Join us to learn more about the unique space of discovery & connection this program offers.
We’re often asked to check a box indicating our racialized identity, or occupy affinity spaces based on one aspect/dimension of identity, foregoing other experiences, heritages and lineages. In many group spaces or programs, we’re asked to identify ourselves according to pre-select fields that represent our racialized experience—casting into concrete terms what is by definition ambiguous, luminous and hard to define. What already betrays categorization.
Bi/multicultural identity—in all of the confusion it can create—is also a bridge, an experience at the borderlands that longs for new ways to think and talk about identity and belonging. Perhaps, too, can an embrace of ambiguous belonging lead us to explore new terrains that disturb the colonial project of race and how it has impacted experiences of belonging and identity globally.
"Race is the Myth with teeth and claws," as Resmaa Menakem has said, our unique experiences position us to challenge the violence that the project of race created.
For the past 3 years, we have hosted hundreds of people across two continents in this dynamic program container called Where Do I Belong: An Embodied Exploration of Identity & Belonging for Bi/Multicultural bodies*, otherwise known as Belonging Ambiguity.
This February 2025, we enter into another portal online of our beloved program for bi/multicultural folks this time for a Global Nepantla cohort!
Nepantla is a Nahuatl word meaning "in-between space," describing being in the middle or at the border; used by scholar Gloria Anzaldúa to describe a transformative, liminal space where multiple realities and identities converge and new perspectives emerge.
This beloved space has been devoted to embodied explorations and conversations about race/place/origin and finding resource in shared experience.
This is a playful experiential space bringing in authentic movement, psychodrama, and sociometry, phototherapy, music, movement and song. As well as through story sharing and unfacilitated conversation space.
Our interest is not to “figure out” where it is that we belong between the identities we hold, but critique binaries and dream together into what could emerge from our experiences of non-belonging and the new meaning we might make for ourselves in the process.
We’re often asked to check a box indicating our racialized identity, or occupy affinity spaces based on one aspect/dimension of identity, foregoing other experiences, heritages and lineages. In many group spaces or programs, we’re asked to identify ourselves according to pre-select fields that represent our racialized experience—casting into concrete terms what is by definition ambiguous, luminous and hard to define. What already betrays categorization.
Bi/multicultural identity—in all of the confusion it can create—is also a bridge, an experience at the borderlands that longs for new ways to think and talk about identity and belonging. Perhaps, too, can an embrace of ambiguous belonging lead us to explore new terrains that disturb the colonial project of race and how it has impacted experiences of belonging and identity globally.
"Race is the Myth with teeth and claws," as Resmaa Menakem has said, our unique experiences position us to challenge the violence that the project of race created.
For the past 3 years, we have hosted hundreds of people across two continents in this dynamic program container called Where Do I Belong: An Embodied Exploration of Identity & Belonging for Bi/Multicultural bodies*, otherwise known as Belonging Ambiguity.
This February 2025, we enter into another portal online of our beloved program for bi/multicultural folks this time for a Global Nepantla cohort!
Nepantla is a Nahuatl word meaning "in-between space," describing being in the middle or at the border; used by scholar Gloria Anzaldúa to describe a transformative, liminal space where multiple realities and identities converge and new perspectives emerge.
This beloved space has been devoted to embodied explorations and conversations about race/place/origin and finding resource in shared experience.
This is a playful experiential space bringing in authentic movement, psychodrama, and sociometry, phototherapy, music, movement and song. As well as through story sharing and unfacilitated conversation space.
Our interest is not to “figure out” where it is that we belong between the identities we hold, but critique binaries and dream together into what could emerge from our experiences of non-belonging and the new meaning we might make for ourselves in the process.
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Lasting Connections Beyond the Program.
One of the greatest takeaways from this program are the connections made with other bi/multicultural folks. Connect with others and stay in contact after the program ends; we offer opportunities to stay in community, if desired.
Four (4) Live Online In-between Connection Spaces for conversation and storytelling in smaller groups are offered once per month on the following dates: Thursdays, February 27th, April 3rd, May 1st & May 29th (same start time).
Additional Exploration & Learning Materials. We offer additional opportunities for self-exploration between sessions; reflection prompts & practices to deepen your engagement with program themes.
Develop experiential Skills & Resources. This highly experiential program invites participants into a deeply embodied and practice-oriented experience. We offer somatic and relational practices to support your process.
