When: Saturday, January 22, 9:30 a.m - 4:30 p.m.
Where: Zoom. With personal reflective activities throughout the day offline and/or outside.
We are always in a process of both becoming and unbecoming. How do we embrace both the aspects of our lives that we find unbecoming or uncomfortable while also allowing ourselves to unlearn tightly held narratives, unravel beliefs about ourselves, and unbecome; releasing patterns that no longer serve us?
When a caterpillar builds a cocoon it doesn’t know what it will become. It doesn’t know what it is building or releasing, and yet it does both. Any given year, each person experiences change, growth, loss, metamorphosis, and these are felt even more so during this pandemic. On a collective level, we are in a time of colossal social and ecological shifts. Who are we within the contexts of pandemic and climate change? How have they shaped us? When we stop to reflect, who are we now? Who are we to our communities and who are our communities to us? What are the cocoons that hold us through these shifts? Who are the other creatures both human and non, that we migrate through these changes with? How do we recognize our separateness and also our interdependence in this moment?
Join Refugia online on January 22, 2022 from 9:30am-4:30pm, where we will explore these questions together. We will spend time learning from the community and life cycle of our winged friends, the butterflies, while creating a reflective space to look back, honor the now and explore our place in community. The day will be a blend of gently guided ritual, personal retreat and collective reflection.
*Stay tuned for a potential in-person retreat in February
Facilitators:
Jodi Lammiman (she/her) is an eco-spiritual director, community educator and an artist who lives on Treaty 7 territory in Mohkinstsis (Calgary, Alberta). As a co-founder of Refugia Retreats, she facilitates dialogue exploring alternatives to traditionally accepted narratives of wellness culture, productivity culture, and capitalism. These counter-narratives are informed by the natural world and its rhythms of rest, germination, and balance.
Sarah (she/her) is a feminist educator and facilitator who has spent a decade working with girls and women in community organizations. She led the creation of a range of activism programs for girls at the Women's Centre of Calgary, and has also been a Girl Guide leader, an anti-violence organizer, a social action network facilitator; and most recently a policy analyst. She holds her Masters in Social Work from the University of Calgary, which focused on social change programming with youth. She takes a popular education approach to her work and believes that people are the experts in their own lives.