Tips to Support Individual and Community Healing

Things we've done to support individual and community healing For Mangos With Chili's 2013 National Queer Arts Festival show FREE: Two Spirit, Trans and Queer People of Color Visions of Freedom, S.D. Shah and Devi collaborated on a video + performance piece where they asked the audience to write responses to the question "What are some things you've done to support your healing and community healing (physical, emotional, cultural, sexual, spiritual, etc.)?" Here's what community members wrote at the show and placed on a physical altar or posted to the event's web stream or facebook page (The piece wasn't a Peacock Rebellion project, but we're posting it here so the list has a virtual altar that's more permanent than facebook. and Mangos' web site is down): How we've supported individual and community healing:

  1. I've developed my inner dialogue and taken time to make intentional goals

  2. let myself cry

  3. go to therapy

  4. kink

  5. learn the truth and speak it

  6. honor my body and sex it up

  7. dress in drag

  8. allowed myself to focus inward and cry for a lot of years

  9. hibernate

  10. smoke pot

  11. light candles

  12. learn to meditate

  13. eat orange and green foods

  14. write down my dreams

  15. connect with other survivors and healers

  16. make art about my experiences

  17. stop trying to organize and run everything

  18. learn how to let myself be touched and feel my body

  19. find people to love authentically

  20. singing and teaching people to sing

  21. stare into someone else's eyes

  22. study Kabbalah

  23. unlearn oppression

  24. support my friends and lovers and community

  25. I came out at 45.

  26. create cultural spaces for marginalized folks like myself

  27. cook and grow food as medicine

  28. stayed in my body

  29. held my sexuality and pleasure as central

  30. therapy and more therapy

  31. loving and massaging my dying friend

  32. loving my friend/her girlfriend

  33. sharing my amazing daughter with the world

  34. sharing my dreams and journaling

  35. coming to this show with a hot woman

  36. not accepting how things are

  37. (trying really hard to) love my body

  38. listening to trauma

  39. speaking despite fear

  40. care-giving for caregivers

  41. food making

  42. write stories

  43. PLAYING a lot

  44. share knowledge

  45. be open and vulnerable

  46. be able to accept pleasure

  47. knowing I deserve

  48. masturbation

  49. allow myself to be adored

  50. unlearn catholicism

  51. love

  52. learning - always

  53. make art with other people

  54. have sex with a lot of people

  55. listen to our elders

  56. short skirts

  57. dance

  58. breath

  59. burn medicine

  60. stay out late with [someone's name]

  61. walk naked with no shame

  62. no judgement and open to infinite possibilities

  63. sharing smiles and kindness

  64. taking steps to take care of myself

  65. I forgave myself and asked my family to confront our collective historical denying to begin ending the ancestral cycles of violence in my family

  66. let myself be.

  67. listen to others

  68. meditation

  69. walk my dog

  70. being open

  71. being honest

  72. shared my experience

  73. I asked for help.