Rites of Passage
Human Connection Workshops
Yadira Capaz is an artist and priestess deeply committed to manifesting the prayers of our ancestors and healing the future. She creates intricate wellness rituals as part of her creative practice. Her Cuban roots in African Spirituality and Taino Indigenous shamanic practices are deep and nurtured in community. She shares practices she has learned from her explorations in energy work, herbalism, somatic healing, art therapy, authentic relating, conscious play, sacred music, and beyond. Signature events from the series include Moonrise Cradle (storytelling around a rainbow bonfire to activate our dreams during moonrise on the Spring Equinox), Twilight Seed (a shamanic journey inside a seed labyrinth at twilight by the sea), and Rooted Heart (a cacao ceremony ancestral memory activation at an urban farm).
The earlier workshops had a stronger spiritual tone, but they have evolved over time to touch on many different topics including grief, poetry, and design thinking. Workshops for Yadira have become an art form and a community-building practice that adapts to all her explorations. The more recent workshops also tend to be collaborations with communities like Ecstatic Playground, Design Science Studio, Tropotrope Arts Learning Lab, We Are Luna Kai, and others.
15+ unique workshops & retreats.
Last updated October 2022.
In this workshop we will learn about Human-Centered Design and apply the Design Thinking Process to refine our project ideas, generate solutions to local problems, and learn unique exercises to brainstorm together in a team! You’ll also be introduced to some critiques about design from the perspectives of Design Justice as well as complementary methods like Participatory Action Research.
The secret to success in any project idea is to design with your users in mind. We’ll be applying this as we go through the 5 stages of the Design Thinking Process: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test engaging in Qualitative and Quantitative Research. We will practice special exercises for each stage to refine our ideas and co-create potential solutions. You will leave with a lot of clarity about your next steps improving your personal projects.
The skills you’ll learn in this workshop will be useful throughout your whole life. You’ll learn about Affinity Diagrams, Brainwalking, Crazy-8’s, SCAMPER, Low to High Fidelity Prototyping, Bodystorming and more! And of course, the biggest key to success: ITERATE ITERATE ITERATE…….. !!!! Fail fast, fail forward, friends!
15. Design Thinking for Hometown Heroes
We invite you to this intimate gathering to connect to the wisdom of Peruvian culture and share in a circle each of our poetic interpretations of what we receive. First we will listen to a a shamanic sound bath meditation led by Peruvian healer Jorge (@munayhealingsounds), then be guided by Yadira (@fluxcapazitor) through unique writing exercises to learn to record our experience with words to share our inner worlds with one another. We will close by co-creating an improvised tapestry of word and sound inspired by the concert.
14. Pin the Shoreline of Consciousness
9 workshops each week. 4 cities back to back. In partnership with Selina Ecuador, I hosted the Earth Week Retreat in Spanish and English in Montanita, Quito, Banos, and Tena in the month of April 2022. The retreat was open to the public, but with special access for Selina Hostel guests. Every morning, I would share a special cacao-making workshop. In the afternoons I shared a different workshop everyday: Shamanic Journeying Dream Interpretation, Inner Child Human Connection Improv Games, Wilderness Art Therapy, and an Ancestral Activation Therapeutic Cacao Ceremony.
13. Earth Week Retreat 2022
@ Selina Ecuador
This storytelling gathering was a meaningful goodbye before a backpacking adventure to South America. I closed a beautiful six months living by the beach apprenticing with my fairy witch mentor roommate @sefora_chavarria by sharing the Coming of Age story of Vaselisa the Wise and Baba Yaga from Women Who Run with the Woñves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. We served a special bone broth soup made in a black cauldron made by Sefora! This was also a few days before New Year’s Eve and it doubled as an open bonfire for vulnerability and setting intentions for the New Year.
12. Bon Voyage with Baba Yaga Stew
I channeled this vision to be the Closing Portal for Art Basel Miami Art Week 2021. After a long and fabulous week, we all gathered back together to process what we received from our journey through arts fairs, parties, and more communities than we knew existed. The wonderful @_earth_air_body led the gong bath, and I led the integration circle and guided meditation. We had one more party to go to, but we decided a restful dinner together at home was the vibe for our little community bonded over the week.
11. A Playful Baptism for Rewilding Dreamweavers from the Stars
I channeled this vision to be the Opening Portal for Miami Art Week 2021. To support many friends exploring Miami Art Week for the first time I curated a guide and calendar of events for us to journey through the inspiration together. This artistic mixed media installation and performance supported us in aligning our intentions for what we wanted to receive from the weeklong experience.
10. A Water Blessing for Trailblazers of an Ancient Future
We actually didn’t dance, in the traditional sense. Instead, we cried, screamed, and sang holding each other through the toughest emotions of grief. Inspired by elder Joanna Macy’s exercises from @workthatreconnects, in collaboration with @ecstaticplayground, we held a deep space on Halloween weekend to face our own mortality, and bridge the connection between activism and emotion.
