Rabbi Michael Lerner & Cat Zavis – The Shift Network – The Passionate Citizen Intensive

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Rabbi Michael Lerner & Cat Zavis – The Shift Network – The Passionate Citizen Intensive

With Transformative Spiritual Activists
Cat Zavis & Rabbi Michael Lerner
 
Unify your inner development with outer engagement to create a life that is conscious, impactful and filled with more wonder and awe.
Learn leading edge skills for systems change, communication, and effecting political change, building from the grassroots up.
As humanity faces mounting environmental, social and economic challenges – all while our political process is increasingly gridlocked – it can be easy to become cynical and disengaged.

But if we allow ourselves to grow apathetic, we become part of the problem rather than the solution. This can also apply to our outlook on our personal and spiritual development. If we only focus on inner work without engaging in the evolution of our world, it can feed this apathy rather than offer a real pathway forward for all.

A far more beautiful, just and caring world IS possible if each of us learns to tap into our core passions and turn them into effective engagement, advocacy and action.

It’s about expressing our soul in action, putting our truth in motion and becoming an evolutionary citizen rather than a passive consumer. It’s about marrying spirituality and service so that we are wise AND effective, conscious AND caring.

Not only is this better for our world, it’s better for us. When we feel empowered and when we engage passionately in issues that matter, we feel better about our lives, we connect with other inspiring people, and we become more connected with the loving community around us. We express our personal growth in a new, deeper and more unifying way that helps create real change in our society.

Passionate engagement is thus at the core of expressing our deepest values and most sacred beliefs about the kind of world we want to live in. It’s a profoundly spiritual act and a way to put love into action.

Rabbi Michael Lerner and Cat Zavis have been at the forefront of this work for many decades, growing the Network of Spiritual Progressives and Tikkun magazine as vehicles for a spiritually-grounded, socially-engaged pathway for sustainable change. They have touched hundreds of thousands of lives with books, articles and movements, inspiring a whole generation of spiritually-based change agents.

They understand the heartbreak that can come from engaging in big issues and suffering setbacks. They understand the challenges in balancing soul work and the rigors of social engagement. And they know the glorious fruits borne when we become full-spectrum, conscious humans making a major social contribution.

In the 10-week Passionate Citizen Intensive, Cat and Rabbi Lerner will share a lifetime’s worth of little-known secrets for how to put your passion into action in ways that are effective, self-sustaining, unifying – – and get results.

They’ll take you beyond surface slogans and political soundbites to a deep understanding of the structural underpinnings of our current problems and how we can affect those structures in a more lasting way without wasting time on simplistic, ideological mudslinging.

When we understand the issues, know ourselves deeply, and seek guidance from the best change agents, we become real forces to be reckoned with.

The Passionate Citizen Intensive is ultimately about discovering a life-affirming way to evolve our democracies in a way that truly serves the larger world. It’s about uniting your spirituality with action and infusing wisdom into your service so that you can rise up to meet the considerable challenges ahead.

The environmental, social and economic crises we face on a planetary scale can seem insurmountable. But the real truth is that if enough of us engage passionately, strategically and effectively at the right leverage points, evolutionary, breakthrough changes can happen rapidly.

Who would have predicted the falling of the Berlin Wall so rapidly or the rising support and legislation for gay marriage? The pace of change can accelerate in all the critical challenges we face. So, it’s imperative that each of us learns how to go beyond slogans or arm-chair complaints to an understanding of consciousness and policy and movement strategy. We need to understand how problems have been created AND how they can be solved. We need to learn to work together across (and outside of) party lines, united in our commitment to create a better world.

The Passionate Citizen Intensive will illuminate a more collaborative, positive and forward-looking approach for you to engage as a spiritually conscious citizen. You’ll emerge far better informed about what is REALLY going on, as well as more confident and well-equipped to do something about it – all from a loving, ethical and self-renewing foundation built on self-care and a consistent spiritual practice.

