Afleveringen
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Roshni is a trauma-informed, embodied sexuality coach who helps women andnon-binary vulva owners connect to their bodies and find their sexualpleasure, power and wildness.She is a Certified Sex, Love and Relationships coach, a Certified FemaleSexuality coach, a Certified Male Sexuality coach and a Certified Jade Eggcoach. She has completed a year-long (650+ hour) training in the Sex, Love andRelationships Certification with Layla Martin’s VITA (Vital Integrated TantricApproach) Institute. She is currently training in Somatic Experiencing® (a 3-year Practitioner Training in a body-oriented therapeutic model that helpsheal trauma). When she is not coaching or creating content, you can find her drawing nakedwomen and reptiles, communicating with and savouring the life force thatemanates from trees, grass and natural bodies of water… and enjoyingquality dark chocolate.
This episode we chat about:
🌈Societal shame surrounding sexual practices across gender expression and orientations
🌈The journey towards sexual empowerment and healing
🌈Roshni’s personal story of growing up in a conservative environment and finding her path to becoming a sexuality coach
🌈The importance of trauma-informed care, consent, and exploring one's sexuality with curiosity and without shame
Episode Resources
www.daliakinsey.com
Decolonizing Wellness: A QTBIPOC-Centered Guide to Escape the Diet Trap, Heal Your Self-Image, and Achieve Body Liberation
Connect with Roshni
https://www.roshni.live/free-gift
Episode edited and produced by Unapologetic Amplified
This transcript was generated with the help of AI. Thank you to our clients for supporting us as we strive to improve accessibility and pay equitable wages for things like human transcription.
Dalia Kinsey: Hello everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Body Liberation for All. I'm excited to bring to you a guest who can help us tackle a really important topic in all communities, but one that tends to be a little more.
of a traumatic area in LGBTQIA-plus communities, and that is sexuality. There's so much shame tied up in a lot of sexual practices across the board, even if they're considered mainstream and kind of vanilla. But if you happen to be a queer person, depending on where you're born and what community you're born into, there's probably even more shame related to anything that has to do with an encounter with someone of the same gender or someone who is gender nonconforming. So, I'm excited to have Roshni here. Roshni is a trauma-informed embodied sexuality coach who helps women and non-binary vulva owners connect to their bodies and find their sexual pleasure, power, and wildness.
Welcome to the show, Roshni.
Roshni Dominic: I'm so happy to be here with you.
Dalia Kinsey: And I love looking at your website, one, thanks for including people who have vulvas who do not identify as female. And two, I see the metaphor between food and orgasmic pleasure throughout the website, which resonates with me because I want for people to be having more pleasure across the board because it's so much easier to pursue habits that give you a payoff in real time instead of putting it off. But so many people are afraid of pleasure because pleasure in general was seen as a bad thing or taboo thing. And even when it comes to food. Some people are uncomfortable having a very pleasurable, maybe orgasmic experience with food.
But at the same time, everybody knows that correlation can be there. Yes, for sure. Everyone needs to look at the website so you can see the visuals that I'm talking about.
Roshni Dominic: I love that.
Dalia Kinsey: Go ahead. Oh, sorry. Didn't mean to cut you off. So, because you are a person of color, you probably already have an experience with sexuality that a lot of us can relate to, even though you're mostly a straight person.
Can you tell me a little bit about how you came to be sexually powerful, even though you came from a patriarchal upbringing, like most of us are in patriarchal cultures all over the planet. There's almost no matriarchal representation on the planet right now. How did you get to where you are?
Roshni Dominic: Yeah, so, um, firstly, I love that you noticed the food analogy throughout the website and how, you know, it's pleasures, pleasure, right?
Food, sexuality, it's all, it's all connected. Um, so I love that you noticed that and just coming to answer your question about my upbringing and how I, how I became a sexuality coach. So, yeah, I mean, my upbringing was, um, it's, it's a triple conservative upbringing. So, uh, I was born in Bahrain, which is in the Middle East, which is right next to Saudi Arabia.
So, Bahrain is right next to Saudi Arabia. And then I was born in this, um, conservative Indian families with a conservative Indian upbringing. And then lastly, I also was raised Catholic. So, I went to Catholic primary school as well in Bahrain. So, um, so it's. It's, it's not what you would call an environment conducive to becoming a sex coach.
Um, and, uh, you know, it's, uh, I remember like in my primary school, they actually cut out the pages in the science book, which had the reproductive system in it. So, but we all found out anyway, because my cousin got the book that didn't have the pages cut out. And she was like, oh my God, look at this. And we're like, why is that what they're hiding from us?
So anyway, um. But you know what? I'm privileged in that I always, I had this deep connection with my sexuality, like it emerged. I mean, I was very, um, scared of my sexuality, understandably, right, in the environment that I grew up in, but also, I had this deep connection that was emerging, and I'm very privileged that my body was, um, in a place where it wanted to heal, starting around 10 years ago, where I really dove into my Sexual journey, um, and sexual healing and delving more into pleasure.
And yeah, so I'm, I'm privileged that my body felt safe enough to heal, um, and felt safe enough to follow those breadcrumbs. Um, that, you know, the breadcrumbs where my body was like, oh, go to this trauma specialist to do this course. Um, you know, explore this, uh, program and, um, you know, and then. And everything that I explored, I'm just really grateful and privileged that my body felt safe enough to do that.
Because if it didn't feel safe enough, it was not going to happen, right? So, yeah, that was, that was how I became a sex coach. I just followed the breadcrumbs and, uh, found that this was really, really fulfilling and, um, purposeful and meaningful for me.
Dalia Kinsey: Did you simultaneously feel like you were starting to reclaim or fully own your sexuality as you were doing the training or did that healing work come first?
Roshni Dominic: I would say the training came first. Um, and then the healing came after that because the training came first, you know, I was delving into, um, Jade egg and Yoni eggs, as they call them, so Taoist methodology, and then some Tantric as well, um, and then just general, like, orgasmic stuff. So, there was all that and I came into it with this mainstream mindset of, um, you know, possibly influenced by Hollywood and things like that.
Which is just one facet of what sex can be like, right? So, as I did this training, I discovered more things, which I was like, Hmm, what if there's more? And then the healing happened, the healing of, shall we say the overlay that society kind of overlays over sexuality and says this is how you should have sex, and this is who you should have it with and how many times per day and how frequently and these are the sex practices you're supposed to do and that's it, nothing else, anything outside is weird or forbidden, right? So that's where the healing came in is actually
My sexuality is mine and it's not for somebody else or a society to tell me what to do and how to express it.
Dalia Kinsey: Yeah, that's a powerful statement in itself that it is yours and no one else should be telling you how to express it I know that can feel really tricky if you have training in a religious context a social context, and a familial context that says everybody gets to tell you how to express your sexuality, especially if you're assigned female at birth.
Everybody has something to say about how you express your sexuality. Your sexuality. So, to get to a point where you fully understand your body as well that you get to decide. That sounds like it could take a while for a lot of us to get there.
Roshni Dominic: Yes, it's still, I'm still on my journey with that to be honest.
Still on my, it's not that I've reached the perfect Nirvana of this or anything like that. journey.
Dalia Kinsey: Yeah. You mentioned you had to feel safe enough in your body to do this work and you're also trauma-informed. And I know sometimes people hear the word trauma and they're thinking something again, maybe influenced by Hollywood.
They're thinking of a certain type of PTSD, or it had to be a massive event and they feel like maybe there are some things they don't feel comfortable discussing or feeling or thinking about, but they don't recognize that you could have trauma responses, even if you've never been through anything that you maybe would define as trauma.
How do you define trauma in the work that you're doing? And tell me a little bit more about why feeling safe in your body is a prerequisite for this work.
Roshni Dominic: Yeah. So, um, I would define trauma as something that, I mean, there's many definitions of it, but one that really resonates with me is too much too fast.
So, something that was very overwhelming, that one could not, that one didn't have someone who was safe enough with them to help them through it, to support them through it, um, and another definition is too, too little for too long. So, so, you know, if you, if one didn't get that, um, the connection with the primary caregiver and the support and love of the primary caregiver, and that was, you know, it was not there in their early life, for example, that would be too little for too long.
Um, so it's anything that our nervous systems find overwhelming. Um, but We're not able to process because if we were able to process it, it would naturally, that's what somatic experiencing, which is what I'm training in right now. You know, the body is very wise, and it knows what to do, right? Once it feels safe enough and it's in a safe enough container and feels that safety, then it will process that trauma and release it.
But if we've not been able to process that trauma and release it, then yeah, it just remains as a trauma of something that happened. Too much too soon or too little for too long, for example.
Dalia Kinsey: It seems like now we are seeing more health care providers and coaches being more informed around trauma, understanding that you could have the best of intentions.
But if you're not aware of when you're pushing too much you can do even more harm to the clients you set out to help. So, what is the role of trauma in sexuality and why is a trauma-informed person approach so
Roshni Dominic: important. Yes. I'm really glad you brought that up about, you know, if, if one pushes too much, then it can cause harm.
And that's exactly why being trauma-informed is really important. Um, I, my biased opinion is it is a prerequisite to, to this work in sexuality is, um, you know, sexuality is very tender topic. So that's, Reason number one, I would say, to be trauma informed is many people have gone through, unfortunately, um, you know, experienced sexual trauma or abuse.
Um, and, and as you were saying, you know, sometimes we think, oh, we haven't gone through any trauma, but then living in this rigid Binary society that says this is how sex should be and this is who you should do it with and how often and anything outside the norm is weird or wrong, like that itself can be inherently traumatic as well, especially for LGBTQ plus folks.
Um, and so in my view, it's so important to be trauma informed, uh, to prevent harm from being caused, um, to the client. Um, and in, in like the, the definition for me for trauma informed is not. putting more stress on an already stressed-out system.
Dalia Kinsey: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I know, um, you mentioned Actually, okay, maybe didn't mention it, but I know I have it here in writing that you specified you create a safe enough space, understanding that there's technically no way any of us can guarantee a safe space.
I know sometimes I'll say something's a safe space or a safer space as a shorthand, but also knowing that I can't guarantee. And I'm a safe space for anyone. I'm a human with flaws and internalized bias, and you never know when you're going to say something that could be a trigger for someone else. But how do you create a safe enough space for this type of healing work?
