Highlights from this session:

• The role of ritual in creative expression, social movements, and healing work
• Embracing a spirit of playfulness and how that helps us to be more present, handle grief, and live richer lives
• The spiritual impact and radically transformative power of art and fiction

adrienne maree brown grows healing ideas in public. Through her writing, poetry, songwriting, and podcasts, including How to Survive the End of the World, Octavia’s Parables, and The Emergent Strategy Podcast, adrienne has nurtured emergent strategy, pleasure activism, radical imagination, and transformative justice as ideas, frameworks, networks, and practices for transformation. Her work is informed by 25 years of social and environmental justice facilitation primarily supporting Black liberation, her path of teaching somatics, her love of Octavia E Butler and visionary fiction, and her work as a doula. She is the author/editor of several published texts including Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds.

Highlights from this session:

• Working towards peace with the earth and seeking forgiveness from the earth
• How our consciousness and intelligence arise from nature
• Rooting our intellectual capacities in our emotional and spiritual experiences

Tiokasin Ghosthorse is an educator, musician, and international speaker on peace. He is a member of the Cheyenne River Lakota Nation of South Dakota and has a long history with Indigenous activism and advocacy. Tiokasin is the Founder, Host, and Executive Producer of First Voices Radio. In 2016, he received a Nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize and is the recipient of numerous other awards and honors for the arts, music, and community work. Tiokasin is a master musician of the Lakota cedar flute(s) where stories and cultural knowledge are conveyed through music.

Highlights from this session:

• The life experiences that led Eileen to create a purposeful, sustainable, and empathetic business
• Exploring how businesses, governments, and other systems can become healing forces in the world
• How doing inner-work created freedom and presence in her personal and professional life

Eileen is the Founder of EILEEN FISHER, Inc, the design company known for making simple, timeless clothes since its creation in 1984. A sustainability pioneer, Eileen created the company’s first Social Consciousness role more than 25 years ago. The company’s commitment to creating a regenerative manufacturing model is part of her vision for a future without waste. In 2022, Eileen announced that she would step down as CEO but remain at EILEEN FISHER, Inc. to focus on the clothes.

Highlights from this session:

• Alternative economic systems that prioritize the well-being of individuals, communities, and the environment
• How to place yourself in the present and disconnect your ego from quick fixes and short-term solutions
• Measuring the well-being of a country via “Gross National Happiness”

As an associate of the Presencing Institute and an Executive Committee member of the Club of Rome, and drawing on her past career as a physician and public health researcher in Africa and Asia, Senior Policy Advisor at the United Nations, and Program Director at the Gross National Happiness Centre in Bhutan, Dr. Julia Kim integrates global experience in leadership development, contemplative practice, research, and policy in the fields of well-being, well-being economics, global health, and sustainable development.

Highlights from this session:

• How viewing performance can help us grow in our own art
• Movement as the essence of being human
• Creating a joyful connection to our bodies through purposeful movement

Ohad Naharin is a choreographer and the creator of the Gaga movement language. Born in 1952 in Mizra, Israel, he began his dance career with Batsheva in 1974 and made his choreographic debut in New York in 1980. In 1990, Naharin was appointed Artistic Director of Batsheva Dance Company and established its junior division, Batsheva – the Young Ensemble. In addition to his stage-work, Naharin developed Gaga, the innovative movement research and daily training of Batsheva’s dancers that has spread globally among both dancers and non-dancers.

Highlights from this session:

• Tibetan practices based on archetypes and their ability to engage and orchestrate the brain
• The importance of engaging in active, daily awareness
• The transformative power of going through the “pit of despair” instead of avoiding it

Lama Tsomo is an American lama, author, and co-founder of the Namchak Retreat Ranch, specializing in Tibetan Buddhist wisdom and meditation. Born into a Jewish household, she became a lama in Tibetan Buddhism and is fluent in Tibetan. She is passionate about educating young people and supporting positive social change. She holds an M.A. in Counseling Psychology and has authored two books about Tibetan Buddhist practices.

Highlights from this session:

• Fostering hope and post-traumatic growth in veterans, first responders, and others diagnosed with PTSD
• How we can safely deviate from medical models to apply individual care to trauma
• The importance of community in trauma healing

Cormac Doyle trained as a Registered Nurse Mental Health in Dublin, Ireland, and has completed 25 years of military service, serving in both the British Royal Air Force and the British Army. He is a qualified Flight Nurse and has worked at the command level within the RAF and the Army. He has developed a service for veterans’ mental health, which he self-funds. His particular area of interest is the assessment, management, and treatment of stress reactions, PTSD and CPTSD. He created UltraBLS/VRT as an enhanced intervention based on EMDR, constructive conversation, progressive relation, client self-development, and human performance. With a colleague he has opened a one-to-one bespoke psychological trauma mental health retreat in Bulgaria – The Serenity Project.

Josh Goldberg is the CEO of the Boulder Crest Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to ensuring first responders, combat veterans, and their family members live great lives in the midst of struggle, stress, and trauma.  Along with Boulder Crest’s Founder and Chairman, Ken Falke, he co-authored Struggle Well: Thriving in the Aftermath of Trauma. Josh and Ken co-authored Transformed by Trauma: Stories of Posttraumatic Growth alongside Dr. Richard Tedeschi and Dr. Bret Moore. In 2017, Josh was named one of 60 Presidential Leadership Scholars.