Mending and Healing

A workshop series designed to foster belonging, healing, and community through somatic practices of needlecraft and guided meditation, and discussion-based learning. In response to rising social isolation, workplace disengagement, caregiving burnout, and mental health challenges, this initiative is provides a transformative space for participants to reconnect with themselves and others. When I first came up with this idea, my hope was to create an experience where the mending fuels the healing, and the healing infuses meaning into the mending.

Our team of four works collaboratively to structure each workshop, iterating based on the feedback surveys and reflection of previous sessions. We discuss pedagogies we want to center for the session and find ways to weave these concepts into the clothing repair facilitation portion that I lead. Our workshop dry runs involve me teaching the team the mending technique we will be using so that they are equipped to troubleshoot participants’ projects on the day.

In our workshops so far, some of the teachings we’ve referenced are Dr Shawn Ginwright’s Four Pivots, Beverly Daniel Tatum’s Complexity of Identity, and Paulo Freire’s concepts on liberation.

Many workshop participants are mending for the first time. Participants have often commented on how the process of mending a hole feels cathartic, even when the skill was foreign to them before the workshop. People also talk about how they feel more relaxed and less frantic leaving the workshop than how they felt coming into the space.

Me facilitating the mending portion of the workshop 1