What Can Dogs Teach us About Power, Gentleness, and Learning in a Reactive World?
A mini workshop with Didi Pershouse, Sunday, October 11th, 4 to 6 PM Eastern Time
Enroll in Course
From Heeling to Healing: What Can Dogs Teach Us
About Power, Gentleness, and Learning in a Reactive World?
A discussion and mini-workshop with Didi Pershouse, based on her Wisdom Underground essay "Dogs, Power, and Learning"
WORKSHOP POSTPONED, DUE TO ILLNESS (covid-yuck!). Feel free to sign up and we will let you know as soon as we reschedule!
What might the intimate, ancient relationship between humans and dogs teach us about our own reactivity, as individuals and as a society?
In Didi Pershouse's recent essay Dogs, Power, and Learning, she looks at how the ferocious splits in approaches to dog training (force free, balanced, and traditional) echo our debates about so many aspects of life: including parenting, policing, religion, and even artificial intelligence. She thinks that most of the time we are asking the wrong questions.
In this workshop we'll use questions from the essay and living-systems frameworks as a window into our own experiences with learning, with our views of what discipline and softness imply, and with the "snarling, lunging, messy place" we seem to be in collectively.
Some questions we may explore:
- What's the difference between learning and behaving?
- Why are questions about control and freedom so agitating?
- Are we addicted to rewards?
- What does with the current appetite for "strong leaders" in politics tell us about our nervous systems?
- Why is it so hard to break out of hierarchies?
- How are boundaries and limits made known without language?
- How do we help our collective nervous systems become less reactive?
What to expect:
- Small-group and whole-group conversation
- Frameworks to guide our discussion
- Space to share your own thinking and experience, about your relationship with your own dog, or the "dog" pacing around in your own nervous system
- A look at how our questions change as we talk
Who it's for: Dog nerds, environmentalists, parents, educators, activists, policy makers, and anyone curious about power, care and communication. You don't need a dog or any training experience.
Your Instructor
Didi Pershouse is well known as an innovative international educator both in-person and online. She is the founder of the Land and Leadership Initiative. Her facilitator's guide Understanding Soil Health and Watershed Function is used in over 90 countries.
She became deeply involved in the intersection of food systems and health systems while providing rural health care for two decades at The Center for Sustainable Medicine, and wrote The Ecology of Care: Medicine, Agriculture, Money, and the Quiet Power of Human and Microbial Communities.
She has written a field training manual for the UN-FAO Farmer Field School Program and the Andhra Pradesh Community Managed Natural Farming Initiative in India, involving over 1,000,000 smallholder farmers. She was a contributing author to The Climate Emergency: How Africa Can Survive and Thrive; Climate Change and Creation Care; and Health in the Anthropocene. She was one of five speakers at the United Nations-FAO World Soil Day in 2017.
She serves on the Planning Commission for her town, is a board supervisor for the White River Natural Resources Conservation District, and is on the board of directors of Regenerate Earth, Soil Carbon Coalition and the Vermont Healthy Soils Coalition. While serving on the state appointed Payment for Ecosystem Services and Soil Health Working Group, she helped to reorient the program back to its public roots. She led a successful effort to conserve the Zebedee Headwaters Wetland while serving as a Vermont Conservation Commissioner.
She is on the Vision Council of the Global Earth Repair Convergence, and a member of the Ecosystem Restoration Alliance. She is a lineage member of the Change Agent Development Community (stewarded by Carol Sanford), and is seeding new communities of practice in a Wisdom tradition that uses living systems thinking.