Autumn Attunement Course - tuning out harm & tuning into kinship

Course Description

Join us for an immersive learning community course designed to support us in our un/learning processes to tune out harmful systems and tune into kinship with Earth and with each other. This fall season offers practices to compost our failures and become fertile soil for new stories to emerge and thrive, so that we may become more resourced, resilient and ready to face the genocides and ecocides we are currently witnessing with the ability to act out of love, dignity, and discernment.

We come together to explore radical attunement, a practice of aligning with earthly cycles and dismantling the destructive colonial patterns of extraction and violence that dominate our world. Together, we will go all the way to the ‘radix’, radical referring to exploring the roots of the problems, and the actions required of each of us from our different positions in society. We will face how we are often complicit in systems of injustice and harm, and how these systems manifest in our bodies, habits, and behaviors. By shedding these ingrained patterns, we open ourselves to new ways of sensing, knowing, and acting that move in sync with Earth’s rhythms, metabolisms, and intelligences. We work from the premise that the struggles for human liberation and ecological attunement support each other.

Autumn – a season of reflection, letting go, and transition to the barren wintertime –, is the perfect season for this exploration. Together, we will honor our lineages and express gratitude for the year’s harvest. As we move through this season, we will release what prevents us from showing up with discernment and gather the seeds of wisdom and resilience for the future.

The course includes:

• Opening & Closing Ceremonies: Rituals to ground and conclude our journey together.
• 6 In-Person Sessions (Full Days): Each session centers around a core practice, explored through hands-on practical exercises, outdoor activities, deep conversations, embodied methods, creative expression and silent reflection.
• Curated Resources: reading, listening, watching materials and embodied practices to engage with at your own pace, deepening your understanding and practice.
• Mentoring (1 Hour per Month): Personalized guidance to support your individual process and practice.
• Community Area: A space for ongoing dialogue and connection with fellow participants.

Course Breakdown

Equinox Opening Ceremony

Saturday evening 21 September, 19.30-21.30 (online) Introduction ritual to Radical Attunement and this season’s program. We ground ourselves in gratitude, participating in the ancestral traditions to mark the equinox as the balance between day and night and the transition between seasons, honoring the larger web of life we belong to.

Session 1: Tuning into Kinship

Fri 4 October 10-17 Deconstructing the myth of the individual and honoring our lineage of ancestors – biological and energetic. Finding kinship with the more-than-human worlds. Who/what do we connect with? How to find our place in the great dance of life?

Session 2: Tuning Out: Decolonial Detox

Fri 18 October 10-17 What harmful or poisonous weeds need to be uprooted? Identifying the patterns, logics and attachments to the systems of extraction. We will hold space for shedding what harms.

Session 3: Fertile Composting

Fri 1 November 10-17 What can be offered to the compost heap? How do we responsibly engage in the larger palliative care needed to let capitalism, colonialism, and extraction decompose? How can we support the transformation of this debris into fertile soil for new stories to sprout and thrive?

Session 4: Fermentation

Fri 15 November 10-17 Fermentation is useful for both composting and preserving food for the winter. Through different fermentation processes, we will consider what kind of living cultures we are called to cultivate. How can we sit in the darkness with limited oxygen without suffocating or feeling immobilized? This is about staying with the trouble, while growing our lung capacity.

Session 5: Seeds of Change

Fri 29 November 10-17 What is called for in times of collapse? How to weather the “shit storm” and cultivate endurance for the difficulties ahead? In times of collapse, we are called to keep the seeds and not waste them, so they can be planted when the storm has passed. During this session we will explore ways to carefully collect and save the seeds of change that thrive in our communities, and in the soil where we are rooted.

Session 6: Winter Harvest Closing

Fri 13 December 13-22.00 with closing ceremony 19.30-21.30 Winter potluck. In this session we will delve deeper into preservation methods and taste the fruits of the season. How to integrate and preserve what we have tuned into and practiced during the previous sessions? We will share lunch and dinner together, concluding the course with a fire ceremony to support a deeper release and expansion, kindling our commitments to a continuous practice of radical attunement.

Note: the exact content of the sessions is under development, and subject to changes and additions.

Signup

To sign-up click here.

