| A course in miracles
I visit on one summer afternoon, to check out for myself exactly what's so "innovative" about the center. Kokomon takes me around back. "We don't put a padlock on this gate," he says as he leads me into the Forgiveness Garden. "We want people to feel welcome and to come help us." It's clear, by the look of the place, that the people are coming. Tomatoes, squash, and peppers sprout everywhere. Children have painted portraits of heroes such as Mahatma Gandhi and Congresswoman Barbara Lee on stacks of tires. As we sit down on chairs built by the East Bay Conservation Corps, Kokomon explains the nontraditional mental health principles behind the work that he, Aeeshah, Amana, and their volunteers do. There are twelve principles of attitudinal healing, he explains, that flow from a book by Helen Shucman, A Course in Miracles, as well as psychiatric research by Jerry Jampolsky. Almost three decades ago, Jampolsky found that children with catastrophic illnesses improved when they changed their mental outlook. Attitudinal healers believe that we are not only responsible for our thoughts, but also for the feelings we experience. Our pain stems from our own thoughts, guilt, and judgments about people, experiences, and events. By exploring these feelings, and coming to terms with them, we can eventually heal them and find inner peace. "It's easy to point a finger and say B did that to me. But if you hold onto this, you don't feel good. You won't feel well. You have to be responsible for your thoughts and your own feelings," Kokomon says. The Clotteys' contribution has been to take this specific message of love, forgiveness, and the need to let go of fear, and to apply it to the problem of racial healing. "It's easy to say, 'Hey, I'm poor,'" Kokomon says. "What are you going to do about poverty? Yes, the government did this to you, but are you going to sit there and let the government put madness on you the rest of your life? If you eat food that is not good for you, it will make you sick. You are responsible." Kokomon and Aeeshah make shared stories the cornerstone of the monthly racial healing circles. "Many times we don't know each others' stories because we're afraid of being the recipient of fear, rage, guilt, or shame," Aeeshah says. Because conversations on race can be incendiary, she believes we must start racial dialogue by connecting all the people in the room through a common ritual. This is the reason that the Clotteys begin their circles with drumming and a reading of ground rules of respect. "That puts us all on the same page, with the same rhythm," Aeeshah explains. Adjusting everyone's sense of rhythm--which affects not just the way you keep a musical beat, but also the way you talk and walk--is important to creating an expressive, honest atmosphere, the Clotteys believe. It brings all of the participants into the space of the room from the various places they have come from and untangles them from their everyday uncertainties--what Kokomon calls the "tapestry of madness and fear." As he explains: "When we're in trouble, our rhythm changes. Mindful drumming is about letting go of stress and putting the body, mind, and spirit in alignment. Then, we are really ready." This basic work of talking, listening, and (literally) harmonizing with each other, the Clotteys believe, can ultimately heal racism. "You can't legislate people learning to accept each other," says Aeeshah. "That requires heart work." "We define racism as a life-threatening disease," Kokomon says emphatically. "It's killing people. We don't want to wait until people are dying, but try to take a different angle, with prevention. This is for the people who are living so they don't get to that point." According to Kokomon, committed participants of their racial healing circles have made lasting changes in their lives. White people especially respond to the circles, often working out guilt about their privileged pasts. In their book Beyond Fear, Aeeshah and Kokomon recount the story of Gerd, a German-born engineer who spent many years in Liberia. As he was mourning his status as a childless and single older man, he woke up to the realization that he had fathered a mixed-race daughter in Liberia whom he had turned his back on, more than three decades earlier. "Now, all I have of her are two pictures and three strings of beads--a very personal souvenir of her mother and a whole new way of hearing the country song 'I'm in love with you, baby, and I don't even know your name,'" Gerd says in the book. He started searching for his daughter, putting together a computer picture of what she would have looked like at thirty-four years of age. To the Clotteys, Gerd's story shows the timelessness of all things and the need to face the past to move on into the future. They write: "He spoke of learning more about love and forgiveness in the last few months than in the previous fifty-eight years of his life. He is now actively involved in human rights work in Liberia, with the understanding that Africa is a deeply personal matter for everyone and that every human being is someone else's daughter or son and deserves love, attention, and respect." Though Aeeshah and Kokomon insist their methods have achieved tangible results, it's also easy to see how people might respond to their unconventional beliefs with skepticism. I raise my doubts with Kokomon at one point. "Spacey? People think it's more than spacey," he says. "They often think it's a cult." He laughs; it's hard to think of Kokomon Clottey as an evangelical zealot. Even though he and Aeeshah and Amana live by these twelve principles and hope others will live by them, too, they say their work isn't about indoctrination. "There's a difference between being spiritual and being religious or dogmatic," Kokomon says. "If you're dogmatic you separate people. We're nonpolitical and include everyone and everybody." In his view, the principles of attitudinal healing are nothing more than ground rules for human decency in people's everyday lives. "We just want to give them tools to improve their life. That might just be planting tomatoes in the garden." Amana sees their outside-the-box thinking as an advantage in these times. "Traditional methods and standard thinking are not working for our kids. They're not living in standard homes. The question is how we support children for these conditions," she says. Once they get to know what really goes on at the center, parents seem to support the Clotteys' methods. Anthony Hall said he hesitated before sending his eight-year-old daughter Kenya to the AHC because he worried that its nontraditional principles had something to do with cult-like behavior. But he eventually came around. "The AHC's principles are humanistic. They don't contradict our Christianity," he says. Interestingly, both Aeeshah and Kokomon grew up in Christian households--Aeeshah in small-town Louisiana and Kokomon in Gamashie, Ghana. It took them time to come around to attitudinal healing. Aeeshah's early frustration with the racism she felt as a student at the University of California at Berkeley led her to the Nation of Islam in her search for racial uplift and support. But after seven years with that black nationalist group, she wasn't sure she had found the answers to her questions. "I had an enormous amount of love in my heart," she writes in Beyond Fear. "However, it was only shared with a portion of people on earth, and I added to my confusion by teaching this lesson to others. I taught love and fear." Then Aeeshah attended a seminar where she was introduced to Helen Shucman's book, A Course in Miracles. She suddenly felt as if she had found her spiritual path. She headed next to Tiburon, California, to meet with psychiatric researcher Jerry Jampolsky, and decided then that she was going to begin a new line of work. Aeeshah introduced Kokomon to the ideas of attitudinal healing in 1990, as the two of them were collaborating on a tape of spiritual poetry set to African drumming. Kokomon, who was born in Gamashie as a member of the Ga-Adabe people and came to America as a musician in 1977, soon found that the principles of attitudinal healing resonated with the experiences of his own life--in particular his encounters with American racism. He brings all his talents to his work at the center, weaving the principles of attitudinal healing into what he has learned as a medicine man, modern interpreter of the Ga-Adabe's wisdom and rituals, and master drummer. Right now, the AHC keeps going through the full-time efforts of Kokomon, Amana, and several dedicated volunteers. Aeeshah's salary as an assistant program director at Casa de la Vida, a residential psychiatric treatment center in Oakland, forms the basis of the center's $100,000 annual budget. The AHC also receives substantial supplemental grants and some local contributions, but is still actively looking for other sources of income to expand their programs and their staffing. A course in miracles |