Embodied Anti-Colonial Methods & Martial Healing Program in Yucatan Mexico
by Isuini Martial Healing Arts
Introduction
Isuini Martial Healing Arts invites international advocates for the Earth and conscious Human development to skill-share in an immersive learning setting in which their experience, ideas and newly acquired tools will be put into practice.
The aim of this seasonal program is to offer an intersectional retreat space and laboratory that brings together academics, artists, organizational leaders and storytellers. The structure welcomes all learners and centers the needs and participation of BIPOC international students, especially those with roots in Central and South America.
The program is designed to facilitate equitable and meaningful exchanges between students, teachers and local communities through learning the Yucatec Mayan Language–the second largest indigenous language spoken in Mexico today with speakers in the state of Yucatan accounting for about 34% of its population. Given that opportunities for work and economic development favor Spanish speakers and many other factors, the Mayan language is in overall decline, yet a significant percentage of the population continues to speak Maya in their everyday lives, which situates students in this program to learn invaluable lessons about resiliency and more.
Open to college, university students (undergraduates & graduates), professors and independent scholars, as well as professionals working in the Region.
Introduction to Yucatec Mayan Language-
A Mayan Linguist from the Yucatan Peninsula will teach these lessons. The past and present understanding of Yucatec Mayan language is important for visitors to start to access the depth of knowledge and potential contained in the peninsula.
*Spanish language proficiency is encouraged, but not necessary.
Anti-colonial Research Methods-
This workshop series is taught from an applied anthropological perspective and is designed to benefit people in any field. It will equip participants with the tools necessary for engaging with local communities and help them structure and learn the needs of the region in a collaborative and accountable way. The tools people learn in these workshops will serve them across settings for the rest of their personal, academic and professional lives.
Spanish Language & The Yucatan Peninsula –
These lessons will be focused on regional history, geology, plants, vocabulary and will include some Mayan language.
Martial Movement Mornings-
Throughout the program the participants can join a Baguazhang Martial Arts Class. These classes are open to all participants of the program. These sessions will support focus and ground health and learning in an embodied manner.
Programm Overview
The program will ensure that all participants are welcomed and contextualized prior to their arrival as well as offered a space for care and wellness throughout the program via leaders and facilitators with organizational and community building experience.
Foundational methods and skills will be shared with participants upon arrival and will include bilingual interpretations of the context of the Yucatan Peninsula from an indigenous and decolonial standpoint, as well as engagement in at least one whole-group cultural outing depending on the duration of the program selected.
At the end of programmed lessons and workshops, visitors will be given the opportunity to put into practice the sum of their anti-colonial unlearning in a community-based container. Visitors will be given the opportunity to interact with local communities and organizations, assess needs, and analyze the immediate ways to attend to impacted communities as foreigners amidst on-going devastation of the culture and area due to a rapid upsurge in development wrought in by the Mayan train project.
Participants will be invited to apply their skills and newly acquired learning in a setting that fosters visibility, dialogue and collaboration between participants, teachers and local communities. This laboratory is a space for celebrating the coming together of clear centered minds and bodies to sprout new possibilities for a collective expansion.
Once settled on site, participants will meet for early morning Internal Martial Arts sessions that teach a daily practice to fully embody their work in the program. These classes, seldom offered in travel programs, will help participants focus and ground while providing them with embodied methods for navigating the realities of engaging across differences and decolonial work: burn out, compassion fatigue, and emotional imbalances.
At the end of the program there will be a closing ceremony, a debrief dialogue, and a celebration.
Key Programm Outcomes
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- Participants will leave with a unique interactive and embodied learning experience in the Yucatan Peninsula, not available as tourists, in wellness retreats nor in other regional study abroad programs. This unique program design is based on the crossroads of the faculty and facilitators as well as their more than 30 years of compounded transnational ethnographic work.
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- Acquired anti-colonial skill sets and modeling of accountable ways to hold community space and in circle keeping facilitation will help participants recreate their experience in any setting and/or places they may travel.
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- Intersectional Alliances: Participants will create mutually beneficial and ongoing alliances within the group and with locals for nurturing their ongoing projects. This will enrich the social knit transnationally and bring generative, long term offerings to the local communities amidst violent development and displacement.
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- Embodied Restorative Justice: Participants will learn to self-heal and restore through the internal martial art practices. Attending the body throughout this retreat will provide participants with an embodied understanding of the importance of nurturing health and joy as students, equity workers, healers, and organizers.
