Healing Across the Racial Divide: A Journey into Race, Power, and Belonging
A space for soulful, embodied, and healing conversations about race
3 Sunday evenings, 6-8 p.m:
Feb. 1, March 1, and March 29
Online. Recordings available.
Register by January 15, take 10% off,
use code EARLY10
The Invitation
In this experiential, 3-part series, poetic storyteller, healer, and racial justice catalyst Norma Johnson and nature-based therapist and cross-cultural shamanic practitioner Kris Abrams invite you into a practice of courageous listening and deep healing. Through poetry, story, dialogue, embodied awareness, and spiritual connection, we will explore how racism, hierarchy, and history live in our bodies—and how we can begin to release their hold.
In previous “DEI”-type spaces we have experienced, the dynamic often revolved around moral hierarchies, critical thinking and analysis, and blame/shame - asking us to check our hearts, grief, joy, laughter, inner knowing, brilliance, and spirituality – our very souls – at the door. With this series, Norma and Kris invite you to take a deep dive into conversations about race where all of you is welcome.
What does “healing across the racial divide” mean?
Both of us believe that healing the racial divide must start within – and in relationship with those we have been taught to see as the “other.”
In Norma’s words:
“As a Black woman born in the 1950’s, the anger and frustration of white people’s racial ignorance would live in the background of my relationships with them. Because race was always there whether they could see it or not. The persistence of this anger became in time a creative force to help make change. That ignorance became the tool for me to challenge. If they could not see themselves in race, perhaps they could see it through my eyes and my heart — and that began my collection of Poems for My White Friends. Over time as I continued to share these poems and as they inspired thought and conversation, I found my own heart began to soften as I got to experience that ignorance is not the heart. It’s the mind trying to make sense of things according to the data it has to work with. At some point, I got to see that my anger has data and stories too, and that they are connected to those places where I am angry with myself for not being whatever it is that I think I “should” be or “should” do. I may not have been able to see that if I had not given my anger over to creativity and a way for my heart to expand.”
In Kris’ words:
“As a white, non-binary, gay woman, I was taught to reject my body, my emotions, and my sexuality. And how could I be a spiritual person if every experience I had with religion told me that I was bad? So when I tried to show up for conversations around race, I felt like a hollow shell, a mind protecting an internal emptiness. I filtered the conversations through this wounding and inverted the dominant culture’s hierarchy of worthiness, putting people of color on a pedestal and adding skin color to my list of unacceptable traits. This, of course, made internal healing and healing across the racial divide impossible. It was only when I took responsibility for healing my wounds, and found a spiritual path that embraced all of who I am, that I found I could listen to people of color and explore my internalized racism without getting stuck in shame, and experience the beauty and radical equality of all of us.
So, healing the racial divide asks us to commit to personal, internal healing even as we learn from and engage with people across the divide. In this spirit, we will have conversations we’re not supposed to have. We will build emotional intelligence, learn healing ways to work with anger, shame, blame and fear, and open a spiritual field that allows for truth-telling, grief, and joy to coexist.
Participants of all identities are welcome in this circle; we will explore ourselves and our world through the lenses of Black experience of everyday racism and of unconscious white supremacy. And we will begin to consider what we might do in our daily lives to initiate healing.
How the Series Flows
Healing Across the Divide consists of two components, a primary monthly Convening led by Norma and Kris, and an optional Integration Circle in between Convenings, for people looking for additional tools and support.
Each monthly Convening offers a rhythm of reflection, artistry, dialogue, and integration:
Grounding the theme – Norma and Kris will introduce the month’s focus on race, power, and belonging.
Poetic offering – Norma will share one of her Poems for My White Friends, inviting the heart into conversation.
Courageous dialogue – Together we will explore what arises in honest conversation, supported by community agreements and compassionate facilitation.
Embodied and spiritual integration – Kris will guide a practice drawn from somatic, therapeutic, or nature-based spiritual traditions to help participants regulate, reflect, and ground the learning in lived experience.
Two weeks after each monthly Convening, Kris will facilitate an optional Integration Circle. These smaller circles will respond to the needs of the group as they arise, focusing on practices such as emotional regulation, mindfulness, and nature connection to support continued learning and care.
The context: Balancing urgency around ICE violence with long-term learning, healing, and action
This offering was born in the aftermath of the recent ICE violence in Durango. Many in our community were shaken—not only by the brutality itself, but by the collective shock that such harm could happen here.
As one protester told the Colorado Sun after they were brutalized by ICE:
“I know that this kind of stuff is happening everywhere, which isn’t OK, but that this is happening in Durango, Colorado, is insane. Nobody touched these officers. We were all just peacefully protesting… and it was taken way out of hand by these officers.”
Yet, for many people of color, this was not a surprise but a painful confirmation of what they have long known: that racialized violence is not confined to certain places; nor is it a relic of the past. It is woven into the fabric of our nation, surfacing wherever and whenever those in power feel their control being threatened by the rising strength and demographic visibility of people of color.
