Unity Academy Curriculum

This four-day workshop will be facilitated by Bob Anderson and Terri O’Fallon. Participants, prior to the workshop will fill out and be debriefed on the LCP and the STAGES assessments. This workshop will unfold within an integration of Terri’s adult development STAGES, a deep exploration of the fundamental framework of the LCP and the Unity in-formed integral model that forms the underpinnings of the academy.  It will explore the seven practices of Creative leadership and introduce the framework and practices of future coursework within the academy. This workshop will deeply launch the process of the school. Participants will leave with an expanded capability to use the LCP for working in a deep and transformative way with their clients.

This workshop will lay the foundation for the entire Unity Academy experience. Through a series of didactic, somatic, experiential, and reflective exercises, you will:

• Take and be debriefed on the Leadership Circle Profile and STAGES assessment. Learn about the stage at which you are making meaning, how that is showing up in your LCP feedback and clarify your developmental agenda at this point in your life.
• Learn the deeper underpinnings and integration of the UML as informed by the STAGES framework and the Unity In-Formed Model of Leadership.
• Get introduced, through the STAGES assessment and model to the terrain of later stage development and the opening of sequential MetAware levels of development.
• Learn to apply the STAGES model in your coaching and consulting practice.
• Begin the exploration of the physics that will form the foundational support for the entire academy. Learn how the STAGES model integrates with the LCP, the UML, the wisdom traditions, and quantum physics.
• Be guided into state experiences of the MetAware levels of consciousness.
• Explore experientially six leadership practices that, if practiced, will reliably boot up Creative if not later stage leadership. They are:
  • Discern Purpose: What am I here for? What are we here for? What must I be about to live the life I came here to live and not someone else’s? What do I love more than I fear?
  • Distill Vision:What is wanted of me/us now? What is the emergent and desired future that wants its way with me/us? What will exist in the future that does not exist now? What is the organization, that if it existed, would put us out of business?
  • Know Your Fears. How do I/we get in my own way? What do I/we make up that it is too risky to act on the purpose and vision? What is at risk beneath my Reactive strategy, search for a safe path, and/or playing not to lose?
  • Authentic, Courageous, Non-Violent Conversation:How do I consistently speak the truth, especially when it requires courage? How do I have difficult conversations in a great way? How do I act out the vision I hold in every encounter?
  • Balancing Intuition and Reason.How do I/we open up intuitive meta-capability? How can I/we learn to be informed from a field of larger intelligence about the emergent, desired future and the innovations required to manifest that future?
  • Catalytic Presence. How do I, when I enter any circumstance, embody a presence that resonates a catalytic field for what wants to happen? How do I, through my very presence, create the conditions for courage, honesty, reconciliation, healing, insight, breakthrough innovation, inspiration, in other words, for what is most needed?
• Learn energetic practices that open transformative states of presence.
• Get introduced to the entire body of work that will comprise the Unity Academy.

This workshop will be a very personally powerful personal and leadership development experience. It will stand alone and can be take independently of going further on in the academy.

Jump to:

• • The Energetics of Embodied Presence and Dialogue
  • Deep Process
  • Application and Manifestation

Return to Unity Academy page.

This workshop is integral. It is Unity in-formed. It is an integration (both theoretical, scientific, and experiential) of many diverse traditions: energetic healing, Aikido, spiritual/wisdom traditions (North, South, East, West), quantum science (physics, biology, neurology), psychology (cognitive, adult development), and shadow healing (individual, intergenerational, collective). These traditions, integrated within the practice of leadership and organizational transformation, have much to offer us about how to be more effective coaches, consultants, and leaders. This workshop is about expanding the human meta-capacities that allow us to become a more transformative agent for our clients and for our organizations.

This workshop will help participants embody and ground stable access to progressively deeper dimensions of the quantum field (and/or the human energy field), open pathways of intuitive access to unified informational field and to the field of the client and develop an unprecedented level of transformative presence from which to work with clients and lead organizations. It will use Aikido to accelerate access to the above, ground and embody it in action under pressure, and demonstrate how to be in non-violent, harmonious connection while in conflict. Finally, this workshop will introduce the practice of dialogue—intuitively listening to and speaking from the field of intelligence for breakthrough insight on important issues. Participants will experience a new and unexpected level of transformative power and presence from which to work and lead.

