Just completed a course at Stanford with A-lan Holt, Mark Gonzales and many amazing guests. In Living Free we explored how justice based work urges us to interrupt systems of violence with systems of healing that recover traditions, invent new modalities, and connect to survival practices developed by many generations of people in community. We brought together leading artists, thinkers, organizers, and healers to envision work and embody practices that resist the subjugation and erasure of their bodies, land, and natural resources. In this course we ask: what does it mean to embody health? How can we shift frameworks of pathology into frameworks of wholeness through intentional design? What practices can we develop, recover, and share that help us create systems that support and value equity, healing and creativity for communities most at risk? And finally, how can we all live free?
For many students this was a liberating experience of community healing. One wrote:
"Living free, to me, means existing and operating in ways that model the liberation I would find when all oppressive institutions and systems have been successfully dismantled. . . Living free means that I am thriving as a member of the loving and healing communities that I am a part of, finding love and compassion and being able to live authentically and without fear of being targeted for being who I am. To me, living free incorporates resilience to the systems that seek to break and kill me while seeking to eradicate my contribution to the oppression of others. Living free is also utilizing self-care to really heal oneself and thrive."