Direct Intervention & Immersive Initiative
Treats
These TREATS take us on emotional, psychological, and spiritual journeys that enable us to internalize through all our senses what we experience during our deeply fulfilling, yet still mainly digital lives together. Immersing ourselves in each other furthers our trust, intimacy, and dignity, lifting us to a new appreciation of who we are – our shadow and our light – and unifying us as an interdependent community. Like Nature we thrive in our diversity.
Our first TREAT in San Francisco broke down the walls between us.
Despite a little over a year together in the most unconditionally loving community, our neural wiring from decades of feeling alone kept us separate from each other. One act of courage that brought us together was when the Leaper women connected with and began to release generations of spiritual and cultural patriarchal oppression. The primal agony spewed through their screams, viscerally connected all of us to our respective existential human condition pain. We departed with a whole new level of feeling and caring for each other.
Our second TREAT in Washington, D.C. revealed to us our common fears, insecurities and shame – we are terrified of rejection, we need to be in the know, and we don’t like to take risks because we are afraid of failure.
Outrageous improv exercises were assigned, where we acted our various life situations spontaneously. An example of one involved playfully, and with great exaggeration, acting out each other’s personas in excruciating detail. This TREAT provoked terrifying and triumphant feelings in us. We discovered that failure is an essential part of learning and can be fun when approached with intention for growth. We learned that we are all in this together, and we can trust ourselves and each other no matter how frightened we get.
By our third TREAT, held in Los Angeles, we were primed to begin stepping into our individual superpowers.
Our inner work focused on helping us connect with, own and refine our innate gifts. The gathering culminated in each of us sharing our own unscripted, raw, and visionary “TED-style talks” – revealing that we are more powerful, , creative, and talented than we could have than imagined.
Our fourth and most recent TREAT in Seattle began with a BALAGAN! Balagan is a yiddish word that combines the meaning of wildness, chaos, and circus into one word, and we infuse the meaning of the word with playfulness and outrageousness too.
The balagan commenced as we embarked on an exercise to manifest a TREAT space – a 7 bedroom, 5 bathroom home available for one whole week during peak vacation season in Seattle, for under $1,500 and under one hour drive from the airport. We learned that this exercise wasn’t really about manifesting the dream house. The actual manifestation fueled our ingenuity and broke down the walls between us and “strangers.” We built beautiful relationships with people from places of worship, retreat centers, farms, cafes, camps, theaters, foundations, non-profits, entrepreneurs, and more. For instance, when reaching out to the local social business network, a women jumped into action sharing our need with everyone she knew and hosted a few community members in her home that were arriving in Seattle prior to the start of our TREAT. These extraordinary connections formed a deeply caring and generous community in Seattle that were waiting to embrace us upon our arrival!
The intention for this fourth TREAT was to experience Our Collective Light in Action.
A taste of our collective light was already pulsing through our veins because of the manifestation sprint leading up to the very first day of the TREAT. Building upon this momentum, over the three days strategically designed exercises helped us anchored the emotional, relational, spiritual, and intellectual shifts that have taken place in our individual lives and as a community and to catalyze us into our next collective learning edge.
- We reviewed and anchored the progress each of us has made since we began our work with Leap Forward. The areas affected include our relationship to self, loved ones, family, friends, work, colleagues, self expression, time, money, spirit, and the planet.
- We defined and claimed our individual “guru” capabilities and gifts. For example, “I am the guru of vulnerability and courage.” “I am the guru of play and adventure.” “I am the guru of the unknown.”
- We experienced profound connection to “strangers” as we walked through downtown Seattle with our deepest core pain points written on cardboard signs. For example, our signs read; “I’m afraid of my emotions, can you help me feel?”, ”I am weak and insecure, can you prove me wrong?”, “I am afraid of making mistakes, can you challenge me?” We learned that people who are in touch with their own pain and trauma and/or in the lives of others stopped to talk with us, asked questions, shared stories, and appreciated sharing a moment of being simply human.
- We served two community based nonprofits that support vulnerable populations. We built relationships and our hearts expanded in learning about people’s struggles, concerns, and ambitions.
- We left Seattle with new friends, new possibilities for partnership, and inspired to enter a new chapter for ourselves…sharing our story with the world – The New Human Story!