SURRENDERED UNITY LEADERSHIP TRAINING
The world needs leaders, healers, and visionary creators. Over an intensive 15-month study of leadership and compassionate connection, you'll learn the joy of self-empowerment in service of the greater good.
Our Mission
The Surrendered Unity Leadership Training is a 15-month leadership program to empower your unique self-expression and realize your fullest potential. This training (themed "Compassion in Action", or CIA, for the 2017 program) allows a deeper, ongoing experience of the practice and principles of Avalon retreats, to create the impacts we'd wish to see in the world.
As with all Avalon workshops, our Surrendered Unity Leadership Training draws on the support and power of group-work, focused on creative spontaneity and compassionate connection. The program is an exploration of the alchemical meeting of souls that allows healing of traumas and transformation of consciousness, for yourself and others. We train in surrendering to that which nurtures this healing and transformational process and to become keenly aware of these things in ourselves: purity of intention, openness of perception, clarity of thought, heart-centered compassion, courageous self-expression and co-creation of new possibilities.
This program is to empower your boldness, for you to fully express what longs to be expressed through you, in alignment with the needs and intelligence of the collective, and from this place, to co-create your life and the world with more clarity, courage, compassion, and care.
The World Needs Healers
Consciousness growth is a social process that occurs in relationship with others. Some relationships are compassionate and healthy, expanding our capacity to connect, meet, love, and flourish. Others are unhealthy — the expressions of harsh disconnections with others (violence, abuse, oppression, neglect, not having our needs and desires met from those we'd trust). Painful experiences and traumas are deeply imprinted as emotional suffering and contracted life energies in the body. This creates a wide spectrum of negative mind-states — mistrust, fear, anger, shame, guilt, addictions, depression, and self-deception, as well as a general lack of vitality, self-compassion, honesty, and integrity. Wounds and scars can weigh heavily on the quality of our lives and hold us back from expressing our greatness, beauty, power, and purpose.
But we are fortunate that the intelligence of the body knows how to heal the wounds of the heart — to weave together what in us feels broken, that we may once again be more whole and alive. The suffering and contracted life energy of unhealthy relationships can be healed and released in compassionate relationships. To skillfully master this art is at the core of the Surrendered Unity Leadership Training.
The Training
The Surrendered Unity Leadership Training program is a radical, holistic paradigm for trauma release and shadow work in groups, based on creative spontaneity and compassion as the basis of human connection and psycho-spiritual healing and transformation. The program is built on an Integral synthesis of approaches to compassionate, consciousness-based psychotherapy that has been practiced in Avalon Retreats since 2015.
Through Avalon's Surrendered Unity Leadership Training, we reclaim a visceral sense of freedom, aliveness and wholeness.
The program weaves together three journeys to freedom, aliveness, and wholeness:
- Healing our wounds
- Profound meetings with the other
- Healing the world
first journey: HEAL YOUR WOUNDS
Before we can heal and transform others, we must heal our own wounds. This first journey brings us into both the dark and light spaces within our own psyches. We learn learn how to set up a sacred, collective space of presence, compassion, and commitment to support the healing process for ourselves and others.
The Surrendered Unity Leadership Training program trains us to trust the body’s wisdom and to courageously surrender into what is alive in us, from moment to moment. We are guided to an inner space where we can feel the root causes of our suffering, in order to “freelease” trapped life-energy, self-constrictions on our behavior, and shadows. In this, we may free energy that gives clarity and will-power to our life purpose.
Through this emotional cleansing process, we are able to understand, forgive, and embrace ourselves with greater compassion while taking full ownership for every relationship in our lives.
“The hidden gem at the core of Avalon is that we are training ourselves as leaders, by releasing our core contractions — and seeing what then flows naturally. The results are utterly inspiring. I say that as someone who’s attended three Avalons, so far.””
Before we can share our highest gifts, we must first know that we are good, that others are good, and that life is safe and rich enough for us to be ourselves
second journey: PROFOUND meeting with the other
Living is "meeting". As part of Nature Itself, we grow from our connection with other humans. To heal and transform the world requires that we be awake, to be authentically impacted by the cries, calls, and pulls of Life Itself.
