Mindfulness is about being fully present in the here and now, being in touch with what is going on inside us and around us. It enables us to arrive in a place of centred awareness – able to be responsive and connected, to engage courageously and effectively in the world. On this training we seek to harness the empowering skills of mindfulness to values and action for social and ecological justice.
Mindfulness is about being fully present here and now, being in touch with what is going on inside us and around us. We can harness our attention and awareness to become more responsive and connected, and to engage courageously and effectively in the world. On this training you will learn to develop the empowering skills of mindfulness in service of values and action for social and ecological justice.
Using practices to train our minds and focus our attention, we build inner resources to become more balanced, energized and emotionally intelligent. In our fast-paced, stress laden, and complex world, Emotional awareness is crucial for being resilient in challenging times. It is central to mobilizing, engaging, communicating and influencing others, as well as thinking deeply, creatively and strategically. Harnessing mindfulness has never been more important in helping to bring about social change.
Mindfulness enables us to be aware of our thoughts, our feelings and our sensations. This makes us better able to take responsibility for our own mental states and reactions – enabling us to choose our responses, so they remain creative and helpful. Mindfulness also underpins our capacity to empathise and connect with others – to build mutually empowering relationships. It also helps us to pay attention to what is happening around us, to cut through assumptions and expectations, and to take account of the reality of our situation.
Secular mindfulness training has benefited from a great deal of research and study which show that these practices have direct material effect on the neuro-plasticity of the brain, effectively re-sculpting it for effectiveness, creativity and wellbeing. Embodied awareness is a key to emotional intelligence and raising levels of personal resilience. There is clear testimony that mindfulness training can enhance our focus and attention, increase self-awareness and the awareness of others, and strengthen cognitive effectiveness.
All of this can enable you to:
• find clarity and focus when it is required
• deepen your capacity to empathise
• direct your thinking where you need it
• listen and communicate more effectively
• be more emotionally alive and tuned in
• stay flexible and creative under stress
• remain energised and inspired
The integration and self-awareness that comes from mindfulness help us to stay true to ourselves and act out of authenticity. It can help us keep our vision bright and the ethical basis of our work transparent. It enables us to be worthy of and inspire others’ trust and confidence in us. It helps to shape our own sense of agency and that of those we work with.
We will locate the exploration of mindfulness and emotional intelligence on a foundation of values and ethical commitment to social and ecological justice. We will be asking how the benefits of mindfulness practice can be put in service to the embodiment and realisation of our values in the world.
This course offers tools and approaches which integrate personal transformation and practical skills for working with others to affect social and environmental change. It brings together a wealth of knowledge, wisdom and expertise from different traditions and a wide range of actors from activists and educators to spiritual, political and civil society leaders. It aims to facilitate personal and collective reflections on our roles in bringing about change.
This training covers:
• tools for deepening self-awareness and emotional intelligence
• inner resources for sustaining vision and engagement
• interpersonal skills for working well with others
• approaches for thinking creatively and strategically
• methods for using mindfulness to enhance our performance at work
The course will help individuals to learn and deepen mindfulness practice for developing inner resources of clarity, insight, patience, courage and emotional resilience. They will learn greater effectiveness in engaging, supporting, working with and influencing others. We will also take time to review and evaluate personal strategies for working to realise social change.
The course is suitable for those who are new to mindfulness or new to exploring secular mindfulness approaches (such as mindfulness based stress reduction/cognitive therapy) and how it can support being an effective agent of social change within groups, communities, movements or organisations.
In the solidarity economy:
(See details of our approach to radical economics here)
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Paula was INTRAC‘s Training Manager for more than 5 years. She was responsible for managing INTRAC’s broad range of training programmes including tailor-made, open, and blended courses. She has continued her work with INTRAC as an associate and trains on training of trainers, facilitation skills, M&E of training and managing roll outs effectively. She is a co-founding member of the Training Providers Forum which is an informal network of non-profit training providers working across the development and humanitarian sector. The forum has been running for five years, sharing best practices in training provision, forming collaborations, and offering yearly workshops to sector on key themes such as M&E of training and building the capacity of local training providers. Paula has also been exploring how inner practices can help to support social change work through building personal awareness, resilience and insight. She is training to be a mindfulness teacher and is a co-founding member of the Mindfulness and Social Change Network.
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Based in Valencia since 2016, Didi has over 20 years experience facilitating learning about social justice and organising with others to take action in diverse settings – everything from the formal classroom to popular education-style beneath trees.
An activist since her teens, it was while working as a lecturer in Peace Studies in Japan that Did began to weave together her commitment to social justice with interest and love for teaching/learning. In Japan she worked with women’s rights groups organising and following up on the 1995 women’s conference in Beijing, ran trainings for humanitarian and development NGOs, and was involved in the Korean-Japanese Citizens’ Civil Rights movement . This community work led to doing human rights observation and accompaniment in the conflict zone in Chiapas (Mexico), and facilitating exchange visits between US and Mexican activists. After six years in Mexico, she moved to London where she worked for Quaker nonviolence training programme Turnning the Tide and other organisations both locally and internationally running courses and accompanying groups’ campaigns. Since 2016 she is part of the Ecodharma Ibérica team facilitating workshops about effective group-working and personal sustainability for grassroots groups based in the Spanish State and the Ulex Project. Didi also continues Zapatista solidarity work with the UK Zapatista Translation Service and the Don Durito Collective. She is passionate about the right to freedom of movement and urban food-growing. In Valencia she collaborates with Valencia Acoge, a local organisation doing migrant and refugee support work, and L’Horta el Cabanyal, a collective garden on reclaimed land.
