Who are we in a changing climate?

What are we called to do?

Who are we called to be?

The Transformative Climate Advocacy Program is a self-paced, online learning journey that explores the interior dimensions of people’s engagement with climate change—worldviews, beliefs, emotions and mindsets. Including those of change-makers, ourselves, while also expanding and empowering us!

The program integrates theory, transformative practice and application creating a community of change agents and opening up new inner and outer horizons.

Research in psychology and worldviews helps us understand not only what people believe about climate change but why they believe it and how they see themselves as agents of change (or not). Understanding this helps us to navigate values-based conflicts and design solutions that speak to the motivations of different communities.

Additionally, engaging with our own psychological and spiritual development helps us to show up in fuller ways. That supports us to work with emotions of grief, anger and denial as doorways. This deepens our impact, awakens us to generative futures for all of life and supports new ways of approaching change work.

The program includes contributions from experienced climate change agents who integrate interior development in their work, and it includes embodiment and awareness practices, reflection and inquiry.

This program, while focusing on climate and planetary sustainability, will benefit advocates and change-makers in any field! You’ll find a more detailed course description below.

This offering is in partnership with Worldview Journeys and BeBenevolution

The very pressures of climate disruption may function as a catalyst that awakens humanity to the kind of planetary awareness and interdependent global actions that we need to create life-sustaining societies.

With regard to this crisis, it’s become almost a cliché to say that we need a mind-shift or a paradigm change. This signifies an increasing recognition within the climate and sustainability movements that the most important barriers—and supports—for transformative change are, in fact, interior.

The dominant, exterior-oriented climate strategies (focused on governance, economic incentives, technology) are necessary but inadequate. It’s become clear that new approaches are urgently needed—approaches that can support a more profound transformation towards sustainable, regenerative and life-enhancing societies.

This program explores such new approaches and focuses in on the interior dimensions of climate change, aiming to:

1. Expand our understanding of cultural and psychological development (ie., of how mindsets and worldviews change and evolve) and apply these insights to climate advocacy and change work;

2. Support our own psychological development and inner transformation, to deepen impact and empower ourselves as change-makers;

3. ‘Lean into’ the magical and mystical, to tap into the deeper purpose and greater potential that’s called for in this transformative historical moment.
   
   Each of these purposes is further explained below.

Expand Understanding of Culture & Psychology to Support Change Work

How we perceive life, each other and our planetary challenges is shaped by our meaning-making or mindset. As Tibetan cosmologies recognize, the world we live in is manomaya or mind-made. However, this also means it can be unmade or remade by engaging with thoughts, beliefs, and emotions! Systems thinker Donella Meadows identified that one of the deepest ‘leverage points’ for systemic change is the mindset or paradigm out of which the system arises.

This program aims to expand our understanding of these mindsets or paradigms—focusing on adult developmental psychology and the evolution of worldviews—and apply their insights to advocacy and change work. This is crucial as one of the main challenges confronting the climate movement today is how to appeal to both hearts and minds, inviting people into sustained, collective action and positive change.

Developmental patterns shape how people make meaning of climate change, what motivates us to act and can inform how we design and communicate change initiatives. Moreover, being able to understand and relate to different perspectives and experiences—including those that contradict our own—is essential to the process of forging sustainable, inclusive solutions.

Support Personal Transformation to Empower Change-makers

The program also aims to support our own psycho-spiritual development—that is, one’s personal growth and transformation. This is crucial for those who aspire to be transformative change-makers. We can’t convincingly ask others to change if we’re, personally, not willing to change nor familiar with the experience of transformation.

Change in culture and systems is shaped by the development and maturity of the change agent. In Otto Scharmer’s words: “the success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervener”. Exploring our frames and values, mental habits and states of mind alongside embodied awareness is therefore a powerful investment in our activism!

Research shows developmental growth forges a gradual widening of viewpoints, an increased ability to deal with complexity and uncertainty and an expanded circle of care and compassion. Through embodied exercises and exploratory practices we’re inviting and challenging ourselves to grow into the very planetary perspectives needed to address our planetary issues.

