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Embodying Liberation

This course offers a transformative journey into embodied resistance and collective healing. Developed under siege and exile, Ashira Active Meditation draws from Sufi whirling, somatic release, and indigenous Palestinian practices to support healing from trauma on both personal and collective levels. Participants will: - Explore how continuous trauma shapes the nervous system - Learn how the body can be a site of both memory and liberation - Engage in movement practices, grief rituals, and storytelling - Reclaim joy as a form of resistance Guiding Questions: - How do we grieve while building resilience? - How can our bodies become vessels for transgenerational healing? - What does it mean to be radically alive in times of collapse? This course centers voices from SWANA and global majority communities, offering tools that are culturally rooted, somatically empowering, and spiritually sustaining.

Taught by Ashira Darwish

Live Online8 sessions x 90 min

Course Overview

This course offers a transformative journey into embodied resistance and collective healing.

Developed under siege and exile, Ashira Active Meditation draws from Sufi whirling, somatic release, and indigenous Palestinian practices to support healing from trauma on both personal and collective levels.

Participants will:

Explore how continuous trauma shapes the nervous system
Learn how the body can be a site of both memory and liberation
Engage in movement practices, grief rituals, and storytelling
Reclaim joy as a form of resistance

Guiding Questions:

How do we grieve while building resilience?
How can our bodies become vessels for transgenerational healing?
What does it mean to be radically alive in times of collapse?

This course centers voices from SWANA and global majority communities, offering tools that are culturally rooted, somatically empowering, and spiritually sustaining.

Who Is This Course For?

Artists, activists, healers, therapists
People living through or supporting others through generational or political trauma
Members of colonized and marginalized communities, especially Black, Brown, SWANA, and diasporic peoples
Anyone seeking embodied tools for personal and collective resilience

What You'll Learn

Explore somatic tools rooted in ancestral and cultural practices
Create a personalized integration map for sustainable wellbeing
Critically examine and decolonize Western psychological frameworks
Embody Sumud — Palestinian steadfastness — as a physical and analytical practice of resistance

What's Included

Live Sessions

Interactive classes with your instructor

Session Recordings

Lifetime access to all recordings

Community Access

Connect with fellow learners

Certificate

Proof of course completion

Course Modules

The Body Keeps the Score

Understanding how oppression lives in our bodies

Somatic Practices for Release

Tools for releasing stored tension and trauma

Reconnecting with Body Wisdom

Listening to what your body knows

Embodied Freedom

Living liberation in your daily life

Real-World Project

Learners will design a personal or community-based ritual (eg guided meditation, movement practice, storytelling circle, or grief ritual) They will also prepare a personal case study + presentation documenting their healing journey throughout the course and how they’ve applied Ashira Active Meditation in service of their communities.

About the Instructor

Ashira Darwish

Healer

Somatic practitioner and liberation educator guiding others to embody freedom and healing through body-centered practices. Ashira is a motivational speaker, investigative journalist, and the visionary creator of Ashira Active Meditation — a trauma integration modality rooted in embodied movement, ancestral wisdom, liberation psychology, and neuro-somatic healing. Her work is a lifeline for those navigating the impacts of war, displacement, and intergenerational trauma, particularly among Palestinian communities. Ashira’s journey into healing began after a life-altering injury in 2012 that left her paralyzed with a severed spinal cord. Defying every medical prognosis, she embarked on a personal and spiritual path of recovery that not only restored her mobility but led to the creation of a groundbreaking method for trauma transformation. Her approach blends active meditation, Sufi and Kundalini practices, sound healing, and trauma-informed movement into a dynamic, culturally rooted modality. Grounded in the principles of liberation psychology, Ashira’s work emphasizes healing as a collective, justice-centered process — reconnecting individuals not only to their bodies, but to their communities, histories, and power. Recognized for its effectiveness in treating ADHD, PTSD, and continuous trauma in both children and adults, her method transcends clinical frameworks by restoring dignity, embodiment, and spiritual sovereignty to survivors. Ashira’s pioneering research established a link between spinning movements and trauma therapy. Her studies revealed that spinning can safely activate the prefrontal cortex — a key area affected by trauma and neurodegeneration — offering a transformative tool for emotional regulation and nervous system restoration. She is a certified EFT therapist, trauma coach, and sound healer, and her healing philosophy is both deeply personal and globally relevant. In 2021, she was honored by the Indian Society for Applied Behavioural Science for her contributions to societal transformation. In 2023, she was named one of Palestine’s most inspirational women by Build Palestine. Beyond her healing practice, Ashira is known for her fearless journalism and advocacy. She has collaborated with organizations such as BBC, Internews, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch, bringing global attention to Palestinian voices, stories, and resilience. Through her initiative, Catharsis Holistic Healing, she has trained over 200 Arab-world practitioners and continues to offer free trauma support to communities in crisis — from Gaza to refugee camps, from classrooms to frontlines of resistance. Ashira’s life is a testament to what is possible when healing is embodied, liberation is holistic, and community is sacred. Her work weaves together science, spirit, and struggle — offering not just recovery, but reclamation.

