Gemstones in the Sun Freedom Circles

Gemstones in the Sun Freedom Circles are vital small Gemstones’ spiritual support groups that are facilitated and led primarily in person and/or digitally by Movement Chaplaincy Team members. They are composed of POC who desire to participate in an ongoing spiritual recovery process, working together in solidarity to lessen greed and lack and to connect to a range of alternative and supplemental ways to create a sense of security in and a deepened understanding of what true freedom involves and why it can never be denied.

Before you sign-up to participate in Freedom Circles, please mindfully and carefully read our Freedom Circles Guidelines Clarified. 

Freedom Circles Guidelines Clarified

Freedom Circles are the foundation and the root of Gemstones In The Sun. Freedom Circles are “life recovery” work of a different and unique kind. Our approach to healing and transformation shines through the lens of Relationship building. Inviting, establishing, building, and nurturing relationships is essential to the sustainability and the richness of Freedom Circles and the GITS Community.

Freedom Circles are Communities. The richness of Community is all inclusive of good and bad, ugly and beautiful, sweet and bitter, pain and joy, disagreements and solidarity, secular and spiritual. This inclusivity is what makes each of us who we are - humans - being and experiencing multiple levels and layers of our Beingness - sometimes all at the same time.

Freedom Circles are where we begin to breathe and give birth and rebirth ourselves into new ways of being, seeing, feeling, and knowing. It is where our healing, recovery, and transformation process begins and deepens through the continued sharing of our authentic selves, the mindful practice of respectful listening, hearing, and speaking, the deeply honoring of real-time life stories and experiences, and holding space for the Wisdom of all our Ancestors to come through.

Freedom Circles are where we begin to curate “brave hearts” and “brave spaces” that, GITS believes, will empower those who choose to fully commit to this deep dive process to live “Braver lives.” This transformative work is not for the faint of heart. It requires so much more than most are aware of, ready, willing, or able to commit to. This work asks all who say YES! to be open, honest, and vulnerable with ourselves and each other, sit in the discomfort of something we heard or shared in Circle/Community, meditate, pray, cry, get angry, feel deeply, love strongly, reground to our center, grow beyond our comfort zone, pause, breathe, come back to Circle/Community... and try again. 

With all of this in mind...

Freedom Circles and the GITS Community are for you if you are aware of, ready, willing, and able to commit to:

  • Seeing yourself and each other as amazing precious Gems. As a precious Gems, you commit to the best of your ability, to do no harm to yourself or each other

  • Being honest, patient, and respectful and remembering we are each growing at different rates and paces

  • Practicing non-judgement, deep care, and full-heart listening and responding

  • Honoring each other’s intuition, wisdom, and ancestry

  • Empowering one another on this healing journey and to live into our collective purpose

  • Allowing ourselves and each other to be imperfect and make space for growth

  • Accepting accountability for any harms we have enacted within and beyond the group

  • Being open to feedback, even when it is hard

  • Challenging yourself and others to stretch beyond perceived limitations and viewpoints - even if we do not fully understand it all 

GITS and Freedom Circles are fully aware everyone may not be ready to step into this deep self-exploration and expansive learning journey. Again, this work requires “brave hearts.” With Love, Compassion, Grace, and Gratitude, we honor all of who you are and where you are on your Life paths. Within Freedom Circles and beyond, we desire you to grow and flourish in ways that are exactly right for you. Please know that it is really okay if your continued growth is not with us.

It is with deep clarity and awareness that Freedom Circles are not for you if:

  • You believe you already have ample support in your life recovery process and you feel you do not need the support Freedom Circles offer

  • Having your views and beliefs respectfully challenged is too uncomfortable or takes you too far out of your comfort zone - [which is how we grow] - and you are not willing or able to sit with that discomfort, move through it, and return back to Circle/Community

  • You are not willing to respectfully and mindfully engage in open, honest, and affirming conversations - no matter how messy they get - with those whose thoughts, beliefs, cultural views, and language, may differ from yours

  • You require professional support and care that is beyond the scope of Freedom Circles and other GITS Community engagement

GITS Freedom Circles are always free of charge.

