Yamani is deeply committed to preventing, acknowledging, healing and transforming individual and systemic trauma. She believes the time, space and practice of healing is not only a luxury for those who can afford it but a human right for all people.  To that end, she is deeply committed to listening, supporting and facilitating healing through a variety of modalities.

Yamani works through a variety of modalities to deepen her internal and external healing work. She is deepening her generative somatics practice to re-organize herself on purpose toward embodied transformation and alignment of her values, commitments and actions.  She studies (decolonizing) non-violent communication an awareness practice and approach to communication that aims to address the universal needs of all people by orienting toward compassion as the motivation for action rather than fear, guilt, shame, blame, coercion, threat or justification for punishment. Yamani has a regular practice of group meditation, community acupuncture and bodywork. In her quest to learn more about the body and how to heal it, she studied clinical massage at the Soma Institute of Chicago and occasionally offers  public, outdoor community based bodywork. She is a 200hr RYT  trained by Yoga Skills (2016) and certified to teach children’s yoga by Global Family Yoga (2013). She completed birth doula training with the International Center for Traditional Childbearing (2014)-now the National Association to Advance Black Birth) and became a volunteer doula, first with Chicago Volunteer Doulas to provide birth support to families free of charge. Yamani believes that a good deal of trauma could be prevented by having adequate support during gestation and the full spectrum of pregnancy outcomes whether birth, miscarriage, abortion and parenting. All of which she has experienced.

Yamani is an adult child of an alcoholic; she manages depression, anxiety and PTSD as a survivor of physical and sexual abuse as a child, abandonment, and betrayal trauma. Her commitment to reproductive justice is deeply rooted in her love for children and a desire to end child abuse. She views efforts to co-parent children post divorce as explicit healing work to mitigate or end a cycle of inter-generational trauma.  She has been on a mission for more than a decade to understand, translate, heal and combat mental health stigma and disparities. She envisions a world where intellectually, emotionally and physically disabled people are equal, understood and supported. Her personal investment in healing her individual, familial and generational trauma undergirds her broader commitment to opening and embodying radical compassion and healing justice in relationships, environments, institutions and communities. Yamani doesn’t claim to be an expert on healing. However she is in a continual practice of seeking and choosing a path with people on similar journeys, with shared values and commitments to doing the hard work to dismantle damage and imagine a world with less conflict and pain, and more understanding and joy.

image credit: joanna arellano-gonzalez, espiritu embroidery.