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Category: Musings Monday

  • Musings Monday: Why I Want to Start an Affordable Retreat Centre

    Content Warning: death, mental illness, ideation

    As folks have probably guessed by now, I’m the type of healer that is obsessed with healing because I’ve spent a lot of time (and still do!) working on my own healing journey. When my partner Steve died and I was imploding my other close relationships around me in the messiest way possible, struggling with suicidal ideation, alcoholism, codependence, and a host of other mental illness and trauma-related issues, I finally dragged myself to what I called “emo rehab”, and, as the cliché goes, it changed my life. At the time, a volunteer-run organization offered a weekend day retreat setting in the city of Ottawa/Odaawaa that was pay-what-you-can, where you worked on addiction, compulsive behaviours, trauma, etc.

    I had never been in a situation where I just focused on my healing before, and everyone else was focused on their healing, and we all kind of supported each other together. And we all kind of goteach other somehow. It was magical. Ever since then, I was hooked. I love going to retreats!

    I also have a critical mind, honed from Western education on critical theory, my father’s revolutionary spirit, and my mother’s sharp brain. So I noticed some patterns in the retreats I went to. I noticed that I was usually the only racialized person there, or the only queer person, or the only trans person, or one of the few folks in their twenties (this was 10 years ago when I started going). And that, aside from that first “emo rehab” experience, a lot of these retreats were really expensive! Like, $600-$1000 expensive! I had to save up a lot.

    The biggest critical factor for me, though, was that they often worked only from a medical and disease model of recovery. This came off as implying that Western science was a central authority, and that we were sick because of our own fault, and ignored contributing systemic factors like the intergenerational trauma of war and colonialism, or the ongoing onslaught of nableism, racism, sexism, cisgenderism/transphobia, and other daily indignities or brutal violence. Sometimes they would have a “spiritual factor” that supplemented the main model, either a version of Christianity that was only about prayer and surrender to God, or a mish-mash of culturally appropriated techniques from various other religions and faiths without any context or credit. These patterns created a cycle that would perpetuate a lack of diverse and marginalized folks from accessing these kinds of programs, the very folks that, in my opinion, would benefit from it a lot.

    I think I would have just continued to feel kind of sad that so many of my friends and loved ones couldn’t access these spaces even if they wanted to, if I hadn’t gone to camp. Now, this wasn’t just any camp– this was a leadership retreat for trans and queer youth and youth from trans and queer families. I went as an adult mentor/camp counselor type person. It was overnight, in the woods, reasonably affordable– and they had the systemic analysis! I had only ever experienced systemic analysis in activist and academic circles where it was treated with a kind of clinical reverence or desperate bludgeoning technique of “accountability”, but I had never witnessed a program trying to live these values with care, and love, and (so many!) emotional check-ins.

    This experience taught me so much– the power of intentional community, that I could help facilitate other folks’ healing, and, most importantly, that running a diverse, anti-oppressive retreat was possible.

    As the years went by and I got jobs in the non-profit and social work field, I started to accumulate different kinds of knowledge– how to fundraise, how to run conferences on a zero budget, attending spiritual ceremonies and retreats run by Elders, anti-oppression facilitation skills, accessibility and disability justice, a graduate program in critical social work, and building relationships across different nations, identities, and peoples.

    Through meditation, dreams, and visions, I feel that the knowledge I’ve gained and continue to gain, as well as my own love of communal healing, has given me the confidence to begin planning on running my own pay-what-you-can retreats in various cities, with the eventual hope that further down the line I can co-create a pay-what-you-can retreat centre with Elders that are Two Spirit, queer, and trans, who are also Black, Indigenous, and/or people of colour (QTBIPOC).

    In the meantime, my first goal is to focus on my own people in the diaspora, the ones called “Filipinos”, or, as the younger generation have re-named themselves “Pilipinx”, as part of a Latinx-inspired liberation movement. In these first retreats, I want to introduce folks to language, culture, history, activism, and pre-colonial indigenous spirituality and ceremony. As an artist, there will also be a lot of arts-based activities in music, theatre, dance, visual arts, chanting, and sculpture. Similar to the work of Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart regarding the historical trauma of the Lakota people, the goal of these retreats would be to address the historical trauma of primarily youth, millennial, and Gen X diasporic Pilipinx, especially trans and queer Pilipinx– though as we continue I hope we can include a variety of other generations in the healing process too.

