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I wish you many blessings.

tree turtle (always spelled lowercase even at the beginning of a sentence) is my legal name and my Buddhist Upāsikā ordination vow name. I write, publish, edit, and offer professional services under my other name, Cleis Abeni. My pronouns are she/her. Click here to learn more about my names. 

I am a Black American woman peace educator and healer who loves to work benevolently for others. 

Currently, I am the Executive Director of Wisdom Projects, Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and the Director (CEO) of the Baltimore Wisdom Project (BWP).

I am also a longtime professional editor; a 2001 Pushcart Prize award-winning writer who has published widely in small presses and journals; and a multifaceted teacher.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was one of the first practitioners to introduce high-quality trauma-sensitive mindfulness and restorative justice practices into programs for youth and families in the Baltimore-Washington, D.C. area. 

For over 30 years, I have developed and implemented innovative, evidence-based programs and services for violence prevention and community health for low-income youth and families.

I have worked on staff (including as an executive) as a nonprofit professional at several organizations to uplift their programming, communications, operations, and fundraising. 

If you are encountering me through this website, please call me by my first name, tree.

Here is a list of people who molded, mentored, or taught me. 

My purpose in life is to live compassionately and contemplatively for peace, healing,  justice, and creative freedom. 

For all of my life—even during my late childhood—I have been interested in three humanistic and humanitarian main themes: 

1. How healing and peacemaking restores our minds, bodies, and spirits in the wake of trauma and violence; 
2. How community organizing, community healing, and community education uplift collective wellness in a way that enhances the good of the human species as a whole despite our cultural differences; and
3. How people on the social, economic, and political margins of societies survive and thrive despite fluctuating power and powerlessness.

Everything I do are vehicles to uplift people and work through these themes.

Ever since I met her while studying at the Beauvoir summer program at the National Cathedral in 1978 as a youth, I have revered the late civil rights leader, Pauli Murray, and modeled elements of my lifework after her.

Click here for a detailed timeline of my healing and clinical training and work.

I am a clinician with a deep background in health, wellness, and social service. I was first encouraged to study nursing by Baba Chuck Davis, a remarkable nurse, choreographer, dancer, and  impresario for West African dance and culture. He was my teacher at the Capital Health Institute School of Practical Nursing. I was a formerly licensed Registered Nurse (RN), a Registered Nurse in Psychiatry (RNP),  Licensed Practical Nurse (LPN), and a formerly licensed social worker (LSW).  I was also a peer/community counselor, a former addiction and recovery counselor, a certified specialist in conflict resolution, and a multifaceted healer with a certificate in trauma-informed care. 

As a nurse and/or a health navigator, I worked mostly on night shifts at DC General, Maryland General, Providence Hospital, the Walter P. Carter Center, FutureCare, Hahnemann Hospital, St. Joseph's Hospital, and the Ohio Hospital For Psychiatry while working at nonprofits or teaching during the day. I was also a School Nurse at Paul Laurence Dunbar High School in Baltimore City.

Since 1985 (over 30 years), I have worked with children, youth,  adults, and families as a peace educator to prevent violence, advance community health, and elevate wellness. I have also specialized in wellness for people with mental and physical disabilities. As a peacemaker, I apply trauma-sensitive and disability-aware principles and practices of restorative justice, conflict resolution, de-escalation, and Social and Emotional Learning to all of the work that I do.

Mindfulness and mindful movement are also my foremost vehicles for individual and collective healing and in 1990 I created and still regularly use a method for whole-community mindful practice. 

I was mentored by Lee Donald Stern (1915-1992), a Quaker leader in the Alternatives to Violence Project; by Ruth Revels (1936-2016), a Lumbee Elder with whom I studied restorative justice practices through talk circles; by Amos N. Wilson, with whom I studied trauma-informed care; by Llaila Afrika, with whom I studied African-centered holistic health; and by several other key figures rooted in the twentieth century African American peace and civil rights movements like Dr. Pauli Murray. All of these people helped shape my vision for peacemaking. 

