A Brief Reportback from the Firewalkers Event at Modern Times, from Sascha:

 Periodically, if we’re lucky, spaces get opened up around us that allow for the kinds of scary and powerful questions to be raised that reshape dialogues and shift cultural paradigms.

Last night a group of us was lucky enough to be able to create that kind of space for each other.

In recent months some of the old time Icarus Project organizers became aware of this book called Firewalkers: Radically Rethinking Mental Illness put out by a group in Virginia called VOCAL. Firewalkers tells the story of a bunch of people who’ve all struggled with serious mental health issues and, in different ways, learned to see their struggles as sacred quests of transformation.

 “After we walk through the fire, and everything burns away from us, our lives can become deeper, richer, and strangely more powerful.”

Very similar to the Icarus vision we all hold so dear.

In fact, as we came to learn, the Firewalkers folks were really inspired by our work when they created their book.

Malaina

So last night we had a really amazing event at Modern Times Bookstore in San Francisco featuring Malaina Poore, one of the people who helped organize the Firewalkers book. It was sponsored by the familiar faces of the local Bay Area Icarus group that meets every Sunday at the California Institute of Integral Studies, but it was more curious strangers than old friends.

There was somewhere around 20 of us in a cosy room in the back of the store facing a podium. On the podium, Malaina, visiting from Virginia, was carrying all these stories with her and in a very sweet and disarming way managed to create a powerful space for people’s questions. And there were plenty of questions. A lot of them revolved around what to do with the power of our stories and visions we carry around with us everyday. A young woman with the image of a panopticon tattooed on her shoulder spoke of her frustrations in traditional therapy knowing that her stories have social and political context that ends up getting left out. From those of us in the community that vocally struggle with (or hide from the world) our own intense versions of madness, to a woman working in the mainstream psychiatric establishment, to a Jungian analyst from the East Bay, to the local Icarus members who represent many different worlds of thought, the discussion circled around treatment options to spiritual practices to political action.

Firewalkers in the Bay

At one point Aurora Levins Morales, a local story teller and a historian, stood up and said how important she thought it was to remember that there are stories being told about us all the time and that we should never underestimate the power of telling our own stories together and sharing them with the world. Our individual stories are always reflections of larger social stories.

 We talked about the work of the Icarus Project in not only creating spaces for people to tell their stories but in giving people the tools to create those spaces themselves, to try and channel our energy into positive community activism and creating local support network.

An older woman in the back talked about how in the late 60’s and 70’s in the Bay Area there were safe houses people could go if they were freaking out – that there was a culture of healing and resistance which used to exist, was crushed by all the forces that rose to power in the 1980’s, but that we don’t have to recreate the wheel all over again.

Ken Rosenlthal invited everyone to the opening night of Crooked Beauty this Saturday as one powerful example of story telling.

There were a couple people in the crowd that represented a group called Sins Invalid, a performance project on disability and sexuality that incubates and celebrates artists with disabilities, centralizing artists of color and queer and gender-variant artists as communities who have been historically marginalized from social discourse.

On the whole it felt really good to be in the room with such interesting people and I’m so grateful to Malaina for taking the time out of her life to come pay us a visit and share her work in Virginia. A few hours earlier, over burritos down the street, Malaina and I were brainstorming future visions of Firewalkers and Icarus working together, from high school curriculums to slick youtube videos. Our work is only going to become more relevant over time and hopefully we'll have more good excuses to collaborate down the road. Let’s hear it for visionary cooperation! --Sascha