Saturday 26 March (3 hours) 10am PDT / 1pm EDT / 5pm GMT / 6pm CET (check your time zone here)
Each of us – every being – is an integral part of the greater web of life. Nature is not ‘separate’ from us; we are nature. The manufactured lines of division humanity has built have caused a severance of our sense of our intrinsic place within the web of life and negatively impacted our ideas of belonging.
Yet we long for that feeling of connection – the sense of belongingness, to feel at home and held within the cycles of life. We long to awaken to our place in the world. Through practices that expand our awareness to the vibrancy of life around us, we can build those relationships with the natural world that support our wholeness.
What is the Council of All Beings?
"The Council of All Beings is a communal ritual in which participants step aside from their human identity and speak on behalf of another life-form. A simple structure for spontaneous expression, it aims to heighten awareness of our interdependence in the living body of Earth, and to strengthen our commitment to defend it. The ritual serves to help us acknowledge and give voice to the suffering of our world. It also serves, in equal measure, to help us experience the beauty and power of our interconnectedness with all life." – Joanna Macy
A practice of empathy and connection, the Council of All Beings, supports the shift from an egocentric to an ecocentric perspective.
During the Council, beings come forth to speak of their concerns and the challenges they face, and to be witnessed and received by the humans. Through sharing, recognition and acknowledgement of the suffering caused by the human species, all beings begin to experience a deep empathy for each other and a broader awareness of our inner-connectedness and interdependence grows. As the beings share messages of their unique gifts, the humans begin to gain fresh perspectives on ways to act on behalf of life.
Key Potential Takeaways for Participants:
Listen and converse with the natural world.
Practice deep listening, empathy, and mirroring.
Develop a greater awareness of the web of life, and the interconnection of all beings.
Step out of your personal identities and into the truth and wisdom of another being.
Gain insights into your own longing for connection to the gifts available in nature.
Identify and release painful emotions that hinder connection with Soul.
This workshop will be limited to 20 participants.
This workshop is co-held as a collaboration between WTR Facilitator, Frieda Nixdorf and Madalyn Loustalot, Extinction Rebellion Global Support Trainings team facilitator.
These workshops are available on a gift economy basis, without the expectation or requirement of money coming to us. In this way, we are participating in re-seeding the flow of generosity in the world instead of continuing to uphold the exchange economy.
We are inviting you to ask yourself whether you too would like to step into this flow. It would be impossible to truly quantify the amount of labor that has gone into creating this offering, nor would we want to ask for money in exchange for that labor.
Rather than an acknowledgement of work put in, we ask: do you have a willingness to contribute money to us? This would mean that Frieda and Madalyn are able to sustainably offer more places and spaces in support of The Great Turning. We recognize this can be an unusual and challenging request for many people. For that reason, if you just want ease, an amount between $30 – $50 USD is requested as an amount that we trust would support our sustainability sufficiently over time.
Please consider your needs and ours, any amount given will support Frieda and Madalyn’s sustainability and connect with Frieda regarding your intentions. Or simply contribute via PayPal at paypal.me/FriedaNixdorf or via Venmo at Frieda-Nixdorf.
The languaging around the framing and invitation to the gift economy is from Miki Kashtan of Nonviolent Global Liberation.
Frieda Nixdorf, Soul-Aligned Purpose Guide and Mentor, and WTR Facilitator
The thread that underscores all of Frieda’s work is the recognition of the healing and regenerative powers of nature and her commitment to serving the planet and growing the cultural shift of the Great Turning. In addition to mothering a young human who is on the brink of venturing out into the world, she offers her gifts as a soul aligned facilitator, purpose guide, mentor, teacher and a playful and connected collector of dream world imagery. Frieda’s background is in psychology, education, art history, visual culture, expressive arts and the non-profit environmental field. She currently serves as adjunct faculty at John F. Kennedy University and staff mentor at Purpose Guides Institute and as a staff member of the Work That Reconnects Network team.
Madalyn Loustalot, Convergent Facilitator, Extinction Rebellion (XR) Global Support and Nonviolent Global Liberation (NGL)
Madalyn is a convergent facilitator with a background in economics, environmental engineering and whole systems sustainable development. She actively advocates for Nonviolent Liberation and The Great Turning through lead coordination roles within Extinction Rebellion (XR) Global Support and Nonviolent Global Liberation (NGL). She focuses her personal life and engagement with community on visioning regenerative cultures into futures that care for all life.
