“My interest in bridging my passions for yoga and social justice has been a result of my professional endeavors and expertise in social justice and sexual violence work, alongside my yoga teaching journey. I believe that the process of learning, advocacy, and dialogue cannot be confined to just one part of a person’s life.”

“Creating Culturally-Sensitive Healing Spaces” is part of our online training series and designed to enhance our practitioner community’s capacity to offer trauma-informed care. At the same time, these teleseminars can empower survivors by exposing them to a wide range of healing resources and importantly, increase our societal understandings of the layered impacts of sexual trauma and important insights around resilience.

In this teleseminar, Grace Poon discusses the overall negative effect that oppression has upon all aspects of human functioning. Scholarship illustrates that discrimination increases issues that impact physical, mental, behavioral, social, and spiritual aspects of one’s self. Due to the relationship between oppression and health, she believes it is our responsibility as healing arts practitioners to understand how to create culturally-sensitive and anti-oppressive healing spaces. In order to safely support survivors through a trauma-informed lens, we must support, advocate, and develop spaces that honor the intersectional identities and cultures that each survivor embodies and ultimately brings into healing spaces.

Learning objectives include-

*Discussion of the way different identities shape & inform the experiences of people

*Exploration of the importance and relationship between social justice and holistic healing arts

*Understanding statistics and cultural-specific challenges of under-served and marginalized survivor populations, including: Homeless Survivors, LGBTQ Survivors, Undocumented Survivors, Native American Survivors, Elderly Survivors, Refugee Survivors, Veterans Survivors, Large Ethnic-specific survivor groups in the United States, Body-Diverse Survivors, Ability-Diverse Survivors

Consider following along with Grace’s presentation by reading through the Resource Guide she created. The resource guide is the “preview” version (which still works for structure of the teleseminar) and if you wish to own the full version, please let me know Grace know by contacting her at gracepoonyoga@gmail.com. She offers her guide at a sliding-scale cost.