Sandra Butler’s workshops provide women with a safe and generative environment in which to look at unexplored parts of their lives. Through discussion and reflection, she skillfully guides them to new understandings about difficult issues. Butler has facilitated workshops for over thirty years for women in countries around the world.
WORKSHOP 1
This one-day workshop creates an opportunity for mothers of adult daughters to explore the rich complexity of their relationship. Through discussion and reflection, participants will identify the challenges and satisfactions of their bond, and discover ways of thinking and acting that best serve their unique relationship by engaging the experience and wisdom of others.
Unresolved aspects of the relationship feel more pressing as mothers age. They can more fully see their part in the current difficulties and often struggle with guilt at their earlier choices. Yet they also can come to accept the strengths and limitations of their daughters and the realistic possibilities of their relationships. Opportunities for an unsentimental and loving acceptance can surface through this line of vision.
The Mothering Adult Daughters workshop is designed to allow participants to give to and take from the experience what they need to engage with this time of life and with their daughter in helpful and healing ways.
WORKSHOP 2
Risk, Engagement and Wholeness
Geared to healing professionals and social activists, Crossing The Threshold explores the symmetries between the injured aspects of the self and the ways in which they are echoed in global politics.
The suffering in the world echoes and mirrors the suffering of the self. Identifying our thresholds and what keeps us from stepping across them allows each participant to find their growing edge as an individual, a member of a family unit, a community and a society. Creating the resources necessary to step across into new and unfamiliar ways of being requires both courage, readiness and willingness.
The complexity of our fundamental inter-connectedness is examined through the multiple lens and practices of healing, activism, faith, community building and re-commitment in a daylong group process that challenges, nourishes and renews.
WORKSHOP 3
This workshop is designed as a resource for partners, family and friends of loved ones with a diagnosis of cancer. Bringing with it the end of innocence, cancer doesn’t happen to “other people,” it happens to us, changing every aspect of life as it has been lived. The ways we construct meaning, the patterns of our partnerships, friendships and parenting, the value we place on work, our relationship to faith—all are reconsidered and re-imagined.
The book, Cancer In Two Voices and accompanying film, in which two lesbians discuss their unique experience with terminal illness will be shown. Using both as a springboard, the group, through the sharing of personal experiences and exploration of the themes in the video will engage in dialogue and focused writing that embodies the personal experience, the politics of the disease and the spiritual resources that can guide and inform us.
For more information on these and other individually tailored workshops, please contact the author.