Roots Branching in Transformation

At Root Woman Studio we explore experiential learning and the transformational impacts embedded in learning through doing. The site offers three primary threads to explore:

• Process Painting: Being open to not knowing what mystery might come from within through color, brush and paper.
• Nature Journaling: Being curious to discover what's real in the external natural world without preconception, asking questions, noticing sound, weather, detail,and form then capturing this wondering in our journal.
• Reflections: Synthesizing that which arises from experiential processes, be it a blog, a poem or even a heart-felt letter to the world.

Root Woman Studio facilitates many forms of experiential learning. As a facilitator, I have learned to be both humble and wise to all the possibilities yet to be discovered in each learner. Together, as a circle of learners, using simple agreements to create a safe and respect space, learners explore with basic tools and protected time, who they are as unique individuals. We shape a space both sacred and transformative. The direct experience is followed by a period of reflection and sharing where we provide witness to the individual transformation's of one another.

This is the most powerful form of learning that I know. I have had the good fortune to experience transformational learning in a number of very special contexts with masterful facilitators. Now, through the work of Root Woman Studio, I want to honor these life-changing experiences to which I have been privileged and provide others the chance to explore this special territory. I call this transformative learning, learning that breaks through artificial boundaries and creates an emancipating sense of expansiveness and greater potential to create in our lives!

April Reid has been an educator and facilitator more than 25 years, with a doctorate in transformative learning. She completed Stewart Cubley's Principles of Process Painting and Art of Facilitation courses and multiple facilitation practicums. In addition, she has been tutored by the extraordinary facilitators at Wings-Seminars. She is an advocate of all manner of experiential learning including service learning, process painting, nature journaling and working with children, youth and adults to develop executive function skills through experiential processes. She currently lives in the Pacific Northwest on the Salish Sea and can be reached through the site contact page for additional information.