How to Thrive in the New Era by Living a Personal Narrative of Hope, Healing, and Unlimited Potential
A workshop for creating resilience by identifying, deconstructing, and reimagining the stories that keep us sick, suffering, and stuck.
Inspired by the New Science of Directable Human Potential and the Wisdom of Life School.
Why “Unbroken?”
Each one of us is beautiful, whole, complete, and wise (yes, you!) exactly as we are. But we get confused about who we are because we’re told disempowering stories that our pain and suffering are immutable outcomes of our genetics and life circumstances. That we’re sitting ducks needing to be “fixed” or rescued by the experts.
Unbroken pays homage to this exquisite nature of ours while upending the cultural narratives that keep us sick and stuck.
In the Unbroken workshop, you’ll unlearn these harmful insidious narratives and realize the vast power and potential you’ve possessed all along.
Unbroken is your new story of healing.
Karyn Shanks MD
About Your Workshop Mentor and Guide
Karyn Shanks MD is a physician-healer-teacher-writer who lives and practices in Iowa City. Her work is inspired by the revolutionary science of Functional Medicine, body-mind-spirit principles, and wisdom gleaned from the transformational journeys of thousands of clients over her thirty-year career. She approaches all of her work through the Unbroken philosophy and framework.
She is the author of HEAL—A Nine-Stage Roadmap to Recover Energy, Reverse Chronic Illness, and Claim the Potential of a Vibrant New You, as well as numerous e-books, articles, and weekly emails offering readers encouragement and support on their healing journey. See her work at KarynShanksMD.com.
Karyn is a graduate of the University of Chicago, Pritzker School of Medicine, completed a residency in Internal Medicine at the University of Iowa, and is board certified in Internal Medicine, Integrative Holistic Medicine, and Functional Medicine. She founded the first center in Iowa dedicated to a Functional Medicine whole-person approach to healing in 2001. She most loves her two grown sons, husband of thirty years, three dogs, books, gym companions, and Nature playgrounds.
Who is the Unbroken Workshop for?
Unbroken provides a powerful supportive healing foundation for all those seeking spectacular health, wellness, and resilience by creating a foundation of personal empowerment and freedom.
Unbroken Learning Goals
Unbroken is a workshop designed to develop and support the foundational personal narratives of hope and unlimited personal potential necessary to create a life of healing and resilience—to not just survive but thrive through life’s challenges.
We’ll define resilience as the capacity to face life’s challenges with strength, energy, and adaptability. We understand that all dimensions of resilience—biological, cognitive, psychological, emotional, and spiritual—can be learned, developed, and sustained by anyone.
Our capacity for resilience is limited only by our personal narratives about what is possible and not possible.
These cognitive roadblocks can be easily identified, explored, and reimagined in ways that unleash our vast untapped potential—this is where we’re headed.
What You Can Expect from Unbroken
You will identify and release the disempowering stories that have held you back from your life’s potential, replacing them with stories to support your growth and healing.
You will throw out the tenacious, perhaps unconscious, stories that have hijacked your personal control of life’s outcomes, and replace them with new foundational healing stories to support, soothe, love, empower, and guide you through the changes and challenges of life—those you choose as well as those that are unexpected. You will experience the beauty and power of your vast untapped potential and renewed resilience.
The Unbroken workshop will be delivered to you in five experiential modules. Each module tells its own story and leads you on a journey of revelatory concepts and practices, ending with a prize that you create through your own wisdom.
Tangible Deliverables of Unbroken
- You will understand the role of powerful cultural narratives that have influenced how you define yourself, your relationships, the world you live in, your personal power and potential, and the possibilities for your life.
- You will identify the disempowering stories that stand in the way of your potential for personal growth, healing, resilience, and wellbeing.
- You will transform your disempowering stories into stories that support, ennoble, and energize you through simple guided practices.
- You will experience measurable, observable, and palpable improvements in your wellbeing and resilience in the face of life’s challenges.
- You will successfully incorporate nourishing self-care practices into your daily life to sustain your growth, healing, resilience, and wellbeing.
