Facing Human Wrongs:

There is no genuine possibility of hope if we cannot face all aspects of reality: the good, the bad, the broken and the messed up. Facing Human Wrongs (FHW) was designed to expand our collective capacity to hold space for difficult and painful things without feeling overwhelmed, immobilized or demanding quick fixes or rescue from discomfort. The course invites us to face our shadows, to compost our (metaphorical and literal) sh*t and to stay with the trouble in order to learn to weather storms of epic proportions together. The course is based on a particular form of inquiry that is counter-intuitive: it asks us to temporarily suspend our conditioned desires for hope, solutions and futurity, and invites us to sit with the magnitude of the challenges we are facing within and around us without turning away. FHW offers an (un)learning experience based on depth education, the work of the GTDF arts/research collective and the book Hospicing Modernity.

FHW is part of the Carbon Debt Reparations (CDR) Initiative that aims to support the public to confront colonialism as the source of the climate and nature emergency, to recognize our collective debt to the Indigenous peoples who protect lands and waters from commodification and to contribute towards the advancement of research, policies and practices of reparation. The CDR Initiative emerged from a long-standing collaboration with the Federation of the Huni Kui People of the State of Acre, who are one of the Indigenous groups in Brazil who put their lives on the line to protect the Amazon biome. FHW is licensed under creative commons, which means that you don’t have to pay anything to take it or to share it with others. You can take FHW individually as a self-study course or collectively as part of a group with the accompaniment of facilitators who have experience with the FHW inquiry. If you take it as a group or if you found the course useful, in honouring the labor of those who put the course together and who accompany the groups, we ask you to consider a CDR reciprocity commitment towards Indigenous communities who are part of the network. This commitment can be a one-off or a monthly contribution.

WARNING: Please note that this course is not for everyone. The course requires you to be in a space where you can hold the weight of multiple moving layers of complexity without being crushed. If you are looking for easy hope, simple solutions, affirmation of your beliefs, the mastery of concepts and tools, or an idealized community or way forward, you should look elsewhere. People who can benefit the most from FHW are those who have already exhausted imaginable solutions and fallen into “the pit”, the murky waters, where they are facing multiple VUCA storms: drowning in complexities and complicities, wrestling with paradoxes, trying hard not to let relationships fall apart, and most of the time, not knowing what to do. If you can recognize “the pit”, FHW can offer you an oxygen tank and a way of diving you might not have imagined was possible. However, if your mind is set to climb a mountain or build a house, diving lessons may not be a good investment of your time or of the time of diving instructors trying to bring you to the deep end of the water. Please take this warning seriously.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.