About Liberate meditation
“Meditate to liberate yourself” is a mantra that Julio Rivera not only lives by, but has become his work’s calling. Rivera, who identifies as Afro-Latino and is based in Connecticut, has launched Liberate Meditation, a free meditation app for people of colour, by people of colour. The app features talks and meditations by guides such Ruth King, author of the popular book Mindful of Race, who speaks about how to bring about the collective healing of racism. Sebene Selassie, the first person of colour guide Rivera practiced group meditation with and Mushim Patricia Ikeda, who is actively helping BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of colour) communities, are also guides.The talks and meditations cover topics that most other meditation apps don’t address: micro-aggressions, racism, ancestors and body confidence. Most guides begin their session by introducing themselves and their ethnic background. “As a brown-skinned woman with kinky hair, I lived, like many brown-skinned women, in this societal in-between space of invisibility and hyper-visibility,” Bothwell says in a buttery-smooth voice at the start of her talk about body confidence. ”We’re either not seen at all or as a criminal.” View this post on Instagram A little about @ekaizenju who has provided a free guided meditation for the Liberate app! Born to parents who migrated from rural Louisiana, Zenju Earthlyn Manuel is an author, ordained Zen Buddhist priest, teacher, seer, poet, artist, and drum medicine woman. She is guided by deep intuition and through her capacity for lucid dreaming. The essence of all her transmissions come together in her talks and books, Sanctuary: A meditation on Home, Homelessness, and Belonging; The Way of Tenderness: Awakening Through Race, Sexuality, and Gender; and Tell Me Something About Buddhism (forward by Thich Nhat Hanh). Her website is zenju.org. Check out the guided meditation with the link in
Key features of the Liberate meditation that are enabled through these drivers include:
- Manna - Liberate Meditation Studio Emporium
- BookYourLiberate - Liberate Meditation Studio Emporium
- Meditations Archives - Page 2 of 8 - Liberate Meditation Studio
- Liberate Meditation: Julio Rivera Created Wellness
- 30 Days of Self Love – Liberation Meditation
- Reiki Meditation for Healing Peace – Liberate Emporium
- Liberate Meditation App - The Chisholm Legacy Project
Anxiety growing up as a person of colour in the U.S.The software developer said he began group meditating at a centre for people of colour at the New York Insight Meditation Center when he was living in New York City in 2017 ― an experience that changed his practice and ultimately, his life.Julio Rivera Julio Rivera, founder of Liberate Meditation. “I remember the first time I went, I had a deeply profound spiritual experience and I attribute that to the safety that I felt in the space among Black, Indigenous people of colour. The safety that I felt allowed the teachings to touch me in a new way,” he said.Rivera then began attending those group meditations regularly to help him manage his inner voice, which he said can be quite critical at times, triggering distress. When a commitment tied him up, preventing him from attending the centre, he felt his mental health wavering with the absence of the meditation sessions. So he looked for online meditation groups or apps for people of colour, but didn’t find any. Rivera, whose career background is the world of app development and start-ups, saw this as his calling, his chance to give back to others. And Liberate Meditate was born. “We want to help empower people, not only to meditate, but to show them that there’s something you can do about your suffering,” he said. “We can help each other get free and be liberated.”Liberate Meditation is available for Apple and Android in Canada. Meditations run from a few minutes long to 20 minutes. There’s an opportunity to rate the overall experience and provide feedback after each meditation.“I have received a lot of feedback already. People have said they’ve been touched by the talks, some have even cried because of the release of their
