Highlights from this session:

• Unburdening BIPOC and country-wide ‘Legacy Burdens’ through IFS and ancestral healing
• Allowing our trauma protector to take on a more healthy, self-led, or new role that is more harmonious within our systems
• Working with individual and collective victims and perpetrators to change the past and update all parts into the present moment

Tamala Floyd, LCSW-BACS has over 25 years of experience as a psychotherapist working with children, families, and women with trauma histories. She has expertise in childhood sexual abuse, women’s sexual trauma, and domestic violence. Tamala has worked in various settings including schools, criminal justice, hospitals, mental health agencies, and private practice. She is an Internal Family Systems trainer and consultant. Tamala also provides business coaching to women entrepreneurs and therapists to assist in building successful businesses and practices by overcoming mindset blocks. She has authored a chapter in “Fiercely Speaking,” entitled “Healing the Wounded Mother,” and a chapter in an upcoming book entitled, “Internal Family Systems Therapy: Supervision and Consultation.” The chapter focuses on IFS consultation with BIPOC therapists.

Dr. Richard Schwartz began his career as a family therapist and an academic at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He created the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model in the early 1980s. IFS is now a widely-used form of psychotherapy, particularly with trauma. Schwartz is currently on the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

Highlights from this session:

• Spiritual practice as a way to face the truth of suffering and initiate positive action
• How a strong ethos of care and a commitment to community enhance our capacity for resilience
• Moral residue: the weight of cumulative failure and recognizing the gift of humility

Roshi Joan Halifax, PhD, is a Buddhist teacher, Zen priest, anthropologist, author, and pioneer in the field of end-of-life care. She is Founder, Abbot, and Head Teacher of Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She has taught on the subject of death and dying at many academic and medical institutions around the world. Much of her work has focused on Engaged Buddhism, where she’s founded projects including the Project on Being with Dying, the Upaya Prison Project, the Prajna Mountain Buddhist Order, and the Nomads Clinic in Nepal.

Highlights from this session:

• Awakening future states of possibility that contextualize past wounds
• Accessing higher forces of creativity and intuition through true dialogue and deep dreaming
• Relating to our collective future beyond intellect by moving into superconscious states of intuition

Orland Bishop is the founder and director of ShadeTree Multicultural Foundation in Los Angeles, where he has pioneered approaches to urban truces and mentoring at-risk youth that combine new ideas with traditional ways of knowledge. ShadeTree serves as an intentional community of mentors, elders, teachers, artists, healers, and advocates for the healthy development of children and youth. Orland’s work in healing and human development is framed by an extensive study of medicine, naturopathy, psychology, and Indigenous cosmologies, primarily those of South and West Africa.

Highlights from this session:

• The path and importance of ceremony, gathering, and prayer 
• How Grandmother Flordemayo’s capacity to vision and dream beyond physical realms was developed and celebrated as a young girl, and how this gift circled back to her later in life to receive a divine message
• The impact and trauma of migration and illness through a lens of story

Born the youngest of 15 children in the highlands of Central America, Grandmother Flordemayo was found at an early age to have the gift of Sight. By age four, she was being trained in the art of Curanderismo, which had been handed down from mother to daughter for many generations. Currently, in addition to her independent work as a Universal Healer, featured speaker, and woman of prayer, she is the Founder of The Path, a 501(c)3 dedicated to the preservation of traditional knowledge and heritage seeds. Through her work with The Path, Flordemayo maintains a seed bank and holds gatherings to further educate and raise awareness of the importance of seeds. She works as a healer/curandera and considers her Mayan heritage a keystone of her work.

Highlights from this session:

• The inner work of interrupting our beliefs, practices, and policies
• Excavating our inner selves and the biases and stereotypes that influence how we move in the world 
• The potential of a humble spirit and being open to what we don’t know

Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, PhD is an Associate Professor of English Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is co-editor of four books and is co-author of Advancing Racial Literacies in Teacher Education: Activism for Equity in Digital Spaces where she examines her concept of “Archeology of Self” in education. At Teachers College, she is the founder of the Racial Literacy Roundtables Series where for twelve years national scholars, teachers, and students facilitate conversations around race and other issues involving diversity. Yolanda appeared in Spike Lee’s “2 Fists Up: We Gon’ Be Alright” (2016,) a documentary about the Black Lives Matter movement and the campus protests at Mizzou. Her first full-length collection of poetry, Love from the Vortex & Other Poems, was published in March 2020. Her sophomore book of poetry, The Peace Chronicles, was published in July, 2021.