We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Z! Haukeness. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Z! below.

Z!, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.

Two risks in my life mirror each other. 1 – Deciding to switch my major to Black Literature and Art during my undergrad at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and 2 – Deciding to leave my long-term job at Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) in order to launch my spiritual healing business.

I’m writing a book about one of the co-founders of SURJ, Carla Wallace. The working title is “Mending The Wedge,” given her primary work of building bridges across the divide-and-conquer strategy of the ruling class. She has worked to bring people together across race, gender, class, and sexuality for fifty years. Writing the book has inspired me to take a separate look at my own history and trajectory in movement building over the past twenty-five years. Studying Black Literature and Art was a key part of that journey.

The department at UW Madison was rooted in Black Feminism. The chair of the department when I was there was Nellie McKay. She co-edited a bible of Black Literature with Henry Louis Gates Jr – The First Edition of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature. She was a preeminent Black Feminist scholar at the time and was grateful to get a chance to study with her. The rest of the department centered on writers such as Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, and Alice Walker.

During my studies, I got involved in a white anti-racist organization called PREA (Promoting Racial Equity and Awareness). In the early 2000s white people working for racial justice was not a popular idea. The forming of SURJ brought together various people across the country who had been doing this work. Carla and a close comrade that she worked with on various organizing projects, Pam McMichael, sparked the organization formation of SURJ. The backlash that was coming at Obama for trying to pass comprehensive health care reform in 2009 was a major impetus.

After I graduated, I continued to do racial justice organizing. I helped launch a black-centered housing justice organization, and I was there a month after SURJ started back in 2009. I stayed with SURJ for fifteen years and, alongside some other strong leaders, helped grow the organization from an all-volunteer organization in 2009 to 500,000 members and 65 staff in early 2025 when I left.

The uprising of 2020 was a peak year for me, SURJ, and the racial justice movement that we had been a part of growing. SURJ played a large role in moving white people into action across the country. Most inspiring for me was to see the thousands of rural towns where Black Lives Matter protests happened. I grew up in a rural area in dairy country, Wisconsin. The Black Lives Matter movement was largely catalyzed by 3 black women – Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Ayo Tometi. More importantly, they are black women rooted in a Black Feminist history and infused the movement with a Black Feminist ethic. To me, the movement, and in particular the 2020 uprising, was the manifestation of what groups like the Combahee River Collective wrote about in 1977 with their statement that described interlocking systems of oppression, or intersectionality. And the work of other Black Feminists like Linda Burnham, Fran Beal, Kimberlee Crenshaw, and Nelly McKay.

Since then, the familiarity with phrases like Institutional or Structural Racism is much more commonplace than when I was part of PREA, or even when SURJ started.

Making the choice to study Black Literature and Art – because I liked hip hop music, I had read a good James Baldwin essay, and something in me resonated deeply with what W.E.B. DuBois wrote in The Souls of Black Folks, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” I felt the same was true of the beginning of the twenty-first century. This led me on a journey to help build an international intersectional racial justice movement, and the largest organization explicitly organizing white people for racial justice in history.

I’ll share about the risk I took to leave SURJ later.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

For the past six months, I’ve been talking to people about their spirituality and their desire for more spiritual sustenance. After years of community organizing, I am deepening my connection to my spirituality and healing practices in these challenging times.

I use a holistic approach – I focus on healing, spiritual connection, and, when applicable, strategy. I’m interested in supporting justice organizers and organizations to incorporate healing or sustainable practices in their work. And, most importantly, I’m interested in working with anyone who wants to live into their wholeness.

Due to a wide spectrum of experiences, I am skilled in various modalities and am able to adapt what is needed to offer healing to individuals and organizations. I have an idea of where we are going collectively. We are all here at this time on Earth for a reason, and it is time for us to root into that.

Always identifying as a spiritual person, I grew up attending a Lutheran church and was very active with the church choir and the church board as a youth. When I went to college, I tried some campus Christian events, but I had too many questions. Why Christianity vs other religions? Are there other ways to understand the world than through the Christian religion? I started reading philosophy and learning about African oral tradition and Indigenous mythology and spirituality. I stopped going to church. I started doing Zen meditation at a house that was turned into a meditation center with fifteen others.

Through my studies at UW Madison, I saw the spiritual aspects of music, literature, and art. I deepened my work in the oral tradition around the world, which led me to find my own Earth-based pagan spiritual roots in Europe. I studied pre-Christian and early Christian religious practices and looked into the Indigenous Sami people of Norway. I learned from my South and Latin American friends, my Hmong friends, and my Filipina partner about their Indigenous spiritual practices.

My sister was way ahead of the game in my family in terms of doing personal and intergenerational healing through therapy. Healing our traumas is a key part of a spiritual path. I began therapy after my dad died during my senior year of high school and have continued various versions of treatment for over twenty years. My mom has been on her own healing path, which opens space for my transformation.

