In honor of Social Work Appreciation Month, I am honored to share with you this live recording of me reciting my poem I Call You Legendary, from my book, Legendary: A Tribute to Those Who Honorably Serve Devalued Children. The eBook is available exclusively at jaiyajohn.com. This reading is excerpted from Reclaiming Our Sacred Ways, a live, abridged keynote message by Dr. Jaiya John at the January 24, 2018 Child Abuse Awareness and Prevention Conference, hosted by Antelope Valley Partners for Health. Lancaster, California. LENGTH 60:00. Available exclusively in the Audio Library at jaiyajohn.com.

In the full recording, Jaiya shares a hopeful message on our need to reclaim ancestral, communal, humanistic ways of nurturing, supporting, and responding to crisis within children, families, and communities. In addition to reciting his classic spoken word piece, I Call You Legendary, from his book Legendary, Jaiya addresses a wide range of issues with soulful truthfulness, including:

• The cultural origins of our current social systems
• Our need to reassess the culture of our systems
• Our need to rebalance and heal our social world
• Reckoning with our cultural supremacies and caste systems
• Evolving our definition and understanding of child abuse
• What it means to be a healer
• Honoring and repairing fatherhood and motherhood
• The harm caused by soulless professionalism
• The persistence and endurance of Mother Teresa
• The critical relationship between wellness and the work of serving lives
• The power of hopefulness and gratitude
• A path for ending generational suffering and trauma
• Our need to soulfully celebrate compassionate servitude
• The medicine of self care, mutual care, and story gardening

This full recording is a valuable resource for MSW programs, new staff orientation, professional and leadership development, staff meetings, staff retreats, in-service trainings, and culture change initiatives. It is available exclusively in the Audio Library at jaiyajohn.com...