Book Launch - "We Birth Freedom at Dawn" and Book Signing - "Reclaim Yourself: The Homecoming Workbook"

About RECLAIM YOURSELF 

From leading mental health expert Dr. Thema Bryant, an accessible resource to process stress and take practical steps toward creating the life you want

Trauma and everyday challenges can cause us to disconnect and fall into survival mode. This comprehensive workbook gently leads us back to our authentic selves by helping us process difficult emotions and identify how ordinary and traumatic stress may have led to harmful patterns, including unhealthy relationships, people-pleasing, control issues, and self-sabotage. Drawing on more than two decades of experience in clinical psychology and trauma recovery, Dr. Thema Bryant guides us through surveys and reflection questions to grow our self-awareness and understanding. She offers a diverse array of psychotherapeutic techniques based in both Western science and indigenous knowledge to help us shift our thoughts, heal our emotions, and actively take steps toward growth. Incorporating journal prompts, grounding exercises, spiritual practices like prayer and meditation, and embodied healing through dance and movement, Reclaim Yourself invites you to process your past, center your present, and transform your future.

About the Author 

Dr. Thema Bryant is the 2023 president of the American Psychological Association, the leading scientific and professional organization representing psychology with more than 150,000 members. She is a licensed psychologist, ordained minister, sacred artist, host of the Homecoming Podcast, and bestselling author.

Dr. Thema Bryant completed her doctorate in Clinical Psychology at Duke University and her post-doctoral training at Harvard Medical Center’s Victims of Violence Program. Upon graduating, she became the Coordinator of the Princeton University SHARE Program, which provides intervention and prevention programming to combat sexual assault, sexual harassment, and harassment based on sexual orientation. She is currently a tenured professor of psychology in the Graduate School of Education and Psychology at Pepperdine University, where she directs the Culture and Trauma Research Laboratory. Her clinical and research interests center on interpersonal trauma and the societal trauma of oppression. She is a past president of the Society for the Psychology of Women and a past APA representative to the United Nations.

About WE BIRTH FREEDOM AT DAWN 

Volumes One and Two

From the Author 

If you have read my prior work, you know that all of this is just a Love letter from the Great Mystery to our earthly yearning souls. As such, with these two new volumes, I desire that you feel the intimacy and urgency of where you and I now find ourselves. Since late 2023, as horrific massacre, new and old, slow and swift, in many forms and lands, has at last captured our collective human attention, our pain and grief and resurgent Love have gushed through my heart and being night and day. Like many of you, my every cell and molecule have been both decimated and revived. I have given myself to this, our profound upheaval. I have crumbled our heartbreak into the sea of this unbearable season, this ongoing sermon of sorrow and solace. In these soul waters, I have soaked

up our manna and nectar to bring home to you.

These two volumes are all of the balm I have been able to gather for you. We Birth Freedom at Dawn is a book and birth water. The title came to me as I ran up a steep hill on a recent summer morning, sun blessing my skin, sweat baptizing my ascendant birthing time to push and deliver. Our ancestors have been with me in a hushed and cradling way during these months of mourning and morning. As this title came to me, Sojourner and Harriet in particular settled in my bones and blood and breath. These two sturdy grandmothers have wet eyes as they hold us now. It is their insistence that we be free of our oppressive ways that has ushered forth these tribal words.

Sojourner and Harriet… Have you ever seen two monarch butterfly mates dancing in sunlight? They may to our eyes seem so very light. Their flight, though, is a consequence of unimaginable struggle and endurance. And yet, here they are, still dancing, still joyful, filled with the orange of sun, bringing forth their generations. 

This title, We Birth Freedom at Dawn, is what its offering is: A radical call. An invocation. A summons. To stir and galvanize and mobilize us. The word We is for our collective humanity. Birth speaks to our unconquerable Divine Feminine and its reclaimed role as we go forward, for the conception, gestation, and birth labor. For we already have this freedom. We do not have to chase it down. We have only to bring forth what is already in us and of us. The word Freedom: An acknowledgement of my life’s work and ministry, including my earlier and kindred book Freedom: Medicine Words for Your Brave Revolution. And Dawn, a hopeful word, for our freedom soon come. It is not long now, dear soul. Not long. Our dark night of the soul too has its end.

This title is a declaration and decree. A promise and prophecy. An awakening and activation. A chant, hum, ceremony, remembrance song. To speak and feel this title is to call forth this freedom alive within each of us. Our freedom is stirring, nascent, divine, and truth. Soon, the fawning sprout begets the forest, and the raindrop begets the river. I pray these words bring back from the brink the many who are on the edge of despair, fear, hopelessness, terror, and fatigue. To allow us to see and feel and be what is coming and indeed what has always been here in the fertile earth of our sacred architecture. My God, these words are prayer.

About the Author 

Dr. Jaiya John was orphan-born on Ancient Puebloan lands in the high desert of New Mexico, and is an internationally recognized freedom worker, poet, author, teacher, and speaker. Jaiya is the founder of Soul Water Rising, a global rehumanizing mission to eradicate oppression. The mission has donated thousands of Jaiya’s books in support of social healing, and offers grants to displaced and vulnerable youth. He is the author of 21 books, including Daughter Drink This Water, We Birth Freedom at Dawn, Fragrance After Rain, and Freedom: Medicine Words for your Brave Revolution. Jaiya writes, narrates, and produces the podcast, I Will Read for You: The Voice and Writings of Jaiya John, and is the founder of The Gathering, a global initiative and tour reviving traditional gathering and storytelling practices to fertilize social healing and liberation. He is a former professor of social psychology at Howard University, and has spoken to over a million people worldwide and audiences as large as several thousand. Jaiya holds doctorate and master’s degrees in social psychology from the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a focus on intergroup and race relations. As an undergraduate, he attended Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, and lived in Kathmandu, Nepal, where he studied Tibetan Holistic Medicine through independent research with

Tibetan doctors and trekked to the base camp of Mt. Everest. His Indigenous soul dreams of frybread, sweetgrass, bamboo in the breeze, and turtle lakes whose poetry is peace.

Dr. John’s book titles include We Birth Freedom at Dawn, Volumes One and Two, Dear Artist, All These Rivers and You Chose Love, No Man Came, Fragrance After Rain, Freedom: Medicine Words for Your Brave Revolution, Your Caring Heart: Renewal for Helping Professionals and Systems, Daughter Drink This Water, Calm: Inspiration for a Possible Life, Sincerity of Sunlight, Fresh Peace, Legendary: A Tribute to Those Who Honorably Serve Devalued Children, Beautiful: A Poetic Celebration of Displaced Children, Reflection Pond: Nurturing Wholeness in Displaced Children, Clear Moon Tribe, The Day Jumoke Found His Name, Father to Son: Ode to Black Boys, Habanero Love: A Poem of Sacred Passion, Lyric of Silence: A Poetic Telling of the Human Soul Journey, and Black Baby White Hands: A View from the Crib.