This New Year’s Eve, over a hundred Seattleites are expected to ring in 2014 in a new way—using guided meditation, music, and a crowd-sourced fashion show to inspire their actions for the next year at Zenyu Healing’s Shine. The event is hosted by Zenyu Healing, a grassroots organization in South Seattle that leads meditations and wilderness immersions for LGBTQI people of color.
The event, which is open to all people, will be held at Hiawatha Loft (843 Hiawatha Place South). Doors open at 8:00 p.m. and festivities will go till 2:00 a.m. Alcohol and food will be available by donation. The event is family friendly. The fashion show will showcase different fashion styles, body-types and families (multiracial, straight, and LGBTQ).
“The purpose of this event is to honor people’s desire for celebration and transformation,” said Zenyu’s Executive Director Christine Cruz Guiao in a statement. “What Zenyu Healing offers is a chance to do more than just set intentions, it is an opportunity to put our intentions into practice in our everyday life. There are many things we want to do, and now is the time.”
The theme of this year’s event is “Shine: a fun and meaningful celebration of community, spiritual connection and social justice.” The event will raise funds for Zenyu’s Heritage Project, a leadership development program which will launch in 2014. The Heritage Project will bring a diverse cohort of Seattlelites together to develop a stronger understanding of their culture and heritage through oral histories, ancestry research, language, and art. This new program continues Zenyu’s mission of racial justice and leadership development.
The creation of Zenyu was inspired by Guiao’s own experiences of racism and homophobia in the spiritual spaces she practiced. Guiao had to both come out as queer in spiritual spaces and come out as spiritual in social justice and political spaces. Zenyu works at the intersection of both of those unique identities to provide a space oriented towards healing, personal growth, and community building with queer people of color and allies alike.
“Our constituents often find that in their families and ethnic communities, they face homophobia, while in the mainstream LGBTQI community they face racism,” Guiao said. “Luckily, this is not the case for everyone, but because of this we saw the need for a space that supports people for all of who they are, which includes their gender, sexuality, and ethnicity. Zenyu is that space.“
For more information, visit www.zenyuhealing.org.
