El Cuerpo Presente, with Yoli
Sat Aug 31 @ 2:00pm-5:00pm
Joaquin Miller, Oakland

Register here

Curanderismo” traditions. Casa Tia Luna is excited to offer this important circle, El Cuerpo Presente as a part of our newly formed Xochicalli-House of Flowers: IndigeQueer Medicine and Healing. El Cuerpo Presente refers to the connection between our body, our presence, and the Teachers of La Tierra rooted in an IndigeQueer “Mexican Curanderismo."  In this gathering, we will focus on the teachings of the Flower and Trees and their relationship to our embodied freedom and presence as indigiqueer bodies and community. Participants will engage in land-based embodiment practices, play-based somatic exercises, and platicas (heart-straightening talks).

Through these explorations, we begin to connect with and remember our embodied relationship to “The Flower World,” a paradisal realm depicted as a prominent figure in Mesoamerican Cosmological Wisdom.

As part of our Xochicalli 24-25 programming initiative, this event is offered as a healing and learning space prioritizing and centering  IndigeQueer and Indigenous BIPOC LGBTQIA+ peoples. Our Xochicalli 24-25 cohort will offer a handful of additional spots to the broader IndigeQueer community by donation. 

Our CTL Protocol:

- HEALTH AND SAFETY:

• We are currently in a serious surge with a highly contagious iteration of the virus, let's do everything we can to prepare for a safer drum gathering.

• 3 days Prior: By RSVPing to join the circle, you are committing to keeping each other safe by following these COVID guidelines beginning at least 3 days before the gathering:

  • If you are not feeling well and/or are experiencing cold/flu symptoms, please protect our communities and do not attend our circles until your symptoms have cleared AND you have tested negative for COVID 2x within 48 hours. Please do not attend if you have a known COVID positive exposure. If you have any questions regarding this, please contact the drumkeeper directly at tialuna415@gmail.com.

  • Testing with Rapid Test by swabbing throat first then nostrils for most accurate testing before arrival.

  • As much as possible, masking indoors in public places and in settings with people outside your pod. This means at the grocery store, doctors appointments, etc. If outdoors in crowded spaces, please also consider masking.

• Day of:
  • Masking: Everyone is asked to please wear N95 or kn95 masks at all times, unless eating or drinking. Surgical masks or lower quality fabric masks are not effective against COVID.

    • If you cannot remain masked the entire time, you are encouraged to stand or sit back from others.
      

  • Vaccinations: We encourage all who join our community to vaccinate and boost if that is possible for you at this time, and to also develop your own personal COVID protocol/precautions to help our communities stay healthy.

    • Drumkeeper Zamora is vaccinated and is committed to timely updating their vaccinations.

  • Outdoor setting: During these summer months, our workshops and circles will take place outdoors as much as possible in the hopes that this increases our safety in attending.

  • Eating/Drinking: Food is shared after all of our circles. Folks are encouraged to bring food or drinks that are individually wrapped, including fruit, etc. Those preparing food to share should be symptom free and should test themselves for COVID before preparing and offering food for our drum gatherings.

-OFFERINGS: For circles and workshops, our protocol asks our guests to offer energetic exchanges with the facilitator/teacher. Please always bring a gift of tobacco -or- a medicine offering from your tradition for the drumkeeper.

-DONATIONS: While we are very happy that we've received partial funding from the Queer Cultural Center (QCC) for our Xochicalli series, donations are very much welcomed and will allow us to use these grant funds for a year of IndigeQueer circles. Your donations are a good way to give back and support medicine offerings like this. You can make small offerings in gratitude and reciprocity (e.g. $15 - $25 donation each time, or a quarterly donation, etc.). This is a part of our exchange protocol where we learn the place and value of medicina in our lives, and account for this as you are able. Your generosity helps our Casa Tia Luna and our drum to continue this spirit work, to travel, spend time with elders, and help us bring guests, etc.

-SHARING FOOD & DRINK: We also ask everyone to bring your waterbottle and snacks/food to share afterward, as is our tradition. We will let all who register for each circle know when have funding for catered food.

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Xochicalli- The House of Flowers: IndigeQueer Medicine and Healing:

This new programming series by Casa Tia Luna will be made up of circles and workshops that explore the subject of IndigeQueer Medicina.

What does it mean to seek traditional medicine in our IndigeQueer communities?

How does the passing on of ancestral knowledge change and transmute with the medicine carrier, while still remaining fundamentally grounded in tradition?

