Healing
Be sure to click here for a general overview of my lifework.
I am a healer, teacher, artist, nonprofit manager, restorative practitioner, mindfulness educator, life science educator, health navigator, a former nurse, and a former social worker, and a lifelong advocate of justice for trauma-impacted children and adults.
Currently, I direct the Baltimore Wisdom Project (BWP) and I also co-direct Wisdom Projects, Inc., the larger 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization within which the BWP is one of two divisions (along with the Chicago Wisdom Project).
This page of my website overviews my thirty-plus years as a healer.
For me, healing is evidence-based engagement (words and actions) that maintains, restores, and elevates wholeness, safety, wellness, equity, peace, and optimal living. When we live optimally, we are the greatest assets (not deficits) for happiness and justice in our lives. My sense of healing is rooted in metaphysical naturalism. Metaphysical naturalism holds that everything we know and do is drawn from the natural world. This worldview rejects supernaturalism presented as fact.
(1)
During my late adolescence, after leaving the last foster care facility in which I was partly raised and emancipating myself with the assistance of a social worker, I earned a G.E.D. and took nursing courses at the now-defunct Armstrong Adult Education School and Providence Hospital in Washington, D.C.
Eventually, I became a nurse. I was first a LPN and then a RN/RNP (Registered Nurse in Psychiatric Nursing), and I was also a LSW back in the days when you could pass a test to be a licensed social worker without a BSW or MSW with training in another healthcare or social service field. As a nurse I worked part-time over the years (usually on night shifts) with no-to-low-income children, AIDS patients, and seniors at the following facilities: DC General, Maryland General, Providence Hospital, the Walter P. Carter Center for Psychiatric Care, FutureCare, Hahnemann Hospital, St. Joseph's Hospital, and the Ohio Hospital For Psychiatry.
During this period, at the suggestion of one of my mentors, Brenda Strong Nixon (1943-2001), I also took a course at Armstrong in trauma informed social work methods and a course in the care of children with autism and learning disabilities. From these studies, I earned a certificate in trauma informed care in 1991.
Brenda Strong Nixon was the executive director of Associates for Renewal in Education, Inc. and one of the founders of the Consortium for Youth Services and Consortium for Child Welfare. She was also the social worker that helped me work with the court system to emancipate myself and leave foster care.
During this period, I became an ordained Buddhist upāsikā and I began my work as a mindfulness educator and peace facilitator. I took weekend workshops at Medgar Evans College with Dr. Amos N. Wilson (1940-1995) before his untimely death. Dr. Wilson was also my teacher in my certificate program in trauma-informed care.
(2)
In 1986, through then-Mayor Marion Barry's Summer Youth Employment Program, I became a youth facilitator in summer programs for socioeconomically at-risk children under the direction of Ernest Johnson at the Greater Washington D.C. Urban League and the Greater Baltimore Urban League. The African American-led Urban League's decades-old principles of social service had a tremendously powerful effect on me. This was the first professional experience in which I learned that it was not just important to help people; how we offer social services within marginalized communities was equally important. I began documenting and searching for effective methods to merge arts education with social service and behavioral management.
I worked half-time during that period in an after school program at the D.C. Arts Center and the Market Five Gallery Arts Center, and I even ran a boogaloo and breaking crew (with a holistic focus) called the Market Five that consisted of myself with four older youth from the center's program. We busked on the street in an area where the Market Five Gallery subway station was being built. I was also Guy C. McElroy's Curatorial Assistant at the Bethune Museum and Archives.
(3)
It just so happened that at one of our boogaloo crew's street performances, Samuel H. Wilson, Jr. (1922-1995) was watching. I had known him since I was a child entertainer in the 1970s. He recruited me to become an apprentice and youth ambassador in the education program at Baltimore's Arena Players, Inc. It was from Mr. Wilson and Anna Hall (his first wife) that I first learned restorative practices and restorative justice. Mr. Wilson was one of the co-founders of Arena Players. He was also a former Baltimore City Public School teacher, and a professor of English, Theater, and Urban Arts at Coppin State University.
