"From Darkness to Dawn:
Staying Grounded and Hopeful
in Challenging Times"
With Courage
Saturday 11/2
9:00a-5:00p
General Admission $95
Supporting Admission $145
Student/Financial Hardship $45
Our lives are bound together. It takes extraordinary courage to stay open, connected and hopeful in dark times. War, violence, poverty, growing economic inequity, rising corporate greed, grave social injustices, and an impending massive ecological crisis threaten the well-being and survival of all. It is critical that we find ways of coming together collaboratively to promote care, justice, equity, and flourishing.
Yet as the world burns, we are keenly aware that there is love and beauty all around. While we need more folks who can do the truth-seeing and truth-telling in our institutions and our movements, we must work to counterbalance our awareness of pain, stress and suffering in the world, with our inclination to celebrate and center life-giving qualities of joy and pleasure. This is not a call to put on rose-colored glasses, but to help us remember there is always more than suffering here.
Our work at Courage is oriented around this seeming paradox. We are committed to helping people stay in touch with the fact of suffering while also not losing sight of the truth of beauty, love and deep ‘okayness’ in this world. We see this as the core of spiritual practice.
This workshop is designed to support all who care about our world—spiritual practitioners, educators, parents, counselors, social workers, medical professionals, human rights activists, eco-justice activists, caring citizens and so on--find the strength and hope to sustain in their work in life-giving ways.
Through contemplative and somatic practice, reflection, journaling, movement and play, we will explore practices that help us learn to:
1) LOVE in more nurturing, joyful ways;
3) SEE the profound interconnectedness of all things and develop a greater appreciation of our agency and potential to effect change;
3) HEAL from burnout, hopelessness and despair and reconnect to fundamental sources of joy;
4) ENVISION the beautiful world we know is possible by reclaiming our capacity for hope, imagination and creativity; and
5) ACT in responsive, life-giving ways that affirm the beauty and sacredness in and around all of us.
About Courage of Care
We launched in 2016 in order to provide a community and platform to help social service and caring professionals, activists, community leaders, parents and all others who care about our world deepen their profound capacity for compassion and creativity and also to learn ways of critically assessing, navigating and transforming complex systems within which they are embedded with a strong sense of purpose and agency. We see the integration of contemplative training, critical pedagogy and systems thinking as critical to our project of collective liberation.
We know that contemplative and spiritual development is central to helping us not only reconnect, but to survive and flourish. We also feel strongly that transformative social justice requires more than just personal transformation. Our liberation is contingent upon our ability to understand structures and systems of oppression, domination, and inequity that inhibit our capacity to realize a more caring, just world. If our contemplative training is not coupled with a critical social and systemic analysis, we may not only fail to transform oppressive systems, but we may end up reproducing them.
We therefore developed an integrated model that weaves tools for both personal and social transformation to help us all develop the courage and skills necessary to realize and sustain our shared visions.
Our diverse, interdisciplinary, intergenerational and interfaith team—with years of experience in education, health care, social work, trauma-informed care, contemplative studies, and social activism—offers education, training, consulting and advocacy services across the country to help individuals, communities and organizations realize their courageous, caring potential.
Learn more about us www.courageofcare.org
General Admission $95
Supporting Admission $145
Student/Financial Hardship $45
It is the mission of the Boston Center for Contemplative Practice to provide balanced financial accessibility to our services. We believe that what we offer should be for everyone. We offer scholarships for our professional trainings and we offer a 3-tiered, self-selecting pricing system for events and classes. Please contact info@thebccp.com if there are ever any concerns around financial accessibility.
About the Facilitators
Brooke D. Lavelle, Ph.D., is the Co-Founder and President of the Courage of Care Coalition, a nonprofit dedicated to facilitating personal and social transformation through relational compassion training, anti-oppressive pedagogies and systems and community organizing tools.
Brooke holds a PhD in Buddhist Studies and Cognitive Science from Emory University, an MA in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism from Columbia University and a BA in Religion and Psychology from Barnard College. Her academic work focuses on the diversity of contemplative models for cultivating compassion and mindfulness.
She is a consultant to the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies AMA Project in Potsdam, Germany and is co-developing curricula and pedagogy to support sustainable systemic transformation. She served as a lecturer at San Francisco State University for several years where she taught a contemplative-based course on compassion and social justice. She also served as a consultant to Teacher’s College, Columbia University's new initiative on Spirituality and Education and was the Senior Education Consultant to Mind & Life's Ethics, Education, and Human Development Initiative. Brooke founded a compassion and equity learning community in the Bay Area and was a member of the Initiative for Contemplation, Equity and Action (ICEA). She previously consulted for the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford University and the Greater Good Science Center (GGSC) at UC Berkeley.
Through her work at Courage, Brooke regularly leads compassion-based, anti-oppressive trainings and consultations. In addition, Brooke co-developed a relational model for training compassion, called Sustainable Compassion Training (SCT). She is also trained in Cognitively-Based Compassion Training (CBCT), Compassionate Mind Training (CMT), and Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), and has taught and adapted these programs in a variety of educational and clinical settings. Brooke now splits her time between Berlin, Brooklyn and the Bay Area and travels regularly to lead compassion-focused workshops and retreats in the US and abroad.
Juliana Santoyo, M.Ed. is core faculty at Courage of Care and is the fo-founder of the Black Lotus Collective in Boston, a space centering the healing of people of historically oppressed backgrounds. She holds a B.A in Human Development from Boston College and an MEd degree from Boston University. Her professional background is as a teacher in public schools in Boston and New York where she works to design and implement new models of education that integrate a liberatory education approach that centers the voices of the historically marginalized in literature and history while providing opportunities for healing and processing of intergenerational trauma in the classroom through the use of contemplative practices, and by encouraging the reclaiming of their voice and power.
Over the past several years, Juliana has been exploring sustainable models for healing and peacebuilding not just in schools, but also in communities in the United States and in Colombia, her country of birth. This has prompted her to think more critically about how contemplative institutions might evolve to offer more inclusive space for people from historically marginalized backgrounds without recreating the violence that white supremacist and hierarchical organizational models impart on those with less power.
Additionally, with a an interest in how these models may be used in the global context, Juliana is co-designing a contemplative-practice based peacebuilding curriculum for use in the context of the Colombian armed conflict. Through this new endeavor she continues to enrich her professional focus, exploring how contemplative practice, a decolonized education of our collective history, and scientific methodologies can come together to explore new and sustainable ways of living.