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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."

December 11th 2018
Mirror and Guide

 

        Reading again some of the letters I have sent you, I have remembered that relationship is what heals. The relationship is the most important element in the work for empowerment with young people; and in this relationship there’s a central element: Recognition.

Everything I do with young people, and I hope I will be able to do better every day, is to allow them to recognize themselves. Every conversation I have with them, every psychotherapy task I make them carry out with advanced techniques, exercises and readings, are all mirrors so that they can see themselves.

During the conversations, tasks, readings and exercises, they put themselves “in relation to”. This “in relation to” is what allows reflection, meaning to turn in ourselves and analyse. Here is where lies self-recognition, and by default, recognition to others (a person or a thing).

As I read the book of Abdul Karim Baudino, “everything that surrounds you are the mirrors that allow you to get to know yourself.” Or like that prayer of the Being: “The others and the events are angels and miracles evoked by you in your journey to fulfillment”. And I feel like that every day.

During the theatre classes I conduct for young people that want to get the monitor title, we do an exercise called The Mirror. One person is in front of

another, and this person has to imitate everything the other does. The key is that the one that’s imitating has to be as relaxed as possible to be able to capture as many details as possible. The better they imitate, the better the other person can see himself.

There is another aspect in this relationship with young people. The first one, the one I just talked about, deals with the relationship as recognition, where the attitude with the person is passive (actively passive). The second one is the relationship as a guide, where the attitude is active (active but relaxed). A lot of times, after walking through some of the corners in the person’s soul and having mapped it, the question I get asked is “what do I do now?” So they are expecting something from me and that

confirms that they have come for my help. Whatever I say to them, I’m acting as a reference.

If I’m paying close attention to the way they interact with me, I can perceive clearly the role they look in me. So I’m aware of it and I play it in an invisible way for them; I emphasise the paternal, fraternal or specialist aspects depending on the moment. Evidently, the setting of therapist-patient relationship is the guide of the relationship at every moment, but subtly those characters arise (it is fascinating the way our psyques work).

 

I wanted to share
these thoughts with you.

Rafa Cortés; youth therapist
#bond #mentorship #rafa