Gathering Our Medicine
Healing and strengthening relationships between Indigenous youth and their kinship circle
Gathering Our Medicine
ONLINE TRAINING
For helping professionals wishing to learn to facilitate Gathering Our Medicine
This 9-week online training program of Gathering Our Medicine has been developed for caregivers of Indigenous youth to encourages strengthened relationships with youth as an essential aspect of inter-generational healing.
Gathering our Medicine is a training model that balances integration of Indigenous and Western ways of knowing and being. This program honours Indigenous ways of knowing and being as naturally providing for our youth’s relationship needs—the conditions for resilience and emotional health. As we practice walking in two worlds, we weave together a better future for Indigenous youth.
Caregivers of Indigenous youth require relational, place and strength-based supports, education and resources that are culturally relevant and take into consideration the impact of colonization and inter-generational trauma. Through Indigenous ways of knowing and being Gathering Our Medicine nurtures care givers intuition (or felt sense of knowing) and confidence to provide for our youths’ often complex, sometimes perplexing relational and developmental needs.
This online training program is designed for helping professionals wishing to learn more about facilitating Gathering Our Medicine in their community or organization. This includes parents and extended family, teachers, helping professionals and other caregivers in the community (CYMH, Family Preservation, Counsellors and Therapists, Educators, Social Workers and others working in community).
This program runs once per week for 9 weeks online.
Weekly Sessions
- Week 1 – A Warm Welcome and The Journey Ahead
- Week 2 – The Healing Power of Cultural Rituals
- Week 3 – Strengthening Relationships Through Gathering Rituals
- Week 4 – Nature’s Plan for Growth
- Week 5 – Reducing Separation Through Continuity Rituals
- Week 6 – Recovering Resilience Through Grieving Rituals
- Week 7 – Ritualized Forms of Expression for Aggression & Anxiety Problems
- Week 8 – Bringing Together Our Kinship Circle Through Introduction Rituals
- Week 9 – Honouring Our Youth and Kinship Circle- Celebration Ceremony
START DATE
2021 Trainings TBD
90 minutes/week
TIME
1:00 – 2:30pm
MORE INFO
Denise Findlay
denise.findlay@gov.bc.ca
” When ceremonies take place, everyone who is participating needs to be ready to step beyond the everyday and to accept a raised state of consciousness. You could say that the specific rituals that make up the ceremony are designed to get the participants into a state of mind that will allow for the extraordinary to take place.”
— Shawn Wilson
” Indigenous teaching focusses as much on learning with the heart as on learning with the mind.”
— Gregory Cajete