Mr. Wilson's concepts continue to have a profound influence on my approach to healing through the arts. Until his death in 1995, Mr. Wilson's education program at the Arena Players not only trained youth like myself for winter and summer theater-work; it also offered extensive restorative justice-centered outreach programming throughout the city at schools, recreation centers, and community centers. Mr. Wilson also worked with a core group of youth (that included myself) to provide restorative justice services within local incarcerated facilities.
I was part of several short-lived after school workshop series developed by Mr. Wilson that attempted to integrate arts education and restorative practices into the everyday curriculum of schools or after school programs. During my time with the Arena Players, I was also a summer youth fellow with the United States Institute of Peace in a program co-sponsored by the D.C. Arts Center.
(4)
I studied restorative justice and talk circles with Ruth Revels (1936-2016), a pioneering educator of Indigenous restorative justice of the Lumbee tribe, as well as with the Peace Troupe and Gary Wood in Fort Royal, VA, and I trained at the Center for Conflict Resolution in Chicago, IL (where I earned a certificate in conflict transformation)
I studied with Augusto Boal (the architect of the Theatre for the Oppressed) at the ATHE Conference in Atlanta, GA. This experience dovetailed with my reading of Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
I took non-matriculating coursework in conflict studies at the University of Baltimore and Temple University’s Conflict Management and Dispute Resolution program.
I also took many workshops on restorative approaches to school discipline with educators like Beverly H. Johns.
(5)
In 1987, I visited Nizah Morris (1955-2002), one of my best friends, in Philadelphia. At the time, I did not know that Nizah's mother, Rosyln Wilkins (1931-2013), was an early childhood educator.
I watched intently as Mrs. Wilkins taught and engaged with infants, toddlers, and pre-kindergarteners at the Wilkins Family Day Care Center, which was held at her home and a neighbor's home.
Each moment of engagement was full of incredible knowledge about early child development, attachment research, and holistic education. Mrs. Wilkins was a devout Catholic yet she was very inclusive and Nizah was Buddhist. Their methods for early child education demonstrated the affirmation and peacefulness required to raise healthy, well-adjusted, inquisitive children.
Mrs. Wilkins was a visionary community educator who spoke out against corporal punishment. The children served at Mrs. Wilkins' center were mostly low-income Black girls and boys. Her tenderness was an antidote to the dangerous "whuppings" that have become bad stereotypes of Black rearing. She passed on that wisdom to Nizah, her other daughters, and everyone with whom she engaged in the work of child education.
The center was my first model for Pre-K education for Black and Brown children who experience poverty and a lack of resources. After witnessing the work, I began to think about the need for equity and justice in education for the youngest low-income children-of-color.
On my first visit to Mrs. Wilkins' children's center, she also introduced me to Dr. Llalia Afrika (1946-2020) who had come from Baltimore to lead several workshops in Philadelphia. He helped Mrs. Wilkins create culturally responsive lessons for the children that uplifted pride within them as Black people.
I then began a lifelong apprenticeship in African-rooted, culturally responsive healing with Dr. Afrika that lasted until his death from COVID-19 in 2020.
(6)
From these roots, since 1986, I have led or co-led hundreds of workshops, mediations, facilitations, trainings, and programs involving healings practices of mindfulness, restorative justice, conflict transformation, anti-violence, and gender-and-sexuality education. I worked at public and private schools (grades K-12), nonprofits, community centers, and homeless shelters throughout the Northeast, Southern East Coast, and Midwest United States.
Some of the many schools within which I offered workshops or residencies were the Lewis Ada H. Middle School in Philadelphia; the Canton Arts Academy in Columbus, Ohio; Harlem Park School in Baltimore, Maryland; as well as McKinley High School and Rudolph Elementary School in Washington, D.C.
Some of the many recreation centers or community centers within which I offered workshops or residencies were or are the McKim Center, the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center, 29th Street Community Center (formerly called the Barclay Recreation Center), Cecil Kirk Recreation Center, Chick Webb Center, Ella Bailey Recreation Center, Gardenville Center, James D. Gross Center, Greenmount Center, Twelfth Street YMCA, and the 3rd Avenue Space.
In the early 1990s, I was also one of the restorative and mindful practitioner-educators on a research team sponsored in part by Coppin State University's Allied Health and Nursing programs that carried out a mindfulness study at Cecil Kirk Recreation Center in Baltimore.
