Lesson: Dream Bigger

It’s important to learn how to create the dream you have for your life and the world. That’s why the course starts with the topic of dreams. 

If you want to step into healing conversations, you have to have a clear understanding of where you’re going, and it starts within: the first healing conversation you need to have is with yourself.

As you step into this healing conversation, one of the first things that you have to do is break past the fear barriers that are holding you back so you can dream bigger. You’ll get the chance to do just that in today’s lesson. Enjoy the expansion! 

Listening Exercise: Your Unique Energy Signature

Listening is an integral part of this process. You have to take the time to understand what these lessons are waking up within you, and the way to do that is with lesson exercises. So today as you discover your unique energy signature, you'll start to learn how to weave in your energy throughout the rest of this practice and also in your life.

Insight Session: Your Energy Agreements

This session is an insight session that is designed to follow the previous lesson (so go back if you haven’t watched it yet). You’ll integrate everything you’ve learned so far and set yourself up for taking practical action in your life. By doing this work, you’ll step more fully into your vision for your life and your vision for the world.

Lesson: What Doesn’t HEAL, Repeats.

“What doesn’t heal, repeats.” In this lesson, Justin Michael Williams unpacks exactly what he means by this phrase. The reason this step is so crucial is two-fold: if you want to change your life and the world, you have to work on your own personal healing so you can contribute to the collective in such a way that you stop repeating the same cycles.

This is brave, bold, and uncommon work you’re doing in this course. Yet through your participation in the program, you can get to the root of your pain and heal it, thus successfully stopping repeated behavior or patterns that don’t serve you in living big, fulfilling lives. When you heal yourself, you contribute to healing the world.

Listening Exercise: Deep Listening Practice

Music and art have been used together for generations to transform suffering, pain, and unspeakable loss into beauty and hope. Today’s listening practice is a special one.

By using music and prose together, you can help awaken the emotions that can be harder to access and feel. Remember, today is about listening. Not judging or analyzing or trying to figure out what comes up as you participate. Simply listen with curiosity and know that you, your growth journey, and your healing are infinitely supported. You are safe here to feel and heal.

Insight Session: Your Emotion Story

Now that you’ve had experience reclaiming your emotions, it’s time to integrate what you’ve discovered in a way that empowers you to move forward in life with clear, confident, and courageous action.

Lesson: Shadow & Light

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” - James Baldwin

Today’s lesson is a big one. It's the crux of having healing conversations with yourself.

As much as we may want other people to change first and fast, the work is always within. By being willing to embrace the discomfort and messiness that comes with the radical honesty and insights you are receiving in this course, you can heal what needs to be healed in yourself … and then start to have conversations with other people and hold space with and for them in a way that has the power to transform your conversations and communities. And isn’t that why you’re here? To make a difference in the world. To light it up with love.

So, today you will continue inward. You’ll go deep. In this lesson, you’ll learn the difference between shadow work and therapy, and what is shadow work in the first place. You're going to learn how to stop letting the past hold you back.

A kind reminder: Bring compassion with you today. Don’t judge or make yourself wrong for anything that arises. And trust yourself explicitly today. Give yourself that gift as you continue his journey.

Listening Exercise: What Are You Hiding From?

In this listening practice, you’ll anchor in to some of the things that might be in your shadow. The things you’ve been hiding from yourself. Justin Michael Williams guides you gently through a few questions. Your only job is just to listen to what arises, without judgement or analyzing. Just listen. This practice works like a brainstorming session with yourself, relying on the power of your attention.

Insight Session: Shadow Exploration

In this insights session, you’ll do work in the course workbook to help you unpack the topics you discovered and explored in the previous listening session.

Lesson: The Big P

In this session, you’re going to learn about the Big P: privilege. And why it’s the very thing that gives you your power. It’s important to understand there are many types of privilege. We have class privilege and gender privilege and able-bodied privilege and neuro-typical privilege and heteronormative privilege. We have so many different privileges, and in today’s lesson you will explore what privilege in a way you may not have explored it before - and that’s important because when you can honor and just name and own the privileges that you have then you are able to reach back and help those in need.

Listening Exercise: Claiming Your Power

In this listening exercise, you’re going to get to the heart of how you feel after taking the power and privilege test. Be mindful NOT to add any narrative, meaning, or story to your test results.

Insight Session: Owning Your Power

In this important insights session, you’ll get to unpack even further your understanding of power and privilege. You’ll want to refer to the course workbook today. And a reminder: thank you for being here in this course. The reason this topic is so important is because we all rise when we use the privilege we have to lift each other up.

Lesson: Collective Shadow

As you know, what happens in your past affects the present. But it goes deeper than that. What happened to your ancestors, no matter skin color or sexual preference or gender identity, has been passed forward to you, unless that trauma was healed.

We have the opportunity to do what no other generation before us has been given the chance to do before, and that’s hold space for healing conversations that cross divides. The human race has the opportunity to heal in a way that's never been possible before now.

We can only start to talk about this after looking within ourselves.
Your healing and going deep and meeting your shadow has led here.

And now it’s time to talk about the collective shadow. Science has proven that we actually inherit trauma from our ancestors. It gets encoded into our DNA. If we had the opportunity to connect to the truth of ancestry, to the truth of the roots of who we are, we would be able to heal a lot more quickly.

So, in today’s lesson, we talk more about how to heal collective trauma.
Thank you for being here.

Listening Exercise: Personalizing the Collective Shadow

It’s important to personalize the collective shadow, so it doesn’t continue to live “out there” as a thing you have no influence over or responsibility in healing. In this exercise, you’ll walk back in memories to better understand your personal history with race.

