In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston describes Janie’s journey of self-discovery. We first meet Janie, tired and hungry, as she sits on her porch with her sister/friend Pheoby and recounts her story. Through her words, we learn of her “self revelation” (p. 7), and how she found peace in her return, possibility in the horizon, and herself in the sanctity of sisterhood. It is in this moment we learn a powerful lesson from Janie: we, as Black women, must learn to come home to ourselves.

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Like Janie, many Black women often find ourselves so dedicated to our work that, while meaningful, can take us away from ourselves (Boyatzis & McKee, 2005; Parker, 2020). As Black women organizers, educators, and wellness practitioners who work to serve our communities, we end up burnt out, stressed, and longing for the healing presence of our sisters. However, as Hurston does in this novel, Black women have long used storytelling as a way to heal from our pasts, come home to ourselves and “call in our souls to come and see” (Hurston, 1937, p. 193; see also Baker-Bell, 2017). We enter this space with the lessons of Janie and Hurston, grounding ourselves  in the vulnerable act of storytelling amongst our sisters in order to return home to ourselves and imagine healthy and liberated futures (Brooks, Anderson, Taylor & Baham, 2019). We take up the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston, 1937) as a framework to guide this workshop. Together, and amongst sisters, we create a sacred space for participants to engage their own stories, recalling their own call to serve, their hurricanes, and self revelation.

We begin this workshop by describing the work we have committed ourselves to, and what brought us to heed the call. We then briefly revisit our own hurricanes to discuss, as Janie did, the anxiety, stress, and physical ailments we endured took us away from the core of our being and invite participants to join us in “[calling in their souls] to come and see” (Huston, p. 1937, p. 193). Drawing on Dillard’s (2016) concept of (re)membering and Thích Nhất Hạnh’s (1986) quote, “breathing in, I go back to the island within myself,” (p. 10-12) we will engage with a brief embodied breathwork practice to reset the nervous system, followed by a guided journaling practice to explore our bodily experiences and processes to understand our emotional experiences around the work we do. In her book, Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living with Fearlessness and Grace, Rev. angel kyodo williams, describes how these embodied practices and creative expression allows space for self-inquiry and restoration for Black people struggling under the weight of systemic racism, intergenerational trauma, exhaustion and grief. The composition of storytelling, breathwork and introspection will invite participants to journey the island within themselves and to find resolve within a community of Black women seeking to write futures full of possibility and rest.