The Alchemy of the Apology Overview
The Alchemy of Apology explores apology as a transformative spiritual discipline capable of personal healing, relational repair, and collective liberation. While many traditions teach prayer or meditation, few offer guidance in the sacred work of apology. In a society marked by denial of historical harm and unspoken family trauma, authentic apology becomes a pathway out of shame, rage, and disconnection. It is a spiritual medicine that frees us from the psychic burden of our actions and can liberate those we have harmed.
Using The Apology as a central text, participants will learn a four-step process for practicing meaningful apology: investigating the personal and systemic roots of harm; naming actions with clarity and specificity; understanding the emotional and spiritual impact on the harmed; and taking full responsibility through genuine repentance, repair, and transformation.
Because many people never receive the apologies they deserve, the course also explores the radical spiritual possibility of writing an apology on behalf of someone who cannot or will not offer one. Each participant will craft one sustained apology over the term, whether to another person or to themselves.
The workshop will include storytelling, contemplative practice, and honest self-reflection. True apology is neither fast nor easy; it requires courage, humility, and a willingness to evolve. By engaging this work as a spiritual practice, students will learn how apology dissolves shame, interrupts violence, restores connection, and expands our capacity for compassion and justice—allowing us to move through the world with deeper freedom and responsibility.
Investigating the personal and systemic roots of harm
Naming actions with clarity and specificity
Understanding the emotional and spiritual impact on the harmed
Taking full responsibility through genuine repentance, repair, and transformation
V (formerly Eve Ensler) is the Tony award-winning playwright of many plays, best-selling author, performer, and activist. Her play, The Vagina Monologues, is an Obie Award-winning, Olivier-nominated theatrical phenomenon that has been translated into 48 languages and performed in over 140 countries. She is the author of numerous bestsellers Reckoning, The Apology, In the Body of the World,and I Am an Emotional Creature. She starred on Broadway in The Good Body and Off-Broadway in the critically acclaimed In the Body of the World. She helped create That Kindness: Nurses in Their Own Words, a tribute to nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic, presented by the Brooklyn Academy of Music in collaboration with theaters across the US. She wrote the book and co-wrote lyrics to Dear Everything-A Musical Uprising for the Earth, recently presented at BAM following its national tour. Her play,THIS IS CRAZY! premiered in October 2025 at Symphony Space .Her film credits include The Vagina Monologues (HBO), What I Want My Words to Do to You (Executive Producer, Winner of the Sundance Film Festival Freedom of Expression Award, PBS), Mad Max: Fury Road (Consultant), and City of Joy documentary (Netflix). She is the founder of V-Day, the 28-year-old global activist movement that has raised over 150 million dollars to end violence against women, gender-expansive people, girls, and the planet—and founder of One Billion Rising, the largest global mass action to end gender-based violence in over 200 countries, as well as a co-founder of the City of Joy, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. V was named one of Newsweek’s “150 Women Who Changed the World” and The Guardian’s “100 Most Influential Women." She writes regularly for The Guardian. Next up is the 30th anniversary revival of The Vagina Monologues at Roundabout's Laura Pels Theatre in spring 2027 directed by Noma Dumezweni along with teaching The Alchemy of The Apology at Union Theological Seminary in New York.
The Undoing Overview
The Undoing is a transformative training method designed to release restrictive physical and vocal techniques, dissolve accumulated habits, and restore a more instinctive, organic relationship to body, breath, voice, and presence.
Through a deeply intentional series of restorative exercises, participants are guided to recognize where tension, psychological obstacles, and ingrained patterns are stored within the body and mind. By consciously letting go of what no longer serves, participants create space for greater freedom, fluidity, clarity, and embodied expression.
The practice invites a return to simplicity and alignment — reconnecting participants with intuition, creativity, emotional truth, and the elemental forces of nature. Through breath, stillness, movement, and sound, The Undoing becomes both a personal cleansing process and a pathway toward deeper presence in artistic work, daily life, and relationships.
What Participants Will Experience
The workshop introduces a sequence of simple yet powerful restorative practices that re-align the mind, body, and voice, including:
Gentle movement practices to center the body and calm the nervous system
Seated exercises inspired by the Alexander Technique and Feldenkrais Method to release ingrained tension in the throat, jaw, face, and body
Minimalist vocal and breathwork exercises that restore a natural, unforced connection between sound, emotion, and expression
Awareness practices that cultivate groundedness, clarity, ease, vitality, and embodied leadership
Participants often discover that less effort creates greater power — allowing authentic voice, intuitive confidence, and fearless creativity to emerge naturally.
Who This Is For
This experience is designed for those who:
Feel held back by physical, vocal, or emotional habits that no longer serve them
Want to release tension and reconnect with ease, clarity, and presence
Seek a deeper relationship with body, breath, and voice
Are artists, performers, creatives, facilitators, or seekers wishing to expand expression and awareness
Feel called to ritual, conscious practice, and connection with nature
Are ready to let go of limiting patterns and return to a more instinctive, alive state of being
“The Undoing is an invitation to return to the body’s original wisdom. When we release what is heavy or habitual, we make space for a more instinctive, effortless form of expression — one that reconnects us to our roots, our intuition, and our power.” — Sussan Deyhim
About Sussan Deyhim
Sussan Deyhim is an Iranian-American composer, vocalist, and performance artist described by The Los Angeles Times as “one of Iran’s most potent voices in exile.” Her work bridges Middle Eastern mysticism with contemporary sound and multimedia performance.
Her work has been presented at major institutions including Carnegie Hall, BAM, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Royal Albert Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, The Broad, and The Wallis. She has collaborated with renowned artists including Philip Glass, Peter Gabriel, U2, Ornette Coleman, and Shirin Neshat.
Deyhim’s voice and compositions have appeared in acclaimed film scores such as Argo, The Last Temptation of Christ, and The Kite Runner. Recent projects include Godfrey Reggio’s Once Within A Time, HBO’s A Revolution on Canvas, and her multimedia performance Whispers From the Underworld.
With a four-octave vocal range and a singular interdisciplinary approach, Sussan remains one of the most visionary and influential contemporary performance artists working today.
TIERRA VALIENTE | BRAVE EARTH
Brave Earth is located between San Ramon and La Fortuna, nestled in between Arenal Volcano and the Children’s Eternal Rainforest, the largest reserve of protected wildlife in Costa Rica.
As a living lab, we have experimented with different building modalities using AirCrete and materials sourced on the land including bamboo and adobe. We have implemented biophilic design, closed-loop systems and permaculture design principles. Ornamental, food, and medicinal gardens surround the center as well as hiking trials to a nearby river, and a natural swimming pond.
CULTURES OF TRANSITION
The impulse for Tierra Valiente stems from an awareness of our civilizational trajectory within the dominant culture with its source code of extraction, domination, commodification, colonization, control, entitlement, and separation from the living world.
We are both informed by this critical lens and inspired to create outside of the old values and incentive landscapes to build a culture based on reciprocity, regeneration and resiliency.
In this collective transition - whether you call it the Anthropocene, the Kali Yuga, late-stage capitalism or capitalist modernity - our intention is to become more attuned to this cultural context in order to decolonize the conditioning of the dominant system and be in deeper service to our collective potential.