In the late 1990s, I was one of five Program Managers for an initiative called Children’s Behavioral Health Interventions, a joint program of St Joseph's Hospital, Hahnemann Hospital, Lewis Ada H Middle School, and four other under-served schools in the greater Philadelphia region. This initiative attempted to study the use of mindfulness and restorative practice to transform the behavioral health and wellness of students within predominately African American, historically under-resourced schools.
Recently, I was a manager charged with ensuring the fidelity of mindfulness and mindful movement interventions on a team of practitioners for a research study at Franklin Square Elementary/Middle School partly sponsored by the Kennedy Krieger Institute of Johns Hopkins University.
I also co-facilitated or co-managed other smaller interventions, guest workshops, trainings for professional development, and mediations in partnership with such organizations as the Urban League, the Arena Players, the DCAC, Project RAISE, the Minority Task Force on AIDS/FACES; Bebashi, Inc.; Unity; GLAAD of Decatur, IN & Chicago, IL; NAASCA; Public Allies; SMYAL; OutPost; Genders Within; Innerground Railroad Project; My Sisters Place; and House of Ruth.
(7)
I have extensive experience designing and implementing anti-violence programming for criminal justice reform. While serving as the Director of Operations for Baltimore's Inner Harbor Project, I wrote the organization's mediation handbook (emphasizing de-escalation, conflict transformation, anger management, fear management, and impulse control). I also trained youth in the field operationalization of mediation practices from the handbook and coached them prior to the youth offering innovative training workshops for Baltimore City's law enforcement officers who worked in the downtown district.
This work built on my years of mediation work between community members and law enforcement. I led meditations that attempted to train law enforcement officers in positive engagement with sex workers in the Kensington neighborhood of North Philadelphia for and organization called Genders Within and my work for OUTPost in Illinois where I offered what was then called "cultural sensitivity" mediations and trainings for police officers on how to engage appreciably with youth and adults of color in low income neighborhoods and LGBTQ individuals.
In 2009, I also edited The Ways That Police Deal With People: The Theory and Practice of Process-Based Policing by Mengyan Dai.
(8)
In the middle 1990s I traveled to the Guangdong Province of Southern China to take courses in ancient Chinese healing at the Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine, earning a certificate in tuina and qigong healing. I traveled throughout Southeast Asia and also earned a certificate in Yoga for children. I gained certificates from the Midwest Holistic School of Massage. I also studied wat po healing at Thailand's Suai School.
While living, teaching, and studying in central Ohio, I trained in Alexander Technique with Lucy Venable, William and Barbara Conable and augmented my studies with lessons in Body-Mind Centering, and Laban/Bartenieff Fundamentals. My mindful movement education owes much to these influences.
I also once maintained a practice as an herbalist committed to the scientifically-based, medically safe use of plants for preventative care, which I learned in lessons from the late Dr. Afrika and Donatella Egwu (1940-2008) who was a student of the curandera, Maria Sabina (1896-1985).
(9)
I have taught extensively in jails, prisons, and juvenile detention facilities as a healer, mindfulness guide, and restorative justice practitioner.
I offered monthly mindfulness workshops for young "offenders" at Lorton Reformatory before that facility’s closing.
I taught weekly "writing for peace" storytelling workshops at the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women through the Goucher Prison Education Program.
I also led anti-recidivist restorative circles (emphasizing anti-violence training, conflict management, and mediation) at the Cheltenham Youth Detention Center, Alfred D. Noyes Children's Center, Franklin County Juvenile Detention Facility, and the Ohio Reformatory for Women.
(10)
For 30-plus years, I have led many healing workshops about healthy, affirmative understandings of sexuality and gender.
I began this work in the late 1980s when I was asked by Deborah Roffman, a pioneer in the field, to led a workshop at the Park School in Baltimore, Maryland.
Ernest Johnson also asked me to give workshops on healthy sexuality, rape prevention, and teen parenting at McKinley High School.
I visited scores of schools to teach healthy notions of sexuality and gender to youth based in principles of harm reduction.
I am influenced in this work by the pioneering efforts of groups like the Advocates for Youth.
