Lead your inner world
Recognise the protector, child, achiever and doubter inside you. Learn to stay close when fear or resistance appears, rather than letting one part quietly run the whole room.
Heart iQ Academy · A 30-day self-paced initiation
As in Circle,
As in Life
You do not go hunting for your pain. You learn to open, and the parts you left behind come to find you.
This is the initiation into Heart iQ Circle Work. Short daily teachings help you recognise what happens inside you around other people, then practise a more present response in the life you already have.
30daily lessons
4case-study circles
30 dayswith Z
Lifetimecourse access
Why circle?
The way you sit in circle is the way you meet your life.
A circle makes visible what daily life lets you avoid. You may wait to be invited, rush forward, watch everyone else or understand exactly what you feel without letting anyone close enough to meet it.
These patterns are not failures. They are intelligent ways you learned to stay safe. When they become visible in a held group, you can practise a response that is more honest and more alive.
You hold back and hope someone notices.
You take responsibility for the whole room.
You explain what you feel instead of letting it move.
You stay close to others and leave yourself out.
The mechanism
Circle makes the invisible visible.
In Heart iQ, the field means the atmosphere created between people. Your body often registers it before your mind does. A silence tightens. Someone tells the truth and the room softens. One person takes a risk and another finally finds the courage to speak.
You learn to notice that movement without trying to control it. You begin with your own nervous system, because the quality of space you can offer another person depends on the space you can hold inside yourself.
If the rain is pouring from the heavens and a thimble is all you hold up, a thimble is all you will receive. Heart iQ is the art of turning that thimble into a bucket, and that bucket into a swimming pool, and that swimming pool into an ocean.
Christian Pankhurst
The work in your real life
Facilitation is a life skill, not only a job.
The course begins with your relationship to yourself, then follows the same skills into intimacy, community and the spaces you influence.
Meet relationship differently
Notice the living space between you and another person. Practise listening, repair and honest impact without abandoning yourself or making the other person wrong.
Create real community
Learn the culture that lets people gather with more truth and less performance, whether that is in your home, friendship group or an existing community.
Bring more of yourself to life
Use facilitation as an everyday capacity for difficult conversations, leadership and the moments when your old pattern would normally take over.
What you will be able to practise
Navigate your inner world and shadow with more compassion
Read a group field and track your body in real time
Take space and receive attention without performing
Share with greater precision and emotional honesty
Offer presence without rushing to rescue or fix
Begin the course
One payment of $297 in your local currency
The method at the heart of the course
The Open S.P.A.C.E Circle
A Heart iQ circle is a body-led sharing space. Nobody is required to perform, fix another person or find the perfect words. Attention returns to what is alive now, and the group learns to stay present enough for truth to be felt.
“I don’t need to be fixed. I need to be met.”
S
Slowing Down. Safety begins with tempo. When things slow, the body has time to speak.
P
Presence. Stay with what is here without rushing to fix it or pull attention away.
A
Attunement. Listen with your whole nervous system and notice the impact moving between people.
C
Connection. Build a field where truth can touch another person without losing either of you.
E
Embodiment. Let truth move through breath, tone and sensation so it becomes more than an idea.
The complete curriculum
Thirty days from presence to leadership.
Move one lesson a day or take longer. Every teaching ends with a simple invitation to notice how it already lives in your relationships and choices.
Week 1
Presence & Aliveness in the Now
The ground the whole method stands on. The open S.P.A.C.E circle, the two forces that generate a group field, the difference between soul forward and soul back, and the practice of just like me that dissolves separation.
Week 1
Presence & Aliveness in the Now
Day 1
What is Heart iQ?
You do not go hunting for your pain. You learn to open so the parts you left behind can rise and be met.
Day 2
The Open S.P.A.C.E Circle
Why being felt in presence, rather than fixed or coached, is itself the corrective experience.
Day 3
The Two Forces That Create Circle Energy
The consciousness that holds space and the surrender that lets life move through you.
