Sowing Shalom: Soul-Anchored Practices for Racial Healing and Nurturing the Beloved Community
The Sowing Shalom Spring/Summer 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 deepen their capacity to remain grounded in the work of racial healing and to imagine relationships and communities shaped by belonging, justice, mutuality, and shared flourishing (link to pre-order).
Spring/Summer continues the formation journey begun during the Fall/Winter Retreat. Having spent time attending to racial formation, stories, histories, and the ways racialized patterns surface in everyday life, participants move more deeply into practices that support healing, grounded presence, and the sacred imagination needed to nurture the Beloved Community.
Spring/Summer centers Centering Prayer and Imaginative Prayer. Centering Prayer creates space to become aware of and release internalized racial narratives and patterns while cultivating the groundedness needed to remain present amid the discomfort, grief, tension, and vulnerability that can accompany racial healing. Rather than turning away from what is difficult, participants practice returning to God’s presence and developing greater capacity to stay engaged with themselves and one another.
From that grounded place, Imaginative Prayer invites participants to engage sacred imagination. Together, we explore what becomes possible as we disrupt and release inherited racialized ways of relating and imagine relationships, communities, and shared life shaped more fully by belonging, mutuality, justice, repair, and flourishing.
Through contemplative practice, storytelling, sacred listening, and communal reflection, participants continue cultivating the inner and relational capacities necessary for racial healing. Spring/Summer brings the seasonal journey from attending and noticing into grounding and imagining, inviting participants to consider how the Beloved Community might take deeper root within us, between us, and in the communities we inhabit.
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.