When our teachers/elders/maestros, maestras, maestrxs are IndigeQueer peoples, is our learning/ hearing/ receiving from our culture bearers different for generations of IndigeQueer Two Spirit and Native TG/GNC LGBQIA+ genderQueer peoples who have held traditions in translation (!) for so long because of the limits of patriarchy, colonization, language, and expression?

CTL is very proud to offer this series and hold space together for these important discussions for IndigeQueer community as we join our learning and healing paths and move together in our journeys.

From the Nahua concept of Xochicalli, we understand this House of Flowers to be expansive. While it is not a home/house literally, it is more of a foundational space, edificacion del florecimiento, where flourishing, flowering, blossoming can take root in ceremony, with elders and teachers. We also draw on the concept of Flor y Canto, in xochitl, in cuicatl, where the flowering comes through language, through palabra, also understood as poetry.

Part of the Xochicalli series will include time for the cohort to come together as we travel and reflect on this amazing journey, and process itself. We will gather for workshops and healing circles, but also group Talking Circles as well, where invited IndigeQueer-Two Spirit and BIPOC-TG/GNC-LGBQIA+ healers and practitioners at different points in their journey as medicine carriers will join our ongoing conversation around this question: What is IndigeQueer Medicine. We will highlight the creation of safe spaces where we can sit and reflect on what might be our core elements of bringing Queer Medicina into the future. Casa Tia Luna's Drum in Residence, the Wakan Wiya Two Spirit Drum, and drumkeeper Zamora will serve as facilitator for much of this work, but we will also help the cohort come together and with invited guests from Bay Area IndigeQueer healers and practitioners as well as drawing from IndigeQueer practitioners from other regions for workshops in plant medicine, body work, creative arts, and beyond, as the content we are sharing, and also reflecting on our learning process, and ways of transmitting knowledge as an important part of our intention here.

We welcome IndigeQueer community to apply for our first cohort at Xochicalli-House of Flowers. Please open the registration link and choose the Xochicalli ticket. It will give you instructions to then submit an application. For any questions, please write tialuna415@gmail.com.

Our program, Xochicalli-The House of Flowers: IndigeQueer Medicine and Healing, is partially funded by the Queer Cultural Center. We want to thank QCC, as well as our friends at the Bay Area American Indian Two Spirits organization for helping Casa Tia Luna produce our first f=grant-funded set of programming as we are transitioning into a 501C3 that will hopefully be able to fund future offerings in this way and increase access for our communities. We are also very much indebted to many community folk who have always helped us with their volunteered time. We thank you! If you would like to volunteer in the future, or make a donation, please contact us at tialuna415@gmail.com.

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BIO: Yoli is an indigiqueer 2-legged nagual (aka shapeshifter), and re-indigenzing cornstalk with roots along the border and so-called central mexico.

As an interdisciplinary performance artist; they explore the intersections between queer intimacy, playful choreographies, land-based sentience, curanderx medicine ways, and indigenous cosmologies. They are the “creative visionary” of Teatro De La Vida, a fluid “performance-based healing ensemble” where the roads of ancestral arts and healing practices meet performance art and experimental theatre.

As an embodiment facilitator and herbalist-in-training; they are passionate about liberating from colonial disembodiment and rooting in belonging as a "hije perdido" (lost child) finding their way home to the Land and queer'ed ancestral ways of "being". Yoli is currently working on their DIY PhD, an embodied research project centered on “El Cuerpo Presente”; sparked by School For the Ecocene. “El Cuerpo Presente” (meaning the Present Body) refers to the connection between our body, our presence, and the Teachers of La Tierra rooted in “Mexican Curanderismo” traditions. Through El Cuerpo Presente, Yoli shares offerings and services to create space to connect to Land, Body, and Being and to explore play as embodied Land-based medicine.

Yoli and their work/workshops has been hosted at diy and community spaces, dance parties, retreat spaces, The Herbal Ginger Center, Frieze LA, The Tulsa Artist Fellowship, Chan Gallery, and Pomona College’s Art Department as a guest lecturer. They have also been awarded residencies and grants through The Ghostlight Residency, The Golden Dome School, and BAAIT’s Two-Spirit Artist Mini Grant. They have a BA in Studio Art from Pomona College and a permaculture certificate through Soulflower Farm, and they are invested in their on-going community-led education through their Diy PhD “El Cuerpo Presente”.

Along with their aforementioned practices, they share what they learn through video/photography, movement, sculpture, installation, writing, friendship, medicine making, "being", and other emergent forms.