I woke up this morning feeling the world feels different today.

We had our first Soulforce young adult leadership retreat this weekend.

The first thought I had this morning was: “This weekend was truth!”

When I woke up this morning, I felt so honored and privilege to have served these young leaders. So grateful. I also found myself having more compassion to myself and my family and even to strangers. I felt a shift in myself.

This weekend we trained leaders in our community to create change in the world drawing from the deepest individual and collective wisdom they had. We called the retreat: Breathe, Connect, & Disrupt. It was about nonviolent resistance through self-transformation.

It’s hard to find the words to describe how I feel right now, but I felt I must write it down so I don’t forget. I feel love flowing from my heart. I fell in love with these youth leaders. I feel in love with this life. I feel so much love for my parents who showed me so much love that I can share this with others. I feel so in love with my children and my husband. I feel a tremendous sense of hope for the world.

It was months and weeks of preparation. It was a dream we all had to serve young adults in our area. We didn’t know if anyone would show up of if we would find the right people. We planned and prepared. We had nerves. We had disagreements. We reconciled.

There were even a lot of no’s I found myself to saying to others in the process of preparation. I had to protect something that was emerging within me so truly that it just needed to be protected. It was liberating to say no to preserve what was sacred, but to do so in dialogue.

This weekend was perfect. As my co-leader Marie wrote on our welcome sign, we arrived as honored guests and and left as noble family.

It was a perfect balance of honoring our pain, naming injustice, and honoring the joy and love energy of life that we all could feel. It is so essential to hold both and brilliant when you can find the balance of both. Justice is naming, acknowledging, wrestling with things like oppression and injustice and pain, but it is also holding the beauty, love, and grace of life. We try to leave"either-or" thinking and we hold this paradox closely to our heart.

We sat in a circle at the beginning of the retreat. In a circle there is no beginning and no end. No teacher. No student. A universal symbol. We held a sacred talking stick. We had a soulforce in the center of our circle--a candle and rock alter my loving sister Marie and I created together years ago. We had symbols that reflected our inner child and our ability to stretch as human beings. We took the time to create the container very intentionally. We introduced ourselves with our feelings--not our resumes or fears. We took a breath and sat in silence.

A loving brother named Shub lovingly made all of our meals and only asked that we pay it forward. The first night we ate chole and daal and rice and sat family style, serving each other and taking care of each other. We honored the food--who prepared it, how it came to us, and the earth. We shared stories about food and we got to hear about family and childhood memories. The love Shubh put into this food was felt by all of us. It was simple, hearty, and was prepared with no excess and no waste. That food had such a big impact on me, making me think so deeply with my own relationship with food and the relationship I’m establishing for my kids.

We connected to some quotes around nonviolence and reflected on what nonviolence is and what it’s not--a sometimes loaded, misunderstood word--and clarified what we meant. King said "there is a time when silence is betrayal." Nonviolence is not pacifism. Nonviolence is a fierce love that inspires social change and revolutions and has existed for hundreds of years, but it is not a story that is played in the mainstream as stories of war are. Often we mention Gandhi and King, but they were just two giants amongst many with a longstanding history.

Blaine, another young leader and co-facilitator, led us in an exercise to connect with our sense of home. We had a subtle but powerful theme of looking at housing in our community, because housing inequity is such a serious issue here in our local community..... but we started with ourselves first. What is home? How does home feel? And if home feels like this, what norms do we need in place to connect to our feeling of home in this learning space?

As we transitioned to the magical loving space of the organic farm we were staying at, we were still carrying the weight of the week. Our young leaders were tired, burned out, stressed, and overwhelmed. We felt the weight of that and held it gently and tenderly.

The next day we did the beautiful and challenging practice of theater of oppressed. We played. We laughed. We tackled big issues. We tried to articulate the problem for how systems of inequalities around housing are set up, and we explored new visions for what a more just system might look like. We drew from the wisdom of the body. We played with power and used our hands to explore how we impact power---how it is co-created and how it is manipulated.

