Holding the Water:

Noncarceral Embodied Crisis Response

Stay Tuned for Upcoming Dates!

In Person: May 1, 2025, 6PM, at the Historic Y. For more details, see the sign up page here.

In responding to our friends in suicidal crisis, often in politicized spaces we have learned by now: don't call the cops! But after that, how can you tend and care for yourself and your friends when they're in suicidal crisis?

Building on the work brought forward by Carly Boyce, The Fireweed Collective, Project Lets, Stay Mad with Mia, Spectaculaur Thoughts, Thabiso Mthinkhulu, and others, this workshop is centered on practicing skills that keep us from enacting harmful and carceral responses on our loved ones. Centering explicitly in a model of no cops, ever (including therapists, social workers, and other "soft cops" aka mandated reporters), we practice somatic skills we might need that will allow us to tend both our own moments of crisis, as well as the crisis of our loved ones.

Much of noncarceral crisis support is the practice of -deeply being with-, even in intensity. We can cultivate the skills to do this with awareness of our survival responses, and both individual and group somatic practices that cultivate deep capacity for intensity. These skills are gentle, practical, and replicable. If there is interest, an ongoing practice group might form.

Formulated because i kept watching us mad folks be in crisis and others incarcerating us or dismissing us or regulating us. formulated because i myself have been in crisis many, countless times, and the thing that always feels supportive, actually, is the felt embodied sense of community who will not try to fix or fade my pain but will instead accompany me.too often, we try to either overt or subtly incarcerate our own or others feelings and experiences - this goes anywhere from locking people away to pushing away an experience because it's “bad", “wrong”, or “too much.”

most of us have experienced our own pain being met with a “too much” or “bad” label, and sometimes that means we instinctively approach others in the ways we have not been supported, which are painful, in some cases violent, and deeply harmful.

what is medicine instead is to see our experience as part of us, to meet it, to hear what needs true tending, and to be witnessed as we witness ourselves.

our bodies when gently and relationally met, without forcing us to go into them too much/too fast/too soon, or beyond our consent or outside our own pace, will reveal the medicine we seek. with gentle and fierce attention, we can tend to one another and ourselves.

this is true -even with- suicidality, altered states, and other forms of crisis. (crisis in this framework is -always- autonomous and self-defined… to define someone else's crisis for them is to reject their experience)

All participants are required to either read Carly Boyce' zine, as well as Project Lets Barriers to Intervention handout OR Project Lets Crisis Approach prior to attending to center in the approach we will be holding.

This is a radical shift from how we usually approach crisis in the overculture, even within the queer amd radical community, and you may come up against habitual responses, which you are invited to examine. We will explore some of these in the workshop via embodied practice (as they tend to get in the way when we are experiencing or supporting crisis), however, this class is not a theory class. This class will only lightly cover theory of non-carceral care and instead will focus on actual practices to utilize in moments of distress. (so please read the resources! tysm!)

We explicitly recognize right now as well we are in an acute moment of collective distress and crisis. These tools practiced here are also to provide communal medicine at this time and allow us to feel for and with each other.

Sirius draws on both their lived experience of cycling self-harm and suicidality throughout their life, coupled with 9 years of experience in neuroqueer respectful somatics and 5 years worth of experience in non-carceral based crisis response.

Lineages: Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, generative somatics, politicized cultural somatics, mad pride, Sins Invalid, informed by Southern Kindred Healing Justice Collective, Project Lets, The Fireweed Collective, Carly Boyce, IDHA-NYC Crossroads of Crisis training.