Sowing Shalom: Soul-Anchored Practices for Racial Healing and Nurturing the Beloved Community
The Sowing Shalom Fall/Winter Retreat is a contemplative formation experience centered on racial healing as sacred, communal work. Based on Sowing Shalom: Soul-Anchored Practices for Racial Healing and Nurturing the Beloved Community (releasing May 18, 2027) this retreat invites participants to explore how race has shaped our stories, relationships, communities, and ways of moving through the world (link to pre-order).
Rooted in the vision of nurturing the Beloved Community, Fall/Winter begins a formation journey that continues with the Spring/Summer Retreat. Across the two retreats, participants engage four contemplative practices from Sowing Shalom that create space to reckon with racial formation and harm, deepen our capacity for relationship across racial difference, and participate more fully in the ongoing work of racial healing.
Fall/Winter centers Guided Lectio and the Examen of Consciousness. Through Guided Lectio, participants engage stories, histories, and lived experiences with sacred attention, listening for how race and racialization have shaped what we have learned about ourselves and one another. The Examen of Consciousness turns that attention toward daily life, helping participants notice where racialized patterns emerge in our relationships and communities and where we experience connection, disconnection, belonging, resistance, harm, and possibility.
Through contemplative practice, storytelling, sacred listening, and communal reflection, participants cultivate greater awareness of their own racial formation while learning to remain present to the experiences of others. Together, we practice the kind of attention, honesty, and connection that racial healing requires.
The journey continues in Spring/Summer through Centering Prayer and Imaginative Prayer, moving from attending to our formation and noticing what is present toward becoming more grounded for the work of healing and imagining more liberative ways of being together.
About the Facilitator
Afrika Afeni Mills is an author, spiritual director, educator, and ordained elder who helps individuals and communities cultivate deeper belonging through contemplative practice, spiritual formation, and racial healing. She is the founder of Soul Compass and the author of Open Windows, Open Minds: Developing Antiracist, Pro-Human Students and the forthcoming Sowing Shalom: Soul-Anchored Practices for Racial Healing and Nurturing the Beloved Community. Her TED-Ed Talk, Four Ways to Have Healthy Conversations About Race, has been viewed more than one million times. Afrika serves as an Assistant Pastor with Grace Communion International and is a participant in the Transforming Center's Transforming Community. She is known for creating spaces marked by warmth, honesty, curiosity, and grace.