Connection, Rupture, Repair: The Trauma-Informed Beloved Community

The beloved community calls out for connection. We may think that connection will be threatened by ruptures to it, ruptures we must prevent as leaders. However, in the dynamic space of rupture real connection is made possible – because of the essential work of repair. Being trauma-informed in our leadership enables communities to face the hard work of justice, discernment, care, and day to day life through attention to what it takes to welcome, not avoid, rupture and then tenderly repair connection.

This weekend workshop is for leaders, clerks, and change-makers who want to support their communities in embracing truth-telling, healing wrongs, and building environments of safety, memory, and reconnection. Participants will learn how to use key ideas in trauma studies in corporate spiritual development through an environment of respect and creativity, deep discernment, and informative content.

Material will include key ideas from polyvagal and attachment theories as well as the psychiatrist and trauma studies pioneer Judith Herman. We will explore how being trauma-informed equips us to build a container for uncomfortable truth-telling and safer environments that encourage curiosity and collaboration. Participants can expect opportunities for personal and collaborative discernment, play and creativity, and invitations to build our own capacities to hold disruption in our hearts with courage.

Leader(s)

Windy Cooler is an embraced public Friend and the assistant clerk of Sandy Spring Monthly Meeting, Baltimore Yearly Meeting. Her ministry has long centered on caregiving in times of crisis in peer to peer religious communities, such as Quakers, and in group discernment: finding the wisdom in communities to address sticky issues. A regular guest of Quaker communities in the United States, and more recently in the United Kingdom, she is also Pendle Hill’s 2020 Cadbury Scholar and a 2022-23 fellow of Odyssey Impact, a change-making organization that centers storytelling as a strategy for building social justice. In the last year she has been invited to present original research, retreats, and keynotes for communities including Woodbrooke, Pendle Hill, Ben Lomond Quaker Center, Powell House, Friends Association for Higher Education, the Washington Friends Conference on Religion and Psychology, Friends Journal, Quaker Religious Education Collaborative, and Southeastern Yearly Meeting.

Windy lives in Greenbelt, Maryland with her spouse, Erik Hanson, and son, Ob. Her adult daughter, Maggie Willow, lives nearby. Windy holds a master of divinity from Earlham School of Religion and is a doctoral candidate at Lancaster Theological Seminary.

Financial aid may be available. If you are seeking funds to participate in this program, click to review and complete our Financial Assistance Application and a Pendle Hill staff member will follow-up with you shortly (please do NOT register online). Thank you for your interest.

Travel directions to Pendle Hill.