Flowchart of RC Pathways developed by Siobhan Vida Ashmole for Gaia U
Beginning in 2023 the Permaculture Colab sponsored Andrew Langford, assisted by Vida Ashmole, both of Gaia U International, to work-up online Re-evaluation Counseling (RC) training opportunities for members of the Colab.
The initial plan was to organize a novel 4 part online training including a free introduction run by RC colleagues who have developed a valuable 3 hour OMBRA training (see graphic above for the meaning of OMBRA), available once a month.
This was to be followed by a 3 module version of the Re-evaluation Counseling Fundamentals that a student could start by entering any of the 3 modules thus providing 3 starting points per cycle. An infographic seeking to explain the format of this online RC training can be seen above.
It is important to note that RC trainings are regulated by the International RC Community (IRC) and that the format of the training is indeed novel in several aspects according to the IRC. Careful, extended negotiations between Gaia U and the IRC, mediated by the Area Reference Person for the Sacramento and Foothills RC Community in California, USA and the supervising Regional Reference Person for this Area have been necessary.
Andrew Langford is a member of the Teachers and Leaders group in the Area RC Community and is a Credentialed RC Teacher. The IRC, with its regional and area offices, takes a good deal of care to ensure that teachers and their training offerings meet IRC standards.
Landing pages for the training were built on the Gaia U website, the training advertised across the Colab 6 weeks in advance of the start date of the first module, an enticing blog post was written and published offering full scholarships but the take-up was surprisingly slim. We had probed, then sensed and, as a result, determined that an entirely new response was called for.
This new response has taken the form of offering the RC training as a one-to-one option. That is, Colab members who are ready to engage, get to learn RC basics in the first place through one-on-one sessions with Andrew Langford. Dates and times to suit the learner are arranged via online messaging and no-one needs to wait for a viable course cohort to emerge. This is as friction-free a process for the learner as we can currently imagine and requires significantly less administration effort.
Folks signing up for one-to-one process so far show rapid progress. As clients they access and get to work on healing their chronic material at an accelerated rate compared to folks in multi-person classes and their counseling skills also develop fast.
Once they have the fundamental concepts in mind and have shown the capacity for practicing these effectively, they are invited to connect with other Gaia U trained RC practitioners. This route enables people to begin building a support network of RC allies besides their teacher whilst, in turn, they also become valuable RC resources for their allies. This mutuality, the capacity to act as client and counselor, is a cornerstone of RC peer-to-peer practice. By these means we go a long way to: –
- eliminating the steep affordability barriers found in many other mental health practices
- contradicting the common hierarchical relationship of therapist/client and
- emphasizes the view that everybody can reclaim adequate power to thoroughly regenerate our ecosocial relations
These are potent outcomes that enable folks to become ever more confident to: –
- take increasingly bold, thoughtful risks in their work-in-the-world,
- rapidly recover their spirits when faced with set-backs and disappointments,
- know that their RC colleagues have always got their back
- while all the time clearing up any distresses that might be holding them back.
To enquire about accessing this flexible format for Re-evaluation Counseling training please WhatsApp Andrew at +1 805 610 0899.
Andrew Langford, co-founder of Gaia University, is an unusualist and possibilist blending small-scale living with large-scale systems thinking. The author of Ecosocial Design, he champions participatory transformative action un/learning. Andrew is a member of the Teachers and Leaders group in the Area RC Community and is a Credentialed RC Teacher.
Charting a route for online RC trainings in a complex and busy international network © 2024 by Andrew Langford is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/