Wisdom, Love + Medicine with Leah Avene
Interview #1, Series II
Melbourne, Australia - 9/17/17
Leah Avene is a musician, story teller, broadcaster and mother of two living in Narrm (Melbourne, Australia). Born in the pacific nation of Tuvalu, Leah's mixed ancestry is Tuvaluan and Irish Settler Australian.
Leah performs music as Philemon, a songwriter and story teller whose music explores identity, ancestry, suffering, yearning and hope through the poetic lens of narrative healing and story as medicine.
Leah co hosts a weekly radio show on PBSfm, All Our Stories, using music as the starting point for conversations around identity, culture, equality and activism.
Leah is also a writer, co cultural facilitator and public speaker who uses poetry to shake up the colonized trappings of the English language and share stories that help connect with, understand and re imagine the world.
http://www.albany.edu/ssw/76447.php
Dr. Salome Raheim is a professor of social work at University of New York Albany's School of Social Welfare. Her teaching focuses on integrative mind-body-spirit social work education and practice and how micro and macro interventions promote social justice.
She is former director of the University of Iowa's School of Social Work and former dean and professor at the University of Connecticut (UConn) School of Social Work, the first African-American to be appointed as dean. Her passion for creating more just organizations and communities has taken her across the United States and to four continents to provide training and consultation to schools, universities, human service organizations and businesses.
Her scholarship and teaching are focused on addressing power and privilege to increase diversity, cultural competency, quality, and effectiveness in education, health, and human services. She is highly regarded for creating inclusive and diverse environments in academic institutions. She has extended the organizational framework for her vision of diversity and cultural competence both inside and outside of U.S. borders.
Article about Leah and her work:https://heraldonlinejournal.com/2017/03/31/express-yourself-with-art-therapy/
Leah is an experienced practitioner, passionate about helping people across many areas such as: personal relationships; core beliefs; life transitions; career direction; resolving conflict; grief, trauma and illness; addiction and body image.
Leah combines Somatic Therapy and Shamanic Healing with Art Therapy to deepen the therapeutic process. Leah works with people of all ages, from children to adults, couples and families.
http://www.keitaawhitten.com/
Keita Whitten is a certified Somatic Experiencing® graduate, Licensed Clinical Social Worker and Kripalu yoga instructor.
She offers a holistic approach to mental wellness, addressing bodynamics and organic intelligence- exploring mind- body, soul, and environmental synergy- to support healing and to create and sustain wellness within yourself. Keita has experience working with creative personalities, queer, alternative lifestyles/identities, people of color, and complex trauma/ PTSD. and brings 20 years of experience working as a social worker in community mental health, public schools, and higher education.
Interview for Embodied Liberation with Deb Bopsie, Contemplative Psychotherapist and faculty at Naropa
Series 2, Interview #4
Faculty member at Naropa University since 2013 and teach in the Contemplative Psychotherapy and Buddhist Psychology program and the Somatic Psychology program.
Deb practices as a contemplative psychotherapist. She believes in the basic goodness of all people and join together with clients to reconnect that basic goodness back into their conscious life. Her practice is to sit with individuals, couples, families, and groups. She believes transformation is possible and healing can take place even under the most dire situations, feelings, and ways we are conditioned to think.
Deb incorporates the body through awareness and movement and spirituality through meditation and intention. She also is committed to social justice and recognize that many intra- and inter-personal problems are also influenced by the systems of power, privilege and marginalization affecting perspective and beliefs.
Rani George has been a spiritual seeker for as long as she can remember. She entered the world of energy therapy 23 years ago training in homeopathy. Then, her tactile awareness of energy and its movement grew spontaneously out of a meditation practice. In trying to understand this growing sensitivity, she was led to study Reiki, Pranic Healing, Healing Touch, Shiatsu, Reflexology and Cranio-Sacral Therapy. As a Reiki Master/Teacher she is intuitively led to incorporate various aspects of all these practices in private sessions, classes, and corporate trainings. Also Rani is a Family and Systems Constellations facilitator.
