CC Speaks: Keyona Aviles on Breath, Creation, and Not Waiting to Heal

As told to Shanaé Burch

Keyona Aviles, LMHC, is a licensed mental health counselor, yoga teacher, and community organizer passionate about the intersection of public health, spiritual practice, and cultural care. She's also deeply involved with GirlTrek, centering movement and wellness in Black women's lives.

A friend brought me to Community Conversations: Sister to Sister. She lived in Cambridge, knew co-founder Erinn Pearson, and told me about these conversations happening at Simply Erinn’s hair  salon. I was working at the intersection of public health, mental health, and spiritual practice at the time — and my life was shifting. I had recently run a nonprofit fitness center for women in Dorchester, finished grad school at Lesley University and had sights on opening my private practice. When she said they were tapping into barbershops and salons to share health information with our community, I thought: I need to see this.

She also said I should get connected because I had something to share. So I connected with co-founder Dita Obler, who was scheduling conversations at the time, and started participating—first around grief and loss, then mental health. Sharing the things I felt were important for people to know.

What Keeps Me Coming Back

There's never a time I've gone that I've felt talked down to. It really feels like sisters—chosen people you're with who you get to be within your fullness and learn something together. I don't feel like there are many spaces where I get to feel that outright.

Every presenter I've witnessed has been so loving. And yes, when I was invited to be on a panel and looked across at the other women, I thought: Well, damn, everybody has a doctorate and a long story about how they professionally came to be. But there's also this through line of wanting it to remain unprofessionalized—not anti-intellectual, but accessible. Casual in that way. Keeping the conversation centered and understood by all of us, while still honoring the depth of knowledge present.

The Power of Simple Things

At our September gathering, I led breathwork before we quilted and danced together in the park. What I wanted to share is this: breath is a very powerful tool, and  over-“culture” wants us to believe everything has to be big, complex, or complicated to shift big things. But actually, this very small thing—breath—is the cornerstone to being. Literally.

When you're having to do a lot of physical labor, you get real acquainted with your breath patterns real quick. Our people knew this in a different way in their bodies. But there's been a lot of disconnect that many of us have had to undo to get to this [knowing]  place. So it feels really important to take us back to something like our breath, where we all have a relationship to our breathing. It's there for us. You don't have to pay a subscription price to access it, and it can literally change so much about how you're experiencing life.

Creating Space to Create

The quilting was so powerful for me. I just can't get over it. To sit and do something that I know is part of a larger conversation—there is a conversation that happens as an artist when you're making things. Both with the zeitgeist of our time, but also with all the people who have been doing this before.

Knowing that my square would live next to other squares, that's also a conversation. Being together in a space while you're speaking and influencing each other as you're making, but then also as the witness is witnessing these things later together—it felt really beautiful. One of the women had her square from a previous gathering, and it was kept for her to build upon. Even in just the setting up of it, it was clear this was a care activity.

Taking Up Space

It's a radical act for a group of Black women to gather outdoors in a park, in a public place, and take up space. To be able to just be with each other and do things that matter to us, in the way that feels right to us. That was very powerful.

I didn't participate in the line dancing because I was focused on my quilt. But being able to make my square while witnessing all these beautiful ladies with Jessica’s guidance—no shame in not knowing the steps—that was moving. People were seen for their wholeness, their humanness, celebrated for getting it and nurtured when not able to get it.

We Don't Have to Wait

Here's what I want the wider community to consider: We don't have to wait to heal.

That's another thing the over-“culture”[1] wants us to believe, especially at this time where there's an onslaught of all the things. It's like, "Well, once this is over, then you can tend to your wounds." But that's not how our people have operated. That's not how things get mended, period. A “stitch in time saves nine” is real. We can't wait until the thing is over to start the process of mending or healing.

There are tools (like relationship with our breath) and ways (like creating spaces for Black women as Black women to learn about healing together) and people (like sisters who are willing to risk showing up and learning/practicing together) who are very practiced in the process of mending and healing. They might be around you. You might be part of that yourself, whether you’re conscious of it or not. So it's okay to get more conscious about that.

Catch your breath. Invite it back into your body. You're powerful.

I wanted to offer a series of breath recordings.

The breath-work is recorded in 4 parts via helloaudio, a private podcast platform: 

1. invitation

2. guide

3. space for practice (guided) and

4. space for practice (open)

Join us for our next Community Conversations: Sister to Sister, Inc.  gathering as we continue creating space for Black women to breathe, heal, and be witnessed in our fullness—together.

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[1] Overculture is a term coined by Dr Clarissa Pinkola Estés Réyes and she uses it as one word (ex. overculture). Recently a sister abruptly invited me to remember that as true culture bearers of the world referring with our language to the overlay of the “U.S. American” way —  laden with white supremacy serving patriarchy as “culture” ain't calling it what it is, so with this suggestion I remix the term to over-"culture".