The Gathering for Change Agents
Year 14
“Tending the Possible: Sacred Practice for Liminal Times”

Welcome!

On this page you’ll find the full collection of audio and resource archives from Year 14 of our monthly Gathering calls. Speaker bios, call summaries, audios and recommended resources for each month’s call will continue to be added to this page soon after the call.

Our theme for this fourteenth year of Gathering together is “Tending the Possible: Sacred Practice for Liminal Times.”  Along with our Year 14 offerings, please take some time to explore the past 13 years of program archives. This is a treasure trove of information, insights, strategies and practices to support you as an agent of purposeful change!

Year 1 Program Archive – “Mastering the Inner Game”
Year 2 Program Archive – “Align Your Outer Game with the Inner”
Year 3 and 4 Program Archive –  “Integrating the Inner and Outer Collectives: The Dance of ME and WE”
Year 5 Program Archive – “Co-Creating the Global Collective”
Year 6 Program Archive – “Radical Relationship; Embracing the Gifts of Polarity”
Year 7 Program Archive – “Creating Agile And Sustainable Change That Matters”
Year 8 Program Archive – “Love in Action: Connecting for Impact”
Year 9 Program Archive – “Agents of Love; Weaving the Tangled Threads of Irreconcilable Differences”
Year 10 Program Archive – “Dancing in the Space Between; Creating Resilience and Possibility in the Now”
Year 11 Program archive – “Paradigms and Possibilities: Embracing Humanity’s Divine Potential”
Year 12 Program archive – “The Art of Agility: Navigating the Natural Rhythms of Change”
Year 13 Program archive – “The Art of Agility: Navigating the Natural Rhythms of Change” – Part 2

Study Materials:

Browse the Year 14 archives:

6/3/26: “Welcome to the Playground”
5/6/26: “The Well of Aṣẹ – Return to Source”
4/1/26: “Returning to Source: Land, Renewal, and Coming Home”
3/4/26: “Circle as a Sacred Practice”
2/4/26: “Tending the Possible: Sacred Practice for Liminal Times”

Join us for our next Gathering on July 1!

6/3/26: “Welcome to the Playground”

Call audio

Play is the only way the highest intelligence of humankind can unfold.”
—Joseph Chilton Pearce

People shook their hands. Then their booties. Then their faces. On a Zoom call. In the middle of the workday.

And then something cracked open.

We started with Kelsey Blackwell’s exformation—shaking off what your body doesn’t need to carry. Sounds simple. Feels ridiculous. Works immediately.

Then we paired up for silly face mirroring, courtesy of Carissa Karban. One person made the most absurd face they could. The other mirrored it back. Then switched. Here’s the thing about making silly faces at a stranger: you can’t think your way through it. Your brain, which has been running the whole show, quietly steps aside. Something else takes over.

From there, Leif Hansen’s group sound-and-gesture mirroring—one person offers a sound and a gesture, everyone reflects it back. By this point people had stopped wondering if they were doing it right. They were just… playing.

And then, in the spirit of pure play, Andy invented something on the spot. Zoom Peekaboo. (Yes, that’s a thing now. We made it a thing.)

“I’ve been serious for a long time. Thanks for this opportunity.”
“Something loosened.”
“I feel such deep love in this space right now.”
“Joy. And hope.”
“So magical.”

Those are direct quotes. Fifteen people. Ninety minutes. No prior relationship required.

Our exploratory theme for 2026 is “Tending the Possible: Sacred Practice for Liminal Times”. This month’s Gathering call was a wonderful example of what we mean when we talk about “tending the possible”. In times as uncertain and heavy as these, play isn’t a detour from the serious work—it’s a sacred practice. A way of staying open, staying connected, staying human. The joy you feel when someone mirrors your ridiculous face back at you? That’s not trivial. That’s the whole thing.

It raises a question we’re sitting with: Are we all just waiting for permission to play?

Here’s something to try this week. Don’t ask for permission. Go first. Make the face. Make the sound. Offer the gesture. See who plays with you. And if no one does immediately — don’t give up. It might take a minute to shake off the having-to-be-professional-and-serious-all-the-time vibes. Someone will come.