Walking the path of passionate citizen engagement requires inner discipline to maintain optimism and focus on the highest good, as it can be far too easy to succumb to bitterness, apathy or animosity – or simply play out our shadow issues in the public sphere. That’s why Mahatma Gandhi required his satyagrahis to engage in daily spiritual practice to cultivate the highest level of ahimsa (non-violence) as well as the mental and physical discipline needed to be an agent of change.

Each of us has within us extraordinary capacities to become an inspiring leader for healing, evolving and liberating our world. You can become a skilled problem solver for our society, just by engaging in this process with your own family and local community.

And it’s vital we do so now, as there is not a lot of time. With resource depletion and global warming hitting new highs every year while a culture of war still prevails – far too little effort and money is focused on what it will take to create the real changes needed, and to make them as quickly as we need to.

Rabbi Lerner and Cat Zavis are uniquely qualified to be your spiritual and practical mentors in advancing you on your pathway of passionate citizenship. They’ll show you how to really BE the change, at all levels, and engage in action in a way that is rooted in love and a new bottom line.

In particular, they’ll share how to:

• Reclaim your idealism and go for what you really want, unleashing the power of genuine desire.
• Communicate with people in a way that speaks to their deeper hunger for meaning, beyond economics and self-interest (hint, this is where progressives often fail).
• Understand the root causes of poverty and how to address racial injustice.
• Create security and alignment through generosity rather than power over and domination (even subtly).
• Study the global environmental issues we face and find the real leverage points to create positive change.
• Deepen your spiritual practices as you engage in your passion areas.
• Understand how we can shift the legal, educational and penal systems in a positive direction.
• Inspire change on the worldview level, not just the issue level, allowing you to build bridges across political lines.
• Design (and build) a world based on a new bottom line that includes compassion, love and justice.
• Understand a real pathway forward for our world in the form of a Global Marshall Plan.

If you increasingly recognize that living in a sacred and meaningful way means having a positive impact on the pressing issues humanity faces, this is the program for you. Rabbi Lerner and Cat Zavis are seasoned, wise and loving leaders from the frontlines of marrying spirituality and passionate engagement.

They’ll inspire you to discover what is possible when you commit to this work in a spirit of awe, wonder and radical amazement – you’ll become far more magnetic AND effective in creating real change.

And you’ll find a sense of peace knowing that you’re truly doing your part to evolve a better world.

What You’ll Discover in These 10 Weeks

In this 10-week transformational program, Cat Zavis and Rabbi Lerner will guide you through the fundamental skills and competencies for sustainable and passionate social change so that you can make powerful internal shifts that allow you to effectively shift our societal structures for the well-being of the planet.

Each weekly, LIVE teaching and training session will build harmoniously upon the next, so that you’ll develop a complete, holistic understanding of how to be a catalyst for bringing more compassion, generosity love and justice to the world.

Our typical weekly pattern will be to focus initially on core skills for you to develop your engagement toolset and then look at a specific issue area in which we can apply the principles and understand the pathway to real solutions.

By focusing our attention each week on prevalent social crises that are gripping our country and the world, we’ll better understand how a spiritually progressive social change approach can move us beyond gridlock, inspire compassion, generate creative problem solving and build unity across political divides.

Module 1: A Spiritually Progressive Worldview and Why It Matters
We will share the difference between a so-called “liberal” worldview and a “spiritually progressive” one and why it’s important to bring spiritual values of love, kindness, generosity and caring into discussions of political rights and economic entitlements – to see each other as embodiments of the sacred and respond to the universe with awe, wonder and radical amazement. We will focus on the environmental crisis and movement and see how to approach this issue from a spiritually progressive worldview and how that differs from both liberal and conservative worldviews.

Focus Issue of the Week:
The Environmental Crisis That Will Affect All of Us

We march by the hundreds of thousands in the streets, vote in favor of GMO labeling, challenge coal and fracking in our communities, and sign petition after petition to stop the Keystone Pipeline and the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement and, nonetheless, environmental devastation continues unabated. We try to do our part by recycling, buying local and creating local gardens, yet there is no comprehensive strategy to tackle these problems. This week we’ll explore tools and strategies needed to build a united movement that can effectively challenge the corporate and political elite in this country and around the world.

