On the Ingredients for Everyday Abundance and Ease

IMPORTANT EVENT INFORMATION

• Event Time in PDT, find the start time in your time zone.
• This event will be streamed live online with an interactive Q&A.
• This event will be recorded on our YouTube channel
• Portions of the audio will be released on our podcast.

ACCESSIBILITY

If you need to request accessibility accommodations, please email publicprograms@ciis.edu at least one week prior to the event. For more information, explore our Accessibility web page.

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Creative, host, and "pleasure doula" Sara Elise is on a quest to examine the ingredients of our lives—those essential components that make up our days. Have we chosen rest, breath, movement, agency, visibility, play, and pleasure? Or are we trapped in the numbing and violent pattern of self-inflicted suffering? Do we celebrate the unique and precious wiring of our brains? Are our relationships a garden of ever-growing and evolving roots? Do we nourish our bodies with what it requires to sense and receive? Are we liberated, awakened, and alive? In the tradition of adrienne maree brown and Sonya Renee Taylor, Sara outlines a radical argument for dismantling the systems that oppress us. But it begins with the individual, and the simple recipe of our every day. 

Sara’s work, and latest book, A Recipe for More: Ingredients for a Life of Abundance and Ease, offers a profound and challenging inquiry into the forces that keep us in a state of survival and limitation, asking us to consider a new way to live. Her work explores the ideas of abundance, pleasure, and self-expansion by examining our connection to concepts like self-inflicted suffering, toxic positivity, rest, rage, visibility, and agency.

Join Sara for a conversation on how to bring the ingredients of an abundant life to our own lives, so that we might honor ourselves, deepen our communities, and finally be present in each miraculous and life-giving singular moment.

Sara Elise is a multidisciplinary creative, splitting her time between Brooklyn and Upstate New York. She is the cofounder and designer of Apogeo Collective, a hospitality experience centering QTPOC, as well as the founder of Harvest & Revel, a sustainable event catering + design company. She has been featured in Dazed, Playboy, Afropunk, Healthyish (Bon Appetit), Well + Good, Nylon, Stylelikeu, and them, among other publications. As an autistic Black & Indigenous femme, she spends much of her thoughtspace contemplating pleasure + pain, collective joy + healing, otherness, embodiment, remembering + reclaiming, self-destruction, and growth— and how inextricably those concepts are linked. To that end, Sara Elise has deep interests in ritualization, BDSM, relationship dynamics, and the development of decolonized personal awareness and well-being. With all of her work, she aims to challenge our collective reality by first reimagining and then creating alternative systems and spaces (both external and internal) for BIPOC and LGBTQIA2S+ people to thrive. Find out more about Sara Elise here.

We are grateful to our Bookstore Partner:

Marcus Books is the nation’s oldest Black-owned independent bookstore celebrating its 60th year. Marcus Books’ mission is to provide opportunities for Black folks and their allies to celebrate and learn about Black people everywhere. Learn more about Marcus Books.