
Course Description
The BD101 WST Series is designed for facilitators, organizational leaders, trainers, artists, healers, and anyone ready to engage in transformative change. This four-part workshop series focuses on redefining our approaches to well-being and system alignment by fundamentally shifting how we see, know, and act within our communities and society.
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Think of the BD101 WST Series as a learning laboratory that offers a pointed focus on inner/outer healing and training intended to co-create the great transformative shifts called for in our communities and throughout society. BD101 WST provides frameworks for understanding what it takes to consciously hold and guide a transformative process. This Series responds to what is called for to unearth root assumptions, core beliefs, and practices that are baked into the culture to separate, diminish, and dominate.
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“Remembering and acknowledging interconnection is the antithesis of societal or systemic oppression because oppression is fully dependent on a culture of separation. Systemic oppression holds separation as the way of seeing the world (reality) and is the basis upon which all strategies for 'progress' and survival are built ”
(NDS from “What I Mean by Liberation Education”)
Key Guiding Assumptions
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​This series intends liberation for all and defines liberation as wholeness.
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Liberatory work—efforts intending wholeness—must include body, mind & spirit.
“ …to be truly liberated is a freedom experienced and expressed in and through body, mind, and spirit ~ the whole of who we are. In other words, liberation is freedom expressed in and through the heart, in and through the intellect, in and through the soma ”
(NDS from “What I Mean by Liberation Education”)
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Being competent in addressing the whole system includes you! This entails: seeing, recognizing, reading, analyzing, discerning, activating, intervening with....the whole system. [Building our competence must include all of this.]
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“If you would create something, you must BE something ” This Goethe quote has been said by many people in different ways. In working toward systems transformation, this truth that has endless implications and unfortunately, one that leaders forget frequently.
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Knowingness is available to all of us. [One of the foundational BD101 Goals is to “Build Skill in Speaking from your Knowingness, Speaking Truth Aloud.”] It is a goal that often evokes the challenge— “but whose truth, there are many truths.” Knowingness is deeply connected to the capacity to discern. We will study and practice developing these capacities in depth.
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Radical truth-telling opens portals to liberation. Because we live in a society founded on denial and illusionary justice we must actively practice radical truth-telling. At the root of isms, systems of oppression, and the notions of power-over, power-under, and so on is: a) forgetting our interconnection, b) frequently acting like we don’t see what we see or know what we know, c) an attachment to not knowing (grounded in fear and a belief in separation) and therefore, d) lying!
Key Series Outcomes
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Consciously Form a Caring Cohort of Learners: Being the beloved community for which our hearts yearn
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Expand Understanding and Use of Transformative Frameworks: Participants will learn to consciously guide transformative processes unearthing root assumptions and core beliefs that perpetuate separation and domination
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Liberatory Practices: The series will offer tools and knowledge for participants to actualize inclusion, equity, diversity, and liberation in their work and communities
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Understand the difference between incremental change and transformation
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Practice holding and moving energy somatically, mentally and spiritually
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Practical Application: Each workshop will include practical elements, culminating in a practicum that will integrate learning and serve community