How to Stay Open Hearted and Supported When it’s Challenging - Workshop at the Neohumanist Conference in Italy
Educating for a Bright Future
I had the honor of presenting at the Global Neohumanist Education Conference Educating for a Bright Future this past July in Salorno Italy. There were educators from over 20 countries joining together for five days of workshops, plenaries and meetings. They shared their past work, visions for the future, and created next steps to bring these ideas to a broader audience. We were also joined by many other progressive educational organizations including Permaculture Education and Yoga in School groups.
Teaching from Presence Workshop
The workshop I presented was described in the program as:
Teaching from Presence: Staying heart-centered and supported while working in schools/organizations with challenging circumstances and communities
As educators, our work takes place inside a network of complex systems: interpersonal and family systems, school and administrative pressures, external assessments, social inequality and injustice … and, someplace in that web, the challenges of our own personal lives. The swirling of these pressures can lead us to believe that we have no power to affect positive change. But this is a false and demoralizing belief, because your greatest impact emerges from within – from your PRESENCE.
Practicing presence does not make the challenges magically disappear, but as you enter presence, you turn on the light of awareness and receive the gifts of insight and wisdom. This allows you to operate from a place of deep knowing as you respond to what arises.
This workshop is for educators who wish to practice staying centered in their hearts as they stand inside the complexities of their work environments. The invitation is for educators who wish to learn how to support deep knowing.
Through this awareness, we can start to become truly response-able- able to choose how to respond to the moment as it arises. Please join me for a breathing space and to explore.
Setting our intentions
The workshop was slated for fifteen people however the workshop had a high demand for participants so I ending working with close to thirty attendee’s. The group was overflowing with enthusiasm and amazing people. We started by sitting with our chairs in a circle. Our first exercise was creating a container for the group, in this exercises we used stone beads and said out loud what we can bring to the group, and what we want to take aways while placing the beads in a physical container. We had so many contributions to that container including belonging, trust and empathy. These qualities really showed up in the next exercises.
Feeling, Sensing, and Intuition
The next exercise started with a two definitions of neohumanism.
“When the underlying spirit of humanism is extended to everything, animate and inanimate, in this universe, I have designated this as Neohumanism. This Neohumanism will elevate humanism to universalism, love for all created beings of this universe.”
“When the underlying spirit of humanism is extended to everything, animate and inanimate, in this universe, I have designated this as Neohumanism. This Neohumanism will elevate humanism to universalism, love for all created beings of this universe.”
We used these definitions and stood together in silence in the center of the circle. We used our thoughts, feelings, sensing and intuition to explore these definitions in relation to ourselves. We then moved a step out and repeated that same process with our relationship with others and finally a last step back and explored our relationship with Neohumanism and our work/life.
Small Groups
We broke up into groups of four and using paper and colored pencils we visually represented what that experience was through words/pictures/colors. We drew whatever came. Next we explored these insights with our small group. We then had some following up questions to stimulate more discussions.
When coming back to the whole group, we talked about how we might extend this experience. Perhaps put all of our squares in the circle on the floor connected to each other and then how see how they were connected to each other. We might use a sentence or phrase to embody the experience in a circle. We talked about how we might use these exercises in the classroom with some interesting debate and discussion.
Closing out
We ended with standing up and coming together as a whole and looking at each other with gratitude and then stepping out back into the bigger conference.
There was so much excitement after the workshop. So many people came up to me expressing joy and energy about the workshop and about how they wanted to bring theses kinds of experiences to their staff and programs.
I was able to continue these conversations with the larger conference the next day during the Gallery time. Here I was able to show more examples of the work I have done and grow relationships that i hope to continue in the near future. I am so excited to explore and move into some international sharing of the work with different countries and their school staff and leaders.
Wanting to know more about some of these experiences or how you can being to these programs to your community?
You’rein luck! later this month I will be announcing our international zoom teacher and leadership circle workshop programs for the rest of this coming year as well as our new educator coaching programs