Black Women's Collective Care Circles : Working With What Is

Working With What Is is a psychosocial support group that engages deep listening and storytelling to encourage everyone to come in with what they are holding and where they want to get to. We will work with elements of Journaling (awareness of and attention to and honouring thought), loving kindness and self compassion (grounding and cultivating space within), social presenting theatre (getting unstuck), playback theatre (listening to self and other, spontaneity, creativity, improvisation) and guided visualization (symbols and the unconscious).

About the speaker :

Dr. Lisa Ndejuru is a psychotherapist, psychodramatist and theatre practitioner.

Her practice is about creating accessible, non-medicalized, scalable strategies for healing and change in our communities, impacted by the violence of anti-blackness in all its forms. Violence flattens our lives and creates silences. Lisa wants to work on intergenerational transmission of trauma, breaking the silences and repairing trust within our communities. Lisa works to open pathways to wellness, emancipation, and finding one’s voice in a post-colonial context of everyday oppression, systemic racism, and large-scale political violence. Lisa’s work on trauma started in her community with survivors of organized violence and colonial violence. She was one of the 2017 Concordia public scholars and the first John F. Lemieux fellow for genocide studies in 2018. As the 2020 Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto’s faculty of information, she is working with the “Vansina collection” of Ibitekerezo tales.