This workshop is a foundational training in the Way of the Council combined with the Art of Narrative Cartography.

Join us, learn some of the simple yet powerful principles for facilitating a council, practice together, and explore creative ways to map our stories as well as those of our ancestors and our land.

Do you feel the call of a week spent in nature and in community?

Feel free to ask your questions to Carine

Ways of the Council?

Circle-based communication designed to support group processes and personal development, for envisioning and clarifying goals, fostering cooperative learning environments, facilitating decision-making, recognizing achievements, promoting reflection, managing conflict, advancing peace and reconciliation efforts, celebrating accomplishments, and uncovering the deep, often unexpressed needs of individuals and organizations.

Sitting together—listening and speaking from the heart— this ancient practice of gathering in a circle with mindfulness, sometimes called “council,” offers a way to create a safe and respectful space where difficult and important conversations can take place.

And what about the art of narrative cartography?

In our ecological identity, the places we inhabit shape us just as much as we shape them. The river where I swam as a child, the places that saw me grow up, those that saw me laugh, love, and cry. My personal history is made up of places, of territories, explored and experienced. Conversely, I influence these places through my actions: the water I pollute or the garden I tend, the trails I carve with my footsteps in the forest, the trees I prune or embrace, the food I consume.

The art of narrative mapping invites us to reexamine our relationship with the places and the earth that welcome us.

An invitation to experience my personal history, my experiences, my values, my strengths, and my wounds, through the landscape and territory explored both through the gaze and through walks and rituals.

Drawing a delicate map, illuminated and carried by the landscape, the vitality of the rocks, plants, mountains, and rivers… The non-human beings who populate my story, accompanying me at every step, from birth to death.

The Navajo have healing paintings and sand paintings (“iikààh”: “the place through which the gods come and go”). The Aboriginal people of Australia have sung paths, passed down from generation to generation, known as songlines.

What might our local songlines or our mineral paintings of the mountains be? The stories of our ancestors, told along irrigation channels, ridges, treetops, or chaotic scree? What does the presence of the wolf teach me about all my relationships? What does the drought in the Forest tell us? What does it “say” in my personal story?

Weaving council stories and narrative maps.

We invite you to explore a truly unique and expansive way of coming together in council, to learn the structure and principles of this particular form and way of being together, to listen deeply, and to be creative, revisiting and retelling our stories of belonging through our rituals, our maps, our dances, and our songs.

A unique opportunity to learn through hands-on experience.

Participants will

• identify effective practices for facilitating individuals and groups.

• develop communication skills and the ability to be fully present in each moment.

• explore the teachings offered in response to our individual and collective needs and questions

• discover different forms of governance tailored to various contexts

• be invited to join a larger community

• map one’s own sense of belonging to the earth and explore personal and collective songs

• Experience the power of rituals

• Immerse themselves in the healing power of stories and circles

• Experiment with other ways of being together and rediscover the wisdom of cyclical thinking

• Deepen their trust in the unknown and in the web of life

• Meet others who are on the same journey

• Sleep in teepees and spend a week in nature.

OPEN TO ANYONE WHO WISHES TO DISCOVER AND INCORPORATE THIS PRACTICE INTO THEIR PROFESSIONAL AND/OR PERSONAL LIVES

ALSO OPEN TO THOSE WITH LITTLE OR NO EXPERIENCE WITH CIRCLE WORK

The workshop will be conducted in English and French, with French translation