- This is an in-person conversation event with audience Q&A. To register for the livestream, CLICK HERE.
- Books are available to add to your order at check-out.
We are at a threshold. As we face uncertain futures, the familiar is falling away. We must discover new ways of being and connecting so we can navigate troubled times together.
Join CIIS Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness professor Sean Kelly for a fortifying and deep conversation with psychotherapist and author Francis Weller exploring how to move together through the anxieties, difficulties, and sacred transitions of 21st-century life. Sharing insights from his latest book, In the Absence of the Ordinary, Francis frames our current era as a rough initiation—an upending experience of profound trauma and transformation that demands us to reorient our ways of thinking, being, and relating.
Francis offers clarity and wisdom on how to face the sobering stakes of our time while offering the nourishment and support we need to embody the new roles this initiation requires. He discusses our collective traumas and how we’re called to the depths, to understand the power of descent, and to cultivate the necessary skills of initiation. He examines how we care for our souls by differentiating between the connected soul and the individualistic self to come back into alignment with the wider world of belonging. We can learn to approach our experiences with reverence, work with our grief, and develop restraint, repetition, and self-compassion. Francis also gives shape to the emptiness we carry and the ways modernity has severed us from our birthright of interconnectedness with the natural world and shares rituals of gratitude and practices of kinship to restore our bond with the living Earth.
Francis invites us to meet these unpredictable times with presence and faith, to restore our souls’ place in the soul of the world, and to hold steady amid, and for it all.
Francis Weller, MFT, is a psychotherapist, writer, and soul activist. He is a master of synthesizing diverse streams of thought from psychology, anthropology, mythology, alchemy, Indigenous cultures, and poetic traditions. Author of The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief and The Threshold Between Loss and Revelation (with Rashani Réa), he has introduced the healing work of ritual to thousands of people. He founded and directs WisdomBridge, an organization that offers educational programs that seek to integrate the wisdom from Indigenous cultures with the insights and knowledge gathered from Western poetic, psychological, and spiritual traditions.
For more than forty years Francis has worked as a psychotherapist and developed a style he calls soul-centered psychotherapy. As a gifted therapist and teacher, he has been described as a jazz artist, improvising, and moving fluidly in and out of deep emotional territories with groups and individuals, bringing imagination and attention to places often held with judgment and shame. His latest offerings are a ten-session audio series on Living a Soulful Life and Why It Matters, a four-session series on An Apprenticeship with Sorrow: Community, Ritual, and the Sacred Work of Grief, and a five-session series on The Alchemy of Initiation: Soul Work and the Art of Ripening.
Francis received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay and two master’s degrees from John F. Kennedy University in Clinical Psychology and Transpersonal Psychology. His writings have appeared in anthologies and journals exploring the confluence between psyche, nature, and culture. His work was featured in The Sun magazine (October 2015), the Utne Reader (Fall 2016), and the Kosmos Journal. Francis is currently on staff at Commonweal Cancer Help Program, co-leading their weeklong retreats with Michael Lerner. He is completing his fourth book, Facing the World with Soul and Why It Matters.
For more information on upcoming workshops, to sign up for the newsletter, or to purchase books and audio series, please go to www.francisweller.net.
Sean Kelly is Professor of Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). He is the author of Becoming Gaia: On the Threshold of Planetary Initiation and of Coming Home: The Birth and Transformation of the Planetary Era. He is also co-editor (with Richard Tarnas) of Psyche Unbound: Essays in Honor of Stanislav Grof and (with Sam Mickey and Adam Robbert) of The Variety of Integral Ecologies: Nature, Culture, and Knowledge in the Planetary Era. Along with his more academic pursuits, Sean is a longtime practitioner of Chinese internal arts (taiji, bagua, and xingyi) and is a trained facilitator in The Work that Reconnects developed by Joanna Macy.
We are grateful to our Bookstore Partner
Marcus Books is the nation’s oldest Black-owned independent bookstore celebrating its 60th year. Marcus Books’ mission is to provide opportunities for Black folks and their allies to celebrate and learn about Black people everywhere. Learn more about Marcus Books.
Accessibility Information If you need to request accessibility accommodations, please email publicprograms@ciis.edu at least one week prior to the event. For more information, explore our Accessibility web page.
Recording Policy Ticket holders will have access to an ad-free replay of the event for one month after the live event, after which unlimited viewing with ads will be available. Portions of the audio will also be released on our podcast. Only registered ticket holders who choose to watch live can participate in the chat and Q&A.
Refund Policy All tickets and add-ons purchased for this event are nonrefundable.
