Holding Space

In the Leadership for Sustainability Education program we hold space for students to get to know and be their authentic whole selves, while together nurturing the loving supportive relationships in which it is possible to discover and live into our interrelatedness. In doing so, students are empowered to go on to do the regenerative and change-making work that they are each meant and called to do. Throughout the program students grow in skills, confidence, self-awareness, and spiritual connection. We situate our work within Transformative Sustainability Education (TSE), which is participatory, relational, emotional, embodied, and spiritual. TSE involves understanding and unpacking the destructive and dominant paradigm that we have been taught to believe in, and learning a new way of being in which we recognize our deep interconnections with the other beings on this living planet. We stop fighting, struggling, despairing, and numbing, and begin waking up to our collective power. I reflect on my work with graduate students including what it means for me to lead from within and to hold space for whole person (inter)relational learning. I share a story of witnessing life-changing transformative learning as students complete the cycle of their graduate program.