The first step in meeting is to reconnect and profoundly engage with the subtleties of the sensorimotor body that perceives and moves in this world. Most of us have forgotten how to be consciously aware of this subtle level of knowing. In Surrendered Unity Leadership, we are trained to see what is invisible and hear what is not said, to stay present in Not Knowing, and to tune in, zoom out, dig deep, hold space, move energies, and follow the natural flow of healing and transformation at all levels of life expression.
We discover a solid ethic and sense of responsibility for what we experience and learn to act only when we are touched or called. Instead of reacting to others in patterned behaviors, our actions are driven by curiosity and commitment for the growth and well-being of others as well as ourselves. Training in profound meetings enables us to stay open, present, and sensitive in the midst of the pulsating dance of gross, subtle, and causal energies flowing within and through us, and between and around us collectively.
In surrendered leadership, we learn to "stay present" with others regardless of how we're feeling; to remain curious about what the next uncertain moment will bring
THIRD JOURNEY: HEAL THE WORLD
The world needs healing. The third journey is to translate the wisdom and practice of surrendered meetings into actions in the world that empower us to transform suffering into more fullness, freedom and aliveness in the
world.
The Surrendered Unity Leadership Training prepares us for leadership outside this training program — as therapists, teachers, writers, social activists — whatever our unique vocations are. In this training, we apply the wisdom of meeting others in surrender, to explore our potential and the ways we are each called to be of service. This journey is dedicatedly supported through the collective intelligence present in the Avalon community.
Our ultimate aim is to create a global community and a “home base” in Gran Canaria, Spain, where revolutionaries, warriors, peace workers, healers, map-makers, magicians, artists, storytellers, and lovers of every kind can unite and shine as true servants of this planet.
The ultimate purpose of self-development is to fulfill our highest calling in this physical world.
““In the Avalon leadership training, I learned that the safest thing to do was let go, and that the concept of a loving community is ‘lived’. ‘Playing’ was taken as seriously as my embodying my own potential.”
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Details
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The Compassion In Action training includes:
- Five intensive 6-day Avalon trainings (in Europe)
- Monthly training via Zoom
- Four personal coaching sessions with the Avalon core team
- Peer support within the Avalon framework to help you overcome the challenges and blocks to your realizing your goals for self-development and contributing your gifts to the world
Qualifications for the Leadership Program
Anyone who has completed a week-long Avalon Retreat can apply to join the Surrendered Unity Leadership. Each prospective participant must also have demonstrated emotional maturity and the capacity for self-regulation, in order to be able to honor the following:
Your Commitment
- To do the self-examination that supports your own growth
- To bring your unique gifts into the world
- To support others' growth
- To cultivate connection with your co-participants throughout the 15-month training
Training Team
The CIA Leadership Program is led by the Avalon core team: Alanja Forsberg, Tom Slater, Tataya Radtke, and Thomas Radtke. Guest teachers whose work complements the Avalon mission may also be invited.
Investment
The Surrendered Unity Leadership Program is €8000* (personal) or €9500* for corporate/business (*subject to change).
Travel, food, and accommodation costs are not included. Room and board is typically €60 – €80 per day.
A €1500 deposit is due up-front to secure your place. Remaining tuition may paid monthly, with any remaining balance due before the final training week.
Please contact us for more information. We are excited to have you join this fast-growing program of participants from across the globe.
BRING YOUR HIGHEST POTENTIAL TO THE WORLD
When we feel whole, we naturally seek to contribute to a greater good. Once we have tasted the pleasure of our freedom and power, we want others to experience more freedom and aliveness themselves, and we are drawn to using our energies — our very life force — to create positive change in this world. We each have different vocations, living situations, and communities. In Surrendered Unity Leadership, we explore and nurture your specific gifts and
how you personally want to contribute them. With the ongoing compassionate support of others in our training team over 15 months — including being challenged to bring ourselves ever more fully and authentically — we co-create a rare opportunity for a deep dive into what "leadership" means for each of us. And we do this with a sense of beautiful play, with each other and with life.
Ultimately, Avalon has a transpersonal aim: of a global community advancing positive change in business, government, education, the arts, science and technology, medicine, and every facet of the human experience. In Avalon, we start with the individual, to tap into and release the incredible potential we each possess to have an inspiring impact on humanity.