T.A.C.T. Trauma Aware Conflict Transformation:
In It Together
familiar-level course • prerequisites include Foundations Program or equivalent • open to all 18 and over
tact: a keen sense of what to do or say in order to maintain good relations; mid-17th century: via French from Latin tactus ‘sense of touch’
From The Burning Times Never Ended and Longing to Belong, the weaving of content and magical working shifts toward strife, loss of powers, and a degraded and disappearing ability for many groups to come and stay together.
Most of us alive in modernity have inherited some form of woundedness in our spirits, cultures, and ecosystems. We know that gathering ourselves in solidarity and kinship is critical to dismantle harmful elements and regenerate wise elements of our inherited cultures to slow down the collapse of global systems.
Bringing the skills, rituals, and trancespells from all the previous courses, we will practice negotiating for shared language, engage a customizable conflict transformation strategy, investigate how shared values and compatible goals influence collaboration, and conjure awareness of how relationships are a convergence of multiplicities.
From an abolitionist framework, this offering prompts an expansion of the breadth and depth in our approach to conflict work. Using conceptual understandings of trauma, attachment, egregoric shadow, hungry ghosts and systems of power dynamics, we consider the arc of motion through accountability magic: reckoning, reparation, and reconciliation.
Course Info
This course is part three of four intermediate courses featured in the Continuing Program.
It is strongly recommended that each course be taken in a self-organized group of 3-7 people. Groups may be affinity, collegial, coven, collective or some other form. This recommendation comes from years of observation and participant feedback.
Taking these courses in groups creates forms of support throughout the study, strengthens the likelihood of practice (as individuals or as groups), and enhances and amplifies learning and self-reflection.
Ritualizing transformative conflict and accountability processes with the support of Wisemind in Councilway, and with the backing of spiritual guides, allows us to sense and act toward ancestral justice.
This course is an encouragement to notice where carceral culture influences how we come to transforming our personal and shared woundedness, and to help prepare ourselves and our groups for a seemingly continued acceleration into collapse.
Expect your own conflict history to get shaken up. Expect a boost in your confidence with engaging conflict work. Expect a rearrangement of perspective: we are in this together.
This course uses practical skills and strategies, discussion questions, experiential exercises, ritual, trance, art, mapping, divination and dreamwork to consider and integrate the learning.
We begin by giving presence to the world we belong to, right now. How are we touched, and how will we touch the tender places of discord in our lives?
A world fraught with broken-ness, inherited and made in our lifetimes. A perfect storm of global crises surrounding us. And we can choose to collapse within collapse, from trauma or conflict, or we can choose other paths of resilience.
We might seek and source paths guided by an agile wisdom in service of growing stronger together. There is no whole and perfect group of relations ‘over there’. We must discern boundaries, and intimacies. Yet we are all in this together.
Rework some of your own conflict wounds. Alchemize fear into empowerment. Resist and reject the Empire’s mandate for control and punishment.
Current understandings about trauma provide insight as to how the wound of time lives in the body and impacts survivors, and harm-doers, in a multitude of ways.
Develop social technologies for relationships and groups not reliant on exile with no paths to come whole again. Adaptive cultures befriend shadow teachings and allow repair of rupture.
Dominant technologies such as social media and second generation large language model AI amplify disagreements on units of truth and paradigms of realities. We must continue as life-long learners to live in this new world and to find common ground outside of rigid radicalism. How do we court relationships for the benefit of the descendants of life with those we find disagreeable or ‘deluded’?
Session One:
Welcome, Setting the container, Burning Times quick review & mini Longing to Belong essentials
Session Two:
Setting the Learning Container: Courting Presence, Making Agreements, Locating this Course in the Bigger Story of Time
Your Personal Conflict Style and Core Fears About Conflict: Know Thyself including Thy Shadow
Philosophy & Approach: Introduction to Transformative Justice: Map & Compass
Strategy and Tactics: Anticipate, Contain, Transform
Oppression & Conflict: Social Injury from Abuse of Power
Trauma & Conflict: Spiritual Injury and the Village-Making power to Repair Rupture
TACT Holistic First Aid: Metaskills for Everyday Use
Session Three:
We Are Not Our Mistakes: People and Power
What are Neuro-Diversity/Divergence/Typicality: Celebrating the Brain-bow
Attachment Theory: Loneliness, Insecurity & Deepening Belonging
Understanding Abandonment & Disposability in Our Groups: Shame, Relationality & Worthiness
Forms of Power- Theoretical and Embodied Examinations: Consent, Interdependence & Agency
Wounds: Irreparable & Transformable: Grief & Rage
Calling Out/Calling In: Discernment, Regulation & Response-ability
Rejecting Control & Punishment Culture for Emergent Authentic Accountability: Reckoning, Reparation, Reconciliation
Session Four:
Meta Skills Continuing
Complex Conflict: Mapping, Identity, Absences
TACT Councilway Ritual Foundations: Intuitive Inquiry & Ancestral Justice
Creating a TACT Collective & forming a Webway
Session Five:
Q/A, TACT Councilway Ritual, Opening the container, Parting Ways
Main material for the Hand-spellcraft: two grapefruit/softball sized balls of any clay you are able to hand-sculpt.