My healing education work in this area also includes extensive guidance for sexual assault prevention as well as anti-bullying strategies for girls, boys, and for LGBTQ youth.
(11)
With Nizah Morris and her organization called Genders Within, I co-led many harm reduction missions on-the-street for addicts, sex workers, and the homeless in Philadelphia and Newark. Founded by Nizah and housed for a short time at Bebashi Inc., Genders Within was dedicated to improving the health and wellness to at-risk girls, women, and gender-non-conforming individuals who experienced health disparities, addiction, homelessness, and/or the challenges of longterm illness (including HIV/AIDS).
For Genders Within, I traveled throughout West, East, and Northern Africa (Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Ethiopia, and Algeria) to offer AIDS prevention workshops emphasizing safe, consensual understandings of sexuality for women, girls, and LGBTQ individuals.
Partly on behalf of Gloria Phellps' former organization called the Innerground Railroad Project, and the now defunct Rak Kun Kham Phes Project (รักคนข้ามเพศ/Rạk khn k̄ĥām pheṣ̄), I traveled as a healer throughout Southeast Asia (especially Thailand) to co-teach harm reduction workshops emphasizing positive, supportive understandings of gender difference.
This work took me to the Mediterranean, including two short trips within African immigrant communities in coastal Italy for Genders Within; and the Caribbean, including a successful yet dangerous mission by land and by cruise ship to accompany an oppressed queer woman activist from Jamaica where her life was in jeopardy.
While the danger and lack of sound resources of this traveling burned me out, these international missions deepened my humanistic commitment to global peace-building, harm reduction, and disease prevention typified by ending discrimination and violence towards marginalized people based on gender, sexuality, race, disability, religion, and income.
(12)
Additionally, I was a certified deep pressure therapy practitioner, a certified Isha-based Yoga for children teacher, and a certified massotherapist.
We are truly one human species divided by needless, culturally constructed factions and hostilities.
Fundamentally, my work cultivates loving-kindness that aims to uplift under-served people and and eradicate systemic policies, practices, and behaviors that foster toxicity, violence, trauma, bigotry, discord, division, and disenfranchisement.
I am a healer, teacher, artist, nonprofit manager, restorative practitioner, mindfulness educator, life science educator, health navigator, a former nurse, and a former social worker, and a lifelong advocate of justice for trauma-impacted children and adults.
Currently, I direct the Baltimore Wisdom Project (BWP) and I also co-direct Wisdom Projects, Inc., the larger 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization within which the BWP is one of two divisions (along with the Chicago Wisdom Project).
This page of my website overviews my thirty-plus years as a healer.
For me, healing is evidence-based engagement (words and actions) that maintains, restores, and elevates wholeness, safety, wellness, equity, peace, and optimal living. When we live optimally, we are the greatest assets (not deficits) for happiness and justice in our lives. My sense of healing is rooted in metaphysical naturalism. Metaphysical naturalism holds that everything we know and do is drawn from the natural world. This worldview rejects supernaturalism presented as fact.
(1)
During my late adolescence, after leaving the last foster care facility in which I was partly raised and emancipating myself with the assistance of a social worker, I earned a G.E.D. and took nursing courses at the now-defunct Armstrong Adult Education School and Providence Hospital in Washington, D.C.
Eventually, I became a nurse. I was first a LPN and then a RN/RNP (Registered Nurse in Psychiatric Nursing), and I was also a LSW back in the days when you could pass a test to be a licensed social worker without a BSW or MSW with training in another healthcare or social service field. As a nurse I worked part-time over the years (usually on night shifts) with no-to-low-income children, AIDS patients, and seniors at the following facilities: DC General, Maryland General, Providence Hospital, the Walter P. Carter Center for Psychiatric Care, FutureCare, Hahnemann Hospital, St. Joseph's Hospital, and the Ohio Hospital For Psychiatry.
During this period, at the suggestion of one of my mentors, Brenda Strong Nixon (1943-2001), I also took a course at Armstrong in trauma informed social work methods and a course in the care of children with autism and learning disabilities. From these studies, I earned a certificate in trauma informed care in 1991.
