becoming sanktuaree:
inhabiting and being inhabited by
ecologies of care
an invitation
In a time where loneliness has become an epidemic, and unmet grief resides below and between so much of the world's preventable suffering⎯ we long to inhabit sanctuary in its myriad of forms. This October and November, únashay and our partners from ten (The Emergence Network) invite you to join us, for:
Becoming Sanktuaree: Inhabiting and Being Inhabited by Ecologies of Care, an online and (optional) in-person experiential practice space.
Throughout Becoming Sanktuaree, we will offer community-held space(s) of encounter, inquiry, and creation; inviting participants into practice, dialogue and feasting, while cultivating our capacities to listen, be present with what is, build relationship, and play with what pulses below, between and around our bodies.
Guest-hosts from around the world will join us, not as ‘experts’ or even ‘teachers’ (although learning is inevitable), but ordinary humans… courting and walking with us, at the hem of an always unfolding miracle.
See below for who’s involved, timeline, where we will gather, and more.
What would happen if we turned towards pain as a portal? What if we let ourselves fall into a different intimacy, and began to build public cultures of mourning and celebration, inhabiting and being inhabited by ecologies of care? Perhaps, by allowing ourselves to be taken by something greater than us, we might become the sanctuaries we so long for in these times.
⎯ Aimee Wilson
There is not the one solution,
but a multiplicity.
It is time to trust ourselves,
to let something new emerge
by journeying into uncharted territory.
⎯ Living Wholeness Institute
the timeline
Online:
October 2nd⎯ with Lidia Yuknavitch, Janice Lee and Brenda Salgado | 12noon to 3pm MST
October 16th⎯ with Bayo Akomolafe, Wangui wa Komonji and Krista Dragromer | 5pm to 8pm MST
October 30th⎯ with Rutendo Ngara, Ned Buskirk and Chelsea Coleman | 12noon to 3pm MST
November 13th⎯ with Nikesha Breeze, Ché-vanni Davids and Brenda Selgado | hybrid clopening (online and in-person) 5pm to 8pm MST
** You may participate in the online journey without attending the in-person gathering in Northern New Mexico.
Optional in-person:
Thurs, November 13th through Sun, November 16th at Dar al Islam in Abiquiu, New Mexico.
Check-in at 3pm, November 13th and check-out by noon on November 16th.
Accommodations on-site (& included in full event costs), or guests are welcome to find local housing at Abiquiu Inn, Ojo Caliente Mineral Hot Springs, & nearby Airbnbs b/w Abiquiu, Taos & Santa Fe (at their additional expense). Recommended to book asap!
the Venue, for optional in-person gathering
After we meet and journey together online, participants are welcome to join us at Dar al Islam in Abiquiu, New Mexico from November 13 to 16th, to gather, walk the land, eat, listen, and co-create physical sanctuaries (i.e. tea ceremony, music, altars, memorial, silence, art, and more).
Dar al Islam sits atop a rural mesa in Northern New Mexico, where the high desert meets riparian woodlands. Designed by world-renowned Egyptian Architect Hassan Fathy, it is an internationally recognized adobe mosque and learning institute. Learn more in this article, written by our dear neighbor Dr. Fatima van Hattum and Asma Sayeed.
the guest-hosts
What are guest-hosts? They are our beloved collaborators across the translocal field, moving and inhabiting their own powerful threads of sanctuary. Throughout each online session, guest-hosts will welcome us into their own practice(s), stories, and how they experience sanctuary in its multiverse; inviting us to go deeper with our own practice(s), inquiry, and service.
