Discerning Vocation while the World’s on Fire
The world is not okay — and many of us are not okay within the world. How do we find and follow our own sense of purpose while opposing systemic oppression, enduring the “shock and awe” of the Trump/Musk administration, and trying to somehow still pay our bills? How do we discern vocation while the world’s on fire?
You are invited into a community of discernment to practice, reflect, and be supported on the path to your next “yes.” Join this seven week, four session online cohort and explore with us.
In this series you will:
strengthen your emotional resilience muscles for navigating chaos,
connect with and root yourself in your sense of purpose,
benefit from the laughter and relief that come from struggling alongside others in discernment, and
engage critical awareness of privilege and systemic oppression that acknowledges the world’s harsh realities while stubbornly carving out space for thriving.
Check out all the details below!
What is vocational discernment?
However you name the sacred in the world, we believe that sacredness is calling you into what is better. Vocational discernment is the practice of intentionally listening for that call and moving accordingly. Whether it’s God, big love, or something else, we believe that the divine in the world gives us all gifts and purposes — and that we can uncover that sense of purpose (and keep uncovering it, as we live our lives), if we train ourselves to listen. Your sense of purpose is bigger than your job — it might align with your paid work and it might be something you follow outside of work hours.
We believe that we can honor ourselves and the next yes we’re called to. We know that we also must navigate with critical consciousness the web of white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and extractive capitalism that surrounds us while we do things like pay our bills and buy groceries. We believe in community care and interdependence as ways out of what the world wants us to believe is inevitable, and that even as we discern vocation individually we can work for the liberation of all.
✺ Session 1 - Forming and Framework ✺
Joining together as a group, engaging with resilience and what brought us here, and noticing what gives us life.
✺ Session 2 - Attraction and Art ✺
Considering the wisdom of our bodies, following what gives us joy, and honoring desire through creative expression.
✺ Session 3 - Imagination and Iteration ✺
Challenging failure, activating imagination, and dreaming different lives with practical steps.
✺ Session 4 - Transitions and Toolboxes ✺
Tying up loose ends, sitting with open questions, and honoring transitions.
Series Outline
Session 1 ✺ We’ll kick off our series with a little bit of getting-to-know-you (to your level of comfort) and setting some collective commitments. What will help us all be brave, vulnerable, and boundaried in this space?
The meat of this session will focus on digging into emotional grounding and resilience. We’ll talk about how to ground ourselves in time of deep emotion - staying present in the middle of big feelings rather than pushing them away or compartmentalizing - and work on building a shared framework for resilience. Facilitators will share the Dream & Scheme approach to vocational discernment and and overview of future sessions.
Emotional grounding and resilience are key skills for discernment in any season; being connected with your deepest sense of self can offer at least a modicum of stability while you’re considering and acting on a new direction for your life. In 2025, with everything that is happening nationally and globally, these skills are even more important!
Vocational discernment can also strengthen your resilience. One way to support yourself in the midst of this chaos that demands our attention and diligent action is to root in a sense of purpose, thriving, and abundance — for yourself as an individual and for your community ecosystem.
Practices: an imaginative approach to keeping your feet planted when you’re experiencing overwhelm and a tool for noticing patterns in your daily life
Session 2 ✺ The series continues with an invitation to reflection on how we relate to our bodies, what listening to our bodies can teach us, and ways we might need or want to disinvest from what we’ve been taught about our bodies by white supremacy, institutional religion, and heteropatriarchy.
We’ll wrestle with how racial capitalism wants us to be disembodied cogs in a profit machine, and cautiously or enthusiastically engage the idea that being connected with our bodily sensations can give us good information about what we want. We’ll consider that what feels good or fun or joyful might be actually be pretty important for discernment.
(Note: Connecting to and honoring our bodies is not accessible and/or joyful for everyone, including members of our community who have experiences with disordered eating, chronic illness, and marginalized identities. We will hold space for the complications and offer opt-in and opt-out choices for everything. You might be forced to have a body by the fact of your birth, but we won’t force you to relate to it in any particular way!)
Practice: using collaging as a tool for accessing our desires without internal judgement
Session 3 ✺ What does failure even mean, anyway? Does ending, quitting, or changing course mean “failing?” What prevents us from feeling free to follow our sense of call? (Spoiler alert: we believe that failure isn’t something to fear and maybe even doesn’t exist?!)
