Six Thursdays: 6 – 8pm | October 16, 23, 30 & November 6, 13, 20, 2025
Healing America’s Narratives:
Freedom, Truth, & Shadow in the 21st Century
Registration info is at the bottom of this page.
Course Overview: In this 6-session, 12-hour, in-person course, we will explore the current state of the United States through the lenses of history, culture, developmental worldview/psychology, and spirituality. More specifically, as we look at the “exteriors” of history and current events, we’ll consider the “interiors” of persistent habits of mind that repeat the same mistakes—costumed differently for new generations—and we’ll inquire into who (we think) we are amid our exploration. Prerequisites: curiosity, openness, courage, sense of humor.
Session Outline (subject to appropriate adjustments based on current events and the energy in the room)
Session One: Welcome & Overview
We’ll clarify the course trajectory, get a sense of who’s in the room, and explore the language of collective shadow, cultural givens, developmental worldview, freedom, truth, and feminine and masculine energies as they relate to U.S. history and current events.
Session Two: 3.5 Foundational Subjugations
We’ll identify the 3.5 subjugations that have characterized the U.S. since its conception, and we’ll begin to explore the question, “Who am I, really?” as it relates to each of us amid these subjugations and current events.
Session Three: Vietnam and post-9/11 Wars
We’ll take a deeper dive into how each of us identifies ourselves, and then explore how the nation’s shadow manifested in the Vietnam and post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—including, but not only, through those habits of mind that repeat the same mistakes.
Session Four: And That’s Not All(!)
First, we’ll take a whirlwind tour of contemporary issues, from planetary ambivalence to for-profit health care, from a corrupted information ecology to chronic depression, addiction, and suicide, and from a culture of violence to the metacrisis. We’ll then explore the politics (and realities) behind the language of “woke”, DEI, CRT, and “canceling” and their polarizing impact on current U.S. culture. Our backdrop for this session is the premise that “everything is a story” and that we have great responsibility for the stories we choose to tell and how we tell them.
Session Five: What Am I Not Seeing?
We’ll begin with an introduction to individual shadow work, and then expand our view to the embodiment of our collective national shadow and the threat it poses to the American experiment. To perpetrate and perpetuate the illusion of democratic process in the course (remember the fourth prerequisite above), we’ll get our collective sense of how to best bring the course to a close in its final session.
Session Six: How Am I in Relationship?
In this final session, we’ll integrate the learnings of the previous five sessions and choose from among several possible practices and ways forward as we bring our gathering to a close.
Is This for You?
The course is designed with the following folks in mind:
- Folks who are committed to truth, truthfulness, and the difference between fact and opinion
- Folks who are anxious, scared, or concerned about the state of the nation (and the planet) and experience bouts of deep sadness, rage, hope, and despair
- Folks who agree with, or embody, the belief that all humans deserve equal rights and opportunities to live free, healthy, responsible, and creative lives—that do no harm to others—of their choosing
- Folks who oppose bullying in any iteration and at any scale
- Folks who are open to exploring or are already engaged with the relationships among history/current events, developmental psychology, culture, spirituality, and other disciplines and how these are relevant to and essential for democracy
- Folks who have an inkling, or a deep understanding that we’re currently not facing policy disagreements, but the dismantling of the democratic structures of the United States
- Folks who understand, or are willing to consider, that all of us who work toward progress in specific areas like climate, health, violence, wealth disparity, race, gender, orientation, identity, and (add yours here___) are called to come together in solidarity to defend and improve the democratic institutions that allow us, however imperfectly, to do our ongoing work toward progress
- Folks who are able and willing to look at, recognize, own, and integrate both the dignities and disasters of the United States—currently, and throughout its history
- Folks who are open to, or already engaged with, their own ongoing development
- Folks who are willing to explore in good faith questions and statements such as Who am I, really? How do I choose to be? Everything is a story. What am I missing?—especially, but not only, in the context of the dignities and disasters of the U.S.
- Folks who are willing to stand as witness to their own and others’ suffering (and joy)
Workers at Yosemite Protest the Gutting of the Federal Workforce
Still Not Sure?
Perhaps consider that the course invites us to engage, recognize, commit, honor, and be willing in these ways:
- engage an unvarnished, good-faith approach to understanding history and current events. Among the areas we’ll explore are the foundational subjugations of women, Indigenous Peoples, Africans and African Americans, and the poor; the Vietnam and post-9/11 wars; the CRT/DEI/woke/cancel extravaganzas; the dismantling of democracy; addiction crises; generally othering others; and planetary ambivalence
- recognize ourselves as humans, citizens, and primary “instruments” in our explorations and understandings of history and current events, which requires that we explore and engage in good faith at least basic levels of critical thought, self-reflection, self-awareness, and self-compassion, and that we attend to our own development through intentional practice. We’ll do this in part through an exploration of questions and statements such as: Who am I, really? Everything is a story. How do I choose to be? What am I missing? What’s my impact & what impacts me? Who are my people? I am going to die. How am I in relationship with all of this? Note that we will name all of them but consider just 2-3 of these in the 12-hour course at UCC Southbury.
- be willing to do the work of integration—of embracing our own development, what we learn, and who and how we are—in order to bring increasingly comprehensive, inclusive, balanced, and complex ways of being to what we observe, how we assess, what we do, and who we think we are as citizens and human beings.
Registration and Tuition
The 6-session, 12-hour course is offered on a (very affordable) sliding scale: $120.00 –> $65.00. If you can afford $120 (or more to help support this work) please register at that amount.
To Register, please select one of the following forms of payment:
1. Send a check, payable to Reginald A. Marra, to Reggie Marra | 119 Kennedy Drive | Thomaston CT 06787
2. Use PayPal, Venmo or a credit card: https://www.paypal.com/ncp/payment/MUDQP425FPVVJ
You will receive a registration confirmation, and, a few days before October 16, a PDF of the Session 1 slides (which you can ignore, study, print, or otherwise engage in the way that best serves you).
Note: If for any reason this course does not run, your tuition will be refunded in full.
United Church of Christ Southbury: 283 Main Street North, Southbury, CT 06488
Click here for the working bibliography that informs both the course and the 2022 book on which it’s based. (https://healingamericasnarratives.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/post-han-bibliography-2.pdf)
For more on the yearlong course on which this is based, click here.
Thanks for reading this far.
If you have questions, please email them to reggie.marra@gmail.com.
Gratefully,
Reggie
Healing America's Narratives 