Courses are ideal for individuals or groups seeking sustained support in cultivating meaning, deepening leadership capacity, building intentional community, and creating lasting change. No prior experience required—just a willingness to engage with curiosity, vulnerability, and care.
Course Experience
Courses range from 4-10 weeks or 3-4 day retreats. Through a combination of direct instruction, experiential exercises, community dialogue and reflective practices you will reconnect with your inner wisdom and build capacity for wise, values-driven leadership. Between sessions, readings, practices, and journaling prompts deepen your learning and integration.
One of the strengths of courses is the chance to learn alongside a cohort of committed individuals, building relationships that often extend beyond the course itself. To support relational learning, we prioritize community building. Learning over time also facilitates application of learning which increases its integration to your life.
Course Descriptions
Courses can be customized to meet organizational needs.
Living on Purpose
Purpose is not a singular thing; it's a way of living with what matters at the center. Investigate and own your unique journey for purpose. Explore the connection between an inner journey for compassionate self-understanding and an outer focus on engaging with the world. In this highly interactive class, we will create a supportive and inclusive community from which you can investigate the contemplative, psychological, social, and communal factors that deepen meaning-making, support authenticity, and encourage living more purposefully. Drawing from disciplines as diverse as art, poetry, design, contemplative practice, sociology, and positive psychology, we will cultivate skills that promote wellbeing and flourishing.
Designing for Purposeful Connection
This course invites students to apply core design mindsets of curiosity, experimentation, reflection, prototyping, iteration, storytelling, and radical collaboration to the design of a meaningful life. The course treats lived experience, conversation, and reflection as primary design materials. Through a sequence of intentionally structured walking conversations, students prototype ways of listening, relating, telling and re-telling their stories, making meaning, and navigating uncertainty. These walks are designed as low-stakes prototypes that allow students to notice assumptions, test new approaches, and reframe how they understand themselves and others.
Leading a Meaningful Life
Explores the foundational skills for a meaningful life. Features lectures and experiential practice workshops from instructors within and beyond the university. Draws on research and practices from fields related to psychology, literature, critical studies in race, gender, and sexuality, the visual and performing arts, as well as wisdom traditions from around the world. Focuses on developing human capacities necessary for a meaningful life, including presence, courage, compassion, resilience, imagination, and gratitude. Examples of workshops and in-class activities include theater improv, movement, meditation, and qigong.
Leading for Meaningful Communities
How can we live together and honor both difference and belonging? How do we create community amidst divisiveness and the existential threats of climate change, oppression of marginalized peoples, and our disconnection from ourselves and each other? We are inherently relational and have the potential to heal, flourish, and lead. Leadership and changemaking must be rooted in a commitment to deep inner work that cultivates wellbeing, insight, and wisdom. Inner work radiates outward to shape the systems that create and sustain our societies. In this class, grounded in your experiences, you will cultivate skills and tools to enhance your intrapersonal, interpersonal and extrapersonal capacities to enact change for yourself and others. Working in teams, you will learn about and practice building community through the application of interdisciplinary frameworks that provide multiple perspectives on the transformation of the self, our relations with each other, our communities, and societal systems.