Creative Resilience Retreat:
Transforming Embodied Oppression & Coming Into Belonging

with Chelvanaya Gabriel
Friday, August 27th, 1 – 4pm EDT (10 – 1pm PDT)
Registration closes one hour before the event

Registration has closed

Self-selected, sliding scale registration: $50 / $75 / $100
$25 access grants available. ACMHE members: $25 discount (join here)

This retreat is an art-based dialogue based on creative prompts and somatic reflections about our experiences with, and conceptions of, how systems of oppression and white supremacy show up in our lives, and in our bodies. No matter our positionality, privilege or perspectives, we are impacted by these systems and, as we move through the world, we carry these impacts with us, into our interactions with others, with ourselves, with the Earth. This is a space for pausing and sitting with what’s there, identifying what we are carrying so that we might better choose, when we can, what to carry and how best to carry it. We will do this together and co-create a ‘whole person space’, including checking in about our access needs. We will alternate between small group creative activities and large group dialogue, and I will lead us in short contemplative practices designed to invite us to hold both greater awareness and a sense of belonging.

Read more about Creative Resilience Dialogues in this Boston Globe piece by arts reporter Cait McQuaid.

Retreat Takeaways: 

• increased awareness of how white supremacy can impact us
• increased awareness of how we reproduce systems of oppression
• building relational skills, eg. active listening
• cultivating a sense of belonging alongside this greater awareness
• an understanding of an abundance mindset in context with navigating the effects of white supremacy

Chelvanaya Gabriel (they/them) is an interdisciplinary art activist/storyteller and resilience facilitator with a background in the sciences. A self-taught artist, they found an Audre Lorde-inspired form of self-care and healing-survival in creating visual work after the 2016 election. This art practice has since expanded to become interwoven with their social justice facilitation and community building work. They create space through their work where stories of wellness, trauma, disability, and neurodiversity, especially of QTBIPOC folx, can be witnessed and collectively processed. Their work is guided by decolonizing contemplative/somatic practices and an embodied awareness of ancestral knowledge/healing. With an afroqueerfuturist/disability justice lens, they ask “Whose stories aren’t being told?” With an interdisciplinary and intentionally collaborative approach, they pose this question and step into boldness and an audacity to both take up space and hold space for all the complex stories that must be told.