In this module you’ll:

• Gain the skills to integrate a spiritually progressive worldview in environmental advocacy work.
• Learn why social change efforts are not as effective as they could be and what you can do to turn that around.
• Develop an understanding of the importance of advocating for a worldview and systemic changes while working on local or particular issues.

Module 2: How to Envision the World We Want 
In this session, we will share a worldview grounded in spiritual and ethical values and discuss the importance of articulating those values explicitly in social change and political work. Instead of simply seeing the political and social change landscape through the lens of political rights and economic entitlements, you will come to understand deeper, underlying core principles that can help build a movement to unite people across differences and speak to their core needs.

Focus Issue of the Week:
Black Lives Matter, and Poverty and Economic Inequality

Ferguson, Staten Island, Baltimore, Oakland – look around and you’ll see, bursting into public awareness, a deep crisis that has been there for many decades. However, it only appears in public consciousness when something as drastic as a race riot or the overt murder of an unarmed black man makes it impossible for the media to bury the story entirely. In our first Focus Issue, we will discuss these topics and explore how we can approach these issues from a spiritually progressive perspective.

In this module, you’ll:

• Understand how to activate the power of visioning rather than just protest.
• See how to work more effectively across partisan divides.
• Overcome limiting beliefs about what is possible when you share a vision.

Module 3: Understanding and Overcoming Resistances
During the third week, we will focus on understanding and moving beyond our own resistances to create the world we want. We’ll ask: What messages did we receive as children and adults that interfere with our ability to actually stand for the highest values and create that which we desire for ourselves and the world? When you can identify these inner and outer resistances with clarity, you discover how to overcome those messages and help others to do so as well. We’ll learn how to quiet the voice within that tells us we have to be “realistic” when what we really want is to be idealistic.

Focus Issue of the Week:
What’s the Matter with Politics as Usual

In this section, we will share a spiritually progressive vision that is different from what you’re hearing from both liberal and conservative leaders. We will use, as examples, the current political realities in the U.S. – what the Clintons and Obamas could have done, but did not, and what progressive candidates like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and other progressives (or even possibly YOU) could say and do to support and inspire the public in new ways that existing social change movements or liberal/progressive candidates have yet to introduce.

In this module, you’ll

• Learn how requiring ourselves to be realistic hinders our ability to both see and advocate for the world we actually want and limits our effectiveness to transform the world and its systems.
• Gain clarity as to why people consistently vote against their own economic interests and the deeper underlying needs that must be addressed to inspire people from all walks of life (regardless of religion, political party, class or race).
• Understand the internal psychological/emotional, intellectual/ideological and spiritual resistances to believing a world of love and justice is possible.

Module 4: The Impact of Global Capitalism on our Psyche and How to Transform It
Global capitalist values have permeated all segments of our society so that everything has a price but nothing has a value and we are trapped in cycles of over-consumption, depression, alienation, debt and loneliness. We will explore how capitalism has become a religion of its own and has resulted in a breakdown of families, morals, communities and the ability to create meaningful, lasting and trusting relationships. Capitalism has led us to believe that we live in a meritocracy where if you do not “succeed” (i.e., earn a certain amount of money or have a certain amount of power) it is your own fault. This leads to self-blaming tendencies. We will unpack this phenomenon and help you shift from self-blaming to understanding how the marketplace and social structures in which we live impact your “success.”

Focus Issue of the Week:
The Elephant in the Room – Global Capitalism

Through this week’s Focus Issue, you’ll learn how your potential involvement with policy initiatives could contribute to healing the damage of current oppressive systems – while restoring democracy and generosity to our social, political and economic institutions so that they begin to reflect love and justice.

In this module, you’ll:

• Familiarize yourself with the vast scale of ways that global capitalism affects both our internal and external lives.
• Uncover the psychological implications that capitalist society has had on the way that you relate to yourself and others.
• Unpack the idea that capitalism, as the status quo, is the only world order possible and envision a new one, which prioritizes a new bottom line.

