Tender & Kind
A late winter class for nourishing
steady calm & compassionate response
Live & virtual via Zoom
Wednesdays 5:30-6:30pm PST
March 4, 11, 18, & 25
Compassion practices and calm earth-based meditations to help you discern:
What is my most compassionate response in these times?
$99 for 4 sessions.
- Come as you are. Sessions are informal and relaxed.
- Bring a cup of tea, light a candle, & get cozy.
- Sessions will be recorded. If you can't make a session, no worries.
All are welcome.
4 sessions of calm connection
Honey, you are tired and things feel unpredictable. It's a lot to be in the heavy swirl of social and ecological unraveling that is currently happening, while still holding up a mountain of daily responsibilities. You're getting tired of constantly reacting to the news- because it's alarming, disheartening and is wearing you down. You care deeply and you're enraged, frustrated, sad, lonely, scared and unsure about how to take action, especially about things that you can't directly fix.
Even as our hearts break and life feels heavier by the day, many of us agonize over these questions:
Am I doing enough?
What else should I be doing?
In what simple ways can I contribute to a world that is more tender and kind?
In this class, we'll gather together with purpose. We'll practice accessing calm stability. We'll guide you in practices that help you touch into compassion for yourself, for our earth kin, and for all the suffering that is happening in our world. And we'll help you turn toward this question and discern with clarity: What is my most compassionate response at this time?
As you care for your tender heart and deeply feel your connection with earth-life, you can deepen your trust in yourself and you can discern your own right way of turning toward this crisis with a compassionate response. You can get clear about what response is right for you.
We believe that the earth shares her wisdom and support generously, offering guidance, grounding, and a source of stability. We believe that practicing loving compassion offers a calming balm for what ails us right now. And we believe that this connection to calm and grounded stability is absolutely needed right now.
You'll leave this class with new compassion practices to ground you, a stable and visceral sense of earth-based support, and more clarity and trust about your own compassionate response.
Here’s what we’ll explore in each of the 4 class sessions:
🌿 Inner compassionate response (for cultivating calm and trust)
🌿 Communal compassionate response (for cultivating loving community)
🌿 Earth-based wisdom and compassionate response (for inner stability and wise ways of being)
🌿 Discernment: What is my compassionate response? (for knowing what is ours to do in times of crisis)
At the end of each session, we will offer you one simple (optional) invitation for practice between sessions so that you can deepen into the experience of compassionate response on your own.
Your Facilitators:
Dr. Heather Burns (she/her) has been a scholar and facilitator of eco-spiritual learning for 20+ years as a university professor and through her business, Alderroot Healing & Renewal. She holds space for transformative healing and wholeness rooted in relationships and interbeing. She has extensive experience teaching others how to design and facilitate eco-spiritual and sustainability learning, and she is an experienced designer and facilitator of participatory, experiential, contemplative, and transformative learning experiences. Over the years, she has deepened her intuitive facilitation skills through guiding retreats, forest therapy experiences, courses in spirituality and deep ecology, and personal mentorship.
Heather holds a doctorate in Educational Leadership in Sustainability, an MA in Women Studies and Adult Education, and BA in Psychology. She was the director of the Leadership for Sustainability Education graduate program for many years and has published numerous articles on transformative and eco-spiritual learning. She is the author of the book Transformative Sustainability Pedagogy: Designing and Facilitating Eco-Spiritual Learning. Heather is also a certified forest therapy guide with the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy, a Reiki master, and a certified permaculture designer.
Irene Elle Bailey (she/her) is honored to design and facilitate nature connection offerings to support the remembering that we are intimately and inseparably connected to all life. Over the past 20 years, Irene has worked with numerous environmental and sustainability education programs as an educator, leader, mentor, and wilderness guide. She holds a MS in Leadership for Sustainability Education from Portland State University and is a certified Forest Therapy Guide with The Association for Nature and Forest Therapy. Irene trained with the Sati Center for Buddhist Studies as a Buddhist Eco-Chaplain and has been exploring meditation and body based spiritual practices for nearly a decade. Her foundation for sharing her gifts with the world is rooted in gratitude, connection, joy, and compassion.
Irene’s life journey has led her to support humans to flourish and re-discover their interconnectedness, self-worth, and sense of belonging so they can show up for themselves, and in turn for all life. She believes wholeheartedly in the transformation and deep healing that is possible when we allow the more than human world to be a wise teacher and cultivate a felt sense of interbeing. Irene supports the creation of safer spaces in the natural world so that others can get the healing and nourishment they deserve to live well.
We believe in the need for restorative time (amidst the incomprehensible suffering of our world, racial injustice, climate crisis) to show up with strength and stability for individual and collective well being.
Sessions will be recorded and shared.
If you miss a session, no worries.