Soul Food for the Activist
UC Berkeley Cal Corps’ “Soul Food For The Activist Retreat” took place on the UC Berkeley Campus on April 4. This year’s day-long retreat was titled “Sustaining Ourselves for a Lifetime of Service Retreat.” The idea of the Retreat is to teach techniques to re-energize, re-connect, and re-align ourselves in our work and our lives. Students filed into a lecture hall early Saturday morning.
They were greeted at the door by Director of Cal Corps Public Service Center, Megan Voorhees, and Service and Peace Fellow, Audrey Lin. The Retreat opened with a Keynote Address from Dr. Shakti Butler, producer and director of the groundbreaking documentaries “The Way Home” and “Light in the Shadows.”
It was followed by a dance led by Giuliana Blasi and Dana Brown, members of Dance Junta, a Brazilian street dance group at Berkeley. After an energizing dance participants separated into different workshops.
The Foundation led two of the workshops. Liane Louie Badua, Program Director of the Shinnyo-en Foundation, led the workshop on “Cultivating a Spiritual Practice.”
The workshop focused on what it meant to have a spiritual practice and how it could support your work for community change and social justice. The workshop allowed students to open up and share their spiritual practices in a very intimate, personal environment. The workshop focused on connecting spirituality and service learning.
The other workshop was co-facilitated by Eliot Honda, the Foundation Multimedia Associate, and Christine Rasmussen, a fourth-year student at UC Berkeley and co-facilitator of a DeCal course entitled “Global Citizens, Transformative Power, and Avenues to Peace.” This workshop called “Bad Art” featured one of the Reflection Cards titled “Be the Peace.”
This collection of Reflection Cards was developed by the Shinnyo-en Foundation in collaboration with Ruth Kirschner, a long-time partner of the 
Foundation, with an emphasis on peacebuilding through stress reduction in life.
In this workshop, the students allowed themselves to open up and express themselves through several different art mediums. The intention of engaging in “Bad Art” was to let the participants experience their art freely without internal and external pressure, and discover what it would reveal about their Paths to Peace. Students left the Retreat refreshed, and ready for the hustle and bustle of Monday morning classes. They took with them a new outlook on the service learning world, and how to keep themselves motivated and well rested.