She is currently organizing a 7-month training with Francesca Mason Boring. Rani is a mantra meditation teacher and group leader, certified through Svaroopa Vidya Ashram. Finally, she has completed a year long program, Companioning the Dying: Opening Fully to Living and serves as a peer companion for that program and as a Reiki teacher and mentor for Montgomery Hospice.
http://shantiflagg.weebly.com/
https://www.etsy.com/shop/ShantiFlagg
Shanti Flagg is an artist and reiki master living in Baltimore. She manages the studio for The Monument Quilt, a community fibers project for uplifting the voices of survivors of rape and abuse. The Monument Quilt: a public healing space by and for survivors of rape and abuse. The Monument Quilt is an on-going collection of stories from survivors of rape and abuse. Written, stitched, and painted onto red fabric, our stories are displayed in city and town centers to create and demand public space to heal. The quilt resists the popular and narrow narrative of how sexual violence occurs by telling many stories, not one. The quilt builds a new culture where survivors are publicly supported, rather than publicly shamed.
http://www.wolfmedicinemagic.com/
Wolf Medicine Magic is a yoga teacher, dancer and Ayurvedic Health Counselor. Regina AKA Wolf Medicine grew up in a small town in Texas and moved to Brooklyn, NY in 2004. She spent most of her life dancing pursing both a BFA and MFA in dance before realizing that her true passion lies in a devoted spiritual practice. In 2013 she received a certification in Ayurveda from the Kripalu School of Ayurveda followed by receiving her 200-hour yoga teacher training from Kripalu in 2014. She believes her challenge in this lifetime is to live in the now and sharing Ayurveda and Yoga are a constant reminder that the present is all there is.
Her love of Ayurveda and yoga has lead her to study throughout the US and India helping her to gain a wealth of knowledge and experience that she is enthusiastic about sharing with her clients. In addition to Ayurveda and Yoga she also offers private and small group Breathwork sessions in the Brooklyn area.
Third Root centers the needs of women, people of color, low income people, people with disabilities, lgbt and gender nonconforming people, survivors, and all people with limited access to equitable health care. Third Root is mission is accessible, empowering, and collaborative in an effort to move toward realizing health justice for every being.
Dr. Moinzadeh's Somatic Experiencing Professional Page
Dr. Moinzadeh is a licensed clinical psychologist in private practice as well as a board-certified physician specializing in pain management and mind-body medicine. He has a life-long interest in exploring the underlying principles and meanings of human existence and have dedicated his life as a gay man and a clinician to the better understanding of these matters.
He has extensive training in psychoanalytic and Jungian psychology as well as somatic approaches and techniques including Somatic Experiencing, Bodynamics, Bioenergetics, and Five-Element Chinese Medicine.
He's active in teaching at educational conferences. seminars, and talks on gay and bisexual men and women’s mental health needs and healthy psychological development especially amongst people of color. He's engaged in ongoing clinical research into the process of embodiment that accompanies psychological individuation in sexual and ethnic minorities and use numerous tools and techniques from somatic psychology to inform my practice. He's also fluent in Spanish, Persian, and French and teaches medical residents regarding in the University of California at Irvine School of Medicine regarding mind-body medicine.
Laura Share owner and operator of Elemental Work - Licensed Massage Therapist and Associate Polarity Practitioner.
Laura has spent many years working with my hands in differing capacities--a bread baker, a landscape gardener, a jeweler. She learned the skills of listening with my hands and looking for balance and detail with the eye. She also worked in the field of human resources, and learned to listen deeply to others, and to hold confidentiality with conviction. She has trained in multiple massage techniques including myofascial release, Swedish massage, reflexology, and trigger point work in addition to advanced techniques designed to target neuromuscular interactions, providing muscular relief without discomfort. She completed training in oncology massage and the concerns at play both during and after treatment. She's pursued continuing education in the relief of neck pain, work targeting the deep muscles of the abdomen and pelvis, work focused on the evaluation and treatment of low back pain, relief of pain using traditional Chinese acupressure points, and biodynamic craniosacral therapy, as well as the use of kinesiology tape for pain relief and therapeutic treatment.
