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Soil, Shadow and Spirit RETREAT SERIES

Kalliopeia Foundation
paicines ranch
Soil and Shadow

 
Soil and Shadow and the Kalliopeia Foundation's partnership explores the intersection of spirit, ecology, and culture.
 
Our first public collaboration, The Living Altar, was an audiovisual tribute to our planet, the masculine/feminine balance, elder wisdom, and the delights of the senses that debuted at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts in 2020.
 
In 2022, Kalliopeia encouraged Soil and Shadow CEO Nikki Silvestri and Noni Limar (a performer, visual artist, and creative director of The Living Altar) to take time away from caregiving their families and businesses and ask themselves: What is spirit moving through you?
 
Insights from this inquiry reflected Nikki and Noni's collective experience in environmental advocacy, police accountability advocacy, and community development.
 
  • Increasingly, humans will be in close quarters with diverse cultures as climate displacement, political instability, and other economic factors shift our locales - sometimes forcefully. As it already is for many marginalized cultures, the intentional community will become a survival imperative. 
  • How rigorously are we attending to the skills required to relate to ourselves and one another in this new context?
  • How must Black communities (and Black women in particular) evolve in our vision of ourselves to survive and thrive in this new context, considering our roles in our families and communities - especially in times of crisis?
Collectively, women of all cultures must also evolve in our understanding of the skills and practices required to build, sustain and evolve intentional communities – how to live. 

The conversation further evolved as Elaine Patarini and Sallie Calhoun (Paicines Ranch Learning Center) joined Sohrob, Sedoo, Nikki and Noni to develop a 9 month cohort experience that explored these themes and questions:
 
  • How do we live during this time? 
  • How does healing disconnection between the bodies of women and the body of the earth increase the relational skills necessary to navigate the complexity of community building?
  • What practices heal this disconnection between humans and the earth? 
  • What is the bi-directional flow between the bodies of women and the “body” of the earth?
  • What energy do we exchange?
  • What does that exchange transform in our relationship to the earth, our bodies, and the earth itself?
  • How does that transformation show up?
  • How does artistic expression contain the wisdom of relational practices in ways that will maintain throughout time?

The Experience

In May 2023, the facilitation team released a long-form application for the first cohort of Soil, Shadow and Spirit.

We were looking for Black mothers with experience in leadership positions who were ready to confront the shadow of power (see the "shadow work" section below), who had experience with personal development/therapeutic work (such that they could calibrate their vulnerability in a way that both honors themselves and honors the group), who had creative pursuits and a hunger to use art as transformation. 

72 applications poured in for 16 available spots - an unexpected and delightful response. The facilitation team thus increased the cohort size to 20 incredible leaders:

 

For three days each in September 2023, January 2024 and March 2024, the cohort traveled to Paicines Ranch to explore shadow work, land ritual and creative expression. 

Paicines Ranch Learning Center and the Kalliopeia Foundation generously supported all lodging, meals, facilitation and materials fees for the pilot cohort.

Community Practice: Shadow Work

This gathering investigated the relationship between radical personal responsibility, feminine power, histories of oppression, “Blackness,” and deliberate disorientation with our existing identity categories.

“In Jungian psychology, “shadow self” describes the unconscious parts of the personality that our conscious ego doesn't want to identify in itself. Individuals and systems can suppress (“not identify”) with what provokes our fear. What provokes our fear can become a prejudice and/or bias. When prejudices are accompanied by power, an exertion upon resource distribution is often found. Remaking resource distribution systems without also integrating our shadows does not work in the long term. Shadow work helps us identify blindspots and short-sightedness that may be interfering with effective relating, both internally and externally.”

~Vonda Vaden Bates, 10th Dot Transformations
  

The Black mama leaders in this gathering leaned into the complex shadow inquiries of power. Where in our lives have we had power and seen our shadows acting upon our behaviors in ways that impacted those we were responsible for? How has our shadow work interacted with the conundrums involved with decision-making, resource management, and people management? Where have we felt our values being impacted by the destabilizing force of holding power in a pressured environment? How does a non-duality practice support us with holding power as individuals with histories of cultural oppression? 

Bayo Akomolafe’s work on Vunja also deeply inspired our orientation toward shadow work.

"'Vunja' is a Swahili word that marks the site of strange ruptures but then invites celebration and dance with/in those cracks. You can think of 'Vunja' as breakdance - the dance that breaks and the breaks that instigate dances. In a profound sense, Vunja is what Blackness seeks: breakages, openings in the coherence and purity of the master, cracks in the veneer of confidence, rifts in the vast territorial 'body' of the Man. We believe these cracks are sites of excess where things spill over, and new forms of becoming together might be cultivated. Vunja is a political and spiritual technology for gathering together, assembling things in a queer way, for performing research.

Vunja is...an attempt to go beyond modern categories and find other places of power.

With Vunja, we find a situated rhythm with no lyrics, something to move to, something to nod to and swing our hips to, something that brings down to earth (and into the cracks!) the atmospheric concepts of 'making sanctuary'."  

 

We also had Vunja inquiries. What breakages are we seeking within ourselves? What gifts and strategies can we “materialize” together through radical disorientation of our established identities?  