Brenda Strong Nixon was the executive director of Associates for Renewal in Education, Inc. and one of the founders of the Consortium for Youth Services and Consortium for Child Welfare. She was also the social worker that helped me work with the court system to emancipate myself and leave foster care.
During this period, I became an ordained Buddhist upāsikā and I began my work as a mindfulness educator and peace facilitator. I took weekend workshops at Medgar Evans College with Dr. Amos N. Wilson (1940-1995) before his untimely death. Dr. Wilson was also my teacher in my certificate program in trauma-informed care.
(2)
In 1986, through then-Mayor Marion Barry's Summer Youth Employment Program, I became a youth facilitator in summer programs for socioeconomically at-risk children under the direction of Ernest Johnson at the Greater Washington D.C. Urban League and the Greater Baltimore Urban League. The African American-led Urban League's decades-old principles of social service had a tremendously powerful effect on me. This was the first professional experience in which I learned that it was not just important to help people; how we offer social services within marginalized communities was equally important. I began documenting and searching for effective methods to merge arts education with social service and behavioral management.
I worked half-time during that period in an after school program at the D.C. Arts Center and the Market Five Gallery Arts Center, and I even ran a boogaloo and breaking crew (with a holistic focus) called the Market Five that consisted of myself with four older youth from the center's program. We busked on the street in an area where the Market Five Gallery subway station was being built. I was also Guy C. McElroy's Curatorial Assistant at the Bethune Museum and Archives.
(3)
It just so happened that at one of our boogaloo crew's street performances, Samuel H. Wilson, Jr. (1922-1995) was watching. I had known him since I was a child entertainer in the 1970s. He recruited me to become an apprentice and youth ambassador in the education program at Baltimore's Arena Players, Inc. It was from Mr. Wilson and Anna Hall (his first wife) that I first learned restorative practices and restorative justice. Mr. Wilson was one of the co-founders of Arena Players. He was also a former Baltimore City Public School teacher, and a professor of English, Theater, and Urban Arts at Coppin State University.
Mr. Wilson's concepts continue to have a profound influence on my approach to healing through the arts. Until his death in 1995, Mr. Wilson's education program at the Arena Players not only trained youth like myself for winter and summer theater-work; it also offered extensive restorative justice-centered outreach programming throughout the city at schools, recreation centers, and community centers. Mr. Wilson also worked with a core group of youth (that included myself) to provide restorative justice services within local incarcerated facilities.
I was part of several short-lived after school workshop series developed by Mr. Wilson that attempted to integrate arts education and restorative practices into the everyday curriculum of schools or after school programs. During my time with the Arena Players, I was also a summer youth fellow with the United States Institute of Peace in a program co-sponsored by the D.C. Arts Center.
(4)
I studied restorative justice and talk circles with Ruth Revels (1936-2016), a pioneering educator of Indigenous restorative justice of the Lumbee tribe, as well as with the Peace Troupe and Gary Wood in Fort Royal, VA, and I trained at the Center for Conflict Resolution in Chicago, IL (where I earned a certificate in conflict transformation)
I studied with Augusto Boal (the architect of the Theatre for the Oppressed) at the ATHE Conference in Atlanta, GA. This experience dovetailed with my reading of Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
I took non-matriculating coursework in conflict studies at the University of Baltimore and Temple University’s Conflict Management and Dispute Resolution program.
I also took many workshops on restorative approaches to school discipline with educators like Beverly H. Johns.
(5)
In 1987, I visited Nizah Morris (1955-2002), one of my best friends, in Philadelphia. At the time, I did not know that Nizah's mother, Rosyln Wilkins (1931-2013), was an early childhood educator.
I watched intently as Mrs. Wilkins taught and engaged with infants, toddlers, and pre-kindergarteners at the Wilkins Family Day Care Center, which was held at her home and a neighbor's home.
Each moment of engagement was full of incredible knowledge about early child development, attachment research, and holistic education. Mrs. Wilkins was a devout Catholic yet she was very inclusive and Nizah was Buddhist. Their methods for early child education demonstrated the affirmation and peacefulness required to raise healthy, well-adjusted, inquisitive children.
