Embodying Liberation
Healing Through Ashira Active Meditation
This course offers a transformative journey into embodied resistance and collective healing. Drawing on Sufi whirling, somatic release, and indigenous Palestinian practices, Ashira Active Meditation is a trauma-informed modality developed under siege and exile. Participants will explore how continuous trauma shapes the nervous system and how the body can be a site of both memory and liberation.
Through live sessions, movement practices, storytelling, and grief rituals, we will reconnect to ancestral wisdom, rewire our stress responses, and reclaim joy as a form of resistance. This is not a typical meditation class—it is an invitation to spin, sweat, feel, and rise.
Participants will experience the healing power of the modality firsthand and learn how to apply it for their own personal integration and in service to their communities. Whether you're navigating trauma, burnout, or collective grief, this course equips you with an accessible, somatic framework to build resilience and deepen connection.
Together, we ask:
● 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 the SWANA region and global majority communities, offering tools that are culturally rooted, somatically empowering, and spiritually sustaining.
Ashira Darwish is a Palestinian-Egyptian trauma therapist, journalist, and founder of Catharsis
Holistic Healing and Ashira Active Meditation. She is a certified EFT (Emotional Freedom
Techniques) practitioner, Reiki master, Neurolanguage Programming (NLP) practitioner, and a
Kundalini teacher. Her work bridges ancestral wisdom, embodied healing, and liberation
psychology. With over a decade of experience leading trauma retreats in Palestine, USA,
Canada and Latin America, she integrates Sufi whirling, somatic therapy, and cultural practices
to support communities affected by colonization, displacement, and intergenerational trauma.
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By the end of this course, learners will:
● Understand how continuous trauma affects the nervous system
● Learn and practice the Ashira Active Meditation method
● Develop rituals for grief, resilience, and community healing
● Explore somatic tools rooted in ancestral and cultural practices
● Create a personalized integration map for sustainable wellbeing
● Critically examine how Western psychology can entrap individuals in pathologizing frameworks and explore strategies to decolonize psychological healing
● Understand and embody the concept of Sumud—Palestinian steadfastness—both as an analytical framework and a physical practice of resistance, rooted in lived experience
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This course is for artists, activists, healers, therapists, and anyone living through—or working with—generational or political trauma. It especially supports people from colonized, marginalized communities, including Black and Brown bodies, those carrying intergenerational trauma, and those striving to support these communities in ethical, embodied ways. Whether you're on a personal healing journey or engaged in collective care, this course offers culturally grounded tools to move from survival toward resilience and rooted connection.
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Each learner will create a personal or community-based ritual or healing practice that they can share or implement locally. This could take the form of a guided meditation, movement session, storytelling circle, or grief ritual.
In addition, learners will prepare a personal case study and final presentation documenting their journey throughout the course highlighting the impact of the practices on their own healing and the ways they’ve used Ashira Active Meditation and related tools in service of their communities. This final reflection will allow participants to share their integration process, witness each other’s growth, and collectively celebrate the embodied knowledge cultivated during the course.
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8 Weeks
Class is limited to 25 students. Sign up to be notified when registration opens.