Tools for Navigating, Embracing, and Transforming Chaos

Please note that registration will close when a session has reached capacity, or at 8:00am the day of the session, whichever comes first. Please plan ahead!

In this moment of COVID-19 and all else in the world, communities are increasingly faced with chaos and uncertainty, which physiologically elicits the trauma reactions of fight, flight, fawn, and freeze. To create peace with justice in the world, changemakers need a connection to peace internally. That journey asks participants to notice their own reactions in chaos, and from there, to move toward new choices.

Building a sense of personal power allows participants to tap into spiritual resources that stretch beyond the individual level. The connection to the divine is key to supporting the experience of moving from reaction to making choices. Join us for a series of online offerings to support seekers and changemakers to track themselves, their communities, and their surroundings, and thus support resilient strategies, campaigns, and communities.

These online sessions are built from themes developed in the Radical Faithfulness in Action program.  Each session can be taken as a one-off. Together, the sessions are designed to build a comprehensive toolkit for those who take them in sequence. We welcome people to be flexible and sign up for whatever sessions speak to you.

The nature of chaos at this moment and all moments impacts people of different experiences and backgrounds differently.  We want to particularly welcome people doing work in multi-racial spaces to learn, heal, and gain skills and share practices together.  Also, some sessions are intended for people of color only.

Session 1: Finding Yourself in Chaos ~ 04/29/20
You may love or hate chaos, but crises like COVID-19 remind us that chaos is a part of life. In this session, learn practices to locate yourself in amidst chaos along with spiritual practices to help nurture your clarity in this time.

Session 2: Tracking Yourself through Chaos ~ 05/13/20
Learn how to build a tracking notebook with creative exercises to help you track yourself in chaos, notice how you’re grounded or ungrounded, and identify practices that will help you. By the end of the session, you’ll have a resource to carry with you through the pandemic. Bring a journal and writing utensil or other means to keep notes.

Session 3: Creating Boundaries with Compassion ~ 05/27/20
Chaos is like a whirlpool where many things go down the drain. Don’t let it be you! Learn how to identify signals that you may be getting pulled under and how to create new boundaries that support mutual aid and your survival.

Session 4: From Reaction to Response: a session for people of color in multiracial community ~ 06/10/20 [people of color only].
As our bodies react to chaos, ancestral wounds rise to the surface and affect our emotions, interactions, as well as unconscious and conscious choices. We gather as people of color to differentiate our ancestral pain from our current realities, process that pain, recognize ancestral wisdom, and learn practices to move effectively in multiracial community.

Session 5: Authenticity in THIS Moment ~ 06/24/20

Session 6: Our Contributions: Adding to the legacy of people of color surviving chaos ~ 07/08/20 [people of color only, limit 30]
Click to register for Session 6.

Session 7: Creativity for Navigating a Changed World ~ 07/22/20 (larger group session – 100 people]
The world changes every day, but in this moment of pandemic and uprising against racism, changes can feel, and sometimes are, even more profound. Creativity at this moment can make new systems and ways of being possible and can also ground us in navigating this shifting landscape. Join this session for song/poetry writing, reflection, and using other creative practices to navigate, embrace, and transform chaos.
Click to register for Session 7.

Session 8: Chaos and Creation: what is possible that wasn’t before ~ 08/05/20 [limit 30]
Click to register for Session 8.

Faculty

Matthew Armstead directs Culture Work Studios – a collaboration hub for strategy development, experiential training, and performance events. She has recently trained Black Lives Matter activists, B Lab executives, Amnesty International USA staff, Canadian Labor Council organizers, Unitarian Universalist ministers, United Nations advocates from the Sexual Rights Initiative, and many others. Matthew has organized for environmental justice, racial justice, LGBTQ liberation, and accountability among masculine-identified people. She serves as faculty convener for Radical Faithfulness in Action – program supporting activists to tap into the divine, follow their calling, and change the world. She is also a core trainer with Training for Change – a global grassroots activist training organization. Matthew weaves together community organizing, activist training, and physical theatre to create performances that engage audiences as active participants. Matthew has a M.F.A. with Pig Iron Theatre Company, and has a B.A. in Theater and Women’s Studies from Swarthmore College.

Erva Baden is a contemporary shaman who weaves together healing modalities with compassion and humor to journey with clients committed to their own deep transformation and healing. She is a Reiki Master and has more than 25 years of experience in facilitating the deep emotional process and release work nationally and internationally in men’s, women’s, and mixed-gender circles. She has studied energy work, chakra healing, and core shamanic techniques, as well as trauma recovery and the intergenerational effects of trauma.

Lina Blount (faculty apprentice) is an organizer, trainer, and nonviolent action strategist and has been working on environmental justice campaigns in the Philadelphia area for ten years. Lina currently works as the Education Coordinator for Pendle Hill and is the co-clerk of the Earth Quaker Action Team board, which she has served since 2013. Lina has also worked with the Divestment Student Network and spent two years as canvasser and anti-fracking organizer in Pennsylvania.

Click to view the flyer. For more information, please contact Lina Blount at 610-566-4507, ext. 122 or lblount@pendlehill.org.