This five-day workshop will be facilitated by Bob Anderson, Joel Yanowitz, and Donna Evans Strauss. Bob has a long history with these facilitators. They were teachers for him. In the mid-80s, Bob got involved with Innovation Associates (Peter Senge, Robert Fritz, and Charlie Kiefer). Joel was the president of Innovation Associates. Joel taught Bob to facilitate their Visionary Leadership Program, which formed the structure of Creative leadership in the UML. Joel is also an Aikido master and has been using Aikido in his work with leaders for decades. In the mid-90s, Bob attended and graduated from the globally renowned four-year Barbara Brennan School of Healing. It was at this school that the Universal Model of Leadership (UML) deepened and came into its current coherence. The Spirit of Leadership white paper was written to complete the thesis requirement in year four to graduate. Donna Evans Strauss was a teacher in the school when Bob attended. This work has deeply informed the Leadership Circle Universal Model, Profile, and mission. These two bodies of work will be experientially integrated in this workshop. See bios below.

This workshop is highly experiential and will explore the application of energetic and bioenergetic healing practice to your coaching, consulting, and leadership development practice.

As this workshop is focused on integral coaching/consulting presence and practice, it will not explore how an integral leadership change effort can be implemented in an organization. That will come in the Application workshop. Our focus will be on the essential presence of transformative coaching and consulting as something we learn to bring to all clients, regardless of their stage of development. We will explore and enhance our capacity—as coaches and consultants—to hold a transformative integral presence in-formed by Unity.

In this workshop, we will progress through a series of individual and group activities designed to enable direct Unity in-formed subtle experience, out of which arises the capacity to embody collective sensing, speaking, and acting. Grounded in our individual presence, together we will explore speaking and moving sourced from the collective field of awareness. Using exercises (both physical and energetic) derived from the martial art of Aikido—the art of compassionate, harmonious power—we will practice our way into a deeply embodied and agile state of presence. From this state, we will practice together the art of collective intuition—dialogue. Dialogue is a unique form of authenticity (that we use with senior teams) wherein we allow the field of greater intelligence to speak through us—to in-form us in precisely those areas where we are seeking breakthrough insight and innovation. Dialogue is the capacity to drop into a deep state of embodied presence together and listen to what wants to emerge from the field. It is a foundational practice for integral leadership, coaching, and consulting. We will practice simultaneously being present and centered (within the self) while deepening relational connection in action. This practice coheres a resonate field that can be accessed intuitively, informing our dialogue with innovative insight and wisdom. Wholehearted presence invites unitive awareness—the conscious, loving, intelligent unity inherent in, and fundamental to reality.

This workshop is a multifaceted set of practices where each practice supports the unfolding of all the others. Through a series of somatic, experiential, and reflective exercises, you will:

Make a Paradigm Shift

• Realize that you are not what you think you are, who you think you are.
• Step beyond the classical, materialist, reductionist mental model that has dominated much of human civilization for hundreds of years.
• Learn why this paradigmatic shift is required for integral leadership to emerge.
• Somatically experience working in the emergent paradigm of the inherent unity of all things.
• Learn how this paradigm integrates unified science with ancient and indigenous wisdom.
• Never see yourself or the world in quite the same way.
• Have a mental model that supports the development of human meta-capacities.

Gain Immediate Access to Expanded and Grounded States of Awareness

• Energy Practices: Practices that open and energize the human energy field.
• Awareness Practices: Practices that directly point to the apprehension of fundamental reality, conscious awareness itself.
• Combining energy and awareness practices to enter states of ecstasy, love, joy, and embodied compassionate presence.
• Learn how to use awareness and energy practices to directly access information intuitively for breakthrough insight.
• Embody these practices as the presence from which and as which you work.

Open Intuitive Access

• Expand your intuitive and higher sensory capacity for gaining access to more and more subtle information within yourself and your client—information that guides and informs what is happening and wants to happen.
• Practice intuition exercises that open intuition and demonstrate its validity.
• Gain instant access to deeper presence, awareness, intuition, and common sense, especially in difficult situations.
• Tune into the subtle information in a group or organization’s energy field to be informed about how to be with, facilitate, and/or lead what is emerging.
• Access and trust intuitive insights in the moment.

