Tuesdays : 5pm pdt/8pm edt

March 18 - April 22, 2025

On Purpose

Clarify and Empower Your Gifts in The Great Turning

Facilitated by Lydia Violet Harutoonian, With video recordings and writings from Joanna Macy and adrienne mares brown.
Special guest for 2 sessions Dr. Lyla June Johnston

Your unique gifts are needed now more than ever

As a member of the web of life on Planet Earth, you were born with
ways to contribute to the healing and thriving of our world.

We all were.

Yet, in this time of great vulnerability, there are many reasons why our gifts get caught in a web of inner paralysis, inhibiting us from giving our unique offerings to the Great Turning.

Doubt, fear, numbness, unworthiness, the need to earn a living, and the daily energy needed to mediate the harms of a white-supremacist-military-industrial-capitalist-complex — these are all understandable reasons why our inspirations and passions may not be easy to grasp or to act on.

We need community support to nurture the ecosystems that liberate our gifts.

And there is good news. You are, even now, in collaboration with millions of people and the more-than-human world to preserve life on this planet. And they are rooting for you to occupy your place in The Great Turning.

When we integrate this truth, we discover that not everything is ours to do. And from there, what is ours to do becomes more clear.

“

If the world is to be healed through human efforts, I am convinced it will be by ordinary people, people whose love for this life is even greater than their fear.”

― Joanna Macy

We will meet at the confluence of…

… two inspiring and brilliantly embodied activist-scholars, Joanna Macy and adrienne maree brown, to help us clarify and strengthen our own purpose in these times. Buoyed by video recordings from Macy and brown, as well as writings from these two woman whose lives span together over the last century, we meet this work at a wellspring of deep ecology, emergent strategy, empowerment, and community liberation.

Joanna Macy’s body of teachings and group work has helped thousands transform despair and apathy, in the face of overwhelming social and ecological crises, into constructive, collaborative action. This work, called the “Work That Reconnects,” brings a fresh way of seeing the world as our larger living body, freeing us from the assumptions and attitudes that now threaten the continuity of life on Earth.

adrienne maree brown’s teachings ground us in the principles of emergent strategy, generative collaboration, right relationship, and imagination as antidotes to the pervasive patterns of harm in today’s society. Her work infuses possibility into everything it touches, making community liberation a work of art and devotion.

We are excited to integrate the wisdom of both of these thought leaders of our time, in order to expand and inspire our understanding of purpose.

“

I think it is healing behavior, to look at something so broken and see the possibility and the wholeness in it.”

― adrienne maree brown

In this course…

We’ll give you practices, worksheets, readings, community conversation, and the soul vitamins we often need in order to step into our purpose in the Great Turning, a collective response to the ecological, social, and spiritual crises of our time, aiming to transition from a culture of extraction and oppression to one that values regeneration, equity, and care for all life."

Your facilitator…

Lydia Violet Hartunoonian,
brings with her

Over 15 years of dedicated study and co-facilitation with Joanna Macy, as well as multiple in-person “Emergent Strategy” trainings with adrienne maree brown. Lydia founded and runs School for the Great Turning and has facilitated Work that Reconnects workshops for thousands of people in diverse communities and settings. She has a great enthusiasm for helping folks bring forth their personal callings and gifts. Lydia’s work involves a unique synthesis of Joanna Macy’s work, her own research and practice in cultural healing and integrity, and her role as a musician and community singing facilitator. She also developed “Tending the Bones,” a course for re-connection with ancestral cultures, mythology, and folk traditions.

Special Guest

Dr. Lyla June Johnston
(aka Lyla June)

Is an Indigenous musician, scholar, and community organizer of Diné (Navajo), Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne) and European lineages. Her messages focus on Indigenous rights, supporting youth, traditional land stewardship practices and healing inter-generational and inter-cultural trauma. She blends her study of Human Ecology at Stanford, graduate work in Indigenous Pedagogy, and the traditional worldview she grew up with to inform her music, perspectives and solutions. Her doctoral research focused on the ways in which pre-colonial Indigenous Nations shaped large regions of Turtle Island (aka the Americas) to produce abundant food systems for humans and non-humans.

Goals of this group:

  • Discover and strengthen your unique role to play in the Great Turning

  • Unblock and creatively problem-solve what gets in the way

  • Be inspired by stories of international changemakers

  • Be lifted up by a cohort community on a shared exploration

  • Let life move through you and your larger, ecological self

Curriculum

Live sessions with Lydia Violet will be held online from 5 pm - 6:30 pm PDT.
All sessions with be recorded and available afterwards to studnets.

March 18

Session 1

The Ecological Self: Coming Home to Our Larger Body

  • Exploring how our identities and responses are shaped by our worldviews

  • Mapping our starting places

  • Clarifying our gifts and strengths

  • Principles of adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy

March 25

Session 2

The Great Turning + Emergent Strategy

  • Joanna Macy’s teaching of the Three Stories of Our Time

  • Locating ourselves within the Three Dimensions of the Great Turning: Holding Actions; New and Remembered Life-Sustaining Systems; and Shifts in Consciousness

  • Emergent Strategy: learning from the natural world around us

April 1

Session 3

Threshold Guardians

  • Honoring Our Pain for the World

  • Mapping the internal and external barriers we must be creative with as we embody our purpose

  • “The wound informs the medicine”

April 8

Session 4

Feedback from the Interconnection of All Life

  • Emergent Strategy: Interdependence and decentralization

  • Who we are and how we share our gifts

  • Practices that bring us home to the living body of Earth

with Lyla June

april 15

Session 5

Designing the Path Ahead

  • Clear intention as a way of holding steady in changing environments

  • Bodhicitta as a precious more-than-human intelligence

  • Strategies for when you get stuck

with Lyla June

April 22

Session 6

Going Forth

  • Celebrating your vision

  • Sharing resources

  • Orienting our work in community

This work serves as a catalyst for personal and collective transformation, urging us to recognize our agency in shaping a more compassionate and ecologically sustainable world.

Together, Joanna Macy and adrienne maree brown’s teachings inspire us to embrace a deeper sense of belonging to the Earth and to act on our innate care and responsibility for the world.

Join and get

  • Pre-recorded video teachings from Joanna Macy and adrienne maree brown, excerpted from their past courses at School for the Great Turning

  • 6 live calls with Lydia Violet Harutoonian, with recordings available within 24 hours

  • A selected anthology of Joanna and adrienne’s writings.

  • Worksheets crafted from intersections of Joanna and adrienne’s work, to support you in clarifying your purpose.

  • An interactive online forum with Lydia Violet

One
Payment

$275

Pay in Full

Two
Payment

$139

Per month for 2 months

Four
Payments

$69

Per month for 4 months

Scholarships

We want to create as much access as we can to our courses, while paying all our teachers and team members a fair, livable wage. If you would like to apply for a partial scholarship, please feel free to fill out this scholarship application, and we will respond to you within a week of entry. Thank you!

FAQs

  • The live sessions of this course starts March 18 and ends April 22, with recordings available forever! Live calls happen on Tuesdays at 5 PM PDT/ 8 PM EDT

  • After enrolling, you have unlimited access to the course videos, writings, and live meeting recordings for as long as you like. The course discussion forum will stay open for approximately 6 weeks after the course is complete.

  • Some kind of computer or smart phone device that logs you onto Zoom and our course forum, hosted on Circle.