Homecoming: Navigating South Asian Ancestral Grief
The panelists and audience will be invited to share how ancestral grief shows up in their lives in these times, where do they draw strength from? Living across lands and generations, what does their spiritual path look like, and how does it inform living through loss and making meaning.
They’ll also offer perspectives on how it feels to be South Asian in the yoga and meditation communities that are often dominated by Caucasian voices.
Panelists
Aman Ali is an award-winning storyteller and filmmaker based in New York City. He's been featured in the NY Times, CNN, NPR, NBC News, HBO for his work promoting Muslim American narratives. He has traveled to all 50 states and 27 countries to tell stories to audiences of thousands of people worldwide. His current film, Two Gods, about a Black American Muslim casket maker in Newark, NJ, is premiering on Vice/PBS this year and has won several awards at top-tier film festivals worldwide. The film currently has a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Serita Colette is a queer Malayali-American healer and organizer in the art and science of sustainable healing on occupied Tongva and Dakhóta land. In 2015 Serita established one of the first People of Color Yoga & Ayurveda practices in Minneapolis, MN. Serita’s work intersects trauma relief, liberation, gender-race-class-sexuality, mutual aid, resilience based practices, bodywork and rest. For the last 4 years Serita has been leading QTBIPOC Rest & Liberation retreats and workshops across the country.
Joan Rupram is an Indo-Caribbean & South Asian femme immigrant and descendent of Indian Indentureship of Guyana. They are a healer and educator focused on ushering wellness as the foundation of sustainable leadership and decentering whiteness through reclaiming our ancestral lineage. Bridging the gap between the spiritual and the political, Joan’s mission is to harmonize inner transformation to restore collective responsibility within our families and communities; creating ruptures of communal care within societies. Joan is the Founder and CEO of JR Consultancy; providing Leadership Embodiment Mentorship for Leaders pioneering self accountability in collective responsibility.
About Table Talk
Table Talk is an honest, lively, and unscripted conversation among health professionals, spiritual and faith-based leaders, artists and other creative individuals to address this central question: "What does it mean to live and die well in our respective communities?"
Every community and culture -- Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian American, Disabled, LGBTQ+, etc. -- has its own unique perspective and shared truth. How do we deal with serious illness, dying, grief, discrimination, and inequity? What does it mean to flourish, celebrate, honor, and connect?
Many of us describe more than one of these groups as home, and many of us have experienced oppression based on multiple aspects of our intersecting identities: race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual orientation, and more. At present, we have few spaces to talk about these questions freely, in ways that make sense for who we are. That’s why Reimagine launched Table Talk. While this ongoing series is explicitly created by and for underrepresented communities, we invite people of all backgrounds to join us to witness, listen and learn. Ultimately we are creating space rooted in the principles of Justice, Equity, Diversity & Inclusion in order for everyone to thrive.
About the organizers
Roshni Kavate is the Founder and Creative Director of Cardamom and Kavate, a wellness platform dedicated to reclaiming nourishing practices rooted in ancestral wisdom for collective liberation. She believes grief is a portal to wholeness. Through rituals and storytelling, we can reconnect to our origins and be our wild selves. She sees the path to being whole as a radical art and political practice.
Roshni's early childhood was marked by the grief her mother and ancestors experienced by living on the margins based on gender and caste. As a Palliative Care Nurse in the US, Roshni witnessed racialized trauma and its lasting impact on the health and wellness of communities of color. Combining her interest in art, wellness and advocacy she has launched a startup, Cardamom and Kavate to reimagine what it means to rebirth ourselves, embody our freedom and live in our pleasure.
Zubin Desai is the Head of Product & Design at Reimagine, a nonprofit organization that draws on the arts, design, medicine, and spirituality to transform taboo cultural attitudes around death and grief, and to address the inequities surrounding how we live and die.
Zubin met Reimagine's founder, Brad Wolfe, when they were classmates and housemates at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. In 2018, Zubin embarked on a spiritual journey through Bali and India and has since dedicated his career to designing products and services that elevate and shine light on the hardest parts of the shared human experience.
