Akap: Embracing Uncertainty, Ourselves and Each Other

At the end of the week, this workshop intends to create a safe, spacious container to bring your grief, anger, exhaustion and fear, and transmute it into ease, even just for these 2 hours together. We’ll share practices to call in your unseen allies, to calm your nervous system on your own, to co-regulate your nervous system in community, to notice where you are holding anger, grief and fear, and to give you practical tools to embrace the uncertainty of the future with grace. Bringing calm to our nervous systems supports our immune systems, and also brings us back to resourceful states of mind, from which we can more easily access joy and pleasure, and rest, even in the throes of a pandemic. Using ancestral invocation, relational exercises, voice/sound healing, breathing/mirroring, co-counseling and a guided hypnotherapeutic journey, we will create a space of respite and release amidst the chaos. And we’ll end with a sonic hug.

About Carmen Leilani De Jesus

Carmen’s recent journey through breast cancer treatment prepared her for this Covid life: exercising caution with and building up her her suppressed immune system, decontamination protocols, self-isolation, facing mortality and uncertainty were all part of that journey.  But what brought her through that journey was reconnecting to her ancestral, elemental and celestial allies, blessing her Medicines, and learning to co-regulate, calm and protect her nervous system through community and connection - all lessons that are useful to share now! 

A second-gen Fil-Am born in San Francisco, Carmen was raised in a Baptist household, in a family that prioritized assimilation/survival over preservation of cultural tradition, or connection to her ancestral lineage. She is an alumni of UC Santa Cruz, which is where she fell in love with the woods.  As a healer, she has certifications in Hypnotherapy, Neurolinguistic Programming, Timeline Therapy and has also pursued study in trauma repatterning, reclaiming body sovereignty and consent. She uses her voice both for toning her vagus nerve, and to bring healing through song.  Her most recent deep dive into the sacred realms has been as a practitioner of the divination and spiritual rituals of the Dagara tribe of Burkina Faso, a lineage into which she has being formally initiated. 

She is a mother to her 12 year old son, Phoenix, and partner to M. Rako Fabionar.  They currently live one Coastal Miwok territory, in San Rafael, California.  In her day job(s), Carmen supports entrepreneurs in operating to operate their businesses with efficiency, kindness and integrity.  At the School of Consent, she produces global training workshops and evangelizes the Wheel of Consent®, a framework for relating with crystal clear consent, and a tool for somatic/touch practitioners, sexuality/consent educators and more.  Her work with consent is informed by the decolonization of the body - learning how our bodies are conditioned to go along with things we don’t want, from childhood through adulthood, how boundaries are not taught or respected, how our anger is devalued - and how to reclaim these things. She finds and shares healing through singing, storytelling, laughing, walking in nature, therapeutic touch and cuddling. Carmen is also a screenwriter and playwright whose contribution to the Filipinx diasporic arts includes the feature length film, Ang Pamana: The Inheritance, Prison Dancer: The Musical and Prison Dancer: The Interactive Webmusical Youtube webseries. The musical she co-wrote, Prison Dancer, is currently in development for a fully mounted stage production at the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.  

Carmen's most recent participation with the CFBS was as an organizer and vocalist for the CFBS Grief Retreat in Nov 2018.  

Intagram: @killapina 

Email: carmenleilani@gmail.com 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/carmensongpoemincantation