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Location
The program will take place in Valladolid, Yucatan, Mexico, a city with an approximate population of 57,000. Accommodations are centrally and safely located in town and two hours or less away from main cities such as Tulum, Cancun and Merida. Scooter and bike rentals are available in town for additional sightseeing.
Activities
Outings to Chichen Itza, Ek Balam archaeological sites, Sink holes and a local Mayan Community. (The month long program will include more outings)
Costs
1 month Cost: 5500
includes stay, transportation, 3 full day group community outings (does not include airfare or tuition)
3 weeks Cost -$3500
includes stay, transportation, 1.5 day group community outings (does not include airfare or tuition)
Cost inclusions
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- Accommodations (single occupancy), limited double occupancy options available.
- Daily breakfast
- Cultural community outings
- Reader and preparation meetings
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Cost exclusions
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- International round-trip flight
- Lunch and dinner
- travel insurance (required), passport fees,
- excess baggage, laundry.
- Entry fees to Archaeological and sinkholes
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Faculty Bio
Yunuen Rhi is a consultant, wellness coach, artist, and researcher-writer. Their Mexican and Korean roots have led them to cultivate Western, Eastern, and Native medicine pathways as an antidote for unifying the fragmented personal and collective bodies. They offer artists and traditional work settings creative bridges for self-healing, accountability and empowerment.
As a fifth generation Ma Gui Baguazhang instructor they do constant research on the body as a source of self-healing through lineage based practices. The service work they did for healing ceremonies with Nespelem, Mixteco and Apache elders for communities across ecologies and borders has provided a framework for helping individuals in group settings access self-healing strategies and pathways. These original instructions are the heart of their facilitation work, and performance art practice; Baguazhang movement practice is the framework they use for inciting change from within. Given so, their work aims to help people activate, fortify and develop a deeper connection to natural systems and resources as a method for healing fragmentation, burn out and intergenerational trauma. They believe that honorable and equitable guidance into this work can help people embody personal resilience and autonomy, which in turn can empower them to replace destructive codes that reside in the mind, body and spirit. Bringing this unique amalgam to work and creative settings can open new pathways for individual and systemic change that can create spaciousness and fluidity within and between clients, minimize compulsive patterns of relating, deepen connection between community members, and diversify strategies and practices for organizational movement that is grounded and impactful.
Photo by Cedric Varial
Daniel Espinosa is a life-long social justice activist, artist and writer. He began his organizing work in the Arizona/Sonora border region defending the human rights of both indigenous and Mexican-American communities destabilized by the violence and militarization of U.S. border policy. Ultimately, inspired by Black freedom movements contesting for political power and self-governance in the U.S, he began working across the country to spur grassroots racial justice political action, including an effort to oust white supremacist Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach in 2014 and the landmark #ByeAnita movement that defeated Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez in Chicago in 2016. In 2018, Espinosa Co-Founded The Mass Liberation Project as part of a political accountability strategy targeting District Attorneys responsible for propelling mass incarceration and anti-Black criminal justice systems. The Project has since grown into a Black abolitionist organization for formerly incarcerated people and their loved ones and has built a relationship with Ghanaian communities to support the healing of Black Americans to return to West Africa and reclaim their culture, heritage and relationship to land. Espinosa is currently developing work that addresses the crisis of belonging that BIPOC Americans have grown increasingly aware of and is reconnecting with his own ancestral village in central Mexico where his family still has elders and land.
María Regina Firmino-Castillo is a transdisciplinary researcher, writer, artist, and faculty member in the Department of Dance at the University of California-Riverside. Born in Guatemala and trained as an anthropologist, her life and work trajectory attempts to transgress colonial and disciplinary categories to critically reflect on the corporeal as a material/discursive site of ontological production, destruction, and transformation–especially in the context of genocidal coloniality and its complex transnational repercussions. Maria is preparing a manuscript, tentatively entitled Choreographies of Catastrophe, which analyzes the role of the body–not as an object, but as an ontological process–in the complex catastrophic conditions of continuous coloniality in the Mesoamerican region. At the same time, the book investigates artistic experimentations in Guatemala, México, and the Mesoamerican diaspora in the US to demonstrate the ways that such projects construct corpo-realities alternative to the necro-ontologies of the present.
*Maya & Spanish Language Instructors to be confirmed according to the season