Janice Lee
JANICE LEE (she/they) is a Korean American writer, teacher, spiritual scholar, and shamanic healer. She is the author of 8 books of fiction, creative nonfiction, & poetry, most recently Imagine a Death (2021), Separation Anxiety (2022), a finalist for the 2023 Oregon Book Award, and A roundtable, unanimous dreamers chime in, a collaborative novel co-authored with Brenda Iijima (2023). An essay (co-authored with Jared Woodland) is featured in the recently released 4K restoration of Sátántangó (dir. Béla Tarr) from Arbelos Films. Her next book seeks to explore ties between the Korean cultural concept of han, narratives of inherited trauma in the West, the Korean folk traditions and shamanic practices of her ancestors (especially rituals around death), the history and creation of Korean script (Hangul), and revisions of the Korean myth of Princess Bari. Lee teaches workshops on inherited trauma, healing and writing, and facilitates guided meditations, especially as a practitioner of Engaged Buddhism (in the tradition of Plum Village and Thich Nhat Hanh) and an aspirant for the Order of Interbeing. She also incorporates elements of ancestor work, Korean shamanic ritual (Muism), traditional Korean folk practices, plant medicine & flower essence work, card readings & divination, and interspecies communication. She currently lives in Portland, OR where she is the Operational Creative Director at Corporeal Writing and an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Portland State University. She can be found online at janicel.com and IG: @diddioz
Lidia Yuknavitch
photo by miles mingo
LIDIA YUKNAVITCH (she/they/aquanaut) is a writer, arts activist, teacher and heart diver. She is the author of the award winning novels Thrust, The Book of Joan, The Small Backs of Children, and Dora: A Headcase, the short story collections Verge, Letter to my Rage, Real to Reel, Liberty's Excess, and Her Other Mouths, and the creative nonfiction and hybrid books Reading the Waves, The Chronology of Water, The Misfit's Manifesto, and Allegories of Violence. She is currently working on both a hybrid novel about adaptations between human, plant and animal species as well as a creative nonfiction book on degendering and love. Her favorite thing anyone has ever said about her work is this: "brutally hopeful" (Ijeoma Oluo, about Thrust). Her TED Talk On The Beauty of Being a Misfit has over 4 million views, which means there are enough of us to rattle the cages, and her anti-memoir The Chronology of Water was adapted for film by Kristen Stewart and will release in the US in 2026. After 30 years donated to academia, Lidia founded the art incubator space Corporeal Writing. She agitates with her heart and art. She is a very good swimmer. You can find her at lidiayuknavitch.net and IG @lidiamiles.
Rutendo Ngara
RUTENDO LERATO NGARA sits at the confluence of many rivers—Indigenous Knowledge Systems practitioner, transdisciplinary researcher, speaker, philosopher, scientist, martial artist, designer, and spiritual coach. Rooted in Southern Africa and initiated in multiple Indigenous traditions, she works across sectors and paradigms, weaving science, culture, cosmology and paradigms of healing.
Holding a BSc in Electrical Engineering and an MSc in Medicine in Biomedical Engineering, her professional journey spans clinical engineering, healthcare technology management, socio-economic development, mathematics, leadership, indigenous cosmology, and fashion design. Her transdisciplinary focus centres on bridging Western and Indigenous paradigms – particularly between medical knowledge systems, the economy, the environment, gender and education.
Rutendo is the founder of Rooted In Soul, co-founder of Ancient Wisdom Africa and the Ancient Wisdom Foundation, and a member of international networks including Earth Elders and the Earthrise Collective. She has served on advisory boards such as the Credo Mutwa Foundation, the South African Wushu Federation, the Future of Work Foundation, and the People’s World Commission on Drought and Floods.
With an ear to the ancestral and an eye on systemic coherence, her pedagogies are deeply relational. She is mentored by Nature in all her forms— including rivers, baobabs, ancestors, and the fierce teachings of grief.
She weaves tapestries through multiple epistemologies. The quest for interconnectedness, co-existence, and complementarity underpins her endeavours.
Báyo Akómoláfé
BAYO AKOMOLAFE (Ph.D.), rooted with the Yoruba people in a more-than-human world, is the father to Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden Abayomi, the grateful life-partner to EJ, son and brother. A widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, self-styled ‘trans-public’ intellectual, essayist, and author of two books, These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (North Atlantic Books) and We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak (along with Professors Molefi Kete Asante and Augustine Nwoye), Bayo Akomolafe is the visionary founder of The Emergence Network, a planet-wide networking project and inquiry at the edges of the Anthropocene that seeks to convene new kinds of responsivities, sensuous solidarities, and experimental practices for a posthumanist parapolitics. He is host of the postactivist course/festival/event, ‘We Will Dance with Mountains’ and curator of Dancing with Mountains, the educational consultation.
