Witnessing: Attuning to BIPOC Nervous Systems

The Collective Skillshare is a dynamic lunch-and-learn style workshop series designed to foster ongoing professional development and community connection.

This month, we have the pleasure of witnessing a heartfelt dialogue between Tolu and Gitika, who will share from their lived experiences and labor as mental health professionals. 

We aim to offer an intimate look into our heart, mind, and spirit to center the BIPOC experience in the current moment. 

Through dialog and connection, we invite you to recognize how our mental health training recruits us into complicity with white supremacy. We hope to support you in building a more nervous-system aware practice that supports true healing and liberation in solidarity with BIPOC peoples.

The facilitators are Tolu Mejolagbe (Founder, Re-member Counseling) and Gitika Talwar (Founder, Pranh Healing & Wellness).

Tolu is a Somatic Therapist 2nd generation immigrant to the U.S. and of West African descent. Gitika is a Clinical-Community Psychologist, first generation immigrant to the U.S. and of South Asian descent. 

We are passionate about decolonizing and liberating our mental health practice. Our firsthand and intergenerational experience with colonization has helped us recognize how centering the BIPOC experience in mental health trainings can lead to a collective awakening to how mental health systems are complicit in advancing colonial logics and how BIPOC-centered healing praxis can provide liberatory tools to benefit us all. 

We are offering this skillshare to center the BIPOC experience, allowing clinicians of all identities to recognize their relationship with internalized white supremacy and its effects on the folks we serve. It aims to address how ignoring or minimizing the impact of colonization maintains trauma.