Help me spread and grow my healing practices

Background and Mission:

My spiritual journey truly began for me after leaving a toxic relationship which forced me to re-evaluate the foundation I had been resting on up to that point. In the past 3 years I have done extensive self work where, as in the words of one of my favorite poets Warsan Shire, "I broke open and dug out all the rot with my own hands." This has involved changing my diet to incorporate a healthy eating, ample amounts of all types of books, from philosophy, to spiritual texts, to various self help books, to reading about different Indian and African holistic health practices. I am grateful for the foundation that was laid for me by my parents to always be mindful of my health and of alternative ways of healing besides relying on pharmaceutical medicine. On this journey I have been blessed with opportunities and teachers that have helped to enlighten me to my purpose. After 3 years of intensive internal self work and healing, I have come to a place where I have built a sturdier, healthier foundation based in God and Love, for myself and the world. From this foundation I hope to build a practice to offering various holistic healing techniques to communities that face the complex structural oppression.

For 2017 I became very clear that I wanted to begin offering the healing techniques that I have learned to my community. With this intention set I have been blessed with opportunities to participate in various trainings that will further my skills and my offerings. I hope to specialize in working with traumatized youth in bringing them into a deeper connection to themselves from a combination of embodied practices, and through this deeper connection with themselves facilitating a deeper connection with one another and Earth.

How I am currently serving my community:

I am currently working with Shaka Jamal, a fellow filmmaker and yogi, who has founded Namaste Ready, a organization to introduced those usually excluded from yoga to yoga and the outdoors. I am also working with organizers at Qilombo, a radical community center in West Oakland focused on Black, Brown, and indigeous self-empowerment, to set up a permanent healing space for practitioners to offer their services and hold regular healing clinics to support the needs of the surrounding community. I am in the process of completing my yoga teacher training and have the opportunity with one more training to be able to graduate this May with my 500-hour yoga teacher certification. I am also enrolled in class full time, studying so far chemistry and biology to have a deeper understanding of how our body operates.

I am asking for your support to help plant the seeds in me that will eventually germinate. Please offer your support in the form of a financial donation so that I may pay for my fees to be able to participate in the Generative Somatic body intensive training for politicized healers. This training will add valuable skills for me as a healer to hold space and work with the bodies of people who have historically and systematically been subjugated to on-going trauma.

How Somatic Therapy Can Help Patients Suffering form Psychological Trauma

Somatic Therapy has the benefits of

• Reframes and transforms current or past negative, abusive, and overwhelming experiences
• Greater sense of oneself
• Greater resilience to stressful situations in the future
• Greater sense of calm, positivism and hope
• Greater confidence
• Reduced discomfort, strain, and worry
• Substantial sense of clarity and meaning
• Heightened ability to concentrate
• More active and engaged in daily activities (http://www.treatment4addiction.com/treatment/types...)

This training will aid me in deepening my ability to transform through the body and increase my ability to to be with people through their transformations and openings. There are historical and social conditions that create holding patterns within certain communities that recreate traumas and keep us stuck in a bleak past. I hope to aid in these communities in self-empowerment and transcending the trauma that keeps us from imagining and enacting a better future.

Thank you so much for your support.