Resources

We borrowed practices from these brilliant practitioners of play:

5/6/26: “The Well of Aṣẹ – Return to Source”

Call audio

“The water bring we, the water wanna take we back.” — Gullah Geechee proverb

This month, we gathered around the well of Aṣẹ with Tiffany Curtis Weeks — community architect, contemplative teacher, daughter of Liberia. What unfolded was less a presentation and more like a pouring: of story, of breath, of the sacred energy the Yoruba call Aṣẹ — the divine life force that animates all things.

Tiffany joined our circle from a hospital in Charlotte, North Carolina, where she was serving as a community birth worker for a beloved friend in long labor. She shared this with us at the very beginning, and it became its own teaching: the very waters we would speak of all hour — birthing waters, ancestral waters, the well within — were quite literally moving through the room where she sat. (We are grateful to share that mother and baby are both healthy; the baby was born safely on Friday evening, after many hours of labor.)

When Todd lit our virtual fire to open the call, he invoked Oshun — the Yoruba orisha of fresh water, of childbirth, of mirrors and music. Tiffany named it as more than coincidence: Oshun, the very figure she rarely calls on, had arrived precisely when she was about to walk into the waters of another birth.

Tiffany’s own waters carried her into the circle. She told us about her great-great-grandparents, who in 1865 sailed aboard the Brig Cora from Barbados to Liberia, joining a movement of freed people returning to the African continent. Her family helped build a town there called Crozierville. She also shared the work of photographer Kennedy Carter and the folklore of the Gullah Geechee people of the southeastern United States — whose family name Braswell appears in her grandmother’s lineage — and gifted us their proverb: the water bring we, the water wanna take we back.

Building an altar together. Before story time, Tiffany invited each of us to hold an object of personal meaning, to bring an intention to our heart, and to whisper that intention into the object. When we were ready, we released our intentions into the chat all at once — a chatter-fall of brief offerings:

  • Go back to the water
  • To show up as fully, openly, and truthfully as I can
  • Release the love I feel and that I know I’m withholding
  • To touch my grief
  • Clarify how I am to share my wisdom and impact the world

A Yoruba creation story. Tiffany then read aloud from Tobe Melora Correal’s Finding Soul on the Path of Orisha — the story of Olorun, the supreme being, who pours her sacred waters from her great pot into the pot of her child Olodumare below, where the waters are cooled by divine breath before being poured into the Orisha and, through them, into all of creation. The story’s invitation: wake up. The aliveness all around you is Aṣẹ. The source has never not been pouring.

A question that opened the room. In the conversation that followed, we found ourselves circling around questions of land, lineage, and longing. Where are my roots? Where is my ground? Where is my source? Tiffany offered a reframe that landed with quiet force: “Maybe the question isn’t where is my land? — but where does the land long for me?” What might it mean, she asked, to be possessed by source, rather than to possess it?

A walking meditation. Tiffany then led us into a moving meditation — a slow walk paired with prompts to be answered in the body, not the mind:

  • Dear presence, please create an altar within me.
  • Dear presence, what am I being called to wake up to?
  • Dear presence, what is thirsting within me?
  • Dear presence, where does the well, the pouring, cooling waters live within me?
  • Dear presence, how shall I offer these waters — my aṣẹ, my gifts — to those I am called to be in service to?

We returned to the circle quieter, more porous. The reflections that closed our time together carried the imprint of the practice:

  • Magic pouring down, in between, and all around. Take what you need and nothing more. You’ll find just enough in every pour.
  • I am a buoy. I am an anchor. I am a waterfall of surprise at the edge of a prairie.
  • Life force, energy, and fear.
  • Renewed and grounded. Tuned in.
  • Move with spirit, even if that means being still. Especially if that means being still.

We left the call quieted and resourced. Tiffany returned to her friend, to the labor room, to the waters of another beginning.

To learn more about Tiffany’s work: tiffanycurtis.com | indwellco.com

4/1/26: “Returning to Source: Land, Renewal, and Coming Home”

Call audio

“In my culture, you can’t heal until you’ve been made whole. Wholeness is what heals.” — Mee Moua

We gathered with Mee Moua — Hmong-American leader, former Minnesota State Senator, and now a farmer and coach tending Roots & Branches Farm in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. What unfolded was less a presentation than an invitation — to slow down, to listen to our own stories of source, and to sit with what liminal time is asking of us.

The Farm as Sacred Ground

Mee shared that Roots & Branches is the direct English translation of two simple Hmong words that speak to three principles: sacred connection, wholeness, and healing. She and her husband Yee founded the farm as a space for themselves and those they love to renew their relationship with the land — to rediscover their roots and to understand who they might become.

