The world needs leaders, healers, and visionary creators. Over an intensive 15-month study of leadership and compassionate connection, you'll learn the joy of self-empowerment in service of the greater good.
Our Mission
The Surrendered Unity Leadership Training is a 15-month leadership program to empower your unique self-expression and realize your fullest potential. This training (themed "Compassion in Action", or CiA, for the 2017 program) allows a deeper, ongoing experience of the practice and principles of Avalon retreats, to create the impacts we'd wish to see in the world.
As with all Avalon workshops, our Surrendered Unity Leadership Training draws on the support and power of group-work, focused on creative spontaneity and compassionate connection. The program is a space for an alchemical meeting of souls that allows healing of traumas and transformation of consciousness, for yourself and others. You will train in surrendering to, and holding awareness of, what nurtures these transformational processes: purity of intention, openness of perception, clarity of thought, heart-centered compassion, courageous self-expression, and co-creation of new possibilities.
This training is to empower your boldness, for you to fully express what deeply longs to be expressed through you in alignment with the needs and intelligence of the collective. From this place, you will learn to co-create your life and the world with more clarity, courage, compassion, and care.
“The hidden gem at the core of Avalon is that we are training ourselves as leaders, by releasing our core contractions — and seeing what then flows naturally. The results are utterly inspiring. I say that as someone who’s attended three Avalons, so far.””
BRING YOUR HIGHEST POTENTIAL TO THE WORLD
When we feel whole, we naturally seek to contribute to a greater good. Once we taste the pleasure of our freedom and power, we naturally want others to experience more freedom and aliveness, and we are drawn to using our energies — our very life force — to create positive change in this world.
We each have different vocations, living situations, and communities. In
Surrendered Unity Leadership, you explore and nurture your specific gifts and
how you personally want to contribute them. With the ongoing compassionate
support of others in your training team over 15 months — including being
challenged to bring yourself ever more fully and authentically — you will dive deeply into what true leadership means for you.
We do this together in a sense of beautiful play, with each other and with life.
Ultimately, Avalon has a transpersonal aim: of a global community advancing
positive change in business, government, education, the arts, science and
technology, medicine, and every facet of the human experience. In Avalon, we
start with the individual, to tap into and release the incredible potential we each possess to have an inspiring impact on humanity.
Avalon's Surrendered Unity Leadership Training is an alchemical space where we heal and transform our consciousness — for ourselves and others.
The World Needs Healers
Conscious growth and self-evolution are social processes arising in relationship with others. Some relationships are compassionate and healthy, inspiring us to increase our capacity to connect, love, and flourish; others are unhealthy, built on harsh disconnections, in the form of violence, abuse, systemic oppression, neglect, and unmet desires and needs from trusted ones.
Painful experiences and traumas are deeply imprinted as emotional suffering and contracted life-energies in the body, resulting in a spectrum of negative mind-states, such as mistrust, fear, anger, shame, guilt, addictions, depression, and self-deception, as well as a general lack of vitality, self-compassion, honesty, and integrity. These wounds and scars sharply limit our quality of life and hold us back from expressing our greatness, beauty, power, and purpose.
But the intelligence of the body knows how to heal the wounds of the heart
and to weave together parts we believe are broken — to return us to feeling whole and alive. The suffering and contracted life-energy of unhealthy relationships can be healed and released in compassionate relationships. To skillfully master this art is at the core of this training.
The Training
This Surrendered Unity Leadership Training is a radical, holistic paradigm for trauma release and shadow work in groups, based on creative spontaneity and compassion as the foundation of human connection and psycho-spiritual healing and transformation. Our methods build on an Integral synthesis of various approaches to compassionate, consciousness-based psychotherapy and have been practiced in Avalon Retreats since 2015.
The program weaves together three journeys towards freedom, aliveness, and wholeness:
Healing our wounds
Profound meetings with the other
Healing the world
first journey:
HEALing YOUR WOUNDS
Before you can heal and transform others, you must heal your own wounds. This first journey is to access the light and dark within your psyche. You will learn to create presence and compassion through a solid commitment to the healing process, and to trust your innate bodily wisdom — to courageously surrender into what is alive in you from moment to moment.
