Inner Work & Multiple Ways of Knowing: A Five Elements Anthology

CHANGE ELEMENTAL 5 ELEMENTS LAB

DEAR FRIENDS,

This is a collection of art, invocations, and inquiries that encapsulate a collective deepening in Change Elemental's work to co-create pathways toward love, dignity, and justice.

While our work is ongoing, the portal opening shared here emerged from an experience in early 2023 when our team engaged in an emergent, creative, and rigorous practice space we are calling the Five Elements Lab. Our Lab's purpose is to strengthen our individual and collective practices of the Five Elements—deep equity, systems change, inner work, multiple ways of knowing, and shared leadership and power.

This iteration of the Lab was designed by artists, facilitators, and co-conspirators Sharon Bridgforth and Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, with Elissa Sloan Perry and Naima Tokunow of Change Elemental. It was designed with particular attention to multiple ways of knowing and inner work. The experience brought these elements to life with the powerful teachings and practices of Theatrical Jazz, as practiced by Omi and Sharon, supporting us to improvise, innovate, and move together in virtuosity and as an ensemble.

With our movement spaces experiencing discord and dis-ease from coping in toxic, racist systems, a crucial part of our work is supporting a big we to be well in it all together. We believe that deepening practices of the Five Elements is essential for transforming the being and doing necessary for thriving, liberatory movements. The Five Elements Lab is our offering to be in practice together. We hope you'll join us in a future Lab.

With love, The Change Elemental Team, Spring 2023

inner work & multiple ways of knowing

A FIVE ELEMENTS LAB ANTHOLOGY

THE FIVE ELEMENTS OF A THRIVING JUSTICE ECOSYSTEM

We are advancing deep equity and liberation. This is complex systems change. The way forward is both planful and emergent.

Complex systems change requires us to define and share leadership and power differently. This takes inner work and embracing multiple ways of knowing.

CREATING & DIVINING MOVEMENT PATHWAYS & PORTALS

The Five Elements work together as a hand. Hands tend to what is with care—creating, divining, and sustaining pathways and portals of liberatory transformation. Iterative, overlapping, and interdependent, sometimes pathways and portals exist in our very DNA, other times they emerge in unfamiliar clearings and rocky outcrops, and in still other times they reveal themselves to be hiding in plain sight.

At times, a finger or two (or an element or two) needs attention like an instrument needs tuning. In this anthology, we turn up the volume on inner work and multiple ways of knowing to support us in defining, finding, (re)membering, and (re)learning our way together.

OUR INTERDEPENDENT ENSEMBLE

Our Guides

Sharon Bridgforth and Omi Osun Joni L. Jones

Our Next Now

Brilliant facilitators of this iteration of the Five Elements Lab and practitioners of Theatrical Jazz. Creators of most prompts and activities within this anthology. Co-designers of the Lab with Elissa Sloan Perry.

All Those That Came Before Us

Our human, plant, and animal ancestors and current kin help us (re)member the ways to the next world now.

Truth-tellers

The Change Elemental team is an ensemble for love, dignity, and justice, who practice inner work and multiple ways of knowing.

A Movement Ensemble

Our beloved community, we invite you to practice and play with us in a future Lab. Together, we can be an interdependent ensemble for liberation.

CONNECTION TO OUR LINEAGES, OUR ANCESTORS

This is an INVITATION. Into your knowing And your unknowing.

Truth-telling will be required. I will show you my truth. Will you show me your truth?

Only revealed can we make the music that transforms.

Not to conform but to virtuosity… in interdependence.

CEREMONY

s needed, what has always been for transformational change, is mony—ceremonies in which we ect deeply with each other, with great spirit, with all of creation."

Altar Building connects us to our ancestors, our lineages, and those who hold us, guide us, and support us to (re)member, (re)learn, (re)find, and be in connection with our individual and collective transformation.

If you had a shared sacred space (like an offerings table or altar), what object would you add to it to reflect and hold your ancestral support?