Dr. Akomolafe is the Hubert Humphrey Distinguished Professor of American Studies in Macalester College, Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA (August 2025) and has previously lectured at the Pacifica Graduate Institute, California. He sits on the Board of Únashay Sanctuary, among other organizations.
www.bayoakomolafe.net | www.dancingwithmountains.com www.emergencenetwork.org
Krista Dragomer
KRISTA DRAGOMER is a shape-shifting she monster living and working on the banks of Red Hook, Brooklyn. As an artist, she amphibiously moves between multiple modalities, creating artworks and interactive practices that invite viewers and participants to sense into possible ways of being and relating beyond categorical definitions of space and place, self and world. Her practice is deeply collaborative, frequently co-creating with organizations and researchers seeking new epistemologies and methodologies beyond institutionalized thought, weaving together her sense based explorations with forms of speculative philosophical inquiry across disciplines.
Krista’s artwork gives corporeality and material presence to forms of life-living and processes that the language of modernity reduces to metaphor, letting the erotics of the unknown unmake bodies into swarms of becomings and emergences, into fleshy refusals to be represented or named, tickling and chaffing the haptics of vision. Through the many forms her monstery practice takes, she is always asking: What does it mean to be human now? What worlds would we make if we truly believed that we are ecological beings rather than autonomous organisms, separate and alone?
Find her work here: https://www.kristadragomer.com
photo by: aeric meredith-goujon
Ned Buskirk
NED BUSKIRK is the Founder and Executive Director for YG2D – a 501(c)3 nonprofit bringing diverse communities creatively into the conversation of death and dying, inspiring life by unabashedly sourcing our shared mortality. YG2D offers a free creatively conscious mortality podcast, monthly live communal grief and gratitude open mics, medicinal community concerts, and grief and healing writing workshops. With YG2D's prison program, ALIVE INSIDE, Buskirk facilitates a weekly suicide prevention group in San Quentin and hosts monthly grief and gratitude open mics and workshops. The prison program has expanded into multiple CDCR facilities throughout California, has visited multiple prisons in Ohio and [in collaboration with the Innocence Network and The Ohio Innocence Project] works with our exonerated community, supporting those who have been wrongly incarcerated, along with the organizations and legal teams that free them. YG2D's hospice and music program, SONGS FOR LIFE, sends musicians to play for the dying, inspiring original songs honoring their lives and deaths. Buskirk also facilitates creative space for cancer patients with UCSF’s Art for Recovery, with workshops online and at the hospital bedside, offering a chance for healing through creative self-expression and witnessing that lets the patient be wholly and fully witnessed while facing what is often the hardest time of their lives."
Chelsea Coleman
CHELESEA COLEMAN is an SF Bay Area singer-songwriter and the Creative Director & Cofounder of YG2D, a 501(c)3 non-profit, where she has been helping create and hold space for others to creatively express themselves through the touchpoint of our shared impermanence since 2012. As a singer-songwriter and storyteller she leads by example, by alchemizing her experiences of loss and complex grief into lyrics and melodies that resonate with others and meet them in their vulnerability with a sense of belonging and inspiration. She’s been working alongside Ned Buskirk and Jordan Edelheit in San Quentin and other prisons around the country, and with exoneree and re-entry communities, as a part of YG2D’s Alive Inside program since 2018.
Ché-vanni Davids
CHÉ-VANNI DAVIDS (Father, Writer, Ritualist) is a weaver of spaces, a tender of grief, and a question wrapped in flesh. Rooted in Johannesburg, he walks the thresholds between education, ritual, and resistance, where the soil still remembers and children speak the wisdom of stars. Through initiatives like Reimagined Learning Community, and Hoods to Woods, he helps unmake the rigid architectures of learning, inviting young people and elders alike into relational, land-based, and liberatory ways of knowing.
Chevanni’s work is not easily categorized. It lives in conversations, ceremonies, and slow gatherings. Guided by the spirit of Ubuntu, not as ideology, but as practice, he accompanies the dying of old systems and the emergence of new possibilities. In his world, grief and play are kin, and the future is composted in community.
