Most of the time, facilitation is easy and a joy. The room finds its rhythm, people say things they have never said out loud before, and by the end, there is a particular quality of stillness that tells you something real happened. I love this work. I am good at it.
But a room that is working well is not where you learn. True learning happens at the edges of facilitation, when the room resists, and my skills are tested. I have had two of those recently, close together, and I have been sitting with them.
As I reflect on these challenging sessions, I am writing this in May, which is the month I dedicate to Oshun. She keeps showing up in how I am thinking about all of it.
When the room tests you
Most people who have sat in a facilitated space have felt the moment when something shifts. A conversation that was moving suddenly snags. Someone pushes against the frame, or the room moves somewhere it wasn’t meant to go, and you can feel, even as a participant, whether the person holding the space knows what to do. That feeling, from the facilitator’s side, is what I have been examining.
The first difficult session involved someone who challenged my authority directly. It was not hostile, but forensic and persistent, interrogating my framing, language, and right to set the terms of the space. My instinct was to explain, justify, and clarify my reasoning, hoping to make the legitimacy of the boundary irrefutable.
Here is what I know about myself: I have a fiery temperament. In Lukumí, the orisha said to be the owner of my head is Ogun, the orisha of iron, labour, and war. Fire is my default. Bluntness is my first language. The calm and patience I bring to facilitation are not my nature; they are my practice, built slowly and maintained deliberately. I am also a Sagittarius, which will mean something to some readers and nothing to others, but which means to me a constitutional tendency toward directness that I work hard to temper with care.
Most of the time, that practice holds. In this session, it didn’t. I got carried away. I raised my voice. And the moment I did, the challenger shifted from engaging with what I was saying to engaging with how I was saying it. My lapse became the subject. Everything I had said before it, and everything I said after, was refracted through that single moment of heat. I had handed over exactly what I should have withheld, and I had done it in front of the room.
This is what stays with me. The intellectual error was real: the moment you justify your authority, you hand the challenger a framework to argue with, and explanation is never resolution, only a different kind of tension with more words in it. But the true challenge is closing the gap between the facilitator I strive to be and who I am under pressure. What I am still building is the capacity to do the harder thing when it counts: address the room rather than the individual, return to the thread of the session without variation, and let the challenger feel unsatisfied. That is allowed. Steadiness reads as authority in a way that explanation never can. The repetition is the message. Ogun’s fire has its place. Inside a grief space, in the final five minutes, is not it.
In contrast to the first, the second session was more complicated because nothing went wrong in any obvious sense. Someone arrived carrying something very heavy, and the room, out of genuine warmth, reorganised itself entirely around them. People were kind. They were present. And the frame of the gathering dissolved so quietly that by the time I noticed, it was already gone.
There is no villain in a moment like that, which is precisely what makes it hard to manage. The challenge is not to shut down warmth but to hold warmth and structure at the same time, and that requires acting early, before the room has already moved. A genuine acknowledgement of what has been shared, a quiet inquiry into whether the person has other support, a gentle redirection that honours the moment without being consumed by it: these things are possible in the first few seconds. After that, the room has made its decision, and redirecting it feels like cruelty even when it is not. I have learned this from the wrong side of that window.
Afterwards, I spoke with the person individually and learned they had professional support. They had come to voice something in a room full of people, which is not the same as needing rescue. The room’s warmth was not misplaced, but it was unsteered.
The frame of a space exists not to limit what people can bring but to ensure the space can actually hold what is brought. The person who needed care got it that night, but it was luck as much as skill, and I would rather it be skill.
Oshun at the water's edge
Oshun is with me always, but in May, I turn toward her to expand and deepen my understanding of her and discover what more she has to teach me.
Oshun is the river: its movement, its patience, its capacity to give life to everything along its banks without being asked and without requiring acknowledgement. She is the orisha of love, fresh water, beauty, and fertility, the vital source of all good things. Without her sanction, no healing can take place, no rain falls, no child comes into the world. The things she governs are not pleasant additions to a world that is otherwise functioning. They are the conditions under which the world functions at all.