Module 5: Developing Real Empathy – Compassion for Self and Others
It is critical that activists, social change agents and social change movements learn how to engage with themselves, their leaders and those perceived to be on the other side with compassion and empathy. Too often we demonize those in our movements and those on the other side rather than try to compassionately and empathically understand where they may be coming from. This demonization undermines our effectiveness and perhaps even more importantly results in a movement that fails to embody the values and principles we are striving to create in a transformed world. To cultivate compassion we’ll practice empathic listening and expression.

Focus Issue of the Week:
Law as a Healing Profession

Lawyers are taught in law school how to argue either side of an issue and our legal system is based on an adversarial process rather than on a restorative process. What would our world look like if we actually focused on healing the harms and wrongs rather than punishment? What if contracts were grounded in shared values of caring for each other and the planet instead of ensuring the greatest profit regardless of the cost to humans or the planet? We will look at how to transform our legal system from one that focuses on individuality and transactions to one that supports community, connection, caring and relationships.

In this module, you’ll:

• Learn about alternative legal systems and ways to address societal problems that highlight and prioritize community, connection, belonging, healing and restoration rather than punishment and blame.
• Discover how to engage the power of empathy and compassion to heal, transform and repair the world.
• Learn the skills necessary to empathetically listen and hear others and to more deeply listen to and know yourself.

Module 6: Integrating the New Bottom Line into the Professions
What would your work look like if your profession was grounded in the principles of the New Bottom Line, rather than an emphasis on maximizing profit? How would this transform what we do everyday and how we interact with one another in the workplace? In this session, we will learn how our professional lives can be a launching point for social change if we deliberately transform them to be filled with meaning and purpose. We will discuss how it is both important and possible to dedicate our labor energies toward a world of love and justice. We will share the current work in various professions (law, healthcare, psychology, engineering, and programming and scientists) and develop strategies to create a Professional Task Force of the Network of Spiritual Progressives in your own workplace.

Focus Issue of the Week:
Transforming our Education System

We all know that our public education system is seriously broken. Schools are underfunded, teachers are underpaid, classes are huge and students’ needs are sorely undermet. We will share our visions, ideas and create strategies for engaging people in working to change our educational system so that all students experience school as safe, fun, engaging and challenging, and teachers have the flexibility and freedom to share their talents and gifts in ways that inspire and help build critical thinkers.

In this module, you’ll:

• Understand the internal psychological/emotional, intellectual/ideological and spiritual resistances to believing a world of love and justice is possible.
• Gain a deeper understanding of how and why schools have been structured the way they are and how that structure supports the current economic system.
• Explore what an education system would look like if based on the New Bottom Line.

Module 7: Bringing a Broader Worldview into More Narrowly Focused Social Change Movements
Sharing difficult messages in the privacy of our homes, with family members or friends can be hard enough, but raising difficult issues and sharing challenging messages in the public context can be even more complex. In this session, we will discuss how to raise the level of political and social change movement conversations from merely focusing on a narrow issue (such as homelessness, hunger, poverty, fracking, climate change) or particular identity (e.g., women, racism, LGBTQ) to put forth a worldview based in solidarity that can unite people working on diverse issues or from diverse perspectives. We will use the skills learned in Module 5 to respond with compassion and empathy – while still promoting our vision and perspective and building a love and justice movement.

Focus Issue of the Week:
A Healthcare System that Can Work for All

We all know that our healthcare system in the U.S. is anything but healthy. Yet there is neither the political will nor sense of people power to transform it. In this section, we will both explore what impedes our capacity to engage in struggles for meaningful change and how we can create a healthcare system that actually works for everyone – patients, doctors, nurses and patient care assistants.

In this module, you’ll:

• Understand how capitalism impacts our capacity in the U.S. to have a healthcare system that works for all.
• Envision a healthcare system that actually prioritizes healing and well-being for all rather than one that prioritizes profit.
• Learn how to contextualize the local, focused issues in the framework of spiritually progressive politics without losing either.