Roshni Dominic: Yeah. Um, it's really humbling, right, that we can't, like, as you say, we're all human and we might, we might make a mistake. Um, and so first thing I would say is to create a safe enough space is respecting the person like that's really important and we're not there my role as a trauma-informed sexuality coach is not to tell the client how they should feel or what or how they should even feel about their sexuality or what gender they should be or what sexual orientation they should be or how they should think about something My role is to help them find their own inner wisdom about all of these things.
And then the other way I create or aim to create a safe enough or safer space is by welcoming all parts of themselves. Welcoming everything that arises, um, not pathologizing any part of themselves or, or any part that arises. So that's really, really important, especially again for LGBTQ Folks who are oppressed, and they've been told or given the message that They are wrong parts of them are wrong that sort of thing.
So, it's really important Um to not pathologize anything that comes up and instead to welcome everything that comes up every part of them that comes up um, and then we were talking about, you know, making mistakes which can happen even to the best, most experienced practitioners, it can happen, right?
But the important thing is to make a repair when that happens is to acknowledge that the mistake has been made, that that happened, and then to make a repair, to apologize sincerely, and then ask the client how they felt about them, what they would like to express, you know, so that's really, really important.
Um, and then. Yeah, really? It's welcoming every part that arises. I think I've covered it all. Definitely the repair when making a mistake and just letting the client know that there's nothing wrong with them and one final thing, I want to say on that as well is for many for many LGBTQ-plus folks, maybe they are in a period of uncertainty.
Maybe they don't know what their sexual orientation is. Maybe they're not sure what their gender is at this point. They might have many questions and no answers, right? Because they're usually trailblazers in their community. They might be the first one in their church, or the first one in their high school to be, you know, experiencing something like this.
It's really important to, when creating, in order to create a safe enough space, to be To, for me to be the person who is with them through the uncertainty so I can be with them through the uncertainty, not, you know, pressuring them or rushing them into making a decision or arriving at an answer, but really giving plenty of space to be there with them with the uncertainty for as long as it takes for as long as is needed.
Dalia Kinsey: Yes. I think that's an uncomfortable place to be in most humans like certainty and for things to be clearly defined. And I think that's one of the things that can be so challenging about having an orientation that is eclipsed in your culture or there's just no real sex ed provided for people with your orientation.
It feels like other people are provided a template and then we don't get anything. But at the same time, maybe that template that the straight people are getting is also trash because then it becomes a box and then the sexual expression is limited to what you were told is. When in reality, anything that two adults consent to is normal and fine.
I think letting go of the idea that you have to have it modeled for you, for you to be able to experience it and engage in it. It's a little scary. scary, but it's a really powerful point to come to. How do you relate to the importance of sexual expression in relationships in general? Because I've noticed that a lot of straight folks will maybe overemphasize how important sex is in queer people.
Like they'll make queerness just about sex. When really for a lot of people who are demisexual or they need connection to have sex, or they, in general, prefer to only have sex with people they have feelings for, it's really more about who do you tend to fall in love with, not necessarily who do you want to go to bed with.
So, I feel like a lot of times straight people are more obsessed with what. Queer folks are doing in the bedroom than they ought to be like even going so far as wanting to know who's the top and who's the bottom or wanting to know what it needs to be versed when I would never ask A straight person like, oh, do you go down on your partner or do you swallow?
That's obviously not an okay question to ask. You're just having like a regular conversation that's not about intimacy with someone. But I hear a lot of straight people ask like, who’s penetrating who? What are you talking about?! Like, these are not things you ask people. It's too intimate, wanting to know what genitals you have? ‘I'm confused by your gender presentation.’
How do you relate to the importance of sexual expression and relationships and balancing for folks that for some people, it's really all about love and connection and the orgasm actually isn't that big of a deal.
Roshni Dominic: Yes. So, I would say the client is an expert on themselves, right?
So just so, um, as we were talking about earlier in terms of, I'm not an expert on somebody else if they come to me as a client, I will help them find their own inner wisdom because I respect the fact that they're an expert on themselves So for everyone who orgasm is not a big deal. I invite you to embrace that embrace That orgasm is not a big deal for you.
Maybe sexual expression is not a big deal for you. Maybe having sex with someone is not a big deal or you don't really care for it. But what you want is the romance and the love instead. And I really invite folks listening to embrace. What your inner wisdom tells you because nobody has any right, first of all, no one has any right to ask people these, um, quite intimate questions about their sex life in a normal conversation where they're not expecting it, um, especially without consent.
So that another part of being trauma informed is the consent piece, um, which is really important. And I really feel that I really feel, um, that unfortunately these, these boundary violating questions sometimes come up and I really invite folks listening to feel into their bodies and, and, you know, feel, uh, whether there's a boundary violation here happening.
And if so, then please feel free to say, actually, I don't feel comfortable answering that question. Yeah, so own it, own it is what is my invitation to, um, everyone listening. Whatever your sexual expression, maybe you're asexual, then own that. And I know it's, I know this is, this is so easy to say, right? Own your self expression.
And I also want to really acknowledge that it's hard to do because, not because there's anything wrong with any of us. It's not our fault. It's the systemic oppression, um, and living in this rigidly binary society. So, I also want to say. Please don't feel bad or like you're broken or something's wrong with you if you can't own it.
Um, you know, but I would also invite as much as possible to really, um, to really own how you feel. Your, your authentic expression of your sexuality.
Dalia Kinsey: Yeah, that's really helpful. A friend of mine is going through training to be a sex therapist, essentially. And one of the things that he was explaining to me is coming up again and again in the training is that things that he maybe already knew intuitively, there's research to support it.
Like that for people who report having the most pleasure during encounters, it can't be measured by the orgasm. But one through line is. Like how in sync, you are with your partner. So, I know that comes up a lot in tantric sex, like really getting in sync, maybe even the way you're breathing naturally starts to get in sync, or maybe even your heart rate gets in sync with the other person, and you feel like an intense level of connection, which I would think probably increases the likelihood that you would have an orgasm, but everybody's body is so different. You know, you can never really be sure. But what have you seen in your work experience? Like who is getting what's the through line in the folks that are experiencing a lot of satisfaction in their sex life?
Roshni Dominic: Yeah. So, the folks who are experiencing a lot of satisfaction in their sex life are not afraid to ask for what they want. They're not afraid to go and experiment and find out what they like and what they don't like. Um, it seems that they do have more of a connection with their partner or partners because of course, um, you know, we support, uh, all relationship structures or, um, lovership structures.
It can be, um, you know, you can have one partner, more partners, one lover, more lovers, absolutely fine. And, um, so it does seem that, uh, a connection with the, with the lover or lover's partner or partners does enhance. Um, and also there's, there was a study, um, that was done, I think it was from Finland, uh, where they said that, um, I think it was a study done on women in particular, where the women who liked, who had a positive view of their genitals actually had better pleasure and better sex.
makes perfect sense to me. So, it's about, um, healing any shame that is, which again, not our fault, it's a society and systemic thing. Um, but once our body feels. safe enough to heal that shame. Um, people find that they more often than not have, you know, experienced much more pleasure, much more love for themselves.
And self-love is, is always beautiful for more pleasure as well.
Dalia Kinsey: Yeah. What do you usually do with clients that, let's say they're not comfortable with their genitals and maybe they are pre-gender affirming care. What is the bridge between being able to enjoy your sex life right now before you feel comfortable in the body that you're in?
Roshni Dominic: Yeah. So, my approach is welcoming everything, welcoming whatever comes up for them when they think about their genitals, when they look at their genitals. Um, and. Um, welcoming everything and being with them because being with is actually really important. Even if I don't have anything to offer in terms of saying sometimes just being with the co-regulation with someone else's nervous system is super important.
Um, because you know, their nervous system then kind of realizes, okay, it's a safe enough space here for me to be with whatever arises for them to be with what arises and I'm there supporting them while everything is arising for them. So definitely, that would be one piece, and another would be, um, inviting them to actually give their genitals a voice.
And asking if their genitals want to communicate with them. And I know that sounds a bit strange, but I believe that, you know, genitals are sentient. They are a part of a living body. Right. And so, they have something to say, too. So, opening that communication with one's genitals, I find is extremely important because it's.
If you had a friend who you never talked to and didn't like, um, you know, how much of a friend would that be, right? Like, what would your relationship be like? Whereas if you, if you were to say, hey, I know we haven't had a great relationship, but I'm curious. And this is, this brings me to the next point.
Curiosity is such a superpower. I tell you, superpower in healing. And when I say healing, I don't even mean like, oh, we have to be healed because there's something wrong with us. No, it's actually about embracing. Healing. Um, my trauma specialist mentor, Shelby Lee, said embracing trauma rather than healing trauma at one point, which I thought was so beautiful.
I have chills saying this because it's about embracing, embracing what shows up, embracing the ambivalence or the not liking the genitals or whatever shows up, um, and being with it because it's not wrong. What's coming up is not wrong. It's not bad. It's just coming up and we're just there to care for it and tend it and give it space.
Because the body is wise, and all these feelings and everything coming up, they're wise, and maybe they have a message for us, maybe they're there to show us something, and it's really about embracing and seeing what happens, and curiosity is a superpower for that. So, getting curious, what do your genitals want to say to you?
What would you say to your genitals? What do your genitals need? What might you need for a good relationship with your genitals or even a neutral one to start with?
Dalia Kinsey: Yeah. I like the idea of a neutral one being an option as well, because maybe, yeah, maybe we're not going to get to 100 percent loving every part of our body.
Roshni Dominic: And that's okay too. It's all welcome. And that's where compassion comes in. Compassion for the parts that just won't change no matter how much we want them to change. Um, again, easier said than done, but even this is where I say to my clients, how about just having 1 percent compassion or 1 percent curiosity?
You don't have to go, you know, the whole go home, was it go hard or go home? Like we don't do that for men from sex coaching. We really don't. It's all about 1%. We call it titration and somatic experiencing just a tiny bit. Can we let this feeling be here just for a few moments?
Dalia Kinsey: Yeah. Okay. That makes a lot of sense.And I feel like when you think about how you define trauma, that really goes hand in hand with that. Yeah. Definitely. I know for some people, depending on how they were socialized, they may think it is their job to give their partner orgasms or it's their job to be multi-orgasmic during encounters. It's really interesting that messaging.
