Context is everything. While the following description gives a general overview of the content of this workshop, I believe that truly meaningful training is adapted to your local culture and situation. In addition, I am fully committed to using my training opportunities to build facilitation capacity in local communities, and therefore prefer to co-facilitate with local experts – particularly people of color and women. Have an idea about how you’d like me to adapt this training to your community? Let me know!

For all the social struggles being waged on picket lines, in courtrooms, and at dining room tables, some of the most challenging barriers to social change lie in our own heads and hearts. Internalized narratives of shame, guilt, or apathy can cripple our plans before they even hatch. The food we eat and the media we watch can dull our senses and heighten our blood pressure. And even our most well-intentioned actions can end up recycling age-old patterns of domination, keeping ourselves and others locked into spirals of erosion. In short, we can’t heal the systems around us if we don’t heal ourselves first. Surrounded as we are by toxic influences, self-care has become, as Audre Lorde once put it, an “act of political warfare”.

In this workshop, we’ll refine and expand our toolbox of self-care. We’ll hone our personal mythologies and develop indvidual vision statements. We’ll examine our present commitments of time and finances, and identify the ones that are no longer serving our best interests. We’ll find the strength in our own vulnerabilities, and share each of our own self-care strategies as we prepare to take our newfound skills as social permaculture designers into the world.

Workshop topics may include:

• Developing personal vision statements and action plans
• Commitment pruning
• Identifying spirals of erosion and abundance