Cultivating Reparative Connections in our Relational Ecosystems
Welcome!
Hi! I'm Cécile (she/her).
I facilitate online grief and support circles to cultivate reparative connections in our relational and emotional ecosystems in these trying times.
I am passionate about relational dynamics, particularly at the scale of intimacy: in the relationships with our loved ones, with the places we inhabit, with the non-human relatives we interact with in our daily lives (plants, rivers, birds…), but also in our relationships with our ancestors, with our collective past and future.
My practice is inspired by teachers, colleagues and friends who reflect on the way systems of oppression and current compound crises affect these relationships AND who explore how intentionally nurturing these relationships can help us envision and co-create liberatory alternatives.
Looking forward to gathering and practicing with you!
The Gathered Meeting Project
The Pond Circles
I created this offering as part of the Gathered Meeting Project, that was initiated by Martha Crawford and a team of facilitators in June 2025 to provide online restorative spaces to rest, share and recover as we navigate the intensity of these times.
You can learn more about this project, the circles' format, the facilitators, their calendar and the registration process here.
I facilitate the Pond Circle on the last Sunday of the month, at 10am PST / 1pm EST / 7pm CET. You can register for the next one here.
Looking forward to gathering with you at the pond!
The circles' title comes from the mini-pond that I created in my parents' garden, an ecosystem that I am a gratefully stewarding and learning from everyday.
Cozy and Cautious Covid Grief Circle
First Wednesday of the month; co-facilitated with Jess de Vries and Britta Love
This is a space for covid-realist folks to gather
virtually and tend the various griefs that we have
experienced since March 2020 and the specific
grief of watching the world go back to “normal”
when the pandemic is still very much here. With so
much isolation in the last 5 years we are excited to
gather and tend grief together, to know that we
are not alone and that we are held in community.
Sliding scale: 25-5$
You can register here.
A (little) bit more about me
I am a white French woman of French, Spanish and Italian descent. I was born in Reunion Island, a "former" French colony in the Indian Ocean. My paternal grand-parents moved there from Hexagonal France in the 50s, after it had become a French “oversea department.” This place, that I left when I was 25 years old, still orients everything I do, as I keep learning continuously from its history, its inhabitants, its culture, and the way it shaped me into who I am today.
From 2013 to 2021, I was a teacher-researcher in US academia on Muwekma Ohlone land, and then on Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican land. I taught French language, history, literature and culture at all levels of the undergraduate curriculum.
Within this institutional context, and often against it, I learned to cultivate anti-oppressive (gender-just, anti-racist, anti-ableist) pedagogies, with the help of supportive and inspiring colleagues, students, friends, activists, artists and care-workers. This practice radically changed the way I taught French and expanded my perception and embodiment of relationality in ways I could not have imagined.
But after years of political awakenings & personal healing, and a much clearer understanding of institutional violence, I left academia during the second year of the pandemic, in 2021, to be in better alignement with my values, my needs and my capacities.
For the past four years I have been studying and practicing how to build the future we deeply desire through our everyday relationships, thanks to a supportive learning ecosystem of many teachers & guides (Alexis Pauline Gumbs, adrienne maree brown, Toshi Reagon, Octavia E. Butler, Dra. Rocío Rosales Meza, Layla F. Saad, Resmaa Menakem, Selma Sardouk, the Wheel of Consent team, Elena Solano, Martha Crawford, and many more I’m so grateful for).
I now live in France, by the Atlantic Ocean, in an intergenerational household with my parents, and a mini-pond that I built and that I am taking care of in their garden. I work independently as a carer-researcher, and facilitate online spaces to practice decolonial, queer, disability justice-centered & liberatory ways of relating.
Looking forward to practicing with you!