The New Life process is built on two important aspects of living. The first is an appreciation that what we truly have in this world is our own life. The second is that during our lives we learn, and that is how we grow. We learn from the day we are born until the day we die. Life is learning, and learning is how we find our own special path. Each life path is a unique and special gift. It is our own personal source of wonder and opportunity. We are busy people and easily distracted by the demands on our lives. We tend to be preoccupied with the things that we regard as so important for our immediate daily well-being. By not taking the time to value the totality of our own life process it is possible to deny ourselves our own hard won wisdom and all the meaning that this has to offer us.
The New Life curriculum was designed to immerse us in the many facets that are an important part of the process of living. Effective learning takes place over time and is enhanced by a community of likeminded peers. We are developing ongoing groups that will tailor workshops to meet their own needs. They will have the opportunity to choose from our large workshop library. Below is a list of workshops that we have developed to aid this process. We are always creating new workshops in order to meet the specialized needs of our groups, so the process remains vibrant and growing. The workshops below have been designed with a two-day format but can easily be compressed into one day. Our existing one-day workshops are noted at the end of the list. If you are interested in participating in a New Life group please contact us by email.
IDENTITY – We begin the workshop series by taking time to fully appreciate the depth of the resources that are part of our own personal identity. The experience of identity is the constant core of how we perceive ourselves throughout life. Identity includes roles, relationships, work, spirituality, and all forms of personal expression. Rarely do we appreciate its richness.
SECURITY – Developing a sense of security is one of the basic building blocks in development. It allows us to develop trust in ourselves, our relationships, and helps us to find our place in the world. Security enhances our ability to grow and achieve throughout life.
RELATIONSHIPS – Human development takes a very long time. This fact alone means that we require relationships that are growth producing in order to mature. Important relationship themes occur and recur as we move through our life cycle. This workshop offers the opportunity to explore and deepen our relationships in every area of life.
VISION – How do we develop a vision about the person that we might become? In this workshop we explore the visioning process by using the template of the ‘journey.’ We constantly learn new things as we journey through life. These can be used to envision new possibilities for the future. Visioning allows us to most creatively use our experiences and skills so that they will keep us growing throughout all of our life.
POWER – The discovery of our personal power is deeply satisfying. In this workshop we explore what power means to us. We also explore how we get power, how we use it, and how we integrate it into our basic value structure. Never underestimate the importance of our own sense of power for it is extremely important for our sense of success in life.
LOVE – Love is at the core of our deepest yearnings. We seek to find and express love in every aspect of our lives. Here we explore our experiences with giving and receiving. Important as well is a related issue, for it is through trustful experiences with loving that we learn to simply let go and enjoy the moment.
BELIEFS AND VALUES – These shape our interaction with the entire world. What we believe about others and ourselves shapes not only our character but encourages our actions. Our values help us to make daily choices that are congruent with our beliefs. This interaction provides a very stimulating exploration for our own individual patterns and how we express them in our lives.
WEALTH – How much is enough? This is the underlying question that we all face as we approach the way in which we develop security for our families and ourselves. In a world that values wealth as an expression of worth, we explore an often hidden scarcity mentality that suggests that all resources are finite and that true abundance may be limited and/or out of reach. This is a very provocative notion in our world.
EMOTIONAL WELL-BEING – What allows a person to be happy and have an ongoing sense of well-being? Here we explore the elements that foster an ongoing sense of contentment and wholeness that are vital in building an authentic, rich, and meaningful life.
DISCIPLINE – What role does self-discipline play in our personal strength? Each of us has a whole range of strategies to reach our life goals and these inspire us to practice self-discipline in order to reach these goals. The question we all face is whether these strategies are rigid and depend entirely upon control. Can we allow ourselves to discover new ways of being flexible and creative in our strategies that involve our inner self-discipline?
REPETITION – Repetitive behavior is built into the fabric of life. It provides comfort and structure. When it begins to take on a life of its own and control us, it shades into addiction. In this workshop we explore how repetition can get in the way of living to our fullest capacity by making it difficult to make choices and change easily. This provides a thoughtful exploration of a universal human condition.
PURPOSE – Everyone addresses the question “what is the meaning of my life.” We all have our own personal answers to the question. In this workshop we explore the components of a satisfying and meaningful life. We explore how we blend what we want from life, why it is important to us, and how we bring these together in a context that provides the most meaning for each of us.
CHANGE – It has been said that change is the one true constant in life. Yet there is nothing that can upset us more than that simple fact. Here we address the manner in which we live with the endless process of change. The task is to manage it more effectively so that we can learn to live graciously with life’s ambiguity.
FAMILY – The family is the crucible that has shaped our beginnings and continues to affect our life quality. We address the universal desire for connection and closeness with others in order to improve the quality of this interdependency as well as our sense of freedom and joy in living in community.
SYMBOLS and ARCHETYPES – Throughout recorded history all peoples have addressed the great mysteries in life by using symbols. Symbols help us to integrate the many facets of experience. They allow us to point to a wholeness and meaning that can guide and inspire us. Symbols effectively point beyond what we can immediately understand and here lies their great power.
DREAMS and DISCOVERY – History has been changed by the power of the dreams of ordinary people. Appreciating the importance of our own dreams can help us understand what we are truly drawn to. Our faith in our own dreams and our ability to make them real is an act of courage for each of us. We only need to develop skills of discernment in order to understand what is possible. Faith in our dreams can allow them to happen.