And again, I think we can usually. Thank Hollywood for this. And we could think pornography in general for this because I've never seen a porn where there was not an orgasm, or a money shot as people might say.
Talk about not being connected to reality. Cause like when you talk to your friends or, well, I know not everybody overly talks about sex, but based on what I have heard there should be at least some porn out there where nobody has an orgasm because that's the reality.
So how do you help people make peace with the fact that you don't have to derive your worth when it comes to sexual expression from how many orgasms are had or, you know, experience during an encounter?
Roshni Dominic: Yes. What a beautiful question. I just want to say before I answer that about porn, I read in a book, uh, once I think it was called, Everything You Know About Sex is Wrong, it's great book. And then there was like the reason we don't see any of these subtleties in porn, like people having no orgasms with just some pleasure is because the camera can't capture it. You know, there's, if someone is putting a screaming orgasm, then the camera just can't capture it because it's too subtle.
And I thought, yeah, well, it makes so much sense why we're not seeing, you know, just two people dying there next to see, because it would be too boring for the camera, apparently. Um, so to answer your question. Uh, but deriving one's worth from, from the number of orgasms one has. So, I will say this is quite personal to me because I, um, had this innocent misunderstanding.
I don't even want to say I fell for the trap because I very innocently came to this misunderstanding because of society, Hollywood, Cosmo, et cetera, about how, um, you know, the number of orgasms I have leads to my worth, right? Like more orgasms equals more worth. And I just want to invite everyone listening to.
Um, consider like what if that wasn't the case because I've in my belief system that is not the case anymore after a lot of healing, I found out that actually my worth is inherent. And that's why I invite folks listening to, um, consider that your worth is inherent. There's no number of orgasms or money or success or insert, fill in the blank, anything else external that can change your worth because your worth is inherent.
These concepts of worth and unworthiness, they're all human concepts that we made up to understand stuff, right? Because actually there's no such thing. I don't think there's even such a thing as worthy or unworthy. It's just everything is and everything. is worthy. I mean, even if you remove the whole, I know we're getting a little bit, um, esoteric here, but if you just remove the whole worthy and unworthy, what's left, right?
It's existence. And it's just, there’s so much inherent worth, it's not even a question of worthy or unworthy, if you know what I mean. But if we are going to talk about worthy and unworthy, then everyone's worth is inherent. You exist, therefore you're worthy. Therefore, there's no number of orgasms that can change your inherent, infinite worth.
So, you may as well go and have the pleasure that you want. And I'm not saying orgasms are bad, orgasms are beautiful, but so Is so is other forms of pleasure as well, and I heard it described in a magazine once somebody said, um, you know, our bodies like a fairground, and we only hop on the same two or three rides every time.
Why can't we go, you know, hop on every ride on the fairground? And I thought that was such a beautiful analogy and orgasm just made me one ride, you know?
Dalia Kinsey: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And even that people wanted to capture something. More visual and that being the pattern is really interesting. I know there are some well I don't even know if some I can think of one company that is a queer owned like trans feminist type of lens pornography company and they will sometimes focus on a person's face because you can read like ecstasy on someone's face also, but that's very different from what most people probably saw growing up.
Well, I shouldn't say growing up, I guess early in your adulthood, who knows whatever you started coming across these sorts of things. I've heard some things, and this is more like a film Hollywood type of realm, that Gen Z is more sex negative and that they don't even want to see sexual encounters and film like they tend to give negative feedback about any kind of sexual encounter being presented on film.
And I don't know where this is coming from, because it seems like in the 70s and going forward, people were kind of over-sexed or like thinking about it a lot but dealing with how taboo it was and happy to see it portrayed in film. Have you noticed a shift between generations when folks come to you?
Roshni Dominic: I would say that Gen Z are a lot more, uh, from what I've seen, they're a lot more comfortable, um, how do you say, embracing their, you know, sexuality in terms of, you know, maybe they, um, identify, like, if they identify as gender non binary, they might be more comfortable to do that.
Um, openly as opposed to someone maybe from an older generation. Um, and I feel like Gen Z in many ways are the rule breakers and I think in many ways they kind of have to be because like, look at the state of our planet. So, so I'm so grateful that they are, you know, coming out in droves of the rule breakers as well.
Um, so I wonder if the, their reaction to the, um, to the sex scenes on, on in movies and stuff is just like, can you stop giving us the same old formula? Like this is what we're supposed to do. And can you please show us something different, but that, you know, be more inclusive. Be more inclusive about other sexual experiences, not just the same old heterosexual penis in vagina sex, which, which apparently, we're all supposed to have according to society.
But no, we don't like it for authentic. Many people's true authentic sexual expression is not that. So, can we see something else, please, that is also authentic to people? So, I wonder if that's a kind of a, we are so tired of the same old BS of being told this is how we're supposed to have sex.
Dalia Kinsey: That makes a lot of sense that I could see where it could definitely be that people are maybe wanting for things to be more real because of how real information is that you can access sometimes on social media.
Like you're used to now seeing all types of lived experience reflected online. But in popular media, it's still pretty hetero-centric. I did see recently; I think it's called Strange Passengers. It's basically a romance that covers the McCarthy era all the way to the AIDS epidemic between one closeted man and one man who was living openly, even around like the Harvey Milk era.
And there were really beautiful, well filmed between those two main characters. And I've never, I've never seen that. And anything that I would consider mainstream before, like an actual love story between two men with sex scenes that had some complexity to it, like where you could see intimacy connection and, you know, that you don't need a vagina for sex. It's not necessary.
Roshni Dominic: Exactly. I mean, so beautiful. And that's what I want to see is more scenes like that, more different scenes that are different to what, you know, we've been seeing this whole time.
Dalia Kinsey: Yeah. That's encouraging. Now I'm seeing a lot of overlap between how I try and work with people in reclaiming pleasure around food and claiming pleasure in your body around sexuality.
How have you seen claiming your power, your sexual power influence claiming your power across the board in life in general?
Roshni Dominic: Yeah. Your question just made me think of the connection between the mouth and the pelvis. If you've, if you've seen diagrams of the vocal cords and genitals, for example, or the pelvis and the skull with the muscles. All of this looks remarkably similar to the point where, um, I've heard Saida Desilet callthe mouth, the vagina of the cranium, because like, it's so similar, the, um, the structures even, and the anatomy.
And also, there is a connection, but like tension in the pelvis usually leads to tension in the jaw, vice versa. So, it's quite connected this whole sexuality and food thing, I think. And, um, in terms of, yes, so claiming sexual power. So, I just want to say before I dive into that, um, really what I'm about to say is for those folks who actually resonate with the phrase of sexual power and sexual energy, there might be folks who don't resonate with that at all.
And that's absolutely fine. You know, you are welcome and included as well. Um, it's just that this a particular thing I'm about to talk about is for people who resonate with those phrases, sexual energy and sexual power. And so, um, just, you know, take what resonates with you, leave the rest is what I want to say.
So, diving in, um, if you do resonate with the phrase sexual energy and sexual power, and you feel you have sexual energy and sexual power, then I would really invite you to claim that because anything that we don't claim, we end up subconsciously suppressing. And anything that we suppress, it takes a lot of energy to suppress something that's naturally supposed to be, you know, vibrant and vital and there, right?
So, yeah, it's an energy drain. It's an energy drain to suppress. That's something that is a part of you, that you feel is a part of you. And so, if you feel that you have sexual energy and sexual power and they're a part of you, I strongly encourage and invite you to claim that because it is part of your overall power.
If you don't claim it, and again, not your fault if you don't claim it, you know, that's the whole systemic aspect of why, why we have been. discouraged to claim our sexual power. But unfortunately, the side effect of not claiming it is that energy drain and power drain. And we end up not claiming our full power in the process.
Dalia Kinsey: Yeah. That really resonates that you can see though, how it's something that may be. You will need a guide as you work through and I'm sure there's a lot that we can do on our own But like with most things it can be really helpful to have a non-judgmental person walk with you through these processes and hold space for you and affirm the things that come up because most of us have never had any of our any of our feelings about pleasure or accepting our bodies or exploring how we connect to other people, we haven't had a space where we can talk about it openly and have our concerns affirmed or have curiosity encouraged.
Roshni Dominic: Yeah, absolutely. And one thing I want to say as well, um, is that, you know, as a trauma informed sexuality coach, um, it's important for me to let my clients know which, what are my marginalized identities and what are my privileged identities as well. So, if they come to me and they want support with, for example, exploring their sexuality or their pleasure, then, um, uh, you know, it's important for me to to put that put that in the space.
You know, these are my marginalized identities. These are my privileged identity so that they know against come back to that safe enough space. Um, so they know it's safe enough to talk about that where our, um, you know, for example, our marginalized identities overlap, or our privileged identities overlap.
And if I find that they, um, that I that they have a marginalized identity that I don't, then I can acknowledge that and I can acknowledge we have different levels of privilege, and I can practice allyship. And another important thing as well is that if we share a marginalized identity, I can't assume their experience of their identity is the same as my experience.
For example, a brown person coming to me, I mean, I can't assume that their experience of being brown is the same as their experience of being brown. Bisexual person coming to me, I can't assume that their experience of bisexual would be perhaps my experience of being bisexual. So, um, yeah, this is why I mean, I highly encourage folks if they want support, definitely, you know, feel for which modality or methodology resonates with your body.
And then I would strongly and strongly recommend that they're trauma-informed as well so that they can hold that safe enough space for you. Um, and also that they are, you know, acknowledging their privileges as well as their marginalized identities, again, to make it safer space.
Dalia Kinsey: Yeah, it's really interesting that you specify you can't assume when you have shared identities that your experience of it is the same because I've definitely had that issue in a therapeutic relationship with like another black American, assuming that we have all of the same cultural influences going on and that we were socialized exactly the same.
And it caused a big rift because they just kept on assuming things and not centering my lived experience in the appointment. And prior to that, I had never even, understood that that could be a problem, but boy, oh boy, was it a problem. So, it's helpful that you clarify that for practitioners that are listening.
Just remember every human body is different. And if you're providing inclusive care, that means you're centering your client in every appointment. They should really be talking more than we're talking because we are. Teaching them to rely on their internal wisdom and getting information from them is the best way to figure out how to support them and go forward and you really can't do that if you never let them talk.
Roshni Dominic: Oh my gosh, yes, yes, yes to everything you said. Yeah,
Dalia Kinsey: Take that in people. So where can people find you if they'd like to work for you? I'm sorry, if they would like to work with you.