9. Death Dance
@DeathOverDinner was an experiment in replicating a global movement to open the taboo dialogue around death. Inspired by The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker, @theconsciousgatherer suggested we try this event as a prototype for a bigger one to come on the subject of death in collaboration with @ecstaticplayground. So we selected our small group for a very deep and vulnerable conversation. If you would like to explore this with your own small group, I highly recommend you check out the Death Over Dinner website.
8. Death Over Dinner
Bring a dish and a dream. Let’s share about the visionary seeds we’re carrying, and hold space to support all of our dreams. We will be doing some collective exercises sharing passion project plans to build our dream team, drawing visions with S.M.A.R.T. goals for the next months and years, and collective weaving through a community mapping practice called Dragon Dreaming. I’ll provide fruits, teas, salad, and some Cuban food classics. Bring your yummiest yums to nourish our futures. By the end of this event,
Together we created a unified dream proposal for a skillshare series educating an ever widening community on topics relevant to climate resilience, health & wellness, art, and tending to the Earth.
7. Potluck of Dreams
In collaboration with the We are Luna Kai community, I was invited to host a Flower Herbalism Workshop in honor of the Crescent Moon in Libra. Plants were mindfully harvested from Earth n’ Us Community Garden to make a flower essence for our circle, flower adornments, and ritual baths. I prepared various batches of dried flower teas and homemade fermented flower champagne to share. We spoke with edible flower petals on our tongue as we connected in a sharing circle around an intricate floral altar. Afterwards we played with movement exercises inspired by the radial symmetry of flowers. I am always humbled with awe at the depths we hold. We are so blessed to witness each other blooming wide open as mirrors.
6. Blooming from Within
Initiations and Rites of Passage are parts of the path. We need support to integrate them, and create empowering stories for how we plan to show up in the world with a critical awareness of history. If you have sat with plant medicine, lost a loved one, returned from life-changing travels, or entered a new life stage, this is an offering for you. It is an honor to walk our truth. Integrity is key to fulfillment. You are invited to join this workshop to bridge the alignment of your values with your actions. Come receive tools to process transformative experiences. This is a space held for you to integrate spiritual lessons into the material world to align with your purpose in service of the bigger picture.
5. Integritea Planting
We gathered over abuela’s homecooked ancestral food for a dinner party to share our gifts of wisdom as The Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn reached its peak. Surrounded by the bounty of fruits and flowers, each participant took turns revealing keys that have opened the doors in our path. We offered each other an astrological analysis of the moment, a meditation for grounding in our bodies, poems of grief and for cultivating mindfulness in nature, a song of lost love, an operatic performance, Tibetan Tong Len compassion meditation, an authentic relating game, political insights on our time, a dream of a nature sanctuary, and a curated selection of crystals for healing. The bravest souls stayed up talking all night by candlelight and jumped in the ocean at dawn.
4. Conjunction Function
Look in the mirror to see who has lived through you. How do you tend to your ancestors? This was a space for us to learn together, and do the work. Through art therapy we are guided to create a family tree from living memory, world history, and the tree of life in exponential cosmic time. Do you feel your ancestors pulsing in your blood? Come take a walk with them to hear their guidance, and dance them alive in your body. Your talents and traumas are the ancestral prayers you carry forward into who you are meant to become. Clarity is knowing your power. We are working with sacred raw cacao medicine to open the heart to the bliss of loving awareness. This ceremonial cacao paste was made with lots of love by me in collaboration with Cacao Ethika in Costa Rica. The energy of this container led to a spontaneous carnaval parade in search of union, a deep guided meditation taking us back to ancient humans and the beginning of the universe, and singing and dancing in collective effervescence.
3. Rooted Heart
We built a counterclockwise 7-Circuit Seed Labyrinth at the beach and held a sacred shamanic drum journeying ceremony at sunset. Dream. Ritual. Play date. Ancient Pathfinding Ceremony. The seed to build a labyrinth was planted with a prophecy given to me by an elder about walking a labyrinth on the full moon to make a wish. From there it snowballed into a research obsession following the work of Lauren Artress with the Chartres Labyrinth, making my own shamanic drum to develop my inner-eye journeying, and finally the desire to host a gathering to share the wisdom of labyrinth meditation in helping us navigate our paths. Labyrinths have a single path that meanders toward the center. Walking that journey to your own center and back out into the world offers a mirror of the lessons you need to learn right now to let go and let be.
2. Twilight Seed
When we are children, our loved ones bid us off into the dream world with songs and stories. And that’s what we did together on a full moon bonfire at the beach that began by watching the blood red moon rising from the horizon. I shared songs in Yoruba, Taino, Spanish, French, and English to honor my ancestors. I told stories shared with me by my teachers from indigenous traditions around the world, and so did all the glowing souls who came to seed our collective dream. We drank herbal tea for clarity, drank honey made by bees from the Everglades for abundant sweetness, and ate chocolate made by a chocolatier in Miami using cacao beans from farms owned by women in Guatemala for opening our hearts. We offered our dreams to the rainbow fire so it may carry them off to the spirit world.
Moonrise Cradle