FIVE (5) Live Online Interactive Sessions. We gather once per month for 2 hours on Thursdays over 5 months from February to June, 2025. Module dates/times & descriptions can be found below.
We are dreaming into the possibility of an in-person gathering for folks in our global nepantla! We may dream into this together!
“For as long as I can remember, the notion of straddling worlds made sense to me. What has, at times, been the source of frustration and even despair (where do I belong?) has become something I embrace as a liminal space of non-identity and non-belonging that has powerful creative potential.”
– Karine Bell
Dr. Leticia Nieto PsyD, LMFT, TEP is a leadership coach, psychotherapist, and educator specializing in liberation and equity, cultural responsiveness, motivational patterning, and evolutionary creativity. Her 2010 book, *Beyond Inclusion, Beyond Empowerment: A Developmental Strategy to Liberate Everyone*, is an accessible analysis of the dynamics of oppression and supremacy that offers readers ways to develop skills to promote social justice.
My father’s people are from Veracruz and my mother’s people are from Puebla, where I was born, in Mexico. The range of racialization within my family is wide and conversations about identity tended to wrap around National identity above frank discussions about race. My ancestral roots include both indigenous exploitation and genocide by colonizers. How these tensions live in the body, sometimes named meztizaje, is complex and potentiated. The sense I now make is that colonization failed to extinguish those it sought to eradicate. The saying, ‘they tried to bury us, they didn’t know we were seeds’, is a poetic way to work with this durable survivance.
The unsettled nature of identity this can generate has been a powerful agitator and psychic activator in my life.
Malia is here for integration, embodiment, soft skills, digesting intergenerational and collective trauma, hanging in nuance and dissolving "boxes." She is a facilitator of DEIA with an emphasis in healing racialized and structural trauma, accessibility and belonging for all bodies. This passion stemmed from moving through life in a nuance body that felt resistant to believing the world existed in binaries.
Always questioning and being curious, she challenges they way our bodies remember, the way we think and the way we collectively care for one another in an approachable and playful way. She invites embodied exploration for individual and collective processing to support the progress for wider cultural change.
My multitudinal lineage grew from Chinese, Swedish, British and African roots. My Asian-American mother and white father’s marriage was not approved by grandmother, a mixed chinese, black and white woman, who wanted her to marry another Asian man. My grandmother, as a mixed woman, never felt like she belonged. With this experience, she leaned into deep assimilation, seeked simplicity, sameness. But through this love I was born. My body is not in sameness, it is not in simplicity, it will not check off a box. I have felt marginalizations and received privilege through the color of my skin. I have always felt like a bridge of sorts, conjoining complexities and seeking exploration of how my body is mirror of all things coming together.
Karine Bell—MSc, SEP, PhD Candidate—is a mother of two, life partner to Daniel, and founder of and co-dreamer in the Rooted Global Village (www.rootedglobalvillage.com). A bi-cultural Black woman, she is also a somatics educator, practitioner, somatic abolitionist, scholar-activist, and clown-in-training. She is currently alive with curiosity around how we can learn to weave ourselves and each other into ecologies of care, countering cultures that create fragmentation, alienation, and hyper-independence; to embrace difference, cultivate embodied capacity for transformation, and engage in radical acts of friendship across division. She is guided by curiosity and wonder as compass points, and research as an act of reverence for life. She is a PhD candidate at Pacifica Graduate Institute where she combines continued practice and study in somatics with studies in decolonial depth psychology with a focus on community, liberation, indigenous and eco-psychologies.
My ancestral roots reach back to the African continent (Ghana/Ivory Coast/Nigeria), Ashkenazi Germany and England/Wales and Turtle Island (unenrolled and distant), I also hold that complexity in my body with both colonizer and colonized aspects, and experiences of what Chicana feminist and scholar, Globia Anzaldúa, calls nepantla. Nepantla is a Nahuatl word she uses to describe the liminal space between worlds and the bridges that represent “thresholds to other realities'”.
“The clash of cultures is enacted within our psyches, resulting in an uncertain position. An identity born of negotiating the cracks between worlds…creating a hybrid consciousness that transcends the us versus them mentality of irreconcilable positions, blurring the boundary between us and others. We are both subject and object, self and other, haves and have-nots, conqueror and conquered, oppressor and oppressed."
— Gloria Anzaldúa
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Join a growing community of people finding dignity in ambiguous belonging and the strength, resource and commitment to shaping alternative and just futures.