Sacred Wellness
Who We Are:
TaMeicka "Ifasina" Clear (pronouns them/him) is a fat, Black, genderqueer person from Texas living in North Carolina. Ifasina is a Master Trainer and space holder who has over 20 years of experience working across age and access needs with a special focus on directly impacted people, navigating teamwork, leading processes, and making decisions in configurations that include indirectly impacted and minimally impacted decision makers. Ifasina is passionate about the kind of work involving supporting others in their leadership, brilliance, and creative genius. As a healer and cultural worker, Ifasina stewards experiences and containers that support marginalized people to take risk, experiment, and engage with concepts and practices that might otherwise be inaccessible.
Zami Tinashe Hyemingway (Zami/he/him) is a Black Trans of Center healer and certified health coach. Zami has a Masters in Social Work and a Masters in Arts and Social Transformation allowing him to use a holistic framework based in mind, body and spiritual healing. Zami has been in health promotion for over 14 years, and has supported two other organizations in creating similar holistic wellness groups in their cities, both groups receiving funding from TJFP while Zami was a core leader. These groups were Bloom Transgender Community Healing Project in Oakland, CA and Kindred Connections in Tucson, Arizona.
Our Mission:
We are a developing collective dedicated to holistic wellness for TGNB BIPOC, disabled and chronically ill individuals in the Durham/Raleigh area. Our work takes many forms including wellness educational programming, community resource distribution, and creating accessible and inclusive physical wellness spaces.
We center the needs of disabled and chronically ill BIPOC TGNB individuals and collective wellness by using a holistic, accessibility conscious, and liberatory approach to wellness. Our approach focuses on the spiritual, emotional, mental, financial and physical wellbeing of our community,
This work in the past has looked like:
Hosting events that center intentional reconnection to traditional foodways
Offering accessible movement and dance courses
Hosting intergenerational community learning spaces
Providing holistic wellness education on food as illness prevention
We work towards ending isolation for many of our BIPOC TGNB kin, by curating opportunities to cultivate a deeper relationship with each other via healing and collective joy. We are committed to building community health and wealth, and view ourselves as community facilitators and wisdom sharers, and not gatekeepers.
Through centering liberatory wellness practices, our work increases wellness literacy through free educational events on nutrition, accessible movement, and ways to heal our relationships with our bodies through tradition and culture. We work against ableism, body shaming, and weight loss rhetoric, reminding our community that we are worthy and deserving of wellness. We work to increase access to fresh food options by having free, healthful meals at each event, hosting events at a local Black woman owned farm, that also provides free vegetable boxes once a month, and providing guidance in how to grow, cook and eat foods seasonally, local to our region and rooted in our culture. We believe in making wellness accessible to everyone, so our events are designed to engage a range of community members from youth to our elders.
Many in our community are living with chronic illness and disabilities, and are under employed, and are also healers, creatives, and entrepreneurs. We believe that in order to cultivate spiritual and social wellbeing, we must invest wealth and knowledge back into the community. Sacred Wellness is dedicated to amplifying the work and voices of BIPOC TGNB and disabled healers and wellness entrepreneurs by supporting their endeavors through creating spaces where they are invited to facilitate, share and sell work, and when we have funding, pay each facilitator a stipend for their services.
We center healing, community, and joyful movement - intentionally offsetting the narrative most often heard about TGNB BIPOC experiences that focus on our pain and death. We believe that wellness and access to food is not only a basic need, but our birthright.