Mrs. Wilkins was a visionary community educator who spoke out against corporal punishment. The children served at Mrs. Wilkins' center were mostly low-income Black girls and boys. Her tenderness was an antidote to the dangerous "whuppings" that have become bad stereotypes of Black rearing. She passed on that wisdom to Nizah, her other daughters, and everyone with whom she engaged in the work of child education.
The center was my first model for Pre-K education for Black and Brown children who experience poverty and a lack of resources. After witnessing the work, I began to think about the need for equity and justice in education for the youngest low-income children-of-color.
On my first visit to Mrs. Wilkins' children's center, she also introduced me to Dr. Llalia Afrika (1946-2020) who had come from Baltimore to lead several workshops in Philadelphia. He helped Mrs. Wilkins create culturally responsive lessons for the children that uplifted pride within them as Black people.
I then began a lifelong apprenticeship in African-rooted, culturally responsive healing with Dr. Afrika that lasted until his death from COVID-19 in 2020.
(6)
From these roots, since 1986, I have led or co-led hundreds of workshops, mediations, facilitations, trainings, and programs involving healings practices of mindfulness, restorative justice, conflict transformation, anti-violence, and gender-and-sexuality education. I worked at public and private schools (grades K-12), nonprofits, community centers, and homeless shelters throughout the Northeast, Southern East Coast, and Midwest United States.
Some of the many schools within which I offered workshops or residencies were the Lewis Ada H. Middle School in Philadelphia; the Canton Arts Academy in Columbus, Ohio; Harlem Park School in Baltimore, Maryland; as well as McKinley High School and Rudolph Elementary School in Washington, D.C.
Some of the many recreation centers or community centers within which I offered workshops or residencies were or are the McKim Center, the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center, 29th Street Community Center (formerly called the Barclay Recreation Center), Cecil Kirk Recreation Center, Chick Webb Center, Ella Bailey Recreation Center, Gardenville Center, James D. Gross Center, Greenmount Center, Twelfth Street YMCA, and the 3rd Avenue Space.
In the early 1990s, I was also one of the restorative and mindful practitioner-educators on a research team sponsored in part by Coppin State University's Allied Health and Nursing programs that carried out a mindfulness study at Cecil Kirk Recreation Center in Baltimore.
In the late 1990s, I was one of five Program Managers for an initiative called Children’s Behavioral Health Interventions, a joint program of St Joseph's Hospital, Hahnemann Hospital, Lewis Ada H Middle School, and four other under-served schools in the greater Philadelphia region. This initiative attempted to study the use of mindfulness and restorative practice to transform the behavioral health and wellness of students within predominately African American, historically under-resourced schools.
Recently, I was a manager charged with ensuring the fidelity of mindfulness and mindful movement interventions on a team of practitioners for a research study at Franklin Square Elementary/Middle School partly sponsored by the Kennedy Krieger Institute of Johns Hopkins University.
I also co-facilitated or co-managed other smaller interventions, guest workshops, trainings for professional development, and mediations in partnership with such organizations as the Urban League, the Arena Players, the DCAC, Project RAISE, the Minority Task Force on AIDS/FACES; Bebashi, Inc.; Unity; GLAAD of Decatur, IN & Chicago, IL; NAASCA; Public Allies; SMYAL; OutPost; Genders Within; Innerground Railroad Project; My Sisters Place; and House of Ruth.
(7)
I have extensive experience designing and implementing anti-violence programming for criminal justice reform. While serving as the Director of Operations for Baltimore's Inner Harbor Project, I wrote the organization's mediation handbook (emphasizing de-escalation, conflict transformation, anger management, fear management, and impulse control). I also trained youth in the field operationalization of mediation practices from the handbook and coached them prior to the youth offering innovative training workshops for Baltimore City's law enforcement officers who worked in the downtown district.
This work built on my years of mediation work between community members and law enforcement. I led meditations that attempted to train law enforcement officers in positive engagement with sex workers in the Kensington neighborhood of North Philadelphia for and organization called Genders Within and my work for OUTPost in Illinois where I offered what was then called "cultural sensitivity" mediations and trainings for police officers on how to engage appreciably with youth and adults of color in low income neighborhoods and LGBTQ individuals.
In 2009, I also edited The Ways That Police Deal With People: The Theory and Practice of Process-Based Policing by Mengyan Dai.
