Reimagining Father's Day
At this virtual mini-retreat, we will reimagine Father’s Day by transforming legacies into new possibilities. What have we inherited from Pop, Papà, Apa, or Baba? How can we make peace with difficult family histories? In workshops led by Luana Morales and Christopher M. Rzigalinski, participants will engage in brave discussions, share stories, write in journals, and meditate using personal objects or heirlooms.
Schedule:
10:00am - 10:15am PT / 1:00pm - 1:15 pm ET
Welcome and Opening Meditation (Luana Morales)
10:15am - 11:00am PT / 1:15pm - 2:00pm ET
Workshop: Healing Our Inheritance (Luana Morales)
11:00am - 11:05am PT / 2:00pm - 2:05pm ET
Break
11:05am - 11:50am PT / 2:05pm - 2:50pm ET
Workshop: Object-Driven Meditation (Christopher M. Rzigalinski)
11:50pm - 12:00pm PT / 2:50pm - 3:00pm ET
Closing Meditation (Christopher M. Rzigalinski)
Context
Reimagine continues to offer gatherings on holidays, often times of extreme vulnerability and grief. In particular, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Thanksgiving, and winter celebrations in December can be difficult because of their traditional associations with family members and reunions. However, even in the darkest seasons of sorrow, reasons for gratitude and joy can be found. As physical distancing relaxes, it’s time to reimagine holidays and discover what matters most about these annual events.
Like Mother’s Day, Father’s Day has its roots in memorialization. The first known Father’s Day service in the U.S. occurred in Fairmont, West Virginia, on July 5, 1908, after hundreds of men died in the worst mining accident in U.S. history. Grace Golden Clayton proposed a service to honor all fathers, especially those who had died. A year later, Sonora Smart Dodd of Spokane, WA was sitting in church listening to a Mother's Day sermon. She decided she wanted to designate a day for her father, William Jackson Smart, a Civil War veteran and widower who raised a newborn and five children. It was not until 1972 that it became a national holiday.
Workshop Leaders
Luana Morales (she/her) is an Afro-Boricua birth, death, and ancestral healing arts practitioner. Her roles include birth and bereavement doula, death midwife, circle keeper, officiant, reiki master teacher, ritual guide, spiritual coach, and herbal apprentice devoted to reclaiming and reimagining our birth, death, and Afro-Indigenous healing practices. She co-creates containers that support reflection, experimentation, healing, learning, collaboration, and joy for our individual and collective liberation. In 2017 she co- founded Seeds of Our Ancestors, a mobile interdisciplinary, intergenerational, and multi-lineage healing squad in service to movement spaces devoted to healing justice. In 2020 she started the Spirit of the Earth Carry Me Home Project. This was a response to disporportionate COVID-19 deaths in low income/undocumented/LGBTQI communities to offer support with the financial impact of the death of a loved one. The project provides an eco-friendly cardboard coffin to be decorated by family (supplies provided) or a local artist, death midwife support, transport of the body, and cremation. In Spring 2021 she started the Journey of the 13 Moons Cohort, a sacred BIPOC-only space to reconnect/discover their medicine, reclaim the exiled parts of themselves, and bring healing to their bloodlines.
Christopher M. Rzigalinski (he/him) is an RYT® 200 yoga and meditation scholar-practitioner. He is also a museologist, online media host and presenter, classroom educator, writer, artist, and activist living in New York City. He serves as the Operations and Development Director of the YogaNow! app. His research and teaching interests focus on how embodied yoga principles can develop equity and social justice in cultural institutions. This work led him to develop a theory of object-driven meditation that seeks to transform the way individuals relate to material reality. His goal is to help facilitate the creation of brave spaces of dialogue that cultivate co-collaboration. You can find more information about his artistic projects at working-definitions-media.com and his yoga practice at workingdefinitionsyoga.com.
