Facets of Being—Global Disparities in Power and Privilege is an invitation to explore identities and social location in local and global contexts. We will dance around the expanded spiral of the Work That Reconnects while turning our gaze towards our own pockets of power and privilege or lack thereof—shifting our perspectives— and weaving diverse narratives into a fabric that can hold all of humanity.
In this six-week course, we will expand our awareness of global disparities and our emotional capacity to hold reality in all its complexity and contradictions. We will play together, tell stories and engage our imagination to move beyond the oppressive systems that thrive on greed and supremacy serving a few while exploiting the planet and the global majority. We will struggle and stretch as we are questioning politically correct terminology that often serves to uphold Neo-colonial patterns of domination.
Date and time: August 5, 12, 19, September 2, 9, 16, 2026 – 6-8pm Cairo, 15:00-17:00 UTC, 11am-1pm EDT
Format: 6 sessions, 2 hours each – online on zoom
Facilitated by Sara El-Sayeh and Yulia Smagorinsky
Cost: we offer two sliding scales, please read carefully
Tier 1: $50-150 — for those of you living in low-income countries/economically unstable regions and are facing systemic barriers related to caste, race, displacement, disability, or colonial legacies (e.g. exchange rate and US dollar hegemony)
Tier 2: $350-650 — for those of you living in high-income countries/economically stable regions; please pay on the higher end if you experience economic privilege relative to others globally
Scholarship Tier: some scholarships will be available (you can apply through the registration form)
Facets of Being—Global Disparities in Power and Privilege meets the prerequisites for the Spiral Journey Facilitator Development Program of 12-hour WTR full spiral group work as well as providing social location/anti-oppression training.
Things to consider before making the decision to sign up:
- Our underlying assumption is that people are resilient.You will be asked to share your voice, your experience.
- At times, it will feel like educational labor – we believe that to create more understanding in our world, educational labor is necessary.*
- We are not going to elevate one form of oppression as more real or true or factual than another. The oppression each person experiences in their soma is real and deserves to be validated. The expression of this experience may very well clash with and trigger another person who comes from a very different positionality. This is also real and valid. We will be holding both realities.
- We are not moving into instant repair when harm happens, real repair is not possible while emotions are high and nervous systems are activated. We don’t believe that there are quick fixes, nor quick repairs to address complex systems of oppression. Instead, we will slow things down, and then slow them down some more.
- We will offer space to breathe, time to track somatically what is happening for each of us and to sit with the mess we are in. This will likely feel uncomfortable. We will offer one-on-one support, as well as facilitate small group dialogues when requested outside of the scheduled session, to move toward deeper and wider understanding, and a possibility of mending what has been torn.
- We don’t believe in cancel culture and that doesn’t negate its existence and still, to not engage with it in this way protects our energy and allows it to be directed to where it matters.
We have the deepest respect for each of you who knows they are not resourced enough at this point in time to engage on this level or who simply needs a break. Please know that if you are currently exhausted from all the educational labor you offer to the world, this may not be the right course for you at this point.
Please review our refund policy, you can find it here.
* A note about what we know:
- Yulia knows intimately the educational labor it takes to teach those around them about what it means to be a non-binary person in a binary world.
- Sara knows that at the risk of sounding contradictory, it’s important to bring in voices from the margin, otherwise the margin is missing and people at the center remain in oblivion about its existence and experience. It takes a lot of courage to be where being canceled is a risk.
Sara El-Sayeh (she/her), M.A. is an Egyptian writer, (single) mother and facilitator roaming the fault lines of Cairo. Sara has an MA in economics in international development and spends a lot of time contemplating life post growth. She’s a Post Growth Institute fellow (2025) and works with the imagination as an important tool to carry us forward on the path of degrowth.
Post-revolution and mid-collapse, her work explores what it means to belong, and at times completely refusing to, in a place that demands that she becomes convenient.
Sara maps the geographies of single motherhood: the labyrinth of repair and care as resistance. Her work helps (her) navigate the freeze of capitalism while slowly weaving communities of care to nourish us through times of collapse.
Post-revolution and mid-collapse, her work explores what it means to belong, and at times completely refusing to, in a place that demands that she becomes convenient.
Sara maps the geographies of single motherhood: the labyrinth of repair and care as resistance. Her work helps (her) navigate the freeze of capitalism while slowly weaving communities of care to nourish us through times of collapse.
Yulia Smagorinsky (they/them), M.Sc.Agr, Spiral Journey administrator and co-facilitator.
Yulia is a farmer, weaver of social change and healing, permaculture designer and a graduate of the Spiral Journey Facilitator Development Program and registered facilitator of the Work That Reconnects Network.
As a horticultural educator and restorative justice practitioner in the Healing Garden at the Philadelphia Juvenile Justice Service Center, Yulia creates beauty and healing spaces and hands-on experiential opportunities for youths.
Yulia is a co-founder of Emergent Abundance Farming Collective, sharing food, knowledge, skills, information, access to land and sources of healing with the local community. They are actively creating platforms and pathways to hold space for others to heal, to listen deeply and transform.
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