Wellness in Action is teaming up again with Raynelle Rino of Rino Consulting Solutions on a Four-Part training (divided over the course of three days with a full day session once a month from January - March 2020) focused on Nature-Based Perspectives & Approaches to Mental Health & Wellness. This deeper dive into the human connection to land and migration will cultivate conditions for remembering and reconnecting to land practitioners are most likely not from, ancestrally. By cultivating this deep connection, practitioners will strengthen their relationships to each other, the communities they serve, and themselves as they continue on their journey towards serving communities while tending to self. The activities are designed to engage the senses, increase the capacity for imagination as a tool for change, and exercise intuitive ways of knowing the principles of nature with experiences in nature.
We will journey through four themes:
1. Remembering Home: We will get curious about our definitions of “home” and “community” and our relationship to ancestral lands as well as the lands in which we’ve settled (United States). We will review history and reflect on urban planning practices that inform land management impacts on communities of color. We will exercise “mirroring” by showing how the behaviors of nature show up in the systems and behaviors of the body.
2. Connection & Reconnection to Land/Nature: Now that we see and name how the infrastructure of the land we occupy promotes a disconnection to this definition of “community” and “home”, we actively work to be in a better relationship with the land. Activities to ignite intuitive sensing and feeling, moving beyond cognition and intellectualizing and towards listening to our bodies and the messages they send and honoring traditions of our cultures that promote the healing and reconnection to nature. Going back to the basics of understanding each of the four elements - earth, air, water, fire - and recognizing how they exist in our bodies will be used as a profound tool to embody how the treatment of the Earth reflects the way we treat ourselves.
3. Mental Health & Migration: Constantly bridging our stories of home to our relationships to land, this element recognizes the key components of one’s migration and its impacts on the disconnection and separation from nature. Understanding the mechanics associated with the systems of oppression will inform the steps needed for practitioners to work towards and promote a holistic approach for wellness and mental health in our communities on this land.
4. Reclaiming what was lost - Your Nature-Based Toolkit: This toolkit will strengthen relationships to the communities while cultivating leadership in practitioners in this program. This Nature-Based Toolkit is designed to offer practitioners a long-term and sustainable way to practice a well-rounded approach to wellness and can serve as a model for the mental health industry when working in communities of color. This toolkit models activities and concepts to honor the grief associated with land loss and the memories of ancestral lands while integrating tools for artistic expression as a form of healing and practicing imagination as a tool for change in communities.
Our intention is for participants to walk away with:
1. A foundational understanding of this country’s urban planning practices that heavily impact the mental health needs of communities of color
2. A developing strength and capacity to address their own migration stories as a tool to cultivate deeper relationships with the communities they serve
3. A safe place to put into practice the cultural traditions and knowledge about nature that practitioners already have
4. An empowering and well rounded program that will support a practitioner’s experience in bridging traditional knowledge about wellness to the structures of the mental health industries Dates/Times:
We ask participants to commit to all three days.
Friday, January 31, 2019, 9:30 AM - 4:30 PM
Friday, February 21, 2019, 9:30 AM - 4:30 PM
Friday, March 20, 2019, 9:30 AM - 4:30 PM