Wisdom, Love + Medicine with elliott
Interview #2, Series II
Landing Bird Yoga in Durham, NC * 9.17.17
Embodiment educator, a fiber artist, and a genderqueer body of cells.
Growing up within norms of binary genders and expectations of being and loving, elliott learned early-on that what is taught as solid – conceptually or physically – is simply not so.
With advanced studies in contemplative education, habits of mind, creative arts, anatomy and physiology, developmental movement patterns, somatic psychology, and yoga therapy, Eliot brings a quiet and reflective presence to meet curiosity insight about conditions and desires for change.
http://sarahpettyacupuncture.com/
Sarah Petty, L. Ac., Dipl. Ac. has a Masters in Acupuncture from the Tai Sophia Institute for the Healing Arts. As an NCCAOM Diplomat of Acupuncture, she has achieved the highest level of certification in her field. She has served several hours of volunteer work for various communities such as drug rehabilitation and for 911 Healing & Remembrance. She also completed a hospital tour in Hefei, China at the An Hui Hospital for further study. She was a Research Acupuncturist at Fort Belvoir Community Hospital in the Traumatic Brain Injury Clinic where she treated soldiers who suffer from chronic headaches.
In 2016 Sarah also completed the three year Somatic Experiencing certificate program. She is currently enrolled in the Somatic Resilience and Regulation: Early Trauma with Kathy L. Kain & Stephen Terrell, PsyD, SEP which is a somatic approach to supporting recovery from developmental trauma
Mea Tavares is a certified Usui Reiki Practitioner & Teacher and Polarity Therapist who has been practicing energy medicine in Maine for the past 20 years. Emphasis in Mea’s Reiki training was on Truth as teacher – both in learning the practice of Reiki through experience, and in learning to perceive and honor the personal Truth of each client.
Jennie is a quirky, loving, former long distance runner, artist, activist, healer, and mainer with a fierce dedication to the principles and practice of yoga. The first time she ever practiced yoga was over 15 years ago. Jennie utilizes yoga as means to ground in the present and soothe her fiery soul, but beyond the physical practice, she is learning to embody yoga’s philosophies and values and move closer to her ultimate goal- to live yoga. In both private sessions and group classes, Jennie uses Ayurvedic and yogic tools such as posture, mindful adjustment, breath work, meditation, and bandha (energetic locks) to create targeted classes and sessions that address individual and group needs- physical, energetic, and psychosomatic. She aims to empower her clients to participate in their own healing process by teaching practical tools that can be used on and off the mat.
Interview for Embodied Liberation with Margaret Roseanau
MA, RCST®, SEP, APP
Series 2, Interview #3: Biodyamic Craniosacral Therapy & Somatics
Margaret holds a Bachelor’s degree in Sculpture from Wesleyan University and a Master’s Degree in Gerontology from the University of Southern California. She is an approved teacher for the Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy Association of North America, (BCTA-NA) and has completed trainings in several bodywork modalities: Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy, Somatic Experiencing®, Pre and Perinatal Psychology, and Polarity Therapy. Margaret has been seeing individual clients in her own private practice since 1997.
Angie's Gym started as a tiny little whisper. If Angie had not been listening, she says she would have missed the chance to build something that signficiantly benefits her local community and visitors to the community. She is a fitness teacher, gym manager - her passion is teaching group exercise classes and supporting her community to get moving.
Ann Ehringhaus, Rosen Method Emotional Bodywork, Woolger Deep Memory Process, Reiki Teaching Master
In 1992 Ann began studying at the Acupressure Institute in Berkeley, CA, the oldest school of Asian bodywork in the USA. She received Basic Certification in 1993 and continued for the following ten years to take additional courses, focusing on Emotional Balancing and Traditional Chinese Medicine. Ann is also a certified practitioner of Rosen Method Emotional Bodywork, Woolger Deep Memory Process, and has been a Reiki Teaching Master since 1997, teaching more than 200 students. She has studied with many pioneers in the somatic movement. She maintains a private practice on Ocracoke Island and in Carrboro, NC, at The Wellness Alliance.
Plan to Thrive is a collaborative blog project to encourage and support the health and wellbeing of people and groups engaged in working for social and ecological justice.
