Deep Academy
Transformative Tools and Skills for Facing Collapse
About Deep Academy
Spring 2021 we are offering an online study group focusing on the remarkable book by David Loy, Ecodharma: Buddhist Teachings for the Ecological Crisis.
You are welcome to join us at any point in this series. All of our study group sessions are being recorded and you can catch up with us at your own pace.
Each session is filled with lively conversation – and the study group has no requirement of a Buddhist Practice. Please feel free to sign up and join us in the in-depth study of this important book.
Toward the end of the series the author, David Loy will join us for a deep dive / Q and A. into his intentions for this book.
Even after the live sessions are complete, you will be able to participate by watching the recordings.
Welcome and enjoy.
About Deep Academy
In our live and on-demand offerings each person will choose their own emphasis and level of engagement – knowing that every other practitioner is also crafting their own practices – practices based on reconnecting ourselves with the long-ago forfeited primary sources of meaning in human life: Deeper Self, Other People, Earth and Soul.
In this unique learning and support environment engaged practitioners can find alliance with kindred spirits, to encourage their practices of reconnection, and encourage a far deeper level of communication, collaboration and right-relationship than we have ever known in our now-toxic, Business as Usual Human Operating System.
We hope you will join us for a sample of the Deep Academy offerings described below, and possibly continue exploring the many different facets of this work of building our inner tool-kits to help us engage in this, the most important conversation and predicament in human history
Whether you choose to participate in just one Deep Academy Learning Series, or engage in a long term Community of Practice, we hope that you find great value in your participation, and perhaps make some significant, even life-long connections along the way.
Below you will find our introductory offerings. The list of Living Resilience Deep Academy offerings will be growing by at least two per month through 2020 and beyond. It will also be bolstered by our schedule of live, online Community of Practice sessions. All of this information will come to you after you sign up for your first Deep Academy Learning Series.
Living in Two Worlds – Introduction 1
These are the two gateway / introductory learning series in the Living Resilience / Deep Academy learning library. From here a sincere participant (or study group) can pursue deep dives into a number of Collapse-Aware topics.
RESILIENCE – Introduction 2
In this, Resilience Series, we each find our own definition of Resilience in these troubled
times – And, we self-assess our own resilience skills including: Self-Regulation, Co-Regulation,
Meditation or Mindfulness practices and much more.
Community of Practice: Inviting the Waves
To engage with the Living Resilience / Deep Academy Community of Practice is to engage with a much needed cadre of supportive, kindred spirits. The work of this community is to support each other in self-selected practices of Reconnection and expansion of individual and collective capacities to be fully present in the face of ever-larger stressors in life. Subscribers to the Community of Practice have not only the specially curated content and weekly online focused gatherings, they also have full access to all Deep Academy resources and Learning Series.
Take My Hand: Conscious Parenting in a Time of Stolen Dreams
This Special-Focus series of parent and child interviews and curated support content is a remarkable opportunity to hear from Collapse-Aware families, what skills, capacities and practices they have adopted, to face our daunting future with sobriety, love and grace… or at least with as little struggle as possible.
A four session Live-Online webinar series recorded in April 2020.
With Becca Young-Allen and Dean Spillane-Walker this seminar explored: Self and Co-Regulation, building your own support group, hard-earned mentoring on the inner and outer preparations for facing difficult times at home and in your community and how to reframe the Coronavirus pandemic from fear, despair and separation – to an opportunity to reconnect with: Deeper Self, Other People, Earth and Soul. What if this is a much needed pause and catalyst for transforming our collapsing Business as Usual world?
Contribution Levels
Our offerings are intended to be as universally accessible as possible – specifically to invite larger financial contribution from those of greater means, and support the participation of those of lesser means. Each time you choose to participate in a program or subscribe to a Community of Practice, you will have an opportunity to choose your level of financial contribution to this project. This choice-based method of pricing is sometimes called, the Gift Economy. We hope you will avail yourself of these levels of financial contribution in a way that encourages your full participation, and, when possible, also supports others.
In the work of Living Resilience / Deep Academy our mission is to offer transformative support and resources to people who are bravely facing the human-caused collapse of Earth and Human Systems we are currently in, and the even larger collapse events to come.
This two part introductory series is the gateway into this remarkable body of work.