Press Play: Change Elementals Roots & Lineages Playlist

— Aja Couchois Duncan

JOMAMA JONES "DIVA INFLUENCES"

Who are your influences?

What contributions do they make to the world?

How does your work honor them?

DIVINATION & INVOCATIONS

Whats present now?

Tarot cards found in Cristy C. Road's Next World Tarot

What are you manifesting?

Card found in "dat Black Mermaid Man

Lady/Oracle Deck," Created by Sharon Bridgforth, Artwork by Yasmin Hernandez.

CONNECTION TO SELF

DEPTH IN ANY ENDEAVOR IS ABOUT TRUTH-TELLING

What’s emphasized:

Presence

Courage Emotions

Possibility

Body knowing

Seeing & being seen

This is a practice of sensing your pathway to our movement portals without getting lost in the necessary depth of truth-telling.

y y have?

How does it support you?

Movement of hands. Keeps me in the way.

A girl in the plains filled with flowers knowing

What is your body telling you?

What is your response to this information?

How can we ask others to have courageous conversations without first doing it ourselves? We are embodying our words...

"Our bodies know and can open the way to new knowing."

— Sharon Bridgforth

Some will get smaller and fit—piece snuggled with piece to make a foundation. Some will dissolve into sand and we will dance a delighted soft shoe while Nelson swings gently with Ella.

CONNECTION TO SOURCE

DEFINING & CULTIVATING THE SACRED

"The sacred is what’s possible when we all have what we need to show up as our best selves."

What’s emphasized: re-storying

Re-weaving & Spirituality & faith

Emotions

Creativity

Inner work

This work is faith-based, faith that "another world is possible," faith in the sacred.

–Elissa Sloan Perry

What's a blessing for your younger self?

Dear girl self I see you.

Those eyes like god just sat down inside of them settling down to see love in everything girl self there is no world where you don’t light it up with wonder. Just you. Smiling the mischievous way you do. the way god does when she looks at you.

Honey.

Baby.

Child.

So new you

Are ancient. They see Your Shine. Want it.

It’s only true they took it if you let it be.

What is a visual to accompany your blessing?

May you live in the world h You want to.

May you be with the people you Want to be with.

May you always be able to be you.

How might you embody this blessing?

PLAY

RELEASING & TRANSFORMING WITH INTENTION & CARE

“When we suppress play, danger is often close at hand.”

—

What’s emphasized:

Multiple ways of knowing Play

Sarah Lewis

What is the role of play in your own life?

Play supports us to release—release our limitations, inhibitions, pre-conceived notions of what is and what is possible. It is a release that deepens our connections to ourselves and each other, our spirits, and our possibility.

How is play expressed for you?

When is it suppressed for you?

“Creativity is being open to the possibility of transformation.”

— Monica Tyran

SYNCING UP: A PRACTICE OF LEANING INTO OURSELVES AND EACH OTHER

"Improvisation [is] the ability to be nimble and try the unknown. Innovation [is] improvisations that—through repetition and exploration—build into new, more lasting ways of being."

— Omi Osun Joni L. Jones

Read a beloved poem with another person. We read "Paul Robeson" by Gwendolyn Brooks. Offer each other some vocables as the other person reads.

mmhmm aché yes!

Embody those vocables. Play with them.

Play with the reading. Repeat words, emphasize the words differently.

What supports you?

What do you want to release?

What do you want to receive?

REST

healing in-between pause.

pausing in-between softening my gra healing myself

Norma Wong

"Know when to put yourself to bed."

-

CONNECTING, DREAMING, TOGETHER

What do you dream?

Green mountains grace beyond me

My ancestors moved with hope

We collide

Fire evening

Crackling with ideas

And wide open laughter

The layers of sediment hidden beneath

Listening to the memories of water's children

Long forgotten, yet belonging

DREAM WEAVING

What is your collective dream?

ANCESTORS

Our ancestors moved with hope

In this space of being and living beyond time, we collide We are who we need

CONNECTION

Fire evenings crackling with ideas And wide open laughter.

Light permeates my being.

If healing is a conjurer, Let me pull magic from my pocket.