Day 4
Soul Forward and Soul Back
Find your default posture and learn to become touchable, so life can actually reach you.
Day 5
Just Like Me
A three-word practice that dissolves the illusion of separation and lets you take the medicine from anyone.
Day 6
Storytelling in Circle
Feel the difference between a story that defends against the moment and one that is longing to be heard.
Day 7
Open S.P.A.C.E Facilitation: A Case Study
Sit behind my eyes in a recorded circle as I narrate the small decisions of facilitation.
Week 2
Shadow & Liberation
From managing pain to expanding range. There are no negative emotions, only energy that has been repressed. The fire energies of boundary and wildness, the water energies of grief and longing, and how they combine.
Week 2
Shadow & Liberation
Day 8
Expanding Your Range
Reframe the stuck places in your life as ranges waiting to be liberated.
Day 9
There Are No Negative Emotions
Pain comes from resistance to feeling. It is repressed energy, not the emotion itself, that turns toxic.
Day 10
The Range of Fire
Bring clear boundary and protective power by choice, by keeping your inner pilot light lit.
Day 11
The Range of Water
Tell the grief that opens you from the sadness of a story, and let heartbreak move through you.
Day 12
When Water & Fire Come Together
Blend passion and ache into a yearning heart, and unlock parts held since childhood.
Day 13
Find Your Authentic Aliveness
Speak from the alive present, and generate aliveness on command, so your words land.
Day 14
Case Study: Liberation & Shadow Work
Watch me coach a vague longing into a clearly named range and onto the mat, in a recorded circle.
Week 3
Relational Truth & Boundaries
The relational field, the we that comes alive whenever people connect. Meeting points and the soul kiss, harvesting your own medicine, sharing impact so it lands as a gift, and why containment and tribe matter.
Week 3
Relational Truth & Boundaries
Day 15
Trans-Personal Meeting Points
Discover the soul kiss, the distance at which a wider field opens between two people.
Day 16
What's Your Medicine?
Turn any moment, even the boring or triggering ones, into personal medicine you carry into your life.
Day 17
Sharing Impact in Circle
Meet someone’s opening so your response lands as a gift, instead of pulling energy onto your own story.
Day 18
Are You An Asset?
Tell whether the charge you feel is your own, an amplified version, or the field’s to begin with.
Day 19
Relationship Dynamics & Containment
Why real containment lets a partner bring all of themselves, and why intimacy needs the support of tribe.
Day 20
Getting Triggered in Circle (and in Life)
Recognise your trauma responses as they happen and move yourself back into openness.
Day 21
Case Study: Relationship Themed Circle
Watch how a relational share becomes a doorway that opens a whole field, in a recorded circle.
Week 4
Alchemizing Pain into Gold
The hardest material met with the most care. How trauma actually resolves, through safety and attunement rather than analysis. Projection and enrollment as tools for repair, and what you tend to do with your pain.
Week 4
Alchemizing Pain into Gold
Day 22
How Trauma Resolves
Why attunement, not love alone, is what heals, and why you can stop excavating and simply open.
Day 23
Projection & Enrollment
Read your attractions and aversions in a group as a map, with an advanced practice on roles and deroling.
Day 24
Can Trauma Be Healed?
Release the pressure to be finished, and see which parts transform and which become your lifelong gold.
Day 25
What Are You Doing With Your Pain?
Name the avoidance strategies that protect a core sense of unworthiness, and meet pain as fuel.
Day 26
Emergence & The Field
How a group becomes a single intelligent field, with two bonus pieces on the science of emergence.
Day 27
Unity Consciousness
The non-dual skill of feeling the goodness in every side of a divide, the deepest muscle a facilitator builds.
Day 28
Case Study: Meeting Collective Pain
Watch how I meet collective grief while staying tethered to something larger than the pain.
