A residential weekend exploring storytelling as a powerful ingredient for peace and reconciliation work and for bringing people together.
Drawing on tales that carry themes of restoration, reconciliation, healing and understanding, the programme will explore how traditional stories help us, as peace-workers, reconcilers, facilitators, people of faith, community builders and leaders, to:
• Create safe spaces for group work and deep conversations
• Develop our understanding of ourselves and others
• Grow our capacity for compassion
• Communicate across divides
• Empower, restore, re-energise ourselves
• Connect with hope, possibility and wonder, from which to better tackle crisis and challenge
• Support meaning-making in the face of difficulty,
• Encourage faith, trust and connection
• Share and talk about our lived experiences
• Reconnect with our values
• Feel re-inspired for the work we want to do
• Think creatively, look at issues we face with fresh eyes, and find answers to the questions we’re carrying for our professional, personal, social and spiritual lives.
We will explore these things through experiential learning, giving participants the chance to experience the points above first-hand and reflect on how these experiences serve them both personally and in their work.
The programme recognises that, in working for peace and reconciliation, one of the most powerful instruments we have is ourselves – our self-awareness, and how we live and model our values, so the weekend will include lots of opportunities to start with your own experience and expand out from there to explore the wider picture: interpersonal, communal, global.
Over the course of the weekend, the programme will include:
• Games
• Reflection
• Folk tales, wonder/fairy tales and myths
• Discussion circles
• Creative exercises
• Nature connection
• Story sharing
• Peer learning
• Ceremony
• And much more besides! - with powerful traditional stories as inspiration.
The two days also hope to offer participants a restorative space, working with an awareness that the old tales go hand-in-hand with spiritual and soul work, and that the heart often opens when we gather in this way.
WHO IS IT FOR?
18s + Anyone who has an interest developing skills and understanding in reconciliation and conflict transformation. Up to 18 participants.