bridge
"Healing is not a certification,
it is our inheritance."
Jonel Beauvais, women's fellowship participant
Our Healing & Centering Practices
Grounding and centering invites the participants to practice authenticity and live into their purpose to incorporate transformative ways of being into their leadership and daily lives. These practices set them up to deepen learning or slow them down to breathe together and strengthen our container.
We incorporate many of these healing and centering practices into the other sessions and also offer these practices to be held on their own. We invite you to integrate these practices into your sessions and attribute the culture keepers who have offered them to the collective.
welcoming & grounding in place
These practices invite participants to move into space with each other with intention, care, and acknowledgement of the ancestors, traditions, and lineages we are bringing into the room.
Practices:
centering & mindfulness
These practices offer ways to collectively center and ground when entering or closing a space. These offerings come from lineages the organizing team holds dear.
Practices:
JOURNALING & REFLECTION
We share these prompts and practices, as ways to create moments of self-reflection and connection.
Practices:
STORYTELLING
Connecting with our ancestors -- those biological and those we claim, including movement ancestors -- grounds us in a sense of place, legacy, and lineage vital to nurturing our way of moving in the world.
Practices:
poetry
We turn to the poets to write towards the world we are creating -- to offer us guidance, a path to walk.
Poems:
body & movement
Our bodies hold our traumas, our labor, and our power and we seek to honor and care for them with these practices.
Practices:
song / call & response
Song has long been a way of building power among the people. We turn to these chants and songs to bring us strength and community in building the liberatory world we need.
Practices:
readings
We honor those we have learned from by saying their names. We live by the world building words of these women of color.
Texts:
The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House by Audre Lorde (1979)
Borderlands:/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldua (1987)
Emergent Strategy, Shaping Change Changing Worlds by adrienne maree brown (2017)
Parable of the Talents & Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler (1998 & 1993)
"Rest is a great thing.
Rest is resistance,
it’s reparations."
Nikole Hannah-Jones, What Is Owned (June 24, 2020)
The full guide of practices is also available below.