Module 8: Living Spiritual Values
Truly transforming our society so that it works for everyone is not only about doing good deeds like feeding the hungry once a month or providing a shelter for the homeless, it’s about ending hunger and homelessness for everyone… and more. For thousands of years there have been wonderful people who act in kind and generous ways in their personal lives, doing acts of charity, giving money or food to the poor, while nevertheless participating in economic and political structures that are hurtful and oppressive to others. In this session, we will explore how to harness our faith, religion and spirituality to engage in the work of transforming and healing the world. We will learn about the Network of Spiritual Progressives ethos of integrating self-transformation with spiritually-engaged activism.

Focus Issue of the Week:
Religious/Spiritual Communities and Transformative Change Work

In this module, you’ll:

• Reflect on what your own personal spiritual values are and how you can translate those values into a shared goal for all humankind.
• Identify what factors block your ability to live or realize your spiritual values.
• Develop tools to help begin your involvement in spiritual activism.
• Learn what it means to be a spiritual leader.

Module 9: Advocating for “Unrealistic” Proposals that Can Make Real Change (Part 1)
In this session, you’ll learn about “unrealistic” proposals and how to share them with others in ways that are inspiring and engaging. We will practice bringing the proposals to various political groups, social change organizations, spiritual and religious communities and to families and friends as a way to integrate all the teachings shared in the previous sessions.Focus Issue of the Week:
Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment (ESRA) to the US Constitution

This week we will look at a specific proposal put forth by the Network of Spiritual Progressives that embodies the values of love, justice, nonviolence, peace and environmental sustainability – seeing each other as embodiments of the sacred and responding to the universe with awe, wonder and radical amazement.

In this module, you’ll:

• Embody the idea that change is possible and that the reality of a better world is only as unrealistic as we allow it to be.
• Learn how to effectively advocate on behalf of large-scale transformation in a way that will not only seem plausible, but desirable enough for others to want to get involved.
• Explore the ins and outs of the ESRA to discover the tangible steps you can take that will create meaningful, systemic change.

Module 10: Advocating for “Unrealistic” Proposals that Can Make Real Change (Part 2)
In this session, you’ll learn how to overcome your own inner reluctance to be a “consciousness transformer” and how to respond to the obvious objections that people always come up with – both the rational objections and those based on inner cynicism, powerlessness, and despair about whether we could ever create a world that embodies the spiritual values for which we privately yearn but publicly doubt is really possible.

Focus Issue of the Week:
The Global Marshall Plan (GMP)

This week we will look at a specific proposal put forth by the Network of Spiritual Progressives that embodies the values of love, justice, nonviolence, peace, environmental sustainability – seeing each other as embodiments of the sacred and responding to the universe with awe, wonder and radical amazement.

In this module, you’ll:

• Learn how to effectively frame this domestic and foreign policy initiative.
• Understand security as a concept of generosity, not as domination.
• Learn how the GMP will shape global consciousness and systems and how doing so can result in meaningful change for the betterment of all.

What People Are Saying About Cat Zavis and Rabbi Michael Lerner…
Presented by a team unsurpassed in experience, skill, and wisdom, the densely-enriched, spiritual activist training immersed me in a theoretically rigorous, practically sensible, emotionally deep, spiritually enlivening communal event that stiffened my resolve and strengthened my confidence in my ability to meaningfully contribute to the creation of the caring world we long for.
– Philip Boche, Lawyer

A rich brew of relevant information, interactive experience, role-play – the medium was the message. It fed mind and spirit. I left it emboldened to be more intentional in bringing the New Bottom Line proposals to my community. Thanks!
– Rev. Lewie Pell (Brother Lewie)

Dreams have consequences. Ideals need to be nurtured. While the specific content of the Global Marshall Plan and the Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment incarnates ways of being in the political space, the experience of the training workshop became the change we wish to see in the world. I deeply appreciate the focus on caring for oneself as we care for the person next to us. I am grateful for the generosity of the other attendees to become a healing community. The training experience gives a sense of living my ideals of caring: with caring, it becomes easy to admire each other’s inner beauty. The training made my dreams bigger.
– Bruce Hirsch, MD

Full disclosure: I have been to too many “transformational change” trainings and may be somewhat jaded by the limited outcomes I usually receive. Yet the transformative healer training by the Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) simply knocked my socks off. A real class act. Very solid content on the New Bottom Line (transforming our society from an obsession with acquiring goods to helping connect people with their deepest yearnings for a world of meaning and purpose) paired with a very solid process of learning about empathy and resilience… all in just 3 1/2 days. Shazam!
– Wayne Benenson, Ph.D.

