Designing Rituals and Talismans with System Involved Youth for Supporting Transitions out of Pandemic Life

Shoshana Phoenixx

Training Description

For many of us, 2020 was a year of unprecedented personal challenges. Some of those experiences were traumatizing. Others were strengthening and rewarding. But as the pandemic has separated us from our friends, loved ones and community services, it has also separated us from the rituals we use to mark and honor important life events. This experience gives us newly deepened insights into the challenges of system involved youth. The aim of this training is to develop new ways to process the challenges faced, acknowledge the impacts they have, and connect with the personal growth they have enabled for system involved youth and families and those who support them.

Learning Objective

• Learn about the cultural and spiritual place, significance and function of rituals and talismans
• Explore how different types of rituals can be used to help system involved youth honor, mark and move forward from significant life experiences
• Practice creating rituals and talismans for marking significant accomplishments and mile markers

Agenda 

10:00am-10:30am - Welcome, Introductions

10:30am- 10:45am - Grounding and Focusing Exercise

10:45am-11:15am - Designing Rituals teaching: Learning to understand, evoke and involve the cultural and spiritual histories of system involved youth

11:15am-11:45am - Break out Group work: Discussion of ritual types and options

11:45am-12:20pm - Create a ritual that would work for you and one that would work for a system involved youth you support

12:20pm-12:50pm – Lunch Break (CEUs will not be issued for this time)

12:50pm-1:30pm - Teaching - Designing Talismans

1:30pm- 1:50pm- Groups work and discussion of talisman types and cultural inclusivity

1:50pm-2:30pm - Create a talisman out of found and collected objects

2:45pm-3:30pm - Closing Ritual

3:30pm-4:00pm –Reflections, goals for further work and course evaluations

Meet Our Trainer

“We can create together. We can heal together. We can mark the moments of ritual together. May the work of our hearts and hands speak together the truth of our lives.”

Shoshana has been working with communities and professional caregivers educating and training on the issues and challenges around progressive illness, trauma, death and bereavement for families for over 36 years. In that work she has supported people in many ways and forms as they experience illness, grief, healing, recovery, and transformation.

She began her grief and loss professional journey during the illness and death of both of her parents when she was a teenager. She subsequently served a residency in Berkeley to become an interfaith chaplain and now describes herself as “a Jewish chaplain, who works from an interfaith perspective”.

She has trained, counselled, and supported adults and children dealing with terminal illnesses, (and students/volunteers wanting to learn) using art modalities and non-traditional approaches

The thread that stitches together all the pieces of her work life is care, compassion and comfort for suffering people who find themselves outside the system of norms in American mainstream culture.

As a person who has lived outside those norms all her life, Mama Shoshana says with conviction, “We have our unconventional ways, and I am here to tell you that they are valid. There are many roads up this mountain called life, and we survive the unimaginable by stitching together all that we learn from one another.”

Shoshana has developed a range of learning interventions and activities including:

• Developing an ethical will
• Developing a "spiritual toolbox" for journeying through life's deepest challenges,
• Bereavement training programs for social workers, care aides, case managers and paraprofessionals
• Grief support programs for groups and teams
• Needs assessment tool for anticipatory grief and loss in clients and families
• Art-therapy based grief support for children

She is also the author of The Phoenixx Haggadah.

This course meets the qualifications for (5.5) BBS CEUs for LCSWs, LMFTs, LPCCs, and LEPs as required by the California Board of Behavioral Sciences & is provided by Fred Finch Youth Center, CAMFT Provider #045295.