2025 was a year our community chose to breathe together. Not just to survive, but to heal. The Virtual Healing Soulidarity Happy Hour: Let’s Breathe Together was born from a simple, powerful truth: those who fight for a better world, care for others, and hold space for trauma need dedicated spaces to restore their own nervous systems. Healing, we believe, is not a solo journey but an act of Soulidarity.

Over four sessions across three months, we gathered virtually from across continents (Nigeria, Mali, Kenya, Zimbabwe, South Africa, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany and beyond) to explore different pathways back to our centre. Each offering was a tool for self-regulation and narrative repair, designed to help us process, release, and reclaim our inner peace.

The Four Pillars of Our Healing Journey

1. Expressive Storytelling & Narrative Therapy with Dr. Ifunanya Dimaku

The Offering: In our October launch, Dr. Dimaku guided us through the power of story to reshape our personal narratives. Using narrative therapy techniques, the session focused on externalising problems and re-authoring our life stories.

The Benefit: Participants learned to separate their identity from their challenges, reducing shame and empowering a sense of agency. It was a profound reminder: “The body tells the story all the time. What story have you been telling?”

2. Breathwork & Meditation with Dominique Dryding

The Offering: Our November session was a deep immersion into somatic healing. Dominique led the community through conscious breathing techniques and traditional movement meditation to directly regulate the nervous system.

The Benefit: This practice offered a direct “reset button” for the stress response, moving participants from a state of fight-or-flight to rest-and-digest. The core takeaway: a gentle body is a truthful body. “Be gentle with yourself… allow yourself to get back in touch with the only thing that is true—the present moment.”

3. Expressive Storytelling & Narrative Therapy (Part II) with Adé Adéniji

The Offering: Building on our foundation, Adéwale’s December session employed Rumi’s “The Guest House” as a framework. Through guided meditation and writing, participants personified emotions as guests, exploring which to welcome and which to acknowledge with boundaries.
The Benefit: This advanced narrative practice provided a tangible method for emotional externalisation, helping attendees engage with complex feelings like grief and anxiety with curiosity rather than fear, nurturing profound emotional literacy.

4. Poetry as Healing Expression with Fungai Machirori

The Offering: To close the year, Fungai created a sanctuary for sensory translation. Using prompts rooted in taste, smell, and texture, she guided attendees to transform abstract emotions into concrete poetry, with Lorna Goodison’s work as a north star.

The Benefit: Poetry became a safe container for the unspeakable. Participants discovered a powerful toolkit to articulate pain, longing, and hope, transforming internal chaos into structured beauty and shared understanding.

Voices from Our Circle: Poetry in Action

The true measure of this work is found in the voices it awakens. With their generous permission, we share poems composed by participants during the December session below, a beautiful testament to the healing power of creative expression:

Pain is a collection

Of clanging copper coins

Its metal taste

Sour like Skittles

Without the innocence

Pain is rusty to touch

It cuts through skin

Then flesh

Then soul

And bone

Undoing and undoing

Until everything is raw

– Fungai Machirori

 

Love is like a well-made bed-

soft, inviting, easy to rest in.

It rustles like a carefully wrapped gift

waiting beneath a Christmas tree,

and tastes like moist chocolate cake,

rich and tender on the tongue.

Its fragrance is a rain-kissed forest,

gentle and soothing,

stretching beyond the body,

making time feel distant and unreal.

Love is warm.

Refreshing.

And it keeps giving.

© Kioya, 2025

 

Grief, that ugly friend

that forces its way in,

The never-ending feeling

Of the end of the world,

Ripping through layers

Of the heart

The silence that screams

Louder than anger,

Pain and betrayal,

Again I say

I’ll never recognise

this feeling of loneliness.

 

Healing is Peace

The beauty

that comes within

The song that calms,

yet impossible to sing

The smell of rain

and dust, lingers

in the air

So soothing,

I just want to be here.

– AnitaQueen

 

Grief as Petrichor

Voice hoarse, fresh off drinking to your pain

Grief is raging thunder with no lightning to warn you

Leaving behind the stench of a massive garbage pile as petrichor

Grief is a jolt from a taser that temporarily paralyses you

It breaks your legs, then your will and then your resistance.

– Clinton McDubus

Why We Breathe Together: The Soulidarity Mission

This series was never just about four virtual workshops. It was a living practice of our core value: intra and interpersonal healing is community resilience. In a world that prizes relentless output, we carved out a monthly sanctuary to remember that our bodies are not machines, our nervous systems are on the frontlines with us, and our healing is essential to sustainable change.

We are deeply grateful to our facilitators—Dr. Ifunanya Dimaku, Dominique Dryding, Adé Adéniji, and Fungai Machirori—for holding such skilled and compassionate space. And to every participant who showed up with courage and tenderness: you are the community.

As we usher in 2026, we must remember to continue to breathe, heal, and grow in Soulidarity.