Meaningful connections build trust. By Valerie Brown “….Trust that meaningful conversations can change your world. Rely on human goodness. Stay together.” ---Margaret Wheatley, from … [Read More...] about Pilgrimage: The Art of Building Community
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Pilgrimage: The Art of Building Community
By Valerie Brown “….Trust that meaningful conversations can change your world. Rely on human goodness. Stay together.” —Margaret Wheatley, from Turning to One Another As I return next month with a group of pilgrims to Walk in Beauty: Pilgrimage of El Camino de Santiago, Spain, The Way of Saint James, to walk this 1000 year old […]
‘Thin Places’: Encountering the Power of Pilgrimage
By Valerie Brown, JD, MA, PCC Have you heard the term a ‘thin place’? A thin place describes the distance between heaven and earth, a place where the space between the sacred and the secular is ‘thin’. The term comes from Celtic spirituality and the Celtic people, who feel deeply connected to the natural world and […]
Pilgrimage: Awakening the ‘Inner Life’ of Leadership
“When a great moment knocks on the door of your life, it is often no louder than the beating of your heart, and it is very easy to miss it.” Boris Pasternak By Valerie Brown Leadership is a journey, much like the soulful and forgotten art of pilgrimage. Over and over, research shows that technical skills, […]
Leadership & Ritual
By Valerie Brown, JD, MA, PCC Recently, I was part of a webinar in a year-long online learning course on transformational leadership. We opened the session with a ritual practice For a moment, I was stunned. In my rushed and productive life, moving breathlessly from thing to thing of a never-ending list, I had forgotten, lost track of […]
Look up!
Cultivating a kinder world by reorienting your vision.
Ghost Ranch: A “Thin Place”
Ghost Ranch is a place that gives voice to ‘your whole self’, to ponder the big questions of life purpose, meaning, and direction.
Retreat: A World Within Our Reach
“….Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely. It is […]
Because of Them, We Can
“Our goal is to create a beloved community, and this will require a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our lives.” – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. On their shoulders, we stand. We step forward because of the vision, the life, and the legacy, of people like, Rev.Dr. Martin […]
The Mindful, Reflective School Leader
The effectiveness of mindfulness practices on students and teachers is supported by hundreds of empirical studies and many organizations specialize in helping teachers and students bring mindfulness into the classroom and other learning environments. However, my experience in co-writing The Mindful School Leader: Practices for Your Leadership and School (Corwin, 2014) is that school leaders […]
Coming to Light: Cultivating Clarity for Leaders through the Quaker Clearness Committee
The clearness committee, developed by members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), is an individual and communal process of spiritual discernment, an instrument to understand the movement of God (in Quaker terms) in a person’s life, and a way for a community to offer support and guidance at critical times. The Light Within is one […]