Conversations with Sari Brown

Today we’d like to introduce you to Sari Brown.

Hi Sari, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
The Healing Feast was born out of a deep hunger for healing connection–at first, really, just my own hunger and need for healing, but then I realized I a lot of other people out there felt the same way. I was a pastor in the United Methodist Church for seven years, and I had never felt like I was able to be my fully authentic self in that role or create the kind of community I dreamed of in local churches. I knew I was called to create wild, rebellious, nurturing, creative, liberating spaces for growth on the margins of the systems of domination. And it just wasn’t happening in those traditional structures.

2020 was a huge awakening and turning point for me, as it was for so many, along with all the challenges and suffering around us. I started spending more time in nature. The hectic, compulsive work grind, the disconnected, hierarchical structures of relating–I could see it all so clearly for the lie that it was to support oppressive power structures. I started returning to my roots as a singer/songwriter to create community outside of traditioanl structures that way, and became involved in different spiritual communities and cohorts that helped me dream big and outside the box.

Then after I became a mom in 2022, stuff really got real. There was no turning back. For the sake of my own soul and body in need of healing from a traumatic pregnancy, birth, and postpartum experience, for the sake of my child who came into this world with such a beautiful soul and deserves so much better, I had to forge a new way to be. I quit my job in 2023 and at first I had no idea what I would do to live out this sense of calling and support myself and my family. I kept playing some concerts but that wasn’t feeling as fruitful as I’d hoped.

Then by chance one day a singer/snongwriter friend told me about these “Soup and Song” events she held, and something lit up inside me. I’d always loved cooking for people. I have lived, worked, and done anthropological research in several South American countries and learned their delicious, nourishing recipes, and my husband is from the coast of Oaxaca, Mexico and cooks the most exquisite Mexican food you’ve never tasted. I realized that if I was going to live out this vision of creating holistic community, it had to be just as earthy and embodied as it is creative, spiritual, and enlightening.

I started in October 2024 with the first Healing Feast in the basement of my home church in Ann Arbor, MI. I described it as “dinner concert series,” with the intention of “healing connections with self, others, the earth, and the sacred.” I sold tickets but also gave away free tickets to anyone who asked for them. About 33 people attended, and we brought in over $1000, 10% of which we gave to World Central Kitchen. My husband and I cooked barbacoa chicken, barbacoa tofu, rice, black beans, salsa verde, and hibiscus tea, all from scratch. I sang songs and lead dialogue and other spiritual or embodied exercises around the theme of “Healing Roots.” I was amazed at how much energy, aliveness, and excitement for what we were doing I felt in that room. We’ve had one every month since then, with a different theme and menu and guest artists and facilitators each time, at varying locations around Southeast and Central Michigan. Each one has been totally unique but had that same energy of excitement. A lot of people have described how healing it feels to participate in it. A lot of the same people keep coming back, and even travel to ones further away from their homes.

There is something magical that happens when we share this nurturing food together, when we go deep to talk about these themes together, when we move our bodies and open our throats and unleash our creativity even for people who don’t normally thing of themselves a “creatives.” This really is a healing experience for many people who have participated.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
I recently spent a 12 hour day grinding mole sauce for our last event, so I am not one to believe that anything really good is “smooth” until you’ve worked out all the roughness! And yet, there have also been amazing ways possibilities have opened up and people have stepped into help when I most needed it. When I started planning for our first event, I had no idea even how to make it legal according to food licensing laws, or how I would be able to afford to rent venues and commercial kitchens for something that was based on giving abundance away freely and trusting as much as we needed to come in. It was really one of those “eat an elephant one bite at a time” scenarios.

I was incredibly anxious leading up to our first event. There are so, so many details in pulling off an event like this, and I’ve had help here and there but most of the time I’ve been the only person who is managing the business, promotional, planning, coordinating side of things. I was also just terrified of failing spectacularly–no one would come, or people wouldn’t really be that enthusiastic about what we were doing. I was creating the kind of community I wanted to experience–but how universal was my vision for other people? After the qualitative and quantitative success of the initial event which expanded and increased with many of the subsequent ones, I was finally able to settle into a calmer rhythm of trust and confidence in the value of what I am doing.

Financially, I’ve been amazed at how much abundance people bring to us, whether it is the host venues who let us use their spaces for free or next to nothing, or the people who get pay it forward tickets or extra donations, or the volunteers who give so generously of their time. We do pay our guest artists and facilitators but not usually as much as they deserve for their talent, expertise, and ability to create healing, inspiring experiences.

