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 share their life experiences, both painful and joyful in the context of the history of their countries and their families and ancestors. Connecting with others in relation to their pain, 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 create 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. In addition to the storytelling exercises creative arts exercises connect participants with a deeper level of expression.
Personal sharing and facilitated discussions raise consciousness of diverse experiences and challenges as well as our common humanity. When personal stories are heard and acknowledged, individuals report that they experience healing and empowerment, less anger, and more connectedness. Through deep listening and meaningful sharing, human relationships can be transformed and restored. All persons are welcome to participate in Healing of Memories.
Workshops may be residential experiences of two and a half days or non-residential. One-day introductory workshops are available to organizations that are interested in partnering and wish to learn more.
Workshops are usually held at one of two beautiful retreat centers in Arizona. However we welcome inquires from organizations wish to provide workshops for their staff at other locations.
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.
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.
Healthcare Workers
These workshops began as IHOM-NA’s response to the courageous, exhausting , and often traumatic experience of nurses and other health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.Workshops were designed to offer a safe, supportive, nonjudgmental, confidential space to share feelings, story, experiences, and to begin to heal painful and frustrating experiences, and the trauma and moral dilemmas encountered in the care of COVID-19 patients.
We now recognize that secondary trauma is an ongoing reality for those who care for patients in emergency rooms, intensive care units, rape crisis centers, street care to the homeless, and the many venues of medical care. Participants have stated that they find support, healing, increased trust, empathy, hope, relief, reassurance and sense of belonging.
- 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.
