What Happens
We open by honoring where we are — the land, the lineage, the ancestors of the people in the room. We build an altar together. Each person brings something from home, names an ancestor, places it in the center. The room changes when that happens. People who have worked alongside each other for years see each other differently.
From there, the teaching is somatic SEL — how the nervous system actually works, what the body holds across a school year, and the practices that move it through. We do Liberation Theater: small groups, real scenarios from their own building, building restorative responses together and acting them out. The room fills with laughter. Play shows up. And inside the play, the real conversations come — about how to lean on each other, how much they have in common, what it would mean to actually be a team.
People leave saying they understand their colleagues differently. More compassion. More togetherness. A felt sense that the building is holding them, not just demanding from them.
Pedro Albizu Campos High School brought us in for a two-day retreat in May 2026. Twenty-eight teaching staff, end of year. They asked us back for next year.