These and other questions informed the arc of our shadow journey together. We broke through and held each other as we met new versions of ourselves and co-created new self-conceptions that gave us deeper access to our power. 

Community Practice: Land Ritual

There are more microorganisms in a teaspoon of soil than people on Earth. This inspiring abundance requires death, destruction, and countless losses to keep the life cycle flowing. Soil fertility reminds us that rapid, sometimes overwhelming, change is the essence of new life. It reminds us that creating nourishing conditions for the life cycle is how to stay grounded. 

Soil teaches the joy of sitting in a field surrounded by sheep, allowing the stillness to seep into our nervous systems. It reminds us to cultivate the ability to lose ourselves in moments of peace and ecstasy, to create the circumstance for those moments to occur whenever possible. 

During the retreats, “ritual” emerged from our inner wisdom about making everyday acts sacred. We sat under grandmother oak and told stories of our ancestors. We pulled elderberries from branches while we sang and wept. We watched flocking birds scream in their sunset spiral dance. We immersed ourselves in the river and let her pull our tears and fears away with the current. We prayed with the vineyard and learned its secrets. We gazed into the eyes of sheep.

We created together. 

Community Practice: Creative Expression

Theater is an invitation to play. To observe the self. Both the divine and the shadow. To wonder why we are the way we are and why we do the things we do. What are our rituals? What are our habits? What do we look like when we can’t see ourselves? 

These retreats invited us to stop and take a view of our inner worlds, to prioritize self-reflection. The invitation to the theater space extended that internal reflection and made it communal. 

Inspired by the work of Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed and Rainbow of Desire, we created theater space together, using techniques of improvisational scene study, image sculpting and collective image building. 
 

We used theater to explore our relationships with ourselves and one another. We witnessed our shadows and how we showed up as oppressed and oppressors. We brought stories, circumstances we wanted to change, questions about our roles in our victories and valleys.  

We sang while we played. We moved our bodies while we played. We spent time in silence while we played. We listened to spirit while we played. We opened and closed creative space with prayer. With affirmations. We spent an entire retreat creating self-portraits and sharing our most vulnerable selves with one another. With life-giving. With visions for the renewal of ourselves and the natural world we are blessed to steward. 

The Future

It's an honor to steward the experience called Soil, Shadow and Spirit. We are excited to invite another cohort to participate in 2025. We are spending the remainder of 2024 and early 2025 fundraising and activating relationships to bring it into being.

If you would like to learn more, listen to our podcast series featuring the Black mama leaders we now call sisters. 

Facilitators

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You can read Nikki Silvestri's formal bio here. Her bio for this gathering includes her experience raising and managing millions of dollars and hiring/firing dozens of employees. Her expertise with difficult staff encounters, from being encircled by a staff team angry about a recent employee shift to terminating most of her team after a funding loss.
 
Her mental/emotional breakdown after discovering that she and her husband could not have biological children. Building a beautiful family and mid-six figures business anyway, through years-long fertility struggles and a pandemic. The thousands of dollars and nights of tears invested in marriage counseling, individual therapy, parenting coaching, and work on intergenerational trauma.
 
She is proud of her life pacing - she built a business at the speed of a healthy relationship with herself, her family, and her beloveds.

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You can read Noni Limar's formal bio here. Her bio for this gathering also includes her experience running an Arts and Culture Non-Profit organization working throughout South Los Angeles, managing an intersectional tight-knit team at a very young age. Founding a women's theater company that collaborated across the Diaspora and all the complex drama that came with being filmed for a docu-series while trying to connect cross-culturally. Working to keep her integrity and morals while working in the commercial industry for well over ten years. Being an OG and Creative Strategist in one of the largest civil rights movements of all time and dealing with all the interpersonal, internal, and very public scrutiny that came with that. Dealing with the ups and downs of pregnancy, birth, and motherhood after giving birth to four children naturally at home and nursing for over 11 years. Balancing working full time as a Creative Director and managing a production team for a large non-profit while homeschooling in collaboration with her husband.  
 

She is in the era of re-wiring programming that led her to chronic dissatisfaction, intense burnout, and mental and physical fatigue. For the last two years, she has been devoted to the purification of her soul and realignment with Allah, and she feels really great about it. 

Shirley Johnson

Shirley Johnson is a practicing licensed psychotherapist, energy healer and yoga teacher based in Oakland, California. Passionate about authentic expression, movement, slowing down and self care, Shirley creates space in her private practice and led workshops & retreats supporting people to live their most authentic life and embrace their whole selves to live their purpose. 

Calethia DeConto

Calethia DeConto (American, born December 27, 1980) is a lens based artist known for her imagery that explores a conscious relationship with nature, personal rituals in healing, sensuality and metaphysical intuitions. Born to adventurous parents - Calethia was raised in about 15 places traveling often with her military father. DeConto began taking photographs at a young age - connecting with the land, communities and new cultures wherever “home” was for that time. 

Calethia has exhibited her photography and short films with galleries across the United States in group and solo exhibits. She continues to utilize her lens as a means to study and honor the natural world by photographing found objects, shapes and feminine figures that come together like a visual poem in the form of collage, cyanotype, experimental film or cinematic photograph.