Roshni Dominic: Yes. So, they can find me at Roshni.live. And there you can find, um, yeah, some blog posts I write, which I do. You can jump on my email list if you want to. And there's even a free gift there, a free PDF with an audio embedded in it as well, um, for those who, um. would like to get out of their head and into their body. So that's something people say a lot. Oh, I want to get out of my head and into my body. And, you know, that can be like, it can almost be like, oh, you know, is someone going to force me to get out of my head and into my body?
And actually, no, that would be harmful. So, my PDF and audio is trauma-informed, which helps you take very gentle steps, and always with your consent. Always, always, it's very, very consent-based, very titrated, which means tiny steps. Um, and you know, there's a description of how to find a resource. So, you're always kind of resourcing yourself as well when needed.
And it's about a very gentle and trauma-informed way of getting out of your head and into your body with the utmost compassion and care for yourself. So yeah, feel free to visit my website and download it there. It's under the free gift section.
Dalia Kinsey: Everybody check that out, especially so you can see the food and sexuality visuals.
Roshni Dominic: Yes, I had a lot of fun with those grapes, Dalia. It was so fun.
Dalia Kinsey: They did a beautiful job.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit daliakinsey.substack.com -
Recording artist and songwriter 2AM Ricky is best known for utilizing his platform to bridge the intersection of LGBTQ advocacy and entertainment. He uplifts marginally perceived communities while building trans awareness, one song and conversation at a time.
In 2021, Ricky became the first black transgender male artist to land #1 on any music chart, with his single "Whatchu On (ft. CeCe Peniston)" peaking on the LGBTQ Urban Charts. His extensive portfolio includes several placements with credits including CeCe Peniston, Tyler Perry Studios, Zeus Network and more.
Ricky has helped industry professionals, corporate leaders, and creatives worldwide to develop language and best practices for transgender healthcare and education, intersectionality, inclusive strategies, and mental health. He recently released a new album titled "Listen If You're Lonely", a musical exploration of mental health, relationships, and life from a black masculine perspective.
This episode 2AM shares some of his story with us and we discuss:
🌈 Growing up without LGBTQIA+ representation and becoming a visible member of the community
🌈 Living a blessed life and finding your calling
🌈 Navigating transphobia in reproductive healthcare settings
🌈 Words of wisdom 2AM has for trans and non-binary young folks
Episode Resources
www.daliakinsey.com
Decolonizing Wellness: A QTBIPOC-Centered Guide to Escape the Diet Trap, Heal Your Self-Image, and Achieve Body Liberation
Connect with 2AM Ricky
https://2amricky.com/
https://www.instagram.com/2amricky/
Episode edited and produced by Unapologetic Amplified
This transcript was generated with the help of AI. Thank you to our supporting members for helping us improve accessibility and pay equitable wages for things like human transcription.
Have you ever wondered why almost all the health and wellness information you see out there is so white, cis able-bodied and het? I know I have. And as a queer black registered dietitian, I gotta tell you, I'm not into it. I believe health and happiness should be accessible to everyone. That is precisely why I wrote Decolonizing Wellness: A QTBIPOC-Centered Guide to Escape the Diet Trap, Heal Your Self-Image, and Achieve Body Liberation and why I host Body Liberation for All.
The road to health and happiness has a couple of extra steps for chronically stressed people, like queer folks and folks of color. But don't worry, my guests and I have got you covered. If you're ready to live the most fierce, liberated, and joyful version of your life, you are in the right place.
Body Liberation for All Theme
They might try to put you in a box, tell them that you don't accept when the world is tripping out tell them that you love yourself. Hey, Hey, smile on them. Live your life just like you like it
It’s your party negativity is not invited. For my queer folks, for my trans, people of color, let your voice be heard. Look in the mirror and say that it's time to put me first. You were born to win. Head up high with confidence. This show is for everyone. So, I thank you for tuning in. Let's go.
Dalia Kinsey: Thank you so much for coming on the show at 2 AM Ricky and I met recently at a 100 Black Trans Men Event that was focused on reproductive justice. And while I was there listening to your story was so impactful. I already knew, of course, that there are a lot of health disparities throughout the country for black folks, for people that have a womb and for trans folks, like when you're more than one type of marginalized, it really gets more and more difficult to get good access to healthcare.
But just hearing your story, it was so visceral. I really appreciate you putting in that emotional labor to share your story with other people, and to do all the advocacy work that you're doing in addition to being a young person who's making their dreams come true. It seems like a lot to tackle at once.
So, I'm so happy that you're here, and I would love to hear about a little bit of your story that maybe people don't always get a chance to hear. Like, how did you know, as a young person in North Carolina, a young Black person, that all that you're doing right now is possible, and if you didn't know it then, what had to shift for you to be open enough to life to be able to get to where you are right now?
2AM Ricky: First of all, I'm from Winston Salem, North Carolina, so I'm from, I would say, a smaller town. I wouldn't say too small. I've seen smaller cities, but a smallish town. And I grew up in a space that everyone knew my family, everyone knew who we were, the history of them. And so navigating through, coming from a small place that everyone knew who your people were, but you might end up going through certain things and we all know in Black culture, "what happens in this household, supposed to stay in this household" type of thing navigating just trauma overall, and knowing that I needed someone who could be a voice for me, but that was also a situation where I needed a voice, and I knew that I was coming from a place that a lot of people looked at us for the voice, and so it was a very complex situation.
And so I wanted to make sure that no matter what I did and no mattervwhat it was that I became, I just wanted to make sure that I made a great impact.
Dalia Kinsey: Okay. So how old do you think you were when you started realizing you wanted to have reach?
2AM Ricky: I, it's interesting because I actually got into music. My first like real project was called "Hiatus" and it was based around the death of my brother and best friend and he used to always say that like he used to always tell me that I will be doing these things and I will kind of like argue against it.
Oh, not because I didn't think it was possible, but because of the weight that I knew came with it, I, as a young kid was like, even now I'm pretty introverted. So I'm not going to say I'm not a people person, but people like me, and I would rather just watch people.
Dalia Kinsey: Oh, I, I can relate to that so much. So it sounds like you actually got a calling.
I think there's lots of different ways we can decide to live our lives. But some people, you know, have a passion that they want to share with others. Or they have a thirst for fame, but I don't think an introvert has ever thirsted for fame. So you're just tolerating attention that comes with sharing your gift.
2AM Ricky: Basically, God says so. And I feel like when I tell him, no, he kind of bullies me a little bit. So we just gonna flow with what he said.
Dalia Kinsey: Oh, the facts. Yes. If everybody can just. Learn to get out of their own way. When people keep telling you like, Oh, but you're so good at that thing. Or like, Oh, that thing that you did, it's still on my mind.
I really think you should push a little further. It's usually easier for other people to see our potential than for us to see our own potential. But I find that a lot of times, especially for queer folks and trans folks, that because we're being undermined in other ways. That sometimes it's even harder to trust yourself, so you know who you are but being your full self, sometimes people reject it or you see them rejecting other people like you, and that may make you feel like, well, maybe I can't trust my gut.
Did you ever have any, any need for breakthrough around that being trans and from a southern state? I mean, y'all consider your, yeah, yeah, y'all are southerners. Yes. Okay. Just because North was in there for half a second, I questioned myself, but yeah. What was it like? What was the trans acceptance like the LGBTQIA
acceptance in general, like when you were a kiddo in the 90s?
2AM Ricky: I would say, well, I didn't really get exposed to too many queer folk when I was coming up. Like we didn't, I grew up more so in an area that was like more like faith based. Like you didn't really see people if they were LGBTQ, you didn't really see them talking about it.
It wasn't a lot of trans representation. So, even once I did get to the point of like, I started going to like, Black queer community. Cause I graduated high school at like, 16. So, I went to college really early. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I was like sneaking into clubs at like 16, 17, chilling.
Dalia Kinsey: I'm surprised you got in cause you look like you're barely 21 right now.
2AM Ricky: You know what? I don't know how I got in either. They never, like, I don't know how I've done a lot of things in life but I'm here. So, somehow, I was in there, and I was in there faithfully.
Dalia Kinsey: So... I guess they just figured, you know what, he's cool. Maybe.
2AM Ricky: Everyone treated me as such.
I don't know how I got in. Favored. Favored, lets call it that.
Dalia Kinsey: Oh, I like that. Do you feel like in general, despite what other people might see as, oh, it's a difficult identity to be born with, that your life has been blessed?
2AM Ricky: Definitely. I think that my life has been very blessed. I don't at any point think that my identity or anything negates the blessings or grace that's on my life.
If anything, I feel like there is a special grace that's on my life for me to be able to navigate certain spaces into having the calling that I have. But to be within my identity. I think that in itself says a lot about the favor that was on me when I was created and when my purpose was in mind. And so I live in that authentically.
I don't take that for granted. And when I do find myself in times of taking it for granted. I always humble myself by reminding myself of the fact of anyone else could have been chosen, but I was, and anyone could have been chosen in any type of design and body is, is how I was created to be able to fulfill whatever purpose it is that I have on this earth.
Dalia Kinsey: I love that. For music it sounds like the first real connection you felt with music and creating your own piece of work was linked to an emotional experience. Did you need that push to feel like it was time to express yourself in that way? Did you have any fear around performing or people judging your creativity?
I'm fascinated by anyone who does creative work. Just knowing how scary it could be to do a work of nonfiction where there's lots of guardrails. So to see artists walking off into like the great unknown, it's very impressive. So what was that step like for you?
2AM Ricky: I've always written music. Even as a kid, I was known for walking around with like a drawstring book bag with a binder, you know, it'd be like full of like lyrics and poems and stuff like that.
And so for me, it was like, I've always been vulnerable within my art and within my creativity, and I'm a person who naturally, like, I know my flaws. Vulnerability is one of them. Like, I think my, like, my calling has forced me to do that because I have to do interviews and stuff like that and talk to people.
But like on a regular basis, I wouldn't just randomly just be telling people what's in my heart. So, music gives me that gateway to also connect with people in a way that normally I might have to battle even myself with.
Dalia Kinsey: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It feels like again, it was inborn, like something you just had to let become, not something that you had to become.
It's like you came here ready to be an artist.
