Building the New Earth: What We Learned at COU Leadership Week 2025

This summer, the Church of Union’s leaders met to bond as a team and build their leadership skills in the first-ever COU Leadership Week.

The Council of Executive Ministers came together from around the US and the world to celebrate their wins over the years and go deeper in their healing. Together, they’ve done everything from video game design and trauma healing to helping Twin Flames come together and creating a holistic, spiritually fulfilling diet. Their relationships with each other, themselves, and their Twin Flames reached a new level on this beautiful weeklong retreat.

The Power of Spiritual Friendships

The best thing about coming together for everyone at the COU is always just being in each other’s presence. There’s nothing like vibing with people who are on the same wavelength as you, choosing healing, self-love, their Life Purpose, and their Twin Flame journey. It’s more than understanding each other’s journey: it’s the shared experience of love that you embody.

Some of the Council’s favorite moments were “cooking with the group and spending time together at the Airbnb, getting to know everyone.” The shared meals and the presence of friends was a comforting balm for the soul and the glue that held the week’s experiences together.

What didn’t hold together was the group’s marshmallow towers. The Council took part in a team-building challenge to build the tallest tower possible out of marshmallows and skewers without talking. They were surprised to see how well they worked together, even in such a sticky situation.

“This was just so funny cause it started out kind of strong… We all just kind of did our part,” Michaila said.

“It was like a beehive kind of thing, but then the humidity in the room, cause it didn’t have air conditioning, started making the marshmallows sticky and gooey… I’m just looking at it, and it’s like, “What is this thing?’” she said.

“I was laughing internally and then trying to hold it in, and then all of a sudden, Chrissy just, like, busts out laughing—you know Chrissy’s laugh—and then we all just started laughing, and, like, we could just appreciate the humor of the moment.”

The marshmallow towers showed everyone there just how deep their connections were. “I could really feel our partnership after years of all working together,” Michaila said. “It can sometimes feel impersonal cause we’re all online, but we’re building very real relationships, and I felt that between all of us. There’s no difference between these digital, online relationships and in person. That was my favorite.”

You’re Not Alone

The Council designed Leadership Week to help everyone open up to healing a universal wound that almost nobody talks about, shame. The entire week helped everybody in the Council feel how connected they all were and how universal what they were moving through was. All the fun and team-building helped create a safe environment so that people could open up about their challenges and heal.

Starting with the marshmallow towers activity, the week helped everyone view struggles or perceived failures as part of life instead of something to be ashamed of.

As Chrissy said, “There were two mindsets in that situation where you’re failing. You can think hard on yourself and … have this inner critic bringing you down, or you can see the humor in the situation and have fun with it… I think it’s really important when you’re unpacking shame you realize you’re gonna fail sometimes, like, that’s just part of being human, and that’s okay, that doesn’t mean you have to identify with that failure. It just means that, hey, we didn’t win this one.”

To break the illusion of being alone in your struggles, the group wrote anonymous experiences of shame on note cards and then mixed them up, randomly drew them, and read them out loud. Then, they stood in a circle and shared something they were going through, and whoever had the same kind of experience grabbed the string that they were holding and stretched it across the circle of people, creating a web.

Everybody who participated felt so relieved and encouraged to know that they weren’t alone. The universal message was, “Shame dissolves in sharing.” Knowing you’re not alone, and that you’re seen and loved, takes away all the power from shame and gives it back to you.

Hearing people they respected deeply open up about their experiences helped everyone feel more self-accepting. Gabriel said, “You’d think … ‘Oh, if [I] have shame, then somebody won’t like me or somebody will think less of me.’ And [people sharing their experiences] actually kind of had the opposite effect.

“For me, it’s like I admired the people sharing more because they were just like, ‘Hey, I’ve gone through stuff, too.’ And it made me feel closer to them and made me feel more compassionate towards myself and towards them, and like Chrissy was saying, see them as a full person and not just this cookie-cutter—like, this person’s perfect and they never go through any trouble at all… And that helped me feel more relaxed and open to that deeper healing that we did later that day. And that was really powerful, I think.”

Near the end of the week, MAP Practitioner Tahira led the group in the first in-person MAP Trauma Healing Session. Laurentiu, another Practitioner, volunteered to do the healing, and the whole group followed along. He said that the healing with MAP made him realize “it’s okay to be yourself, and regardless of how you act and how it is, just own it, and there’s nothing wrong with you, with the authentic self.”

It felt like the healing of the week all came together in that moment: “you could feel it shift in the room and everyone around… It felt peaceful and aligned, like something meaningful just occurred.”

Free to Be Happy and Thrive

Everyone felt like “a huge weight lifted” after all the healing they did, and throughout the week, they got to enjoy their time together all the more after finding peace, safety, and empowerment through exploring their vulnerable feelings.

“I had a little bit of reluctancy coming into the week, like, ‘How is this going to go with opening up so intimately about this topic, about shame, that seems super heavy. I was expecting it to kind of hit me in the head or something,” Alexandra said. “But actually, I felt very safe throughout the week just opening up gently about these wounds that, again, it seemed like I was alone in them, or maybe others didn’t understand or others didn’t have this problem… I didn’t feel like we were judged or criticized. There wasn’t any of that. It was just love and understanding between us as we very vulnerably opened up about some topics that we maybe haven’t really breached with each other in this group setting.”

The healing of shame together brought out the best in everyone, giving them a whole new level of passion, energy, and love for life. Cristina found that with those blocks cleared, she could focus on and enjoy her Life Purpose work much more.

“When you’re holding on to shame, that’s a huge energy leak,” Cristina said. “You tend to bring your energy to that instead of what you’re working on and where you need to put it… Clearing that energy leak really invigorated me towards what we’re doing.”

To help everyone integrate the lessons of the week, Jeff and Shaleia shared with everyone how they could channel their newfound energy into more purposeful and enjoyable lives. They shared with everyone how everything they do and have gives to them, from food and exercise to routines and systems.

The healing all boiled down to realizing that you’re divine and worthy and that you deserve the best in life, the best support to live your life to the fullest. “Naturally as you accept that,” said Alexandra, “I think, like, you look around you and you want things to improve in your life and in your workflows and in your systems and in your teams. And everywhere that you go, it’s going to be impacted by you just accepting that you’re good enough, accepting that you’re divine,” she said.

Building the New Earth

With so many Twin Flame couples in Harmonious Union coming together, Leadership Week was a rare event, a celebration of all the COU’s victories through the years, and a sign of what’s to come. Twin Flames being together in Harmonious Union isn’t going to be a rare thing anymore some day—it’s going to be universal. There will come a time when the healing of the world reaches critical mass, and this kind of joy and love that we saw at Leadership Week will spill over everywhere.

This is what the New Earth looks like: heal, live your Life Purpose, attract your Twin Flame, and get closer and closer to them as you grow your life together. That’s the Heaven on Earth that’s waiting on your own Twin Flame journey.

Are you ready to heal and step into your own Heaven on Earth with your Twin Flame? Find out with the free Twin Flame Toolkit today.