People tend to reach for the parts of her that are easiest to hold: the beauty, the sweetness, the golden scarves, the honey. Those are real, but what years of working with her have taught me is that her deepest gift, at least for me, is about self-efficacy. In the patakís, the sacred stories, she never disrupts or complains or argues for her place. When Olodumare sent seventeen orishas to make the earth livable for humans, the sixteen others set about establishing their domains, making no provision for her. She sat quietly, took up her coral-beaded comb, and plaited her hair. She watched them fail. Rain would not fall. Epidemics spread. Healing broke down. Everything the sixteen attempted came to nothing because they had excluded the vital source of everything. When they finally came to her, she set her conditions and held them. She reminded them of every feast held without her, every offering consumed while she sat apart. She made them wait. And when she chose to help, she gave everything.
In another story, when the orishas needed to reach Olodumare and none of them could, Oshun transformed into a peacock and flew. She tired. The sun burned her beautiful feathers black. She kept going. She arrived bald and hunched, carrying the world’s prayers on her back, and Olodumare was moved. The rains returned to earth, and she was appointed the Creator’s messenger.
And when Ogun, the orisha of industry and human effort, withdrew into the forest and all creation and labour ground to a halt, it was Oshun who went in after him, not with force or argument, but with her golden scarves and a gourd of honey. She danced until he was intrigued enough to emerge from his cave, and when he was close enough, she smeared the honey across his lips, and he came out of the forest with her.
She accomplishes what no other orisha can — not the eldest, not the strongest. The knowing is entirely internal. She never doubts herself, never needs to prove herself, never raises her voice to be heard.
Ogun and Oshun are not opposites, but they are in tension. He clears the path with iron. She opens it with honey. Both are necessary. The question is which one the moment is asking for.
What the river knows
A river needs banks. Without them, the water spreads, loses its depth and direction, and eventually becomes a swamp. The banks are not a constraint on the river; they are what give it power.
I keep returning to this after those two sessions. In the first, someone challenged the banks directly, so I explained why they were there. In the second, the room flowed around them warmly, and I was tempted to let it go. Despite the different circumstances, the temptation was the same: to abandon the structure. In both cases, it was a mistake.
The frame of a facilitated space is the riverbank. It lets conversation run deep rather than wide, move with intention rather than pooling wherever gravity leads. Holding structure is not the opposite of warmth. Oshun’s actions at the edge of the forest and her perseverance while flying demonstrate that. In none of her stories does she raise her voice or justify herself. She simply knows what she carries and acts from that knowing.
But knowing is not a destination you arrive at. It is something you maintain, or lose, and have to find again. Oshun’s quality of calm, unshakeable self-efficacy does not come from nowhere. It is the fruit of practice, and practice is the unglamorous part that the stories don’t tell.
For me, that practice is layered. There is the reading and the ongoing study, the returning again and again to the tradition, to the scholarship, to the patakís, asking what they have to say to where I am now. There is reflection: the disciplined habit of sitting with what happened after a session with a group, patient, or private client, writing it down, and being honest about the gap between what I intended and what I did. There is supervision, which in Spiritual Care, is a structured, confidential relationship dedicated to reflecting on the work, keeping me honest, and making sure the practice doesn’t hollow me out. And there are the people I can call, who know the work from the inside and can see what I cannot see about myself.
And there is the body, because Ogun’s fire is not a mental problem with a mental solution. The discipline that breaks under pressure is held in the body as much as the mind. My meditation practice and my recently revived yoga practice are not separate from my facilitation practice. They are where I build the capacity to stay cool when the heat comes, where I return to myself when I have been pulled away. You cannot think your way into steadiness. You have to practice it until it lives somewhere deeper than thought.
None of this guarantees that the next hard session will go well. What it does is shorten the distance between who I am under pressure and who I am trying to be. That distance is the learning edge and where the work lives.
That is what I am learning toward: to hold the frame warmly and without apology, to stay in that quality of knowing rather than reaching for explanation. To recognise, in the heat of a difficult moment, what the room needs, to trust that the banks serve the water, and that the water knows where it is going.
I facilitate contemplative conversations in community spaces. The reflections here are drawn from that work. All identifying details have been changed because the people who share in these spaces trusted them, and that trust does not end when the session does.
My surname means from the river banks.
I find myself like this at times spread wide without grounding.