The community organizing work I did for many years brought me expertise in various organizing and organizational practices. It helped me understand what healing and spiritual offerings I can contribute to those involved in work for liberation. I brought a spiritual focus to my work at SURJ wherever possible – I did tarot card readings for our staff meetings, for example – the merging of spirituality, healing, and intense campaign work can be challenging to balance.

I’m proud that I have followed the whispers that have led me to this new chapter in my life, which is fully aligned with the next steps towards living into my purpose. I’m proud to be writing a book about one of my mentors, Carla. I’m proud of being part of building various organizations that won campaigns such as passing trans health care for County workers, stopping the building of a new jail, getting various people released from jail, developing community farms and gardens, winning ballot initiatives, starting a co-op for formerly homeless/houseless youth, and bringing tens of millions of dollars to build housing for homeless/houseless individuals and families, and helping to build SURJ, and the intersectional feminist racial, gender, and economic justice movement.

Even though I have been a movement leader for many years, I have often spent my time lifting others up and visibilizing their work. It has been rewarding to use various aspects of my creative abilities to promote myself and to share my gifts. In the past, I have led social media campaigns for my friends who are authors in order to promote their books or poems. It has been a leap to be able to promote myself and hone my design skills in service of bringing light to my face, my voice, and my offerings.

Here are a few of my offerings:

Generative Somatics: I first practiced generative somatics in 2014 when a team of facilitators came to Wisconsin to work with our movement organizations across the state. We were primarily involved in the Black Lives Matter movement in Madison, Milwaukee, and a few other parts of the state. I had heard about somatics from friends, and I was intrigued. It was calling to me.

The experience made my heart and body hum. It fully resonated with my Soul to delve deep into the intertwined shaping of our bodies, minds, and spirits in a group setting. During the centering practice of the morning circles, we noticed sensations in our bodies and adjusted our bodies in length, width, and depth. I began to realize ways I was holding my body that, when adjusted, shifted my thought patterns, and brought more aliveness flowing through my hands and chest.

Since then, I have spent forty days at various in-person group sessions, and five years doing one-on-one work with a practitioner. After doing fifteen years of talk therapy prior to becoming a participant in somatics, I quickly noticed the way that the somatics practices and reflections cut deeper into my shaping from trauma. Not just to help me manage my day-to-day thoughts and relationships, but to begin healing old wounds hanging around.

My healing journey has continued over the past five months as I’ve been leading participants through a twelve-session arc of transformation. It has been enlightening to be on the other side, holding space for people’s openings and learnings. Each session includes an activity that helps to shift patterning towards new ways of being. The process is rooted in a “commitment,” or healing goal, that the participant is working towards. Guiding one’s own destiny, rooted in one’s purpose.

The sessions can be focused on developing your leadership, strengthening your activism or organizing, or making shifts in one’s personal life.

Navigating Conflict and Creating a Culture of Belonging: I have helped build and lead various justice organizations in Madison, WI, statewide in Wisconsin, and nationally. I am passionate about engaging in conflict in a productive way that fosters wholeness, organizational health, and cultures of belonging in our movements and world.

One of the main tools I use to teach about moving through conflict is The Triangle. This is based on an adaptation of Karpman’s Drama Triangle, taught to me, and friends of mine, by our therapist. It is a tool that can help anyone identify when we are seeing a situation from the rigid viewpoint of a victim, perpetrator, or rescuer. When we get on The Triangle, all complexity is out the door. We all experience trauma and oppression. Without the ability to move through it and heal, we can begin to live in a narrow-sighted view of ourselves, others, and the world around us. This is when we get stuck on The Triangle, which can lead to chaos, addiction, drama, and disempowerment.

During the workshop, participants reflect on how we as individuals handle conflict and how we can strengthen our approach going forward. We surface ideas for how we or our organizations can improve our approach to handling conflict, use somatic practices to let our bodies and emotions tune into and guide us through conflict, and practice coaching one another to handle conflict with integrity.

The training doesn’t teach how to lead transformative justice processes; instead, it is a wellness check-up to strengthen one’s culture and practices for the inevitable conflicts that happen daily in life and organizations.

I led a training for the Sierra Club Wisconsin, and their Campaign Coordinator Jadine Sonoda said, it helped participants identify conflict and how it feels in the body. The group discussions and small group work we did was helpful for participants to talk through scenarios and conflicts in their own lives.

Community organizing and organization-building are relationship-based activities. All true relationships have conflicts that arise which can be worked through or let go of. In order to build trust, we often have to work through conflict and get to a new shore on the other side. There aren’t many Hollywood movies out there about working through movement conflicts, but there could be! We put so much passion into our work for justice and liberation, we spend so much time doing it, and the opposition tries to fuel the flames of any conflict that arises. We need examples, practices, and support to handle any conflicts that come up, with skill and integrity. Having conflict through principled struggle is necessary to sharpen our analysis and strategy with one another, as NTanya Lee has pointed out.

