Aishah Shahidah Simmons is an award-winning cultural worker who, for 30 years,
has examined the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and sexual violence. She is also a trauma-informed Mindfulness Meditation teacher who has been studying and practicing Theravada Buddhism for 20 years. Her lived experiences as a survivor of childhood and adult sexual violence and a Buddhist inform her commitment to unveiling silences, healing from trauma, and non-carceral accountability for harm.
Presently, Aishah teaches and leads meditation while she works on her memoir in process, Love, Justice, and Dharma. The book project is the capstone of her trilogy of work centering on healing from and non-carceral accountability for childhood and adult sexual violence. _Love, Justice, and Dharma _is also the bridge to her new direction of work primarily focused on offering resources and teachings on how mindfulness is a resource for supporting balance and cultivating compassion amid the often turbulent vicissitudes in life.
In the early 1990s, Aishah studied closely with her teacher, the late Toni Cade Bambara. She is the producer, director and writer of the internationally acclaimed and award-winning feature length 2006-released film, NO! The Rape Documentary. NO! exposes the taboos that cover-up rape, sexual assault, and failed accountability in African-American communities. The film brings together leading and emerging Black scholars, theologians, artists, activists, men, women, and survivors to break silences and commit themselves to reshaping patriarchal cultures of violence against women and queer communities; and, to look at healing in those communities.
Aishah created the multimedia project, #LoveWITHAccountability®, which examines how the silence around child sexual abuse (CSA) in the familial institution plays a direct role in creating a culture of sexual violence in all other institutions—religious, academic, activist, political and professional. This work is in community with multiracial activists, scholars, and grassroots organizers who are identifying systemic oppressions that disenfranchise marginalized communities while simultaneously exploring ways to address CSA and other forms of violence outside the criminal (in)justice apparatus.
She curated and edited the 2020 Lambda Literary Award-winning, Love WITH
Accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse (AK Press, Fall 2019). The
collection of 40-contributions of courageous, vulnerable writings that feature
experiences and perspectives by diasporic Black child sexual abuse survivors, advocates, and Aishah’s mother, who underscores the detrimental impact of parents/caregivers not believing their children when they disclose their sexual abuse. The contributors explore how we can center survivors’ healing processes, and simultaneously address childhood sexual abuse without relying on policing and prisons.
Aishah has screened her work, guest lectured, and facilitated workshops and dialogues to racially and ethnically diverse audiences at colleges and universities, high schools, conferences, international film festivals, rape crisis centers, battered women shelters, community centers, juvenile correctional facilities, and government sponsored events across the North American continent and in several countries in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean.
Heart Sanctuary: Cultivating Loving Kindness, Compassion, Appreciative Joy and Equanimity from Within
This survivor-centered and trauma-informed 4-hour virtual workshop advocates wellness and is geared for Black, Indigenous, and other people of color.
We live in a time where many, especially marginalized communities, are coping with simultaneous pandemics – childhood and adult sexual violence, white supremacy, misogynoir, sexism, and cis-heteropatriarchy, naming a few. While these realities are centuries old, the Covid pandemic heightened everything. How can we create a space for inner wisdom and compassion in the face of stress, horror, and brutality? Can we respond and not react to the onslaught of injustices happening on the micro and macro levels moment to moment?
Black feminist lesbian ancestor Audre Lorde reminds us, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation. And that is an act of political warfare.” Loving-kindness, compassion, appreciative joy, and equanimity are innate human capacities. They are four expressions of love in their purest and fiercest sense. They are each characteristic of freedom that builds on and are in a cyclical dance with each other. They help us skillfully work with life’s vicissitudes without suppressing our emotions. In this workshop, Aishah will teach heart practices that meet suffering with courage, insight, and compassion, and support inner balance amid the often turbulent vicissitudes in life. These are practices that support responding instead of reacting, and finding refuge and sanctuary amid the often turbulent realities that life brings to our doors.
Please note: The workshop is interactive and requires engagement. As a result, participants are asked to keep their cameras on during the workshop.
Black Feminism and Mindfulness
We live in a time where many, especially marginalized communities, are coping with simultaneous pandemics – childhood and adult sexual violence, white supremacy, misogynoir, sexism, and cis-heteropatriarchy, naming a few. While these realities are centuries old worldwide, the global covid health pandemic has heightened everything forcing many to figure out news to live to stay healthy, if not alive. Black feminist ancestor Toni Cade Bambara asks and reminds us, “Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?… Just so’s you’re sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed, cause wholeness is no trifling matter.”
This talk will explore liberation through the writings of Toni Cade Bambara and Audre Lorde in tandem with Mindfulness practices informed by Buddhist teachings. Bambara and Lorde wrote about liberation in the face of racism, sexism, and homophobia. They also addressed healing from inter and intra-communal violence and accountability. Mindfulness practices teach us to be aware in the present moment without judgement. These extended and intentional pauses through the Mindfulness practices create for space discernment, and, as and when necessary, response with deliberate and compassionate action. Bambara and Lorde’s writings and lived experiences offer road maps that deepen Mindfulness practices that haven’t always been presented through culturally specific frameworks.
Through a Black feminist lens, participants will learn practices that support responses and not reactions to the onslaught of injustices happening on the micro and macro levels. Participants will feel empowered to decrease reactivity and increase care for themselves and others through compassionate responses.
Digging Up the Roots of Sexual Violence
For over 25-years, Aishah Shahidah Simmons’ groundbreaking cultural work has focused on disrupting and ending sexual violence through a Black feminist lesbian survivor’s lens. Her 17-year Buddhist practice informs her commitment to respond to the inhumane scourge of sexual violence compassionately. Simmons’s journey to dig up the roots of sexual violence unearths some of the contradictions and complexities that allow the sexual violence epidemic to flourish while dispelling racist, classist, and heterosexist myths about who causes sexual harm, what enables it to happen, and why; uncovering these myths ultimately allows us to dismantle the silence and untruths that allow sexual violence to happen.
Aishah is also available to screen NO! The Rape Documentary followed by Q & A and discussion. She can do other lectures and workshops on issues of race, gender, homophobia, rape, and misogyny.
