Centering Blackness and celebrating SOUL, our Heritage & Healing Experiences for Practitioners and Professionals in Senegal integrate culture (SOUL) and contemplative practices to allow you to deepen your capacity for healing and restoration, resilience and resistance. They reflect our understanding that We Got Soul; We Can Heal.

As a pilgrimage, which is considered a contemplative practice, this experience is designed to allow you to deepen your self-awareness and your self-care practice. Informed by what we know about race-based stress and trauma and the impact of white supremacy, anti-Black racism and epistemic violence on our lives individually and collectively, our Heritage & Healing experiences foster your capacity to surrender and to feel safe, secure and a deep sense of belonging. We hold a love-filled space that consistently affirms your innate sense of dignity and worth. All so you can deepen your capacity for healing and restoration. So that you might continue to lead and serve courageously and confidently.

Our Diasporic Soul Heritage & Healing Experiences reflect the wisdom of many of our wisest elders and ancestors, including Malidoma Somé who tells us in The Healing Wisdom of Africa, that healing requires community, ritual and spirit. And, Alice Walker who tells us in Anything We Love Can Be Saved that healing means putting the heart, courage and energy back into our bodies with our own culture (SOUL).
Before we were anything else as Black folks we were African.
“Spiritual” African Giant. Burna Boy.
Put another way, we got SOUL, we can heal. SOUL, which, as Dr. Sharon Harrell offers us, is “the transformative healing resource that reflects sensibilities of the African Diaspora.” Soul is “the medicine we are looking for [that] has been within us and our communities all along. (Torres). SOUL reflects the fact that the healing we are seeking can be found in “the relationships with our communities, the natural world, our roots, and our ancestors” (Torres).

Further, our Heritage & Healing Experiences for Professionals & Practitioners allow participants to recognize cultural and contemplative resources that can inform the way they contribute to the well-being of Black folks in whatever kind of work they are doing. A deeper dive than our Communal Healing Retreats, the experience can serve as an initial opportunity for practitioners and professionals to consider how they might integrate the Diasporic Soul Heritage & Healing approach into the work they do that contributes to the healing, restoration and well-being of the Black folks.
THE EXPERIENCE
INTEGRATING CULTURE & CONTEMPLATIVE PRACTICES

Community

Meeting Mami Wata

Ritual

Pilgrimages to Goree & Carabane Islands

Contemplative Arts

Movement Practices

The African Renaissance Monument

Museum of Black Civilizations

Senegalese Cuisine

Daily Debriefs|Guided Reflections

Stillness Practices

Connecting with the Natural World

Travel to the Casamace Region
PRICING: $3000
Includes Pre-Pilgrimage Orientation (VIRTUAL), fully-guided excursions in Senegal that integrate SOUL (culture) and contemplative practices, Accommodations (Single Occupancy), On-Site Meals, Ground Transportation, Roundtrip Airfare to Casamace, Diasporic Soul Tee Shirt, Learning Materials, including a journal, restorative yoga equipment and a copy of We Got Soul; We Can Heal (Jeffers-Coly 2022).

2022 Reunion Retreat|Newfields|Indianapolis, IN
Our Post-Pilgrimage Reunion Retreat offers us the opportunity to further debrief and integrate the Senegal experience in community with other program participants including those from prior years. Our Post-Pilgrimage Reunion Retreat reflects what we know about how important it is sit at the communal plate of Thiebbu Jenn (or the Thanksgiving table) with others who have had the Senegal experience. It reflects our commitment to deepening connections and building community in ways that center Blackness and celebrate SOUL. As well as what we know about the support that community offers as we integrate the experience and to stay engaged in the practices that support our collective capacity to feel grounded, rooted, centered, balanced and well. The Post-Pilgrimage Reunion Retreat will require a program fee (TBD) and travel expenses to the designated location.
Check with the Sistah in HR: Heritage & Healing Experiences are Professional Development