    If you’re interested in supporting this work, please become a patron. If you have any further questions about what I shared, you can comment here or email me feedback. If you’re interested in any of the other retreats, services, and organizations I mentioned in this post for you or your loved ones, please email or message me and I’ll give you all the info. I just don’t write it here because I don’t want to seem like I’m advertising for other organizations, especially without checking in with them.

    For QTBIPOC that are often ostracized by their families and different sections of society, as well as economically disenfranchised, being on a healing journey can change or save one’s life. Though there are many ways to heal, I firmly believe that the ways we can grieve and heal together should be accessible and available to all.

    www.patreon.com/lukayo

  • Musings Monday: 4 Suggestions on Supporting the Grief-Stricken

    Content Warning: death, grief.

    For multiply marginalized people, dealing with death in our communities due to institutional violence, mental health crises, war, and chronic/terminal illness is just a reality of our lives. For me, creating grief ceremonies and offering spiritual counsel to the bereaved is part of my healing justice practice. On top of that, I’ve been thinking of support work regarding death due to recent events in one of the communities I’m a part of, which has inspired me to write this post for those who are blessedly unfamiliar with grief on the daily.

    When my partner, Steve Sauve, died nearly ten years ago, folks had no idea how to manage me. For those who don’t know me personally, I was an extreme kind of character in my late teens and early twenties, and becoming a widower-type person pushed me over the edge. I quit my job, I moved out of my apartment, I rushed into one-night stands yet quit drinking altogether. I covered all my mirrors in black cloth. I went to support groups. I started my own business but couldn’t make enough to pay the bills. I isolated myself and moved in with an ex, then tried to burn down my social and spiritual life by dating people that were not actually compatible with me. I vacillated between putting myself in harm’s way and trying to be the kind of person that would make life worth living now that he was gone. 

    I needed support. There were some folks that stepped up, and others that I just wanted to punch in the face so I could shut them up. Folks judged you if you mourned “too long”, folks judged you if you didn’t mourn “enough”. Looking back on it all, while also adding my experiences of supporting other people who have lost parents, children, best friends, and partners, I’d like to present to you some hard-won suggestions if you’re the type who wants to give support to somebody close to you but are afraid you’ll mess up.

    1) Grief takes energy.

    Before even offering support, I want you to remember this. I know that it’s common in Western society to say “everybody grieves in their own way”, and I’m not disputing that there’s some truth in that. However, I firmly believe that all grief does take energy to process. Now, some people are also enraged as hell, like I was, and that gave me energy to move out of my bachelor apartment, start a business, throw myself into problematic rebounds– all in an attempt to avoid the actual grieving that I hated to feel so much, because it sapped me completely.

    When I grieved, I could barely move. I could barely eat. I could barely think, or speak. Mostly I would cry. From the outside, you might see me and think “wow, this person hasn’t moved from their bed in days, they must feel so rested”. I wasn’t– I was exhausted, because to emotionally process all the time I spent with Steve and all the dreams we would never have now that he was gone felt like a marathon every day. Because of this, I needed help getting food, making food, going outside, cleaning my apartment, being reminded to do basic hygiene, and anything else that able-bodied, neurotypical, non-grieving folks would take for granted.

    2) Check yourself. How are you actually doing?

    Is the loss of your loved one or friend also your loss? Are you trying to avoid asking for help by offering help? Do you think by “saving” them you can save yourself? Get real with yourself. I’ve done this and I’ll probably do this again, it’s a thing I always have to check on. Some signs that you may be trying to “rescue” is that your own support network notices you’ve been acting off, that you don’t have energy to do what you regularly do, or you’re doing “risky” behaviours that aren’t like you.

    Since I brought up support networks, make sure that you have one– whether it’s a close friend that’s not part of the immediate circle of mourners, or a counselor. If you’re going to go into support mode, make sure that if things get intense for you, you have a place of refuge to recharge. I hated feeling like a burden to the people close to me, and if I had found out a friend suffered a breakdown trying to give me support, that would have worsened my grief and pain.

