Collective Wisdom: Community as Medicine
Collective Wisdom is our seasonal rhythm of communal, holistic learning. The belief that our need for human connection is enduring shapes these gatherings. Our intent is to create intention space for inspiration, connection, deepening, and activation in service of collective healing.
Our fall gathering will focus on Community as Medicine:
What does this mean? And what does it look like to integrate creative practices, nature, or other modalities to foster communal connection and resilience in our clients’ lives?
How do we deconstruct the default of one-on-one space to engage more fully and directly with community (e.g. mutual aid, activism)?
As healing practitioners, are we participating in this medicine?
What tangible steps can we take to build, participate in, and sustain collective spaces of healing and action for connection, resilience, and resistance?
Gitika Talwar, community psychologist and Ellen Cline, psychotherapist will join us for a robust, human-centered, intersectional conversation. There will also be space for collaboration and integration in small groups.
This gathering is for healers, practitioners, facilitators, educators, creatives, place makers, and community builders. We are honored to feel, learn, and co-create in community with you.
Format
This is a hybrid offering. You have the option to join us in person at our space in Pioneer Square or virtually via Zoom. Please let us know how you intend to gather with us when you register. Folks who RSVP will receive a note with building and/or Zoom access the evening prior to the workshop.
Please note that the event will begin promptly at 10:30am and conclude at Noon. We ask that you honor this container and those who will gather in it by preparing to be present for the duration of the event. Doors will open at 10 o’clock and you’re welcome to arrive early to settle in, make some tea, and connect with one another.
Exchange
General Registration — $22
with 1.5 CEUs — $44
Member Registration — Included in membership
Authorization
Continuing education units (1.5 CEUs) have been authorized and approved by the NASW Washington State Chapter. Our provider #1975-507. Licensed social workers, marriage and family therapists, and mental health counselors are eligible.
Gitika Talwar, PhD
Community Psychologist
My name is Gitika Talwar (pronounced Ithaca with a G; she/they pronouns) and I am a settler from India who now rests, serves and plays on Duwamish land, commonly known as Seattle. If my personal background can offer some helpful insights, here’s a bit about me: I typically share that I am a Cisgender South Asian woman (Punjabi, Indian), first-generation immigrant / settler from India and I'm sensitive to the impact of caste, race, gender, sexuality, disability, and immigration status. I come from a family of freedom fighters who fought the British occupation of India. Questioning colonialism (and my own complicity in it) remains a lifelong practice. I'm fluent in English, Hindi, and Urdu, and I have a basic understanding of Marathi and Punjabi. I’d also like to add what the wise elder, Sister Clear Grace Dayananda once said about their identities, “I am all of this, I am none of this.”
Ellen Cline, LMHC
Psychotherapist
I love cosmic interconnectedness, reading 6 books at once, and swimming nakey in a big old lake. I’m a soft sculpture artist interested in questions about ritual and process. I’m white, queer, trans, neurocomplex and have had some DSM diagnoses of my own. I am committed to the struggle for liberation and see my work, like all aspects of life, as impacted by and inextricable from that.
My cultural identity and experience of the world is definitively shaped by growing up in Central Asia as a person of US citizenship and English and Irish settler ancestry. I moved to the US at 18 to attend college. After several years in Tennessee and Texas, grad school brought me to Seattle. I’ve grown to love it here, while my heart is always with the global and American South.