What does it mean to really have a sense of belonging?

So much of the way that ‘modern life’ is lived is displaced from traditional ideas of community, or a deep relationship with the land bases we depend on. A sense of home or community is often one divided exponentially among the many obligations that pull upon our time and many being through connections wholly digital. With an increased sense of malaise and isolation, the ‘old ways’ are becoming increasingly popularized while also bringing with them the hard truths of a legacy of colonialism and systemic oppression. How do we find a good way through these times, what kind of local and global village are we trying to build, unearth, reconnect to? How can we find a common sense of indigeneity that also implores use to strongly root from the center outwards? Without claiming to have answers, this months episode offers some insights into the work of Sobey Wing and his personal journey to do just that.

This month join Sobey Wing, Marisa Taborga Byrne, and Dane Zahorsky for our fifth episode as they discuss the ideas of cultural identity, reconnecting to one’s ancestral lineage, and how to parse ideas of community in an increasingly techno-centric world!

About This Month’s Guest –  Sobey Wing

Sobey Wing currently holds the role of President of Kathara (Katara)  Filipino Indigenous Arts Society based in the Unceded Coast Salish Territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaʔ (Tsleil-Waututh) (tuhslay woah tooth) peoples. The goals of the society are to continue to support re-indigenizing and decolonizing as Filipino diaspora living away from their  homelands. This includes with it a focus on rites of passage. They consult with indigenous people both in the Philippines and with the First Nations people of Turtle Island in doing their work and partner with many organizations. They also strive to be in solidarity with both the indigenous peoples of the Philippines especially those in Mindanao as well as on Turtle Island.

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This month, join Emily Frost, Marisa Taborga Byrne, and Dane Zahorsky as they discuss Whole Person Sexuality and how to support youth in empowering themselves and their communities towards equitable intimacy and healthier relationships.

About This Month’s Guests –  Emily Frost

Emily is an artist, girls empowerment coach and contemporary rites of passage guide working with youth and families around the Bay Area of California. She is also a devoted mother, wife, sister and daughter. She is the founder of LOVE YOUR NATURE, a movement devoted to girls and women awakening to their inherent wisdom, power, and purpose. Emily works with young people and adults, in groups and individually, as a counselor, rites of passage guide, experiential educator and consultant. She facilitates programs that develop social, emotional and spiritual intelligence, with a focus on girls coming of age.

Emily is also the co-founder of Real Talk Events, designing events to inspire learning, honest sharing, and authentic connection about what it’s like to be alive in these times. Her ‘Real Talk Curriculum’ is specially designed for teen girls to talk openly about sex, sexuality, intimacy, and other “risk taking behaviors”. She is a is a certified facilitator with Prajna Consulting, at the crossroads of youth advocacy, gender, sex and sexuality. She has trained in the work, philosophy and practice with Prajna’s founder, Charis Denison. Their partnered events address the questions: What are teens doing, what do they want, what do they need, and how can we support them.

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Sexuality Doesn’t Develop in a Vaccum – About This Months Topic:

Whole Person Sexuality, or holistic sexuality, is a expansive topic that encompasses values, relationships, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, experiences, self image, communication and socialization. Healthy love and sexuality emphasize the relational and interpersonal aspects of self-inquiry as an integral part of a thriving community. Holding these conversations with youth in strong and healthy ways can help cultivate the interdependent sexual health of the entire community, as well as be a preventative measure of sexual harm and misconduct.

Whole Person Sexuality is the open acknowledgement and discussion of one’s sexuality and gender not just internally but as an integral part of healthy community, that includes one’s spiritual, bodily, emotional and intellectual connection to their sexualityBy sharing our self perception and esteem, as they relate to other individuals and the community, we can become more sexually and emotionally literate, engendering healthy intimate relationships with self and others.

As seekers ourselves, our goal is to help cultivate the interdependent sexual health of the entire community.