Click the image to learn more about Gemstones in the Sun Freedom Circles.

Want to attend a Freedom Circle? Click here.

 

Listen. Learn. Grow.

The GITS Community Listening Series forum is a learning space for all Gemstones to gather, fostering the shared flow of information and conversation. The forum is intended as a space to cultivate an understanding of intersectionality, as well as a space where all identities are welcome and no oppressions are ranked over others. 

In this learning space, CLSF participants have the opportunity to engage in specifically chosen topics designed to promote deeper inner growth individually and collectively. These topics are presented by dynamic speakers, who are in alignment with GITS’ mission, followed by Q&A.  The presentations [not the Q&A] are recorded and are made accessible to the community via our Library Resource page.

CLSF convenes 4 times a year, once a quarter. 

Community Listening Series Forums are free of charge.

 

Movement Chaplains

Gemstones in the Sun Movement Chaplains midwife new highly effective POC community leaders and advocates who have human relations and community organizing skills. Movement Chaplains portray an inclusive collage of POC cultures, backgrounds, ethnicities, geographic origins, genders, ages, orientations and abilities. They are our vanguards to “Gemstones'' openness in perception that “everything is connected to everything.” And so, GITS’s Movement Chaplains are agnostic, interfaith, and spiritual people who use various expressions to facilitate awareness that in the United States the work of healing one’s own wounds while standing in another POC’s shoes is an essential step towards personal growth.

By extension, POC empathy for all wounded people who hurt other people, strengthens.

Movement Chaplains also do community organizing work in communities of color. They engage in and move between various communities to help to build and deepen POC awareness of what POC share in common by helping POC imagine how their own beliefs, shifting values and resources can be proposed in, and used for, collective community renewal.

Movement Chaplains are groundbreakers and ground-tillers who listen deeply and act humbly. They partner with POC wherever they are gathered to sustain deep transformation by encouraging themselves and all POC to reach new heights by experiencing new forms of success.

To become a candidate for membership on Gemstones in the Sun’s Movement Chaplaincy team, please send us an email. Introduce yourself. We look forward to hearing from you. Briefly, tell us why this opportunity is as good fit for you as it may be for us. If you are already a Gemstones in the Sun Chaplain, this Movement Chaplains Guide is offered to you as our means of additional support.

 

The Solidarity Cooperative Franchise (SCF)

Since healing, recovery, empowerment and economic development work of GITS is our calling, the SCF is designed to allow Freedom Circle recovery meeting participants to practice the life-lessons that they learn from having been through the GITS recovery program in community with other radically diverse groups of healing justice inclined POC. 

The researched SCF model is case tested in preparation for being program piloted.  It functions in support of underserved community members by hiring and/or mentoring them and being actively supportive of their own entrepreneurial instincts as they seek to address their local community concerns and needs. 

This SCF unit serves as the model of the ways that multiple units would connect in order to proliferate and interconnect POC owned and led community services with GITS recovery aligned strategic partners across the United States in service to all socio-economically marginalized persons irrespective of their racial identities, skin tone, value-structures, or zip codes. 

Since each tri-fold component in the unit will spring forth from regional FC participants, the units themselves will reflect in their make-up and operations best POC beliefs, values, and resources practices which will exemplify for the nation how equitable outcomes can be achieved in mass through broadly-supported POC spawned cooperative work opportunities that are tailored to and customized by each underserved communities own self-prioritized needs, irrespective of their zip codes.

In short, GITS promotes societal transformation by correlating the human need to heal from the inside out with the corrective course of turning our present socio economic paradigm upside down. It is the congealing of healing, recovery, empowerment and economic development that makes  our being in solidarity possible.