Summit: Embodied Transformation & Liberation

Session 1 — The Revolution Starts Within
Kai Cheng Thom · 75-minute experiential session

Activist work often focuses on external systems of oppression — but what about the inner conflicts that emerge in challenging conversations? How do we undo our own privilege while honoring our survival needs and past traumas? How do we hold others accountable while extending compassion? Kai Cheng Thom offers frameworks and somatic tools for navigating internal conflicts on the path to liberation.

Session 2 — Ask for Excellence
Michelle Boulé · 75-minute experiential session

A transformation-centered workshop on how to set and reach goals, build confidence to promote yourself and your work, lead effectively, and ask for — and create — exactly what you want. Because you are a powerful being. Period.

Session 3 — Connecting Our Inner Work to the Outer World: Moving Beyond Despair and Showing Up in a Troubling World
Shelly Tygielski · 75-minute experiential session

We live in daunting times, and many of us bury ourselves in self-help cycles instead of showing up for the issues that matter. Based on Shelly's acclaimed book Sit Down to Rise Up: How Radical Self-Care Can Change the World, this session helps you connect to a deeper sense of purpose, move into Empathy-Action mode, build successful movements, and deepen collaborative social impact.

Session 4 — The Art of Living Like You Love Yourself
Chara Caruthers · 75-minute experiential session

How effective can we be as practitioners, teachers, and caregivers if our own internal spaces are unexamined and unloved? Explore the key ways of being that keep you stuck, and uncover practices for liberating yourself from patterns of thinking and doing that leave you feeling unworthy.

Session 5 — When Change Works: Embodied Collective Memory and Imaginal Future
Dr. Leticia Nieto · 75-minute experiential session

What are the patterns and conditions in moments of vitality, congruence, wisdom, passion, and joy? Bodies carry trauma — but they also hold narratives of growth, connection, and engagement. Through movement, enactment, rhythm, poetry, and song, surface stories of resourced moments in social engagement. Based on Beyond Inclusion, Beyond Empowerment.

Navigate internal conflicts on the path to personal and collective liberation

Hold privilege, survival needs, and past trauma in compassionate balance

Set goals, build confidence, and ask for what you truly want

Move from despair into Empathy-Action mode in a troubling world

Connect inner work to outer change as a source of social transformation

Identify and release patterns of unworthiness and self-abandonment

Use embodied collective memory to access vitality, wisdom, and joy

Build sustainable movements rooted in radical self-care