In Part One, Living in Two Worlds we are offering:
A sober reframing of our current global situation from separation, inaction, misinformation, propaganda and apathy – to a grounded, vetted view of the actual impact of our Human Operating System on the Web of Life in which we live.
An empowering reframing of our apparent shared human condition of learned-helplessness, learned-lack of agency and awareness – to a reconnecting with the primary sources of meaning, relationship and power in human life: Deeper Self, Other People, Earth and Soul.
A primer for the creation of a self-generated set of practices intended to reconnect us with those primary sources of meaning . It is through these shared practices of reconnection, practitioners of this work experience access to new levels of aliveness, possibility and relationship – no matter how daunting a future they see ahead of them.
In Living in Two Worlds (the first of many online learning series here in Deep Academy) you will be able to discern if this level of inner and outer work is right for you. It is our hope that you will find great value and possibly additional personal clarity even if Living in Two Worlds is your only experience of this work.
Should you decide to go further on this path we will look forward to many warm and empowering sessions together, and receiving your input as to what future topics we should add to this growing library of Living Resilience / Deep Academy online learning series.
LIVING RESILIENCE.NET / DEEP ACADEMY…
We are living in the most challenging and important time in human history.
In the work of Living Resilience / Deep Academy our mission is to offer transformative support and resources to people who are bravely facing the human-caused collapse of Earth and Human Systems we are currently in, and the even larger collapse events to come.
This two part introductory series is the gateway into this remarkable body of work.
In RESILIENCE we are offering:
A bold, often uncomfortable, but deeply empowering exploration
into how each of us defines and discerns what it means to be Resilient.
Standing on the shoulders of the important work we’ve done in Part One,
Living in Two Worlds, we can again self-assess what level of problem,
challenge or predicament we are in, and how interested we are in
building our resilience skills to face those apparent challenges.
Needless to say there is a large difference in the preparatory strategy
of someone who sees the world as “just fine” and “maybe needs a few
minor tweaks here and there.” – vs. a person who sees our world through
a sober Global-Collapse-Aware perspective.
Each of the four sections of the Resilience Series offers another level of
depth and strength of the various skills and practices offered to assist
each practitioner in the building of their inner skill set.
Again, we intend that, if you were to stop with this work at this point,
you would have much more clarity and discernment regarding your
possible next step in skills building and Sense Making as you pursue
your own path into these troubled times.
If you do choose to join us in this ongoing Community of Practice in
Living Resilience / Deep Academy, we will be happy to welcome you
into one of the many different areas of focus in this work.
Whatever your choices of emphasis and focus in this work of deep reconnection
with: Deeper Self, Others, Earth and Soul, you will find kindred spirits
with whom you can: expand capacities, build skills, refine your abilities
in experiencing and holding paradox, sense making in turbulent times,
and becoming far more aware and facile in seeing and integrating
individual and group shadow… and much more.
Welcome to the work of Living Resilience / Deep Academy and welcome
to a grand opportunity to build RESILIENCE.
Should you decide to go further on this path we will look forward to many warm and empowering sessions together, and receiving your input as to what future topics we should add to this growing library of Living Resilience / Deep Academy online learning series. You are welcome at any time, to engage in our ongoing Community of Practice.
This membership based online Community of Practice offers support, feedback and a much needed sense of camaraderie while walking this deeply rewarding and often challenging path.
Your monthly subscription membership in our Community of Practice (information below)
gives you unlimited access to any and all of the Learning Series in the Deep Academy library.
The Living Resilience Community of Practice is designed to be of service in times exactly like the ones we are in right now.
“Continuing to do pioneering sacred work in a world as crazy and painful as ours without constantly grounding yourself in Sacred Practice would be like running into a forest fire dressed only in a paper tutu.”
– Jungian analyst and author, Marion Woodman, as quoted in The Impossible Conversation: Choosing Reconnection and Resilience at the End of Business as Usual by Dean Walker (2017)
***
It’s a terrible feeling to sense a threat coming. It is worse when the threat reveals itself to be real, especially when many of those you warned still dismiss it, and you do not know whether their reaction is rooted in apathy or doubt or fear. What is a warning, in the end, if not a confession – a declaration of what you value and what you will fight to protect?
To warn of a threat and be dismissed is to have your own worth questioned, along with the worth of all you strive to keep safe.