What happened in Durango has opened a doorway for learning, reckoning, and healing. Yes, we must act with urgency when people’s lives are threatened, and we are proud of how our community showed up. We now invite you to root that urgency in the longer-term work of deepening relationships, building trust, and healing. When we balance urgent action with sustained healing — when we bring together inner and outer transformation — we join the long arc of history that bends toward justice.
Who Is This For?
This program is designed for people of all identities who yearn to have honest conversations about racism, racial justice, and healing the divide. It is for people who are willing to feel painful feelings and learn to transmute them into energy for liberatory action. It is for people who want to move beyond shame, blame, and heady analysis, and into a community devoted to healing.
We do not have any requirements for level of knowledge or experience. If you’ve never taken a DEI/anti-racism training, and maybe even feel a bit intimidated by the idea - we welcome you! If you have taken dozens of trainings and now facilitate them yourself, and are looking for ways to incorporate creative story-telling, psycho-somatic tools, and/or spirituality in inclusive ways, and make room for people in all of our beautiful-tragic complexity – we welcome you!
While the program is open to participants everywhere, recruitment will focus on Southwest Colorado. The intention is to nurture connection, trust, and capacity for sustained relationship—so that when harm happens again, we meet it not with shock, but with readiness to respond, solidarity, and love.
Logistics
Primary Convenings: Three two-hour, online, monthly gatherings with Norma and Kris
Dates & Time: Sunday evenings, February 1, March 1, and March 29, 6-8 p.m. MT
Location: Online, via Zoom. Recordings will be made available to all participants.
Base fee per person: Sustainer Level, $175. This level covers the basic costs of offering this event, honoring the creativity and skills Norma and Kris have developed throughout their lives. If you’re usually able to meet your needs for basic living expenses with ease, afford non-essential classes and retreats with budgeting, and can eat out occasionally, please consider paying at this level.
Supporter Level: $245. This level allows us to offer a reduced price level for those on limited incomes, as well as to people of color participants. If you navigate life with financial ease and have the ability to fulfill many wants and needs (you can afford to dine out when you like, can easily meet your needs through your work or can comfortably not work, you own property, have access to family wealth, etc.) please consider paying at this level.
Supported Level & Suggested Fee for People of Color: $75.* We offer this price to people of color, as an acknowledgement of the barriers to wealth that systemic and interpersonal racism has created, and the emotional labor required simply to survive in the dominant culture. We also offer this level to all people on limited incomes. If you find it challenging to cover your basic needs and have limited access to resources, or if you would not be able to access this offering without a discounted option, we invite you to choose this level.
*We value your presence and do not want economic circumstances to be a barrier for you. If $75 presents a barrier, please indicate this on your registration form. No one will be turned away for lack of funds.
Registration: To save your spot, register for the series by clicking HERE.
Optional Integration Circles: 3 monthly skill-building gatherings with Kris (90 minutes each)
Optional Support Circle Dates & Time: Wednesday evenings??? 6:30-8 p.m.
Location: Online, Via Zoom
Support Circle Cost Per 90-minute Session: $65/$45/$20 (same levels as above)
Registration: Registration will open for each optional support circle after each monthly gathering.
Norma Johnson
Norma Johnson (she/hers) is a healer, inspirationalist, poetic storyteller and racial justice catalyst who brings a creative background to highlight stories of our shared humanity, history, and heart at the intersection of transformation. Locally and nationally, she facilitates discussions on social justice issues of race, inclusivity and belonging. Norma is a producer and proud team member of the podcast, Well, That Went Sideways!, now in its 6th season. She continues to be recognized and honored in the communities she serves, as an inductee of The Corn Mothers; Inspiring Women of the Southwest, and as a recipient of the Boulder County Multi-Cultural Awards for the Arts. Norma’s deeply moving poetic stories are featured in such places as; the World Channel/PBS documentary, The Cost of Inheritance, and in social justice courses and trainings taught by educators across the country. Norma uses creative arts to explore our stories of life and living, bringing awareness to the power of heart as a resilient and sustaining healing agent and force.
Kris Abrams
Kris Abrams (they/she) is a nature-based psychotherapist and cross-cultural shamanic practitioner who guides individuals and groups in healing trauma, reclaiming their most authentic, powerful selves, and reweaving relationship with the Earth and all beings. Kris’ life and work are expressions of a deep yearning to restore wholeness. Her early rebellion against a homophobic church led to a passionate search for truth, integrity, and belonging—first through the life of the mind, then through the work of the heart. Kris was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship and studied women’s organizing within the South African liberation movement; she continued her lifelong commitment to social, racial, and environmental justice in the progressive nonprofit sector, where she produced the international, independent, newshour Democracy Now!, and supported various local and international justice organizations. Over time, Kris became troubled by how often progressive spaces replicate the same hierarchies and divisions they seek to dismantle. That realization opened a deeper healing journey—one rooted in decolonized spirituality, relational practice, and reclaiming our sacred connection to the living world.