Insight Session: Your Infinity Story

In this insights session, you’ll use the course workbook to unpack two things. First of all, you’ll be with your own experience of our listening practice and your earliest memories or experiences of “race.” Secondly, you’ll explore a little bit more about your ancestry.

Lesson: Toxic Thoughts

“Our toxic thoughts often originate from trauma in early life. And although those traumas and situations are usually nonexistent in our current reality, we’ve internalized the hateful voices and learned to rerun an outdated script that was never ours to begin with.” – Justin Michael Williams

You don’t get rid of your toxic thoughts by sweeping them under the rug. You get rid of them by healing them at the root. Know this: Your toxic thoughts are here to teach you something. They are a marker. An indicator. A flag in the ground pointing toward your growth and healing. Life can be messy. In this lesson, you’ll learn how to stop being so hard on yourself so you can heal and grow.

Listening Exercise: Healing Your Toxic Thoughts

This listening exercise weaves together everything we’ve done so far in this course. You’ll personalize today’s lesson so that you may understand the origin of your toxic thoughts so you can start to heal it at the root.

Insight Session: The Collective Mind

The toxic thoughts you may have are not yours, as you discovered in today’s lesson and listening exercise. Rather, they are a collective conglomeration of all the things that have happened in your life: past, present, and future. In this insight session, you’ll take what you learned in the listening exercise and bring healing love to those discoveries.

Lesson: 5 Steps to Real Forgiveness

The true purpose of forgiving someone is to stop letting whatever that person did affect how you live your life today.

It doesn’t mean you don’t hurt or that forgiving someone means you condone what happened. There are so many misconceptions about forgiveness and a lot of things that we have intermingled with forgiveness that actually prohibit us from giving ourselves permission to forgive. In this lesson, you’ll learn what forgiveness is NOT as well as the five-step process of real forgiveness.

Listening Exercise: Asking for Forgiveness

In this listening exercise, you have two options: You can approach this from a place of understanding something you need to forgive yourself for, or you can approach this from a place of wanting to forgive someone one for something. You can do this listening exercise more than once, even doing both options.

Insight Session: Example of Forgiveness Letter

In this powerful insight session, you have the opportunity to write a letter of forgiveness. And this is a letter where you are asking for forgiveness, either from yourself or from somebody that you know.

Lesson: How to Set Clear Boundaries

Conversations about boundaries are most effective when you've done the work on emotional awareness, which is why we had a lot of ground to cover first before we could get to this very important topic.

Boundaries require resilience because you can’t control how people respond to your boundaries, so you need resilience to hold them even if the other person doesn’t agree with them. Because boundaries aren't about the other person; they’re about you. In this lesson, you’ll learn what boundaries really are and how to set them. You’ll also come away learning the difference between boundaries and rules. And finally, you’ll get clear on the biggest lie you’ve been telling yourself about why you can’t set boundaries, so you can have the confidence and clarity to set healthy boundaries moving forward.

Listening Exercise: Holding the Line

In this listening exercise, you’ll get clear on what boundaries you need to set, what is the story you’re telling yourself about not setting the boundary, what are you standing for, and how to take action.

Insight Session: Your Boundary Agreement

Use the course workbook to further integrate what you’ve discovered in today’s lesson, by completing the incomplete sentences. Doing so will help you learn how to create an agreement with yourself about the boundaries that you need to set.

Lesson: Calling Out / In / Forward

One of the reasons we generally stop speaking our truth or standing up for the causes and communities that matter to us is that we end up in heated disagreements. The person on the other side feels shamed or wronged, and that immediately puts him or her on the defensive—and you likely feel exasperated and frustrated. What you have thus created is another inch in the divide.

Calling people out doesn’t work. No matter what has occurred, shaming or blaming someone else (also known as being called out) shuts down the centers of their brain that activate learning and growth. It’s literally biological for them to get defensive when they are called out.

That’s why it’s critical to learn how to call people forward.

Calling forward is an INVITATION.
We are calling them toward something new.
We must also be willing to be called forward, too.

In this lesson, you’ll learn how to express what you value and cherish — rather than focusing too much on your judgments of others or becoming entrenched in who was right or wrong. This is how we move toward solutions together. This makes all the difference between conflict and connection.

Listening Exercise: Your Big Call

Each of us has some situation in our lives that if we stepped a little more fully into, we could call someone forward and change the trajectory for infinity of the whole situation. In today’s listening exercise, you’ll get the opportunity to think from love as you listen deeply for how you can use your voice to create ripples of change.

Insight Session: Calling Forward

Now it's time to use your authentic voice to call someone forward as an invitation toward something new. To connect rather than perpetuate conflict. Use the course workbook to create your invitation for calling someone in your life forward.

Lesson: Becoming Free + Setting Free

If you look the word “liberation” up in the dictionary, you’ll find that the word means both becoming free and setting free.

This is such an important distinction to make because we oftentime only think of the work as freeing our individual selves and leave out the part, the responsibility, of setting others free. Liberation is an opportunity to help change this world. To change lives, the planet, and the conditions in which we live.

Simply put: our freedom is bound to one another.
None of us are free if we’re all not free.

In this lesson, you’ll learn what it means to be skillful in liberation — in becoming free and setting free— and what it means to be skillful in the art of change.

Listening Exercise: Your New Vision

In the final deep listening exercise of the course, you’ll envision the future you, the one living the life of your dreams in the world of your dreams, and get clear on the energy you will bring forth in every conversation and interaction.

Insight Session: From Insight to Action

The way you practice the art of liberation is by putting it into action in your life. So in this final insights session, you’ll get clear on HOW you want to do just that. And you’ll start to create an actual action plan for how to create the vision for your life and for the world. Use the course workbook to help you create your liberation statement.