HEALING OF MEMORIES WORKSHOPS
Healing of Memories workshops are held in safe, secure venues and led by trained facilitators. We create a safe and sacred space in which participants can share painful experiences in a spiritual, yet non-sectarian atmosphere of deep listening and mutual respect. We seek to be fully inclusive and respectful of diversity.
When telling their stories, participants are encouraged to describe their situations in the context of the history of their countries and their families and ancestors. Connecting with others in relation to their distress, often for the first time, allows participants to move forward feeling unburdened, lighter, and empowered to find solutions to their problems.
IHOM-NA’s workshops are a respectful, safe space. We pose questions for personal reflection that catalyze participants’ ability to get in touch with their feelings and ideas of identity, agency, justice, peace, healing and reconciliation. The storytelling exercises and discussions raise consciousness of diverse experiences and challenges. We believe that when personal stories are heard and acknowledged, individuals feel healed and empowered. Through deep listening and meaningful sharing, human relationships can be transformed and restored. Read more about the different types of workshops we offer below!
SOCIAL JUSTICE & RACIAL HEALING
VETERANS
The HOM workshop is a major step that helps veterans on their healing journey. It provides a safe place for participants to explore personal histories and gain insight and empathy for themselves and others contributing not only to personal healing, but also to the healing of interpersonal relationships. The key to the workshop is that it provides a safe environment for the veterans to tell their stories. Many veterans have kept these buried deep inside them and this has been a barrier to their healing. As they tell their stories and listen to others, they realize that they share a common human bond and that we are all wounded in some way by past experiences. The workshop is effective in helping veterans’ deal with the moral and spiritual wounds of war, which is a part of healing that is often left unaddressed in veteran healing strategies.
[Back to the top]HEALTHCARE WORKERS
We provide a safe, supportive, nonjudgmental, confidential space to share feelings, story, experiences, and to begin to heal past painful experiences, trauma and moral dilemmas encountered in your care of COVID-19 patients. The sharing and acknowledgement of feelings is often a first step toward healing. Each workshop is 4-hours long and is held in groups of 9 to 12 people.
Participants find support, healing, increased trust, empathy, hope, relief, reassurance and sense of belonging.
“I felt connected and grounded.”
“It was a healing experience.”
“Listening to others share their struggles, concerns, and hopes made me feel I am not alone.”
If you have experienced the personal, professional, emotional tsunami named COVID-19 and need a safe, confidential environment in which to begin to heal the moral, personal and professional wounds it brought into your life, please register for a HOM Zoom Support Call.
If you can relate to any of these scenarios, then this workshop may help:
- Feeling fear, depressed, shame, guilt, anger, remorse, grief, frustration, and/or a deep moral/ethical dilemma over what you had been unable to do, or what you personally witnessed.
- Making decisions and taking actions that were morally challenging to you
- Witnessing people dying alone and not being able to help, or having to be a surrogate holding space for people to die without loved ones
- Decisions you had to make or could not make on behalf of patients
- Losing patients, friends, colleagues, loved ones
- Living in fear of being infected or infecting loved ones
- Betrayal by the system that was designed to protect you
- Feeling hurt by the actions of your community in not taking the needs of healthcare workers into consideration
The anger, grief, fear you are experiencing are normal reactions to a highly stressful and sometimes frightening experience. Sharing may support now and prevent future emotional, spiritual or psychological difficulty.*
*NOTE: If you are seeing a therapist ask if whether this HOM support and healing experience is a helpful adjunct to your ongoing therapy. If you are overly dependent on alcohol, mood altering medications, or illicit drugs to get through the day, we suggest you get help for that first.
[Back to the top]SOCIAL JUSTICE & RACIAL HEALING
Working Together to Dismantle Racism and Facilitate Healing
This workshop-conference will examine the characteristics of systemic racism and its impact on everyday life by exploring the interrelated themes of diversity, alienation (anomie), entitlement, and community. Presentations developed around these themes will establish critical frameworks for understanding how race and racial ideologies persist in shaping social and cultural institutions, which mediate interconnectedness and/or social isolation between individuals and social groups, and how these factors foster or hinder community-building. Towards the end, perceptions of identity and community will be examined by:
(i) presenting concepts and theories that are core to cultural diversity including the basis of stereotypes, prejudice, stigma, discrimination, and privilege
(ii) investigating the links between practices of exclusion and the structuring of societies, and (iii) exploring the psychosocial factors that contribute to alienation (anomie) and social isolation.
In addition to the information-driven component featured through the presentations of scholars and community activists, workshops (or break-out sessions) will be facilitated each day by the staff of the Institute for the Healing of Memories (IHOM) to help participants process their feelings, experiences, and general understanding of the topics covered. The goals of these workshops with IHOM facilitators are the following:
1) begin the process of building bridges through fostering authentic dialog with and between participants;
2) learn strategic methods of uncovering how racial ideologies shape identity for personal transformation;
3) provide a space to begin the process of healing.
[Back to the top]OTHER
If there is a workshop you would like to see offered and facilitated by HOM that is not listed above, please contact us!