INTIMACY – We all need people and we need time alone. How we balance these opposing needs may be key to our experience with others. Here we explore the themes of desire, sexuality, and ambivalence in order to determine how these influence our ability to be intimate with another. We pay attention to the fact that how well we know ourselves is extremely influential in how effectively we relate to another.
BECOMING – We are never static. We are always in the process of becoming. In this workshop we examine the differing languages that are used by body, mind, emotions, and spirit. Each language represents an important part of the self and contributes to our unfolding, our becoming. Yet each part of self has its own addictive quality that asserts a kind of dominance that can prevent true balance.
CALLING – Why am I here? What is my destiny? We often relegate these questions to the area of religion and spirituality. Following our ‘calling’ also represents an innate desire to share the best of who we are with the world. In this workshop we explore the subtle ‘pull’ that we feel to become the very best that we can be.
POSSIBILITY – Envisioning change for our collective future allows something miraculous to occur, the emergence of new possibility. The possible future always stays shrouded until we dare to consider that we might enter this potential possibility and make it a reality. Embracing possibility takes courage and faith in our own goodness and the goodness of all.
WISDOM – What is wisdom? It is a revered word, yet we are often unclear about what it really means and how we become wise. Here we explore the marriage between cumulative experience, knowledge, and how we make meaning from this. We also consider that there might be an inner wisdom source encouraging us that stands at the intersection of the temporal and the eternal.
COMMUNITY – There is great power in community. New paradigms are always emerging to understand the potential of community. We consider the potential that can emerge when a group approaches the large issues facing us in the world. Community accesses the common shared experiences of the whole. It allows us to hold combined energetic experience, and encourages an experience of co-creation from the place of each of its member’s deepest wisdom.
MENTORING – We all need mentoring at times in our lives. Mentors are the wisdom keepers who give us guidance and support as we seek to find our way toward greater fulfillment. Mentoring success comes more from being than doing. The mentor cares about our success. This workshop is not only about receiving mentoring, but demonstrates how we can develop the skill to become good mentors for others.
BAGGAGE – We are enormously complex beings with experience that is both individual and communal. In this workshop we explore various explanations of how our total psyche is designed, and how we carry memories and life experiences in it. The purpose of this exploration is to understand our self as a total being on a journey to wholeness.
TRANSFORMATION – One of the most difficult experiences for any of us comes when we lose our way in life. We all do this at times. How do we find our way back to ourselves and become transformed by the experience? We simply allow this to happen, partially by acknowledging that all experience is part of the learning process. We are never forgotten and left alone, and are always loved and cherished from a source beyond self. This gives us the courage to find our way back.
CYCLES – Our life journey is a process, and that process unfolds within the great cycle of life through death. In this workshop we explore the larger cycle that involves the journey of outgoing and the journey of return. In the journey of outgoing we develop skills, professions, families, and all the accoutrements of ‘maturity.’ Beyond this is the less acknowledgement of the very rich cycle of the journey of return where we let go of the extraneous, simplify, and acknowledge our hard won wisdom gathered over time. We are whole beings that ultimately return the gifts of our living the Source.
WHOLENESS – We don’t become whole. We are whole beings that become increasingly congruent by taking our authentic journey. In this workshop we explore how we have woven the threads of our life experience into our own unique and exquisite patterns. We increase our awareness that we use all our life experience. Everything has value and function, and at some deep place within we understand this. The pattern of our woven wholeness represents our deepest truth.
LEGACY – We leave footprints in the sand for others to follow. These are the prints of our journey and represent our legacy. They will become part of the path traveled by those who follow. We leave the most meaningful legacy when we follow what excites our deepest passion for the good of all; this opens the door for what can become the good of all. Legacy is born from our moral imperative. It comes most naturally when we have truly sung our own song.
NEW LIFE ONE-DAY WORKSHOPS:
FINDING YOUR PATH – In this introductory workshop we help participants discover how their life is unique and what makes it special. We explore what is right about our lives in order to fully appreciate the sense of direction that can be found in our own life path. We track how we are constantly in a process of growth.
HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH – Today’s economic picture is causing a lot of stress, and we are not sure how our future will unfold. Our anxieties about money are more a part of everyday awareness than usual. In this workshop we explore the origins of our beliefs about wealth to better to understand how our fear of scarcity develops. This allows us to get in touch with the feeling of abundance, where we know that there is more than enough. We then can better determine the connection between our financial goals and what is most important and meaningful.
FROM ANXIETY TO TRUST – Anxiety is one of the most basic of all emotions. It is an emotion that has an immediate physical response and has been necessary for our survival as a species. Yet many of us notice that we are feeling more anxiety than seems warranted in our lives. In this workshop we explore the emotional impact of anxiety in order to appreciate the way this emotion impacts thinking and decision-making. This allows us to redefine our power so that we may take constructive action and to define what is most meaningful.
HOW DO I LOVE YOU AND BE MYSELF? In this workshop we explore the importance of relationships, discovering the origins of our beliefs about loving and being loved. Understanding the roles and boundaries that family members choose or are assigned enables us to create new opportunities for making our relationships more meaningful.
KNOW YOURSELF: Your best Resource for Changing Careers. Today’s economic climate has resulted in significant changes in the workplace. This creates anxiety but also the opportunity to consider a more satisfying path for the future. If you are in transition or seeking new work possibilities for yourself this workshop will help you explore why you feel stuck and/or overwhelmed by your current situation. It will give you a head start in moving toward becoming more effective and happier in your work.