This week’s Self-care Sunday is exercise, meditation, black history and empowerment all rolled into one amazing program through Girl Trek’s Black History Bootcamp. I learned about this 21 day walking meditation/podcast about a month ago, but just started to actually participate this week. I can’t say enough about how grateful I am for this experience.
Black History Bootcamp, led by the women who started the #daughtersof campaign, encourages us to take 30 minutes out of the day just for ourselves to walk, learn and BREATHE. It is centered around gaining inspiration from the paths of inspiring black women in history to build strength for the road ahead.
This is a movement about sisterhood and collective healing. About liberation and the radical pursuit of joy – as an act of resistance and a celebration. These daily walking meditations ground you, encourage you, feel you with inspiration and connect you to a purpose bigger than yourself.…”
Girl Trek
On each day of the program, you’ll get an email that unlocks the celebration of one trailblazing black woman. The email includes a playlist of her most notable quotes and speeches and relevant songs and other inspiration to listen to during your 30 minute walk. There’s also a daily empowerment podcast that discusses each woman’s life as her story is more relevant today than ever. The podcast ends with the Girl Trek founders offering a few actions you can take to apply the teachings of each woman into your own life.
On Friday morning before I started a long day of meetings, I put my daughter in her stroller, loaded up the Day One: Audre Lorde podcast and took off on a morning jog. After just the very first day, I was energized and hooked. What an amazing opportunity to learn more about a powerful black woman, find inspiration from parts of her story that are left untold and to feel a sense of community with the thousands of women across the country who are on the same Girl Trek journey.
Audre Lorde is a trailblazer, she’s a BEAST. I knew her to be an amazing writer/poet from Harlem, but I didn’t know the extent of her role as an activist standing up for women and the rights of the black and gay communities. As I am putting self-care into the forefront of my own life, I loved hearing about her own advocacy for self-care. She reminds us that history shows that we were not meant to survive in America, so we have to be radical in our own pursuit of caring for ourselves. The podcast ended with the homework to think about what your life would look like if you chose to be radical in your own self-care. I was empowered in a way I haven’t felt in a long time. And that was just DAY ONE.
So for today, and for the next few weeks, I am thinking more and more about how I can be vigilant in how I care for myself. And continuing The Black History Bootcamp is definitely one self-care action that am going to see through till the end of the program.
To learn more, visit www.girltrek.org/blackhistorybootcamp and follow @girltrek on Instagram. The program officially kicked off on June 1, but all of the daily recordings are available on Spotify and Apple podcast, so your day one is the day you sign up.
Let me know if you participate. Would love to hear about what inspired you the most along this transformational journey.
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