BELONGING

Belonging

Power with fist to hand

Collectively build and gather abundance Good enough already

SOURCE

Connecting with stories and source—singing, dancing, and weeping with plant kin, finned kin, all our kin and each other.

How is your dream divinely supported?

"All the other versions were necessary to get to the last version."

Omi Osun Joni L. Jones

COLLABORATION: VIRTUOSITY IN ENSE

STEPPING FULLY INTO YOURSELF, IN INTERDEPENDENCE, AS AN ENSEMBLE

What’s emphasized:

All that it takes to connect to ancestors, self, source, dream, & play

Openness to learning, flexing, evolving Collaboration

Truthtelling & multiple truths

Courage

—

“Differentiation and some degree of wholeness is required for interdependence."

Elissa Sloan Perry

What truths do you know?

Which truths are you opening to?

Virtuosity requires courage. Courage to open to one's self. Courage to be one's self. Courage to shine in the fullness of one's self and one's gifts.

"KNOW what you know...and be open to changing."

— Sharon Bridgforth

Who is in your ensemble?

What notes are they playing?

What is your note & when?

Collaboration/ensemble/working together requires figuring out or refining what your note is and where and when to play it.

What is your, our next big leap?

"Being liked, fitting in, all of that, can be okay up until the point that it keeps me from the truth and from telling my truth."

I respond in song and word and movement, playing, laughing, and crying too. Release just enough to move, tortoise like, toward this portal. How do I keep what wholeness I have and get what I need to leap? Stand tall & full bodied in my knowing and right-sized in our connection?

—

Omi Osun Joni L. Jones

How might you, and all of us, with all ourselves in all our ways of knowing support, build, and nurture movements for liberation and sovereignty – for the world we want?

ENSEMBLE A TEMPLE OF OUR FAMILIAR

A temple of our familiar.

Share the gift. Creating the space doesn't mean people will come but this space still needs to exist.

Give and receive love.

Trust our individual and collective truths, boundaries, dreams, held mission, and values as north stars in our journeys and experiments.

Only revealed can we make the music that transforms.

Practice leaping. Demonstrate leaping. Invite leaping. Celebrate leaping, flowers, and beauty.

Remembering that this is not just about us the imperative precedes us, the power we create exceeds our individual capacity.

And what we offered was flowing birdsong. The blessing as resonant as our breath.

Look up. Wonder. Let the breeze lift you. Love.

A world of peace and beauty is possible and necessary.

Let’s double down on advocacy and systems change, so that you and me is a collective we, not just the elite few of us lucky enough to be paid to talk about this.

A temple of our familiar.

INSPIRATIONS

"dat Black Mermaid Man Lady/Oracle Deck," Created by Sharon Bridgforth, Artwork by Yasmin Hernandez. All Rights Reserved, Copyright 2016, Geeched Out Productions / Yasmin Hernandez (Artwork).

Theatrical Jazz by Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, Ohio State University Press, 2018

The Rise by Sarah Lewis, Simon & Schuster, 2015

"Mixed Metaphor: A Liberatory Infrastructure Learning Deck" by Leveraging a Network for Equity (LANE), 2023

"Weaving Together a World Without Violence Medicine Deck: Invocations, Principles, Ingredients, & Recipes" by the Network Weaver Learning Lab, 2019

"People Stitching Earth: Oppression, Healing, Liberation, and Navigating the Terrain In Between" by Aja Couchois Duncan and Elissa

Sloan Perry, Change Elemental, 2022

MEET THE CONTRIBUTORS

Top Row: Delia Allen-O'Brien, Omi Osun Joni L.

Jones, Ananda Valenzuela, Elissa Sloan Perry, Aja

Couchois Duncan, Sharon Bridgforth, Tamitha

Walker McKinnis; Bottom Row: Monica Tyran, Zulayka Santiago, Natasha Winegar, Alison Lin, Naima Yael Tokunow, Natalie Bamdad

Curated By

Elissa Sloan Perry, Monica Tyran, Natasha Winegar, and Naima Yael Tokunow