Invited Guests
Throughout the 8 weeks, practictioners, artists, and cultural workers will be invited to share deeper wisdom, exercises, and teachings. Guests include brontë velez, Esteban Da Cruz, Bett Williams, and Siedeh Foxie.
Throughout the 8 weeks, practictioners, artists, and cultural workers will be invited to share deeper wisdom, exercises, and teachings. Guests include brontë velez, Esteban Da Cruz, Bett Williams, and Siedeh Foxie.
brontë velez’s work and rest is guided by the call that “black wellness is the antithesis to state violence” (Mark Anthony Johnson). as a black-latinx transdisciplinary artist, designer, trickster, educator and wakeworker, their eco-social art praxis lives at the intersections of black feminist placemaking & prophetic community traditions, environmental justice, and death doulaship.
they embody this commitment of attending to black health/imagination, commemorative justice and hospicing systems of oppression through serving as creative director for Lead to Life design collective, educator for ancestral arts skills and nature-connection school Weaving Earth, and quotidian black queer lifemaking ever-committed to humor & liberation, ever-marked by grief at the distance made between us and all of life.
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Esteban da Cruz is an E-RYT 500-certified yoga and meditation teacher, artist, writer, and counselor-in-training. He holds a bachelor's degree in business administration and is currently completing a mental health counseling masters program at UMass Boston. He studies closely with several seasoned teachers, primarily in Tibetan and Indian lineages, and integrates Eastern wellness and contemplative practices with modern western psychology to help individuals and groups cultivate harmony, skillfulness, and wellbeing in their lives.
A polyglot with a diverse background, he has worked with LatinX/Hispanic populations in order to bring greater access to needed resources for individual and community wellness. As a graduate fellow at CMC, his responsibilities include supporting the Spanish and Portuguese mindfulness teams with translation and outreach, as well as teaching live online courses. As a research assistant, he is involved in Mindfulness for Opium Use Disorder and Anxiety studies.
His time is devoted to practice, family, work, and art; his teachings are geared towards the cultivation of kindness, tranquility, generosity, and compassion.
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Bett Williams is a literary writer and psychedelic explorer, and the author of The Wild Kindness; A Psilocybin Odyssey (Dottir Press Fall, 2020), a memoir about growing mushrooms in the high desert of New Mexico. Her other works include The Wrestling Party︎︎︎ and Girl Walking Backwards︎︎︎ (St. Martin’s Press), which was named as one of the Ten Best Young Adult Queer Novels by Vogue Magazine. She has written for several publications including DoubleBlind, OUT Magazine, Flaunt, Lucid News and Lenny Letter.
︎Siedeh Foxie is an intuitive guide and practitioner of the healing arts through ancient cultural traditions. Shaped by a rich ancestral lineage, her practice encompasses the ethical use of sacred earth medicines and energy healing through active touch. Her work is embodied and trauma informed, centering people from the African diaspora and uplifting those from marginalized communities. As a certified therapeutic breathwork facilitator, she focuses upon utilizing the spirit of breath as a catalyst for transpersonal shifts and self-actualization.