It’s a strange time to be alive; we can go online and find every imaginable opinion or hot take under the sun, but when it comes to speaking to our friends, loved ones and colleagues about subjects like gender politics, immigration or technology, it can be hard to know where to start. In a pivotal time for humanity, the cultural conversation around topics that matter most is becoming more polarised, more numbed out, and more disheartening.

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Often, these conversations get stuck because we can't move past arguing about facts. Facts matter, but to have authentic conversations, we have to learn how to speak with our whole being. To approach the act of speaking itself with a deep curiosity, flexibility and creativity. To be aware of what’s happening in us while we’re in dialogue, so that our connection takes us beyond our false certainties into new territory.

It begins with an attitude of 'I don't know'.

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This training is designed to teach you unique practices that help you 'commune while you're communicating', as well as the space to experiment with them. Often, practices like this are taught in personal development workshops or spiritual settings as a way to deepen our knowledge of ourselves. And while they are that, stopping there means we  miss vital ways of seeing for making sense and acting wisely in the times we live in. Eventually, we have to stop looking inward and focus our attention outward into the world; to engage whole-heartedly with the messy subjects we find in our social feeds and the nightly news.

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As a facilitator, I've been experimenting with how to bridge this gap for years, and this training brings together what I've learned. The core practice you'll be learning is Embodied Inquiry; a type of talking meditation which formed the foundation of my counselling training, and has been fundamental to all of the retreats and workshops I've run. Over time, I've also developed new techniques like Curiosity Hacking, Clay Manning (with Trish Blain) and Psychedelic Sensemaking, all of which involve coming back to our senses to help us to expand our perspective into new territory.

I’ve applied these practices in workshops, retreats and courses for thousands of people around the world. It was foundational to the work we did at Rebel Wisdom, and more recently I've used them while facilitating The Protopia Lab, encouraging people from different sides of the political divide to have a new conversation. I've also used them to help 200 people debate around Covid in public, and regularly work with household name corporate clients to embed these ways of seeing and being into the workplace. 

In this training, I’m going to teach all these techniques as an integrated practice: Embodied Sensemaking. This is a training, not a course. It’s designed to give you a solid foundation in these practices so that you can apply them to your own life, work and relationships. If you work with people or as a facilitator, you'll leave with a new set of tools you can draw on. If you’re more interested in learning how to approach polarising topics, these are techniques you can learn and apply in day to day conversations. Whatever your goals, it's a training that will teach you powerful tools of inquiry and how to apply them to a world that desperately needs new ideas and timeless wisdom.