SUICIDE DIARIES 

Suicide Diaries is a multidisciplinary platform to express without fear of pathologizing, psychoanalyzing, policing, or institutionalizing suicidal, death, dying, or grief experiences. bridging the gap of the lonely with community and community with the lonely. Where suicide can isolate, this space aims to gather. Where suicide is taboo, this space aims to normalize. Where death is unknown, this space aims to explore & honor.

SOIL WORKSHOP 

Using the elements to ground, this workshop starts with the element of soil to carry folks into learning and embodying the suicide portal through guided meditations, movement, film, altar tending, ritual making, and writing. This is for those who are suicidal, know someone who is, healthcare professionals, or those that are no longer suicidal but still feel the impacts of once being suicidal in their day to day. 

IN THIS WORKSHOP WE'LL EXPLORE

• unpacking suicidality through a poetry film 
• guided soil meditations
• a suicide portal labyrinth activity: a somatic approach to embody walking through the suicide portal as a suicidal person, an institutional worker (healthcare workers, etc.), and community member using mindfulness emptying practices 
• ritual making through community altar tending 

THIS SPACE IS WELCOME FOR EVERYONE, PARTICULARLY FOR

• healthcare workers or institutional workers 
• community who desires to be a better support system for those going through the suicide portal
• community who have been impacted by close people in the suicide portal
• those actively in the suicide portal 

YOU'LL LEAVE WITH

• an at home ritual making activity for those who are: 
  • community members of those in the suicide portal
  • those actively in the suicide portal
  • those in healthcare or institutional positions 
  • those who are no longer deep in the suicide portal but are impacted by the journey from it
• a reframed approach to talk about suicidality & navigating the suicide portal alongside others
  
• mindfulness techniques that centers emptiness and "un preparing"
• community suicide diaries zines

Although this is a workshop, Suicide Diaries is also part of a broader community project with aims to bridge the isolation gaps between people going through the suicide portal. 
We walk through the suicide portal feeling as if we are alone in it, when in reality many of us traverse this labyrinth too. we just need to talk about it.

what is the suicide portal? read about it here

 

graph ii: The Suicide Portal, Which is Really a Processional Labyrinth. Processional meaning the action of moving forward as part of a ceremony ; also, as having multiple entrances. 

attend the first in person workshop here

• WHERE: University of California Berkely 
• WHEN: March 14, 9 am-5 pm 
• WHAT: for the Empowering Women of Color Conference 

REFERENCES/INSPIRATION: 

the majority of this project has been birthed from my own personal experience in journeying through the suicide portal. i have not done extensive research on suicidality enough to know if any of what i am sharing in this workshop has already been done, but i am absolutely open to hearing what work is being done similarly to mine! please email me anything you might come across to karmaklub555@gmail.com.

but what i have been inspired by is: 

• Being Present For Suicide by Ocean Phillips 
  • particularly this quote: 

    Marady: How do we prepare ourselves as doulas to enter a space where suicide has occurred?

    Ocean: Sometimes the question isn’t how we prepare—but how we unprepare. Because when we prepare, we often bring expectations: that we will offer something helpful, that people will respond in a certain way, that we will know what to do. But in the aftermath of suicide, those expectations don’t hold. We are not there to fix. We are there to be.

    We prepare by clearing space inside ourselves. Through breath. Through body. Through the willingness to empty out the story lines that say: I need to succeed. I need to make people feel better. That desire, however subtle, creates distance.

    So instead of preparing with tools, I try to arrive with openness. Breath connects me to life. My body anchors me to the moment. That’s how I come into the room—not as the one who knows, but as the one willing to stay.

• The Tibetan Book of Living & Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche 
  • particularly inspired around: 
    • the Tibetan Buddhist belief that the major purpose of life is to die- therefore everything you do in this lifetime leads up to the moment of death. 
    • the Death Meditation
    • the overall concept of reincarnation and how the soul never dies
      
      
• Die Wise by Stephen Jenkinson
  • particularly inspired by: 
    • the concept of obedience:
      "Etymologically, obedience has nothing to do with being some kind of slave. It means instead a willingness and an ability to listen to what is, to attend to it. Obedience is following the grain of things. With that skill of obedience, every natural thing knows aabove all how to be itself, come what may. Dying is a natural thing, and left to its natural self each living thing knows how to die. The body has the genius of a natural thing, and it knows how to obey the accumulation of time, wear and tear, disease and symptoms. It knows how to stop." (Jenkinson, 51)
      
      
    • chapter 5: Yes, But Not Like This  on Euthanasia and Suicide"Living doesn't always require the ability to live, or the willingness to, and dying isn't the collapse of that ability or that willingness" (Jenkinson, 170)
      
      "For the purposes of intervening to end life, it is the closeness to death that legitimizes suffering." (Jenkinson, 161)
      • My thought: if we do not actually know when our own death is, as in we do not know how close or far our own death is (we often just have hope for a long life, but that is not guaranteed), if we are both living & actively dying beings, and if this life is riddled in suffering, then isn't coming to suicide at least once in this life the most sane, normal, and legitamate thing to come to?
• The Inherent Whiteness of Psychology & Therapy Podcast by Bobo's Void
• Getting To The Root of Mental Illness Podcast by Bobo's Void
• All About Love by Bell Hooks
  • Especially this quote
    "Definitions are vital starting points for the imagination. What we cannot imagine cannot come into being." (Hooks, 14)