In this session we’ll engage with iteration and push back against the idea you have to have just one calling. We’ll talk about how white supremacy and capitalism try to limit our imaginations and the joy that can be found in fighting that limit. Part of the session will be spent watching a TED Talk that offers a career-based approach to discernment and discussing together.
Iterating from this video, we’ll lean into imagining our future lives and the practical steps that could build those lives. We’ll wrestle with how the uncertainty of this moment in time might impact our plans (and practice that emotional grounding to thrive through uncertainty!).
Practice: imagining several future selves and being curious about the practical steps of how they got there
Session 4 ✺ Endings can be hard. Though we’re together as a group for a relatively short time, our hope is that we will have built strong connections with each other. This session is loosely planned, to preserve space for honoring whatever emerges through the first three sessions. We’ll reflect on what we’ve worked through together and talk about individual next steps.
We might add more emotional resilience strategies to our toolbox, practice a different method of accessing intuition, or engage in a collective discernment practice. Cohort members will be invited to help shape this space so that it responds, as much as possible, to where we are as a group.
We’ll walk back through each of the practices shared in this series, and notice what practices resonate most for different participants in each of their different seasons of life. We’ll reflect together on how these tools can continue to inform each of us on the ongoing journey of vocational discernment.
Practice: TBD, writing a letter to your future self, and saying ”so long” to this space
All the Details
When: Four 90-minute sessions, Tuesdays at 4pm PT/7pm ET: May 6, May 20, June 3, June 10
What: Across the series, you will participate in six hours of facilitated group connection, discernment activities, and guided reflection practices. You will leave the series equipped with strategies for emotional grounding and four practices for discerning vocation.
You will receive recordings of the content and activity guidance (not the participant sharing sections) that you can access for a year. Add these to your toolbox!
All materials you need for practices offered in the series will be provided, mailed to your house before the series begins.
Cost: $150-$300 sliding scale (see suggestions below), with a $60 deposit requested at registration and the balance due either in installments or in one chunk before May 15. Our goal is for this offering to be accessible - we want you to be able to be part of this group without adding stress to covering your day-to-day needs. If the low end of the sliding scale is inaccessible for you, reach out so we can talk about what might work! Here is a general guideline of how we think about the sliding scale. Please feel comfortable in naming whatever amount in the overall range that works for you.
$150 - folks who register with this commitment may not benefit from generational wealth, would be unable to participate at a higher registration fee, and/or are finding it hard to make ends meet each month.
$250 - folks who register with or around this commitment are employed full time with benefits provided, have affordable housing costs and some money to spare, and are able to contribute a little more toward the actual cost of providing this series.
$300 - folks who register with this commitment are living comfortable with more than is needed to just get by, are benefiting from generational wealth and/or have a multiple-income household, and/or want to help cover costs for participants at the lower end of the sliding scale.
Our approach
Vocational discernment with Dream & Scheme combines emotional grounding, embodied practice, self-reflection, and a critical analysis of racial capitalism to equip you with tools to find and fulfill your sense of purpose while still paying your bills. We offer practices you can take with you for this decision and the next (and the next, and the next, and the next ), a way of thinking about how to dwell in the tension between God’s call and the world’s bullshit — an approach to figuring out what to do next with “your one wild and precious life.“
Our understanding of God as loving, welcoming, and invested in the good of the world is fundamental to our approach — and we wrestle with how to talk about that in a society where religion, particularly institutional religion, is so often used to harm, oppress, and harass. In a United States swamped by rising Christofascism, how can we talk about our belief in a God who loves us and draws us together in justice-seeking community? (To be clear, none of our work is about evangelism, conversion, or persuasion. Believe what you want, or nothing, we respect it.)
This approach to vocational discernment grows out of life-long wrestling with faith and religion (as well as wrestling with white supremacy, capitalism, shame, and despair), something that is always deeply personal and sometimes shared in community. In designing this cohort, and our work overall, we build from a foundational belief that the divine in the universe (which we usually call God) is present, is active, sets a wide table, and draws us into goodness.
Register with a $60 deposit to reserve your space in this cohort. After you register, you’ll receive an email asking you where you’d like to fall on the sliding scale and setting up how you’d like to make the rest of your payment. We’ll also ask for your address, for mailing the supplies you’ll need.
It may seem cheesy, but here’s the truth — we’re just thrilled to do this work and would love to support you and your journey. Drop us a line if you’re interested but unsure, or generally have questions — we’re happy to talk things over!