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Format

Live Online

Class Size

25 students max

Sessions

8 sessions

Duration

90 min each

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The World on our Plates: Culture, Politics, and Food Systems

This course takes as its starting point something we all need in order to survive - food - and examines how the personal is entwined with the social and the political. It must be clear this is not a course on “clean” eating or dieting - rather, it aims to examine how our individual choices are shaped by the larger food systems around us. Together, we will examine the various systems and processes leading to the food that ends up on our plates - where it comes from, what it is made up of, who is involved in putting it together - to reflect on larger questions around culture, cuisine, and community. Figuratively speaking, we are less interested in the breaking of bread than in the actual baking of bread. That is to say, whilst the symbolic and cultural elements of food are generally known, this course aims to focus squarely on the material dimensions of how food is made. We will consider how questions around labour, migration, race & gender, coloniality, capitalism and the climate crisis are wrapped up in the production of food. Together, we'll consider how our choices around the food we consume are shaped by the larger social and political contexts we are a part of. We'll see how these contexts affect our lives - not just nutritionally, but socially and environmentally as well. Our weekly sessions will culminate in a bread-making workshop led by Josefina Venegas Meza, a professional baker & pastry chef who has worked in some of London's best kitchens. In addition to acquiring a practical and valuable skill, we intend this practise-based session to function as an opportunity to personally reflect on the various topics we've covered together, and how they might apply in our individual lives. You will also receive a comprehensive and exclusive bread-making handbook with all the essential information you might need to refer back to should you wish to continue baking in future.

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Josefina Venegas Meza, PhD & Pavan Mano, PhD

Live Online25 students max8 sessions

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Beyond Sustainability: Connection, Wisdom, and Regenerative Leadership

We are living in a time when environmental conversations are often dominated by crisis, urgency, and fear. The narratives we hear most frequently focus on collapse, destruction, and emergency. While these realities cannot be ignored, constantly operating from this place can leave us feeling overwhelmed, drained, and powerless. What if there was another way to engage with this work? This course invites you to explore the environmental and sustainability space from a different perspective, one rooted in empowerment, connection, and renewal rather than stress and overwhelm. Over time, the sustainability field has increasingly been shaped by institutions, corporations, and NGOs. While many important efforts happen within these spaces, the deeper essence of environmental stewardship, the relationship between people, land, culture, and ancestral knowledge, can sometimes get lost. This course creates space to reconnect with that essence. Rather than approaching sustainability purely as an intellectual or technical subject, we will explore how to embody other ways of being that allow us to engage with the environmental field from a place of authenticity, care, and inspiration. Drawing from environmental psychology, behavioral change, storytelling, and ancestral wisdom, participants will explore how inner transformation can lead to more meaningful external impact. When we lead from this place, we are able to contribute to healthier systems while showing up with less guilt, less pressure, and more clarity, purpose, and power. By the end of the course, you will feel more empowered to engage with environmental work from a place of inspiration, grounded in a deeper connection to the land, to community, and to the wisdom that has guided humans for generations. Throughout the course, we will reflect on questions such as: - How can we engage with environmental work from a deeper, more life-affirming place that invites both ourselves and others into the conversation? - How can we move from intellectual understanding to embodied practice in sustainability? - How can personal transformation shape broader transformation in global systems? - How can we design and share initiatives, ideas, or projects that emerge from inspiration and authenticity rather than pressure or urgency? - How can we lead and communicate in ways that reconnect people to the land and to each other?

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Najla Abdellatif Vallander · Environmental Advocate

Live Online25 students max4 sessions

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Living with Imagination and Optimism

Imagine having the courage to think and act more authentically, letting go of expectations. Imagine living each day your dream life and with a clear purpose. Imagine becoming the most influential leader because of your compassion and ethics. Imagine that your seemingly wild ideas are instrumental to addressing climate disasters. This is possible if you dare to imagine it. Imagination is human’s superpower – it allows to see beyond current limitations to create unseen and hopeful realities. Optimistic imaginings can increase positive emotions, boost well-being, and lead to empowerment, fostering constructive individual and collective change and impactful action. However, imagination is still mostly associated with children and artists, but unrelated to everyday adult life. As a result, our imagination has become constrained and underdeveloped. While we spend most of our time thinking about the future, our tendency is to imagine apocalyptic scenarios – e.g., worse pandemics – or negative situations rooted in current trends – e.g., AI takes over humanity. We struggle to imagine positive paths forward and often look at others for validation – that is, we follow the familiar and conventional, even if this path does not make us happy. This creates a vicious cycle of pervasive pessimism and hopelessness about the future that increases our insecurities and feelings of anxiety and loneliness, which hinder our imaginative powers. The good news is that imagination can be reclaimed, strengthened, and harnessed. Sitting at the intersection of psychology, neuroscience, and well-being, this course is an invitation to explore the symbiotic connection between imagination and well-being, as well as to discover what is getting in between us and reaching our potential. In addition to inner development gains, reinforcing human skills — listening, imagining, conversing, empathizing, paying attention, collaborating — will better equip learners to succeed as employees are increasingly looking for these skills in candidates. Through a blend of mindfulness-based practices and reflection, experiential exercises (visualization, role-play, futuring, pretend play, sensory engagement), and hands-on creativity activities (drawing, sketching, collaging) learners will journey inwards, slow down, identify their barriers, and experience the transformative benefits of imagination for mental and physical health. In each session, learners will practice tools and skills to unlock their barriers and deliberately tap into their imagination as well as to integrate and foster imagination skills in their life, their community, and their work. By the end of the course, learners will feel a sense of freedom, courage, compassion, and optimism. They will walk away with the inspiration and confidence to live with imagination – and to nurture it in others.

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