We are now over four months into a worsening genocide in Gaza — with over 30,000 murdered and over 2 million now enduring military-enforced famine enacted by Israel, the US, and their global allies. There is no way a 90-minute teaching can impact the depth of sorrow, injustice, betrayal, and state-sponsored violence unfolding in Palestine. And yet, we share a moral obligation to resist the life-desecrating forces at work.
In this gathering, our three guests will share of their personal attempts as Earth-honoring ritualists and educators to embody core values and take tangible action in a time of genocide.
* Donations for this event will go to the Middle East Children’s Alliance and
Mutual Aid Support Network. You can continue to donate after the event is over. We also invite you to support SAND’s GoFundMe to Help Amina & Her Family Escape the Crisis in Gaza
Topics:
In which ways do we each inherit ancestral debts that compel us to work for peace and healing in the present? How can embracing a generational perspective be liberating?
How can spiritual practices complement tangible activism and work for justice?
What is the responsibility of spiritual practitioners towards global movements for Indigenous sovereignty? Especially those living as citizens of the nations who perpetuate colonial violence.
What role can the land and relationship with the Earth play in the work for cultural and systemic healing?
How do we reckon with traditions and lineages that have perpetuated violence?
Presenters
Layla K. Feghali
Layla K. Feghali is an ethnobotanist, cultural worker, and author who lives between her ancestral village in Lebanon and her diasporic home in California, where she was born and raised. Her dedication is the stewardship of our earth’s eco-cultural integrity and the many layers of relational restoration, systemic reckoning, and healing that entails. Feghali offers a line of plantcestral medicine and other culturally-rooted offerings, with an emphasis on Southwest Asia and its diasporas. Her recent book, The Land in Our Bones, documents cultural herbal and healing knowledge from Syria to the Sinai, while interrogating colonialism and its lingering wounds on the culture of our displaced world.
Taya Mâ Shere
Taya Mâ Shere is a ritual artist embracing embodied, earth-honoring devotion as liberatory spiritual practice. She serves as a professor of Organic Multi-Religious Ritual at Starr King School for the Ministry and co-weaves Makam Shekhina, a Jewish and Sufi Muslim multi-religious community committed to counter-oppressive spiritual practice. Taya Mâ hosts the acclaimed Jewish Ancestral Healing podcast and The Sarah & Hajar Series: Sacred Practice and Possibility at the Intersections of Judaism and Islam. She co-founded the Kohenet movement and is co-author of The Hebrew Priestess: Ancient and New Visions of Jewish Women’s Spiritual Leadership. Her five albums of sacred chant have been heralded as “cutting-edge mystic medicine music.” She is currently tending Ceasefire movement chaplaincy and offers bespoke immersions in earth-reverent ritual and embodied, counter-oppressive devotion.
Daniel Foor
Daniel is a doctor of psychology, experienced ritualist, and the author of Ancestral Medicine: Rituals for Personal and Family Healing. He is a practicing Muslim and initiate in the Òrìṣà tradition of Yoruba-speaking West Africa who has also learned from Mahayan Buddhism and the older ways of his English and German ancestors. Daniel was a U.S. Fulbright scholar in Cairo, Egypt as a student of Arabic language, and he is passionate about generational healing and training leaders and change makers in the intersections of cultural healing, animist ethics, and applied ritual arts. He lives with his wife and daughters near his adoptive home of Granada, Spain in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.