As a Courage & Renewal Facilitator, Susan is part of the international network of CR Facilitators, bringing the values, core principles and practices alive through the Circle of Trust® retreats along with other CR programs. The Circle of Trust® retreat is a fundamental aspect of CR work, incorporating CR values, core principles and practices.
Susan offers facilitation, coaching, and wellness practices through a variety of CR programs:
- Seasonal series
- Cross professional
- Women’s Retreat – Finding One’s Voice
- Walking with Grief
- Discovering Your Hidden Wholeness
- Many possibilities
Parker J. Palmer has partnered with The Center for Courage & Renewal (CCR) https://couragerenewal.org/ for over 25 years. As an author, speaker, activist, and visionary, he has inspired many with his visionary words on how to live more courageously and authentically.
Sampler of Parker’s words:
“By choosing integrity, I become more whole, but wholeness does not mean perfection. It means becoming more real by acknowledging the whole of who I am.”
“Our deepest calling is to grow into our own authentic self-hood, whether or not it conforms to some image of who we ought to be. As we do so, we will not only find the joy that every human being seeks–we will also find our path of authentic service in the world.”
“Wholeness does not mean perfection; it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life.”
1. Circle of Trust Retreats® (zoom or in person)
We all carry questions about our life, work, and the world. This discernment process gives you time and space to engage with your questions, with courage and authenticity. These retreats also invite you to understand the gap between your role & soul and how to hold tensions that naturally occur in both our personal and professional lives. This Circle work provides a powerful process of listening to ourselves as well as listening to others when we “hear each other into speech.”
Circle of Trust® retreats offer participants the most immersive experience of the Courage & Renewal approach. During retreats, we co-create trustworthy spaces to do our inner work in community with others. Circles of Trust® helps us listen to the wisdom of our inner teacher, honor each person’s identity and integrity, and renew our courageous spirit as we journey toward personal and societal wholeness. Here are other elements of this Circle:
- Clearness Committees and Open & Honest Questions
- “Coming in from a slant”, i.e. using readings, videos, and nature, to explore the themes of the retreat
- Trustworthy space is built with Conversational Touchstones
- An individual process of inner listening and gleaning wisdom in the group
- Spacious time for reflection
- Focus of Retreat varies, such as Cross Professional, a specific professional or organizational focus, or themes, such as; Finding your Hidden Wholeness, Living an Undivided Life, and Walking with Grief.
Susan also offers additional experiences that can be incorporated into the Circle of Trust® retreat, i.e. Yoga, mindfulness, and Forest Bathing.
2. Mini-retreats, Modified Circle of Trust® Retreats or Reflection Circles
These modifications can meet your specific organizational needs. This may include different elements of a Full Circle of Trust®, such as a lunchtime reflection circle or a retreat time.
3. Healing the Heart of Democracy – series (HHD)
Learning how to deal with political tensions positively is crucial to American society. It is important to practice civility and recognize differences to enliven democratic values. The current trend of shouting, blaming, and defaming others that is prevalent in our politics needs to change. The Healing the Heart of Democracy (HHD) series is based on the Circle of Trust® approach, which explores our inner life and promotes personal well-being. It also helps reclaim our civic well-being.
The Healing the Heart of Democracy approach aims to bring compassion and creativity back to political conversations. The phrase “We the People” captures the essence of this approach. In today’s polarized world, we tend to take sides and forget how to have civil conversations. Such conversations are essential for building stronger communities and organizations.
…The heart's alchemy that can turn suffering into compassion, conflict into community, and tension into energy for creativity amid democracy's demands.
The Healing the Heart of Democracy (HHD) curriculum is designed to provide conversational guidelines and teach five “habits of the heart.” This curriculum offers practical and hopeful methods to help restore a government “of the people, by the people, for the people” by holding the tensions of our differences in a manner that is productive and respectful.
To add specific skills and ways to stay in difficult conversations, Nonviolent Communication (NVC) can be integrated into this series.
Engaging and Healing Differences is an adapted version of the HHD curriculum for 5th graders to college students. It can be especially challenging for students of this age to talk about differences under peer pressure. By applying the Five Habits of the Heart to their conversations, students learn to develop a higher capacity to hold tensions, speak across differences, and lower the intensity of these conversations.
4. Walking with Grief Retreat or Series
This retreat or series can be geared towards personal loss, bereavement, grief and collective loss and grief. Most grief and bereavement work focuses on private therapy, educational approaches, and support groups. Based on the Circle of Trust® approach of values, core principles, and practices, this retreat or series on grief & loss adds another option to listen to our inner teacher and to be listened to by others. Time to explore the relationship between hidden wholeness and your wisdom during a time when most feel a sense of brokenness.
