Dear Friends,
During the 35 years we have been offering this work that we currently call Solsara, it has gone through several names and many evolutionary iterations, growing with and reflecting our own developing consciousness as well as the collective consciousness of the times.
Through all these changes, the essence of this work has always been to foster a just and compassionate human culture by focusing on our return to wholeness as individual humans through practicing self-awareness in ways that bring us into deeper and more loving connection with ourselves and each other.
It has been very personal work, primarily focused on facing and letting go of the internal obstacles that we, as individuals, have to being wholeheartedly ourselves and to meeting our fellow humans in our wholeheartedness with openness, vulnerability, honesty, and compassion.
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What we, the leadership team, have failed to recognize, through the filter of our egalitarian idealism, is the extent to which our culture is embedded with racism, white privilege, sexism, and other forms of oppression, that impact each of us and our relationships to each other very differently depending on our identities.
No matter how vulnerable, honest, and open hearted we may be, and how connected we may feel at the end of a Solsara weekend, we each walk out into a world where the risks and dangers we face and the opportunities available to us vary significantly based on our skin color, gender, sexual orientation, religion, social class, national origin, and the appearance and condition of our bodies.
Beyond uncovering and dismantling our personal obstacles, Solsara must also be about uncovering and dismantling the systemic oppression that has kept all of us stuck in an unjust and oppressive culture. Beyond our personal needs and growth, we also want Solsara to be a vehicle for empowering our innate capacity for the much-needed leadership that is essential for our collective liberation.
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We are excited about making the changes that are necessary for Solsara Immersions to be a space where people of all identities who are drawn to this work feel that they can be fully themselves, be seen and recognized for all aspects of their life experience, and feel safe, held, empowered, included, and respected.
We are very grateful to have Ricci, who has decades of experience as a racial justice educator and equity worker, deep personal and scholarly knowledge of the racialized human experience, and a long history with Solsara, joining our leadership team to collaborate in creating the next evolutionary phase of this work, which we are hoping to begin offering by the summer.
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Our focus right now is a powerful new offering, Interrupting Whiteness: an interpersonal & embodied examination of our racialized lives. This is an expanded version of an extremely potent and profound training, created and facilitated by Ricci eX and Abigail (also a longtime Solsara assistant and social justice educator), which was offered to a group of assistants this past summer. We feel this workshop is an essential and invaluable step in developing our capacity, as a community, to move towards a just and equitable culture.
We are offering Interrupting Whiteness in Eugene in February and in Portland in March. It is open to everyone (Solsara graduate or not). We hope you will join us!
With love,
Larry, Carrie, and Sara Eden