Connecting with Ancestors in Community

About this event

Come and connect with ancestors while in community with others! Please join us for an afternoon of opening our hearts to connecting with those who are no longer with us- even those you may have never been able to meet in this lifetime. Practices of storytelling and altar building in community will support us in calling in greater connections to ancestral wisdom and care. Those who are grieving lost animal loved ones are welcome to join the community as well. We will be guided by a very special community-organizer and grief therapist, Susana Victoria Parras. Susana Victoria Parras Bio Susana Victoria Parras (she/her/hers) is the daughter of Guatemalan immigrants, mother, friend, partner and a community- organizing mental health therapist of color committed to generating healing, justice and care through non-carceral practices. For the last 18 years she has worked within and outside of some of the most carceral institutions in our current society: schools, hospitals, and social service providers. Before she found ethnic studies, social justice, abolition and transformative justice she found safety and hope in places and relationships that were imperfect, spacious, loving and curious. Her political homes include her ancestors, community, partner Alejandro, family/place of origin, chosen family, and her imagination. She is accountable to ancestors, her inner children, her daughter, her partner, teachers and all those that cultivate her process of accountable care and growth. Susana specializes in anti carceral grief and suicide care & transformative collective practices within community settings. She currently provides anti-carceral mental health therapy through her practice Heal Together, community garden and grief programming through Heal Together’s Anti-Carceral Care Collective and organizes with CAT 911 (Community Alternatives To Policing) in South Central Los Angeles where she also lives, loves, and works. Susana dedicates her life to organizing through healing as a central component for justice, resistance, and activism. Container for the Space We believe in the importance of both/and. It is both necessary for us to have spaces to be honest and transparent about our experiences with pain and the impacts of violence, and it can be very activating or triggering for folks. We encourage a collective intention to practice towards mutual safety and education that is liberatory and true. • We will work to move through this space with care and gentleness, together, and we ask you to take the brave steps (if you haven’t already) of beginning to befriend and developing an understanding of/relationship with the places within yourself that are unhealed, unseen, more sensitive, raw, or places of higher activation. • It can also be helpful and supportive to co-reflect and co-process in safer spaces, but only when we feel safe enough inside our body, minds and environments to hold that. We recognize this is difficult, which is why we don’t do this alone. We heal together.