Education that leads to change

Assisters 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 global transformative education platform Advaya. Wespoke with the two sisters about creating a global network for inner and outerchange.

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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 intimatelyconnected to the health of the individual. And in the same way, the health ofthe 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 comingto understand the deeper responses to the challenges of our time. We are tryingto explore the bigger picture whilst also trying to think about how we can makepositive changes in the world without this feeling like a burden. We want positivechange-making to be a celebration of our embodied existence and the humanability to draw out harmony where disharmony has occurred, as all nature andlife does.

e: How do you work on manifesting these ideasin your activities, whether in-person or online?

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 togetherwith different but complementing perspectives that deepen and expand ondifferent topics. For example, with the topic of imagination we might have aneuroscientist, 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 theconcept of imagination as a whole, and enable us to bring it into our own livesso that we can approach the world differently.

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

RR: We are currently hosting a nine-monthonline 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 grossand get more subtle, beginning with with “food and farming”. Each month we progress a little bit deeper, we touch on topics like depression, addiction andthe shadow, death and grief, myth, story and imagination, meditation andconsciousness. 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, withdeath and grief, we began with Charles Eisenstein and Stephen Jenkinson indialogue with Kaira Jewel Lingo, who was a Buddhist monk in the lineage ofThich 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 SelenaKing, who’s a death doula in the United Kingdom, which was more participatory.

In the workshop, weare able to explore the topics that we first discovered in the deep dive and engagewith the material in a different way. It's not just listening andconceptualising, but thinking about how the concept affects us, andcommunicating that with the other people in the group.

At the beginning ofeach month we create a big reading list and we invite people to add to the list, so at the end of the month we have a big resources list for each topic. Also, we have a book club every month and some another sessions, such asceremonies or participant presentations.

That's an example for one month and we do that for nine months. You can imagine that if you come inat the beginning in October, not knowing anything about these topics and then you leave in June, having had a really profound experience, because apart from the content, it's the connections that you can make with each of the different participants. It's like a university course – but deeper.

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

RR: We host the course on an online communication platform called Mighty Networks. It’s a bitlike Facebook, but you don't have to pay to reach everybody. When you write amessage, everybody can read it. You’re not relying on algorithms, things aren’thidden from your group. We host all the material on the platform, and every participanthas 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 andconnection 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 practicalapproaches to forest care. There are almost 50 different teachers from over 30nations around the world. It consists of seven two-week modules. In eachtwo-week module, we are in a different bioregion. We begin in Northeast Asia with people exploring forest bathing,qigong, village groves, different ways of engaging with the forest in a veryspiritual way. Then we move through the bioregion of Britain and Ireland, thento the boreal forest of Scandinavia, Siberia and Canada, and then to theAustral forests in the Zona Austral. Longago, 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 MelinirFamily and the Comunidad Quinquen in Chile, with some people in the northernregion of New Zealand, as well as Australia and Vanuatu. The following modulehosts the tropical forests of subsaharan and equatorial Africa with Liberia,Chad, Kenya and Tanzania - amazing people are joining us from there. We thenmeet 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'rethinking about how traditional knowledge systems and traditional wisdom canreally help us in the modern day, particularly with how we engage withsomething that's more than ourselves. In this course we're looking at ourrelationship to the forest.

e: This is an elaborated, very fine-tuned structure. How do you come to this kind of course architecture?

CR: We're always collaborating withfriends. On this forest course we're working with a colleague from LeedsUniversity. In the previous journey course, we were working with our friend Eve Annecke, who founded Lynedoch Sustainability Institute in South Africa. On a recentcourse about food and farming, we were working with Chelsea Green Publishing,and for our current course about activism we are working with an activisttraining institute called Ulex Project in Spain. We really like to collaborate with people, and we thrive in a situation like that.

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 ofa larger us, rather than polarisation or narratives of “them-and-us”. Activismcan be very polarising and can come from an aggressive or angry place, which isultimately very depleting. We try to create big narratives that bring peopletogether and empower one another to have a strong voice. But a voice that'sinclusive of all opinions and can really have a sense of direction, which willalso allow people to come together more.

To share thisdifferent narrative is a form of activism. We're not on the street witha 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 adifferent role in the world.

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

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

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