Exploring the skills of eldership – Eldership Academy

Exploring the skills of eldership

Facilitating your life, your team, your relationships, your community

Our 2018 annual eldership retreat introduces facilitation as a core attribute of eldership. Amidst the beauty and calm of Farfa Abbey, in the heart of the Sabine hills, we will explore a Process Work approach to eldership. Process Work, pioneered by Arnold Mindell and colleagues around the world, is an open systems approach to training awareness to work with experience. The deep democracy attitude behind Process Work welcomes all ages, parts of ourselves, states of mind, abilities and experiences in learning to live together joyously, creatively and with dignity, on this planet we call home.  Life experience, personal growth, and social awareness are the life blood of a deeply democratic eldership.

Our retreat location offers a special atmosphere, for our learning community, from nature’s surrounding and centuries of Abbey life. The eldership of place is supportive for tapping into our powers to flourish, space to interact and to enjoy being alone as we discover our mojo anew for our personal path, sustaining best possible health, and contributing meaningfully in whatever phase of life and context we are in.

What is eldership?

We use the term eldership for an almost indescribable attitude of natural curiosity, vitality, and an overall helpfulness in a given situation. Eldership is not a fixed state, but a momentary experience, accessible to anyone. Role models, such as Nelson Mandela inspire a vision of eldership, in shining a light on the profound gifts and strengths of others. Such giants remind us of the innate characteristics that anyone of us can develop and use in our own lives, families and communities. At times, life itself seems to push us to the brink, even against our rational will, to discover moments of eldership through the many ups and downs we experience through life.

What will happen in the retreat?

Each day Nader and Julia will offer a short thematic presentation on aspects of facilitation and eldership. As an entire group we will practice facilitation skills using topics of interest to participants. Behind interactions are different levels of experience – the ability to stay grounded in everyday reality and analysis; the emotional bandwidth to embrace tension and complications; and a detachment to allow an impossible situation to move forward, with all the inherent ups and downs. Our group process method invites creative exchange that allows these different levels as well as many sides and aspects of a situation to become visible in fresh and frank exchange, and make space for spontaneous insights and creative solutions to arise. Topics and questions of participants will set the tone for our process.

Madeline Cunningham, artist and potter, will guide participants in experimenting with clay, inviting play and spontaneity, while integrating ideas and experiences creatively. Through the medium of Clay emotions and feelings can be expressed creatively where it can be hard to reach with the use of words.

Art, yoga, poetry, literature, and story-telling, small groups and inner work are other refreshing ways we may use depending on the moment, to share what matters, and get to know as yet undiscovered aspects of ourselves, and who we are becoming.

The rhythm of the day includes time to rest, to go for walks, to enjoy the local village, to enjoy good company, and the nourishing meals prepared by the nuns at Farfa Abbey.

This workshop is for:

• Awareness seekers of all ageswishing to develop eldership facilitation skills to apply in any life situation
• Providers and professionals working in the field of care, education and human services;
• People of any age desiring a life of meaning with an eldership-informed awareness; and