We often use the word “fellowship” rather than “community” to describe the kind of connectedness we hope to cultivate in our offerings. While both words matter, we tend to use “community” to point toward a larger and more informal gathering of people, often brought together by shared values, shared interests, or a shared sense of identity. By “fellowship,” we mean a cohort of people gathered in a formal container, for a particular purpose, over a specific period of time, where the support offered and received is directly related to the intention of the space.

Fellowship may include belonging, but its primary orientation is toward shared practice and development. In our workshops and courses, the support offered and received is usually connected to the intention of the space, which means that not every offering will be for everyone. Instead, we try to widen access through a variety of formats, configurations, and intentions, so that people can engage the process of development in ways that fit their interest, capacity, and context.

Connect Theory with Practice

One of our intentions at Awaken to Meaning is to bridge the gap between theory and practice. We are interested in how ideas about meaning, wisdom, connection, and transformation become lived realities rather than concepts we only understand abstractly. This means engaging in practices that may lead to novel experiences, whose impact can range from ordinary or underwhelming to deeply clarifying, challenging, or transformative, depending on the person and the group.

Encounter New Possibilities for Change

Our leadership team brings decades of experience across facilitation, teaching, leadership, and practice-based modalities. Across different contexts, we have facilitated transformation in multiple forms for thousands of people, and one of our hopes is that you enter our spaces with one way of understanding the world and leave with at least a slightly different one.

Transformation often happens gradually, unexpectedly, or both. Sometimes it comes through long-form intention: a series of small “three-degree turns” that accumulate over time until we notice we have reoriented. At other times, it emerges through a moment, exercise, encounter, or insight we could not have planned in advance.

We cannot guarantee that every session will provide profound insight, but we do try to create environments where meaningful emergent moments can happen.

Practice with Agency

Within all of this, we hold a simple golden rule: you are invited to honour yourself. You do not have to do, say, disclose, or participate in anything you do not want to.

Saying “no” can often be wise. Relationally, we generally cannot trust your “yes” until we have heard your authentic “no.”

Meet Challenge with Support

Because every person comes with a unique history, capacity, and nervous system, we do not promise that a developmental space can be simply “safe.” What feels safe for one person may feel unsafe for another, so what we can offer is a safer and more intentional container than many everyday environments: a space where people share an intention to learn about themselves and one another through practice.

A more accurate term for our spaces may be “challenging spaces.” That does not mean every experience is intended to be intense. In fact, a lot of that is up to you. We try to design our curricula so they are not so conservative as to be boring, but also not so risky as to be reckless.

Practice at Your Own Edge

Within that challenge, we encourage you to notice what you need moment to moment and to model it honestly, without attachment to whether it will be reciprocated. After all, there is another person across from you, also honouring themselves. If you are in an exchange with someone and want to go deeper, you might say, “I’d like us to go deeper, if you’re up for that,” or you might simply share something deeper: “I’m a little nervous right now at the idea that you might not like me. And I’m sharing this instead of doing what I usually do, which is to try to entertain you to get you to like me.”

Receive Possible Benefits from the Work

Some of the things we expect you to get out of your time with us are:

• Increased Self Awareness
• A Strengthening in and/or Towards Virtue
• Feeling Heard, Seen and/or Accepted
• Experiencing a Deeper Quality of Connection than we may be used to
• Relief and Self-Acceptance

Ideally, these experiences begin to integrate into your life outside Awaken to Meaning. You may experience more groundedness and clarity, become more able to get what you genuinely want in your relationships, participate more effectively in your various roles, and experience more richness and meaning in life.

It is important to note that, as much as we humans are the same, we are also very different. We come into these practices with different histories, capacities, contexts, and needs, all of which shape the impact and outcomes of participation.Which then integrates into your life outside ATM where you might experience more groundedness and clarity allowing you to get more of what you want in your relationships, be more effective in your various roles and experience more richness and meaning in life.

Understand What This Is, and Is Not

What we offer here is not therapy, though it may sometimes have therapeutic effects. This can be confusing, because sessions can feel meaningful, relieving, or emotionally significant, and we acknowledge the reality that trauma is often “in the room.” The key distinction is that we do not actively target trauma, diagnose participants, or provide clinical treatment.

If you are currently under the care of a mental health professional, please speak to them about the practices or programs you are considering. A psychologist, counsellor, therapist, or other qualified professional is likely in the best position to help you assess whether a particular offering is appropriate for you, and to support you in processing your experiences.

Take Care of Your Readiness

If you are frequently overworked, ill, heavily medicated, or already know you are prone to triggering or dissociative episodes, we strongly recommend working with a qualified professional before taking on some of the practices offered here. Our interest at Awaken to Meaning is for people to move toward wisdom and wellbeing. If participation in workshops or practices repeatedly unearths unresolved experiences in destabilising ways, we are probably not taking good care of ourselves, and may be moving away from wisdom rather than toward it.

It is also not uncommon to attend a session, especially one that is new to you, and experience some fatigue afterwards. New experiences are neurologically and metabolically demanding. It is also not uncommon to experience some discomfort, which is different from pain, as we lean into the edge of our capacities: that sweet spot just outside our comfort zone, where our framing of ourselves, others, and the world can begin to crack and reshape.

