Tips to Support Individual and Community Healing

Things we’ve done to support individual and community healing

For Mangos With Chili’s 2013 National Queer Arts Festival show FREE: Two Spirit, Trans and Queer People of Color Visions of Freedom, S.D. Shah and Manish collaborated on a video + performance piece where they asked the audience to write responses to the question “What are some things you’ve done to support your healing and community healing (physical, emotional, cultural, sexual, spiritual, etc.)?”

Here’s what community members wrote at the show and placed on a physical altar or posted to the event’s web stream or facebook page (The piece wasn’t a Peacock Rebellion project, but we’re posting it here so the list has a virtual altar that’s more permanent than facebook. and Mangos’ web site is down):

How we’ve supported individual and community healing:

1.  I’ve developed my inner dialogue and taken time to make intentional goals
2. let myself cry
3. go to therapy
4. kink
5. learn the truth and speak it
6. honor my body and sex it up
7. dress in drag
8. allowed myself to focus inward and cry for a lot of years
9. hibernate
10. smoke pot
11. light candles
12. learn to meditate
13. eat orange and green foods
14. write down my dreams
15. connect with other survivors and healers
16. make art about my experiences
17. stop trying to organize and run everything
18. learn how to let myself be touched and feel my body
19. find people to love authentically
20. singing and teaching people to sing
21. stare into someone else’s eyes
22. study Kabbalah
23. unlearn oppression
24. support my friends and lovers and community
25. I came out at 45.
26. create cultural spaces for marginalized folks like myself
27. cook and grow food as medicine
28. stayed in my body
29. held my sexuality and pleasure as central
30. therapy and more therapy
31. loving and massaging my dying friend
32. loving my friend/her girlfriend
33. sharing my amazing daughter with the world
34. sharing my dreams and journaling
35. coming to this show with a hot woman
36. not accepting how things are
37. (trying really hard to) love my body
38. listening to trauma
39. speaking despite fear
40. care-giving for caregivers
41. food making
42. write stories
43. PLAYING a lot
44. share knowledge
45. be open and vulnerable
46. be able to accept pleasure
47. knowing I deserve
48. masturbation
49. allow myself to be adored
50. unlearn catholicism
51. love
52. learning – always
53. make art with other people
54. have sex with a lot of people
55. listen to our elders
56. short skirts
57. dance
58. breath
59. burn medicine
60. stay out late with [someone’s name]
61. walk naked with no shame
62. no judgement and open to infinite possibilities
63. sharing smiles and kindness
64. taking steps to take care of myself
65. I forgave myself and asked my family to confront our collective historical denying to begin ending the ancestral cycles of violence in my family
66. let myself be.
67. listen to others
68. meditation
69. walk my dog
70. being open
71. being honest
72. shared my experience
73. I asked for help.