Actionist Power-up
Liberate more of your ecosocial actionist potential. The RC un/learning path explores the deep social & cultural barriers to our ecosocial challenges and equips us with the tools to eliminate them over time. Get sharper and gather allies to help with hospicing the old and midwifing the new with more zest and flexibility.
Healing Ourselves and Helping Others
We all struggle with personal and collective hurts. With RC we learn to attend to our own distresses and those of others with compassion while offloading our embodied, messy and troublesome emotional backpacks. The RC processes opens pathways to more effective, distress-free actions, as we let go of the constraints of social and cutural oppressions.
Community Of Practice
Develop long-term connections with allies from the Gaia U RC cohort on successful1 completion of your RC training. Learn to reach out to give and get ongoing support in this critical work. You don’t have to do this alone. We are a part of a global network dedicated to fostering ecosocial futures and we welcome you to come onboard and help expand our capacity.
1 Becoming an RC practitioner takes practice, an open mindset (a capacity for mindflex), a willingness to feel feelings we might have kept buried for years and an orientation to building community. Not everyone is ready and able to meet these challenges. You best find out by trying. Together we’ll negotiate your standing during or at the end of the training to ensure your needs, RC thinking and our capacities are a good match.
The Pathway to Healing
The RC Course has been structured so that you can begin at any point, and complete the courses in any order.
OMBRA is offered as a free bonus which can be taken as many times as you like.You may take OMBRA before attending any RC courses, but you are also welcome to attend without first completing OMBRA.
Once you complete all 3 of the core elements of the RC Fundamentals Training we will interview you to see if your needs and emerging RC skills, RC thinking and our capacities are a good match. If we are well aligned you’ll be invited to to join the Gaia U RC Cohort with access to one on one sessions, ongoing classes and support group calls.
A window into the process: A Free 3-Hour OMBRA Workshop
Oppression, Movement Building, and our Relationship as Activists
Join this once-a-month, no-cost workshop for an enlightening experience during which the principles of Re-evaluation Counseling (RC) come to life. (RC is a well-developed process for profound inner and outer change).
The OMBRA workshop is designed specifically for individuals like you who are passionate about ecosocial projects and are seeking effective paths for community building and actionism – this inclusive and safe workshop gently opens the door on RC theory and practice. It comes with a very useful, post-workshop write-up. You might want to attend this more than once – we did!
Who Is This For?
All Gaia U folk are invited, courtesy of our generous allies, K & A, who are not from Gaia U. The workshop is especially especially crafted for those involved in movements like permaculture, climate justice, Extinction Rebellion, regenerative design, social and environmental activism, collapase preparedness and ecosocial enterprise. See how RC informed processes can help you connect with yourself and others and how it may amplify your impact through liberated intelligences.
Your Guides on This Journey
Delivered by seasoned RC practitioners (K & A 2 ), this workshop is a heartfelt gift to you – the change-makers and visionaries of our time. With extensive experience in movement building for an ecosocial future, the facilitators of OMBRA are not just teachers but fellow travelers committed to a better world.
2 We use initials to preserve a level of confidentiality and safety. You can imagine that there are powers in the world that might prefer us not to liberate ourselves from oppression nor to act towards hospicing imperialistic modernism whilst bringing forth a new ecosocial future.
The Path from OMBRA to RC
The OMBRA workshop equips you to see the world and your story within it, with new eyes.This is a lovely beginning and there is plenty more to do. We invite you to continue your world-change journey through our online Re-evaluation Counseling training .
RC, with its rich 70+ year history, is a living, organized project of action learning and research. It emerged through the courageous and persistent actions of working-class people in the post-WW2 era, determined to address the deep-seated hurts and traumas arising from oppressive societies that separate us from our connections with all of life and from our inherent goodness.
For more info on how OMBRA integrates with RC read this letter from our Gaia U co- founder
Why RC?
RC is not simply another self-development approach; it’s a transformative practice that clears out the unhealed hurts that get in the way of us bringing forth societies that meet the needs of all life. RC’ers expect to work at the bringing-forth!
Through long-term peer-to-peer support, skilled use of technique and attention, access to community reference people, RC enables us to overcome the compulsions and triggers (restimulations) arising from systemic oppressions such as classism, sexism, racism, and more.
It’s a collection of time proven methods that enable us to rediscover our inherent ability for ecosocial caring, our unlimited capacity for intelligent creativity and our spirited aptitude for finding joy and meaning through right livelihood.
Our reason for offering these classes arises from our Gaia U world-change focus in which we thoughtfully design and act on ecological, social and economic interventions intended to rapidly and yet without desperation, adapt our societies to deal with the crises of our time (climate chaos, mass population displacements, soil loss and ecosystem destruction, inequalities, pandemics, social and political regression, violence and warfare and social collapse).
Looking for More Info?
RC has a rich history and more information about benefits, applications, history and practices can be found on these websites:
rc.org
Upcoming Courses
We are using the Gaia U modular approach that enables you to begin the full journey to an RC Fundamentals badge starting with any module. Your progress is tracked using the iCAAFS open badge system so you’ll always be able to see what modules you have the badge for and which skills you have understood and practiced.
We will provide sequential translation from English into Spanish for all modules.
June 2024: Liberation From Oppression
During this class we will gently face up to the historic and abiding oppressions that distort our cultures. These are many and varied and this class serves as an introduction to the RC Theory of Oppression and Liberation.
This includes understanding the various means whereby oppressions are ‘laid in’, maintained, and developed. We will come to understand that none of these are inherent in being human, that all humans are fundamentally good, and that we can slough off oppression over time, through discharging the hurts that otherwise hold them in place.
We will also acknowledge that we are all agents of oppressions (we all ‘do’ oppression to others) and that we are all affected by oppressions we have internalized (in which we act on self-limiting thoughts installed by our societies) and that our societies are riddled with structural forms of oppression. We make these acknowledgments without blame or guilt by always remembering the essential difference between the inherent goodness of all people and our distress patterns – it is these patterns that cause us to act with indifference and without compassion and we can get rid of them.
Dates
Classes will begin in June 2024. Exact days and times to be confirmed.
Register your interest below and let us know what days and times work best, we will try to accommodate the majority of the cohort. Usually we use the mornings PST/evenings CET.
Class Rhythm and Duration:
– 5 live 2 hours classes using Zoom.
One class every week with up to 1 hour of readings and 1 hour of practical assignments in between classes.
Previous RC Fundamentals class attendees are welcome. Many of us benefit from multiple refreshers of both theory and practice.
Cost and Enrollment
We’re committed to making our courses accessible to all, regardless of financial background. This is why we’ve implemented a sliding scale system for course fees, based on an estimate of $5 per person per teaching hour to adequately support our dedicated teachers and technical team.
How It Works:
- Self-Evaluation: We ask you to assess your payment based on your financial situation. Consider factors like your wealth relative to global and local levels, income flexibility, disposable income, and access to luxuries such as travel.
- Income Equity: The sliding scale is designed to foster income equity. Regardless of the level you choose, you’ll receive the same high-quality course. This system allows those with more financial resources to support the participation of those with less.
Why a Sliding Scale? We believe in equitable access to education. This system helps ensure that everyone has the opportunity to learn, grow, and contribute, regardless of their financial means. Your honest self-evaluation supports this vision of accessible, inclusive learning.