2AM Ricky: Yeah, I can say that, like, every obstacle that I've had, even within my personal life, I can see how, like, I'm a very faith based person, and so, like, I can very much see how when people say that, like, everything works out for your good. I can, I'm a person that can, like, really stand on that.
I advocate for that. Like, I, I can reflect on my life and see how every little thing, good, bad, indifferent, has aligned to what I am doing now and the impact and influence that I'm making now to the world.
Dalia Kinsey: I love that. I know, depending on how your life is playing out, sometimes it can be hard to see how a bad experience could ever serve you or make you any stronger or do anything for you.
What do you say to other young folks? Young trans folks who are dealing with families that aren't being affirming and watching how the political environment has completely turned against trans folks and basically all queer folks, but the people who are really getting the most heat, it's definitely trans folks.
How do you kind of explain that to a younger person that you can still do what you want to do with your life? And this doesn't define you, but you also should be allowed to be in spaces where you feel safe and you can show up fully.
2AM Ricky: I would say that for one um, I would say for one, I'm a living example.
I think that I, even though I battle with vulnerability, I am vulnerable for the mere factor of there are kids just like me who need to see what someone like, who looks like them looks like to live in their truth and to make it through not having acceptance and make it through not feeling like they have support and make it through feeling like they are not seen and let them know that anything is possible.
As long as you're alive, as long as you're breathing, regardless of what the circumstances feel like in that moment, everything is nothing but a moment. Like, literally, no matter how bad today is, you're gonna go to sleep, and you're gonna wake up. And tomorrow, you're not gonna be in that moment. It might be things that feel the same, it might be circumstances that feel the same, but you're technically no longer in that moment.
So if you can just focus on making sure that you live for the next moment, you make it for the next thing, you keep pushing. For that next moment, because that moment that you're no longer in that circumstance will come.
Dalia Kinsey: That's really helpful. And we really, I feel like as a, I hate to say as an elder to some people, I'm now an elder.
When did that happen? But it is helpful just to be seen so that people understand that even if you don't know any older queer folks like in your family or in your area that we're out here and a lot of us have survived really rough times. And we just want to see everybody make it to the point where they can look around and notice.
Wow, my circumstances completely changed. I found my real family, people who can hold space for me and support me and make me feel safe, and I never thought I'd get here, but you have to hang on. Some of us have to hang on longer than others to get to that point where you notice. Oh, it's true. Things really do get better.
Yeah, when it's come to navigating some areas are more tricky than others when it comes to navigating queer identity and trans identity. And the healthcare system is one of those areas where you go in because you're in need of care, you usually go in in trouble. It's usually a bad situation or a bad situation is looming on the horizon.
And you can't always go exactly where you want to go. You can't always go to the providers that are trans inclusive. How has that process been like for you? Because I feel like in general, everybody who could be anyone who could give birth, we all notice that there's an issue with providers not listening to us.
So I would imagine, That tendency is really, really problematic when you're a trans man and you're trying to explain to maybe an ignorant provider what your concerns are and why you came in. Like, do you have any pointers after having to navigate health care systems as a transmasculine black person in particular, because sometimes we're even less likely to be listened to.
What have you learned from having to deal with the health care system?
2AM Ricky: For one, a lot of our healthcare professionals are very uneducated on how to properly care for trans, non binary folks, especially those of color. For one, I would urge every medical professional practitioner to bring in a Black trans strategist and consultant, and bring them in frequently, and the reason why I say frequently and not just once a year is because times are changing, medicine is always evolving.
And what we learn about ourselves is constantly being updated. But it's very important to have different perspectives of not only care, but also within the marketing materials given out within your facilities, within the photographics that we see up on the walls, making sure that representation is seen in every area, that the receptionist, especially the receptionists, have proper training, because they're the first instance that a patient gets and first interaction that a patient normally gets, And from personal experience, I've had instances of walking into the office, like you said, in trouble, in pain, there's a major issue, and literally being told, sir, why are you here?
This is for women. You're not supposed to be here. You don't know where you're at. Being, being argued against as I try to check into my own doctor's appointment.
I have had nurses literally argue, nurses and doctors argue with me again even become very aggressive. I've had instances of doctors and nurses getting aggressive with me.
Dalia Kinsey: Even after you, so..... this is such a mess. So after you've already cleared the first hurdle, which is checking in with an untrained receptionist that doesn't understand a birthing person could have any kind of gender presentation.
So you dealt with that person. And then you get into the room and then there was more resistance as to why are you here? Why are you here?
2AM Ricky: Yeah, I've had it both when I've been met in the room, but when I walked in at the receptionist. I've had it once. I've made it into the receptionist trying to be seen.
I've had it. I've had doctors offices wrongfully give me medicine because they didn't know what to do. And then the doctor themselves come in and me and the doctor going at it because they're misinformed. And they're, you know, using the wrong pronouns, the wrong language and extremely uneducated.
I'll never forget when I had uterine cancer. I had to go get a test and I remember a relative coming with me and finding out I had gotten bad results. And the person not only not having any compassion, but because of them being so uneducated, their lack of, and because they had, I guess, a personal opinion against the queer community as a whole, their personal opinion came out instead of proper care.
Mm. So instead of getting the news that, hey, this is what's wrong, I got papers tossed at me with a person who's been arguing against me and insisting I shouldn't even be in that space. Oh, luckily, I've been to the doctor's office that I could read and had someone with me who understood that could, although that was difficult for them, because this was a relative having to say, oh, crap, here we go.
This is what we're dealing with. Oh, in the midst of were heated, we're arguing down nurses, practitioners, we're having Black women coming aggressively approaching me and I'm having to keep the my composure like, lady, you don't even know.
Dalia Kinsey: This is wild. It's like the way the transphobia becomes so violent so quickly.
I don't think people are, I don't think people are getting it. Like how is it that a paying client, a paying patient can come into your facility and experience this kind of abuse. And I know they still sent you a bill. I know they didn't say don't worry about the bill because we were a******s while you were here.
2AM Ricky: Oh, no, not at all.
Dalia Kinsey: They never do that. That's just...
2AM Ricky: Like, I've, I've literally, like, any doctor's office who I have, when they give me any little bit of experience the person who runs this knows who I am. Because... I will go to every power that be and let them know not only this is what's been wrong. I'm actually a professional and an expert who gets sent out to go consult to people.
So let me explain to you what trainings you need, who you can call, and where you can find these folks.
Dalia Kinsey: I love that. It's every, you're always ready with the reframe. Is this a learned skill or is this something An adult taught you, like, do you remember a role model who's always like, that's all right
I know exactly what we're going to do with this lemon.
2AM Ricky: It's really a survival technique. I think, like, if you're trans and being masculine. I think the masculinity plays into it too, like learning to and having no other choice but to have to constantly know how to navigate, how to flip a situation, how to get yourself out.
And whereas a lot of people may try to respond with aggression and frustration, I get frustrated too, I get angry, I get all of those things. Y'all ain't gon see it. I got my core people who I feel safe if I need to throw something at a wall in front of them. Right. They gon hand it to me. But besides that, I've just learned that, like, the safest way to protect myself and protect others in my identity
it's quick conflict resolution and quick de escalation. As a black transmasculine person, I'm constantly being stigmatized as aggressive. So if I'm the person who's trying to de escalate, you can't say I'm aggressive. If I'm being stigmatized as the person who's trying to be overpowering but not coming in kind, not coming in, Hey, friend!
You know what I'm saying? Like... Then that stigma can't be placed upon.
Dalia Kinsey: Yeah. Oh, someone was telling me, I, I just, because I present as femme, no matter what I've tried I keep trying to radiate neutral, but I don't guess I really know how to do that. But people basically generally regard me as Black femme, and I get that having to control your reaction because everyone already thinks you're going to be aggressive, but a trans masculine Black friend of mine was saying that I have only seen a fraction of what it is to not be able to speak your mind because people assume masculine Black folks are even more aggressive.
I was assuming y'all are out here living like a better life, a freer life, being able to say what you wanted to say, not realizing that that pressure to keep making yourself palatable is on all Black folks, regardless of gender presentation. And that it actually gets worse, the more masculine you are.
2AM Ricky: So I would say, honestly, people say that passability is a privilege.
I say passability is a pressure. I have this expectation to now live up to the standards of what they think I'm supposed to be, live up to your standards of what I think you think I'm supposed to the standards of my past, so why are you having these problems? Like there's so much that comes into it. And then there's also the pressure of, I don't want to say, like, there's a pressure to be the superhero.
There's a pressure to make sure that you fix the problem because you're viewed, always viewed as the person that everyone expects is going to get listened to anyway.
Dalia Kinsey: Wow. That's, that's seriously, that's something for everybody to... Take in this is a wild thing about systemic oppression is that it even hurts the people who look like they're benefiting from it, but I keep being surprised when I hear about it from the masculine standpoint, because we hear about the patriarchy and obviously the patriarchy sucks but still
in broken systems, where someone has to be small or less than for someone else to be powerful, everyone's being hurt. I feel like that's the, that's the lesson. It's just hard to remember. So if there was some parting piece of wisdom, you could leave with everyone. And I'm assuming we have some trans babies in the audience.
I know we have some non binary babies in the audience. What's a bit of advice you would give them if they magically could internalize it, even if it's one of those things that you know, it actually takes years to learn, but let's just pretend what's a piece of wisdom that you would want everyone to internalize and understand for themselves and carry with them through life.
2AM Ricky: For one, write everything down. Every dream, every goal, everything that you hope to become that feels impossible. Write it down. And revisit it. Update it. Because when you write it down you begin to manifest that and turn that into reality. For two, I would say, find your, find that happy place. And for some people that happy place is a place of faith, it's meditating, it's whatever it is, find that happy place.
And make sure that that is not something that is another person, it's not something tangible, it's something that you can hold on and you can access at any given moment that you need it, that you need to feel protected, um, because that's something that no one can take away from you. And three, remember that every influence and inspiration and icon that you have is a human too.
And a lot of us have experienced a lot of the same things and probably experienced some worse things that you probably don't even know about. And knowing that, know that if we can do it, so can you.
Dalia Kinsey: I love that. Oh, that's such a beautiful note to leave it on. Can you tell us where we can find your most recent album or honestly, just any find you period?
2AM Ricky: Y'all can follow me on all social media platforms @2amricky, it's number two AM like in the morning R.I.C.K.Y. Make sure y'all go check out my new album. Listen if you lonely, it's available on all social, all listening platforms. My single Cream was actually just up for Grammy consideration, so we'll see what's happening next month.