Nikesha Breeze
NIKESHA BREEZE is a multidisciplinary artist, teacher, and facilitator whose work interweaves creativity, spirituality, and radical care. Drawing from over 25 years as a Hindu pujari, kirtan wallah, death doula, and Chinese medicine practitioner, Nikesha’s practice is deeply rooted in ancestral and cultural grief work. Their art reclaims historical narratives of the African diasporic body while envisioning Afro-futures, employing mediums such as oil painting, ceramics, sculpture, performance, and installation. Nikesha creates transformative sacred spaces and enacts durational rituals that center mourning, prayer, and radical reclamation. Their public rituals invite collective accountability and care, embodying cultural sovereignty and diasporic healing. A writer, poet, and filmmaker, Nikesha reconfigures language and narrative as tools of liberation, crafting new syntaxes that honor communal memory. Nikesha’s life work bridges art and ritual, guiding communities through grief, healing, and the reclamation of ancestral wisdom. Find their work here: https://nikeshabreeze.com or IG: @nikeshabreeze
Brenda Selgado
BRENDA SELGADO is the founder of Nepantla Healing and Consulting. Brenda has received training in traditional medicine and healing in Purepecha, Xochimilco, Toltec and other lineages. She draws on the healing powers of the natural world to guide her work, and shares teachings from her elders regarding alignment with prophecies and practices connected to the great transitions humanity is currently facing. She is grateful to her Ancestors and her relationships with many beings in the Beloved Unseen, and she is committed to co-creating a society filled with wholeness and beauty.
Brenda is a spiritual and mindfulness author, indigenous wisdom keeper, curandera, trainer and organizational consultant. She has over 25 years of experience in transformative leadership development, nonprofit management, traditional healing and ceremony, mindfulness, movement building, women’s health, and social justice. Brenda is in the process of establishing the Nepantla Land Trust and the Nepantla Center for Healing and Renewal.
Wangui wa Kamonji
Born and based in Ongata Rongai, East Afrika, Wangũi wa Kamonji is a regeneration practitioner researching and translating indigenous Afrikan knowledges into experiential processes, art, and honey. She has been following an ancestral invitation to rethink and reimagine everything from indigenous Afrikan ontologies, and extends this invitation to others through fromtheroots, an ecoversity based in East Afrika and supporting individuals’ and communities’ transitions from coloniality to the pluriverse through transformational training, coaching and practice accompaniment. Weaving research using academic and indigenous methods; storytelling in written and oral forms; traditional Afrikan dance and movement practice; ancestral connection, processwork, and nervous system relation, fromtheroots provides rooted embodied tools for us to decolonise and reindigenise.
Her work is published on Decolonial Passage, Open Global Rights, Africa is a Country, Transition Network among others. She is also related to planetary networks such as the @EcoversitiesAlliance and the Global Tapestry of Alternatives (GTA). Wangũi loves reading, laughing, drinking tea and dancing (sometimes all at once).
the hosts
Aerin Dunford
AERIN DUNFORD is a network- weaver and passionate about connecting people, ideas and organizations. She is the Lead Weaver at ten (The Emergence Network). Since the death and stillbirth of her son, Rafael, in 2018, Aerin has been called to work with grief in new ways; she has been reflecting, writing and convening others to metabolize.
Aimee Wilson
AIMÉE WILSON (they/ them) serves as founder and executive director of únashay. Music is their primary language. They have served under many roles, as singer, writer, social worker, waitress, cleaner, new systems architect, and group facilitator. After the sudden deaths of their mother and, 1 year later, dearest friend to addiction, and decades of work within a system that doesn’t take care of the grieving⎯ Aimée was moved to live into únashay. They don't perceive únashay (or sanctuary) as something solely to ‘build', but rather a presence and attention to inhabit. They dwell in New Mexico with wolf-hybrid and human kin, tending the sanctuary and writing music.
payment/ attendance options
ᛘ • BECOMING SANKTUAREE (four online sessions + the option to gather for 3 nights at Dar al Islam in Abiquiu, New Mexico). See below how to attend, and please note this is an experiential practice space that invites the participant into deep presence and collaboration.
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♆ Register HERE for online sessions ♆
And read PDF invitation to learn more.The four 3-hour online sessions will take place every other Thursday, beginning in October, 2025. The final session will be a hybrid clopening, marking the end of the online journey while the in-person journey in New Mexico is kicking off. **You may participate in the online Becoming Sanktuaree journey without attending the in-person gathering.
Costs: We offer a sliding scale for the online experience based on relative financial standing. The payment system is designed for those with more access to wealth to cover the costs of those with less access to wealth; we trust your discernment of how you personally fit into this global economic context.
