Wayfinding for Modern Life
Find Your Own Way
A 6-month program that works directly with your attention, perception, and lived experience, honing your capacity to meet uncertainty, orient in complexity, and recalibrate to your thread of continuity.
TWO COHORTS:
Cohort A starts May 7th PDT (Europe & North America)
Cohort B starts May 8th PDT / May 9th AEST (North America & Australia)
As the world gets louder and our sense of direction is getting lost in the noise.
The art of wayfinding is one of humanity’s oldest capacities. For millennia, we’ve moved through unknowns by engaging our felt sense, orienting beyond the confines of our identity and responding practically to what is arising, when no clear path was given.
This 6-month program brings those ancient principles and tacit forms of know-how into modern life as practices you can embody and carry into moments of transition, choice, and change. It invites you to shift from a stance that views life as happening to you, into an active participant, co-creating with what is arising as you move through your days.
You become able to work at the edges of what you know, to transmute tension, draw upon wider sources of insight and sync up with currents of meaning that enrich your sense of self and way of engaging in the world.
For people who
Are moving through transitions or uncertainty, and want a way of engaging that feels alive and sustainable.
Feel fragmented or disconnected, and are longing for a deeper sense of coherence.
Are tired of formulas and hacks that don’t integrate into their actual lives.
Feel that their path/way of living and being in the world does not fit into dominant norms and are seeking a sense of direction that feels in integrity with who they are and are becoming.
Want tools for orienting and engaging in complexity that are simple, embodied, and embedded in their own experience.
Are in a liminal space between one role, or phase of their life and another, and are seeking to actively shape the next stretch of their path
Format
This 6 month program unfolds as an arc. Each lab is two hours long, held once a month. Together, we enter the space with time for reflection and experiential inquiry. I bring in the concepts and frameworks from my PhD, and insights I’ve learned from 13 years working with individuals and groups, around the world, as a coach, consultant, and facilitator.
We work with metaphors, frameworks and practices that touch what’s unfolding in your life right now. You’ll be invited to bring a specific challenge or area where you’re seeking more coherence, such as:
A practice you want to cultivate.
A project you wish to create.
Becoming more capable and confident in working with your own creative practice.
Each session will move through the phases of wayfinding: seeing, shaping, and enacting, helping you test relevant practices in your own context, and hone your attention so you can pick up on themes and patterns that help you engage in whatever you’re facing more effectively.
Elsa Henderson, PhD
Elsa moves between the roles of facilitator, coach, and educator. Drawing on her background in process-oriented psychology, embodied cognition, and systems thinking, she helps people meet uncertainty and find their way in all kinds of inner and outer terrain.
What we cover
1. Orienting as Seeing Beyond Vision
Recognize where you are, surface intentions of where you’d like to focus.
Gain practices for sensing your next steps even in moments when you feel stuck or doubtful.
Understand how you can work with uncertainty rather than feel inhibited by it.
Noticing the layers of information in current moment and beginning to sense how to draw upon them.
We will focus on orientation as a capacity & seeing in the fog as a practice.
2. Place, Gaps, & Engaging Liminal Space
Learn to engage the places around you as sources you can be in conversation with that can offer support and information.
Explore gaps, missing information and experiences of something being “off” as vital aspects of seeing and sensing your way.
We will focus on negative capability as a capacity & engaging with what hasn’t quite taken form as a practice
3. Resistance & Spark
Understanding ways of meeting and working with tension and uncertainty, effectively.
Learn to perceive from the edges of what you know rationally.
Develop your ability to read beneath the surface of a situation, attending to what is felt and implied as much as what is visible and stated.
We will focus on cultivating inner congruence as a capacity and finding your ground to meet difficulty and resistance as they arise.
4. Sensemaking, Time, & Rhythm
Understand how your energy moves and what sustains your capacity to engage over time.
Learn to distinguish what is relevant and generative from what distracts or diminishes your clarity and presence.
Cultivate the ability to get beneath mood and emotion to surface information for aligned decision making.
We will focus on cultivating discernment as a capacity & emotional fluidity as a practice for aligned decision making.
5. Enaction–Knowing as You Go
Iterating your practice and adapting according to what arises.
Noticing the particulars of a situation and what’s being invited of you.
Tightening the feedback loops between reflection and response.
We will focus on cultivating reflexivity as a capacity & calibration as a practice.
6. Arcs & Valleys
Recognizing your next steps while tracking the larger context.
Listening to the moment to sense how to respond.
Honing your wayfinding practice.
We will focus on cultivating metacognition as a capacity & the conversational nature of wayfinding as a praxis.
Strengthen your capacity to engage complexity without losing yourself, recover meaning in real time, and move forward with a steadiness rooted in lived authority.
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What you’ll experience
Learn about the phases of wayfinding, how to orient to the pace and complexity of current times.
Practices for finding your most aligned stance for meeting the uncertain
Mapping the indicators that help you discern and decipher your next steps
Time for reflection – to connect the dots and pause long enough to make sense of the themes and patterns arising in your context
Through this work, you will
Gain confidence in your capacity to meet the uncertain. Instead of feeling lost, you’ll develop resilience in the face of the inherent uncertainty of modern life, helping you feel less anxiety, distress, and more agency as things unfold.
Learn to engage complexity without losing yourself. Instead of outsourcing your authority, you'll cultivate your discernment and ability to find your way through all manner of situations and challenges.
Rethread meaning into your daily life: Instead of feeling pulled apart by competing demands, you’ll learn to sense the subtle continuity in your life, the indivisible coherence that’s always present beneath the surface.
Reduce overwhelm: Instead of ending the day drained, you’ll notice a natural vitality emerging from the way you engage. You’ll feel more alive connected to yourself, present to your relationships, and the unfolding world around you.
See things more fully. Notice more of what is present. Recognise and learn from your own biases and habitual ways of engaging, explore practices for widening your perspective when your perception narrows.
Structure
Each month: 2-hour lab - group calls + one 1-hour check in to explore questions and cases arising in your wayfinding practice.
Additional: Bi-weekly practices, audio recordings, PDF’s or readings to support your wayfinding practice + WhatsApp group to share reflections and remain in conversation with each other between sessions.
Cohort Call Times
COHORT A - Europe / North America
Starts May 7th PDT
Main Session (2 hrs): 1st Thursday at 8:30 AM PDT / 11:30 AM EDT / 4:30 PM BST (London) / 5:30 PM CEST (Paris/Berlin/Rome)
Check-in Call (1 hr): 3rd Thursday at 8:30 AM PDT / 11:30 AM EDT / 4:30 PM BST (London) / 5:30 PM CEST (Paris/Berlin/Rome)
COHORT B - North America / Australia
Starts May 8th PDT / May 9th AEST
Main Session (2 hrs): 1st Friday at 3:00 PM PDT / 6:00 PM EDT / 1st Saturday 8:00 AM AEST (Sydney/Melbourne)
Check-in Call (1 hr): 3rd Friday at 4:30 PM PDT / 7:30 PM EDT / 3rd Saturday 9:30 AM AEST (Sydney/Melbourne)
Investment
$1200 for 6 months
$500 deposit required with application
Scholarships are available
Additional Customized Support
4 - 1:1 Sessions - $750.00 USD
Receive additional support in working with your questions, integration and weaving the practices of wayfinding into your day-to-day experience and immediate context. These sessions focus on deepening your practice and getting customized support as you engage in wayfinding in your life and the specific areas you’ve chosen to focus on in the series. I will work with you to meet and navigate whatever is coming up in your reality.