(8)
In the middle 1990s I traveled to the Guangdong Province of Southern China to take courses in ancient Chinese healing at the Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine, earning a certificate in tuina and qigong healing. I traveled throughout Southeast Asia and also earned a certificate in Yoga for children. I gained certificates from the Midwest Holistic School of Massage. I also studied wat po healing at Thailand's Suai School.
While living, teaching, and studying in central Ohio, I trained in Alexander Technique with Lucy Venable, William and Barbara Conable and augmented my studies with lessons in Body-Mind Centering, and Laban/Bartenieff Fundamentals. My mindful movement education owes much to these influences.
I also once maintained a practice as an herbalist committed to the scientifically-based, medically safe use of plants for preventative care, which I learned in lessons from the late Dr. Afrika and Donatella Egwu (1940-2008) who was a student of the curandera, Maria Sabina (1896-1985).
(9)
I have taught extensively in jails, prisons, and juvenile detention facilities as a healer, mindfulness guide, and restorative justice practitioner.
I offered monthly mindfulness workshops for young "offenders" at Lorton Reformatory before that facility’s closing.
I taught weekly "writing for peace" storytelling workshops at the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women through the Goucher Prison Education Program.
I also led anti-recidivist restorative circles (emphasizing anti-violence training, conflict management, and mediation) at the Cheltenham Youth Detention Center, Alfred D. Noyes Children's Center, Franklin County Juvenile Detention Facility, and the Ohio Reformatory for Women.
(10)
For 30-plus years, I have led many healing workshops about healthy, affirmative understandings of sexuality and gender.
I began this work in the late 1980s when I was asked by Deborah Roffman, a pioneer in the field, to led a workshop at the Park School in Baltimore, Maryland.
Ernest Johnson also asked me to give workshops on healthy sexuality, rape prevention, and teen parenting at McKinley High School.
I visited scores of schools to teach healthy notions of sexuality and gender to youth based in principles of harm reduction.
I am influenced in this work by the pioneering efforts of groups like the Advocates for Youth.
My healing education work in this area also includes extensive guidance for sexual assault prevention as well as anti-bullying strategies for girls, boys, and for LGBTQ youth.
(11)
With Nizah Morris and her organization called Genders Within, I co-led many harm reduction missions on-the-street for addicts, sex workers, and the homeless in Philadelphia and Newark. Founded by Nizah and housed for a short time at Bebashi Inc., Genders Within was dedicated to improving the health and wellness to at-risk girls, women, and gender-non-conforming individuals who experienced health disparities, addiction, homelessness, and/or the challenges of longterm illness (including HIV/AIDS).
For Genders Within, I traveled throughout West, East, and Northern Africa (Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Ethiopia, and Algeria) to offer AIDS prevention workshops emphasizing safe, consensual understandings of sexuality for women, girls, and LGBTQ individuals.
Partly on behalf of Gloria Phellps' former organization called the Innerground Railroad Project, and the now defunct Rak Kun Kham Phes Project (รักคนข้ามเพศ/Rạk khn k̄ĥām pheṣ̄), I traveled as a healer throughout Southeast Asia (especially Thailand) to co-teach harm reduction workshops emphasizing positive, supportive understandings of gender difference.
This work took me to the Mediterranean, including two short trips within African immigrant communities in coastal Italy for Genders Within; and the Caribbean, including a successful yet dangerous mission by land and by cruise ship to accompany an oppressed queer woman activist from Jamaica where her life was in jeopardy.
While the danger and lack of sound resources of this traveling burned me out, these international missions deepened my humanistic commitment to global peace-building, harm reduction, and disease prevention typified by ending discrimination and violence towards marginalized people based on gender, sexuality, race, disability, religion, and income.
(12)
Additionally, I was a certified deep pressure therapy practitioner, a certified Isha-based Yoga for children teacher, and a certified massotherapist.
We are truly one human species divided by needless, culturally constructed factions and hostilities.
Fundamentally, my work cultivates loving-kindness that aims to uplift under-served people and and eradicate systemic policies, practices, and behaviors that foster toxicity, violence, trauma, bigotry, discord, division, and disenfranchisement.