Interactive education in the exchange of cultures

As sisters and longtime yoga practitioners, Christabel and Ruby Reed felt that individual healing needs to also lead to transformative action. To explore this connection, they founded the platform Advaya, a global network for inner and outer change.

evolve: What's the core of your work with Advaya?

Christabel Reed: From the beginning, it was about exploring how the health of our environments and ecosystems is intimately connected to the health of the individual. And in the same way, the health of the communities and networks around us are interdependent with our individual health.

The main theme behind our work is looking at the inner and the outer.

The other part is about exploring and coming to understand the deeper responses to the challenges of our time. We are trying to explore the bigger picture whilst also trying to think about how we can initiate positive changes in the world without this feeling like a burden. We want positive change-making to be a celebration of our embodied existence and the human ability to draw out harmony where disharmony has occurred, as all nature and life do.

e: How do you work on manifesting these ideas in your activities?

CR: We research inspiring people and topics around the world and curate courses around some of the ideas that we find particularly transformational. We like to bring people together with different but complementary perspectives that deepen and expand on different topics. For example, with the topic of imagination, we might have a neuroscientist, an activist, a systems-change theorist, and a storyteller. We might think about how these people work with the imagination in different ways, how they can complement one another to give a deeper understanding of the topic, which could then change how we see the concept of imagination as a whole and enable us to bring it into our own lives so that we can approach the world differently.

e: Can you give a recent example where you felt that whole idea was blooming?

RR: We are currently hosting a nine-month online course called “A Journey Home” with three hundred people participating. It's a nine-month journey and every month we go deeper. We start with the gross and get more subtle, beginning with “food and farming”. Each month we progress a little bit deeper, we touch on topics like depression, addiction and the shadow, death and grief, myth, story and imagination, meditation, and consciousness. And we progress all the way through to “reimagining activisms”, which is our final topic.

Every month follows the same format. We begin with a deep dive, with some of the most inspiring figures that we can think of from that individual field. So, for example, with death and grief, we began with Charles Eisenstein and Stephen Jenkinson in dialogue with Kaira Jewel Lingo, who was a Buddhist monk in the lineage of Thich Nhat Hanh at Plum Village. The following week, we had a workshop with Colin Campbell, who is a traditional witch doctor from South Africa, and Selena King, who’s a death doula in the United Kingdom, which was more participatory. In the workshop, we are able to explore the topics that we first discovered in the deep dive and engage with the material in a different way. It's not just listening and conceptualizing, but thinking about how the concept affects us and communicating that with the other people in the group.

e: And how do you experience how people are changed and impacted by that?

RR: We host the course on an online communication platform called Mighty Networks. It’s a bit like Facebook, but you don't have to pay to reach everybody. When you write a message, everybody can read it. You’re not relying on algorithms; things aren’t hidden from your group. We host all the material on the platform, and every participant has a profile. They can write to one another and share their experiences. It's a very interactive platform, that enables a strong sense of community and connection with all the participants who are going on this journey together.

We're using the same platform for another course that we begin in May called “Guardians of the Forest”. It’s a three-month course in somatic, spiritual, and practical approaches to forest care. There are almost 50 different teachers from over 30 nations around the world. It consists of seven two-week modules. In each two-week module, we are in a different bioregion. We begin in Northeast Asia with people exploring forest bathing, qigong, village groves, and different ways of engaging with the forest in a very spiritual way. Then we move through the bioregion of Britain and Ireland, then to the boreal forest of Scandinavia, Siberia and Canada, and then to the Austral forests in the Zona Austral. Long ago, Chile and New Zealand and Australia were one landmass, which is why they have shared forests. We're going to be with an indigenous group called the Melinir Family and the Comunidad Quinquen in Chile, with some people in the northern region of New Zealand, as well as Australia and Vanuatu. The following module hosts the tropical forests of sub-Saharan and equatorial Africa with Liberia, Chad, Kenya and Tanzania - amazing people are joining us from there. We then meet teachers from the tropical rainforest of South America and finally finish up in the tropical rainforest of Southeast Asia with speakers from Indonesia, Sri Lanka and India.

As you see, we're thinking about how traditional knowledge systems and traditional wisdom can really help us in the modern day, particularly with how we engage with something that's more than ourselves. In this course, we're looking at our relationship with the forest.

e: One of your themes is reimagining activism. How is that showing in the courses? Are you also supporting ways to bring this knowledge into action?

RR: We don't coordinate actions ourselves, but we try to reframe activism to be very regenerative and to create a sense of a larger us, rather than polarization or narratives of “them-and-us”. Activism can be very polarizing and can come from an aggressive or angry place, which is ultimately very depleting. We try to create big narratives that bring people together and empower one another to have a strong voice. But a voice that's inclusive of all opinions and can really have a sense of direction, which will also allow people to come together more.

To share this different narrative is a form of activism. We're not on the street with a protest board, but we're creating a different type of education and knowing. When you can see the world differently, you can see how you can play a different role in the world.

The testimonials we've received have been things like: Because of this talk, I left my job and I started a new cooking company in London. I now source only organic food and I sell it to companies around the city. Or people who attended a talk on sustainable fashion set up a project working with poor people in council houses to sew and create beautiful sustainable items. We have a lot of people who tell us things like that, they've heard something for the first time and their life has changed.

We really try and reach different audiences and reach outside of our echo chamber, because, with the way that social media platforms work, your echo chamber gets smaller and smaller. So, through collaboration, we really try and reach new people. And it's particularly on those people that our work can have a very big impact. Otherwise, it just reinforces views that people already have.

The conversation was conducted by Gerriet Schwen and Mike Kauschke.

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