And yeah, I just, I really appreciate you bringing me on board and just let me talk to y'all.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Body Liberation for All Theme
They might try to put you in a box, tell them that you don't accept when the world is tripping out tell them that you love yourself. Hey, Hey, smile on them. Live your life just like you like it
It’s your party negativity is not invited. For my queer folks, for my trans, people of color, let your voice be heard. Look in the mirror and say that it's time to put me first. You were born to win. Head up high with confidence. This show is for everyone. So, I thank you for tuning in. Let's go.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit daliakinsey.substack.com -
Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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“When we break bread with others/strangers, we begin to cross boundaries, which in turn creates a bond that removes ‘Other’ from our lexicon even if momentarily.”
- Chef Kuukua Yomekpe
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe is a the founder of Asempke Kitchen a catering, pop-up, and Culinary Experience company that specializes in providing great plant-based options to traditional West African cuisine.
In this episode Chef Kuukua shares her entrepreneurial journey as a queer Black cis-woman living with an invisible disability.
This episode we explore:
🌈 Giving yourself permission to follow your joy
🌈 The impact of Anti-African and Anti-Black bias on building a business
🌈 LGBTQ life in Ghana
🌈 Managing chronic illness and a creative life
Episode Resources
www.daliakinsey.com
Decolonizing Wellness: A QTBIPOC-Centered Guide to Escape the Diet Trap, Heal Your Self-Image, and Achieve Body Liberation
Connect with Chef Kuukua Yomekpe
https://www.asempekitchen.com/
https://www.instagram.com/asempe_kitchen/
Episode edited and produced by Unapologetic Amplified
This transcript was generated with the help of AI. Thank you to our supporting members for helping us improve accessibility and pay equitable wages for things like human transcription.
Have you ever wondered why almost all the health and wellness information you see out there is so white, cis able-bodied and het? I know I have. And as a queer black registered dietitian, I gotta tell you, I'm not into it. I believe health and happiness should be accessible to everyone. That is precisely why I wrote Decolonizing Wellness: A QTBIPOC-Centered Guide to Escape the Diet Trap, Heal Your Self-Image, and Achieve Body Liberation and why I host Body Liberation for All.
The road to health and happiness has a couple of extra steps for chronically stressed people, like queer folks and folks of color. But don't worry, my guests and I have got you covered. If you're ready to live the most fierce, liberated, and joyful version of your life, you are in the right place.
Body Liberation for All Theme
They might try to put you in a box, tell them that you don't accept when the world is tripping out tell them that you love yourself. Hey, Hey, smile on them. Live your life just like you like it
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Dalia Kinsey: Welcome back to body liberation for all. today's we're going to be talking about the vibrant world of African cuisine with a special guest. I'm super excited to have her on. I have been trying to explore things that I may have lost because of colonization and on that long list of things that we have lost is our connection to traditional foods and since presumably almost everybody who's of African descent in the US who descended from enslaved people came from somewhere on the west coast of Africa. I've basically been exploring cuisine from the entire west coast of Africa. But I'm still still a novice. So super excited to have Kuukua on today. And because we're going to have some visual references in this episode, I want you to know that you can check out the podcast on YouTube, along with a growing library of videos we're making for you, just like body liberation for all the mission is to promote the health and happiness of queer folks of color.
And. to try and help providers who want to be better hosts for us as well. So if that is something that you would like to tap into, do not forget to subscribe. And if you want to see some of the things we're talking about in this episode, be sure to check out the YouTube video. So welcome to the show, Kuukua.
How are you doing?
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: I'm doing well. I have had quite an exciting couple of days. I was in Florida. It was nice and very hot. And came back yesterday and it's about 50 something up here. Central New York, finally. Other than that, I mean...
Dalia Kinsey: So, you've been doing a good bit of travel, because we met recently at NGLCC, which is the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, essentially.
And you can tell from the name that it's been around for a while, because the name doesn't really sound like it's including... all of the rainbow. But that's just because it's been around for a while, but it was really exciting to be in a place with so many entrepreneurs, so many queer entrepreneurs. But I was a little surprised at how little focus there was in the content on passion.
My assumption was that a lot of us start our businesses because there's something we're passionate about that we want to share with others. But it really had more of a large business focus, which generally in capitalism, big businesses exist. To make money. There was a need in the market and they seized it.
It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with passion, but when you were talking about what you do, it clearly started with passion. Can you tell us a little bit about your journey to the United States even and then becoming a self trained chef. I'm so impressed by all self trained everything because it's obviously a legitimate way to build skills.
But it's something that I think a lot of us are afraid to even attempt because maybe we've been a little held back by public schooling or traditional schooling kind of leaves you feeling like you can’t do anything without a guide.
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: To join my mother and her brother who was doing a PhD at Ohio state. And so my mom is an RN, retired RN. And so she was at Mon Carmel in Columbus, Ohio. So that's how we ended up in the US. She had been living away from us since I was four. And so I'd been raised by my grandmother, her mother. So came to the U S when we first came, I realized my mom was making friends, mostly.
Through her nursing colleagues and some other immigrants who were either nurses or in home health. And so she spent quite a bit of time with them, you know, sometimes on the weekends, but not always. But definitely at Thanksgiving and at Christmas and any other major holiday like Labor Day. cooking African, you know, Filipino, Ethiopian, you name it.
We had all the different dishes in the house. And so that kind of sparked my interest in feeding other people because I wasn't trained. I didn't go to school for that, you know, because as an immigrant daughter, you went to school to become a doctor or a nurse or a lawyer or even better if you went into banking, right?
So I got interested in cooking for others and feeding others through all those different potlucks that we were holding. And eventually people started asking us for catering. And so my mom and I got an extra stove and put it in the garage, which was probably illegal. But we did it and started cooking for catering.
Nothing big, you know, like people who were going abroad and wanted to have like a little fundraiser, people who were taking their students to Ghana, who wanted the students to get a taste. So I did a little bit of that and then I moved out to Indiana to work for Notre Dame. So once I got there, I got sort of, I infiltrated the black community.
So there was a lot of students of color who had very little knowledge of Africa. And so I cooked every weekend and had them over in my apartment because I lived in in the dorm. And so that's how that part got started. I left Indiana to California to do my second master's. And while I was there, I started catering, paying for my rent through little side job and then cooking classes.
So that's how it all started, you know, just slowly, slowly building. And then seven years ago, I decided I was leaving higher ed. I'd worked in higher ed about 25 years, and I was going to start my own business. I did it for two years, full time, mostly on loans and credit cards. And then I fell. So I had an accident and while I was carrying some pot.
and could not walk for three months. So I had to put the business on hold, went back to higher ed, and that's how come I ended up in New York in central New York. So it's been a journey of, you know, getting to this point of doing it full time and legally, like being an LLC actually about to convert into an S 4.
So it's, you know, it's kind of through its iteration, and we came to the U. S. in 1996. So it's I think about 27 years of just playing with the idea, going into higher ed, teaching, doing the things that were sort of respectable by the immigrant parent standards, right? And then finally going, this is what I really want to do is work for myself.
And I want to work for myself, feeding people. And that's, that's really where my passion is. It's like, if someone says, thank you, that was the best meal I've had. Thank you. That was so comforting. My job is done, you know, so I feel so good. Oh yeah, that's been my journey. Well, what did your
Dalia Kinsey: parents say or what did, I don't know if there was one parent who's more focused on their vision for what you should do professionally in the States, since you did give their path a chance.
Were they more on board when you said, you know, I'm clearly a full grown person, and now I realized I want to do something different. Did they just say, all right, well, we
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: support you. So my dad passed 20 years ago, actually, 2003 August. So he's been gone a while. And so he never really got a chance to, you know, be a part of our life in the U.
S. He lived in Ghana and never came to the U. S. So. Mostly it's been my mom and she has been focused on the pension, right? So as a, as a registered nurse, she had a pension and she's getting social security, um, and is able to live a pretty decent. You know, life in her older age because she has those amenities, right?
And so that's her biggest problem is like, what are you gonna do when you cannot lift the pot anymore, right? Whatcha gonna do, where's your retirement coming from? So she stresses about that a lot. And you know, every now and then when things aren't going so well, she's like, are you gonna return to higher ed
I'm like, no. So, you know, I think for her it's. It's really about survival after. I can't do what I'm doing. You know, right.
Dalia Kinsey: And that, that's a real, that's the tricky thing, especially when the people that came before us put pressure on us, that's based in a desire to protect us. But we know that maybe our circumstances are a little But the pension thing even weighs on me.
Some in most positions, you know, pension doesn't even exist anymore, but in education and in a lot of government funded jobs, the pensions are as they have been for years and years. So that, that is something that I think about when I say, I want to go all in with my business. Where did you find the clarity?
to remain faithful to what gives you joy.
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: I can't say I have complete clarity though. I think what has been really helpful and continues to be is that I'm partnered to an amazing woman and she has a full time job. And so we've kind of traded off. So I had kept my higher ed job until two years ago.
When I went full time. So October 15th, 20, whatever, 21, um, I, I quit and I went full time business. It was really a rough start because COVID was still in existence. Food gatherings were not a thing, you know, we're not back yet. pEople are doing catering or takeouts. And so I, I got into that. But it's been really a blessing to have her by my side because.
Knowing that mortgage is paid and homeowners association is paid and some credit cards are covered and I will never go hungry because she continues to work makes it easier to kind of run along, you know, and do my, my thing, my passion thing. I think it would have been rougher and I would have borrowed for money.
At this point I don't have any loans, either from the government or from any bank. So I've been running on my cash flow, which is not enormous, but it kind of keeps me going enough that I haven't borrowed anything. And I think a big, a big chunk of that is, is related to her support and being able to just
Yeah. Yeah.
Dalia Kinsey: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. I was in a coaching program a couple of years ago that was for BIPOC creatives and entrepreneurs. And they talked about safety being crucial to giving you the freedom to explore your passions. And it's something that if you're from a working class family,
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: a lot of
Dalia Kinsey: us just.
have to build that sense of safety. And we have to acknowledge that's something we have to take out the time to create. So a lot of blockages that I kept hearing people in that cohort talk about they blame themselves for Like, Oh, I don't believe enough or I, I'm, my mind sets off and I'm not willing to go all in, but safety was an issue, whether it was financial safety or some other fear of being verbally abused or something, because you pursued your passion, which you would think that food should be neutral.