Creating a culture of belonging goes hand in hand with engaging in conflict. We have to be affirming, have roles for new people, support people’s leadership development, and have a compelling vision of where the strategy of the organization is going. And we also need to be able to accept constructive feedback, and areas of improvement in our work and organizational practices.

Finding Our Divinity Group Sessions: Since January 1st of this year, I have been on a deep spiritual healing path. Building on my somatics work, I have been participating in a spiritual community, which has helped me develop a strong connection with a higher power, and with the feeling of god/goddess/spirit/source within myself, and all of us.

Through my practices, I have learned various ways to conceptualize a relationship with this sacred source. The meditations that I have developed have helped me on my journey, and I’m grateful to be able to share them with others. While I have some spiritual community, I have been craving more, and know that others are as well. Whether people are part of an organized religion or do spiritual practices on their own or with friends, the desire to come together in practice and discussion is strong.

I’m hosting eight weekly sessions with guest co-hosts to lead meditations and spark conversations about spiritual concepts like sacred geometry, opening your heart, quantum physics, living into a new earth, and accepting one’s purpose.

Participants will walk away with a spiritual practice that actually sticks—because it feels aligned with who they are. They feel a deepened connection to spirit/source/god/goddess and the unseen world around them. They have a better understanding and help to envision the beautiful possibilities of the future of the Earth, which we are moving towards.

I support people who feel called to go deeper in their spiritual practice. Those who are shedding old beliefs and want to reclaim their connection to the divine. People that I talk to are craving a sacred community rooted in joy, empowerment, mutual care, and truth. Many believe in co-creating a better world and want their inner transformation to be a key part of this process. It’s not a quick fix, but it is a worthwhile journey. I see myself as someone who on a humble healing path of my own, without answers, but with a desire to be in community with others to support eachother to live our best lives.

Akashic Records: I first listened to the breakout podcast The Telepathy Tapes in mid-January of 2025, and the mention of the Akashic Records caught my attention. A friend told me about the podcast, which explores non-verbal autistic children’s ability to communicate telepathically with one another, and with their parents and teachers. It documents some of the students’ ability to visit the Akasha, a space akin to collective consciousness or the quantum field, with their light bodies, or Souls, and meet other students at a place called The Hill. Here, they socialize with others after school and access vast amounts of information documenting all of history. Some young children have learned multiple languages in this spiritual place of knowledge or had conversations with great scientists and artists of the past.

At the end of the series, the youth who have been the stars of the podcast are asked to share what they most want listeners to take away. The speakers request care and concern for people with disabilities and share messages they have received in the Akasha about what’s to come on the planet. One speaker says, “The miracle is out, God is letting very future information be known now.” Another said that the podcast, and those interviewed, are bringing the message that a new Earth and a new way of being human are being birthed: more spiritually connected, acting out of love and compassion, and stewarding a unified healthy planet.

These statements inspired me to learn how to access this place of direct contact with a spiritual power.

I had some Akashic Record consultations years ago and was always moved by the Akasha, the worldview of the Soul, and the ethereal space of my Soul’s record and journey. I learned at healing ceremonies with my spiritual community that there are quite a few people here in Louisville trained to do consultations, and it was recommended that I get a consultation.

Soon after, I did just that with Wendy Sue Wahl, who is a member of Akashic Records Consultants International. She was immediately able to hone in on my core wounding of my father’s death when I was a teenager, and the subsequent abandonment issues that stemmed from that time. I cried a cleansing cry for most of the session. At the end of the session, I was grateful to hear some of the affirmations about my path and purpose, which Wendy Sue received from the Masters, Teachers, and Loved Ones of the records.

Subsequently, I took Wendy Sue’s class to get trained. It has been a joy and a spiritually nourishing experience to begin to open people’s records and share information about their purpose, pathways to healing, and visits from ancestors. Maybe the most profound consultation that I have done was for my mom. Many of our shared ancestors came through vividly. I got to know her more intimately after all these years, and she developed a healing connection to a nourishing spiritual source.

Artist as Activist + Activist as Artist – During movement moments when I have been whole-heartedly engaged in community organizing, I seek out music that reflects the feeling in the air: Janelle Monet’s Say Her Name or Pynk, Macklemore’s Hinds Hall, Beyonce’s Formation, or Halluci Nation’s Land Back are some that hit my soul at the right time. I have always been nurtured and inspired by the intersection of culture and creating a new world. I love beautiful banners at protests, I love visual art that conveys a message and a feeling of the political moments we go through, and I love books and poems that open our pain into flowers.