I used to think that the worst feeling in the world would be to tell a terrible truth and have no one believe it.
Sarah Kendzior
Author of: Hiding in Plain Sight: the invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America
And, the second, in which we are reminded of the core human need to be accepted, seen, honored in your own family, tribe or community. It also offers a piercing reminder of how traumatic it is to be dismissed in an atmosphere of: fear, apathy, doubt or ridicule.
The Living Resilience – Community of Practice is intended to be a safe container for people who are aware of the current human-caused collapse of Earth and Human Systems. It is also intended for those who are hungry for a community within which they can find: support, understanding, resonance, generous sharing of Practices of Reconnection… not to mention: Co-Regulation, ceremony, celebration, immense creativity and collaboration… and, even the F-word… Fun.
The Living Resilience – Community of Practice is set up to be as useful and valuable for a relative newcomer to our global predicament as it is for the long-time ‘collapse-atarian.’ This Community of Practice is a vehicle for deep exploration and integration of both foundational and advanced individual and group practices that can be utilized in virtually any country around the world. It is quite possible that a person just beginning their study of Self-Regulation and Circling could find themselves in profound conversation with a long-standing master practitioner of Shadow Work or Trauma-Healing methods.
The calling of these times is clearly a calling for Reconnection with our long-ago forfeited, primary sources of meaning in human life: Deeper Self, Other People, Earth and Soul. It is also a calling for the creation of an entirely new way for humans to conduct themselves with each other, and with Earth herself.
***
The Living Resilience Community of Practice offers a number of resources from which to choose:
* Access to all COP online gatherings in any given month and all COP curated content. These COP online gatherings are all recorded for unlimited watching to match your schedule.
* Access to the Deep Academy / Community of Practice SLACK networking platform.
* Additional Small Group Gatherings to be scheduled and attended by the participants in each small group.
* Access to the entire library of Living Resilience / Deep Academy online video learning series.
* Access to all special-focus series like, Take My Hand: Conscious Parenting in a Time of Stolen Dreams and Shadow Work.
* Access to all Poetry of Predicament Podcast (YouTube channel) episodes and access to special, archived interviews and additional curated content.
* Access to all Safe Circle Calls.
Living Resilience / Community of Practice, like all Living Resilience / Deep Academy offerings, is priced on a Gift Economy Sliding Scale. The Community of Practice is self-paced, and based on a subscription model, encouraging participants to engage for at least a few months at a time. Ideally a person, or a team, would sign up for an initial three month period… and renew as desired, to continue to deepen their important inner work over time.
You are free to unsubscribe and resubscribe to the Community of Practice as needed, in order to fit your scheduling and break-time needs.
Take My Hand: Conscious Parenting in a Time of Stolen Dreams is an ongoing, ever-growing set of very personal interviews with Collapse-Aware Parents.
The experience level and personal resource level of these parents range from a sense of overwhelm, struggle and even existential anxiety – to a sense of grounded wisdom, resilience and deep inner resourcing – as they share about the daily challenges of raising children in an era that is now commonly called, the Sixth Mass Extinction.
Far from being a morose and discouraging series of rants or complaints, this remarkably intimate series of interviews has proven to be a testament to the life affirming possibilities that can be generated, even when we see the world through a frame of predicament and collapse.
In addition to the interviews at the center of this Take My Hand series, we will also be posting support content ranging from related articles and videos to all manner of content that can remind us of the immense beauty of beauty of parenthood and childhood and of life itself.
There are many parents and non-parents alike who find great solace, kinship and inspiration in their participation in, their viewing of, this remarkable series.
Past Programs
What are the Inner and Outer: Tools, Skills, Preparations, and Core Capacities, we need to not only survive these times, but to Thrive?
From Predicament to Possibility
A Four Session Live-Online Webinar Series
With Becca Young-Allen and Dean Spillane-Walker
April 2020
All sessions have been recorded and are available for unlimited viewing by all future participants.
Registering for this series also gives you access to a curated set of additional media and resources to deepen the work of the series, and, other Deep Academy offerings focusing on topics related to this focus on empowerment in times of great stress and predicament.
The suggested price for this series: $100.
Please do not let price considerations keep you from participating in this series. You will find reduced-cost, and even no-cost ‘coupons’ to choose from as you register for this program. This Gift Economy model of pricing all Living Resilience / Deep Academy offerings is intended to make this work accessible to people at all levels of financial resources.