Subsequently, in addition to my present nonprofit work, across the last 30-plus years, I did the following:

• I was a youth fellow in a joint program sponsored by the United States Institute for Peace and the District of Columbia Arts Center.
• I was a Program Managers for an anti-violence initiative in Philadelphia called Children’s Behavioral Health Interventions. 
• I was a Mindful Movement Instructor II at the Kennedy Krieger Institute where I helped ensure the fidelity of mindfulness for a research study at a public school. 
• I was the Director of Operations for Baltimore's Inner Harbor Project where I wrote the organization's anti-violence mediation handbook and helped train youth how to apply the work of the handbook within workshops for Baltimore City's law enforcement officers and business leaders in Baltimore's downtown district. 
• I led peacemaking peer support groups and writing workshops at the Lorton Correctional Complex in Virginia just outside of Washington, D.C., and at the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women (MCIW), and other incarceration facilities.
• I designed and led restorative justice, mindfulness, and life science programs for violence prevention at the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center, the 29th Street Community Center, the Chick Webb Center, Penn North Kids Safe Zone, and many other community centers, and recreation centers. 

I am a longtime mediator with extensive experience in conflict resolution. There are many terms and approaches for working through conflicts outside of (or adjacent to) the criminal justice system and the courts (like mediation, negotiation, arbitration, dispute resolution, conflict management, conflict transformation, and transformative justice). I have lived through, studied, and often applied many of these shifting concepts and practices in my work since the late 1980s.  

I earned a certificate from the Center for Conflict Resolution in Chicago. For many years, I was a member of the Conflict Resolution Education Network/National Institute for Dispute Resolution, and a member of the Society of Professionals in Dispute Resolution. 

In addition to an interdisciplinary BA in English, Peace Studies, Philosophy and Religion, and Theater Arts from Goucher College, I hold an MA in science writing and poetry from Johns Hopkins University; and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts, Education, and Dance (with a specialization in mindful movement) from the Ohio State University.

At OSU, under Dr. Maletic's direction, I was the first person in the world to notate and analyze two movement forms: (1) The 52 Blocks/52 Blows, an African American martial arts form, and (2) Voguing, an African American and Latina/o LGBTQ dance tradition. In my movement documentation and analysis, I used Labanotation, Motif Description, and Effort-Shape Analysis to document how the dancing embodied different ideas of community and personhood. 

Under Dr. Gerbes' direction, I wrote a thesis on the humanist idea of community in the choreography of Doris Humphrey for which I received the Selma Jeanne Cohen Award from the Society of Dance History Scholars. I also researched improvisation in African American vernacular dancing and created an evening-length showcase of structured improvisations featuring multiple Black social dance traditions from the Lindy Hop to BBoy/BGirl.

I specialize in using data-driven ethnography and community participatory fieldwork to uplift community health and wellness.

As with my formative study with Baba Chuck Davis, my health studies, STEM, and artistic endeavors have often intersected. I have always integrated science and healing with the arts.

I am a former foster child, and a former child resident of housing projects who experienced homelessness as a child and as an adult. (I was also blessed to attend private schools for short periods.) 

In my infancy, childhood, and adult years, I survived multiple forms of violence (beatings, burnings, child sex trafficking, child sexual assault, and gang rape). The physical wounds and trauma left a lasting effect on me. I know full well that most children who endured what I lived through die from their injuries or they die soon after as they fail to cope with their trauma. 

As a child, I was diagnosed autistic and hyperlexic. Like many autistic people, I sometimes stim. I began studying Buddhist meditation in the late 1980s to learn how to re-pattern my mindset to cope with my autism and multi-faceted trauma. 

My early commitment to Buddhism helped me calm my mind and body in the wake of trauma. Early in my life, I made a commitment to never harm anyone and to work against the harm and oppression of youth,  adults, non-human species, and the environment for the rest of my life. 

Thus, along with my training, education, and professional work, my firsthand experiences inform my life-work on violence, disability, discrimination, neurodiversity, homelessness, trauma, and poverty.