It's something we all need to live, but it absolutely isn't neutral. can be really politicized. We hear a lot about European cuisine,
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: but it's very rare
Dalia Kinsey: that we see African cuisine featured. And I would think that maybe you've gotten pushback about your choice of cuisine. Have you experienced that? Or what is your interaction?
With the
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: market been like it has dependent on where I was. So with being in initially in Ohio, we had a good following. We focused on doing traditional meat. So go and lamb. We did chicken occasionally, but not always. And then we offered three vegetarian. Ohio was rough because there were, I think, Whoa.
There were then about six or eight Ethiopian restaurants. There were a couple Ghanaian restaurants and other like Senegalese and such. We were very much working to appeal to the non African. And so the people who were interested and wanted to explore the cuisine. But weren't sure how to access them, especially since some of the neighborhoods were not the best parts of town.
And so your average white American was not going to enter those neighborhoods not knowing what they were going to do, right? Or what they were getting themselves into. So we were downtown at a deli that was pretty frequent, you know, frequented by a lot. It was diverse, but most of our customers ended up being Caucasian customers.
We did not we weren't able to move forward in, in Columbus, mostly because we weren't we weren't able to get our own space and a result of that was people's attitudes towards African food. So a lot of people who were approaching for space were like. This is the stuff you find on M. L. K. Boulevard, which everybody knows M.
L. K. Boulevard is where the Blacks are, right? No matter where you are in the city, that street has been renamed, you know that's where the brown folks are, right? So in their head, even one person said, We're not sure the kind of people you're going to attract. Right. And I called him out on it and he was like, Oh, that way, you know, blah, blah, blah.
And so it was really, really sad that we kept being met with roadblocks after roadblock. wE also tried out for a food hall. Which, in retrospect, was definitely not my, my passion and not where I wanted to go, but in, in the moment it felt like we needed a space to get our, our name out, to get the word out, and to be in a central location.
where we were, we were able to reach a different crowd of people than our own other African people who, for the most part, aren't eating out, right? So most of us know how to cook. So we, we cook at home. If we eat out, we eat out the grilled tilapia or the thing that we can't do at home. So that's also sort of the downside.
Like we're not feeding Africans because they're cooking their own stuff, right? so We, we, we were met with different at different points, but with different roadblocks. We have done well in Ithaca, I think, because the population is diverse. It's well traveled. I cannot tell you how many people I've met who have been to Ghana, been to Senegal, Togo, Benin.
So there's well traveled, they're well traveled. They are. Very curious people and they are very accepting. And so we've done really well here and are contemplating our own space. Possibly it's gonna happen. I think the curiosity is there here, whereas we didn't have it the last two places where we've been, and that has prevented us from moving forward and, and becoming our own little space downtown or, you know what I mean?
Yeah, that's really
Dalia Kinsey: interesting. I think with a lot of things, sometimes you can think, Oh, maybe my idea just won't work. But what if it's just the wrong place? You know, yeah, that's a pretty important lesson. Well, we, so you mentioned a lot of different countries. Now, does your,
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: so the name of your
Dalia Kinsey: business is Asemp,
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: I'll let you say it.
Asempet Kitchen. So Asempet means curiosity in my language, which is fancy, which is from Ghana, West Africa. So it's not a language that's spoken anywhere else on the West Coast. Unlike Hausa or, you know, Igbo or, you know, other languages, Swahili, for example, is spoken in a few countries Fenti is very, very, you know, central to.
The central region of Ghana. Hmm. So that's one
Dalia Kinsey: of the unaffected languages by colonization. Like, that was a language that was already there. Oh, how exciting!
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: Is that your only other language? No, I speak Ga which is also coastal south, south Ghana, southern Ghana, but very central, centralized not spoken throughout the country as much.
And then tree, and tree is kind of like our language that binds all people. So just about your average person on the street speaks tree because it's kind of like, it's not the patois because we do have our own like mix mix English and tree and, you know, some other words in there which right now I'm blanking on pigeon, so pigeon is what it's so we do have that, but I speak Fenti and Gaa, which are very, like, localized, and then Trio, which is kind of, like, most people can understand it.
And even if they don't speak it well, they can get it, get by. So while
Dalia Kinsey: you were living in Ghana, were you eating cuisine from neighboring countries? Or, like you mentioned, you said, most people from Africa, in your experience. know how to cook. So what was eating out like? Was that for special occasions or for when
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: you were traveling?
So eating out really only happened for like graduation or birthdays or any, you know, big events confirmation, those kinds of things. And we would eat out in a probably a traditional Ghanaian restaurant, but it would have spaghetti, which is technically not Ghanaian. And we could get meat pies, which are kind of like turnovers or empanadas.
We could get grilled chicken. So we get things that we wouldn't cook at home, like the grilled tilapia roasted chicken, those kinds of things we would not cook at home. So if we ate out, that's where we would go. I didn't have Indian, I didn't have Mexican, I didn't have any of those other cuisines until I came to the U.
S. Now, however, that is a different story altogether, right? So globalization has burst on the scene. You can find just about any cuisine in Ghana that you desire. I don't know how authentic they are or how good the food is because I didn't. I didn't do a whole lot of eating out when I was home this past March.
My mom lives in a relatively oh, I wouldn't call it the ghetto, but it's it's definitely You know, not the best part of town. Oh, she decided to move back. She did. Yeah. So she moved back three years ago. She's coming up in, in a month for a few months and then she'll be back. She'll be going back. Oh, but she lives where my grandmother bought housing, which when she bought was a really nice neighborhood and has kind of gone downhill since then.
She's, she's done renovations. She's put up an electric fence. which has its own issues, right? So it's like we're creating our own little bubble inside of this, and when I go home I have all these issues, like, you know, but that's another story. But anyway, so when we're, when we were home in March, she has found a caterer who does all her cooking.
So my mom was diagnosed with Parkinson's and so has not been cooking much because she was shaky on her left side. And so this woman did all our cooking while we were there, which created a sort of ease for us because we didn't really cook while we were home, which is rare for me because when I get home, I want to cook because now I have access to ingredients I don't have in the U.
S. So I want to try my hand at things that I couldn't do here. But I didn't do any cooking. I think I boiled an egg and I have been the extent of my cooking when I was in Ghana in March. But that, you know, that's because now we have our own, you know, personal caterer, thanks to mom. But for the most part, I would have been more adventurous if I didn't have that.
you know, meals prepared for me. I would have gone out and eaten Indian and eaten, you know, Senegalese and eaten, um, you know, whatever else was available. But we didn't do a whole lot of eating out because of, you know, having food catered. Yeah.
Dalia Kinsey: Well, I see a part of your business is also educating people on how they can create these dishes at home.
What are some of the main things that you focus on in classes that would help people kind of get their feet wet with Ghanaian
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: cuisine? So most of the stuff that I teach cooking lessons on. are things you can easily acquire. So I try not to teach on things that you cannot find you know, snails or, you know, stuff that we use at home, crab, the small red crab, not the big dungeness crab that everybody's so excited about um, And, and snails, and like guinea fowl, and you know um, just forest meat, right?
So those are things that are not easily accessible, for example. So I would, I would teach on peanut stew, because peanut is readily available. You can put in any kinds of veggies that are available to you. You can put in any kind of meat that you would like. I also teach on red red, which is black eyed peas with plantains.
Those are easy, easy to find. Black eyed peas just, just about any grocery store should have them in the bean section. wE use olive oil instead of red, red palm oil because There isn't a a sustainable way to harvest right now. I found something at Wegmans, which is kind of like our Whole Foods here in Ithaca.
But it's like this big for 10 because it's sustainably harvested. And I support it when I have to, but on a regular, I prefer to cook with olive oil because it's more accessible to the average person. Is there a big taste difference there? There is a big taste difference. So, when I can, I offer it to them as a garnish.
So I would buy it from Wegmans, and then I would give them maybe like a tablespoon of it to kind of put over the top of their sauce, whatever they've just cooked. thAt initially requires palm oil. So like contumere, for example, requires palm oil, which is our spinach dish. And technically the spinach dish is taro leaves.
It's not, it's not spinach, like the baby spinach we have in the U S it's taro leaves, which I cannot acquire unless I ship, um, or get it from a wholesaler, which have not cooking that, you know, that large of a quantity to make it worth, worth the shipping. We cook okra, which is also readily, you know, available.
Not fresh. Because most Americans are quite squeamish about slimy food. And so I get the frozen version, which makes it less likely to get slimy because by the time you're done cooking. You have not extracted all of the slime from it. Oh, okay. So I love, I love the, we call it ma. I love that, that look and that feel and that taste that comes with the okra when it's fresh and finely chopped.
And that's my dad's ethnic group. That's our traditional dish. And I love it, but I only offer it to those who are like, yeah, bring on the Oprah. But like the average person is like, I'm not so sure about this. So the traditional
Dalia Kinsey: dish has more of that like mucilaginous texture. I know that's good for you.
But I never thought of it as like a universally American thing that we might be weird about slimy foods.
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: But yeah, that sounds pretty accurate. Yeah. So we'll do okra. We'll do red bread, which is the black eyed peas. We'll do, I do spinach sometimes. And I explain to them where they can get the taro leaves if they want.
Sometimes the Chinese markets will have them, Asian markets. And sometimes you can order it online and then we have something called a goosey which goes in with the spinach and then that becomes a goosey stew. So a whole nother dish. A goosey can be found online. It's super expensive, but it's also available.
What else do I cook? I cook a leecha, which is actually an Ethiopian dish that my mom taught me. So mom. lived in Ethiopia for her nursing school. Her dad used to be an ambassador and so they grew up in Ethiopia. And so she, she cooks Ethiopian foods and taught me a couple of them. So I cook Elicha, which is easy.
It's cabbage, potatoes, carrots, bell peppers, and red onions, um, in a curry, curry base. So yeah, those are probably the basic things I teach. I'll teach more traditional things when people come home. If I have a lesson at home for three or less people, one to three people, and because I can control that a lot better than a group of 12 or 15, I can do the more expensive ingredients because I don't have to buy a lot of them and I can show them.
If they're curious, different. Yeah.
Dalia Kinsey: Oh, that sounds so cool.
