Virtual Forum for Healing Our Way Home – A Retreat for Women of Color

Virtual Forum
Healing Our Way Home: Touching Ancestors, Joy and Liberation

A Retreat for Women of Color

with Dharma Teachers
Dr. Marisela Gomez, Kaira Jewel Lingo and Dr. Valerie Brown

Join us for this free informational session, to learn more about this upcoming retreat for women of color.

Our focus will be the book Healing Our Way Home and the importance of ancestors, joy, and liberation. Join us for an exploration of how we can see ourselves in each other’s path of joy and liberation, and take refuge in our individual and collective healing.

Please join us as we explore this unique opportunity to spend time with the authors and gain insight into the themes that will be explored in the retreat.

TEACHERS

Marisela Gomez MD PHD is a mindfulness practitioner in the tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh’s Order of Interbeing, public health scholar activist, preventive/alternative medicine physician. Of Afro-Latina ancestry, she lives in Baltimore involved in social justice activism and community building/research and co-facilitates mindfulness gatherings with Baltimore and Beyond Mindfulness Community for BIPOC and Social Activists. She is the author of Race, Class, Power and Organizing in East Baltimore, Healing our Way Home, and numerous book chapters in popular and scholarly publications. She has blogged at Huff Post and mariselgomez.com on the intersection of wisdom justice and mindfulness. Dr. Gomez is also a co-founder of the non-profit Village of Love and Resistance whose mission is to organize for community land control in historically marginalized communities in Baltimore MD.

Kaira Jewel Lingo is a Dharma teacher of Black and biracial heritage with a lifelong interest in spirituality and social justice. Her work continues the Engaged Buddhism developed by Thich Nhat Hanh, and she draws inspiration from her parents’ lives of service and her dad’s work with Martin Luther King, Jr. After living as an ordained nun for 15 years in Thich Nhat Hanh’s monastic community, Kaira Jewel now teaches internationally in the Zen lineage and the Vipassana tradition, as well as in secular mindfulness, at the intersection of racial, climate and social justice with a focus on activists, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, artists, educators, families, and youth. Based in New York, she offers spiritual mentoring to groups and is author of We Were Made for These Times: Ten Lessons in Moving through Change, Loss and Disruption and co-author of Healing Our Way Home: Black Buddhist Teachings on Ancestors, Joy and Liberation from Parallax Press. Her teachings and writings can be found at www.kairajewel.com.

Valerie Brown is an author, Buddhist-Quaker Dharma teacher, facilitator, and executive coach specializing in leadership development and mindfulness practices with a focus on diversity, social equity, and inclusion. A former lawyer and lobbyist, Valerie transformed her high-pressure, twenty-year career into serving leaders and nonprofits to create trustworthy, authentic, compassionate, and connected workspaces.  An award-winning author, her book Hope Leans Forward: Braving Your Way toward Simplicity, Awakening, and Peace (Broadleaf, 2022) received the Nautilus Gold Award for Eastern Spirituality for 2023. Valerie’s extensive training blends social justice, mindfulness practices, leadership development, and spiritual growth.