We struggled for a while to come up with a name for the Seven Levels event we hosted in July. It was taking place at beautiful Ghost Ranch Retreat Center outside of Santa Fe, and its purpose was to bring together fellow fans of the Seven Levels and create a space for collective sharing, learning, exploration and play.
The word “conference” wasn’t quite right. We wouldn’t have keynotes or hierarchies. But “workshop” and “retreat” didn’t work either. It was more structured and content-driven than that. It would be a little bit of everything, we thought.
The title we landed on was “Convening the Collective” – a “thinking together gathering” aimed at deepening our individual relationships with the Seven Levels, learning from each other’s unique applications of the framework, and exploring the cutting-edge neuroscience research BEabove is doing right now.
As with most things BEabove does, this was going to be unlike any event we had ever attended. We wanted it to be structured enough to offer takeaways, but loose enough to leave room for inspiration from the collective.
Who would we attract? What would the group energy be like? Would our people “get it”?
Well, July arrived and we couldn’t have been more thrilled with the experience the group co-created in our four days at Ghost Ranch. Each of us came ready to do important work, and synchronicity blossomed.
One of the most highly anticipated portions of the event was our introduction to two concepts that are on the cutting edge of neuroscience and have the potential to greatly impact the way we approach coaching engagements. They are the prediction cycle, and time-based thinking (as in: past, present and future). Believe it or not, these concepts are causing us to rethink and rewrite some of our program curricula (stay tuned!) so you know they must be good!
In place of keynote speakers, we opened the floor members of the group to teach us about their sacred work as it relates to the Seven Levels. A highlight of these “play sessions” as we called them, was a guided walk through an on-site labyrinth, led by our student Kristy who had – just the week before – completed a labyrinth training. She beautifully mapped the various stages of the labyrinth walk onto each of the Seven Levels and held space for us as we took the steps ourselves.
We also gave the group a sneak peek at the new Seven Levels game – that’s right, we made a game! – and we got some very helpful feedback to make the finished product not only insightful, but really fun to play! We can’t wait to get the final version to you.
What excited us most, however, was the way the room buzzed with conversation long after each day’s events were finished. A favorite event for many of us was our “pub night” where we transformed our meeting space into an Irish-style pub complete with drinks, snacks and even a few off-color jokes. (A special thank-you to Jean for trekking 20 minutes to find us an Uno deck!)
All in all, it was a chance for some of the best brains and hearts in the community to be together in conscious community and dive deep into how we as a collective can raise the level of consciousness in the world. Oh, and we played a lot, too!
If you’ve been looking for this kind of group experience and haven’t been a student of ours before, consider our signature program, Neuroscience, Consciousness and Transformational Coaching. We just released our 2020 dates and locations >>