We believe holistic health approaches are both a desired strategy and outcome of social change.
We want to see:
Healthy individuals
Healthy communities
Healthy bodies, minds and hearts
Healthy relationships
Healthy organisations
Healthy movements
… and for any of these you can substitute ‘powerful’ for ‘healthy’.
We recognise that health status is an outcome of political, social and economic inequality and as such we see our bodies as political sites.
We want to reclaim health and wellbeing from the fitness and weight loss industries and start a conversation that resists ableism, ageism, and all the other oppressions that target bodies.
We also want to challenge activist cultures and identities which emphasise stoicism, isolation and joylessness. We don’t believe burn-out is inevitable.
Jacoby Ballard has a specific interest in applying the teachings of yoga for the liberation of all beings, inside and out, which means being in intimacy, alliance, and solidarity with those not often encountered in the yoga classroom: dis/abled people, those with abundant bodies, people of color, undocumented immigrants, queer, trans, and gender non-conforming people, and low-income people. Jacoby is also interested in the ways that the trauma of oppression occupies the body, and uses the tools of plants and yoga to heal.
Jacoby is currently a part of an exciting new yoga teacher training called Bending Towards Justice. He co-founded Third Root Community Health Center in 2008 with the expressed interest of offering the tools of yoga, massage, acupuncture, and herbal medicine to people of all types and stripes at a sliding scale. Jacoby works to create space for all of these communities to benefit from yoga in a resonant setting.
When we inhabit our bodies, we include more of our selves in our lives. Writing becomes sparky and full figured. Memories acquire flavor and smell. Our interior lives describe themselves with new richness. And when we combine some of this vital, embodied writing with deep listening? Magic. Embodied Writing blends meditation and gentle movement with writing exercises and sharing, Embodied Writing explores what happens in our writing when we invite our whole selves into the room. In her bodywork practice, Jones offers Neuromuscular therapy for chronic and acute pain, Zero Balancing to address stress or anxiety and Craniosacral therapy to build clarity and capacity.
Jones graduated from the Namaste Institute of Massage in Portland, Maine in June of 2013. A student of Zero Balancing she has received training in both CranioSacral Therapy (via the Upledger Institute) and Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy (from Dr. Kate Klemer and Courageous Heart Therapies). Jones apprenticed with Integrated Awareness in 2008 and am a Reiki Level 2 practitioner. Before beginning her health studies, she received a B.A. from Wesleyan University in 1999, attended the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in 2002 and received a Masters in Education – specializing in digital media and storytelling – from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 2006.
Nicola is a thought and action partner helping teams move from ideas to action. Many of us suffer from disconnection, isolation, and a feeling of inefficacy at work - that soon permeates our lives. We separate the personal and professional in unhealthy ways that lead to destructive, unjust, and inequitable decisions for us as individuals and communities.
Part of Nicola's work is support organizations break the silos between professional development and personal growth we enable ourselves to bring our whole selves to work and create stronger communities in our businesses and teams. This in turn allows us to better achieve the potential of healthy, holistic community life with our neighbors and broader communities. With over ten years of experience in organizational development, community organizing, advocacy, electoral engagement, and training she founded Up With Community to address the fact that numerous organizations and enterprises have perfected creating meaningful visions of change, but continue to struggle with achieving their long-term goals.
http://universalpartnership.org/
Rusia N. Mohiuddin, based in New York, is a trainer, facilitator, & somatic coach who pioneered the integration of somatics into an organizing framework. Her current mission, through an organization she founded called Universal Partnership (UP), has been developing a holistic model for social justice change work that places in its center the necessary transformation of social change agents.
Rusia brings a unique style to creating pathways for individuals to bring their best selves forward when enacting social change in their organizations & communities. The work of UP aims at untangling the internalized oppression, trauma & violence. UP understands the importance of creating safe spaces & training that bridges healing & social justice in order to have well-grounded, effective leaders in the non-profit world.
http://midnightapothecary.blogspot.com/
Dori Midnight practices community- based intuitive healing with roots in traditional folk healing & magic, plant and stone medicine and anti-oppression practices. Drawing on her training as a clinical herbalist and interfaith minister, as well as her mixed ancestral heritage, Dori's work is grounded in self-determinism, collective liberation, and the belief that healing ourselves is inseparable from healing our communities and the planet.
