“Your life is not your body, your mind, your health or your identity. Your life is energy that moves through all of these things beautifully creating and undoing them with perfect timing. Holding this perspective shifts everything.” 
- Jeanne Denney

The School of Unusual Life Learning, (SoULL) is a school for personal transformation and professional development for adults. We teach natural wisdom, somatic awareness with a whole human life perspective in small, highly experiential programs lasting from 3 hours to 3 years. The programs are for anyone called. Most students are helping professionals, healers of one kind or another, spiritual seekers, creatives, or just ordinary mortals with existential questions.

Our three year program is a 400 hour program that starts culminates in a “SoULL Life Doula” Certification (in development). This program helps people learn to work with the life force itself within human beings through life, not just for a particular life passage (such as birth or death). We work with the principles of transitions and the mind/body response to them. Grounded in both somatic traditions of Neo-Reichian work and mindfulness teachings, this study adds (without being limited to) a somatic and energetic understanding of aging, illness and dying, grief, which dramatically changes and expands our understanding of somatics and the body itself. SoULL also establishes unique theories of relationships and communities as they are connected to Nature, the body and our human development. These theories support leaders in other fields, including social justice and those trying to envision a more vital, sustainable future for humanity.

“SoULL offers a bridge that heals social dissonance and connects things that feel Disconnected…The by-product of this education is increased vitality, empowerment,’ deeper relational connection and a sense of belongingness. You become aware that life is a force. It has a rhythm.”
- Andrea Pollak

While we encourage students to consider completing the full program, not everyone is called to make that commitment. Therefore we offer the opportunity to our first unit, https://www.soullcommunity.com/nature-of-being-human The Nature of Being Human, as a stand alone program. Similarly, students can do just one year, or one year at a time, adapting it for their own personal growth, or work in areas other than supporting people in change (such as environmental work, creativity, theoretical work, invention). We try to make the work adaptive enough to allow students to be creative, pursuing individual calling and leadership. ASWB Social Work CEU’s are currently applied for, for 2022.

Short programs are focused on bringing original material and unique perspectives to professionals and others in small bites. Our programs focus on supporting human change, caregiving, burnout, grief, death, community, relationships and many other topics that apply our teachings.

Finally, SoULL is a vibrant community. We encourage students to remain engaged in between years or modules, and offer community membership and special programs where we evolve ideas and expand each other. Anyone who has taken The Nature of Being Human can become a member of SoULL.

If you would like to know more about where this work came from, you can read it HERE.

SoULL’s primary training programs are offered in person in Wisconsin (near Chicago) and online, but they also pop up in other locations around the world.

Our mission is to revitalize humanity through holistic education that aims to end human suffering and confusion about life and mortality.

We do this by:

• Teaching embodied wisdom and empowering students to embrace a life that includes death.

• Training helping professionals in somatic awareness and whole life perspective.

• Advancing somatic theory and practice.

• Maintaining a vibrant learning community that works with nature to support the life, work and innovations of students, staff and teachers.

Founder Jeanne Denney is a transpersonal and somatic psychotherapist, educator, hospice worker, healer, and author of The Effects of Compassionate Presence on the Dying. She works in many venues to help people fearlessly embrace a life which includes aging and dying. Jeanne has spent years at bedsides, contributed pioneering ideas to somatic psychology, death and grief work, and been deeply involved with creating the Art of Dying projects in New York City. Her insights on energy and the body through aging, illness, and dying are derived from a wide lens of human experience and deep understanding of our mortal journey.

Website: https://www.soullcommunity.com/

Email: soullcommunity@gmail.com