Workshop Offerings

As a facilitator I hold a space in which groups may feel their own skill and leadership, practice together, and grow shared language and containers for connection. 

I offer four workshop types, with intentional room to customize to your setting and needs:

1. Introductions as Relational Openings
2. Practicing Feedback and Navigating Shame
3. A Series: On Resisting Burn Out
4. Seasonal: Land Based and Creative

>>> Read on for expanded workshop descriptions below.

These workshops flow in and out of my consultation practice, and shared between them all is the flow of my facilitation - the ways I hold space for connection - including:

• Container setting with ongoing consent in place;
• Creating shared goals and agreements;
• Practicing vulnerability with clear boundaries;
• Circle format slowed introductions;
• Deep listening without expectation of solution;
• Small group and solo reflective times;
• Reflecting back and mapping themes;
• Plant, ecosystem and seasonal relations as metaphor and grounding;
• Utilising feedback loops and processes where conflict occurs;
• Remembering joy, fascination, passion, movement, breath, creativity;
• Embracing not knowing and resisting the illusion of perfection.

My workshop offerings are outlined below, and will iterate to suit your needs:

1. Introductions as Relational Openings

In this workshop we will discuss and share lineages of practice and ancestry.

For many, and especially in white settler folks, colonialism has created a chasm of disconnection from our ancestral cultures. This disconnection often leaves us hungry, with a deep desire for belonging. This hunger can cause harm, to ecosystems and communities, when we extract without relationship, reciprocity or return.

Through thinking about connections to land and food, following plants, tides, moons and seasons, we will map our practices, values and ancestry. We will form these into introductions, and practice sharing them with each other.

What gifts do you hold? How may you support others in holding up theirs?

We will practice together to be able to call in our ancestors: the ones we want to walk beside us, guide and strengthen us; and the ones we acknowledge in a practice of accountability; lands; teachers. We will make room for the many gaps in connection that may exist. We will consider, research, and discuss entanglements.

For me, this practice of offering introductions as relational openings, has been expansive, generative, and in many ways life changing. I will share in this workshop where I learned this practice, and my experiences as a result of keeping with it, through many iterations and in ongoing ways.

2. Practicing Feedback and Navigating Shame

Navigating shame, especially the shame spiral of white fragility, and especially when standing in leadership positions and working on teams, is a skill we must practice.

In this workshop we will develop our toolkits for both giving and receiving feedback, and for navigating the shame that will likely arise when we have caused hurt or harm.

This includes practices of:

• Naming tension without speaking for someone else’s experience;
• Acknowledging mistakes without moving to defence, innocence or explanation;
• Separating the mistake from your value;
• Moving towards accountability;
• Using a feedback loop to get to shared understanding of what happened, and how it was experienced for different people;
• Self care and community care - resource sharing.

Feedback, both giving and receiving, is an ongoing practice. It will likely be uncomfortable, and while we will certainly get better over time, that discomfort will likely never go away!

We grow through feedback and we learn where we are uncomfortable, when we shed old skins. This is an edge we will work to explore in safe enough ways together. There is no perfection in this practice, that is why I name it as practice. Perfection is a hierarchical concept that has done a lot of harm, and which we will seek to be unlearning together in this workshop.

3. A Series: On Resisting Burn Out

This workshop series is designed for any one who has experienced burn-out, or is in burn-out, and wants to resource themselves, their team, or their organising group.

>> To rethink structures, slow down, build in spaciousness, and move towards a different way of being.

>> To be sustained and able to access the full spectrum of our feelings and experience, and also deliver the work we seek to create in this world.

Together we will:

• Map your org/project/work culture;
• Listen for patterns;
• Surface gaps and tensions;
• Plan for strategic resourcing of those gaps;
• Make visible a pathway to align your lived experience with the stated values and goals of your project and person.

This series will include seasonal mapping, planning for rest, and making room for release and closing where needed.

This work is sacred. We need an alternative to constant burn-out. Thinking together, and practicing together, to be building towards that alternative, is the conversation this workshop holds.

4. Seasonal: Land Based and Creative

I am a practitioner of land-based relational crafting and tending. This means that I make the supplies I work with, and/or gather them through relationship. I tend for the lands, people and other beings I live alongside through this practice.

I weave lessons, metaphor, inspiration and practices from this land based creative work, into all of my offers. Below are workshops that offer spaces for grounding, reflecting, and gathering together.

I offer the following four types of workshop, seasonally:

Wax Candle Dipping:

My favourite time to offer this is later fall through winter. A way to bring warmth and light into darker days, and to practice ritual together.

>>> As we circle the melted wax, as we dip and form our candles, we may ask: what gifts are held by darkness, by seasons of rest.

Blackberry and Dandelion Basket Weaving:

This is a form of weaving that intentionally uses invasive species to create small baskets of wonder and use. This is available when the blackberries are sending out their new growth in the spring, and when dandelions are at their tallest.

Spring into summer is the time to harvest and process these materials. It is possible to return to weave another time throughout the year, in fall or winter.

>> > As we harvest, process, prepare and weave, we may ask: what gifts do these species offer, of food, medicine and fibre, and what harm?

Pollinator Gardening

Growing and tending for gardens that support many pollinators in finding forage and habitat so they may thrive, is a pleasure. Sharing the knowledge behind how and why to do this, is a passion.

This workshop is available year round for the theory sharing side. In early spring -for inspiration into the active gardening season, or in winter, as we rest and reflect on what we noticed. A hands on version is available when the soils are warm, and through summer months as blooms abound, and into early fall - when leaving room for pollinator lifecycles to continue.

>>> As we talk and as we tend, we may ask: what habitat and forage, what joy and medicine, does this garden offer and to who?

Honey Bee Biology and Tending a Hive

I am an experienced honey bee keeper, and love to share the fascinating life cycle, social behaviour and complexity of tending a hive, along with the joys of local honey, propolis and pollen, and the magic of the vibrating honey bees themselves.

If you have honey bees I am available to travel to you, to support your practice and knowledge, and grow your routines.

If you do not have honey bees, and want to learn about them, or if you are thinking of tending a hive or two, I would love to share my passion.

In any case, I am passionate about sharing the many lessons of 14 years of tending hives, with you and/or your group.

>>> As we tend together, we may ask: how might we find balance, in what we take and what we give, as members of an ecosystem that expands from our hive, to the many miles of forage our honey bees visit, and to all those they interact with on their ways?

all photos by haddon common, time and times.