This Surrendered Unity Leadership Training guides you to an inner space where you can feel the root cause of any suffering in your life. From here, you can release the trapped life-energy that comes from your shadow side and from withholding your free expression with others (what we call "freeleasing" in Avalon). A freelease typically opens great energy flows that give clarity and will-power to your life purpose.
From this emotional cleansing, you will now be able to understand, forgive, and embrace yourself with greater compassion and to take full ownership for every relationship in your life.
When we feel emotionally freed of the past, we can embrace ourselves and others with compassion and take full responsibility for our lives.
second JOURNEY:
PROFOUND mEETINGS WITH the OTHER
In the most poetic sense, all living is meeting. We are all embedded in Nature, and as humans we grow from our connection with other humans. To meet others profoundly is to reconnect with a sensorimotor awareness whose subtle power many of us have forgotten; this awareness is what perceives within us and moves us to act, nonetheless.
In the Surrendered Unity Leadership Training, you will learn to attune to what is invisible and hear what is not said — to stay present in "not knowing" and to tune in, zoom out, dig deep, hold space, move energies, and follow the natural flow of healing and transformation at all levels of life expression — with others.
You will discover an ethic — a sense of responsibility for what arises in your awareness that moves you to act only when you are touched or called for, as you find yourself increasingly freed from reactive responses. From this space, your interactions with others can now be driven by a curiosity and a commitment to others' growth and well-being as well as your own. Training in profound meetings allows you to stay open, present, and sensitive, in the midst of the ever-changing dance of gross, subtle, and causal energies that run through you, around you, and between you and others.
In surrendered leadership, we learn to stay open, present, and sensitive to every energy that arises in ourselves and with others.
THIRD JOURNEY:
HEALING THE WORLD
The world needs healing. To heal and transform the world requires that we stay awake and be authentically impacted by the calls and pulls of Life. The third journey in this leadership training is to transmit and translate the wisdom and practice of our surrendered meetings and surrendered action, into transforming our and others' suffering into fullness, freedom, and aliveness.
This Surrendered Unity Leadership Training is about healing ourselves that we may become healing warriors of expanded consciousness on this planet — to step into our full leadership outside the training program, whether as therapists, teachers, writers, activists, or whatever role we occupy in life. We apply the wisdom of surrendered meeting to explore our unique potential and ways of service, our journey supported through the collective intelligence of the Avalon community.
Our aim is to create a global community, including a home base in Gran Canaria, Spain, where revolutionaries, warriors, peace workers, healers, map-makers, magicians, artists, storytellers, and lovers of every kind can unite and shine as true servants of this planet.
The ultimate purpose of self-development is to fulfill our highest calling in the world.
““In the Avalon leadership training, I learned that the safest thing to do was let go, and that the concept of a loving community is a lived concept. Playing was taken as seriously as my embodying my own potential.”
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Details
Contact us to be added to our newsletter mailing list (coming soon), to receive updates about our training and other Avalon retreats.
The Surrendered Unity Leadership: Compassion In Action training includes:
Five intensive 6-day Avalon trainings
Monthly online training via Zoom
Two personal coaching sessions per month with the Avalon core team
Peer support within the Avalon framework to help you overcome challenges and blocks to realizing your self-development goals and contributing your gifts to the world
Qualifications for the Leadership Program
Anyone who has completed a week-long Avalon Retreat is invited to join the Surrendered Unity Leadership Training. Each prospective participant must also demonstrate emotional maturity and the capacity for self-regulation, in order to be able to honor the following:
Your Commitment
To do the self-examination that supports your own growth
To bring your unique gifts into the world
To support others' growth
To cultivate connection with your co-participants throughout the 15-month training
Investment
The Surrendered Unity Leadership Program is €18,000 (personal) or €24,500 for corporate/business (subject to change).
Travel, food, and accommodation costs are additional. Room and board are typically €80 – €100 per day.
A €1500 deposit is due up-front to secure your place. Remaining tuition may be paid monthly, with all outstanding balances due before the final training week.
Please contact us for more information or to join. We are excited to have you join this fast-growing program of participants from across the globe.
Contact us for more details or to register for our Leadership Training →