“As political refugee children born to successive generations of refugee children,” Mee told us, “our souls have traveled through space and time seeking a place to set root and thrive.” The farm was built as an act of answering longing, and as an offering. The medicine the land carries — slowing down, reconnecting with the earth, re-remembering who we are and where we came from — was never meant to stay only with her family. Roots & Branches belongs to everyone who carries the weight of disconnection.

What the Land Has Taught

Mee offered us some of what she has learned in her first few years as a farmer — lessons she said she had to relearn, even though they were already woven into her ancestral intelligence:

  • The seasonality of life, and that hardships and joys are intertwined but never permanent because they move in cycles
  • That pruning is required for growth — of a plant, and of a person
  • That cuttings are not waste; they carry the potential to reroot
  • Humbleness in the grandness of the big sky and the long horizon, which has a way of disappearing the urgencies of today’s headlines
  • That change and adaptation maximize productivity — that planting the same thing in the same place, year after year, brings diminishing returns

In her culture, when you meet someone, you ask not only who are you, but whose are you. Since coming to the farm, Mee has come to a deeper understanding of whose she is — by leaning into the wisdom of generations of ancestors intertwined with the rhythm of the land.

The Question We Sat With

Mee then invited us into her question:
In liminal times — the in-between time between where you are coming from and where you are going — reconnecting or renewing our relationship with our source is the resource we need. What is your source? When was the last time you reconnected with it? What did that experience tell you about who you are or are becoming? How did it resource your own sacred practice?

We moved into triads to share our stories, then returned to the larger circle.

What emerged was tender and varied. One participant spoke of a long liminal season of not belonging — of realizing that belonging is something we can carry with us rather than something tied to any one piece of ground. Another shared the challenge of living in community after years of rich solitude, and the practice of learning to respond rather than react. Another reflected on source as a cosmic ocean — and on the question of how to stay connected to stillness out in the chaotic world. Another named a felt tension between longing for the land and resistance to going there, and trusted that the tension itself had something to teach.

Mee reflected back that we, as change agents, are each like a lightning rod — a conduit for others to find themselves. What makes the conductivity possible is anchoring. And sacred practice, she said, is how we anchor. “That’s why liminal time might be the time to look at how well we are anchored.”

The Rooster Returns

At the close of our time, we returned to the fire lighter who had opened our circle: the Rooster — chosen by Mee as a sacred animal at Roots & Branches.

Mee shared a story from her first summer on the farm. Her mother had insisted they bring roosters in. Mee asked why. Without the rooster, her mother said, your seeds won’t come up. Every morning when the rooster crows to wake up the sun, the seeds hear it. They know the sun is coming, and they peek out of the ground to be nourished.

Two weeks after the roosters arrived, the seeds began to rise.

As we sat with the rooster’s meaning — the one who stands at the threshold, who calls us home, who finds something in us that has been waiting to be called — reflections emerged: the rooster as a reassurance that dawn is coming even in the darkest night; the rooster as a model for confidence within our own constraints, not puffed up, simply rooted in who we are; the rooster as an invitation to listen for what is being called in us.

Mee, born in the year of the Rooster, closed with her father’s words: the ancestors gifted her with that sign because they knew she would be small in stature, but would need a loud voice to announce who she was.

 

3/4/26: “Circle as a Sacred Practice”

Call audio

“Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
— Lewis Carroll

What if tending the possible isn’t about certainty—but about the practice of showing up anyway?

That’s the question that animated our March Gathering, as we opened our 2026 journey into “Tending the Possible: Sacred Practice for Liminal Times” by finding our footing together in Circle.

Circle is one of humanity’s most enduring forms of gathering. Across millennia and cultures, people have drawn together in circles to share stories, make decisions, and witness one another’s truth. No one sits at the head. Hierarchy dissolves. Every voice belongs. We return to this format regularly because our community has made clear: this is medicine.

Socrates himself lit our virtual fire—reminding us that a circle isn’t just a shape. “The unexamined circle,” he warned with characteristic mischief, “is merely people sitting in a shape.” And so we came ready to examine.

Guided by five circle agreements—presence, truth-telling, confidentiality, embodied trust, and openness to discomfort—we gathered in small groups of four and moved through these four invitations:

  • What is something you tend in your life—and what has tending it taught you?
  • Where in your life do you sense possibility stirring, especially in places of uncertainty or transition?
  • What do you need to believe about yourself for something to feel possible?
  • What would it mean to let yourself be tended—fully, without tending back?

