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    • Guiding the Guides
    Guiding the Guides

    If you find yourself here, it's most likely because you've been asking difficult questions like "who will guide the guides?" This is our organic response, which will hopefully grow with your own contributions as you find the question to which you are the universe's answer and begin to learn how to share that with others in creative and non-coercive ways.

    This section is primarily devoted to how to host. Currently, that applies to hosting juntos in the course of a Kernel block, and then hosting interviews with new potential Kernel fellows once you become a guide. Hopefully, we will be able to add guides for hosting in-person events when those become more appropriate again.

    In Practice

    Guides are people who have been through a Kernel block themselves. In this, they differ from mentors, who are industry experts and intimate friends of the program who have not themselves been through it. Guides help in two primary ways:

    1

    Lead interview conversations and provide feedback on candidates before each block.

    2

    Host 1-1 and small group conversations in during each block to help orient people and make them feel truly at home.

    As a guide, you will be added to a specific channel where the stewards will coordinate both the interviews before, and the more organic guidance required during each block. Being a guide is an opportunity to learn by leading, which has the potential to be both a powerful and deeply humbling experience. We do not expect you to be perfect, or even professional. We do expect you to be honest, transparent and to serve others to the best of your capabilities.

    Why do we serve? At first, it is because we know intellectually that it is a noble and pure-hearted way to live; a means of seeing, understanding, and working against the subtler parts of our ego. Later on, it is because we wish to experience how the people we serve are simply reflections of our self; how there is no true division between us and them. We serve to see our self in others; to be without separation.

    Reminders

    The first thing to remember is that Kernel is about horizontal conversations between peers. Your role as guide or host is to listen with fine attention. It is the quality of your listening which will move the overall conversation closer to shared truth. It is not about what you can share or teach. Put all of those desires and impulses away and simply show up with the intention to learn as much as you can.

    Kernel conversations are not a platform for you, your product, or your organization. They are not one-to-many broadcasts, no matter how important what you know might seem to you. They are shared explorations of the truth outside ourselves and they can only come from a deep and lived honesty about that which we know and that which we wish to know.

    So, in preparing for a conversation, it is important to bring into your awareness just how much you do not currently know. When you speak from that place - with the humility, honesty, and humour it naturally engenders - you invite others to share authentically and we guarantee that you will be amazed at the unexpected shapes your conversations take.

    Finally, when in the conversation itself, simply trust that whatever is unfolding is valuable even if it doesn't appear to you as such in the moment. In fact, when someone says something which you disagree with or don't follow, it is a great gift, because it gives you the opportunity to examine in detail your own resistances and bias. When you find yourself nervous, confused, confronted or frustrated, try your best to take a few deep breaths, settle your attention once more in your heart, remember that you are here to learn, and then ask another question.

    Asking questions from a place of neutral curiosity is what can bring people to answers they themselves weren't fully aware of before the conversation and - trust us - that is the greatest gift you can give another human being. We're not trying to transmit our own knowledge in these spaces, we're trying to help each person come to their own realisation of that which they already are and already know, because that is what the First People's greeting is really about:

    Tsamkwa /tge? Are your eyes nicely open?
    Kiri kwa /tge. My eyes are nicely open.

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