Unbroken Venues
For the Unbroken workshop, you will join a cohort of intrepid learners, each learning and practicing at their own pace. You and your cohort will work independently but come together as a community through our Unbroken Workshop Private Forum and for live Q&A sharing sessions at participants' request.
Each module will be delivered upon sign up and will include:
- Short introductory videos.
- Your Unbroken journal delivered in a downloadable format for printing.
- Experiential practices and lessons to begin each module—permission slips, tools, and guided reflections.
- Core lessons for each module delivered in downloadable format for printing.
- A writing practice experience to integrate the new practices and lessons.
- Unlimited access to the community and instructor through our Unbroken Workshop Private Forum.
- Intermittent opportunities throughout the workshop for live Q&A and sharing with your community.
The Unbroken Experiential Modules
Module One: The Wisdom of Our Storytelling Brains
Module Two: The Influence of the Storytelling Culture
Module Three: The Power of Self-Guided Change
Module Four: The Exhilaration of Story Mining
Module Five: The Love of Your Healing Story
The Unbroken Experiential Module Structure
Each of our five workshop modules contains a unique part of our journey, sharing a common structure.
- Introduction to the module.
- Write a permission slip: to strengthen, free, and empower us as we do our important work.
- Learn and practice powerful tools: to forge deep, compassionate connections to ourselves as we re-wire and strengthen our minds; acknowledge and honor our feelings and emotions; soothe and reassure our bodies we are safe to be our true selves to do our authentic work.
- Sink into a guided reflection: to become our own compassionate witnesses to our truth; to sink deeply into our bodies to observe, feel, and calm, preparing us to receive the important lessons to come.
- Unbroken Lessons: the conceptual framework we’ll use to identify, explore, deconstruct, and reimagine the cultural and personal narratives that keep us sick, suffering, and stuck. These lessons are based on the New Science of Directable Human Potential—epigenetics, neuroplasticity, core Functional Medicine systems biology, and body-mind-spirit positive psychology, a common-sense analysis of our cultural values, and Life School wisdom of my clients and I after thirty years of observing how people heal.
- Writing Practice: We’ll consolidate our new learning and support our healing transformation through the dynamic process of writing, using our Unbroken journals. Neuroscience shows us that writing literally re-wires our brains and accelerates personal growth. As a powerful tool for self-observation, exploration, discovery, and guidance, we’ll use writing to consciously craft our new stories of healing.
- Overarching premise: We are Unbroken.
How to Use the Unbroken Workshop to Your Best Advantage
This workshop is beautifully simple. Showing up, listening, using your new tools, considering new ideas, and writing for short periods of time will result in tangible shifts in your resilience through learning, calming, empowering, and practice.
To succeed with this workshop, you must commit. Not to this workshop or to me, but to yourself. The program is very flexible regarding the amount of time you need to put into it however, your level of benefit will match your level of effort. No one can do this for you.
Here are a few suggestions that will help you maximize your benefit from this workshop. They are based on my own practices and those of my clients who have been successful with similar programs.
- Work through each module in the order in which it is presented as each one builds on the previous ones.
- Then, work through each component of the individual modules in the order they are presented to you as, again, each one builds on the previous one.
- If you find yourself resisting a particular practice, pause, take a deep breath, and do it anyway. Remember, this is for you. Resistance is often an indicator of what we need the most—our brains go into survival mode when change or uncertainty abounds. Think of yourself as a warrior daring to step up for yourself.
- Each module will take approximately 2-4 hours to complete, but they can be done in pieces to best fit your schedule. Optimally you will have:
- 1-2 hour for module introductory practices and lessons.
- 1-2 hour for the writing exercise.
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The Unbroken Workshop was created to allow participants to complete one module each week for a total of five weeks, though I encourage you to go at the pace that feels most comfortable for you.
- Establish a period of 10-20 minutes per day to devote to writing in your Unbroken Journal—daily practice of your new skills and lessons is key to creating the changes that support your resilience.