What is CLN?

Creative Liberation Network (CLN) is a community of facilitators, artists, and activists who provide  educational experiences through collaborative projects, co-founded and organized by James Amutabi Haines, Amani William Carey-Simms, and Seneca Beth Miller.

CLN offers a range of services based in mindfulness, somatics, emotional intelligence, exploratory process, dignity in creativity, collaboration, indigenous cosmology, and social/eco justice.

CLN’s Unique Approach:

• provides a synthesis of cross cultural information designed to help dismantle internal and external systems of oppression.
• utilizes philosophical and mystical inquiry into the nature of the universe and the sacred — combined with practical explorations in mindfulness, dignity, and global cultural history.
• hones collaborative creative power to create worlds we thrive in.
• stimulates the innate ability to envision and create an equitable and sustainable future by living in an increasingly liberated way today.

CLN SERVICES

• Curriculum Development
• Trainings and Workshops
• Community Actions and Community Building
• Somatic Sex Education
• Ritual and Ceremony
• Organizational and Personal Consulting
• Interactive Art
• Fundraising Asks and Motivational Speaking
• MC’ing, Musical, and Oratory Performance
• And more!

Who is CLN?

AMANI WILL / WA AMA & THE LION TRUTH

I am an Altar of Free Being, a Midwife of the Creative Liberation Network, the Lion Truth. We behind prison, classroom, cultural, emotional, and psychic walls with the free, we in outdoor classrooms in the redwoods, we in the studio, on stage, in circle, on the corner, and in yours. We consult, program manage, facilitate, and curriculum write. This a Singing Poet BeatMan, Meditator, Educator, shit talking Irreverent Reverend. I am an Altar of Free Being, a Midwife of the Creative Liberation Network, the Lion Truth.

JAMES (AMUTABI) CONNIE HAINES

I am a multimedia artist that works in the mediums of sound, the written word, paint, video, music, digital editing, and collage. I have 20 years experience as a facilitator: holding space for high school-age youth struggling with addiction, facilitating workshops on issues of oppression, facilitating mindfulness workshops in Juvenile Detention facilities and truancy programs around the Bay Area; and teaching Theatre of the Oppressed classes. These experiences have taught me that the intersections of social justice, art, community, and creativity is one of the pathways to our personal and collective liberation.

Empowering the creative spirit present in all of us allows for more beauty, decadence, complexity, and intimacy to flow into life. Art is our movements, our stories, our breath, our choices, sculpted into the masterpiece that is our life. The art that comes through me is a reflection of my inner and outer questing, the people I have held community with, and those who have impacted me through their stories.

I am currently working with CLN (the Creative Liberation Network), a collaborative arts project re-imagining the tarot, writing a book called – Magic Without Magicians, working with Youth to create an Oakland permaculture treasure hunt and creating a variety of interactive story-based experiences to support whomever wants to join the network in unlocking their creative potential. CLN has been facilitating a milieu of creative workshops meant to help cultivate creative capacity and dignity.

SENECA BETH MILLER

Whether I am talking about sex, race, birth, JustBodies or sustainability, facilitating workshops with incarcerated adults or teenagers in the woods, making art or bodymoving, my actions are likely to be guided by liberation, solidarity, and an underlying agenda for cultivating playful comfort-zone-stretching interconnection with self and others.  A lover of the paradoxical and paranormal, ancestral wisdom and asymmetry, my suburban-desert-born-being strives to bring water to the deserts, metaphorical and literal. A midwife of transition, as well as a multitude of strange and creative projects, CLN is both a gift to the world and a selfish attempt to center my life around liberated creative processes. My work in the world is dedicated to the future generations, that they may be born into bodies liberated from intergenerational trauma and raised without shame of their bodies, desires, or sexual expression.

Why CLN?

In a world full of problems and conflict, we find ourselves called to search for direction, understanding, and freedom. The ways we interact with power in the personal and political realms of both individual and shared experience ask that we express our stories and desires honestly, boldly, and vulnerageously.

CLN offers this question to live into:

how do we respond skillfully to the happenings of the world, to the social, political, interpersonal, and existential dynamics of the daily human experience? 

CLN invites you to participate in a project with longevity, cultivating creativity, joy, and play as a means to creative liberation.