Initiation as Prevention

Preventing sexual assault is one of the greatest and most important challenges in our lives today. The key is to be proactive and not reactive.  Of fundamental importance is holding space to explore healthy personal and interpersonal practices. The more one can build off of the existing sexual health education (or lack-thereof) in intimate and public discussions, the more it will reinforce a culture of healthy sexuality, create a feeling of invitation and investment, and aid in preventing sexual misconduct in the various places we frequent from our bedrooms to our workplaces.

Practicing Community holds consent based openness and access to relevant information  as paramount values. One of the most common experiences of rites of passage for many youth is sexual exploration.  Without guidance or dialog this natural threshold can often manifest dysfunctionally. Whether the topic is emotional, verbal, or sexual abuse, free and open information and dialog regarding natural curiosities, taboos, and desires will build respect and mindfulness in maturing youth.  

We encourage practitioners and caring adults to create situations in which peers are guided by mentors to explore healthy and responsible sexual literacy. Consider a viewing of Al Vernacchio’s TED talk entitled ‘Sex Needs a New Metaphor.’  He promotes moving away from a winner/loser dynamic regarding sex and towards a collaborative model of sexual interaction among youth.

Here are a few discussion topics that can start you off in addition to the many wonderful resources below.

Discussion Topics:

  • Common assumptions about sex, sexuality, and taboos.
  • Sexual awakening as a rite of passage.
  • Appreciating sexuality as vehicle for spirituality.
  • Seeking mentors or trusted peers to rely on for sexual advice, accountability, and support.
  • Sexual and physical insecurities and fears.
  • Gender Identity, expectation, and inequality; the restrictiveness of gender roles.
  • Developing and enforcing physical and emotional boundaries and safe words.
  • Clearly defining and practicing consent and requiring it for every step of a sexual interaction.
  • Understanding and defining red flags or danger signs in relationships.
  • Awareness and history with STD’s and normalizing testing.
  • Understanding male and female responsibilities and options for birth control.
  • Ensuring access to a trusted OBGYN or primary care doctor.
  • Becoming familiar with turn-ons and offs and clearly articulating what is wanted and   not wanted
  • Appreciating individual differences and preferences.
  • Differentiating online from face to face courtships and relationships.
  • Dealing with social pressures and anxieties.
  • Normalizing sexuality conversations and articulating fantasies to avoid suppression or maladaptation.
  • Understanding the ecology of sexual relationships and all their variations, including monogamy, polyamory, bisexuality, etc.  
  • Coming to clear agreements in relationships: what it means, how it is respected, what constitutes cheating, etc.
  • Jealousy, obsession, and reactionary behavior in and outside of relationships.
  • The different love languages.  The differences in expressions of love and affection.
  • The regular practice of check-ins. Encouraging strong and honest intimate communication.

Resources

For Youth:

Websites

Literature

Hotlines

  • LGBT National Help Center Youth Talk Line 1.800.246.PRIDE (7743)

Camps

  • Camp Victory : a private nonprofit organization that strives to create a special place for child and teen survivors of sexual abuse

For Parents and Guardians:

How to talk to your children about sex

For parents of sexual abuse survivors

Videos

For Adults:

Centers

Body Love Resources

Literature

 

 

  • Wild Feminine, Tami Lynn Kent
  • Vagina, Naomi Wolf
  • Cunt, Inga Muscio
  • The Joy of Sex, Alex Comfort

Videos

For Survivors of Sexual Assault:

Hotlines

  • Bay Area Women Against Rape 510.845.7273
  • San Francisco Women Against Rape 415.647.7273
  • GLBT National Help Center Youth Talk Line 1.800.246.PRIDE (7743)
  • RAINN- 24 hotline 1.800.656.HOPE

Organizations

Trauma Work

Transformative Justice

Books

  • The Survivor’s Guide to Sex, Staci Haines

Sexuality Health Education & Trainings:

Prevention and Healing Work with Youth:

International Work:

YPW Partners Doing the Work:

Though Youth Passageways holding a gathering at All Nations would be a momentous gift and opportunity, it felt important to be very thoughtful saying ‘yes’ to the invitation. Embedded in the very fabric of YPW from the start has been a steadily evolving practice of permission seeking and the intention of coming to the places it gathers in service and in right relationship with those places and the peoples that reside there. Over the rest of 2017 and January 2018, finding that ‘YES’ was explored deeply alongside Becky, as a new SC member, and in collaboration with the Cross-Cultural Protocols Working Group. An organizing team formed consisting of Becky and Dallas Chief Eagle, Dane Zahorsky and Darcy Ottey, and supported Gathering by Yolanda Cordova-Swallow, Gigi Coyle and Sobey Wing. This team, in dialogue with the whole SC, decided that a small gathering of 35 to 40 people would best serve the place and people of the land. Half of the attendees would come from All Nations and Pine Ridge, and the other half would be a “delegation” from the greater YPW network. Becky, Dallas, the CCP, and others helped offer a mindful and heartfelt process of preparing and informing the YPW delegates to contribute and collaborate with the Place so that reciprocity would be at the heart of the gathering.

Below are some of the steps in this preparation and trust building process:

March 2018 – All Nations Site Visit:

In early March, Dane Zahorsky, YPW’s Director/Broom pusher, and his partner, headed to All Nations Gathering Center on behalf of YPW, to deepen the relationship with All Nations and get a working understanding of the place, its capacity, and ways of possible collaboration between the two organizations. Learn more about that journey and what came out HERE.

June – PC Episode 3 – The Spirit of Wellness & The YouthVoice Team Forms:

After the site visit, and in preparation of heading to All Nations later that summer, Becky and Dallas were invited to be guests on the newly launched YPW Podcast: Practicing Community.  You can listen to Becky and Dallas dive into their work HERE.  At the same time Marisa Taborga Byrne, YPW’s Network Mapper, had started to develop a bond with Dallas’s daughter, Delacina Chief Eagle and joined the organizing team as the Youth Voice Track point person.

July – August – Participant Calls:

The preparation process included two calls; the first shared historical and current context on Pine Ridge Reservation and All Nations Gathering Center and offered deeper awareness of the socio-economic and political issues affecting the community. You can listen to the first call HERE. The second, hosted by Sobey Wing and Gigi Coyle, focused on the relationships between settlers and indigenous peoples and provided examples of asking permission and consent to organize events on traditional territories that are not one’s ancestral homelands. You can listen to that call HERE.

 

< Back to 2018 Gathering Page

This month, join Becky and Dallas ChiefEagle, Marisa Taborga Byrne, and Dane Zahorsky as they discuss Whole Person Wellness and how their work is to sustain and reconnect spirit in peoples lives is impacting and transforming their community!

Read the Transcript

You can read and download the full transcript in PDF format HERE

About This Month’s Guests –  Becky and Dallas ChiefEagle

Becky and Dallas Chief Eagle are co-founders of the All Nations Gathering Center on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Both do work that’s hard to contain to any short intro, a few of the things we might mention are Dallas’s work as an artist-in-residence in schools across the nation since the mid 1980’s using Hoop Dancing and other techniques to teach the lessons of the Lakota Way or Becky’s work as the compliance officer of the Oglala Sioux Lakota Housing where she helps manage 1500 low rent rental units across the 9 districts of the reservation.

Over the more than 10 years they along with a growing team of folks have impacted and transformed many people’s lives. The Center blends modern practices with the beautiful traditions of the Lakota Way in the lush and vibrant Yellow Bear Canyon just outside the Black Hills south of the Badlands in South Dakota.

From getting out of unhealthy relationships, stopping suicidal intentions to healing bodies and minds, their healing has been a powerful catalyst for many men and women of all nations to heal and live healthier lives.

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Health as a Whole Journey

Whole person Wellness is much more than the health of our individual mind, body, heart, and spirit. Yes, it’s all of those things, and also it is interrelated to place and community. There is a continual mutual exchange between our place on this earth and our unique way of being in the world. Expanding our view of Wellness can open a deeper connection with ourselves, with the land we call home, with the communities we are surrounded by.