The conversations were rich, personal, and at times quietly breaking things open. Here are some of the threads that surfaced when we came back together:

  • Tending teaches us what we’ve been avoiding. Compost piles, plants, puppies, aging parents—what we tend reveals something about our relationship between care and control. How close those two actually are.
  • Possibility stirs where we stop overthinking. Several of us noticed a growing pull toward forward movement, risk, and putting ourselves out there—and a recognition that our own analysis can be the very thing holding us back.
  • To feel possible, we need to feel wanted. Not just capable—wanted. The invitation matters as much as the readiness.
  • Being tended is the hardest practice of all. The fourth prompt broke something open for many of us. To be held—fully, without giving back—bumped up against pride, exhaustion, and a lifetime of being the holder. And yet, in the vulnerability of naming that, something shifted.
  • We are always being tended. Perhaps the deepest thread of the whole gathering: the forces that animate us, the spirit that moves through this circle, the unconditional love that is always present—these are forms of tending we didn’t choose and can’t control. The tending is not all up to us.

We walked away feeling sorted, seen, and—as one participant put it—yummy. That quality comes from real connection.

Note: To honor our agreement of confidentiality, the Circles themselves are not recorded.

2/4/26: “Exploring “Tending the Possible: Sacred Practice for Liminal Times”

Call audio

“The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity.
The optimist sees opportunity in every difficulty.”
—Winston Churchill

As your Gathering co-hosts, we spent a good deal of time since our December meeting, to review the current state of world events, surface relevant and resonant change agent/participant topics, check in with our trusted sources of guidance and consider potential opportunities and challenges for purposeful change makers in 2026. Our aim, of course, was to identify an invaluable and irresistible theme for this Gathering group to explore in 2026.

Here’s where we landed…

Our new theme for 2026 is:
“Tending the Possible: Sacred Practice for Liminal Times”

In our first Gathering for 2026, we introduced and explored our new theme for the year and generated ideas for speakers and topics.  In small and large group spaces, we shared thoughts, feelings and sensations of the fast-paced, far reaching and tumultuous changes around, and in us – along with our senses of meaning and possibility when it comes to our new theme. We also shared ideas about topics and potential speakers for our monthly calls.

What a gift it was to share with each other in ways that felt so authentic… and so deeply moving energetically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually.

How often do you have the opportunity to share
a welcoming and non-judgmental space with people who
Listen – and graciously receive and expand upon your words and feelings?

How would it serve you
and those you serve – if you
create time and space
to Gather here, with us…

Our first Gathering for 2026 was highly engaged and insightful. In a circle format that included small and large group conversations, we introduced and explored our new theme for the year and reflected on the following questions to deepen and expand our ideas and intuitions about what our new theme means to us – and each other.

  • When you hear the word sacred, what comes to you? What does it point to in your experience?
  • What in your life right now feels sacred to you—and how do you know?
  • Where are you – in a liminal space right now—a place that’s no longer what was, but not yet what’s next?

From this place, we generated ideas for speakers and topics during the year.

 

Your Gathering Hosts

 

About Beth Scanzani

Beth Scanzani is a highly respected and multi-faceted transformational coach, teacher and speaker. A lifelong student and curious soul, she has enjoyed exploring and integrating a wealth of knowledge, resources, and strategies that draw upon a wide range of psychological, scientific, and spiritual teachings. Prior to her transition into teaching and coaching in support of evolving consciousness, Beth enjoyed a successful career as a human resources executive in the high tech and healthcare industries.

True to her nature, Beth’s studies encompass a purposeful blend of psychological, scientific, and spiritual perspectives. She has attained numerous coaching certifications including True Purpose Coach™, Belief Closet™ Practitioner, Master Career Coach, Dream Coach™, iPEC Empowerment Coach™, Energy Leadership Coach™ and Theoretical Foundations of Coaching with David Rock. In addition, she is a trained facilitator and teacher of the Voice Dialogue™ process.