Mountain top: $65 USD
Plateau: $200 USD
Foothills: $335 USD
Valley: $470 USD
Riverbed: $665 USD
Timeline:
October 2nd⎯ with Lidia Yuknavitch, Janice Lee and Brenda Salgado | 12noon to 3pm MST
October 16th⎯ with Bayo Akomolafe, Wangui wa Komonji and Krista Dragromer | 5pm to 8pm MST
October 30th⎯ with Rutendo Ngara, Ned Buskirk and Chelsea Coleman | 12noon to 3pm MST
November 13th⎯ with Nikesha Breeze, Ché-vanni Davids and Brenda Selgado | hybrid clopening (online and in-person) 5pm to 8pm MST text goes here
All proceeds will go towards Únashay Grief Sanctuary’s development and services for the underserved grieving. -
♆ Register HERE ♆
And read PDF invitation to learn more.This option includes all 4 online sessions, 3 nights at Dar al Islam in Abiquiu, New Mexico, 8 meals (with tea/ coffee provided), and complimentary access to our final evening (November 15th) “Grief Feast & Sanktuaree Fundraiser” with Dr. Bayo Akomolafe and a musical performance with Luz Elena Mendoza.
Total cost for this is $1500.
Proceeds from Becoming Sanktuaree, and our final day including the Sanktuaree Bazaar, a talk with Dr. Bayo Akomolafe, and performance with Luz Mendoza will go towards Únashay Grief Sanctuary’s development and services for the underserved grieving. And proceeds from the Grief Feast will go towards Earthseed Black Arts Alliance and Únashay. -
♆ Register HERE ♆
And read PDF invitation to learn more.This option includes all 4 online sessions, 8 meals (with tea/ coffee provided), and complimentary access to our final evening (November 15th) “Grief Feast & Sanktuaree Fundraiser” with Dr. Bayo Akomolafe and a musical performance with Luz Elena Mendoza. Total cost for this is $1300.
Proceeds from Becoming Sanktuaree, and our final day including the Sanktuaree Bazaar, a talk with Dr. Bayo Akomolafe, and performance with Luz Mendoza will go towards Únashay Grief Sanctuary’s development and services for the underserved grieving. And proceeds from the Grief Feast will go towards Earthseed Black Arts Alliance and Únashay.
ᛘ • Nov 15th GRIEF FEAST + SANKTUAREE FUNDRAISER with Báyò Akómaláfé and music performance with Luz Elena Mendoza. This will be the last day of our time together, and open to the public. We welcome ALL to o join at any part of the day. Learn more and find ticket options below.
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Attend the “Sanktuaree Bazaar” from 2 to 5pm⎯ Saturday, November 15th to roam the stunning vaulted complex of Dar al Islam, and experience first-hand the different forms of sanctuary our participants and local neighbors collaboratively build and share.
♆ Click HERE for tickets ♆
All proceeds will go towards Únashay Grief Sanctuary’s development and services for the underserved grieving. -
♆ Click HERE for meal tickets ♆
Sat, Nov 15th⎯ 5pm to 7pm
at Dar al Islam in Abiquiu, NM.
This ritual dinner will be co-hosted by Earthseed Black Arts Alliance and únashay. It will be a slow 5-course meal, with local artist Nikesha Breeze to court us through each part of the meal representing different layers of grief.
Proceeds from the feast will go to Earthseed Black Arts & únashay grief sanctuary. -
♆ Click HERE for tickets ♆
From 7pm to 8:30pm⎯ Dr. Bayo Akomolafe will share a public talk and end with an open community discourse, with elders and community members to join.
All proceeds will go towards Únashay Grief Sanctuary’s development and services for the underserved grieving. -
♆ Click HERE for tickets ♆
Sat, November 15th at Dar al Islam in Abiquiu, New Mexico⎯ 8:30pm to 10pm.
Luz Elena Mendoza (of Y La Bamba) will perform an intimate solo set to close out the day. Between Luz's siren voice-heart and the stunning vaulted ceilings of Dar al Islam, this is not an evening to be missed.
All concert proceeds will go towards Únashay Grief Sanctuary’s development and services for the underserved grieving. -
♆ Click HERE for tickets ♆
2p to 5pm⎯ Sanktuaree Bazaar
5p to 7pm⎯ Grief Feast with Nikesha Breeze
7p to 8:30pm⎯ Dr. Bayo Akomolafe & community discourse
8:30p to 10pm⎯ Music Performance with Luz Elena Mendoza (of Y La Bamba)