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One Village Healing Moves The Mending Online

Lucy Gellman | April 28th, 2020

One Village Healing Moves The Mending Online

Downtown  |  Arts & Culture  |  One Village Healing  |  COVID-19

 

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Adae teaching his weekly guided meditation classes. Zoom screen grab. 

Kwadwo Adae sat in the center of a room, legs crossed. Three flames danced in a candelabra in front of him, bookended by plants on both sides. Pink and purple flowers, their tips exploding with pollen, bloomed on a canvas behind him. He rolled his neck slowly and softened his shoulders.

“In your stillness I want you to feel,” he said. “If you have not already done so, just close your eyes and give yourselves a few moments to be in your body. To exist in stillness and time.”

Adae is one of the instructors at One Village Healing, which moved courses and one-on-one mentorship sessions online earlier this month. After pressing pause to evaluate community needs during COVID-19, co-founders Hanifa Washington and Thema Graves have taken the spot and its mission virtual.

“Right now, we’re really in this place of creating some sense of normalcy, and just sort of getting back into this rhythm that we were in before,” Washington said in a recent Zoom interview. “Leading by example, we took a pause to allow ourselves to charge up, to search, to discern, and then to respond from a place that is really needed and also beneficial to ourselves."

“We're not just giving from an empty cup," she added. "We're not doing that.”

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Thema Graves and Hanifa Washington in April of last year, at an opening celebration of One Village Healing. Lucy Gellman File Photo.  

In the months leading up to COVID-19, One Village Healing was thriving. The practice, which opened a space on Crown Street last year, was set to celebrate its first birthday in early April. There was a fundraiser planned for the spring, as well as the intention to move into a bigger space.

In under 12 months, Washington and Graves had found that the community wasn’t just receptive to One Village—New Haveners sought out the spot, which offers everything from mindfulness meditation and yoga to healing and affinity groups.

When the city began taking precautions around COVID-19 in early March, “we were initially really hesitant to close,” Washington said. She recalled texting back and forth with Graves, as the two assured each other that they could find a way to practice safely. But as information continued to develop, they talked about how frightening the situation was.

Within days, schools closed. Restaurants, bars, and theaters closed. Gyms closed. The city and the state urged nonessential organizations and businesses to let their employees work remotely. One Village closed its doors and hit pause.

“Everything that we're moving through right now—we have to keep remembering that we are in a state of trauma,” Washington said. “Like, deep, intense trauma. And so every action, every movement, every decision is going to be touched by that."

Washington and Graves took time to figure out a plan that was still sustainable for the space, even if it was going to be fully digital. They met online with instructors and group leaders, some of whom Washington said were more hesitant to go virtual than others.

Around the same time, Graves was approached by Dean Risë Nelson, head of the Afro-American Cultural Center at Yale. The two had worked together with her on wellness initiatives including reiki and yoga in the past few years.

Nelson explained that the Center, through which Yale students have discovered and attended One Village Healing, was ready to offer a few months of financial support. Washington praised them effusively: it has allowed One Village to continue offering free programming and paying their staff through this time.

“The beautiful thing about it is it’s not just for them, but also seeing the need in the community,” Graves said. “It was right at the time where Hanifa said, 'what's going on? What are we going to do?’ It was very instrumental in helping us launch it forward and really feeling like a push.”

The space launched its virtual presence earlier this month, with guided meditation classes from artist and instructor Kwadwo Adae and a slate of weekly classes. There are also a number of one-on-one sessions and affinity groups, which Washington said are carefully marked to signal that they are intended for specific audiences.

Thursday trap yoga and meditation classes with Zen Zilla Yaga Founder Shefau Dabre, for instance, are labeled as “an intentional affinity healing space for Black womxn.”

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One Village Healing when it opened. Lucy Gellman File Photo. 

It’s one of the ways that she and Graves are able to keep One Village’s fundamental mission—undoing systemic oppression through the creation of deliberate, safe, wellness-focused spaces—going. While this global pandemic may be a new one, COVID-19 coexists with the long-running trauma of institutional racism.

To date, U.S. landfall of the virus has killed Black and Brown people at disproportionately high rates, while also stoking new waves of anti-Asian xenophobia. Washington said that part of her practice has been acknowledging those systems of oppression, and pushing past them while doing work that breaks them down.

“I have just been in this practice of pausing and grounding,” she said. And that looks like really taking some deep breaths, feeling the earth beneath my feet, connecting with the core of the earth, feeling my connection to things bigger than me, and then feeling my body. Being like: ‘How do I feel? What's really happening right now?’”

As they power up Zoom and hold classes from their homes, members of the One Village team are also adjusting. Sopa! Co-founder Eric Rey, who runs the Black Obsidian Men’s Group, said he’s been trying to focus on Zoom’s advantages. While the program has drawbacks—he now struggles to read body language, for instance—he's been excited to use new tools like screen sharing.

“I've started to think about ways to maximize the potential of being online in ways that can't be done in the real world,” he said. “Like, I can pull up a clip of John Coltrane and have the brothers see like, Coltrane sweating over his sax.”

Monday night, Adae filled the virtual space with his meditation, talking attendees through the need to focus on their breath. On a handful of screens, people logged on, muted themselves and turned off their cameras. Adae instructed them to roll their necks, relax their shoulders, let their heads hang. Muscles slackened across New Haven. He took in a big breath and exhaled.

“Breathe out everything that does not serve you,” he said. There was a beat. “Let the breath purify the mind and nourish the body and cleanse the spirit.”

While Adae focuses on “how sacred breath is” during his hour-long meditation—a message that feels particularly poignant in the midst of a virus that takes that life force away—other offerings allow movement and gathering.

Each Sunday, Dabre leads free yoga meant for beginners and families. There are half day retreats and one-on one coaching offerings that people can sign up for online. Graves and Washington close out the weekend with a “Sunday Circle” that brings together arts and culture with healing practices.

Graves said she’s been taking that approach to her personal life as well. At home—she lives by herself but joked that she's in an “animal kingdom” thanks to several pets—she’s tried to focus on what it means to rest and pause more often.

When she is not on the clock for One Village, she’s been taking walks in Edgewood Park and connecting with friends and family at a safe, usually virtual, distance. She praised the number of virtual classes that have popped up from community partners in the past five to six weeks, and said that she’s glad One Village has been able to contribute to those.

“There's like this sea of offerings that's really amazing, and it feels really good to be a part of that,” she said. “To witness that. These people that have kind of been storing up, and now there's an acceleration. It's like a banquet to choose from.”

“Yes, there are hard times,” she added. “Yes, it's confusing. It's weird. It's all of these things. And we get to connect with each other still. So that has also been healing too.”

To find out more about One Village Healing, visit their website