Beth is deeply passionate about sharing knowledge and strategies that create meaningful and sustainable transformation in service to co-creating a world that works for everyone. Beth has co-developed and/or co-taught many tele-seminars for the True Purpose Institute ™, the Shift Network and others including Voice Dialogue Mastery, Inner Harmony Practitioner Training, Evolving Beyond Your Wounds, Shadow Quest, Purposeful Coach Training, Blessing Yourself, Divine Guidance on Purpose and Purposeful Marketing. Beth also serves as a valued guide for those who wish to explore deeper meaning, insight and guidance through their sleeping dreams and waking life stories. She co-developed and teaches Stories from the Night Shift, a NASW CEU eligible seminar for therapists, coaches and other practitioners who want to increase their competence and confidence in accessing the treasures buried in sleeping dreams.

People who work with Beth value her insightful, strategic, fun and results-oriented coaching which helps them to achieve breakthrough results on short-term goals while simultaneously creating fundamental shifts that build a strong foundation for ongoing success and fulfillment, personally and professionally. Her eclectic approach and natural agility enable her to customize her coaching style, strategies and processes to help clients create a clear vision, navigate their way out of uncertainty and restrained momentum, and successfully achieve their desired outcomes.

Through her work as a teacher and coach, Beth demonstrates her dedication to providing transformative courses, workshops and coaching in service to those who are ready to reclaim their inner wisdom, embrace their life purpose and true nature, and wholly offer their unique gifts to others…and to the world we all share.

About Andy Swindler

Andy Swindler’s brings hearts together. He envisions a world that embraces healthy tensions to nurture dignity and agency for every person. Andy’s Chicago-based practice, Lead From Love, empowers conscious leaders and inclusive organizations to shift the dominant narrative from fear to love through an embodied expression of purpose and values.

He began his entrepreneurial journey at age 24, which led to owning a boutique digital marketing & software development company for 14 years until exiting at the end of 2016. Andy’s journey of studying human interaction and shepherding human flourishing now culminates in FeelReal, which he has incubated and evolved since 2007.

Andy is a Certified True Purpose® Coach & Consultant, Barrett Values Centre® Practitioner, Collaborative Operating System Consultant and Voice Dialogue™ Practitioner. He co-hosts The Gathering For Change Agents each month and is the Strategic Partnerships Chair for Conscious Capitalism Chicago Chapter. Andy speaks and writes on issues of equity and inclusion. He developed The Metamodel framework to visualize the alignment between more than 100 different conscious leadership, business and dialogue frameworks.

About Susan Alexander

Susan Alexander, PCC, is an executive and life coach with an extensive business background. She created her company Rosebud Coaching and Consulting to specialize in helping individuals to create new possibilities for their personal & professional life to fulfill their most important goals and aspirations. Her work focuses on individuals connecting with confidence and clarity to what’s most important to them (their purpose) and removing barriers of beliefs and assumptions that stand in the way of their full and authentic expression. Susan helps individuals be extraordinary leaders in all aspects of their lives. She coaches executives, managers and individuals with a special emphasis on the power of self-perception and communications and their impact on job performance.

She is a certified True Purpose Individual and Organizational Consultant. She is also certified in numerous instruments including Enneagram, Myers Briggs, Gallup Strengthsfinder, Conversational Intelligence, EQi, Positive Intelligence.

About Todd Hoskins

Todd Hoskins helps people and organizations work better together and reimagine what’s possible by learning from the patterns and rhythms that emerge in living systems. Through his practice, Canopy Gap, he combines insights from ecology, network science, and human behavior to support teams and organizations as they navigate complexity and change.

As both a practitioner & guide, Todd works in three interconnected ways:

  • Designing organizational systems that enable more natural collaboration and adaptation
  • Facilitating ecosystem partnerships that create value across organizational boundaries
  • Coaching individuals and teams to discover new ways of seeing, being, and moving through the world

Todd brings a unique perspective shaped by his graduate work in psychology, training in somatic awareness, and deep study of natural systems. He has helped launch and transform organizations across sectors – from technology startups to public media, from educational institutions to environmental initiatives.

In addition to his work with Canopy Gap, Todd co-hosts the podcast and leadership program Leading from Being. He serves as Senior Fellow for Architectures of Collaboration at the People-Centered Internet, and his board work spans digital equity, youth mental wellbeing, and building bridges through meaningful dialogue.

Todd splits his time between the tropical dry forests of Costa Rica and the wilderness of Northern Michigan. Together with his partner Pia, he teaches Argentine Tango – an embodied practice that mirrors his work with organizations, blending structure with spontaneity, and technical skill with creative emergence.