An Online Half-day workshop led by Arisika Razak and shah noor
Saturday March 5th
10am – 1pm PST (Time Zone Converter) Closed Captioning Provided
The teachings of the dharma can teach us how to embrace each other skillfully and move into wise and compassionate action. “Embracing the Dharma: Compassion, Community Care, & International Solidarity” is a half-day interactive workshop led by Arisika Razak and shah noor where participants will have the opportunity to meditate, reflect, and dialogue on the power of compassion. In this time when transwomen, gender expansive folk, and LGBTQAI+ communities are threatened with erasure and violence, let’s come together and celebrate the concept of gender equity, self-love and joy. Let’s remember our s/heroes and gender expansive kinfolk who paved the way forward for us, naming, claiming and opening the roads. We’ll use writing, story-telling, meditation and music to honor the diversity of our bodies, our identities, and the power that arises from within. Bring a candle – or the light in your heart – writing/art supplies, and a story of someone who inspires you this International Women’s Day.
To make a gift to sustain the work of East Bay Meditation Center, please do so via Paypal: paypal.me/eastbaymeditation or our website: eastbaymeditation.org/dana 100% of our programming is sliding scale and no one will ever be turned away for lack of funds. Thank you for the gifts of your generosity and for supporting the work of East Bay Meditation Center and our beloved teachers who have volunteered their time.
Teacher Bios:
Arisika Razak, MPH, is Professor Emerita, and the former chair of the Women’s Spirituality Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies is currently a core teacher at the East Bay Meditation Center. For over twenty years she provided midwifery care to women in the San Francisco Bay Area, serving as a home and hospital birth attendant, healthcare administrator and patient advocate. Her current research interests include Africana wisdom traditions, Buddhism and womanism, and embodied spirituality and movement. A graduate of Spirit Rock’s Dedicated Practitioner Program and the Sounds True Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program with Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach, Arisika leads community based sanghas in the Western Insight convert-based meditation tradition, and is a regular contributor to Buddhist books and journals. Her teachings incorporate diverse spiritual traditions, multicultural feminisms, queer theory, and contemporary diversity theory. She has led spiritual and healing workshops and ritual celebrations for over four decades, and regularly presents at online and in-person conferences on women and other marginalized members of the African Diaspora.
shah noor hussein, MA (they / them) is a writer, visual artist, and educator crafting narratives at the nexus of Black feminist thought and Queer diaspora studies. They are a doctoral student and Cota-Robles Fellow at UC Santa Cruz and earned their masters from California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in 2017. shah’s poetry has been featured in Fog Lifter Press (2021), the LA Review of Books (2020), Umber (2019), and CUNJUH (2017). shah’s work has been published in numerous anthologies, including a forthcoming collection of Black feminist writing, When We Exhale, alongside the words of Maya Angelou, Sonia Sanchez, and June Jordan. shah works as Managing Editor for the Arrow Journal, publishing scholarship at the critical nexus of racial justice and spiritual wisdom. shah found refuge in EBMCs sanghas in 2014, participated in EBMC’s 2019 Resilience, Refuge and (R)evolution Program, and graduated from the 9th cohort of the award-winning Practice in Transformative Action year-long secular mindfulness program in 2022. They have been teaching writing since 2015 and began offering these teachings at EBMC workshops in 2021.
