The Listening Circle: A Place and Space to Engage with the Present Moment

In this critical time, when the weight of the world often leaves us feeling fragmented and overwhelmed, this is an invitation and an opportunity to make intentional space for radical presence and deep restorative nourishment.

This hour-long listening circle is a dedicated sanctuary designed for genuine, felt connection. We will collectively turn toward the present moment, allowing a pause from urgency so that reflection, pause, and true healing processes may surface.

The focus is on the poetics of felt ways: the essential, often non-linear, language of our interior lives. This is a gentle invitation to express your experience—your joy, grief, insight, or fatigue—through image, metaphor, and intuition, moving beyond intellectual analysis into the richness of what you actually feel.

Learning Objective Participants Can Expect From This Event

• By bearing witness to one another with compassion and without judgment, we cultivate a deep and nourishing solidarity, within and with our clients.
• This practice is how we ground ourselves, not to escape the critical nature of our times, but to strengthen our capacity to meet them collectively, rooted and whole.
• Participate in and make space to honour felt ways, for profound rest, radical listening, and shared humanity.

Who is This Workshop Appropriate For?

• Anyone hoping to engage in reflection and collective meaning-making: therapists, coaches and socially-engaged practitioners.

How May This Workshop Impact Your Practice?

• The relentless pace of social processes and ─ often ─ material ways of living directly infringe upon our deepest human capacity, our ability to be compassionate in our responses to the world. The circle is not just a space for personal healing, but a necessary response to the systemic pressures that wear down our capacity for gentleness and generative action. It offers a lived experience toward a listening that doesn't omit societal fears or the complexity of the present moment.

No preparation is required, only your presence.

ZOOM 

This event will be hosted on the Zoom meeting platform where we will use our cameras and microphones to interact with each other as a group.

SELF-SELECT FEE

The self-select fee is a radical inclusion policy to open learning for all colleagues. The guide price for this event is £20.00, however, we appreciate that income varies greatly in different locations and circumstances. Please contribute what you can to help us maintain inclusive professional training.

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At Onlinevents, we and the presenters we collaborate with are committed to working in a way that aligns with the ethical codes and frameworks of our respective professional organisations. We expect all colleagues attending our events to uphold the ethical principles of their professional membership.

If you are not a member of a professional organisation, we ask that you participate in a way that is both authentic and respectful, fostering a space of mutual learning and professional engagement.

By registering for this event, you agree to be present and interact in a manner that reflects these principles.

Dr Francesca Bernardi PhD, CATA/ACAT

Francesca Bernardi is an independent scholar, artist, and speaker. Her socially-engaged work focuses on individuals navigating dis/ability, cultural, and social exclusions. This work is non-hierarchical, decolonial, and multimodal, rooted in arts-informed methodologies, critical dis/ability studies, and social pedagogy.

She is the founding chair of the Antonio Gramsci Society UK, a forum for accessible civic engagement, and a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute. She serves as an editorial board member of Disability & Society, and is a member of CATA-ACAT. Francesca has worked extensively as a teacher and artist-in-residence in schools, alternative provision, further education, museums, and theatres. Her published work includes original research, translations, and collaborations with institutions like TATE, the RSA, and the Leverhulme Trust.

She currently holds roles as a supervisor and lecturer in Childhood Studies and as a Visiting Scholar in Arts Therapies.

Website | www.frabeart.carrd.co