The Prayer is in the Pause: Discerning Reaction from Right Action in Our Liberation Movements with Alexandria Saleem

Alexandria Rema Saleem is a first generation Palestinian-American creatrix. (She's also a dear friend, Womb Room member, and mother of twins!) Her creative work activates from a place of multidimensional healing, to serve as a conduit of ancestral knowledge, collective consciousness, and communal desire. She works between the land, as a regenerative flower farmer, with sacred activism as the foundation of her artistic practice the interweaves through all of the seeds she plants. In this conversation, we explore: How we access the internal spaciousness to discern right action when there is threat in our nervous systems The language of “war,” “genocide,” and how we navigate our activations around language to find connection and relationship Alexandria’s experience of being able to feel family members in Palestine she has never met, through her bodily experience of grief Our quantum capacity to feel (grief, suffering, pain, joy, liberation), beyond the confines of time space How grief connects us to our lineages What it means to hold paradox in the body, and the ways that we use self-punishment, blame, or hopelessness as ways to get out of feeling Letting our yin (emotional expression) resource our yang (discernment, direction, action) Connection to land, food, family and the intergenerational alchemy as the lighthouses of liberation Alexandria is a multimedia performance artist, art director, and set designer whose practice is hybrid, incorporating dance, performance art, film, installation, happenings, and environment design. Her practice holds space for the intimate to become a window into the universal & cosmic; Inviting the collective experience to eclipse individual subjectivity and allow for an evolved empathetic process. She works with individuals, communities, and other creatives to reclaim our human right to have sacred spaces, through world building, dance, ritual, risk, and tenderness. She is co-director of the Center for study and preservation of Palestine, Founding member of the Black Oregon Land Trust, and Co-founder of SWANA Rose Culture and community center.  Some of her selected resources to share include: PFC Palestinian femminist Collective US Campagin for Palestinian Rights Palestinian Youth Movement Alexandria's IG ___________ Join The Womb Room, where we are cultivating coherence, embodied sovereignty, and practicing interdependence