Closing
Leading Circles & Retreats
The last lessons turn toward holding space for others. How I open a retreat by inviting surrender to the collective, and the full set of agreements that make a container safe.
Closing
Leading Circles & Retreats
Day 29
How to Start a Retreat
How I frame the opening of a retreat so people surrender to the field, with a deeper piece on culture.
Day 30
Heart iQ Retreat Agreements
The full set of agreements that turn a gathering into a safe container, ready to adapt for your own spaces.
Four real case-study circles
Watch complete Heart iQ circles with Christian explaining what he notices and why he makes each choice.
Four knowledge checks
Confirm the central ideas have landed before moving into the next body of work.
Certificate of completion
Complete the lessons and checks to receive your Heart iQ Academy course certificate.
From the transmissions
The words you will carry into the rest of your life.
“You are me, cleverly camouflaged as you. There’s just one of us in the room.”
“You need to be touchable in order to be touched. We need to be meetable in order to be met.”
“Shadow does not mean dark. It means that which hasn’t been allowed.”
“Your problems in life are the symptoms of limited range. Every problem you experience is not due to the problem. It’s the result of a part of you that isn’t open.”
“There is no purpose to life, just a life of purpose.”
Week four · Why trauma stays
What happened was only part of the story.
When I was fifteen, my best friend and I were ambushed outside a nightclub. He was beaten badly on the ground. I got free, then froze and watched. Weeks later he was out drinking and largely untroubled. I had panic attacks and anxiety for years.
“It wasn’t just the fact that it happened. It’s that in the weeks and months after, there was no place for me to go to talk about what happened. I was left alone in my own experience.”
The event does not explain the whole imprint. What happens afterwards, and whether anyone is there to meet us, can change what the body carries.
“Pain is like the alcohol in the wine. It’s what makes the wine rich, but too much will kill you.”
“You want your wounding for life, because that wounding becomes a portal. When you remove the wound, you remove the gift that came from it.”
Where the thirty days are going
The reason this work exists.
Twenty-five years ago I studied with Neale Donald Walsch, and one of the primary teachings in those books is that we are all one. It resonated. It touched something. And I was left with a question I could not put down.
I knew we were all one. I wanted to feel it in my body.
So I set about building a transformational technology that could take that from a concept into a lived experience. Circle work is what came out of it. What happens in a circle is not a metaphor for unity. It is the thing itself, happening in a room, in bodies, for a few hours at a time.
What we practise in the microcosm of a circle is a map of what is possible at the scale of nations and of the whole human family. I am not attached to a timeline for that. It might be a hundred years or a thousand. I am not here to finish it. I am here to plant it, and it spreads through the people who learn to hold it.
“Nobody does anything inappropriate given their model of the world.”
Your thirty-day journey, wherever you are
Take the circle into your lifewith the Heart iQ app.
Watch each daily teaching, read the lesson notes and return whenever life gives you a real moment to practise. Your first 30 days also include Z, your Heart iQ guide, available by text or voice when you want help making sense of what is moving in you.
- Lifetime access to all 30 daily lessons
- Four real case-study circles
- 30 days with Z, your Heart iQ guide
- Your progress shared across app and web
Learning in the Heart iQ Hub
The teaching stays close while life becomes the practice.
Ask Z for 30 days
Use text or voice to ask about a lesson, unpack a term or explore how the work relates to a moment in your own life.
Learn in community
Share reflections and read what others discover, without any requirement to reveal more than feels right.
Return for life
Keep every lesson and case-study circle, and revisit the material whenever a new layer becomes relevant.
This is for you if
- You long for deeper connection in your relationships
- You want an embodied entry into Heart iQ Circle Work
- You already know the work and want to strengthen the ground beneath it
- You want more emotional range and relational intelligence
- You want the way you feel in circle to become available in daily life
This may not be the right fit if
- ×You want a professional facilitator certification from one self-paced course
- ×You need live therapeutic support or help with an immediate crisis
- ×You want information without bringing any of it into daily life
- ×You are looking for advanced supervised practice rather than an initiation
From people learning the work
What Heart iQ Circle Work made possible.