Here’s What You’ll Receive

• Ten 90-Minute Class Sessions with Cat Zavis and Rabbi Michael Lerner
  Experience a rare opportunity to be mentored and learn with pioneering spiritual activists Cat Zavis and Rabbi Michael Lerner – from the comfort of your own home. Each class session helps you create the specific skills and abilities to turn your passion for activism into action.
  
• Ten Audio Recordings of Class Sessions
  After each class, the audio will be available for you to download in high quality MP3 format. This way, you’ll never have to worry about missing a session, and you can listen anytime and anywhere – on your iPod, in your car and at your convenience.
  
• Ten PDF Transcripts of Class Sessions
  In addition to the high quality MP3 audios, you’ll also receive the entire class transcription in PDF format after each session is completed. This way you can review, print and highlight the most important insights and practices that you’ll learn.
• Interactive Exercises and Questions for Each Lesson
  After each lesson you will then have the option to do related exercises and answer questions in order to accelerate your learning and integrate each week’s lesson.
  

An Unprecedented Opportunity to Join The Passionate Citizen Intensive Virtual Training
We, at The Shift Network, feel deeply honored that Cat Zavis and Rabbi Michael Lerner have chosen to partner with us on this exclusive, LIVE online training. As you may know, this is a rare opportunity to learn directly from these renowned spiritual activists whose transformative work is helping us to awaken and heal ourselves and our world.

Through this powerful online format, you’ll not only save time and money on workshop costs (plus travel, accommodations and meals – which would cost thousands of dollars), you’ll be able to benefit from Rabbi Lerner and Cat’s incredible teachings and exercises from the comfort of your home – at your own pace!

If you are serious about transforming your relationship to activism and becoming a truly engaged, compassionate and effective agent of change, then you owe it to yourself, your loved ones – and our world – to take this one-of-a-kind training.

About Cat Zavis and Rabbi Michael Lerner…
Cat J. Zavis is the executive director of the Network for Spiritual Progressives as well as a collaborative divorce attorney, mediator, and conflict resolution and Empathic Communication trainer. She has been practicing Empathic Communication, mediation, and collaborative law for seven years. She conducts workshops and trainings in Empathic Communication for parents, collaborative professionals, mediators, teachers, students, political activists and spiritual centers. In 2009, her business was awarded a Peace Builder Award for her contribution to building peace in her community. Her combination of personal experience and professional expertise give Cat a unique perspective and ability to help people in conflict navigate their differences, whether personal or political.

Rabbi Michael Lerner, author of The Left Hand of God: Taking Our Country Back from the Religious Right (Harper San Francisco, 2006), is rabbi of the Bay Area congregation Beyt Tikkun and editor of Tikkun magazine: a bimonthly Jewish and interfaith critique of politics, culture, and society. Tikkun is one of the most respected intellectual/cultural magazines in the Jewish world, but also one of the most controversial because of its stand in favor of the rights of Palestinians, on the one hand, which locates him in the minds of many as the leader and most prominent spokesperson in the United States of Jewish supporters of the Israeli peace movement, and on the other hand, because of his stand critiquing the anti-religious and anti-spiritual biases of the secular Left, insisting that they need to address the spiritual hunger of Americans as equally important to their material needs. He is the co-author with Cornel West of a book entitled Jews and Blacks: Let the Healing Begin, and several other books, including Healing Israel/Palestine. He is also the author of another ten books including The Politics of Meaning, Healing Israel/Palestine, The Socialism of Fools: Anti-Semitism on the Left, Spirit Matters and Jewish Renewal.

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