Body Talking: Spirituality, Creativity, & Somatics for Queer & Trans Folk (workshop)
Hosted by Imani Ford
Sunday, December 21st
3-4 pm
Daya Bushwick
Sliding Scale, donation-based $15 - $30
Body Talks is a poetic approach to somatic healing grounded in creativity and spiritual health.
This workshop will include meditation, self-Reiki, color, writing, and drawing prompts.
Spiritual Health is a part of your wellbeing that encompasses exploring, finding, and grounding yourself in purpose, meaning, and inner peace. People often explore spiritual health through religion and spirituality, but everyone has access to spiritual health. Spiritual health is ultimately about connecting to something larger than yourself, such as personal values, nature, community, creative practices, or even liberation movements and social justice. Body talks are about how to collect and cultivate tools and practices to sustain us and ground our liberation work in healing.
Body Talks encompass:
an intuitive dialogue between the body and mind & their relationship with creativity and space.
healing collaboration between the left-side brain (responsible for speech and abstract thinking) and the right-side brain (responsible for image processing and spatial thinking)
A way to simultaneously engage the spiritual & somatic aspects of healing trauma
Slow, progressive, somatic engagement with the nervous system (titration)
Reconnection to your embodied, ancestral knowledge
An educational space to share & find resources to liberate the body as well as the mind
Body talks are for everyone regardless of artistic, meditation, Reiki, or somatic experience.
The heart of Body Talks lies in the belief that collective creativity, spirituality, and somatics can be a vehicle for social change, personal growth, and healing from isolation, loneliness, and the ongoing effects of systemic harm. Although many competing unmet needs have distracted them from the most sacred, mundane aspects of these three practices that bring them joy, Imani realized that their belief in these practices has always kept them fighting for something, whether with others or for themselves. They will create spaces that ensure those who are welcomed are certain they belong. Despite the hardships we face, Imani embraces the intersection of these disciplines to curate innovative, collaborative, creative spaces that foster tools for deeper connection with self and others inside and outside of Body Talk’s safe containers.
About Imani
Imani Noel Ford (they/he/she) is a black, trans-masculine, genderqueer interdisciplinary artist, writer, expert teaching artist, and aspiring yoga teacher, born and raised on the South Side of Chicago, now based in Queens. They teach visual art, music production, creative writing, and healing-centered art workshops to students and families across NYC. He earned degrees in African American Studies and Visual Arts in Sculpture from Princeton University in 2018; an MA in English & Comparative Literature from Columbia University’s PhD program in 2020. She began making music shortly before being accepted to Berklee College of Music. They decided to self-teach and continue to make and learn music. He is currently cultivating a digital video art practice that allows him to continue to investigate the abstract visual language he did in painting and mixed media in a more financially accessible way. They have been practicing both Vipassana and Anapanasati meditation since 2016. They are Reiki II attuned and are currently training to become a Focalizing Practitioner under Nick Werber and Jo Miller, both of whom continue to pass on Dr. Michael Picucci’s groundbreaking work.
Although Black Body Production’s concept has existed for some time, Imani has tweaked and expanded its purpose. Without the necessary safe containers for healthily processing rage, grief, loneliness, feelings of unworthiness, and shame due to the ongoing effects of transphobia and retaliation, Imani did not have all the resources inside and outside to healthily cope. Their experiences with self-sabotage while they were at their most vulnerable, navigating housing precarity, helped them see what they wanted to offer people with the skills and knowledge they have and want to cultivate with others: spaces that would have really helped them. The truth is that we are fighting for a lot of BIG, BIG, BIG things right now, but we are also fighting for small joy, small wins, and basic, personal, human needs like peace of mind, a sense of safety in our bodies, and access to dignity, self-regard, self-respect, self-compassion, and feelings of worthiness.