Living Stories

FEELING FOUND : spacious embracing of humble, humanising healing

A Depth Encounter with ‘white-bodied’ kin for our collective liberation held by Miche Fabre Lewin and Yolanda Sokiri

12 Sessions | September 2024 dates TBC

“Racism is a problem in the psyche of whiteness that white people must take responsibility to solve.”

Renni Edo Lodge

“… rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. 
Healing is an act of communion.” bell hooks

Every day ‘white-bodied’ kin can be contributing to the slow, deep and heartening work of uncovering, unlearning and dissolving white body supremacy and its multi-layerings.

None are free till we are all free.

As a three-month Depth Encounter, Living Stories is an opportunity for ‘white-bodied’ kin to strengthen our capacities for connecting integrally and authentically with our Black, Brown and global majority kin as part of actively making cultural change in the everyday.

Watch a conversation with Miche & Yolanda for an overview of the Encounter:

THE INVITATION

We, Miche Fabre Lewin and Yolanda Sokiri, are two women artist-elders whose wisdom kinship is nourished by ancient traditions and contemporary knowing. Our devotional and trust-making practices share in the Earth Heart of African | European lineages, one of us living in a White bodymind and one living in a Black bodymind.

Living Stories is an invitation to ‘white-bodied’ people who are heeding the call from our Black, Brown and global majority kin to become response-able and address the racialised ‘whiteness’ within our psyches and behaviours. 

Within this mythopoetic encounter, participants will experience a dynamic, interdependent sequences of ritual practice, poetic encounters, story weaving and embodied interactions with matter, metaphor and mystery. 

In cultivating these foundational and sacred practices, we can open-heartedly face the complexities, disturbances and distortions of white supremacy. Together, we inhabit a healing sanctuary of enlivening connections within which we find ourselves and each other.

Together

we respond 

we welcome    we acknowledge     we call in     we experience     we entrust     we support    

we care    we respond    we cultivate     we reveal     we encourage     we reflect     

we inspire     we disrupt    we contain    we hear    we nourish   we encounter     we forgive 

we celebrate     we feel     we emerge     we withdraw    we reach out     we re-source 

we heal   

Who This Is For:

PURPOSEFUL, PREPARED AND PRESENT ‘white-bodied’ kin:

  • creating an ongoing ethical space for deep, emancipatory, and practical work;

  • encouraging yourself and others to keep showing up and showing how; 

  • developing capacity and resource for collective liberation;

  • building an awareness of how white supremacy permeates, violates and separates;  

  • acknowledging the ways in which we are still perpetuating white supremacy; 

  • risking to live an authentic, whole life free from oppression and harm;

  • dedicating energy to discovering how to act with humility, integrity and accountability; 

  • seeking everyday practices for the uncovering|unlearning of white supremacy;

  • delivering legacy work in homes and communities with reliable and safe resource; 

  • noticing and celebrating the liberation work done thus far;

  • recognising, in right relationship, the support needed from lineage; 

  • honouring the spontaneous, stretching, spiralling nature of the in-between; 

  • inhabiting sanctuary time to practise courageous kinships;

Experiences:

Living Stories Depth Encounter will offer:

  • keeping real within the realm of possibility for collective liberation as a personal responsibility;

  • loosening the warp of white body supremacy through creative, embodied, artful and ritual practices that combine play, joy, creativity and challenge; sanctuary for deep listening and feeling with each other as ‘white-bodied’ kin; 

  • deepening and broadening our way of being with the feelings with and for each other;

  • being with ‘white-bodied’ kin within an environment of ease and bounty;

  • hearing the embodied voices of two living flames is remembering what has been forgotten in our dormant selves;

  • engaging with the Earth-Heart through nature|culture interactions;

  • experiencing deep trust encounters and building cultural muscle to re-energise; 

  • opening to new directions, impulses and inspirations for living our passions; 

  • receiving collaborative and loving support to enliven our kinships and communities with respect, freedom and integrity.

