Please note that the correct date for The Art of Surviving training in
Charlottesville from the previous message is:

Friday, October 26

Payment can be made to:

1354 Gristmill Drive
Charlottesville, VA 22902
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You are invited to attend "The Art of Surviving and the Spiritual
Dimensions of Violence and Peace: A Workshop for Professionals Working
on the Front Lines of Violence" offered by Rachel Mann, M.A., Ph.D.,
Founder, MettaKnowledge for Peace, LLC, Joyce Allen, M.A. Early Child
Development Psychology, Founder of Time to Speak, and Roberta
Culbertson, Ph.D.Founder and Director of the Institute on Violence and
Community. Friday, October 26, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Virginia
Foundation for the Humanities, 125 Ednam Road, Charlottesville, VA.
$50 registration fee includes lunch. Contact Rachel E. Mann for more
information: 434-227-0538 or rachemann@.... More information on
program and facilitators below.

Violence and trauma are ubiquitous in our world today. Many people
are seeking answers to pressing questions. How can we stop the cycle
of violence? Why is there so much violence? How can we find peace?
These are fundamentally spiritual questions, no matter what our
religious, moral, or spiritual beliefs and values. The answers, if we
find any, touch upon basic questions about why there is suffering and
our faith in whether healing and change in ourselves, the people we
work with and the world at large are possible. Indeed, an experience
of violence towards ourselves or others can lead us to a crisis of
meaning and faith.

Many of us work with client populations dealing with these challenges.
Many of us have faced our own. Working with survivors of trauma can
also deplete us or trigger our own crisis. While there is greater
acceptance of the need to address the psychological and physical
causes and effects of violence, as professionals, we tend to skirt the
issue of meaning and spirituality in the interest of not imposing our
own belief systems on others. Or we lack a constructive vocabulary to
do so. This workshop helps us explore how we can address our own and
each individual's spirituality and experiences of violence and peace
in respectful ways. It helps us explore the spiritual dimensions of
violence and if and how real peace can be achieved.

The Art of Surviving is a collaborative project of the VSDVAA and the
University of Virginia Women's Center funded by the Virginia
Foundation for the Humanities (VFH) since 2006 as a way to explore the
spiritual dimensions of violence revealed in the artwork and writings
of survivors of sexual violence. We will use samples of this work as
a way to launch into exploring the spiritual questions evoked by
experiences of violence and how self-expression may or may not address
them.

We will use and teach methods and theories from psychology and
various experiential, action-oriented tools drawn from healing
traditions worldwide. The goal will be for participants to emerge
with the following:

� Personal renewal and a greater sense of hope about the future of the
world.
� A deeper understanding of the intersection between physical,
emotional, and spiritual effects of violence.
� Tools to support maintaining inner peace in the "war zone" of
working with sexual and domestic violence.
� Tools and understandings about how to evoke spiritual issues and
questions while respecting differences in value and faith systems.
� Information about The Art of Surviving project and how to use it in
your professional setting to foster similar questions about "the art
of surviving" and spiritual life.

Schedule

Location: Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, 125 Ednam Road,
Charlottesville, VA 22901

Cost: $50/person, to include lunch.

Please come wearing comfortable, loose-fitting clothes.

To Register
Email Rachel Mann at rachemann@.... Payment should be sent to
the address below. A full refund will be given if cancellations are
made 4 days in advance. After that, a $25 processing fee will be charged.

About the Co-Facilitators

Rachel Mann, M.A., Ph.D. founder of MettaKnowledge for Peace, LLC
Rachel taught for 20 years in higher education in the emerging field
of violence and peace studies. Her degrees were uniquely
interdisciplinary and integrative with an M.A. in Soviet Studies and a
Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures�the latter with an emphasis
in folklore and anthropology. She was interested from the beginning
in the connection between the individual, society, expression, and
spiritual life. During eleven years as a faculty member at the
University of Virginia,, she developed innovative methods for
exploring the inner and outer dimensions of violence and peace
combining Western psychology, Buddhism, and the teachings of
indigenous Wisdom Keepers from around the world. She has been a
student and practitioner of Buddhism since childhood and is trained in
a variety of alternative and complementary and alternative healing
modalities. She has developed, facilitated, and sponsored programs
enabling people to explore the many dimensions of peace, violence, and
transformation in workshops, seminars, and lecture series. These
include "The Art of Surviving", funded by the Virginia Foundation for
the Humanities and administered in collaboration with the Virginia
Sexual and Domestic Action Alliance, and "Shamanic Perspectives on
Violence and Peace". She is currently involved in a partnership with
the Institute on Violence and Community in Charlottesville, Virginia
and Trauma Healing and Reconciliation Services in Burundi, Africa on a
joint research and experiential project on community healing after
violence. Her writings on technology, education, violence, and peace
can be found in a variety of journals and linked to her web site. She
is an animal lover who lives in Charlottesville, Virginia with her
20-year-old cat, Griselda, and her Great Pyrenees puppy, Tea and
Sympathy, "Sym" for short. She honors the lessons and love given to
her by many teachers and mentors, from human to non-human.

Joyce Allen, M.A.

Joyce Allan holds a Master's degree in Developmental Psychology and
Early Childhood Education. She is also a Registered Nurse and a
Psychiatric Clinical Nurse Specialist who has 37 years of experience
working with children, adolescents, and adults. Ms. Allan is currently
serving as the Director of Nursing at the Commonwealth Center for
Children and Adolescents in Staunton, Virginia.

After being awarded an endowed fellowship in 1998 from the Institute
on Violence and Culture at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities
and Public Policy, she took a two year sabbatical from her private
practice in order to research and write Because I Love You: The Silent
Shadow of Child Sexual Abuse.

Since 1989 she has offered clinical and educational services through
her Child Development Resource Center in Charlottesville, VA. Joyce
lives near the Blue Ridge Mountains in central Virginia with her
husband, Freeman. They have four children - Joe, Jenny, Dan and Gabe.



Roberta Culbertson, Ph.D.
Roberta Culbertson is Director of Research and Education at the
Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, where she oversees a program
of fellowships, conferences, publications, and professional education.
She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of
Virginia and her B.A. from Sweet Briar College. Roberta worked in
public service on refugee mental health, mental health promotion, and
criminal justice for twelve years before joining VFH in 1989. As
Director of Research and Education, Roberta conceived and created the
Institute on Violence and Survival and raised the funds for its
development. She writes and speaks on the physiological, cultural,
and spiritual effects of violence and has developed programs designed
to educate professionals in health and allied fields about the
long-term effects of violence and the spiritual dimension of healing
from violence. Roberta is a Buddhist practitioner and is trained in
shamanic ways of seeing. She is the co-author, with Ambassador W.
Nathaniel Howell, of Siege, Crisis Leadership: The Survival of U. S.
Embassy Kuwait (VFH Press, 2001), author of "Picnicking in the Third
World: An American Childhood" (forthcoming), and has written numerous
publications for government. Roberta has written and received grants
from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller
Foundation, the Dart Foundation, and the Edna Wardlaw Trust for her
work on violence.