Lean Into the Mystical to Tap Into Deeper Purpose & Potential

The program invites all of us to explore and ‘lean into’ the magical and mystical. We do this with the intention of tapping into deeper purpose and greater potential. This is called for in our present challenging and transformatively historical times. As sustainability advocates and change-makers we’re well aware that humanity is on a highly destructive pathway. Facing this heart-breaking reality, dealing with our own fears, anger and grief, supports us to stay committed to constructive and creative responses.

This is a ‘higher art’ that we can practice together, inviting and revealing wisdom and inner integration to emerge. We will share spaces where we can explore the complexity of our feelings allowing deeper purpose, wisdom and creativity to surface. Such responses may turn out to be essential in turning this crisis into a chance—an opportunity for a new world to be born while an old one is dying.

All in all, this program is going to be fun and engaging, profound and challenging, create a community of transformative change agents and open up new inner and outer horizons. Come join us on this transformative journey!

Practical

The program is theoretical, experiential, and applied. Each session will include: 1) content (theory and knowledge); 2) experience (e.g., awareness practices, embodiment, shadow work, interactive exploration); and 3) practice (application or case-studies).

To deepen, explore and apply the material in your own context, work, and life, we have developed our live course into a self-paced program. You’ll also receive insightful readings and other supportive materials as well as stimulating reflection questions and practices to boost your personal learning journey.

Since this course was originally offered in-person, you'll find references to collective practices, which we have translated into individual exercises. We encourage you to take part in both the somatic and break out portions of this course. In some cases you may be able to work with a friend or colleague by setting up the practice and sharing pertinent practice aids.

Learning outcomes

• To explore ideas and insights from research on worldviews and adult developmental psychology in ways that are insightful and actionable for climate change and advocacy.

• To support deepening self- and other-awareness learning about mindsets, meaning-making, and the development of consciousness.

• To engage in personal development through embodiment and awareness practices, working with emotions, shadow work, somatic awareness, and inquiries exploring our own internal landscapes.

• To learn about climate action projects and campaigns that draw on and integrate human interiors and psycho-social development.

• To create a community of change agents interested in integrating self, culture, and systems.

Who Should Participate?

This offering will be of most use to:

• Change agents who seek to deepen their impact by integrating human interiors in their change work.

• Change agents interested in supporting their own and other’s development in support of transformative (climate) action.

• Researchers and practitioners passionate about applying adult psycho-social-spiritual development to (climate) change work.

Note: All changemakers and concerned planetary citizens are welcome to join, learn, and explore how these insights can be applied to your own fields of action and expertise. The program is useful and applicable well beyond climate and sustainability fields.

Course Sessions

Session 1
Radical Presence: Coming Together—Being With Each Other & Climate Change

Session 2
Meaning Making, Communication & Transformative Leadership with Guest Contributor Barrett Brown

Session 3
Worldviews as ‘Big Stories’: Understanding Cultural Landscapes

Session 4
Community Engagement & Action: Working across Differences with Guest Contributor Stephan Martineau

Session 5
Reflection, Integration, & Shadow: Powers & Pitfalls

Additional Session
Post-Progressivism, Worldviews, & Climate Change Policies with Guest Contributor Steve McIntosh

Session 6
Cultural Responsiveness and Pluralism in Transformative Change with Guest Contributors Lynette Thorstensen & Sushant Shrestha

Session 7
Self as Instrument & Leadership Embodiment with Guest Contributor Anouk Brack

Session 8
Going Forth: Awareness in Action

Optional Add-ons:

Climate Change Developmental Assessment

3-session Coaching Package with Abigail, Lynam, PhD

No matter how much you have accomplished, you may find yourself in the midst of a deepening or an opening into a new version of your self, your work, and your life's purpose. You may sense the dawning transformation of your own awareness as a result of changing life circumstances, and you may be at a place in your life where individualized attention with an experienced coach can offer you the support to make the most of your readiness for change.

Abigail is offering a specially priced package of 3 coaching sessions to help you make the most of your experience with the self-paced Transformative Climate Advocacy Program. If you decide you would benefit from individual coaching after beginning the program, you can purchase this package at its regular price of $600.

*After registering for the self-paced program, you will be given the opportunity to add the 3-session Coaching Package to your purchase for $450. This package is also available in the classroom for $600 should you decide to purchase after beginning the course.

Registration

*Program special pricing for optional add on products valid only for Sustaining and Supporting levels of tuition.

Core Faculty

Guest Contributors