Gifts:

What gifts we will gain and what will be different after Living Stories Depth Encounter:

  • countering white body supremacy with simple everyday practices and tools; 

  • a bridging between a community of learning and lifelong relationships;

  • experiencing the anchoring foundation of supportive pair-work with each other; 

  • speaking up and out with courage for our self-aware and recovering our wholeness;

  • holding and staying with discomfort to unravel the disturbances; 

  • honouring how to be silent and listen – taking time for a visceral slowing down; 

  • being ‘white’ kin witnesses|withnesses for our Black, Indigenous and Brown kin;

  • expanding our resilience for being present and feeling|knowing how to act; 

  • equipping ourselves with resource, nurturance and capacity as our own medicine; 

  • engaging in making new encounters across difference and unfamiliar cultures; 

  • contributing educational material for the liberatory healing work;

  • cultivating the capacity for practising awe and gratitude.

DATES & REGISTRATION

12 Sessions over 3 Months

Begins: Wednesday November 8th 2023  
Ends : Wednesday 14th February 2024 

6 sessions before Yuletide/New Year and 6 sessions after

Session Time: 7-9 GMT | CET 8-10pm | PT 11-1pm 

Full Session Dates:
Nov 8, 15, 22, 29 & Dec 6 & 13 2023 
January 10, 17, 24, 31 & February 7, 14 2024

Important: To preserve the dynamic and confidential nature of this online experience, live participation is required. There is no replay of this Depth Encounter. Audiovisual “gifts” will be sent out as resources in February post Depth Encounter.

Registration also includes 3 months access to the entire School of Mythopoetics platform ($150 USD Value!)

Cost: £750 GBP / $915 USD / €860

Limited scholarship options are available.
Please email miche@studiofabrehardy.earth to inquire.

Have questions before registering? Reach out to miche@studiofabrehardy.earth

Meet Your Guides

Miche Fabre Lewin (PhD, Dip Art Therapy)

Born on Zimbabwean soil with French and Jewish heritage, Miche now dwells in the UK. Her work as an artist of the becoming spans Europe and Africa and is ever resonant with the memoried magnificence of granite and savanna landscapes from her youth. 

Honouring indigenous traditions and contemporary artistic practice, Miche hosts artful processes and convivial rituals as encounters with the spirit of place through the sentient matter of soil, food and water. This devotional and liberatory work enlivens an ecological consciousness of our belonging within animate Earth – an opening to the sacred in the everyday as the ground for living justice. 

Miche has contributed 'Cooking, Culture and Conversations’ for TedX Soweto and her writings appear in diverse publications and journals. She is an Honorary Artist Research Associate with the Institute for Sustainability, Equity and Resilience at Coventry University. With her collaborator Flora Gathorne Hardy, Miche is co-founder of Studio Fabre Hardy, a socially engaged arts and ecology practice.     

Website www.livingjustice.earth

Yolanda Sokiri (MBA, AMI Dip Montessori)

Born in Dar Es Salaam,"Home of Peace" Tanzania, child of the magnanimous Kilimanjaro and the migratory Nile, she now lives and learns in Switzerland. Yolanda is an initiated Earth medicine woman who demystifies the complex, and nuanced, business of being human.

She has situated herself within the acrostic, ode and free verse poetry traditions. A storyweaver whose words soften landscapes, serve lineages and speak life. Curating spacious healing processes anchored in ancestral presence, wisdom, leadership and communication.

An award-winning pioneer in social-justice, Common Purpose leader, her work is embodied, intentional and invitational.  Translating silent to listen, transmuting stories to store ease, transforming choices for NOW: Normalising Ordinary Wisdom. Her creations are a surrender to JOY: Justice Opportunity Yearning for those committed to celebrating individual change and evolving our collective healing resources. Yolanda is a Soul Consultant, devotee of the Sacred, Obvious, Unsuspecting, Living examples of Sovereign expressions of Love. Founder of "Welcome Home", an unlearning harbour for brave Souls.

Website www.yolandasokiri.com

All images copyright Miche Fabre Lewin and Yolanda Sokiri