Mindful Facilitation: Holding Space for Transformation
What does it really mean to facilitate learning?
It may seem like a simple question. A facilitator designs activities, asks questions, guides discussions and helps a group move through a process. But beneath these familiar practices lies a more fundamental question:
What if education is not about delivering knowledge, but about creating the conditions in which people can discover, experience and create knowledge together?
This question sits at the heart of Mindful Facilitation for Empowerment; the Training of Trainers (ToT) Legacy program developed from the work of Pracha Hutanuwatra and Jane Rasbash.
From September 26 to October 11, 2026, Gaia Ashram will host this intensive residential training, led by three facilitators who learned directly from Pracha and have continued to develop their own practice through his teachings: Om (Sunisa Jamwiset Deiters), Petra Carman and Heaven (Tu Hong).
In a recent online conversation, the three spoke not simply about what the training teaches, but about what mindful facilitation has come to mean through their own experience.
Their stories reveal an approach to education that begins not with techniques, but with how we show up—with awareness of ourselves, openness to others, and a willingness to stay present to what emerges.
The Facilitator Is Not the Center
For Petra, a turning point came in 2016, when she first met Pracha and Jane in Findhorn, Scotland.
At the time, she was already comfortable speaking and communicating ideas. What she recognized she lacked was the ability to truly engage others—to listen deeply, make room for different perspectives, and allow a group to generate something beyond what she herself had prepared.
Pracha showed her another way.
He knew when to step forward, and when to step back. He could challenge people when challenge was needed, while creating enough space for them to discover something for themselves.
For Petra, one of the most important lessons was that the facilitator does not need to be the most visible person in the room. “The best facilitated process is the one you don’t know is happening.”
This is not about the facilitator becoming passive or irrelevant. Quite the opposite. Stepping back requires a high degree of awareness: knowing what is happening in the group, recognizing when intervention would serve the learning—and when it would simply satisfy the facilitator’s own need to control the process.
The people in the room are not passive recipients of knowledge. Their experiences, questions, uncertainties, mistakes and insights are part of the learning itself.
This is reflected in three principles Pracha often returned to:
Relationship is education.
Decision-making is education.
Self-cultivation is education.
Learning happens not only through what we are taught, but through how we relate to one another, how we make decisions, and with what level of honesty are we willing to encounter ourselves.
Learning to See Our Own Potential
For Om, mindful facilitation is deeply connected to her own journey of transformation.
Growing up in a poor rice-farming family in Thailand’s Isaan region, she carried a strong sense of inferiority and never imagined herself confidently speaking before international groups.
Then she met Pracha.
He saw potential in her that she could not yet see in herself. Once during a training exercise, he asked participants to step forward and cross a line whenever they identified with a statement being read out by him. When Pracha said, “I am a child of a local farmer,” Om remembers shaking as she stepped forward. Yet instead of judgment, she found acceptance—and gradually learned to accept that part of herself.
Through years of training and repeated practice, she began to see her background not as a limitation, but as part of who she was. Eventually, after eight years of learning and working closely with Pracha at Wongsanit Ashram, Om eventually founded Gaia Ashram with her partner, Tom Deiters.
Looking back, Om says what gave her the confidence to do so was not simply the knowledge she had gained, but a learning attitude: the willingness to remain open, learn from experience, and figure things out along the way.
This became central to her understanding of facilitation. The facilitator does not need to have all the answers. Instead, their role is to create the conditions in which people can discover their own capacity to learn, grow and contribute.
Empowerment, in this sense, is not about giving people power. It is about helping them recognize the power they already carry.
From Knowing Facilitation to Embodying It
If Om’s story shows what mindful facilitation can unlock in a person, Heaven’s experience points to another question: How does facilitation become something we truly embody?
For Heaven, the answer is practice.
“You have to keep practicing until facilitation becomes your own,” she says. “You embody it.”
This is why the ToT is intentionally intensive. Participants do not simply learn facilitation techniques; they practice facilitating again and again, individually and in teams, receiving feedback from trainers and peers.
Sometimes, the practice deliberately pushes them beyond their comfort zones. They may have to facilitate while feeling nervous or under pressure, work with a partner in unfamiliar ways, or respond to situations they cannot fully anticipate.
