Black History

Black Love Day

THE AFRO — Black Love Day, founded by Ayo Handy-Kendi, the Breath Sekou, is celebrating 26 years.

Published

7 years ago

February 19, 2019

By AFRO Staff

Black Love Day, founded by Ayo Handy-Kendi, the Breath Sekou, is celebrating 26 years of creating healing, loving solutions for rebuilding relationships, in countless, Black and White communities, locally, nationally and internationally.

The commemorative holiday, recognized on Feb. 13, offers a spiritual alternative to the commercialized Valentine’s Day. This year’s celebration, which calls for a 24-hour demonstration of using love to heal relationships, kicks off a year’s campaign of conscious raising, cellular memory cleansing and generational trauma healing around our 2019 theme: “Heal a Woman, Heal a Nation.”

This initiative focuses on the 400th Anniversary of the arrival of the first Africans to be sold into bondage in North America in 1619 at Jamestown, Va. Campaign efforts will help heal the inequalities that Black women have dealt with from the impact of the institution of slavery and the structural racism that evolved from it, creating deeply rooted issues for them, their families and communities that still exist today.

“For a real ‘wake up’ solution-based, demonstration of generational/cellular clearing techniques which will help support many current issues and change the legacy of slavery’s impact on Black women’s relationships with their man, their children, other women and the self-love/self care that Black women need for themselves to stay resilient – [I] encourage you to promote this alternative Valentine’s Day message,” said Handi-Kendi, steward of the non-profit African American Holiday Association (AAHA) and the founder of the Ritual of Reconciliation. She is the author, of “The Black Love Book- the definitive guide to the Wholyday” and “Applied Breathology.”

Handy-Kendi is also a professional Breathologist and Breathworker of over 40 years, who has used her transformative practice of Optimum Life Breathology (O.L.B.) to heal her own cellular memory of childhood physical and sexual abuse, along with other serious adversities.

Thanking you in advance, in the Spirit of the Akoma (the heart).

This article originally appeared in The Afro.