Join the Zoom Event today by Clicking Here (you will be taken directly to the Zoom event)
Come create an energetic human connection in our July 15th Beloved Community Cafe virtual space. We are inviting some of our Antiracism Book Circle co-facilitators (Bhavanada, Curtis, Susan, Alain) to share insights from their facilitation experience of Resmaa Menakem’s My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Bodies and Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Facilitators, Silvia and Muna, will open the space to the group for reflection and conversation as well as touch on why these two impactful books in the antiracism culture will be offered again as part of the book circles this coming Fall. We invite you, the community, to join us along with your favorite beverage to ask questions, engage in meaningful discussion with us, and have fun listening to our amazing book circle co-facilitators.
About the BCC Facilitators:
Silvia Morales is the Executive Director for the Resource Center for Nonviolence. She is trained as a public interest lawyer and has a passion for civil rights. In her life-long role as advocate for the Latinx community, she has remained dedicated to providing spaces for racial healing and understanding. She loves the Central Coast of California because it continues to provide her and her family a life filled with beauty and purpose.
Muna AlSheikh was trained as a therapist, she has experience in eclectic spiritual and body practices. She worked with kids and adults in the foster care system, held workshops/talks on social and peace activism, and volunteered doing inner work with inmates in the prison system in California. She is working now with the RCNV running the antiracism book circles.
About the Book Circle Facilitators:
Bhavananda Lodkey dedicates her life to an embodied spiritual pathway. Her work spans decades of spiritual healing and guidance, devotional yoga, mentorship and rites of passages for girls to women, hospice grief support and end of life services and ceremonies as well as holistic workshops, performance art, and event productions.
I conclude that Black bodied participants in both the Fall (2020) and Spring (2021) book circles have a “need” to communicate around their traumas; as significant and pressing.
Curtis Robertson, Jr. is a professional musician, health care professional, meditation facilitator, Certified Yoga Teacher and Organic Gardener. Looking at the deep roots of racism is a path he has been on for many years.
Being involved in Community/Book Circles is a engaging way to collaborate in anti-racist work on this path of liberation for all.
Alain Desouches is an Electrical Engineer by training from France. Arrived in San Jose, US in 1967 for work. After retirement, Alain joined The Pachamama Alliance in 2007, became deeply engaged in social justice issues, and has been participating in SCCCCOR, the Santa Cruz County Community Coalition to Overcome Racism since 2013.
Through Resmaa Menakem’s book My Grandmother’s Hands, I’ve been discovering the somatic approach to doing antiracism work, a new dimension to my exploration and activism.
Susan Kohen is committed to working, in community, for racial justice She has cofacilitated three book circles with the RCNV, and through this experience, has learned that joy is as inherent as the challenges in this work. Susan is also on the organizing team of SURJ (Showing Up for Racial Justice-Santa Cruz County).
MGH is more like a course on the wisdom of our bodies than a book. It wasn’t until I went through the practices with others that I understood a crucial element of healing racial trauma-in ourselves and in others we encounter-is the ability to settle our bodies. This is where our power is sourced.
Learn more about our Antiracism Book Circles Here
Other helpful links:
Resmaa Menakem on Healing Racial Trauma through Body Centered Approaches
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yl8NKF5to-0
Isabel Wilkerson- America’s Unspoken Caste System