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Linzy Na Nakorn is a movement director, politicised somatics practitioner, community organiser and facilitator. For the past decade she has been facilitating movement, body work and creating theatre, dance and participatory performance that advocates for and organises with communities in pursuit of housing, disability and racial justice. Her movement practice focuses on trauma-informed approaches to building resilience, capacity and joy via way of the body for personal, interpersonal and community sustainability. Linzy was a Co-Director of The Big Ride for Palestine in partnership with The Gaza Sunbirds, Native Woman Ride and Middle East Children’s Alliance; using cycling as a tool for mobilising active solidarity and in support of campaigning for the rights and self-determination of the Palestinian people. Linzy is part of a UK network of activists and artists advocating for Radical Care – supporting organisations, researchers and institutions to work towards system change in societal approaches to labour, leadership and access.
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Jeroen (he/him pronouns) has been involved in grassroots social movements for more than two decades now, starting back when he was fifteen. Throughout the years the fights for “climate justice” and “migrant justice” have been consistently on top of the list of struggles that make his heart beat faster. A key transformative moment for Jeroen was reading Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire’s revolutionary pedagogy gave him a language to support the creation of emancipatory learning environments, rooted in a desire for collective liberation. Jeroen has also been exploring in depth Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed and Joanna Macy’s The Work That Reconnects among other methodologies to build his trainer’s toolkit. Inspired by the liberatory possibilities of these traditions, he started an organization with a friend, LABO vzw, based in Belgium, where he has worked as a trainer and campaigner between 2013 and 2023.
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Ella brings more than 10 years’ external experience working with not for profit and community based organisations across diverse themes including: advocacy for migrant communities; local community engagement in national policy making; and structural relationships between poverty and disenfranchisement, and education and poverty. Immersed in critical theory in her early 20s she brings a holistic and questioning approach, and is passionate about systemic solutions that centre relationship and interconnection between ecology and society. A long standing member of the collective, Ella has been part of the core team since the inception of the Ulex Project. Her work bridges facilitation, developing project partnerships, governance, strategy, operations, and project and programme evaluation. She has developed and overseen more than 70 partnerships with a range of different actors across European social movements.
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Alex has been facilitating courses geared towards social and personal transformation for the past 6 years. They have spent the last 10 years as a core member of the collective running the Ulex Project and has a deep experience of the integral approach we have developed. Their area of training expertise is sustainable activism and skills for developing ‘deeper resources’ for action. Their commitment to social justice and history of political activism have involved them in direct action and affinity group work focused on climate justice, anti-capitalism, queer politics and gender identity. A strong focus on the somatic dimension and embodied practice (informed by their work as a dance artist and yoga teacher) underpins both their approach.
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Nina (they/she) is a participatory artist, community organiser and political theatre maker. Theatre of the Oppressed has been a core part of their practice since they trained in India with Jana Sankriti in 2018. They are an artistic director of queer led theatre company, You Should see the Other Guy, who work on and off stage to tackle social injustice and make raucous musical verbatim plays. Nina has designed and delivered multiple TO training programmes in activist, community and academic settings, often combining TO with song making to collaboratively explore themes around power and identity. Their current fascination is thinking about TO as a practical manifestation of queer theory and asking: Is Theatre of the Oppressed queer?
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Marianne is a Holistic Security Trainer and Coach, part of the Holistic Protection Collective. She accompanies activists, human rights defenders and journalists globally. Being an activist herself, she is also a trainer for direct action and civil disobedience, and having a background as a mediator, she trains other activists how to facilitate dealing with conflicts in grassroots groups and diverse teams.
Tools for effective and sustainable activism
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new stories: different worlds
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Knowledge, skills and perspectives to challenge oppression and create spaces of solidarity.
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Tools for effective and sustainable activism
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Navigating the complex terrain of migrant and migrant-solidarity organising
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an introduction to a holistic and transformative approach to activist training and facilitation
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Go to the people, learn from them. Live with them. Love them. Start with what they know. Build with what they have – Lao Tzu
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Building facilitation capacity through participatory practices.
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a space to think critically, to ask challenging and transformative questions, and find deeper inspiration and understanding to empower social change.
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building and strengthening regenerative praxis for BIPOC organisers.
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Ulex: Latin (argelaga Catalan, gorse English) noun:
1. A thorny-evergreen flowering shrub, with a high capacity for regeneration and resilience. Its seedpods open in contact with fire and it reshoots from charred stumps. A successionary plant that grows well under challenging conditions. It improves soil fertility through nitrogen fixing, preparing the way for renewed biodiversity.
2. A traditional choice for igniting fires. Burns hot and bright.
3. A networked project adding nutrition and fertility to European social movements through training and capacity building. It kindles the realisation of social justice, ecological intelligence, and cognitive vitality.
