Thriving on Complexity: Transformative Learning Labs

Upcoming: Athens & Cairo

Complexity is the very essence of the world we seek to navigate in Transformative Learning Labs.

These labs are geared to help participants harmonize the interplay between internal and external complexity, aimed at aligning our skills with the world's demands and discovering "the simplicity on the far side of complexity."

The challenges facing humanity are so intricate that our era is sometimes termed a crisis of complexity. This underpins our current ecological, economic, and social upheavals. In every scenario, what humanity needs to bring to the table is more intricate than our prevailing perspectives can grasp. Even our own creations—technologies, cultural memes, and organizations—are growing in complexity, amplifying the demands of daily life.

Creative Entrepreneurship and the Transformation Economy

Education, psychology, and business practitioners alike are called to creatively engage with the emerging transformation economy, to establish flourishing practitioner habitats within emerging sociocultural ecosystems. This course explores the intersection of creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship in the context of rapidly changing cultural landscape. This is relevant for students in Psychology, Education, and Business in preparing for success as coaches, facilitators, organizational leaders, and entrepreneurs.

The Road From Eleusis: Psychedelics, Trauma Healing, and the Neuroscience of Transformative Learning

Both individually and collectively, human development unfolds multi-dimensionally through progressive stages that emerge within the enabling conditions of those liminal spaces that can support transformative learning. Over the millennia, the role of transformative learning in cultural evolution has included the use of psychedelics. Psychedelic experience can contribute to transforming habits, patterns, and lives. Although there have been approaches to transformative learning that demonstrably parallel the creative and transformative effects of psychedelics without their use, this course focuses on the role psychedelic compounds can have in healing and transforming individual and collective trauma.

While casual, frequent, and the non-ritualized use of psychedelic compounds can be harmful, even so and similar to mindfulness practice, the use of psychedelic compounds is on its way to becoming mainstream. The scientific study and utilization of psychedelics is at an inflection point as indicated by inclusion on the list of the top 10 annual scientific breakthroughs in the journal, Science. Both hyping and debunking distort what we do and don’t know about psychedelics and neuroplasticity, in effect problematizing the application of research to therapeutic and transformative efforts. This course reviews contemporary research on psychedelic practice in the context of cultural history, mythology, and political development.

Purposeful Pathways: Professional Practice and The Coach's Journey

Human well-being thrives on meaning and purpose. Integrating meaning and purpose together into a coherent livelihood and professional practice is a challenge. It is challenging to cultivate a practitioner habitat attuned to local worlds and practitioner frames such as coaching, psychotherapy, facilitating, managing, and entrepreneurship.

To achieve meaning, purpose and livelihood, most professional practices require creating a generative entrepreneurial ecosystem. This course weaves together developing leadership competencies for professionals necessary for transforming the professions in ways that realign the professions to their deeper and sacred purpose. Finding one's true calling, one's sacred purpose, enables us to lead lives in which our passions and capabilities are forged into our livelihood.