About Courage of Care 

Our mission is courageous, caring and simple: to help build a loving, just, and liberated world.

Courage of Care launched in 2016 out of a longing to build a community of compassionate, truth-telling, healing-centered, visionary and transformative practice.  We are an intergenerational, multi-racial, and mixed class collective with varying spiritual lineages and professional backgrounds.  Through hands-on workshops, online courses, our popular summer intensive, and consulting work, we support and train individuals, organizations, and communities to build and nurture cultures of practice rooted in:

• *contemplative practice,
• *critical analysis,
• *transformative justice,
• *storytelling and creative arts, and
• *embodied wisdom.

On building communities of practice 

“[W]ithout community there is certainly no liberation, no future, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between me and my oppression.”

— Audre Lorde

We focus on building cultures of practice because we believe that healing is communal and liberation is collective.  Spiritual activism involves more than just adding a social justice lens to our meditation course, or adding a mindfulness component to our social justice training: it takes courage and community. 

We are called to nurture authentic, non-transactional relationships with one another, to get to know each other in our beauty and our messiness, to learn more about what motivates and sustains us, and to break bread together.  When we co-create cultures of practice, we are shaped and transformed by the very act itself; we begin to live into our visions of a more just and loving world now.  

Beloved community is for all and by all.  Founded on safety, belonging, care, and sacredness, it is fostered through anti-oppressive and decolonized principles and practices.  The work of building the beloved community is nowhere else but right here.

The principles of the blueprint 

Our model begins with love, which we see as the foundation of any beloved community.  The Latin root of the word courage is cor, heart.  Sensing that we are held in love and community empowers our courage.

Captured by the acronym RISE, Courage’s blueprint follows the practice of grounding into a sense of belonging in order to resource ourselves so that we may:

• Reveal truths; see what causes and perpetuates injustice and oppression;
• Invest in reparative and restorative healing; 
• Sense alternative ways of being that exist in the here and now; and 
• Embody transformation through a willingness to show up fully and take risks. 

Although we use a variety of contemplative and somatic practices, anti-oppressive pedagogies, and systems tools throughout the curriculum, all aim to call forth ways of knowing, being, and doing.  In other words, we practice to embody an active ethic of loving as individuals and communities, rather than to master any particular technique.

At its core the blueprint is adaptive and non-linear.  We seek to build resilient systems in the midst of the constant change of our bodies and world, the joy and suffering which characterize life, and the oscillating rhythms of expansion and contraction, creation and destruction which reverberate through all levels of existence.

The structure of this course

Each session of this course will focus on one module of the blueprint. Through talks, contemplative and somatic practices, guided reflections and ritual, we will build a container and a culture of practice that supports us in working toward liberation.

This course is entirely self-paced. We invite you to consider moving through the course one module at a time, allowing yourself enough time to explore each practice and sit with the reflections and teachings offered.

We are so excited to be with you all and we look forward to building beloved community with you through this course and beyond.