A great workshop on anti-oppression and activist burnout by R3Collective

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Not to miss: our friends at R3Collective are organising a great workshop!

Tending to Our Hearts: A Mindfulness Workshop for Artists and Activists

 

**This is Anti-Oppression 303 — the conversation folks have started a hundred times about how we can love each other better in radical communities.  Let’s get inspired, looking at how we can move through what stops us and thrive together**

                         

While artists and activists powerfully resist injustice at the organizing level, oppressions affect us in personal ways as well.  Often we lack spaces to reflect and share about our inner experiences—about those places where oppressions have touched us and left us wounded.  Racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, ableism, sizeism—as well as exclusivity and judgment within our own communities— invite us to feel ashamed of our very humanity.  These issues affect our relationships, our leadership, and our sense of possibility in life.

If you are interested in reconnecting with your sense of possibility, and engaging mindfully and creatively with a discussion about emotional impacts of oppression, please come to Tending to Our Hearts: A Mindfulness Workshop for Artists and Activists.

You can expect:

  • an introductory and interactive one-day workshop on Saturday, April 28th, 10-6pm
  • to learn and practice mindfulness tools to acknowledge and extend resilience
  • the option to share about the emotional impacts of oppressions in your life
  • a part of the day will involve a musical collaboration activity to expand and ground our vision for healing, connection, and transformation within radical communities
  • lunch included!

Note: while the workshop is designed to be therapeutic, this will not be a group therapy event; folks will be invited to share about their experiences, but not the most intense ones.  Sharing will be kept to specific amounts of time and coaching will be offered to enable folks to speak from a grounded place.  If/when hard feelings do come up, people will be supported in tending to them.

REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED FOR THIS WORKSHOP. We feel it’s important to prioritize access to this workshop to people of colour, Indigenous people, poor folks, gender non-conforming people and folks living with disabilities. So, we’ll be holding 50% of workshop spots for members of these communities.

When registering, please let us know how you identify (in ways that feel safe to you). Please register with your name, contact information as well as access needs at tendedhearts@gmail.com.  The workshop space and bathrooms are wheelchair accessible.  We sadly don’t have the budget needed for ASL interpretation at this time!

COST:  $30-$50—pay whatever on this scale you can afford.  No one turned away for lack of funds.

Facilitator Bios:

Sheila Banerjee is committed to enabling radical social justice communities to be the powerful change agents that we intend to be— recognizing our multiple strengths while being curious about those places where we get stopped.  A queer, biracial cis-woman, Sheila’s current roles include parent, psychotherapist and activist.

Ali Sauer is a queer, white, cis-woman with an invisible disability.  She is a psychotherapist who works with an anti-oppressive feminist framework.  Ali was inspired to become a therapist after years of doing social justice work where she witnessed and experienced enormous amounts of burn-out, oppressive behaviour and vicarious trauma.  She spends a lot of time trying to figure out how activists can be nicer to each other and to ourselves.

Sedina Fiati is a queer performer (actor, singer, dancer), creator, arts facilitator and activist. Her mediums are the stage, screen, internet, street corner, anywhere she can say her piece. She holds a BFA degree in Music Theatre from theUniversity of Windsor and has appeared in various festivals all over Toronto including: Fringe, SummerWorks, Mayworks, rock.paper.sistahz, Buzz and Manifesto. She is a member of the R3 Collective and Moyo Wa Africa.

This workshop is offered in partnership with the R3 Collective, and 15% of proceeds will go to R3.  R3 (Roots Rhythms Resistance) is an artists’ collective recovering indigenous roots and resisting colonial oppression through music, dance, visual art and theatre for and by marginalized peoples, with a particular focus on Queer Indigenous and Queer communities of colour.  http://r3collective.wordpress.com/

 

 

 

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