Healing Love, Healing Money: Trust as the Foundation for a New Culture
A Four-Day Live Online Course in partnership between Clear Sky Center and Tamera.
Hosted by Karen McAllister and Duncan Cryle from Clear Sky and Monika Alleweldt and Benjamin von Mendelssohn from Tamera
October 1-4, 2026
10am–12pm MDT / 12–2pm EDT / 5–7pm BST / 6–8pm CEST
This course explores a simple but rarely examined question:
What if our struggles with money are not primarily financial…but relational?
And what if the way we’ve learned to love is shaping the way we earn, spend, give and receive?
Over four days, we explore how fear around belonging, intimacy, security, and survival shapes both our relationships and our economic behaviour and how healing trust at the community level may be essential for real change.
Why This Course?
This course emerged from two parallel inquiries that unexpectedly led to the same place.
Clear Sky Center is a Buddhist-inspired contemplative community and retreat centre in the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia, Canada. Tamera is a peace research community of around 160 people in southern Portugal, with decades of experience exploring trust, love, and the foundations of a new culture through their Global Love School. Both communities have spent years asking how we might live, love, and organise ourselves more honestly. Both arrived, from very different directions, at the same territory.
Karen McAllister began exploring people’s relationship with money in 2010 while helping lead Clear Sky through significant financial challenges. What appeared to be financial issues often revealed something much deeper: wounds around safety, belonging, and power. Over time, this work expanded from individuals to couples, organisations, and communities. Again and again, the same pattern emerged. Money was rarely just about money. It revealed deeper questions:
Will I be okay? Do I belong? Do I have a voice?
In 2025, Karen and Duncan visited Tamera in Portugal to learn more about the Love School and its decades-long exploration of trust, intimacy, and community. There they had deep and generative conversations with members of Tamera around the striking parallels between the wounds people carry around money and the wounds they carry around love.
Both touch our deepest fears and longings. Both reveal where trust has been broken. Both invite healing.
This collaboration was born from a shared recognition that healing our relationship with money and healing our relationship with love are not separate journeys. They are part of the same movement toward greater trust, freedom, creativity, and service.
Who Is This Course For?
This course is for spiritual practitioners, community builders, coaches, healers, leaders, and thoughtful human beings who want to understand how survival, belonging, love, money, and power shape their lives. It is relevant for anyone seeking healthier relationships with themselves, with others, with money, and with the communities and cultures they participate in, whether those are families, workplaces, spiritual groups, or intentional communities.
If you are curious about trust, intimacy, community, and cultural healing and willing to explore your own patterns with honesty and compassion, you will likely feel at home here.
Agenda
Oct 1st — The Roots of Fear
Why Money Anxiety Is Not Just About Money
We begin by exploring how:
- fear of exclusion shows up as financial stress
- scarcity responses live in the nervous system
- collective trauma influences earning, saving and giving
- money becomes a proxy for safety and belonging
Participants will:
- start to map their early survival adaptations around both love and money
- learn introductory groundwork to notice grasping, avoidance or control patterns
- begin tracking somatic responses to financial and relational stress
Oct 2nd — Love, Possession & Power
The Hidden Economic Training Ground of Relationship
This session looks at:
- ownership in love and ownership in the economy
- jealousy, control and financial secrecy
- how partnership becomes an economic unit
- the influence of patriarchal conditioning on intimacy and livelihood
Participants will:
- step into exploring communication patterns around money and intimacy
- embark on identifying inherited relational and financial agreements
- undertake the practice of truth-telling in a carefully held small-group setting
Oct 3rd — Trust as Infrastructure
Community as a Container for Healing
We examine why:
- healing often fails when kept private
- both love and money tend to isolate us
- trust requires social structures, not just personal insight
- new relational agreements create economic safety
Participants will:
- work in small pods to explore feedback and witnessing
- experiment with shared inquiry around resource and care
- reflect on what supports transparency in both love and livelihood
Oct 4th — Ethical Livelihood
From Private Survival to Collective Sufficiency
We close by exploring:
- what “enough” really means
- purpose-aligned earning
- generosity and reciprocity
- livelihood as participation in cultural healing
Participants will:
- set out on clarifying values around work and contribution
- contemplate giving, receiving and sustainability
- sow the seeds for creating a personal practice that aligns love, money and service
Throughout the Course
- short meditation practices
- relational inquiry exercises
- somatic awareness practices
- buddy conversations
- optional journaling prompts
The emphasis is on:
- slow integration
- shared learning
- relational repair
- and honest dialogue
Intended Outcomes
By the end of the four days, participants may notice:
- less isolation around money or relationship struggles
- increased capacity for truthful communication
- clearer alignment between values and livelihood
- greater ease in giving and receiving
- a shift from private survival toward shared sufficiency
Where Might This Lead?
This pilot is intended as a beginning rather than a complete journey. Depending on participant interest and what emerges from our collaboration, future opportunities may include:
- A longer 8–12 week course
- A deeper exploration of healing love and healing money
- Continued learning through Clear Sky’s programs and practice community
- Opportunities to engage with Tamera’s work and offerings
- New collaborative programs developed by the facilitators
These are possibilities rather than commitments, and we look forward to discovering what wants to emerge together.
