United we stand!!

So, another fruitful Sunday and the story goes on……
The pune self help group met on Sunday, the 18th April at our standard meeting place. The meeting
was attended by around 9-10 people. I am glad to say that now that’s the average count in the
Sunday meetings and lot of ideas pouring in from the ignited minds. Together we make the voyage
faster and exciting.Sanjeeth coordinated the meeting this time. Another new Vaibhav member joined Pune chapter of
SHG this Sunday. The meeting started with meditation followed by vocal exercises and slow reading.
These have become our regular dose of starters for the Sunday meet and sets us upfront for the
next activities. After this we played energizer, courtesy JP.Then we viewed few video clips on stuttering which Sanjeeth had brought with him. In these videos
John P(don’t remember what P stands for) showed his journey with stuttering. These videos were
enlightening for us on some of the aspects of stuttering. We had discussions at length about what
we as individuals observed. Some of the points in the clips and the discussions after that were
how desensitizing helps to relax. John used voluntary stuttering with the people passing on road
and we observe how initially he stutters badly and how he becomes completely fluent after doing
this for a number of times. He was asking “do you know where china town is?”. Initially he could
not say more than just “ddddddddddd…dddddd’’. And later he said the complete sentence fluently.
One of the other takeaways was the reaction of the people about stuttering. Some people laughed,
some people were patient, some people did not care, some people just ignored him. At one point
when John started with dddddddd..dddddd… the other person annoyingly asked “WHAT dddddd….” And
we all laughed. The point here is if we (being PWS) can laugh at John when he speaks with stutter,
it is equal right of other people when they laugh at us and we should learn to understand that.
It’s not their fault when they laugh, it’s just their reaction to our action (stutter) and that
is perfectly valid I think. Actually we had a lot of discussions about these videos and people
came with vast difference of opinion on some of the topics. One of the other topic that could be
debatable was ‘does talking to people about stuttering helps?’. Among us for some it helped but
for others it did not. Some people have or are comfortable discussing about their stutter to family
members or friends while some are not .Most of us agreed upon that talking about it is also part of
acceptance and we should be doing that. The discussions were catching up like anything and we realized
we were missing some the activities planned in the agenda. So we BOUNCED back on the agenda. We did
few bouncing exercises. Then we practiced voluntary stuttering, the importance of it from videos was
still fresh in our minds. After this we did have discussions about the weekly goals. Nice to know that
people are working towards the goals and reaching them, though not completely but still the progress
is worth appreciating. We had planned to have a talk by Manohar but as we had a lot of discussions in
this meeting the time flied. We thought to wrap up the things. A quick discussion and feedback about
the meeting and we were done. Me, manohar, JP and Mahesh had a nice lunch together and we departed.Agenda for the next meeting remains the same. We are planning to include few interesting activities
like confessions from people if they want, talking on phone with speaker on. We also might go out
to a shopping mall to practice in real word using our weapons of speaking. All in all we had a
fruitful Sunday and the story will continue…..