Becca Young-Allen and her then-husband, Chris Martenson, chose to take a conscious, alternative track, away from the Business as Usual way of life… in these past more than 15 years they have created a remarkably empowered family, a gorgeous, fully functional, alternative, rural home, and generated numerous ways of sustaining themselves while being of service to people within their community and around the world.
One would have to look long and hard to find a better exemplar of generating “a more beautiful world our hearts know is possible”, than Becca Young Allen.
“The present crisis is significant. It is also only an example of more to come. We need to navigate this one and learn how to become exquisite at navigating this entire class of events.”
– Jordan Hall, Situational Assessment Right Now
This will be an unusual, and we believe, quite powerful, set of online webinar gatherings.
Yes we have a huge list of potential topics, ranging from the brass-tacks physical preparations for living in a community, a nation that is in at least partial shut-down… To the interpersonal skills that are being called for even now as we settle in to a new reality of social distancing, thousands of businesses shutting down, economic melt-down, an impossible increase in individual and collective stress levels and so much more.
While we may indeed cover the more physical and material, Outer preparations in this series… we will pay close attention to the emotional, psychological, spiritual, and energetic flags and needs that are expressed – and do our best to explore opportunities for powerful truths to be shared, and losses and wounds to be acknowledged and spoken.
We will include a considerable amount of small-group sharing time, in each session.
***
Some of the questions that informed Becca’s recent facilitation of a Community Meeting in her neighborhood…
In a culture that is already vastly isolated and where loneliness is a national epidemic, how might we respond creatively to a virus for whom the recommended medicine is further isolation and separation?
How can we respond to the Corona virus in a way that increases connection, strengthens our web of community, while empowering our individual sovereignty and capacity to respond to challenge as prudent adults?
How can we respond to this virus, which is an intelligent being, without resorting to the fear and language of enemy and war (kill, eradicate, defend against)?
What is a grounded, prudent, wise, connected adult response?
The four sessions:
In four Thursday sessions, with support materials for engagement between sessions, we will:
- Introduce Self-Regulation and Co-Regulation practices immediately available for use in your home setting.
- Introduce methods for the creation and sustaining of local support groups or project or study groups.
- Introduce support group leadership skills and variations that, again, could be used immediately in your home setting.
- Invite deep listening and deep sharing (self-assessed) for as much connection and support as a person may desire, in an online setting.
- Seminar-based exploration of new ways of doing and being on every level: personal, relationship, family, neighborhood and beyond.
- Opportunities to collaborate and explore with others the use of Deep Adaptation’s Four Rs and other self-assessment tools to facilitate self-growth, expansion of core capacities, and self-discovery.
This is a lot to cover in four, 2-hour, Thursday sessions, and many of these topics will be introduced at-best. Again, we offering this brief series as both a stand-alone set of focused gatherings… and, as an introduction to the larger body of work that is, Living Resilience / Deep Academy.
In our ongoing Community of Practice (starting MAY 2020), we all have the time and space to dive deep into personal and shared practices for reconnection.
Your participation in this four session introductory series will also give you access to all elements in our Deep Academy library and to the recordings and live April sessions of our Community of Practice gatherings.
Other possible Transformational Resilience topics: (many of the topic choices will be determined by the priorities of the participants)
Reframing the Coronavirus pandemic from fear, despair and separation – to an opportunity to reconnect with: Deeper Self, Other People, Earth and Soul.
Resilience Skills Building
Self-Regulation
Co-Regulation
Inviting, forming, facilitating your own local focus-group or support-group.
Bringing a powerful reframing and context to your own family dynamics, plans and relationships… within these troubled times.
Practical guidance for sane, thoughtful gathering of supplies for extended “Shelter in Place” periods.
The Facilitators:
Rebecca Young-Allen is an ordained inter-faith clergy, spiritual and emotional healer and guide, a certified Focusing practitioner and teacher, community builder/weaver, mother of 3 grown children, nature lover, gardener and homesteader.
Becca is dedicated to helping others love themselves as they are, while releasing the negative beliefs and traumas of being human, to find their own path of emergent flow and positive relational connection to Self, Nature and Spirit in the new paradigm.