For Heaven, this is not separate from the learning—it is the learning.
The practice helps course participants discover whether they can remain present when situations become difficult: Can they notice their own reactions? Can they keep listening instead of taking control? Can they respond to what is actually happening rather than simply following a plan?
With repeated practice, facilitation gradually moves from something one knows to something one can embody.
And participants learn not only from the trainers, but from one another. Every practice session brings different approaches, ideas and creative ways of working with a group. The community itself becomes part of the learning.
For Heaven, this is also what makes facilitation relevant far beyond workshops. It can support learning, collective decision-making, community building and deeper exploration of the challenges people face together.
The techniques may vary with each context. What remains is the capacity to stay present, listen deeply and respond with awareness.
A technique can be learned. But facilitation, ultimately, has to be lived.
The Group Becomes the Source of Wisdom
In mindful facilitation, experience itself becomes a teacher.
Instead of simply teaching a concept such as leadership, facilitators create situations in which participants can experience leadership, decision-making, trust or uncertainty for themselves. The experience then becomes the starting point for reflection: What happened? What did we notice? What can we learn from it?
The facilitator listens, asks questions, and helps connect and synthesize the different perspectives that emerge.
The knowledge, therefore, does not come from the facilitator alone. It is co-created by the whole group.
As Heaven explains, everyone who enters the circle is a contributor to the collective wisdom. This is what makes the process empowering: participants are not simply receiving knowledge—they are actively creating it together.
Holding The Unknown
Perhaps one of the most challenging aspects of this approach is that the facilitator does not always know what the outcome will be.
The group may be exploring leadership, trust or decision-making. The facilitator can design the conditions for learning, but cannot fully determine what the group will discover.
This requires a very different relationship with control.
Om describes it as learning to “hold the unknown.”
Sometimes the group may move into conflict. Sometimes someone may become vulnerable. Sometimes an activity produces an unexpected insight. The facilitator needs to remain grounded enough to stay with what is unfolding rather than rushing to bring the process back to a predetermined plan.
This is why presence matters so much.
For Om, mindfulness is not something that can simply be switched on when a workshop begins. It has to be cultivated through daily practice. At Gaia Ashram, meditation, attunement and intention-setting are part of everyday life. Om also maintains personal practices such as Tai Chi and Qigong.
“Presence is not something you can click on,” she says. It is cultivated over time.
From Personal Transformation to Social Change
The deeper purpose of this work, however, extends beyond the learning space itself.
Pracha’s larger question was how education could contribute to social transformation.
Drawing from engaged Buddhism, mindfulness, social activism, transformative education, indigenous knowledge, ecological thinking and other traditions, he developed an approach that connected inner transformation with outer change.
Om describes this as discovering the connection between the “wall” within ourselves and the walls that exist between people and within society.
When people begin to understand their own fears, assumptions and conditioning, they may also become better able to recognize the structures that shape relationships, communities and society.
This is why mindful facilitation can extend into so many different fields: education, community work, leadership, organizational development, activism and participatory decision-making.
The underlying question remains the same:
How do we create conditions in which people can access their own capacity, learn from one another, and participate meaningfully in shaping the future?
Pracha passed away in 2023, followed by Jane Rasbash in 2024. Their teachings continue to live through the work of those who learned alongside them. For Om, Petra and Heaven, this means not simply preserving what they were taught, but continuing to practice, explore and embody it in their own work.
This is the legacy they are now carrying forward: not a fixed formula, but a living practice of mindful, participatory and empowering education—one rooted in mindfulness and self-awareness, and one that asks the facilitator to keep cultivating themselves while creating the conditions for others to discover their own wisdom and capacity.
And perhaps this is what makes the Training of Trainers so much more than a training in facilitation. It is an invitation to cultivate the awareness, courage and capacity to become the change we wish to see — and to create the conditions for others to do the same.
The Mindful Facilitation for Empowerment – Training of Trainers (Legacy ToT) will take place at Gaia Ashram from September 26 to October 11, 2026. The residential program welcomes educators, facilitators, community workers, leaders and others who are ready to deepen their practice — and to explore how mindful, participatory learning can become a pathway to meaningful change.
Write to us at gaiaschoolasia@gmail.com for more information
