The Undergrowth Sanctuary: Practicing Freedom as Strategy
This course strengthens leaders' muscles to imagine and remember you are already free - a place where sanctuary is strategy, and you create your own compass for navigating systems collapse and renewal.
Course Overview
This course strengthens leaders' muscles to imagine and remember you are already free - a place where sanctuary is strategy, and you create your own compass for navigating systems collapse and renewal.
You will be held through a transition you may be in or are considering with embodiment practices, peer reflection on texts and experiences, and visionary storytelling. The container will be trauma-informed and orient towards resilience, as we celebrate our own and each others’ intersections and differences.
In this course, embodied practice and imagination serve not as an escape but a portal – as you listen for what it is time to put down and what to embody in this transitional time. Learners will carry a “compost and seed notebook” with you throughout the 8-weeks, gathering images, phrases, dreams, songs, and real-world examples that will seed your final Strategic Compass.
Each week includes:
individual and relational reflection on limitations on your hopes, fears, and values and how you orient towards them;
nature based somatic and creative practices to support grounding, connection, resilience, release, transition and grief tending; and,
short readings and inspirations by Black, Indigenous, and Global South feminist writers and imaginaries on freedom, love, courage and new world building.
Who Is This Course For?
This course is for emerging, mid-career and seasoned leaders who may be:
- Burned out or disillusioned - by ongoing crises, systems collapse and institutional spaces that keep you separate and constricted, trapped in roles you have outgrown.
- Ready - to compost heroism, false urgency and perfectionism, and soulless models of leadership.
- Longing - to embody more joy and wholeness in the work and to experience the wellbeing you wish for others.
- Hold - a marginalized identity yourself, while holding a team, a community, a strategy, or an organization together.
- Curious - about how intersectional feminist, somatic, earth-based, and creative practices might help you imagine beyond what you have been fighting against.
What You'll Learn
- A strategic compass for navigating through systems collapse and its symptoms with vision and purpose
- A toolkit of feminist, earth-based and body-based practices for grounding, resilience, centered transitions, imagination and grief tending
- New relational muscles for navigating uncertainty, complexity and not-knowing with loving power and boundaries
What's Included
Live Sessions
Interactive classes with your instructor
Session Recordings
Lifetime access to all recordings
Community Access
Connect with fellow learners
Certificate
Proof of course completion
Real-World Project
Students will create a strategic compass for their lives or work that includes a north star, horizon, people, practices to support the embodiment of their visions. They will be able to share these with the group, and make pragmatic moves towards making their visions real.
Session Schedule
About the Instructor
Social justice and embodiment facilitator, strategist and guide
Shawna is a social justice and embodiment facilitator, strategist and guide with a commitment to joyful, trusting relationships that build loving power with. She helps social justice leaders and organizations bring liberatory visions to life with healing centered mindfulness, somatic, creative and nature-based practices. She is currently working on Reports from a (r)Evolution of Being with Root. Rise. Pollinate!, shares writing, collages and songs for her Substack, Practices of Freedom as Things Fall Apart. For nearly thirty years she has supported transformative leadership, cultures of care and belonging with a range of movement building, international development, philanthropic and community based groups. She formerly taught master’s level courses and workshops on race, power, and international development at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.
$800
Get Notified
Sign up to be notified when registration opens.
October 15
20 students max
8 sessions
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