Resources

Articles

Approaches / Tools

Talks/Podcasts

Conferences/Events

Partners

<Back to Practicing Community

This month join Larry Hobbs, Marisa Taborga Byrne, and Dane Zahorsky for our second episode as they discuss our connection to wild places and specifically the power and beauty of nature-based rites of passage!

Read the Transcript

You can read and download the full transcript in PDF format HERE

About This Month’s Guest –  Larry Hobbs

Larry has worked in a variety of both humanitarian and nature-based work throughout his lifetime. From a field biologist studying whales and dolphins to a psychotherapist working with individual and family systems to a teacher and naturalist leading wildlife expeditions worldwide, to years of Rites of Passage training at the School of Lost Borders.

Larry has dedicated many years to the 4H Challenge Program embedded within the Washington State University’s extension program with a vision of making traditional Rites of Passage available to all 4H youth. Although still conducting river dolphin research in Southeast Asia and teaching and leading natural history trips around the world, Larry’s passion rests in guiding Rites of Passage and in sharing his knowledge of the ways we interrelate with and understand the natural world that supports us all.

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Nature as a Lens

At any given moment if you turn your face to the sky, you’re simultaneously looking at the past and the future. As you wake each morning, the rays of sunlight washing across your face have traveled 93 million miles, appearing precisely as they were 8 minutes ago. That self-same sun will still shine eight minutes from now, and another after that, on and on until, eventually, in a few billion years, it will nova in sublime fusion, transforming our solar system into something new.

More tangibly, take a moment and look to the ground, place your hands in the dirt. You are touching your future. There, your body, your ashes, everything and everyone you’ve ever known or loved will one day return, reincorporated as billions of nearly indiscernible molecules nesting betwixt and between the roots and soil beneath your feet.

Think of the tectonic plates on which you stand, forged from the Earth’s molten youth, its fiery adolescence, think about the countless leaves and trees returned there after innumerable seasons, carried on the wind, the breath of the Earth, dust and mud from river beds, valleys and mountains, and the atoms of our ancestors, the foundation on which we love, breathe, fight, mourn and build our homes and communities.

I grew up in the Great Plains of the United States where the horizon seems to justify that the earth is indeed flat only broken by the small city centers, constellations of vertical buildings, reminders of our superiority over our environment. Yet 250 years ago, the center of Kansas City was nothing more than flowering grasses, originally home to the Clovis tribe and a hundred million years before that they were the bottom of great sea and awe as we understand it was unknown on the Earth.

Our ideas are no different than our cities. They gather in complexity; sometimes great leaps are made, and they provide us with the openness to adapt and open to what is asked of us. Like all things, they are fleeting, the best become sacred, most will erode. And much will change in the next thousand years. Often our inability to lean into this humbling perspective rests in the fundamental misunderstanding that each of us suffers, and ultimately lives and dies, alone. Look back at your sorrows. How many before you have shed similar tears? Alone, at night, out in those plains, we all share in our ability to persevere and adapt in the face of struggle, is this not the core truth of why passageways persist after thousands of years?

And at the center of those passages for a great many people is an alignment and stewardship of wild places, those that engender…wild ideas.

To be in wild places, to be with wild and unfettered ideas, we are invited to ground in what is most essential, we are called into service as individuals and communities, the kinds of people our hearts, and the cosmos, dare us to be.

So this month as we dive into nature connection, take a moment, go outside and look up to the past, run your hands through the future. Feel the connection of time and place, and be remember all we share with one another. Whether you are digging in the soil or digging in your past, pointing a finger at the moon or contemplating your future, we and the universe are inseparable.

Resources

Dancing in the waves, relishing the sweet scent of a flower, tracking animal stories through imprints along a river bank, listening to bird song. What nature offers is a connection to a broader scope of life, to where we came from, to right where we belong. Below is a list of nature-focused programs, articles, and other resources. Enjoy!

There are over 50 Youth Passageways Partners Doing the Work

Other Nature Connection Organizations

Blogs from Youth Passageways

Resource Pages

Online Articles:

Blogs

Book/ Videos

 

<Back to Practicing Community 

Join Kruti Parekh, Marisa Taborga Byrne, and Dane Zahorsky as they discuss Transformative Justice and how Kruti’s work is expressed throughout her life and how it shows up in our community!