Learning outcomes

• Gain a deeper understanding of the ways the capitalist-colonial-heteropatriarchal system is ingrained in our bodies and institutions, and recognize how we may be complicit, whether consciously or unconsciously.
• Shift your sensibilities from a colonial sensorium to a more relational and response-able way of sensing and acting with the world.
• Expand embodied ways of relating to land, cosmos, water, self, human, and more-than-human kin.
• Experiment with tools and practices for embodying responsibility and response-ability, and (re)learn how to integrate the concepts and ideas discussed in the course into your daily life.
• Expand your understanding of kinship to include more unorthodox and/or radical possibilities relevant to the issues and contexts we find ourselves entangled in today.
• Expand your repertoire to ground yourself, connect with others and participate in the transformations needed to become more resourced while contributing to the learning community.
• Foster the potential for collaboration with a deeper understanding of our roles in both upholding the crises and transforming ourselves and our world.
• Actively engage in developing your practice and commitment with regular opportunities for feedback,

Who is this with

This course is designed for people with a socially engaged practice, who are committed to contributing to the larger transformations required in our society. For people who try to enact their commitment from whatever they are doing: : parenting, making art, engaging in activism, studying, building tech, telling stories, braiding sweetgrass, researching alternatives, making trouble, staying with trouble, foraging for herbs, watching the clouds, or cooking stews.

We welcome different disciplines, generations, experiences, orientations, identities and backgrounds. Welcome to queer, trans, non-binary, Black, Indigenous, people of color, disabled, parents, neurodivergent people, migrants. We will do our best to make it possible and affordable for you to join and connect. Please let us know if you have specific needs. We welcome people whose livelihoods and nervous systems have been impacted by systems of oppression. Our different lived experiences shape us in ways that both give us rich knowledge and understanding and limit our access to opportunities. It is through embracing our differences that we seek to form a web of care.

We especially welcome those who have been disillusioned with current systems and are seeking radical, non-reformist approaches to change. Those who know that transforming ourselves can change the world, and transforming the world changes us. The course is open to all who align with the above values of the learning community.

Profiles:

• People working at the intersections of art, radical tech, research, permaculture, activism, cultural practice, science, music, writing, cooking, crafting, or any form of creative practice and social justice work.
• People who are socially engaged and willing to put their commitment into practice.
• Are seeking to nurture community and are willing to take responsibility for their own learning process.
• Are open to being questioned, discomforted, stirred up, and reemerge again with more resilience and discernment.

Other practicalities:

• All sessions will take place in or near our studio in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
• Working language will be English. Individual talks are also available in Dutch, Spanish, and/or German.
• We ask for full commitment to participating in in person meetings as per the schedule.
• Participants should be able to dedicate at least one day per week to digest the course materials.
• There is limited space in this first course, and we will make a selection of max 13 people per group. We will inform you if there is space for you by 9 september

Contributions

Our courses are offered in the spirit of mutual generosity and long-term commitment. “Reschooling with” is supported by a registered not-for-profit organization and run by freelance-artists-educators-moms. It is being built with generosity and voluntary labor (which is not included in the ‘real cost’ calculation). At the moment, we don’t have public or private funding or any independent means of financing the project. Therefore, we need financial contributions to make the project viable.

We offer sliding scales based on your financial standing. The range between the scales reflect the striking inequality in economic conditions between different members of society and parts of the world. We offer:

• 3 spots for people facing financial insecurity (think of unemployed or underemployed, people who support children or other dependents on their own).
• 5 spots for people with access to (low)income (people who manage to make ends meet)
• 5 spots for people with access middle- or high-income (if you have savings, are building a pension, can go on vacation or expect an inheritance)

The middle scale reflects the basic real cost required to make the course possible. If you can offer more than the middle rate we suggest, then please do. This will help to support the ongoing development of the work and enable others who are more economically marginalized to have access to the course. We trust your discernment.

Timeline

• August 1 – 24: Open call and applications reception
• August 24 Deadline to apply
• August 24 –31 Applications review
• September 9: Final decision to applicants
• September 21: Equinox Opening Ceremony

Course dates:

• 4 and 18 October
• 1, 15 and 29 November
• 13 December