    One resource that you should have emotionally is patience. If you don’t have that going into this, I’d really suggest you not offer any support. I seriously tested folks’ patience, refusing help when I looked like I needed it, lashing out when I shouldn’t have, and indulging in exasperating behaviours. While you should clearly enforce and protect your own boundaries, also be aware that it’s not personal– rage and grief sometimes are colliding in people’s bodies and they shoot out or clamp down in ways most won’t expect, and that requires a lot of patience to manage if you’re a support person.

    Read the rest of the article here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/21030486

  • Musings Monday: Nanay Myrna Pula

     

    Photo taken from the Manila Times: https://www.manilatimes.net/manila-collectible-features-…/…/. Image description: A smiling brown-skinned woman with black hair wearing beaded and hand-stitched regalia.

    The word “Nanay” means “mother”, and is a kind of honorific when referring to Nanay Myrna Pula. She is a tribal Elder of the T’Boli people, a culture bearer, and storyteller of epics. She has been preserving and translating the work of her people, having been one of the few folks in her tribe that was sent to Western school but returned to continue the indigenous way of life.

    She’s been recording the work of the chanters, priestesses, and other Elders of her tribe through audio tapes and written papers, and, with the help of generous sponsors like myself and my patrons on Patreon, she will be able to digitally transfer and preserve the work for future generations.

    Nanay Myrna Pula also hopes to begin a School of Living Tradition where she can gather some of the last living Elders of traditional ways and arts in her tribe, and have them live under one village compound to teach the next generation of T’Boli before, after, or as an alternative to going to Western school.

    But why is she everybody’s “mother”? I’ve only spent time with Nanay Myrna Pula in person twice– in a week-long gathering in Mindanao in July 2015, and in another week-long gathering in Luzon in July 2017, both called Pamati.

    Before my second meeting with her, I had a dream sent to me by my Ancestors that I would receive a talisman to remind me of my purpose, and I would receive it during my next trip with indigenous Elders of the Philippines. Sure enough, one day as I was walking around the meeting area of the Pamati 2017 Gathering, Nanay Myrna Pula came up behind me and slipped a beaded gong necklace around my neck, and would not take money for it.

    At another point in the gathering, after many diasporic Filipino/Pilipinx delegates (especially myself) had wept and explained the loss of their culture and connection to the land and mentors to guide them, Nanay Myrna stood and proclaimed that she would be mother and grandmother to us all, that we could dry our tears and lean on her. It is that kindness and generosity of spirit, both to her own tribe, and to us youth and diasporic peoples of different nations than her own, that, for me, has earned her the honorific of Nanay.

    Read the rest of the article here and become a patron today: https://www.patreon.com/posts/20886291

     

  • Musings Monday: 5 Common Mistakes I’ve Made in Transformative Justice Work

    Content Warning: mentions of abuse, violence, sexual assault, oppression.

    —

    Whenever I get the phone call, or text message, or email, my heart seems to drop into my stomach and my fists clench, like I’m about to throwdown in a school yard or poetry slam.

    “He hurt me, and he’s hurt others– what should I do?”

    “She touched me… but I don’t want to call the police. I just want her to stop doing this!”

    “They’re a marginalized person, I don’t want to leave them but… but this relationship is so messed up! How can I fix this?”

    See, I recently attended a training in Chicago (originally called Zhigaagong, O’nionkserì:ke, and Shikaawke, on the territories of the Miami, Peoria, Potawatomi, and Illinois Native Americans). At this training, run by the amazing Just Practice Collaborative, we talked about transformative justice and community accountability, reminding me about all the times I’ve been pulled into a situation of interpersonal violence and oppression among poetry communities, queer and trans social circles, and activist collectives. Not only did it remind me of how I’m brought into these situations, I also remember every single one of the mistakes I made.

    Maybe you’re like me, the type of person a friend of a friend calls because they think you can help out, start a process, talk to an abuser, find community resources, or just know somehow what to do. Maybe you’re like me, in that you’ve also been abused and an abuser, that you’ve worked on your shit and continue to work on your shit, and just want the people around you to work on theirs and stop hurting each other and being hurt. Maybe you’re like me, in that you think there’s another way than tearing people and families apart with over-policing and under-resourced mental health and community services.