During my MFA program in January of 2025, I developed and taught a class called Artist as Activist + Activist as Artist. The workshop pulls on some of my favorite political artists and examples of how I have seen art and community organizing overlap. At the core, both creating art and community organizing are creative processes.

At its bare bones, this is an interactive writing workshop in which we explore the symbiotic relationship between art and activism. We delve into some of my favorite political artists and activists who live and work at the intersection of the two.

The main topics include:

1 – Manifesting Through Activism: exploring the creativity of activism and organizing,
2 – Visioning the Future We Want: using imagination to inspire our art and activism,
3 – Art Reflecting Activism: Examining how art can paint a picture of the movement,
4 – Art Enhancing Activism: using poetry, puppets, visuals, or dance to enhance protests, campaigns, or organizational work.

Art and activism go hand in hand to usher in the concrete improvements we need in people’s lives. Art can inspire personal transformation, individual and collective action, and cultural change. It can point us toward the future that we want to live in and clarify our message. Art can be used to sustain activism and organizing by making our rallies and actions more powerful with visual art and spoken word poetry. We can use an essay, a poem, or a piece of fiction to bring more imagination to our organizational meetings. One of the participants of the workshop, Brenda Radchik, said that she loved how much of a focus there was on manifestation and using our imagination to create our realities.

I’m offering the workshop as an adaptable stand-alone workshop for an organization, one person, a group of friends, or a classroom of high school or college students.

I love to work at the intersection of healing, liberation, visioning a new world/earth, connecting with spirit, building community, creating, and joy. My consulting business is called Z! For Beauty because I want to live in a beautiful world and offer my own contributions of beauty. My astrology includes a Taurus sun, moon, Venus, Mars, Mercury, and Chiron. Tauruses love to evoke all the senses and live in the richness that the Earth has to offer. I want to live in that place of richness together with the folks whom I interact with.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

In 2024, I worked on the presidential election to try to stop Donald Trump from becoming president again and implementing an authoritarian agenda. SURJ had one of the largest democratic voter contact programs outside of the Democratic Party. We made millions of calls to voters and knocked on tens of thousands of doors. We went hard, and we had a two-year build-up of growth and experimentation to get there. And my co-director of our department was leading a cross-departmental team of thirty-six people. We were doing big things with a great team.

The week of the election, I ended up in the hospital with sharp pains in my heart and chest. I went twice. They couldn’t quite figure out what was causing them, but generally attributed them to stress. I was feeling stretched and exhausted from the past few months, the past few years, and the past twenty-five years of going heart-first into movement moments and struggles for justice. Regularly working sixty or more hours a week.

I needed a change of pace. I shifted and started my new business. I have lost weight. I have gotten my nervous system back into order. This has come with the help of my spiritual community, my generative somatics community, my family, and my friends.
Being able to create programs and trainings to share with the world has had some level of stress, but also a freeing feeling of bringing my creativity to light.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

Building on my opening story about taking the risk to major in Black Literature and Art, leaving SURJ was another time that I made a pivot for the better. It feels in line with a broader spiritual awakening that is emerging on the planet.

This choice is new, but I’m already feeling the vast implications of making this choice. I have been able to delve deep into spiritual concepts like those mentioned in my Finding Our Divinity sessions. All of this is rooted in my healing journey and undoing traumas that I picked up during childhood and adulthood.

The work that I’m doing now relies on faith and personal healing. We are up against a lot – public benefits and government agencies continue to face cuts and attacks, the US authoritarian President using the military to quell protests against fascist Immigration enforcement, and there are ceasefire talks are in process right now, following nearly two years of genocide in Gaza, loss of israeli life, and broadening conflict with Iran.

We are at a time of a great shift cosmologically. The outer planets, Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Pluto, and Jupiter, are shifting signs. The Hopi, Mayan, prophecies and calendars point to a shift during this time, we are moving into the Age of Aquarius, and the Earth’s axis is shifting on its 26,000-year cycle. We are shifting into a golden age, a time of a New Earth.

The old is crumbling. The systems of white supremacist, Christian nationalist, cis-hetero-patriarchal capitalism are taking one last grasp at power before we move into a time of being heart-centered, love-based, unity-conscious, and spiritually sovereign. It is written in the stars. This means all of us shedding any aspects of these systems that we have taken on, regardless of our identity.

The work that I’m doing is to support people in moving into this time of collective ascension. This requires shadow work, healing our trauma and intergenerational trauma, while also opening to joy, community care, and living into our purposes.

I’ve taken a risk to live into the current path, or timeline, of my purpose, and it is paying off. I hope to continue the journey alongside you.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://zforbeauty.org
• Instagram: @zforbeauty
• Facebook: https://facebook.com/zhaukeness
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/z-haukeness-b8a994141
• Youtube: @zhaukeness907