Moving through Collective Reset to Collective Healing?
Unearthing Magic on Cortes Island
What happens when you spend 5 days with 14 leaders focusing on joy, play, laughter, movement, breath and presence?
I’ve just returned from a 5 day program that I co-led with Adrian Sinclair on Cortes Island at Hollyhock called “Collective Reset: A Leadership Retreat”. The program was an intuitive co-led experience that intended to offer leaders the kind of activities and practices that reset their nervous system without powerpoint slides or acronyms.
In a world full of screens and constant information flows it’s getting harder to find places to unplug and think about what you need most in your leadership. Hollyhock at Cortes Island was the perfect setting to imagine what was possible when the unconference meets leadership retreat. The ongoing complex challenges of climate change, conflict and inequity have worn out leaders who are already dealing with burnout in teams and themselves.
We imagined a program of nervous system reset with a focus on collective and individual experiences. We focused on the idea of looping the experiences - silent forest walks, multiple rounds of tea that led into conversations and reflections. We co-created experiences for the participants that began to feel like habits.
Twelve brave souls showed up for Collective Reset and it was a really amazing few days. I'm beginning to think that collective healing is possible when we focus on being in person, putting away the electronics and letting go of our expectations of learning about leadership. It was clear that getting outside and immersing our group in laughter and play is the perfect antidote to non stop online meetings and working from urban centres. I’d like to imagine that we were collectively unearthing magic as participants shared stories around the campfire.
For now I am including a long list of questions that emerged during our time together. I have spent my life thinking about questions and how important they are to our learning. Instead of answers I would like to think that asking better questions is the way forward. We suggested that folks do more introspection on this retreat instead of solving other folks problems. Here are 10 questions that emerged.
Why am I here?
What am I noticing?
Do I want to be alone or in the group? silent or talking?
What’s happening in my body?
Am I the tea? Am I the forest?
Am I in the past or the future?
What do emotions feel like in my body?
Can the forest handle all of our stories?
What passions have I forgotten?
How do we do this at home?
That’s just a few of the questions that I scratched in my journal during the time away while we walked in the forest, drank tea in circle, swam, ate, sang, sauna’d, danced and laughed with a new group of 14 humans.
It was definitely a wild experience of changing states and shifting gears. We will be sharing more about what we learned and how things went as we consider Collective Reset 2.0. We are planning on co-writing a piece with the participants who are interested so stay tuned for that.
We are grateful to the inaugural cohort who dove in with enthusiasm and courage.
We are also grateful to the folks at Hollyhock who helped create the space for this kind of innovation, the chefs who cooked incredible food, the gardeners who grew so many of the greens that we had in our meals and the folks behind the scenes who supported the program. We also want to acknowledge that the program took place on the traditional territories of the Klahoose, Tla’amin, and Homalco Nations.
This quote from Pema Chodron came to mind as I put together this reflection and reminded myself of the pitfalls of perfection.
“The essence of life is that it’s challenging. Sometimes it is sweet, and sometimes it is bitter. Sometimes your body tenses, and sometimes it relaxes or opens. Sometimes you have a headache, and sometimes you feel 100 percent healthy. From an awakened perspective, trying to tie up all the loose ends and finally get it together is death, because it involves rejecting a lot of your basic experience. There is something aggressive about that approach to life, trying to flatten out all the rough spots and imperfections into a nice smooth ride.”
― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice For Difficult Times
It all sounds so magical and necessary in these chaotic times we live in. As always, thank you Janet, for your eloquent story telling and inspirational messages that are so useful for any and all walks of life. Definitely makes one stop and ponder...