    If so, this rueful, yet hopeful, post is for you. Here’s some of my mistakes. I hope they help you and your people out.

    Wait, what’s TJ?

    If I was going to explain TJ to your Lola or grandma, it would go something like this:

    “Lola, this is the idea that there are some other things people can do instead of calling the police in situations like when their friends are having a fight or when Tito Nonoy is hurting Tita Lenlen. We try to solve the problem together, as a group of people, as a community. We try to make sure that the solution doesn’t use violence or revenge, and most times it means changing the ways the whole family and community works so that this behaviour doesn’t happen anymore.”

    “Huh,” your grandma will say. “Sige, anak. But who is in charge?”

    “Whoever we choose to be in charge, Lola. Maybe you. Maybe Ate Bing. Maybe Kuya Jose. We make sure everybody gets someone that can listen to them, and someone organizes a plan that everybody trusts. Everybody has to agree, though.”

    “What if somebody doesn’t agree, anak?”

    “Then we don’t do that specific thing. We can do other stuff besides calling the police– making a safety plan, having a community meeting to teach people other ways besides hurting each other, having a mediator, and other stuff like that.”

    “Ay jusko, this is complicated and hard.”

    “Alam ko, Lola. I know.”

    1. I didn’t know my options.

    In the beginning, I thought “transformative justice” and “community accountability” were the same things. Nobody explained to me, like in the imaginary exchange with your Filipino grandma that I just had in the above section, that there were other options besides trying to have a community support somebody’s accountability process– i.e. to support someone to be responsible for their actions, so that they can stop hurting people and repair the relationships around them.

    Here are some situations where a community accountability process isn’t an option:

    • If the person that did harm doesn’t want to take responsibility
    • If the survivors want revenge
    • If an institution, like the courts, the police, social workers, etc., get involved
    • If there’s not enough people in the community to offer support or organize a process

     But you can still do TJ! The Community Interventions Toolkit lists different kinds of options. There’s also the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective’s Pods and Pod Mapping. I’m going to write further about this in the upcoming sections.

    2. There wasn’t enough support for everybody involved.

    Usually, if a community is survivor-centric, people remember to make sure that the survivor gets support. If folks know about TJ, they also think about getting the person who’s done harm some kind of support, whether it’s to remind them of their humanity while they go through all of this, or whether it’s to keep them on track about how to take responsibility, or both.

    But the support train doesn’t end there. The support people also need support– maybe it can be just meeting with each other, or with the main organizer. If there’s a main organizer that people go to, that person also needs support– either their own counselor, confidante, or another person who’s organized this sort of stuff but isn’t involved in this particular process.

    What does support look like? Listening, mostly. Like, at 2am when you’re breaking down crying because everybody’s so angry and sad and you don’t know what’s right or wrong anymore. The other part of support, besides the listening, is keeping you on track, and reminding you why you’re doing this, or, being honest with you about when you need to take a step back and whether the whole process needs to be put on hold.

    If there’s no people who can keep confidentiality and be supportive for everybody that’s taking part in the process or the planning, people are going to burn out and ghost on you. I’ve been the support person that didn’t have anyone to talk to, and though I tried not to ghost on the whole thing, I got burned out quick, and all it would have taken was somebody to check in on me and see how I was doing to keep me steady. At the same time, I could have asked at the beginning of the process for a facilitator to have regular meetings with me to give me support.

    3. We didn’t have a plan.

    “Yikes,” you may be thinking. “What do you mean you didn’t have a plan, Lukayo? Why would you even be part of anything if there’s no plan?”

    Okay, so, let me be more clear: We didn’t have a plan that had a clearly articulated goal. We didn’t know when the process would be complete, or what to do if somebody continued to do harm. We had something that looked like a plan, though. The somewhat-plan was this, paraphrased, and conveyed to the person who did harm: “You have to stop coming to these spaces indefinitely and to get help.”

