your facilitators

Much of our lives have felt defined by an experience of not knowing where we belong.
We individually and collectively have experienced our sense of self and belonging as persistently challenged within a cultural context that strives for purity within neat, predetermined, categories.

Our experience has been marked by the cracks and fissures that our bodies embrace in a refusal to remain contained within categories; instead we use ambiguity as a tool against supremacy. We have a strong commitment to anti-racism and we want to bring that into how we socially locate.

Dr. Leticia Nieto PsyD, LMFT, TEP is a leadership coach, psychotherapist, and educator specializing in liberation and equity, cultural responsiveness, motivational patterning, and evolutionary creativity. Her 2010 book, *Beyond Inclusion, Beyond Empowerment: A Developmental Strategy to Liberate Everyone*, is an accessible analysis of the dynamics of oppression and supremacy that offers readers ways to develop skills to promote social justice.

My father’s people are from Veracruz  and my mother’s people are from Puebla, where I was born, in Mexico. The range of racialization within my family is wide and conversations about identity tended to wrap around National identity above frank discussions about race. My ancestral roots include both indigenous exploitation and genocide by colonizers.  How these tensions live in the body, sometimes named meztizaje, is complex and potentiated.  The sense I now make is that colonization failed to extinguish those it sought to eradicate.  The saying, ‘they tried to bury us, they didn’t know we were seeds’, is a poetic way to work with this durable survivance.

The unsettled nature of identity this can generate has been a powerful agitator and psychic activator in my life.

Malia is here for integration, embodiment, soft skills, digesting intergenerational and collective trauma, hanging in nuance and dissolving "boxes." She is a facilitator of DEIA with an emphasis in healing racialized and structural trauma, accessibility and belonging for all bodies. This passion stemmed from moving through life in a nuance body that felt resistant to believing the world existed in binaries.

Always questioning and being curious, she challenges they way our bodies remember, the way we think and the way we collectively care for one another in an approachable and playful way. She invites embodied exploration for individual and collective processing to support the progress for wider cultural change.

My multitudinal lineage grew from Chinese, Swedish, British and African roots. My Asian-American mother and white father’s marriage was not approved by grandmother, a mixed chinese, black and white woman, who wanted her to marry another Asian man. My grandmother, as a mixed woman, never felt like she belonged. With this experience, she leaned into deep assimilation, seeked simplicity, sameness. But through this love I was born. My body is not in sameness, it is not in simplicity, it will not check off a box. I have felt marginalizations and received privilege through the color of my skin. I have always felt like a bridge of sorts, conjoining complexities and seeking exploration of how my body is mirror of all things coming together.

Karine Bell—MSc, SEP, PhD Candidate—is a mother of two, life partner to Daniel, and founder of and co-dreamer in the Rooted Global Village (www.rootedglobalvillage.com). A bi-cultural Black woman, she is also a somatics educator, practitioner, somatic abolitionist, scholar-activist, and clown-in-training. She is currently alive with curiosity around how we can learn to weave ourselves and each other into ecologies of care, countering cultures that create fragmentation,  alienation, and hyper-independence; to embrace difference, cultivate embodied capacity for transformation, and engage in radical acts of friendship across division. She is guided by curiosity and wonder as compass points, and research as an act of reverence for life. She is a PhD candidate at Pacifica Graduate Institute where she combines continued practice and study in somatics with studies in decolonial depth psychology with a focus on community, liberation, indigenous and eco-psychologies.

My ancestral roots reach back to the African continent (Ghana/Ivory Coast/Nigeria), Ashkenazi Germany and England/Wales and Turtle Island (unenrolled and distant), I also hold that complexity in my body with both colonizer and colonized aspects, and experiences of what Chicana feminist and scholar, Globia Anzaldúa, calls  nepantla.  Nepantla is a Nahuatl word she uses to describe the liminal space between worlds and the bridges that represent “thresholds to other realities'”.

Can you relate?

meet malia

meet karine

meet leticia