A moment I will never forget emerged in a spontaneous moment of transformation that you simply can’t plan. While trying different kinds strategies to disrupt power, a beautiful young man went into his heart and a beautiful love explosion occurred. The amazing thing was that he was playing the role of the "oppressor," yet a surprising thing happened where LOVE took him over. This young man shared with such vulnerability and emotion that time stopped. We all stopped. He was given so much compassion and love in the scene that he was acting in that something unexpected emerged in him. Love flowed to dirsupt power.

In that moment we all stopped, sat down on the floor, and one by one our hearts continued to break open. We shared our deepest pains with each other. Stuff maybe that can never be shared in a lifetime was shared with people we met less than 12 hours ago. It was truthful. It was honest. It was held by the love of the community.

The day continued with more work on the iceberg of change. We maintain that 80% or more of social change is actually beneath the water, and yes that means we must explore the roots deep within us. They become strong. They become love anchors. We figured out what is our work right now--constructive work, inner work, or direct action? We talked about fighting for our future.

We heard the youth voices of Standing Rock. We gain so much inspiration from this example, and we imagined that future generations will ask us: "Wow, what was it like to be alive in the time that Standing Rock happened?"

A hard question emerged in our discussion: Why do people of color have to carry the emotional labor of white allies? How can white people do their work without it taking a toll on people of color? I later realized that I actually had to say no to some loving white allies who wanted to be apart of this retreat, when I realized we had enough white facilitators. Maybe one answer is setting boundaries. But also knowing is is essential to have common spaces too. Again we hold both.

Hard questions. No easy answers.

While during the day there was an explosion of sharing our pain….In the evening there was an explosion of love and celebration. We shared poems, sang songs, shared stories, danced, and felt so much joy our hearts could barely take it. We heard from old souls and magical unicorns and New York queens. We heard truth. We heard freedom. With no technology…. Just a group of people in a room sharing who they are. What a party that was!

It was our final day together. We begin with meditation. We walked in nature. We did some more theater of oppressed to now look at how we may disrupt acts of violence that show up in interpersonal relationships. Sometimes we say NO. Sometimes we DIALOGUE. Sometimes we use LOVE to transform. Sometimes we let it BE. There are always options. But the important thing we do NOT react with more violence by dehumanizing the other side--we seek to understand them even while condemning what they do might be WRONG. We wrestled with that complexity.

The California quails came by that morning in a group. There was a Mountain Lion that had been roaming around. The cows mooed. The chicken ran around. The sheep jumped the fence. Even the animals were with us at this retreat.

Time stopped, it felt, in this countryside retreat.

We went into the future 7 generations ahead to speak to future beings who tell us that we actually have achieved the great turning. We actually did achieve the new story, they told us. We actually did arrive. Wow what an empowering stance to believe we will actually take a turn. This violence we see around us stopped. This disconnection we see around us stopped. From this place, we set our intentions for our future work. To keep working on ourselves. To keep creating change in the world. We each looked at each other in the eye. We sent each other love energy.... clapping and cheering each other on.

Tears flowing.

Love flowing.

Hugs flowing.

It was the end of our weekend retreat, but hopefully the beginning of so much work together in the future.

We didn’t want to let go of the circle.

Hugs.

Cinnamon Rolls.

Solidarity Calls.

As one of our young leaders said, we are family now.

Today I woke up and the world felt different. I hope we may all find these magical moments of being with community and feel that love overflowing in our hearts. It is the feeling of BEING in the beloved community. Everyone is seen. Everyone is doing their part. We live humbly. We take care of each other. We do the work. Now we carry this feeling being at this retreat to the other spaces we work and live in.

And I have always believed and will continue to believe that it will always be the youth who will have the passion, conviction, and faith to be anchored in their hearts. I was just reminded of that this weekend. We may create spaces for them, but they will be the guides.