Session Five
To be thoroughly aware of the dramatic changes underway and to set ourselves up to be authentically helpful is to learn to stay with profound uncertainty, to metabolize a mind-boggling and heart-breaking situation to the point of compassionate clarity. This session takes on that spiritual task. Here at the apex of our journey, we will support practitioners as much as their system will allow, an opening of view, heart, and identification. Earth, as each of us, is moving into radical change and can do so with as much wakefulness is available to us. With mind, heart, and the sense of who I am more open than ever before, we can learn to stay and be with, attending to the wordless and unfamiliar. Participants will be supported to listen at depth. We can begin to listen to sense what wants to emerge.
Session Four
Having opened up internally and individually, we rise to the collective and historical, understanding how objectification accumulates over time in the form of dominant institutions, how delusion is codified and how domination spreads that delusion. Participants are invited to explore, with compassionate accountability, how the dominant cultural body conquers, colonizes, and exploits not only Earth and other peoples but its own members. This is where we let it all in, the full catastrophe.
Session Three
Our ultimate goal is transformation at depth but we can’t get there unless we recognize ourselves with compassion. We need to understand how it is we found ourselves in this astonishing situation. In a process that involves not just mind, but heart and body, we are looking back, remembering both for ourselves and our people the causes and conditions that led us here. With great care and attention, we begin to untangle the tangle.
Session Two
In this second session, we will especially make space for difficult emotions, especially fear, grief, and rage. We can investigate the narratives that support these emotions and how they might be loosened, meeting our habitual defensive responses not only with kindness but with clarity, courage, and determination. This is an ambitious journey, one that requires not only safety and compassion, but also a certain boldness. We are challenging massive forces and patterns; Mara doesn’t go down easy (and gets back up). So we can also purposefully discover and nourish our wholesome ambition.
Special Session
In this special session, we’re joined by best-selling author and researcher Dr. Dan Siegel for a tour of mind from the perspective of contemporary neurology. Dan will walk us through what science is coming to understand about what mind is and, critical for our purposes, how we can actively cultivate a healthy, resilient mind, and one that directly experiences, knows, its relatedness with all of life.
Session One
In this opening session, groups will be gathering and all participants will be keen to know what they’ve signed up for. We’ll begin by gathering and reflecting on our global situation and the changes that are rapidly underway. We’ll map out the journey, ensure satchels are packed, and facilitate connections among travelers. In particular, we’ll be seeding psychological safety, essential to risk-taking, inside the course framework and among group members.