humbled
tl/dr: ask for what you need.
I entered this new/next year of my life in community, learning, growing, and feeling the quiet power of being seen and heard.
If you’ve spent any time reading my notepad, you know how deeply wellness lives in me. You know how much I value creating spaces for rest, for inner exploration, for healing.
And if you’ve read my post Safe, you also know how essential it is that Black and Brown people have spaces to heal that are truly safe. From my experience, the depth of our healing changes profoundly when the space is devoid of white gaze.
The depth of our healing changes when the space is devoid of white gaze.
returning to the work
This weekend, I returned to The Hoffman Institute, for a graduate weekend.
I completed my full process in January 2020, right before the world shut down and my life changed forever. Hoffman was the work I needed, the grounding I couldn’t yet name, the preparation for what none of us could have imagined: isolation during the pandemic, the extraordinary loss of life due to COVID-19, and the racial awakening that shook the world in 2020.
My own awakening came that year, and it changed everything. It led me to devote my life to supporting Black women who are, quite literally, sick and tired of being sick and tired.
You can hear me talk more about my process, and how it shaped my life, in my interview with Hoffman teacher and coach, Drew Horning.
the land that holds
Fast forward to August 2022, my first graduate weekend at Hoffman.
By then, the Institute had relocated from St. Helena to Petaluma after the devastating Glass House fire in 2020. The Petaluma land is vast: rolling hills, long trails, and wildlife unbothered by human presence. It’s peaceful and grounding, a place where your nervous system can settle, where the earth holds you steady, and the wide sky reminds you that anything is possible.
Petaluma is an “all things are possible” kind of place.
meeting Regina
A few months earlier, in May 2022, I had been studying Embodied Leadership at the Strozzi Institute. That experience, the one I wrote about in
Safe, left me hesitant to enter another predominantly white wellness space.
Still, I followed my intuition, kept some guard up, and showed up for my first Hoffman graduate weekend. Drew, familiar from my original process, was one of the facilitators.
To my surprise, the one Black female teacher at Hoffman was there too, this time as a student, and she was a part of my small group. The universe, as always, placed exactly what I needed in front of me: Regina Louise.
Between sessions, we walked the land together. The trees and birdsong held our conversation as I shared my Strozzi experience. Regina is dynamic, full of life and conviction, unapologetic and deeply committed to creating spaces where people can learn how to live whole.
Together, we dreamed. What would it look like to have spaces where we could safely process our trauma? Where we could speak openly about the systems that have, for generations, placed one group above all others? What would it feel like to be free inside that truth?
We dreamed of spaces where healing didn’t require translation.
leaving Strozzi
I left that graduate weekend inspired and returned to Strozzi for my final class. It was more of the same, only heavier.
We were learning somatic release in a mixed group, and an enclosed space. I believe in energy, in how we hold it, share it, absorb it. Someone’s joy can lift me; someone’s fear can linger in my body.
Watching white bodies release trauma in the same room with Black and Brown bodies, without acknowledging the imbalance or the harm, was something I couldn’t participate in.
My awakening in 2020 had already shown me the weight of trauma I was carrying from their systems. Taking on more was not an option.
When I spoke with the co-founder about what I was experiencing, the response was dismissive, filtered through the belief that it was my issue.
I left, and I did not return.
a circle fulfilled
That brings me to this weekend, my birthday weekend, and my second graduate weekend at Hoffman. Guess who was my teacher? Regina Louise.
And this time, the entire weekend was structured for us, Black and Brown graduates, to safely and openly explore how systems of oppression have shaped our lives.
Black, Indigenous, Latin, Asian, Middle Eastern, Bi-racial — we gathered and spoke truth. We saw how these systems live within us, how we unconsciously uphold them, and how we can choose differently.
We regulated our bodies. We danced. We sang. We celebrated breakthroughs and cried deep tears of grief for who we might have become if racism had never existed.
We cried for who we might have been if racism had never existed.
the dream realized
This was the work I had dreamed of. The work Regina and I whispered into the wind three years ago. She fought to bring it into being, and she did, Hoffman did.
I am overjoyed, deeply grateful, and so proud to think about how the ripples of this work will move through families and generations to come.
The work we dreamed has begun to live in the world.
I am humbled and remind you all to ask for what you need - you never know who’s listening and has the power to create what you dream of.
x - n.