Bret WarshawskyFounder, Storylivingry Studio · A Civil Rights Moviement for the Soul

Quick Overview of Taste of Wonderland

5 Aug 2022 · 2 min

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1:31

In this brief facilitator-led overview, Bret Warshawsky outlines a mental‑health and addiction workshop that uses an Alice‑in‑Wonderland metaphor to structure the experience. The agenda consists of four main stations: (1) the Hallway of Doorways – a 30‑minute exploration of systemic cracks across medical, community, and personal domains; (2) the Pool of Tears – a 30‑minute session for participants to identify and mourn what they are grieving and what must be let go; (3) a break followed by a look‑through the Looking Glass, where emerging, non‑traditional approaches to mental health and addiction are presented; and (4) the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party – a collaborative synthesis where insights from the previous stations are mixed to generate new ideas, concluding with a closing. The tone is conversational and instructional, with a hopeful, reflective sentiment toward re‑imagining care.

Chapters

So today, where our little process is, and we might zip through this a lot faster because there aren't as many of us, but it is based on Alice in Wonderland. And so the first stop on the, on the, on the tour of the, of the Taste of Wonderland is the Hallway of Doorways. Where we're going to look at the cracks in the current system. And when we use the word system, we're also referring to the, the, the whole— it's not necessarily the medical system or the hospital system or the community system. It's all of that. So it's any, any experience with, with mental health and addiction. We're going to spend about 30 minutes there. We're going to spend about 30 minutes in the pool of tears, which is looking at where, where, where we're grieving. What we're grieving, what we need to let go of. Then we have a little break, and after that we're going to look at some of the exciting things that are happening right now that are very different than the current approaches to, to mental health and addiction. And the last step is, is putting together the, uh, the ingredients that come from the hallway, from the pool of tears, from the looking glass, mix them together at a Mad Hatter's tea party and see what we come up with. And then we have our closing.