Work With/in the Human Energetic Field

• Learn to access and work with various dimensions of the quantum field expressed within the human energy field.
• Learn to feel, direct, and conduct energy in support of your client, culminating in a full-body energy healing with fellow participants. The focus here is not that you would be prepared to do hands-on healing, but that you become much more sensitive to the use, movement, and impact of energy flows within yourself and your client.
• Be introduced to the five different body types shaped by the human energy field. These body types were initially developed by Wilhelm Reich. Each has a unique bodily configuration and energy field dynamic. This workshop will introduce the types and in Application workshop you will learn how they are represented in the LCP and how to regulate the energy field of your body to create a healing response to each type.

Deepen Embodied Presence

• Learn to expand, balance, and bring greater coherence into the field of your body.
• Open all the energy centers of the body (head, heart, and will) to become more unconditionally and wholeheartedly present with your client.
• Learn to resonate a highly coherent transformative field with the clients and groups with whom you consult—a field that catalyzes transformation, intuitive insight, and breakthrough innovation. Be the presence that heals, makes whole, and catalyzes transformation.
• Become capable of direct transmission—emanating a resonant field of greater coherency—for catalyzing transformation.
• Use energetic presence practices for becoming more grounded, powerful, compassionate, and authentic when under pressure.
• Become a more creative, generative, and reconciling presence.
• Through the power of your presence, generate and hold a field for what wants to happen (higher intention) to happen.
• Create the inner conditions for deep inquiry, authenticity, vulnerability, depth, and dialogue.

Engage in Dialogue

• Practice speaking from deep states of awareness. Words spoken from these states, directly into your client, are often the keys that unlock, open, catalyze transformation.
• Discern between dialogue and discussion on the discourse spectrum.
• Using all the above, create the conditions and resonate field for dialogue.
• Feel/sense together into the field of complex challenges and possibilities.
• Generate insights and breakthroughs in thought, perception, and outcomes for the world.
• Use dialogue circles as a generating system for seeing new possibilities, strategy, system design, culture, products, and services.

Heal Shadow Wounds

• Have opportunities to face deep shadow elements within yourself.
• Practice an expanded version of “What’s at Risk?” to access the self (no-self) at the “bottom of the well.”

Note: Somatically and energetically opening the field of the body to higher currents of energy is activating. Unprocessed wounds and shadow inevitably arise. This can be very deep and intense work. It is also liberating. There will be time in every one of the academy workshops for working with shadows as they emerge. In this workshop you will be supported by the team in compassionately and powerfully engaging the shadow elements that emerge for you. In the Deep Process workshop, you will be introduced to how to facilitate this work with your clients. 

Jump to:

• • Foundations
  • Deep Process
  • Application and Manifestation

Return to Unity Academy page.

This three-day workshop will be facilitated by Bob Anderson and Donna Evans Strauss. This workshop will build upon the capability to be an intuitive transformative presence and will teach coaches and consultants how to facilitate very deep process work with their clients. Deep process work is one of the gateways to integral human development. The primary focus will be on working with shadow. This is working with the core wounds, blocks, distorted and disowned parts, and traumas (personal, intergenerational, and collective) that live within all of us.

This is not a workshop in how to coach leaders moving into or operating at an integral level—and it is. This workshop is about how to coach or consult from an integral-unitive presence. It is about being the presence that transforms, that creates a catalytic field of transformation, while working with a client (or group) that may be at any level of leadership development.

This work is founded on the principle that, to maximize the developmental opportunity we have in any moment with our clients, all parts of us must be attended to and made fully available—from the very highest to the most wounded aspects that we carry within us.

This approach works uniquely and directly with the ascending and descending currents of energy in the body. Descending in service of transcending. This is where healing—making whole—takes place. You will learn to meet your client deep within their core wounds, hold them in loving, wholehearted, radiant presence and, thereby, support the alchemical, transformative movement that wants to happen. You will learn, as this unfolds, to bring light into what is unfolding and, thereby, catalyze and support the integration of previously contracted shadow energy into the graceful ascending and descending flow of spirit-energy through the field of the body.

