Guiding Lights
Why We Resonate With Aspen Trees
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Like us, aspens are interconnected, regenerative, and resilient. They're able to bend instead of break and to send out new shoots for growth in challenging times. In fact, aspens are the largest and oldest living organism in the world.
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Here are some of the core values that inform, infuse, and shape our class. We are guided by collective wisdom, hospitality, inclusivity, creativity as our birthright, courage, compassion in action, Right Livelihood, community and self-care, and joy.
Collective Wisdom
We believe we are wiser together than apart. By pooling our collective insights, intuition, discernment, and experience, we can create better facilitation outcomes and stronger communities.
Hospitality
The art of facilitation is the practice of hospitality: setting a welcoming table for all who participate in workshops, meetings, and more. We seek to create a sense of belonging for others that, in turn, brings out their best.
Facilitation also entails holding a hospitable space for diverse people, including BIPOC, people living with serious illness or disabilities, LGBTQ, those facing significant life challenges, and other unrepresented voices.
Inclusivity
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Creativity as Our Birthright
Transformative facilitation is rooted in the understanding that we are all born to create -- art and writing, ideas and collaborations, insights and new ways of seeing, community and connection -- regardless of pedigree, education, awards, publications, and status.
Courage
Good facilitation calls us to summon our courage, which sometimes means engaging with conflict for the good of those we work with -- as well as facing fears, anxieties, and insecurities.
Compassion in Action
The continual practice of compassion in action requires us to treat others with respect and dignity. This includes welcoming and integrating people into facilitation spaces, holding gently shared individual or group vulnerabilities, and steering others by kindness.
Right Livelihood
For facilitators to sustain themselves, they need to be compensated (whether the work is paid or compensated in other ways). Facilitators also need to heed their own right livelihood callings in order to elevate the quality of their lives.
Community and Self-Care
An ethic of care informs the communities with which we work, as well as our own self-care. In pursuing this ethic both together and alone, we can create personalized paths that promote health and healing.
Joy
Facilitation can offer both ourselves and others the joy of discovering our individual voices, accomplishing good work, creating something new and meaningful, and the delight of nurturing a shared sense of belonging.
