, she told me she felt fragile. It was at that moment I thought I could tell her about Rumi’s poem, written by Rumi, the great mystic Sufi from the 13th century. Here it is:

THE GUEST HOUSE

 The human being is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Mevlana Rumi

I asked her to close her eyes and imagine her heart as if it were a guest house and a being called “fragility” would arrive to it. I asked her to observe carefully this being, what it looked like, its behavior…. 

She described it “as a string of white smoke that moved through her chest.”

She told me that she felt fine around it, comfortable; I encouraged her to listen to it, continuing with the visualization:

 – “What does it want to tell you, Sofia?”
– “It’s giving me strength.”
– “Great!,” I exclaimed. “This is a good message for you, Sofia. Fragility has connected you with your strength. Just as the poem, we have to welcome to our house those emotions and thoughts, to observe, care, and treat them with an open attitude because they bring a 

message. It’s also important that this observation and attention remains with no identity: While this emotions and thoughts are within you, they are not you, even if they live in you temporarily.”

 

Rafa Cortés; youth therapist
#critical_incidents #job #metalearning #observation #rafa