Lab of Unlearn: Reading Group
Tuesday, May 26 • 8 PM - 10 PM • 17 Macdougal Street, Brooklyn, NY
We’ll begin the evening by building a communal altar together. In the first 15 minutes, you’re invited to bring something meaningful, or any material that carries weight for you. Whether it’s something you want to honor, a memory you’re holding, or simply an offering to the room, we’ll arrange these pieces together into a temporary altar and collective art installation.
If you don’t bring anything, that’s completely okay. We’ll have objects, plants, flowers, and fabric on hand for you to add if you’d like. And if you’d rather just settle in your own way, that’s welcome too.
This opening is also a time to arrive slowly, meet the people around you, and grab a drink from Uncle Chin — the local business generously hosting us.
Once the altar is set, Jacqueline @jacq__jypsy will guide us into a meditation woven with violin, sound, and stillness. From there, we’ll move into the reading group itself: passages read aloud and conversation unfolding wherever the reading takes us.
No prior reading is required. Come as you are, with curiosity and a willingness to listen. This is a gentle, conversational space: a small ritual of study held in care.
The Lab of Unlearn Reading Group is a collective study space for slowing down. We come together to think through books that challenge us, letting conversation and shared presence become their own kind of practice.
For this session, we will gather around Prentis Hemphill’s What It Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World, a book that asks how personal healing, embodiment, community care, and collective liberation are deeply connected. The book invites us to consider how our wounds, habits, memories, and inherited survival strategies shape the worlds we try to build.
Together, we will read selected passages, reflect on our own experiences of unlearning, and discuss how transformation can move from the body into our relationships and the wider world. No prior reading is required. Participants are invited to come as they are, with curiosity and a willingness to listen.
