Teaching Radical Inclusion: How Lived Experience Becomes the Curriculum

Sara Eisenberg's path to creating a course on radical inclusion was decades in the making. She began as a community organizer and activist, eventually burning out. She took what she calls "quite a right turn" into healing — earning an herbal medicine degree and spending 25 years studying nondual Kabbalistic healing. When events in Baltimore in 2015 brought issues of police violence and racial injustice to her doorstep, she felt compelled to bring her consciousness practices back to the work of social justice. "Now I'm closing the loop, bringing the consciousness practices that I learned on my healing path back into the work of the divisive issues of race and gender, which needs so much attention and really a new kind of technology," she explains. "Because we haven't made a lot of progress using the tools that we have." She had seven in-person workshops planned across three states when the pandemic shut them all down. After a few months of adjustment, she moved everything online.

What makes Sara's course fundamentally different from most online programs is that there is no traditional curriculum. "The content of the course is really the lived experiences and memories of the students," she says. Her expertise lies in creating a container — an environment of honesty and kindness that encourages vulnerability. She guides participants through a journey of uncovering unconscious bias using prompts, themes, and practices that surface beliefs, stories, and origin memories. "In some cases I'm really writing the curriculum as we go based on how the students' material interacts with one another, how they receive one another, what they learn from one another and what their ongoing developing need is." The four-week format at $197 accommodates eight to twelve students maximum, with a next-level three-month program in development at $775. Sara acknowledges the scalability tension: this is high-touch, small-group work by design. But the depth of transformation — and students consistently reporting they got far more than expected — validates the approach.

One of Sara's most surprising discoveries was that Zoom actually works better than in-person settings for this particular kind of work. Each session begins with a settling practice: she guides participants through awareness of their physical bodies, emotions, thoughts, and breathing. Then she has everyone bring their attention to the screen and welcome each other in with genuine hospitality. "It was really quite a discovery for me to see how the gaze that is permitted on zoom so much facilitates this work," she says. "If we were in a physical space, for people to connect this way at the beginning of each session might be almost too intimate, but there's something about the screen that gives this great power and safety." She uses metaphors and prompts to guide exploration of themes like belonging and exclusion. Students examine their origin stories — how they first learned what it meant to belong, what it cost them, what benefits they received. By course end, most students arrive at a specific realization: "There wasn't anything that suggested to me that I was going to get a rule book about how to be a good anti-racist, but I was still hoping for one. Instead, I got so much more."