Having time to reflect on one’s grief is rare, as our larger Domination Culture tends to push you to “get over” your grief after a month. This approach gives participants new ways to explore grief and loss, inviting more witnessing of our stories than the often “fixing you” with advice interactions that can occur.
Various themes and Third Things are used to help you understand your personal and collective grief, loss, and bereavement from different angles. Grief brings up many questions and the focus of these retreats is to work with those questions rather than provide answers for you.
5. Soul of Aging Series or Retreat
Created by two Courage & Renewal Facilitators, Caryl Ann Casbon and Georgia Noble, the curriculum is flexible to adapt to faith traditions or secular settings.
Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.
In this program, based on the Circle of Trust® approach we will creatively approach “the art” of aging intentionally, and the many soulful invitations our maturing years offer us. As we enter and traverse the later season of our lives, we are excited to offer this program to provide fellowship and a soulful, trustworthy exploration of community.
This complete curriculum contains ten+ sessions, which can also be modified for a shorter series. Here are the session themes:
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- Introductory session on the Circle of Trust® approach
- Calling in the Ancestors: Visions of Aging
- Spiritual Formation Across the Lifecycle
- The Courage to Name and Claim Your Unlived Life
- Pathways to Wholeness
- Truth and Forgiveness: The Call to Completion
- Enlightenment In Slow Motion
- The Foreign Currency of Change
- The Wisdom of Living in Deep Time
- The Final Stage of Growth
- Generativity and the Legacy of Our Lives
6. Highest Calling of Your Heart Gathering – A time for rest, reflection and cross-racial dialogue.
For Clergy, social & racial justice facilitators & educators, and congregations.
So I say to you, walk with the wind, brothers, and sisters, and let the spirit of peace and the power of everlasting love be your guide.
Based on the words of the late John Lewis, those in social & racial justice work, or other Human Rights Movements, can have a brave space to talk about living in the radical love that was modeled by Lewis and the hope of a Beloved Community.
The words of John Lewis inspire us and bring up longings that many of us may be missing in our racial justice work. This retreat provides you with:
- To speak the questions that arise from our highest calling
- A place to speak about our fears, hesitancy, and wondering if I am causing more harm than I intend
- Interacting with both those at our table and those who might come to our table in time
- Naming how to hold the places we are painfully separate from each other
Why? We want to create a courageous and safe space to explore the questions and tensions we hold in our racial justice work: A place to include love, relationship building, and connection with others around a higher vision for this arduous racial justice work.
So much of racial justice work is focused on the role of planning and doing action, often leaving out the soul of this work. We welcome the soul in this circle-based gathering.
Framed by Courage & Renewal Values, Principles, and Practices, you will experience a slower pace of conversation, compassionate presence to yourself and others, listening in a slant to our stories and questions we are holding, and a brave and safe shelter to hear our hearts.
This contemplative approach to dialogue allows us to lean into discernment in our racial justice work as well as hear and hold the discernment of others as they explore their next steps. You will experience grace and a place to catch your breath. This is not a workshop, planning session, or collaborative action committee, as we have all had our schedules full of these!
7. Leading Together (LT)
Integrating CR values, principles, and practices into your team, school community, organization, congregation, or community organization. This is a coaching framework, that helps you support more courageous and authentic conversations.
Leading Together (LT) is a new professional development and coaching model of the Center for Courage & Renewal designed to develop individual and collective capacity to build trust and enhance communication among adults in schools or your organization.
Based on CR values, principles, and practices, this coaching process helps you incorporate ways to engage others in your field that support both alignment of role and soul on an individual level and the collective level of alignment with each other.
A large curriculum supports creative ideas and activities to deepen authentic and courageous conversations about your relationship to your profession and each other.
8. Peer Learning Circles –(PLC)
This Community of Practice moves away from the expert model, opening up space for real conversations about both the work and our relationship to that work. Small groups meet every month to:
- share important questions or dilemmas
- explore the essence of our work
- deepen understanding of the many nuances of our work
- reflect on our relationship to the work, those we serve, and with our colleagues
- listen to shared storytelling of similar experiences
- sharing of insights and other questions
- resource sharing
This Community of Practice provides two key supports in creating a trustworthy space and tools for collective deep listening and building a community that has courageous and authentic conversations that most often don’t happen naturally in our work lives.
Susan can help you establish a PLC, support practice in the skills, principles, and practices, and/or help facilitate your monthly session. We can work together to identify who might benefit in this circle and how to implement it in a workplace setting.
After being in my own PLC for ten years, I can’t say enough about the power of being able to talk about the questions and dilemmas that matter. Having time and space to
Talk about the essence of one’s work, helps reduce burnout, form a foundation for co-learning from each other, and enliven our imagination and creativity. The courageous conversations help you learn to integrate the tools into your everyday work life as well.
Solutions by Joshua Troy, LLC
