a welcome from the founder of avalon
Hello, and welcome to Avalon. You found us!
Avalon is a field of wisdom, care, and empowerment created "with and for" humanity. Avalon is here to serve people ready to heal and to take responsibility for their own growth, to manifest their gifts and potential.
If you know you want to change something in your life — you feel a need to grow, to identify and refine your gifts, to heal, to explore more of who you are and your ability to connect freely with others — I created Avalon to be your island of possibilities.
We work from a principle of “yin first”, meaning, to most first from love, from the universal feminine/receptive energy that embraces every aspect of humanity with compassion. Before we can give unconditional love, we need to have experienced it ourselves. Many of us have not experienced this kind of unconditional caring from others. We need to feel this, before we can fully heal ourselves — or others. Avalon was created for this reason.
We are proud of what we co-create in Avalon retreats — a safe grail of knowledge where we can fully meet our hidden shadows, belief systems, trapped energies, and traumas. (In Avalon, we use the word “trauma” broadly, for in our childhoods, we have all had the experience of being hurt by others in ways that had us give away some of our power, innocence, and beauty. And we carry the memory of this in our bodies and in how we relate with others and with life.
Avalon is a place where we come to heal ourselves. Avalon facilitators and leaders do not work as therapists (we are not here to “fix” you). If you come to Avalon, you´ll find yourself learning self-leadership and authentic relating. You will meet other beings with the same search as you — to find yourself and to find others.
I said Avalon is safe; by this, I mean that we use time to get to know each other. We use time patiently to allow knowledge to emerge — during the day’s events and trainings in Avalon retreats and in a nightly debrief about each day’s events. This gives us the time-space to reflect on what actually happened during our day of work.
In Avalon, leaders “lead from surrender”. This means there is no planned agenda other than diving in together to the mists of what we need to meet and encounter. Our mission is to offer you a place for you to find your freedom, aliveness, and health. We do so by meeting you exactly where you are, with ourselves as leaders and the whole spectrum of human experience.
We dive into trapped energies with you. We allow everything (except harm to yourself or others). We explore vulnerability, power, anger, joy, and grief — in all forms. We taste and release the contractions (what we call “freeleasing” in Avalon), and we laugh spontaneously when Nature reveals the incredible humor often lying right beneath our rigid patterns of holding back our true natures.
In Avalon, we train in giving feedback to each other — relating authentically and honestly. We train in becoming surrendered leaders, and believe me, this is much more fun than being a leader in the old paradigms of “command and control”.
Together, we’ll reach for the skies with you, and we´ll dive straight into our personal hells to feel, heal, and integrate that, too. To become whole is a journey — not excluding parts of life but meeting the pain of contractions and fully integrating these into a self-compassionate knowledge of our Whole Selves and our Whole Experience. We can tap into the power of shadow energies that we once used to limit ourselves and instead use that energy in service our lives and others’.
Welcome to Avalon — a space to heal and transform in presence, togetherness, courage, compassion, Nature. Here we are free to cry, scream, and taste joy of body, mind, spirit. Everyone — EVERY ONE — is needed in this collective field. As humans, we are all evolving, going somewhere — but there is no way to reach this knowing without first being willing to be in “Not-Knowing Land” first.
Alanja Forsberg
Founder, Avalon