Creating Connection Through Conflict

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What if the parts of yourself you most want to hide turned out to be the most generative parts of you?

Our shadows show up most vividly in relationship. The parts we reject, defend, or project onto other people also hold our honesty, our creativity, and our capacity to belong. Creating Connection Through Conflict is a three-part experiential sampler and practice laboratory led by Lee Warren, offering embodied, playful, and creative approaches to engaging those shadows.

This is not a conflict resolution class, a communication model, mediation, or group therapy. It is a hands-on sampler of exercises that help us lean into our shadows in ways that cultivate discovery, connection, and delight. Through games, ShadowPlay, process work, hot seats, ZEGG Forum, role play, relational experiments, fishbowls, nondual inquiry, family constellations, and other creative practices, we will move toward the material we usually avoid, and in doing so introduce new patterns into the strategies we have long used to protect ourselves.

Across three evenings, the group becomes a laboratory where our relational patterns can surface and offer insight, practice, and new possibility. The work helps us normalize conflict and difference, build attachment and belonging, deepen trust, strengthen skills for repair, grow our self-awareness and emotional literacy, and explore the role of eros in conflict.

A sampler is a short experiential tasting of several practices rather than a full deep dive. The intention is to give us a felt sense that this is possible, and to build appetite, safety, and curiosity for a longer-form offering to come.

This is for anyone who senses that conflict holds more possibility than we have been taught, whether you are navigating a close partnership, deepening friendships, building community, working collaboratively, or simply longing to become more skillful and alive in relationship.

You do not need to be in active conflict with anyone, and you do not need to be good at it. Bring your defenses, your tenderness, the part that wants to run, the part that wants to be right, the part that wants to blame, the part that wants to be cherished, and the part that is afraid it may not belong.

This work sits close to the heart of what we practice at Emberlight. Our value of Curiosity asks us to embrace the unknown with adaptability and creativity, and our value of Loving Presence asks us to listen deeply and bear witness to one another. Our shadows are, at their root, our fear of living and of dying. Learning to meet them together is one of the ways we stay human, connected, and alive within the circles we love.

This is a three-part series and one registration covers all three evenings: Thursday, October 1, Thursday, October 8, and Thursday, October 15, 2026, from 6:30pm to 9:00pm. The sessions build on one another, so please plan to join us for all three.

We will gather in the Lighthouse at Emberlight, 83 Sanctuary Rd, Swannanoa, NC 28778.

Meet Your Facilitator: Lee Warren

Lee Warren is a somatic guide, Tantra and death educator, writer, and community builder. Her work has been shaped by more than three decades of ecovillage living, coordinating dozens of regional events, a deep commitment to place-based education, and participation in Tantric community, settings where conflict, collaboration, belonging, and repair have been part of the everyday terrain. Her approach to creative conflict draws from training and practice in NVC, Process Work, IFS, ZEGG Forum, and attachment, along with the additions of embodiment, erotic ShadowPlay, and trauma-informed Tantra. She is the founder of Reclaiming Wisdom and Queen of Death, and the author of the forthcoming book Dying Together: The Art of Community Death Care.

We will gather in the Lighthouse at Emberlight, 83 Sanctuary Rd, Swannanoa, NC 28778. Please contact events@emberlightway.org with any questions.

This is a benefit event for Emberlight. Please note that all event tickets are non-refundable, except in the case that Emberlight cancels the event