Flourish Fridays
Dynamic live sessions.
Practitioners at the cutting edge.
Radically different ways to explore the same question:
What does it actually take to thrive?
We're often told to optimize our well-being, boost our productivity, and hack our way to happiness. "Flourishing" is often portrayed as a thing for people who have it all figured out.
We see it differently.
We believe that flourishing is asking powerful questions about meaning, presence, connection, and what to do when the usual answers stop working.
This series of encounters will provoke your thinking and leave you with valuable practices you can use starting that same day.
Sessions are 45 min long, live, interactive and online.
All sessions are free and open to everyone. If you'd like to support this work and help us keep it accessible, donations are welcome.
1 - The Power of Movement, Creating and Flourishing
October 2, 12:00 p.m.
Travis Knights describes his own lineage in one move: "Before there was a stage, there was a circle." The Montreal-born tap dancer, choreographer and filmmaker was trained from age ten by Ethel Bruneau, and has spent more than two decades carrying that inheritance across four continents. He treats rhythm as one of humanity's oldest tools for connection, and culture as a form of medicine. Expect a session on what movement remembers, what creating actually asks of you, and why each generation has to decide for itself whether to pick the thread back up.
2 - If You Can Dream It You Can Do It
October 16, 12:00 p.m.
"If you can dream it, you can do it" is an inspiring sentence that hides the hard part. Brian Collins spent his career on the hard part: as a Walt Disney Imagineer, building the stories behind some of the world's most beloved attractions. He now teaches Creative Cross-Pollination, a powerful and entirely learnable habit: put two unrelated things side by side until something new falls out. Come for a working account of where ideas actually come from, and a process you can apply on a problem you're already stuck on.
3 - Where Healing Meets Humanity
October 30, 12:00 p.m.
Modern healthcare is extraordinarily good at treating bodies and strangely bad at attending to people. Dr. Iza Correll founded OVI Children's Hospital in Kenya, a long-term facility for abandoned children with terminal and debilitating conditions, and has spent more than a decade learning what care requires once the clinical part is handled: dignity, presence, and systems designed around the human nervous system rather than against it. Expect a hard look at what the word "care" is supposed to mean, from someone who ventured into building it from nothing.
4 - Illuminating the Heart: The Courage to Connect, Feel and Flourish
November 13, 12:00 p.m.
Most of us get through the hard stretches of a life without wanting to burden the people we love with them. Linda Satchell is a licensed psychotherapist and expressive arts specialist who has spent her career on what that costs, working with trauma, attachment, adoption and loss, and teaching the approach to clinicians at university level. In addition to traditional therapy, she works through art-making and guided imagery meditation, on the view that being properly heard and offered another angle can reveal more choices than we thought we had.
5 - The Luxury of Denial: Loving Without Losing Yourself
November 27, 12:00 p.m.
For most of her working life Linda Mestel was the person who could spot denial in somebody else: a nurse through surgical trauma and psychiatry, then a manager and clinical supervisor in community mental health at a Montreal social service agency. Then, one day, her own youngest child asked her to lunch and told her he had been using cocaine. Her memoir The Luxury of Denial is an account of the years that followed. Expect a candid session on loving someone through a substance use disorder without disappearing into it, and on the wider habit underneath it, of starving the parts of ourselves we would rather not look at.
