12 Petalled Lotus

Human Development Education

 We explore how we come to be who we are, and what remains possible as we continue developing throughout our lives.

Understand your life more deeply.

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Human Development Across a Lifetime

The Pathways explore human development across the lifespan—from birth through to death.

They help us understand how our lives take shape, what influences us along the way, and what remains possible as we continue to develop.

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Twelve Qualities of the Heart

The twelve petals come from ancient teachings that associate them with twelve qualities of the heart. 

Purity • Love • Understanding • Clarity • Empathy • Kindness • Harmony • Peace • Unity • Compassion • Bliss • Forgiveness

Within 12 Petalled Lotus, these qualities are understood as sacred possibilities for human expression that can be explored, embodied, and freely chosen. They can also provide an associated contemplative lens that can deepen each Pathway's inquiry.

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We Learn by Being Together

Through conversation, reflection, curiosity and shared experience, we become interested not only in our own lives, but in how other people came to be who they are.

Together, we illuminate the experience of each other's lives.

Human development is participatory. Understanding can deepen simply through being together.

As we bring our experiences, encounter difference with curiosity, and become genuinely interested in one another, community and belonging can grow.

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The Body Is Part of How We Know

12 Petalled Lotus is body-based learning.

We think, talk and reflect — and we also pay attention to what we experience through the body.

Sensation, emotion, movement, activation, settling and connection can all offer information about our experience and help us understand our lives more deeply.

Our approach is informed by embodied and nervous-system understandings of human development, including principles drawn from Somatic Experiencing.

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Tools for Looking More Closely

Within the 12 Petalled Lotus body of work, we have developed tools that help us explore different aspects of human experience.

ESAM — Embodied Secure Attachment Method

ESAM helps us notice what happens within us and between us in relationship.

Through Timing, Tone, Touch, Transparency and Tending, we can look more closely at how connection is experienced and expressed in everyday life.

Integrated Human Development Model

The Integrated Human Development Model helps us see our lives developmentally—placing individual experiences within the larger course of a human life.

These tools draw upon and are informed by knowledge from human development, attachment, psychology, neuroscience and related fields of study.

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Explore 12 Petalled Lotus

There are different ways to participate in the 12 Petalled Lotus body of work.

The Pathways 

Our deepest learning experiences, exploring human development across the lifespan through each of the twelve Pathways.

Guided Inquiry 

Shorter guided learning experiences that bring questions from ordinary human life into conversation with what we know about human development.

Most are offered online, with occasional opportunities to gather in person. 

Books & Resources

Ways to explore particular areas of human development in your own time.

Conversations

Webinars, articles and other opportunities to wonder, think and learn together.

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 Understand Your Life More Deeply

We spend our lives becoming who we are.

There is always more to understand — about where we have come from, what has shaped us, the people whose lives meet ours, and what may still be possible. 

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WHO THIS LEARNING IS FOR

12 Petalled Lotus is for people who want to understand themselves, their relationships, and the experiences that have shaped their lives.

You may arrive with a particular question, a recurring pattern, a relationship you want to understand, or a growing curiosity about what it means to be human.

Your life has been and will continue to develop and adapt even when it seems invisible.  Understanding this can change how you see your experiences, your relationships and yourself.  

You are welcome to begin wherever the learning meets your life. 

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