“Everything I offer, I have lived and experienced in my own coming-alive process by following the pathless path of saying YES to everything, including every hard time and dark-night-of-the-soul along the way. It is from this welcoming everything that grounded joy as a way of life can truly emerge.”
(Here is a video of an interview with Rebecca about her recent leadership in community building in the face of the Coronavirus in her neighborhood. And, Here is a recent interview with Becca and her daughters, Grace and Erica Martenson.)
Dean Spillane-Walker has been a student of spiritual traditions, energetics and shamanic practices since his teens and carried those practices into his extensive experience of wilderness guiding and exploration. When he combined his decades of study of psychology and transformational facilitation he was a vital part of training teams that provided life changing learning experiences for thousands of executives, gang members, intimate couples and deeply engaged spiritual adepts around the world.
Dean’s life-changing shift of direction and focus is well detailed in his 2017 book, The Impossible Conversation: Choosing Reconnection and Resilience at the End of Business as Usual.
Dean’s singular focus now is offering his gifts to our predicament-laden world in a spirit of inviting beauty, grace and love – without attachment to outcome. He is the founder of LivingResilience.net and the Collapse-Aware learning program, Deep Academy. He is the host of the Poetry of Predicament Podcast (a YouTube channel) and a volunteer moderator on the Deep Adaptation Forum.
All of Dean’s programs and coaching are grounded in decades of direct experience, expanded through devotional practice, and validated, when possible, through current science.
Ultimately we hope that many of you will be enchanted with your experience of this series, From Predicament to Possibility…Transformational Resilience: Inner and Outer Tools for Facing Disruptive Times, and choose to continue on with us in our ongoing, Community of Practice.
Past Programs
It is with this pre-course preparation in mind that Living Resilience offers: the Deep Academy video learning series, online remote coaching for individuals and groups, online support groups / Safe Circle Groups and abundant support materials, practices and resources.
Brené Brown
Living Resilience Summer Training Series 2019
There is another name commonly used for these times: The Sixth Mass Extinction. For the relatively small number of people who are brave enough to boldly name and face this existentially challenging time, a now-overused quote, seems to be particularly fitting,
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
This series of online-streaming training sessions are intended to encourage the generation of precisely this kind of ‘new’ thinking. The calling of this time is for a complete transformation of human life on Earth.
This series of learning and training sessions is a combination of live training participation, online participants, and later viewing of sessions for those who are unable to join in real-time… or those who desire additional practice rounds with selected sessions and material.
This live-online series is now over…
If you are interested in participating by viewing session recordings, please sign up below.
Attend Online
If you or your group are interested in participating through
viewing session recordings and self-paced engagement
with the Between-Session materials, receive all links to
all the program recordings and support materials
by subscribing in the section above…
We are offering this course at no cost.
If you are inspired to financially support this
Living Resilience / Deep Academy project
Please donate using the button below…
Cost
If you are unsure of an appropriate amount…It is safe to say that this type of training and access to the resources and the body of work that underpin it, would be under-valued at $100.
We are thrilled to direct any additional donations (beyond covering base expenses) to a fund that enables participation by people who are unable to pay.
It is strongly recommended that a participant attend and experience all of the sessions of this series. Ideally in real-time. It is also strongly recommended for participants, whenever possible, to engage in the training sessions and practices, with friends, family members or other close allies. The majority of this work is best done in the company of kindred spirits, close and committed partners who are also engaged in the deep and demanding work of these predicament-laden times.
Each session will include a selection of the core elements of this Living Resilience body of work, including:
• Self-Regulation (and group Self-Regulation) practices.
• Mindfulness and other meditation practices – beyond customary meditation
• Expansion of Awareness and Presence
• Predicament vs Problem vs challenge
• Learning segments re: “What got us into these predicaments?”
• Defining and Redefining, Hope.
• Reconnection with our long-ago forfeited primary sources of meaning: Deeper Self, Others, Earth and Soul.
• Each person adopting their own particular practices based on their needs, their circumstances and their vision of living into a new world.
• Despair and Grief as deeply important guides to deeper aliveness and authenticity.
• Facility with and basic understanding of individual and collective Shadow dynamics in our turbulent world.
• Reclaiming core truth, integrity and agency.
• Reinventing our sense of purpose.
To financially support the ongoing deepening and development of this important work, please consider donating. Thank you for your support of this project.