    What happens if the person shows up to the space? What kind of help? How do we know this person has been “helped”? When can this person return to the space, if ever? How does this help the community, and the person who has done harm, transform?

    We didn’t ask these questions, and shit began falling apart in about six months, and was a trainwreck in a year’s time. We never got answers. I hope the survivors got closure and some kind of justice, but I stay up late at night thinking about whether or not any transformation took place at all.

    The Creative Interventions Toolkit I mentioned earlier has a great section on Goal Setting that’ll help with planning, though honestly, you should probably read the whole thing before you even start a process, so you can consider your options, check to see if there’s enough allies and support, and then figure out a plan together. This isn’t just about making a plan for the process, but also a communications plan on how everybody’s going to talk to each other and how meetings are scheduled.

    4. We didn’t have consent from everybody.

    Get people’s consent. Sounds basic, right? Like the support stuff above, it’s a lot more complicated than it sounds. If you’re in polyamorous relationships that are heavy on communication, you may start to get what I’m hinting at.

    Picture this: A survivor, X, wants to do a process with the person who’s harmed them, Y, but does not want to be in the same room ever as Y. X gets a support team, A, and Y gets a support team, B. Y wants their friend, W, to be the facilitator. Team B checks in with Team A about facilitator W. Team A checks in with X, who does not want W, but would prefer Z instead. Team A goes to Team B, who goes to Y, and Y agrees to Z being facilitator.

    Phew. We haven’t even started on the plan yet– though at least the communications and confidentiality plan must already be created if people are checking in with each other.

    Problems begin when there is no communications plan and discussion about confidentiality. Another problematic situation is when “the community” (whether it’s the facilitator and support teams, or random “allies”) decide “what’s best” for the survivor and how to “handle” the person who’s done harm. Nobody checks in with X about what they want, or is interested in Y’s opinion on what’s being asked of them.

    Everyone involved should be checked in on regarding every major decision in the process, based on the communications plan that everybody agreed on. Obviously stuff like “should we have coffee or tea at our meetings?” aren’t relevant, but the facilitator, the support team, the goals of the plan, how to start a process, how to finish it, when meetings happen, how frequently– these are all major components. 

    If the survivor doesn’t want to take part, you can at least check in on them about what the community wants to do to keep itself safe, like “Hey, is it ok if we run workshops in the next few months about accountability in the punk scene? We won’t name you or your situation, but we wanted to make sure that you’re comfortable with what we’re doing to make the rest of the community feel safe.”

    5. We didn’t know the difference between “consequence” and “punishment”.

    Here’s the biggie for me, and the one mistake that I’ve made more than once when I’ve taken part in this, so I’m going to be really clear about it:

    TJ is not about revenge or punishment. It’s about transformation.

    If you’re into vendettas and retribution, if you’re the type to scream “kill your rapist!”, that’s your choice, and I totally get it. But that’s not transformative justice, and TJ is not the right fit for you.

    I’ve been in processes or witnessed plans where the goal is basically banishing somebody forever, or shaming them constantly wherever they went, or getting them fired from their job. Personally, some of these goals make sense depending on context. These goals don’t make sense in a situation where the survivor says they want to engage in community accountability and transformative justice, and the person who has done harm takes responsibility and wants to change.

    At the Just Practice Collaborative training, a simple question arose as a measurement for whether a process or a plan or a tool was TJ or not: “Is this a punishment, or is this a consequence that will lead to transformation?”

    When somebody who has done harm comes to you asking for community support so they can change, and they actually, really, seriously want to change, you’re not coddling them, you’re being given a golden opportunity to decrease the number of hurt people in the world. You’re supporting the possibility that there will be less victims and survivors because of this one person. More importantly, this person can raise their kids and their grandkids to stop hurting others and to take responsibility. You’re not just transforming people’s lives in the present– you are changing future possibilities.

    As I learn from my mistakes and continue to engage in this work, I try to remember that. I hope you do too.

    Want to know more about transformative justice and anti-oppression, and get some cool tools I’ve made? Become a $10/month patron, or get a group together to subscribe as one patron so you all can have access to the tools and troubleshooting tutorials together!

    https://www.patreon.com/lukayo

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