We are pleased to be collaborating with a sister organization, Prairiewoods, to bring you this program series by Karen Hering. Karen has long offered programs at both retreat centers; we are grateful for this new series opportunity and to connect in shared mission with others on this path of learning and service.
On the Cusp of Change: where memory and imagination meet
Online programs and in person retreats
with Karen Hering, author of Trusting Change
Life is made of change. It always has been. But in the 21st century, the changes come faster and closer together. How can we pause to make sense of our changing world and to better understand our choices in living with change, whether it’s personal or global?
“On the Cusp of Change: where memory and imagination meet,” is a yearlong online series of 12 stand-alone programs, cosponsored by the Christine Center and Prairiewoods. Taking a deeper dive into Karen Hering’s book, Trusting Change, it emphasizes how to engage our imagination and memory when encountering the uncertainties of the present day. The opening online retreat, attuned to the start of a new year, introduces an overview of the dynamics of living with change, Saturday, January 6, 10:30 am – 1 pm CT. On the second Tuesday of each month, 7-8:30 pm CT thereafter, Karen will lead an online session of embodied practices, guided reflection and conversation with a specific focus of how to make change more trustworthy.
Registration is available for individual sessions through the Christine Center and Prairiewoods ($15/session). Participants can attend every month or a single session.
The yearlong series also includes in-person retreats, at the Christine Center and Prairiewoods, in the spring, summer (a focused retreat for writers) and fall. Retreat participation is open to all, whether they’ve participated online or not.
Karen Hering
Karen is a writer and teacher who has been immersed in the work of words for most of her life. She is an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister and author of Writing to Wake the Soul: Opening the Sacred Conversation Within and Trusting Change: Finding Our Way through Personal and Global Transformation, newly published in 2022. As a consulting literary minister based in St. Paul, Minnesota, Karen leads guided writing sessions, retreats and programs about living well in the midst of change in community, congregational and workplace settings, and online. She also serves as a companion and guide for people and organizations on the threshold of significant change. Her writing has appeared in literary journals, periodicals and meditation anthologies.
On the Cusp of Change: where memory and imagination meet
2024 Retreat Schedule
Online Retreats
Second Tuesday of each month from 7-8:30pm
**Additional Registration Step Required for Online Sessions**
Once you have registered and paid, you will subsequently receive an email confirmation with a Zoom registration link.
This will confirm your registration and you will receive another email from Karen with the Zoom meeting link for that month’s online session.
September | Claiming Companions
September 10, 7-8:30pm, CT
$15
Register Online
When naming our threshold “journeying companions, often the first ones that come to mind are contemporaries, those physically or virtually present in the here and now. When we widen our invitation to include those who came before us and those who will follow after, we gain a steadier balance supported across a greater span of history.” (From Trusting Change, by Karen Hering).
October | Moving On
October 8, 7-8:30pm, CT
$15
Register Online
“When we step into the present moment without attachments to what we’ve known before and what we’ve expected or desired for the future, we are opening the way for many emotions, including joy.” (From Trusting Change, by Karen Hering).
November | Imagining a Way
November 19, 7-8:30pm, CT
$15
Register Online
“The facts of my situation, and the logic and reason I use to arrange them, will only take me to edge of what I know. Even using my five senses will only extend as far as the range of my sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. But imagination has the ability to reach farther by accessing the deeper well of the unconscious and creatively rearranging what I’ve known before. The uniquely human capacity to imagine is a valuable threshold skill that can open a way into and through the unknowns of the not yet.” (From Trusting Change, by Karen Hering)
December | Widening What We Trust
December 10, 7-8:30pm, CT
$15
Register Online
“In our thresholding, not only does our current identity include the years we have already lived through; it also includes the future we are living toward. Just as the acorn carries within it all the potential—crown and roots and trunk—of a large oak tree to come, so too, our own future growth is folded within us. Being fully in the present moment, we can find strength in expanding our wholeness to include past and future, roots and crown and seed together, in an ever-growing identity reaching toward the light.” (From Trusting Change, by Karen Hering).
Join your fellow thresholders for an evening of embodied practices, guided writing, reflection and conversation led by Karen Hering.
October In-Person Retreat at Prairiewoods
Cultivating Love and Trust in Times of Change
Friday, Oct. 25, 6:30 p.m.–Sunday, Oct. 27, 1 p.m. U.S. Central Time
Change is rumbling in the ground beneath our feet. Growing conflicts, major elections and shifting weather patterns – as well as turns in our personal lives – all remind us we are living in stormy transformative times of uncertainty. We need one another in new ways; and we need renewed capacities for love and trust. This retreat is for all who wish to gather on the cusp of change to deepen our understandings and practices of giving and receiving a liberating love, of becoming trustworthy and trusting others, of gaining skills to strengthen and sustain relationships we can rely on in the midst of change.
We’ll draw from the wisdom of bell hooks, James Baldwin, Sharon Salzberg and others and use guided reflection with writing, silence, conversation and embodied practices. Led by Karen Hering, author of Trusting Change and facilitator of Threshold Times on Substack, the retreat will offer an experience and exploration of joy, creativity, love and trust.