These testimonials are from SOULIFT leaders and participants.

Healing into Action: Tampa, FL in 2019

It was a rich collaboration [with Cherie Brown] because both of us were meeting our edge. Cherie was meeting her resistance around spiritual and soul talk, and I was meeting my trepidation around political activist talk. I think that Cherie might have been wary of spiritual bypassing, while my wariness concerned the possibilities of losing my deep calm center and wide perspective while embroiled in divisiveness and controversy. Through this process of collaboration, we had a profound impact on each other.

— Rabbi Shefa Gold (co-leader)

I was reflecting on the impact that you have made on me, and I notice that the place in me that was filled with trepidation about addressing the difficult political divisions has calmed, and I am experiencing hopefulness in spite of this crazy world. I am clearly less reactive and there seems to be paths opening before me that I could not have imagined before.

I come back to the moment when you introduced the ‘controversial issues’ practice and said emphatically, “This is a Shabbat practice!” And it was! What that means to me is… it is possible to bring Shabbat Consciousness to everything. Shabbat Consciousness is the awareness that we are all on the same side ultimately. I can keep an inner calm that doesn’t take away from my outer passion. I can keep the larger perspective present, even as I engage with difficult details. Your impact is the lessening of fear, the opening of possibility.

— Cherie Brown (co-leader)

I adored being part of this … Soulift. I knew I was going in order support Shefa as she explored and surpassed her edges in this new collaboration, and I knew I was going to support myself as mystic-activist in these tumultuous times. I wondered about the juxtaposition of the co-counseling exercises with the ecstatic, chanting practices, and I had had no prior experience with Cherie, but I was deeply curious to see how it all would play out. As happens pretty much every time I work with Shefa, the blessings far exceeded anything I could have imagined.

I found the back and forth from Shefa’s teaching and chanting sessions to Cherie’s teaching and co-counseling sessions enriching and mutually supportive. In Shefa’s sessions, I remembered, reconnected with, who I am on the soul level and experienced the magnificence of the realms in which our small selves move. Cherie’s sessions called up the very particular troubles of this world and helped heal some of the historical, cultural, and familial wounds and scars that have accumulated from navigating my way through its manifold oppressions. After Cherie’s sessions, I felt lighter, with even more space, then, to take in the Mystery, the Wonder of Being that Shefa so skillfully calls up. Bringing that expanded state of consciousness into the challenges of this world, is, after all, what I want to be doing in my life as mystic-activist.

— Susan/Shoshana Asiel (participant)