Is This Course For Me?
Money and relationships are among the most emotionally charged areas of human life because they touch our experiences of safety, belonging, attachment, and power.
This course invites participants into meaningful personal inquiry. Strong emotions, familiar patterns, or old stories may arise as part of the process.
For this reason, we work slowly and with care, using meditation, somatic awareness, reflective exercises, and supportive dialogue practices.
Participants are always encouraged to honour their own pace and boundaries.
While this course is educational rather than therapeutic, it is designed with trauma-awareness and nervous-system sensitivity in mind.
Pricing
- CAD $450 to CAD $550 – Pay-It-Forward
Helps make supported spaces possible for others and strengthens the collective container. - CAD $350 to CAD $450 – Full Contribution (Sustaining Rate) Reflects the true value of the course and supports the continuity of this work.
- CAD $200 to CAD $350 – Supported Access
For those with limited income, in transition, or experiencing financial constraint at this time.
Your Teaching Team
Karen McAllister
Karen McAllister is a contemplative leader, senior meditation teacher, certified money coach, Co-Executive Director of Clear Sky Meditation Centre and co-founding member of Clear Sky Meditation Centre.
For more than fifteen years she has explored how our deepest patterns around safety, belonging, worth, and power shape both our relationship with money and our relationships with one another. Her work began while helping lead Clear Sky through significant financial challenges and evolved into supporting individuals, couples, communities, nonprofits, and values-based organizations in transforming their relationship with money.
Alongside her professional work, Karen’s own life has been a laboratory for exploring trust, partnership, intimacy, and community. Living and practising within intentional community for more than two decades has shown her that many of the fears and attachments that emerge around money also emerge in love. Questions of security, freedom, honesty, belonging, and power often sit beneath both.
Her approach integrates meditation, somatic awareness, relational inquiry, and practical financial coaching, supporting people to move from survival-based patterns toward greater trust, authenticity, connection, and service.
Karen is passionate about helping people discover that money is not merely a resource to manage but a relationship that can become a path of awakening.
Duncan Cryle
Duncan Cryle is a co-founding member and Co-Executive Director of Clear Sky Meditation Centre. He brings together over twenty years of meditation practice, organizational leadership, systems thinking, and community development.
While much of Duncan’s work has focused on financial stewardship, governance, and building resilient systems, his deeper interest lies in the relationship between transparency, trust, and human connection. Through decades of living, leading, and partnering within intentional community, he has explored how honesty, accountability, freedom, and mutual care can support both healthy relationships and healthy cultures.
Together with Karen, Duncan has spent many years examining how money, power, intimacy, and community influence one another. Their shared journey has revealed that healing often begins when difficult conversations become possible and when trust is supported by both personal practice and collective structures.
Duncan brings a grounded and practical perspective to the course, helping participants explore how relational insights can be translated into sustainable agreements, healthy systems, and meaningful cultural change.
Monika Alleweldt
Born 1954 in Giessen, Germany, M.Sc. (Agriculture), works for many years for and with the “Plan of Healing Biotopes”. Since 2001 she mainly lives in Tamera, Portugal.
Until 2024 she was one of the owners of the publishing house Meiga. Since her early youth she aspired to a career in helping people in need all over the world. As a young student, she travels to Guatemala as part of her studies. The trip becomes a turning point in her life.
She realizes that help alone does not change anything. Symptoms can be alleviated, but the cause of the suffering is not eliminated. So what is the right approach? A serious illness forces her to return home early and leads her to an existential decision. She completes her studies but then leaves her professional career and sets out to find an answer that gives hope. She examines many paths, contacts different people and initiatives.
Finally she finds convincing answers in the work of Dieter Duhm. A cooperation begins that continues to this day. In 2021 she finishes her first book titled „Global Liberation from Fear and Violence“ (in German).
Today, she is joining with other women to bring forth a second book, provisionally titled Women’s Solidarity: The End of Collective Repression. The End of Patriarchy — a work that envisions a new feminine consciousness, and a deep reverence for, and love of, the masculine.
Benjamin von Mendelssohn
Born into a once-wealthy, culturally significant Jewish banking family in Germany, the issues of reconciliation, politics and money accompanied Benjamin from his early years.
After a radical but frustrating period of political engagement in his youth, Benjamin started to explore holistic approaches to bringing about change. To this end he co-founded the Peace University at Potsdam and later researched into many social experiments and intentional communities.
Although he trained as a healer, dancer and choreographer Benjamin retained a focus on new models for living and a passion for complex synergies and systems theory. Creating syntheses of seemingly opposing forces is important to him – politics and spirituality; vision work and concrete manifestation; Eros and religion; free sexuality and deep, committed partnership; nature and technology and most critically inner and outer peace work.
Benjamin has been living and researching in Tamera since 1998 where he now serves as a next-generation leader. He has been co-leading The Global Love School since its inauguration in 2012 and was director of the Grace Foundation for Humanising Money for 15 years.