Find Aftercare and Support

Ideally, as in yoga, we want to stretch the muscles and joints of our capacities without tearing them. Sometimes a tear can still happen, and in those cases, we direct your attention to the Get Support section of our website for our aftercare guide and a listing of friends of Awaken to Meaning who offer professional services in therapy, coaching, and counselling.

While we do develop our own programs, courses and workshops – and while team members have developed a number of practices unique to Awaken to Meaning – we are also greatly influenced by the work of others.

This is by no means a comprehensive list but such influences include:

4E Cognitive Science and Meaning-Making

• Awakening From the Meaning Crisis: Part One: Origins – Dr. John Vervaeke & Christopher Mastropietro
• Constructive Developmental Theory – Robert Kegan
• Integral Theory – Ken Wilber (and others)
• Gestalt Therapy / The Paradoxical Theory of Change – Fritz Perls / Dr. Arnold Bessier
• The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Revised Edition) – Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson and Elanor Rosch

Philosophy, Theology, and Religious Thought

• “I and Thou” – Martin Buber
• The Courage to Be – Paul Tillich
• What is Ancient Philosophy? – Pierre Hadot
• Religion and Nothingness – Keiji Nishitani
• The Art of the Nō Drama: The Major Treatises of Zeami

Ecologies of Practices

• An Acrobat of the Heart – Stephen Wangh
• Self as Instrument – Diane Musho Hamilton and Rob McNamara
• Guy Sengstock, Decker Cunov, Michael Porcelli, Josh Stein & others (Circling and Authentic Relating)
• Getting Real: 10 Truth Skills You Need to Live an Authentic Life — Dr. Susan Campbell
• Surrendered Unity Leadership – Alanja Forsberg
• Non-Violent Communication (NVC) – Marshall Rosenberg
• Awareness Through Movement: Health Exercises for Personal Growth – Moshé Feldenkrais

To learn more about our practices as well as a statement on facilitated practice which touches on possible concerns around capitalism and gatekeeping, please visit here – Our Practices

Awaken to Meaning calls us into practice, into the participatory.

One of the primary ways we cultivate wisdom is through consistent engagement with an ecology of practices, held in community/fellowship. An “ecology of practice” is a purposeful arrangement (a logos) of meaningful practices designed to balance and accelerate well-being and growth. It is an integrated network of activities designed to stimulate your mental, spiritual and physical sense of connection to ourselves, to others and the world at large. Conventional intellectual learning is not sufficient for philia-sophia, and the love and cultivation of wisdom. This is a task that involves the whole of the person. It involves the body as well as the mind, movement as well as stillness. It adds sociability to solitude, and spontaneous creativity to methodical reasoning. As 4E cognitive science (and many of our spiritual traditions reaching back to antiquity) teach us, the categorical divisions that separate these domains are often illusory, and among the general misconceptions that pervade modern thought.

An ecology is a living system of relationships. There is no “panacea practice,” no perfect salve that will guarantee good perspective and sound action in daily life. The individual is a complex system of interrelated forces and influences, and their attention is shaped by this same complexity. This requires an interrelated system of interventions to help gain balance, offset various biases, and create a tension of perspectives that help keep things in proportion. There are four ideal components of an ecology of practice, addressing different aspects of our cognitive complexion.

Dialogue
Dialogue is not just a form of conversation. It is an existential mode, a way of standing in relation to other people, to oneself, and to the world. It opens us to novelty, to mystery, to the limits of our own awareness. This was one of the great innovations of the Socratic tradition; Dialogos is the way we learn about ourselves, find reflections that allow us to grow and develop, and listen more attentively to the unseen patterns around us.

Imaginal
The “imaginal” is a term popularized by philosopher Henry Corbin. Unlike the imaginary, which conjures fantasy independent from reality, the imaginal uses images – and other impressions – to enhance perception and insight. Corbin’s imaginal world (or mundus imaginalis), drawn from the works of Islamic philosophers like Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi and Ibn ‘Arabi, is an order of reality that bridges between matter and spirit, the realm of imagination where we encounter the deeper patterns of being. Corbin writes, “It is a function that permits all the universes to symbolize with one another.”

Mindfulness
The term mindfulness is widely used. It is often associated with Buddhist practice, such as the Vipassana tradition, but it can be used to describe various Western practices of attention. Ultimately, mindfulness involves the cultivation of attention. In meditation, we use techniques to scale and guide our attention toward our own internal processes. In contemplation, we direct this attention to the people and patterns around us, such that we might develop deeper and more comprehending relationships with reality.

Embodiment
The mind is not simply an ethereal entity, or a brain floating in a vat. It is inseparable from our sensations, nerves and emotions, the limbs and digits that make contact with the world. Any wisdom tradition must include this contact. Our practices must extend to the dynamics of the body in order to be metabolized and made real.

Continuity of practice is important, and building strong habits is essential to maintaining an ecology of practice. Just as any habit, these begin with playful, modest, and incremental exercises – a moment of stillness, a reflection on the day, a game that lets the imagination wander in ways that reveal those unseen forces inside of us. These seem like modest adjustments, but they can provide the space to alter our perceptions, to step back from confounding dilemmas, to make connections with people that hold a mirror to our lives.