Read the Transcript

You can read and download the full transcript in PDF format HERE

About This Month’s Guest –  Kruti Parekh

Kruti Perekh

Kruti Parekh has been working synergistically with young people and families in the most marginalized communities in both New York and Los Angeles for 18 years.

Kruti’s experience includes adult ally at the Youth Justice Coalition, organizing to transform the juvenile and criminal injustice systems; director for youth programs, including YouthBuild, Teen Court, and Workforce Investment Act Programs as well as domestic violence accountability, workforce development, youth empowerment, youth leadership and wellness programs.

She would like to use her experience to help create the necessary infrastructure within Los Angeles City and County to prevent harm, death and incarceration for youth and increase graduation rates, financial independence and positive social contribution. Kruti has a Bachelor’s Degree from Brandeis University, Masters Degree in Social Worker from Hunter College and a self-proclaimed PhD (People’s health Degree) from the Youth Justice Coalition.

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Resources and a Personal Narrative on Transformative Justice

In a time when we are faced with the disheartening truth that our government and society have often neither been righteous nor equitable, how do we rebuild relationship, repair harms caused and return to trust? “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.” Many of us have heard and even used this quotation attributed to one of the greatest icons of peace of the 21st century, Gandhi. Even so, somehow in our society, when conflict arises, we blindly follow the “justice” systems in place that present and promote punitive consequences, criminalization, and cycles of oppression. What is an alternative? Transformative justice.

Finding transformative justice, or TJ, changed my life and made the seemingly impossible possible. It was a light in the void, gifting hope after a lifetime of desperation. At a young age I was harmed by an adult in my family. I disclosed this harm to my mama, and she immediately sought help with the “authorities.” The police, Child Protective Services, and the public defender were all involved, with the promise of “justice.” It took over a year to go through all the legal battles, which of and in themselves were traumatic, and in the end, the harm was dismissed and the perpetrator found not guilty.

Our government system failed my family and me, “victimized” us, tore us and our community apart, and uprooted every belief I’d had injustice. A deep mistrust of our government and how wrongs were “righted” was seeded. The adults around me followed the system like sheep following the herd off the cliff.  There were no other models to help us move towards a deeper, more holistic kind of justice, forgiveness and reparation based on love.

After wandering in a field of pain and mistrust for over a decade afterwards, I still had the longing for peace and chose to reconnect with the one who had caused me harm. I thought that love and determination for healing would be enough to repair the relationship and the pain. I was wrong. The renewed contact was hopeful, but I felt unable to address the harm and work toward the repair needed. A stronger container was needed with witnesses, companions, allies who believed in us and the re-union we hoped for.

And then the way of transformative justice came to me and the teaching that harm (like most things) has to be held within a community for transformative healing to be attained. It is a model where each has an understanding of both the effects of the harm that was caused and the history or story of the harm. Through using TJ, I have felt empowered. Conflict still has not been easy, but at least it’s easier. And in the rebuilding of my relationship with that loved relative, TJ has given the opportunity for a greater healing within our community as well, as they have taken their part in our conversations. It does take a village!

In our times, TJ is regenerating in many places, and there are increasingly more resources. Below are organizations, links, books and articles I’ve found or been gifted along the way. My prayer is n all relationships we can begin to open our eyes, our hearts and open up the possibility for true healing. Let’s practice and live in what justice truly is, simultaneously empowering and strengthening individuals and communities!

YPW Partners Doing the Work:

Youth Justice Organizations:

*Many of these were found at http://savethekidsgroup.org/resource-links/

Articles:

*Many of these were found at http://savethekidsgroup.org/resource-links/

Books:

    • Ruth Morris, (2000) Stories of Transformative Justice
    • John F. Wozniak, Michael C. Braswell, Ronald E. Vogel and Kristie R. Blevins. (2008). Transformative Justice: Critical and Peacemaking Themes Influenced by Richard Quinney.