A walk through the first year of the Willow Pathway
On a Tuesday evening in early October, a group of strangers will gather online from across the UK and beyond. Within a few weeks they’ll know things about each other that took other friendships years.
This is how every OneSpirit class begins, and this year we can show you the road ahead in unusual detail.
Our Year One curriculum guide sets out what actually happens, gateway by gateway, because a two-year formation is a serious undertaking and you deserve to be able to picture it before you commit.
Here is the shape of the journey…
The year moves through five gateways, each spanning five Tuesday evenings, with a deliberate rhythm inside each one. Each gateway starts with a reading, a poem, a recording, a practice. You spend time with them in your own way, and you are not asked to arrive with answers. Then a small group of around ten, held by two tutors, is where the theme moves from something you have read into something lived. The whole class gathers afterward to weave together what the separate circles discovered, and only then are frameworks and vocabulary offered. You meet the territory before you are given words for it. That ordering is our whole pedagogy in miniature: experience first, language afterward.
Sacred Welcome (October).
The year opens as a rite rather than an enrolment. You’re witnessed here for who you are, and the group builds its own agreements about how it will hold itself. In these first weeks you’ll spend time with stories and poems from traditions beyond your own, each carrying its own picture of what it means to be welcomed, and you’ll reflect on what welcome has meant, or not meant, in your own life.
Sacred Encounter (November to December).
Having been welcomed, you begin to ask a harder question: what am I bringing to my relationships? This gateway works with what Jung called shadow, the parts of ourselves we have learned to keep hidden, which show up in how we meet other people. The person who irritates or fascinates becomes a doorway into what you cannot yet see in yourself.
Sacred Worth (February to March).
The question underneath all the others: what makes you sacred, before you do anything to earn it? Ceremony work begins here, and the ordering is deliberate. Before you can bless, you need some taste of what it is to be blessed. You’ll spend time with a practice of praise drawn from a tradition outside your own, and by the gateway’s close you’ll design and offer a baby blessing of your own.
Sacred Responsibility (April to May).
Attention turns outward, to power and the systems we all live inside. The work begins with imagery rather than theory, exploring how real change often comes from working with what’s already there rather than against it. It also introduces one of the year’s more liberating ideas, Krister Stendahl’s holy envy: the capacity to be genuinely moved by what you find in another tradition, and to notice your own position and influence within the systems you’re part of.
Sacred Listening (June to July).
The year completes with the practice that carries all the rest into ministry. You’ll practise listening across real difference, the kind that doesn’t resolve or get agreed on, the kind you simply learn to stay in. The standard in this gateway is contact rather than competence. We are not asking you to become an accomplished listener in five weeks; we are asking you to begin making real contact with what listening is.
We want to be honest about the nature of this work. These gateways touch tender territory: early messages about your worth, your relationship with power, the discomfort of genuine difference. You engage at your own depth and pace, always, and you are held throughout by your small group, a designated tutor, and one-to-one supervision. Safety, in our understanding, is not the same as comfort. What we commit to is that you will never be asked to stay present to discomfort alone.
The Willow Pathway travels this year online, on Tuesday evenings, woven into your existing life. If you are drawn to full immersion instead, our Sylvan Pathway walks a different road to the same becoming: three five-day residential retreats a year at Florence House on the Sussex coast, following the arc of a human life from conception to death, and beyond.
The final free online Intro Days before enrolment closes are Tuesday 8 September (Willow) and Thursday 10 September (Sylvan), both 6.30–8.30pm. Applications for the Class of 2028 close at midnight on 30 September, and Sacred Welcome opens on 6 October. Read the full Year One guide, download the prospectus, or simply come along in September and feel the room for yourself.
Read the Year One guide · Register for an Intro Day · Explore the Willow Pathway