It has been–and continues to be–a struggle to make the event more energetically sustainable for me. I still earn an average of about $3.50 an hour for all the time I put into preparing for and pulling off each event. I have found more volunteer help to call on in the intense time leading up to and during the event so that I don’t totally wear myself out or stress myself out, but I still need a larger, more consistent pool of volunteers to make it sustainable. I also am struggling to find time and help for marketing, fund development, and even finishing the paperwork to apply for non-profit status–all that behind-the-scenes stuff. But what prevails is always the gratitude for the amazing people that are with me on this journey and are stepping in to contribute in all the ways that they can.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I have been a singer/songwriter since 2002, when I was 15 years old, and I began playing music and recording albums with friends from the Earthwork Music collective. This group was founded by my friend and mentor Seth Bernard, and has included many artists over the years that work together as community builders, activists, collective healers, often focusing on environmental and racial justice and empowering youth and children to use their voices and creative expression for good. I played around the folk/roots music circuit in Michigan for several years and released my first album, a collection of “unconventional spirituals” called “For What is the Journey” in 2004 at the age of 17, then an album called “The Color Suite” that was packaged with a book of poems and stories in 2009. But I had started following a call to ministry in 2006, and I was studying anthropology and religion and living in Peru and Bolivia and writing an ethnography. By 2011, as I was entering my master of divinity program in seminary, I felt I was trying to fit too much in my life and I made a big deal of announcing my retirement from music and playing my last show. In the intervening years, I never really felt complete.

During this critical time of awakening and growth in 2020, I started working on an album called “The Holy Broken Heart.” It was released in 2022 and I still consider it my magnum opus–musically, anyway. I was crowdfunding it in the middle of the pandemic and it really struck a chord with people. I used the music to gather people around healing on many levels, focusing on the mysteries and paradoxes of the healing journey, with mutual witnessing of the brokenness and the holy beauty that is always intertwined in our stories. This was all online, of course, because it was early in the pandemic. So something was still missing in the embodied connection that creates healing.

Now, the main way I use my gifts as a singer/songwriter is to write an original song for each Healing Feast event based on the theme for that month–which is usually a simple, open-ended phrases like “Delicious Resistance,” or “Earthy Epiphanies.” I get everyone together in a circle and teach them to sing the words with me, then lead them in some simple movements to embody the message of the song and interact with each other as they do. It pushes some people way out of their comfort zones, but I’ve seen how even those folks feel freer, more joyous, more connected, more affirmed for who they are afterwards. It feels like the most tangible, transformative way to put my artistic gifts to use that I’ve found yet.

What are your plans for the future?
We are in the process of forming a non-profit! We already have formed a 9-member board and our president is Meaghan Bergman of Goddess Goals LLC, who has been featured in Voyage Michigan also. Non-profit status and structure is the big, exciting next step that will allow us to more fully emrace the model we’re already using of community-supporting and community-supported work. It will also us to pursue new kinds of fund development and be more fully inclusive and sharing of abundance in the ways we market and organize our events.

Non-profit status will also allow me to work on linking this project back to the United Methodist Church, which is still my religious home and the body I am responsible to as an ordained clergy person. This is the kind of thing the church needs to be supporting and doing to create community in totally new ways, and they know it. It’s just a matter of finding a way to connect The Healing Feast with the church in a way that has integrity for both sides. I will not compromise our interfaith, open-ended, no-boxes vision. I am not trying to convert anyone to anything, in the sense of making anyone believe anything or take on any specific affiliations, religiously or otherwise. I’m trying to create a community where we are all transformed by knowing, supporting, and loving each other in our diversity of identities and perspectives.

We are also excited to start bringing the Healing Feast to new places. Within the next year or so, plans are in the works to go to Flint, other parts of Detroit (we’ve only been to Ferndale once), northern Michigan near Petoskey, and Grand Rapids.

Meanwhile, we’re very grateful to be settling in to a more solid partnership with one venue, Central United Methodist Church, across from the state Capitol. They are a church that is all about including and co-creating with diverse, outside-the-box groups like ours. We love working with them.

Pricing:

• $33 is the suggested regular ticket price to one of our events, which helps us cover basic costs
• $22 is the suggest discount ticket price for an event, intended for those who want to contribute something but have more financial limitations at this time
• $55 is the suggested pay-it-forward ticket price, for those who are able to cover their own ticket and help make it more sustainble to give away free and discount price tickets
• Free tickets are always available to anyone who requests them, no questions asks, by emailing us or DMing us on social media
• Or any donation amount is gladly accepted!

Contact Info:

• Website: http://www.patreon.com/thehealingfeast
• Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/thehealingfeast
• Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thehealingfeast