*ASL and captioning provided*
NOTE: 2.75 CE credits are available for this class (click here for more information)
Class Description
All of our relational encounters are shaped by complex power dynamics. Conflict is an inevitability, making it critical to build the capacity to engage with it. For those working to disrupt how “care” is provided, we must attune to the ways in which mainstream practice has been shaped by systems of oppression. Our nervous system responses to disruption also mirror the colonial structures we seek to dismantle, eliciting defensiveness, paternalism, and separation from self or the othered. What does it look and feel like to practice resourcing our bodyminds and spirits in conflict while the Earth’s and our own inner resources dwindle from capitalist extraction and exploitation? What can the wisdom of the body in conflict with social norms teach us about moving through conflict with greater fluidity and creativity? How can care providers create containers that honor the liberatory potential of rupture?
This class will invite participants to question and queer their current approaches to conflict within care and community contexts. Through contemplative methods of presencing and witnessing our bodies on the earth and our interconnectedness to non-human and more-than-human kin, we will ground in our desires, depths and curiosities within conflict. Together we will attune to the expansiveness of radical world-making, reframing tension as a tool for building greater awareness, pleasure and play. Faculty will offer rituals and reflections on the fluidity of our power, wisdom, identity, and capacity. Participants will cultivate skills for engaging with conflict in ways that hold space for mystery, mess, and mending.
Learning Objectives
- Specify how dominant approaches to conflict uphold systems of oppression (e.g. sanism, ableism, racism, transphobia)
- Demonstrate the ways in which conflict holds potential for deepening insight and interconnectedness
- Identify how spiritual perspectives can illuminate the language of violence within conflict
- Review body-based practices that make it more possible to be present to discomfort, harm, and rupture
Faculty
Isa Frank is a queer, non-binary, somatic sex educator, horticulturist, and artist living on the Coast Salish territories of WA. They are also an aspiring abolitionist, and ancestral mender, with a deep dedication to cultivate community resilience through pleasure, play, and earth based practices.
Atlas Tan (they/them) is a spiritual care provider, healing space facilitator, meditation instructor, and educator on topics like grief, death, and contemplative pedagogy. They identify as transgender, nonbinary, neurodivergent, third culture, and someone living with chronic pain. Their practice is mostly inspired by lineages of Tibetan Buddhism, Theravada Buddhism, Healing Justice, Disability Justice, martial arts, eco-spiritualists, and disruptive mystics that traverse the line between boundaries. They are dedicated to help make spiritual care more accessible to those recovering from religious trauma, and build communities of embodied learners that challenge oppressive systems of knowledge transmission.
What You Get
Registration includes the 3-hour class session, an optional 90-minute discussion group one week after the live class (Sunday, June 9, 2024 from 12-1:30 pm EST), and access to IDHA’s School for Transformative Mental Health on Mighty Networks (our virtual learning community where you’ll have the opportunity to engage with other students and your faculty).
Questions?
Email us at contact@idha-nyc.org
