Building a Sustainable Culture in Challenging Times

( Finding resilience // Resources and tools for our times )

Center for Education for Sustainable Development of the Heliopolis University for Sustainable Development, Cairo

Deadlines, projects, exams, family, Corona… one way or another, we are often under a lot of pressure or feeling overwhelmed.

How can we find resilience and strength in challenging times? How can we nurture ourselves and deepen our self-knowledge to find and access the resources and gifts within us to be empowered and able to embrace stress?

What value do self-reflection, grounding, and slowing down hold in our busy lives and how can we make time for this despite being under a lot of pressure or handling too many things at the same time? How can we take better care of ourselves so we can express ourselves and our potential more as well as care better for the communities and projects around us? And how is all this related to building a truly sustainable culture?

Between 4th and 6th of July 2021, a group of academic staff from the Heliopolis University for Sustainable Development in Cairo gathered for a 12hour immersive and transformative journey into self-development, self-empowerment and resilience to explore these questions and themes, facilitated by me with support from Hadeel Bahaa, Mariam Habib and Naela Refaat.

Our intention was to explore together how a more sustainable culture could look like and what role each one of us can play in it, knowing that true change begins within us/with ourselves, as well as to gain better self-awareness, competencies and tools for challenging times.

For this, we began our journey together by exploring who and where we are now - how did we get here? Who are we at this moment and how are we showing up? Why are we showing up?

We explored what the words culture, sustainability, sustainable culture and resilience mean for us personally and for the group, drawing on the wisdom and knowledge within every individual to create a comprehensive shared understanding as well as taking stock where and when we might be embodying and living a sustainable culture already in our day-to-day lives.

Through a ‘River of Life’ exercise in which we focused on the moments in our life where we felt most alive and joyful, we also traced our individual journeys up until this moment and discovered what defined and shaped us by sharing parts of our journey with the group.

By looking at our lives from the angle of joy and aliveness we already began changing the narrative and focus from the hard and painful moments that shaped us to what allows us to thrive and be strong and resilient ~ knowing that we always have a choice about how we respond to challenging situations.

After laying the ground, building a safe space and approaching the topic of sustainability and culture, we then began narrowing our focus on the theme of resilience and on personal tools for being more resilient. Hadeel and I offered different methods to map our current or general resilience levels, as well as strategies and resources available to us to be and stay more in our power. Through time for exchanges and sharing in small groups and the large circle, we again learned from each other and heard more about each other’s life, strategies and wisdom, thereby being able to complement our own strategies and tools with the practices and learnings of other participants.

The last day then focused on going forward and on how to include what we learned in everyday life. How can we translate the micro culture that we created in the time together into our daily context? How can we support each other to create and embody the culture and habits/practices we would like to see more of and that we experienced in the three days together? If every culture was once the act or habit of one individual – then how do we seed/nurture the habits and actions that we would like to see more of?

Adhering to our motto of “Let us go slow so we can go far”, there was ample space for meditation, self reflection, journaling, quiet time and for slowing down, becoming present in the moment and our bodies, as well as for connecting to the other participants we were sharing this space with, thriving in the immense wisdom that emerged from the collective, being inspired and motivated by hearing about other people's pain and how they turned their struggles into drivers for change, and enjoying the experience of being seen, heard and met as a full human being beyond labels, roles and hierarchies.