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Living well

December 17, 2023 Collab Salon: On Inspiration

Thank you to all who have contributed to the Collab for 9 years. Please join us during these challenging times as we mark Collab Endings and New Beginnings together, and link our lives around inspiration.  This Collab has three parts:1- Re-membering the Collab Salon:Cohosts Peggy Sax, Charley Lang & Larry Zucker will  briefly share some of our initial inspirations, history, intentions, hopes, and significant changes over the years.2- On Inspiration: Ian Percy will invite us to reflect on the experience, the effects, and the practice of inspiration. He will guide us to focus on:  Recalling and honouring an experience of inspiration during the past year and Imagining possible experiences of inspiration during the year to come. 3- Inspiring and imagining The NextGen Collaboratory: Poh, Akansha and Peggy will glimpse the upcoming series of six bi-monthly 3-hour gatherings, beginning in May 2024, reaffirming our narrative foundations while exploring contemporary and emerging narrative practices.

2023-12-26T14:34:42-05:00October 13th, 2022|Comments Off on December 17, 2023 Collab Salon: On Inspiration
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July 19, 2020 Collab Salon: How to live whilst dying? What children and young people with a Life Limiting Illness (LLI), can teach us about living

"Given the current realities of the COVID-19 pandemic the narratives around living and dying, choice and decision making, facing our own mortality, are all more paramount than ever and what is perceived as something that affects others and is ‘rare’ has come very much into everybody’s everyday life.  Whilst my work has always focused on children and families I hope the lessons they have taught me will be transferable to many situations and leave everyone with some thoughts to take away and consider both personally and professionally." Dr Claire Cooley, Kent United Kingdom

2020-08-16T17:07:49-04:00September 20th, 2019|Comments Off on July 19, 2020 Collab Salon: How to live whilst dying? What children and young people with a Life Limiting Illness (LLI), can teach us about living
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April 19, 2020 Collab Salon: Reflections on practice with people who are suffering

As a counsellor working for hospice, I meet with people who are suffering, sometimes with unsolvable problems, as they live with serious illness and the knowledge of their approaching death.  What can these experiences offer to those of us facing suffering in many different contexts during this time of Covid-19 pandemic? Given the current context, this Collab is still evolving. I hope to share some of my reflections on practices that ease suffering. These include thoughts on how we create space for stories of suffering, how we respond to big stories day to day and questioning practices that can be significant in restoring a sense of meaning and agency. I look forward to hearing how you might apply such practices to your own context for work. To facilitate the discussion I will be providing a collaborative document to illustrate some of the narrative practices we will be reflecting on. Sasha Pilkington

2023-04-16T08:33:29-04:00September 12th, 2019|0 Comments
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September 15, 2019: Anti-Machinalization (a.k.a Burn-out) Global Summit

Have you seen anyone spending extraordinary hours working in isolation with the best of intentions, being fueled by expectations or a sense of obligation/responsibility even though the initial fuel was un-mistakably passion, curiosity, creativity and/or social justice? We have a suspicion that Machinalization of human beings today is never a personal problem but a globally witnessed/experienced phenomenon that could potentially have life-suffocating, or even life-threatening effects on our lives. The summit started with Sumie Ishikawa’s sharing her ‘insider experiences’ and her hope-generating discoveries as to how we could possibly co-resist Machinalization, followed by Amy Druker interviewing Sumie and an outsider witness. Participants were invited to join in a group discussion, where taken-for-granted Machinalizing discourses and practices that are woven into the capitalistic structure of modern society can be called into question. Let’s imagine together small acts of co-resistance so that the human part of us can survive and thrive in this Machinalizing time we live in today!

2020-09-27T19:47:17-04:00October 31st, 2018|Comments Off on September 15, 2019: Anti-Machinalization (a.k.a Burn-out) Global Summit
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December 2018 Collab Salon: Fields of kindness: An antidote to tyrannical devaluing

Somatic therapies and a resurgence of interest in affect are two significant trends in recent times. These movements invite narrative-oriented practitioners to pause and unpack what claims are being made and their implications. In exploring challenges and possibilities, we considered the dialogical features, affective tones, emotional depictions and embodied expressions of re-membering practices. The December 2018 Collab focused on a notion of relational fields in instituting new forms of everyday living, especially giving attention to expanding relational fields of kindness when tyrannical and devaluing voices seek to usurp a person’s voice and erase their knowing about their achievements.

2019-12-29T07:03:24-05:00January 31st, 2018|Comments Off on December 2018 Collab Salon: Fields of kindness: An antidote to tyrannical devaluing
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April 2018 Collab Salon: Yoga and Narrative Practices

What are some ways we can integrate Narrative and Yoga practices? What might this look like?  What are some of the questions, dilemmas that need to be considered when exploring such a combination? What are the ways in which these practices could work together to strengthen and deepen one another? Can we do this in ways that fit with an anti-oppressive approach to working with people and practices?  In this Collab Salon, Narrative practitioners and Yoga teachers Sarah Hughes and Kayla Robbins reflected on these questions and shared some of their experiences, ideas and struggles. Participants were invited to share their own experiences and reflections, and to imagine new areas of possibility between these two practices. 

2020-01-01T08:58:04-05:00January 15th, 2018|1 Comment
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