Naturopathic medicine is a distinct primary health care profession, emphasizing prevention, treatment and optimal health through the use of therapeutic methods and substances which encourage the person's inherent self -healing process.
A few years into practice, Dr. Potvin realized that she wanted her practice structure to be designed differently. Her goal is to help her patients stay on track with their health even when life gets crazy, and making education for health independence the foundation of everything.
http://www.addverbproductions.org/about/cathy-plourde/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8sxkq0aXSk
Cathy Plourde is co-editor with Catriona McHardy for Making Out Like a Virgin: Sex, Desire & Intimacy After Sexual Trauma. Cathy Plourde's plays on coping with eating disorders (The Thin Line) and engaging bystanders in interrupting violence (You the Man) have been presented across the US. She has presented and published nationally and internationally on theatre and arts for social change, wellness, education, and community building, and has received commissions and artist residencies from numerous organizations to develop works addressing these issues. As founder and director of Add Verb Productions she raised over a million dollars to promote this work, including the award-winning performance and activism anthologies (Out & Allied, vol. 1 and 2) for LGBTQ youth and their allies. She has founded Animal Mineral Press with award-winning narrator Tavia Gilbert.
https://www.facebook.com/pg/ann-helfrich-acupuncture-aha
Five Element Acupuncture is an ancient technique based on the observation of nature, the human body, and the way life moves. In Five Element Acupuncture we let the natural world inform us, we recognize patterns of ecology and wellness, and we learn what it means to live well in, and with, each season.
Ann Helfrich works in partnership with her clients to help them become the experts in their own healing - working together to identify symptom triggers, beginning and maintaining new practices to overcome old habits, and using acupuncture to find relief, health and wellbeing. Ann is a graduate of the Tai Sophia Institute and College of the Atlantic.
Gina began her career as a birth doula, childbirth educator and assistant midwife, trained in the midwifery (or holistic) model of care. After almost 10 years in the field and 100 births, Gina’s focus shifted to caring for her own son in 2008, a journey that would lead to new interests and experiences. In 2013, Gina began to study a trauma healing modality called Somatic Experiencing (SE) with the idea of supporting her clients through birth-related trauma and other experiences that may affect pregnancy, birth, and parenting.
Now a co-director and teacher at Roots and Fruits Preschool in South Portland, Maine, she integrates her past experience in the birth world, drawing on her holistic roots as well as her new tools as an early childhood educator and student of somatic experiencing to support children, families and peers in and out of the classroom. With a growing understanding of developmental trauma, social justice and intergenerational trauma,
Gina’s building an eclectic set of tools to help folks heal trauma, become their most authentic selves, and move toward embodying Radical Love here on this planet. Gina is also in the process of getting her Master in Education from Goddard College in VT where she is studying social justice, trauma-informed classroom tools, and embodied education as a tool for liberation.
Shannon Mackey was the Director of Clinical Services at Maine Family Planning before having her daughter. She has spent her entire career working in the reproductive health and justice field. In addition to raising her daughter, Shannon now teaches pregnancy, birth and parenting classes at Birthroots in Portland, Maine.
http://www.alanhalford.com.au/
Working under the conflict transformation umbrella, Alan uses a number of facilitation processes to work with individuals, small groups and whole organisations in bringing a focus to the underlying issues. By giving attention to what is working well in the team, it is possible to carry forward what is the best about the past and incorporate it into future design. By asking questions about what we value or appreciate we can "improve" and build on what we have discovered. Working this way gives voice to the "Group Intelligence" of the organisation.
After study in America and Australia, Alan became an accredited mediator, a conflict resolution specialist and has worked with people's feelings (and his) ever since. Alan offers confidential facilitations for groups, individuals and managers
In January & February of 2017 Sage Hayes travelled between Maine and North Carolina interviewing healers and practitioners who are integrating trauma informed healing with art, vision and justice.