In this workshop, we will practice everything learned in prior academy workshops and further develop our capability to hold an unconditional, compassionate, radiant space for whatever shadow elements emerge and for all emotions, however painful. Therefore, we will spend considerable time together doing deep shadow work, for our own integral development and to learn together the various practices deep process coaching.

This workshop will lead you through a set of practices that will initiate you into how to facilitate deep shadow work. You will:

• Have opportunities to face deep shadow elements within yourself.
• Practice everything learned thus far in the academy and expand your capacity to be good support in helping others meet and hold deep wounds and shadows.
• Rest in a deep and unshakeable embodied presence while working.
• Feel all dimensions of your client: emotionally, physically, subtly (how their energy flows or does not in their system), and spiritually.
• Learn elegant inquiry and energetic methodologies for helping your client drop somatically into core material, as well as for supporting transformation.
• Recognize—feel somatically and intuitively—the different frequencies of personal, transgenerational, and collective wounds.
• Learn to trust in not having to know what is unfolding or where it’s going. The process has its own intelligence.
• Hold a profound connection to the highest light within you and your client as the transformative presence you bring. Learn how to actively work with this light and energy to support the alchemy of transformation.
• Hold an unconditional, compassionate, wholehearted, and radiant space for whatever shadow elements emerge and for all emotions, however painful.
• Regulate your presence to create a safe and powerfully transformative coherent field in which deep work takes place—thus allowing for much deeper work, insight, and higher levels of innovative breakthrough.
• Hold wide, open intuitive/subtle access with which they both experience and support their client.
• Rest in a deep and unshakeable embodied presence, radiant spaciousness, while working.

During the workshop, we will create a very safe container and a very high-energy transformative field as we devote ourselves to working very intensively, intuitively, and experientially with all aspects of ourselves. We will spend our time in deep shadow work as well as expanded states of presence and intuitive connection.

Shadow work opens the flow of vitality, energy, information, intuitive access in the body. The result is far greater effective, undefended, wholehearted, radiant transformative presence from which to lead and work.

Jump to:

• • Foundations
  • The Energetics of Embodied Presence and Dialogue
  • Application and Manifestation

Return to Unity Academy page.

This five-day workshop will be facilitated by Bob Anderson, Donna Evans Strauss, Chris Thorsen, and Bill Adams. This workshop will build on all the above as it is applied. It will continue to work with energetic practices and Aikido for individual, collective, and systemic application. It will continue working with the practice of non-violent communication. The process and capability to facilitate dialogue will be fully explored. This workshop will go beyond being informed by the field to practices that shape and in-form the field of manifestation. Participants will learn how to work at very expanded states of awareness, frequency, energy, and information density to accelerate the creation of intended results and the emergent future.

This workshop is part two of the Energetics of Embodied Presence and Dialogue workshop and the Deep Process workshop. As such, it will build on everything learned in both workshops and focus on application to the practice of coaching, consulting, and leading from a Unity in-formed integral approach. You will:

• Deepen into the energetic and awareness practices.
• Expand intuitive access to the field.
• Develop further your ability to sense into and work with the energy field of your client.
• Integrate the STAGES model, with the Typology model built into the LCP/UML, with body types (type evolving through stage) such that as you sit with your client you can recognize their type, body type, and stage. All of this will inform you on how to be good help to your client.
• Learn how to modulate your field to create a healing response to each of the five body types.
• Learn how the five energetic body types show up on the LCP. Learn unlocking moves for each type.
• Gain more practice in deep process work.
• Learn and practice the distilled essence of courageous conversations—non-violent communication.
• Practice dialogue—listening together to the field and the insight that wants to emerge.
• Learn to speak from, as, and into the field, that is, to let the field speak you. Learn how to do this with your client and in group dialogue.
• Learn to facilitate dialogue as a tool for organizational transformation.
• Learn collective practices for listening to the system and for finding leverage points for change.
• Practice both individually and collectively accessing the field at expanded states of awareness to declare for and call forth the emergent future.
• Discern purposeful direction (individually and collectively)—What is wanted of me (us) now?

Jump to:

• • Foundations
  • The Energetics of Embodied Presence and Dialogue
  • Deep Process

Return to Unity Academy page.