Embodying Collective Transformation: reflections and highlights
Embodying Collective Transformation – a series of week-long intensive trainings and month-long transformational community residencies – took place at the Life Itself Hub in Bergerac from September to November. The hosting & facilitation team consisted of Karl Steyaert, Nadine Helm, Jocelyn Ames, and Catherine Tran. We welcomed over 35 participants, ranging in age from 19 to over 60, from over 10 different countries across 4 different continents.
Looking back over the three months, we’re proud of and grateful for:
- The incredible personal and collective learning and growth.
- The deep sense of belonging, settledness in community, positive transformation, meaning, and purpose that we heard was experienced by many participants.
- Increasing exploration of shared leadership month by month.
- Successful navigation of multiple tensions while holding everyone with compassion.
- The richness and diversity of offerings in our Open Space schedule.
Our question for exploration was: “How are we called to deepen our individual and collective capacity to care for the wellbeing of all life?”
In practice, this looked like a smorgasbord of activities, incorporating the mundane, profound, simple, complex, heartwarming, vulnerable, playful, serious, easy, challenging, joyful, inspiring, experienced, experimental… A small sampling of those includes:
- Offering, asking for, and receiving emotional support (e.g. empathic listening, IFS parts healing)
- Cooking nourishing community meals together with fresh, organic ingredients from the local market
- Practising giving and receiving (sometimes challenging) feedback
- Caring for our collective space through cleaning, gardening, and tidying
- Deepening personal self-awareness and awareness of interpersonal and relational dynamics
- Making collaborative decisions around live issues in the community (e.g. what is our COVID policy?)
- Learning about each other’s projects for work in the world and exploring synergies and potential collaborations, or starting projects together
- Many meaningful connections
- Slowing down… (e.g. inviting pauses of mindfulness)
- …speeding up! (e.g. high-intensity interval training workouts together!)
- Seeing, listening to, and holding others with compassion – and letting ourselves, too, be heard, held, and seen.
In the words of one participant, what we did together was to “learn the art of loving”.
In her blog post, ‘Learning to Love ~ Transforming the World from the Inside Out’, Leni Cellini wrote:
"It has been one of the most healing and enriching experiences of my life.
[…]
During the residency, I have discovered a path that leads to real inner and outer transformation. By getting to know others more deeply, I can understand myself better. And the more I accept the different parts in myself, the more I feel compassion and love for others. It is a path that requires patience, courage, and a lot of practice, but it also offers a specific way to grow into the direction of non-violence and love together."
We are grateful to everyone who contributed resources – time, money, energy, experience – to make these residencies happen, especially to those who made donations to help make participation more accessible to those in need of financial support. We are grateful, finally, to each and every participant for our courage, companionship, and curiosity in coming together in the shared, and ongoing, exploration of what it means to thrive, evolve, and serve to make a world that works for all life. It means a lot to be in this together.
More from Life Itself
https://lifeitself.org/blog/2022/11/11/embodying-collective-transformation-transform-what