“This training is heart-centered, heart-led and heart-opening. You will laugh. You will cry. But most of all you will deepen in an experience of what it is to truly feel loved and to love others authentically from your innermost heart.”
“I could not do the work in my community, helping and mentoring young men, giving them a sense of purpose and belonging, without the Heart iQ model. Now I am giving back. Thank you.”
“Since using Heart iQ with my clients I am having amazing results. It is changing lives. They are sharing, expressing, and feeling without holding back.”
“It has made such a huge difference in myself and my ability to be present with clients. It has transformed my coaching.”
Your guide
Christian Pankhurst
I came to this work through my own nervous system first. A childhood shaped by intensity and a lack of safety left me with anxiety and a deep sense of disconnection. What began as a search for relief became a lifelong study of what lets a person stay open and present in connection, especially when it gets hard.
Around twenty-five years ago I began the work that became Heart iQ. I have refined this body-based approach through hundreds of retreats, always returning to the place where it becomes real: your own body, relationships and choices.
“This young man, Christian Pankhurst, knows how to articulate these messages as well as, if not better than I can. He is a profound source of wisdom and depth.”
A pathway, not a pressure
Begin here. Continue only if the work calls you further.
As in Circle, As in Life is a complete initiation in its own right. If you later want to study facilitation as a craft, Circle Work Facilitator Training is the next step. Healing in Tribe is the residential immersion for experienced practitioners ready to hold deeper group process.
1
As in Circle, As in Life
Learn the culture and practise it in your own life.
2
Circle Work Facilitator Training
Study how to hold and guide a circle.
3
Healing in Tribe
Enter supervised residential immersion and advanced process work.
“It’s a bit like walking with a pebble in your shoe. Every step, there’s an ache. That pebble is the reminder that what we’re living in is not normal. And the day you stop feeling it is the day to come back.”
Christian Pankhurst
Begin your facilitation journey
As in Circle, As in Life
$297
Lifetime access. One payment.
- 30 daily video lessons, including four recorded case-study circles
- Session notes and reflection prompts on every lesson
- 30 days with Z, your Heart iQ AI coach, on call any time
- A community space to share, connect, and be witnessed
- Four weekly knowledge checks and a certificate of completion
- Lifetime access to all the lessons
New to Heart iQ circle work? At checkout you can add Heart iQ Foundations, the practical companion, for $97, and go deeper with our facilitation training for $497.
14-day full-body yes guarantee. If it is not the right fit, write to us within fourteen days for a full refund.
Questions before you begin
What does it cost?
As in Circle, As in Life is $297 for lifetime access, shown in your local currency. It is one payment.
I have no experience. Is this still a fit?
Yes. You do not need to be a professional facilitator. Everything is taught from the ground up in short daily lessons you apply the same day. Many people take this simply to become more present in their own relationships and life.
How much time will it take?
Each day is one short video and an invitation to apply it. You can move a lesson a day, or at your own pace. You have lifetime access, so you can return to any lesson whenever you want.
Is anything live or scheduled?
No. The whole course is self-paced and pre-recorded, including the case-study circles, which are real Heart iQ circles I narrate you through. Start whenever you are ready and move at your own rhythm.
What do I get at the end?
A certificate of completion once you have finished all thirty lessons and passed the four short knowledge checks. It marks the ground you have covered and the true beginning of your facilitation journey.
Is this the same as professional facilitator certification?
No. This course gives you a certificate of completion and a strong initiation into Circle Work. Professional training and supervised practice sit beyond this course.
How do I access the course?
Use the Heart iQ app on iPhone or Android, or sign in through your web browser. Your progress follows your account across devices.
What if the course is not right for me?
Write to [email protected] within fourteen days of purchase. We will refund the course under the full-body yes guarantee.