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: I
Dalia Kinsey: now offer inclusive wellness solutions for individuals and organizations. If you like myself believe that health and happiness should be accessible to everyone, and you're looking for someone to help you make your programs more inclusive, or you're looking for an inclusive wellness specialist to come in with solutions tailored to your team's needs, then visit daliakinsey.
com. The link is in the show notes. to learn more about how we can work together.
You mentioned when you were in Ohio that you were connecting to a lot of the Black American students there that were really curious about African cuisine. Have you seen? How meaningful it can be for people to connect to food that it's not exactly the same at all. But we do see a lot of parallels in African American cuisine.
You can tell that the people who first
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: created these dishes
Dalia Kinsey: came from West Africa because people found similar produce. To recreate comfort dishes from home. Like what have you noticed in those clients? Like how meaningful a class with
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: you can be. So, unfortunately, here in Ithaca, I don't, I can probably count on one hand all seven years how many African American folks have actually, like, approached me to do a class.
So they might try the food. What was the strange. No, no, no, Indiana. So those were my students at Notre Dame. So there was a very controlled group. I think they were just curious and learning more. But Ohio, I probably had one or two that I recall. And here, even in Ithaca, I'll get a couple students from Cornell.
But they are African. I rarely get African Americans or black Americans, depending on, you know, how you want to identify approaching me for a class or a lesson, you know, so that's fascinating. Yeah, because we, we always think about um, what do we, what can we do differently to outreach to. siblings that don't identify as African or Afro Caribbean.
What are we not doing? How are we marketing? How can we work it differently? Do we just cut our losses and be like, okay, we're here. If you want, you can try us. If not, you know, that is
Dalia Kinsey: really curious. I wonder with so many things with business, because. At least in the U. S. anyway, every resource you read is focusing on the white consumer.
So you don't find a lot of information about how to really reach. A black American audience. And then on the rare occasions that you do, it's usually so offensive that you're like,
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: if this is true, I don't want to use it or believe it. Like I read something horrible.
Dalia Kinsey: It was one of those things where like something gets published that was originally internal in a company.
And it basically
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: was saying, Oh, you can give this demographic. A product of any level of
Dalia Kinsey: quality, meaning save all the money you want, give them the cheapest thing, charge a markup that they don't have a lot of options because of transportation and what parts of town they're in. And all you have to do is be personable.
It was. Like they're in writing that you just have to be kind of nice and there tends to be a lot of loyalty in this demographic. Once you get them in, unless something really bad happens there, people are going to just keep coming back. Yeah. And I would hate to, I hate to believe that, but I also know the town that I work in during the day, that seems to be true, like a lot of people are paying over what is a normal fee for things in their neighborhoods.
And if I'll go shopping or run an errand on a lunch break, I'm like, this isn't happening. I'm going to go shopping when I go back home. It seems like businesses are booming and they don't really seem to be doing that much for their customers.
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: And
Dalia Kinsey: then at the same time, we're obviously not a monolith. So it's like, how do we market to such an extremely diverse
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: group of people?
I think, I mean, what I have struggled with And I also hate to believe it's true is that we are not a curious people. Even my own Africans right now come to my stall and are very upset that I don't do meat anymore, right? So now we're solely plant based mostly because meat is expensive and meat requires more astringent, astringent?
Yeah, astringent, I think. I was an English major and I'm always concerned about using the right word. More just, Just more particular storage and, and cooking and temping and that kind of stuff. Okay. And also because I believe that plant based allows everybody to access it. So even if you wanted meat, you could go home and put the meat in it and, and still enjoy it, right?
But if I put meat in it, the person who only eats plant based cannot pull it out. So that's been my journey the last five years of just focusing on plant based and using vegetables. In, in the stews, like the peanut stew, for example, has cabbage and sweet potatoes and, and those kinds of things.
Sometimes, not at market, because market is like, farmer's market is, it's such a quick turnaround. Like, we pay for the kitchen we're in, and so we're in and we're out. And it just has to be a very quick, you know, efficient way of doing things. And so we don't get to like, Boiled potatoes and chop them up and put them in and all the things that we could do when we have a smaller class or a lesson that I, I like to do, like I put sweet plantain in the, the peanut stew, if we're home and we have access to it, you know?
So, there's lots of diversity of vegetables when we're able to do, do that. At market is completely a difference. You know, a different
Dalia Kinsey: beast. I a connection there. Like, I wonder if curiosity goes down as stress levels go up or something, because otherwise I can't. Just off the top of my head, understand why that might be so, but I will say I was literally complaining about that to a coworker before this
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: call because someone had mentioned
Dalia Kinsey: my mom is not American.
I mean, she's a naturalized citizen, but she, her food culture is still that of her parents, which was Jamaican and Cuban. And so there are a lot of Southern dishes. I'm not. familiar with. Maybe I've seen them before, but never eaten them or I don't know how to make them. And the people in the office were making a big deal out of me, not having tried some Southern dish.
But then when I tried to explain, well, you know, that's really not the food culture of the house I was
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: raised in. And no one was really interested
Dalia Kinsey: in hearing. what that might have
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: been. And I
Dalia Kinsey: find that's a pattern. And then I wonder how much information are they missing out on? Because they seem pretty insular, like very into their own experience and not into learning about other people's experiences.
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: I, I don't know if that's part of the trauma that it is to
Dalia Kinsey: be melanated and in the United States. Is that where the curiosity went? I find it strange, but my grandmother always said that curious people are the happiest. Life is long. You think it's short? Until you get older and you're like, Oh,
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: it's still going.
As you said, if you're not interested in learning new things, like, what are you going to do with all this time? Absolutely. Yeah. I, I wonder that too, is, is it really just the inability to consider anything outside of your comfort zone? Right. Cause I mean, there are people who will stop by and think we're Jamaican.
And we'll want to have Jamaican food, which is fascinating because I feel like Jamaican food is, is also different, but it's probably closer because, you know, rice and beans and chicken and plantain and um, but you know, it's, it's different because there's ackee and saltfish and there are things that I think are just as different as African cuisine is.
So I find it really fascinating and it's mind boggling that I cannot get my own, you know, siblings to try the food. When I'm, I'm so passionate about sharing this with everybody, you know. That
Dalia Kinsey: is so relatable and a little heartbreaking.
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: If you have a breakthrough and you're like, Oh, I
Dalia Kinsey: did this thing. And they're like, Oh, the black people started coming in.
You have to let me know
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: because I feel like I am crystal clear on who I want to serve.
Dalia Kinsey: But if I'm honest. 90 percent of my business is not coming from my imagined target.
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: And so I'm like,
Dalia Kinsey: at what point do you just say, okay, well, the market has showed me who really wants to work with me. And I doubled down or.
You know, well, I know I'm not going to do that, but I sometimes wonder like, is that the more sensible thing to do? But I'm letting my passion lead and I feel like at some point I'm going to figure out what, what are the barriers? I
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: think there's probably barriers
Dalia Kinsey: there that I just haven't fully understood yet.
Maybe. I
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: don't know. I'll report back if I
Dalia Kinsey: figure anything out because I am fascinated by learning about anything that has to do with the continent and I thought that that was a very common black American
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: thing, but maybe not. I don't think so. I think there are vestiges of the African booty scratcher for lack of a better term concept, right, that are still in people's minds.
There is definitely more of a movement towards accepting Africa, and a lot of Black Americans I know have moved back home, like a good chunk of my friends when I was in Ghana, when I was living in Ghana, ten years ago. We're African Americans that had moved there. And friends who had, who were Ghanaian that had lived abroad and had come back.
Dalia Kinsey: For half a second, didn't Ghana threaten to take us back? I remember, I don't know if this was in the 90s or something, but it was It was a popular thing. I don't know how accurate it was. You know how they take small clips of the news and this was pre internet, but I remember hearing that some announcement had been made by somebody official in Ghana that like, come on back home.
Like we've got the visas for you. If you want to come back, you don't have to prove that this is exactly where you're from, but you can come on back and like start your life here. And then I wondered,
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: like, what happened to that? So, actually, year of return might have been three years ago now. So, it's recent.
So, you might have heard that in the 90s as well. But more recently, they're actually granting visas and citizenship to African Americans, I think and Jamaicans. So you can return by land. Get started on a business if that's what you want to do, find a job. I'm not saying it's going to be easy because it's a very different culture.
And at least from my experience of the black Americans I was hanging out with, it was not easy because it was a big culture shock. Things were a lot slower. Things are sadly based on bribes. And so people do things for you that they should do normally as part of their job description, but only after you buy them lunch or you buy them dinner or give them something for their taxi fare or, you know, whatever they want to frame it as, right?
Right. So a big, a big part of the culture is, is based on. On that quid pro quo, right? I don't know what I'm, what the word is. But anyway, the culture is, is based on that. And so for them, it was a big shock, like to go to the passport office and wait in line for four hours because somebody took a two hour lunch break or, you know, so there's things that don't work for the system here and would never fly.
that kind of go unnoticed or unquestioned in Ghana. And so it was a big culture shock because you don't just go get your permit and build your land. You go and you visit the chief and you tell the chief why you want to build land and the chief gets a cut and the chief's assistant gets a cut. And you know, it's just, It's very convoluted.
And I think coming home and expecting, coming to Ghana and expecting that things are going to be pretty straightforward and pretty like the U. S. is, is a, you know, misconception. And so I saw that in, in their faces a lot of the time. Oh my God, I can't believe I spent four hours. wherever, you know, fill in the blank.
And I still didn't get anything done and I bought somebody lunch, you know, so it's really rough. So yeah, the gates are open, come on over, but it's a big culture shock and, you know, people need to be what, like they need to reframe their, their mindset when they're walking in the door, because it's definitely not the U S it may be globalized, like everybody's wearing cutoff jeans or torn up pants or, you know, whatever you see here in the U S the music is similar.
R and B and hip hop, and we have our own hip life and, you know, we have our own music as well. But a lot of things are globalized, but the culture, like the very sort of the, the mainline culture is still very laid back and very, yeah, that almost
Dalia Kinsey: definitely takes some getting used to it.
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: Yeah. Yeah. The
Dalia Kinsey: pace.
Well, what is queer acceptance like in Ghana? Like, is there marriage equality?
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: No. So there's actually a law on the books that they're hoping to pass that says you can turn your neighbor in. So we are going back to the 40s and 50s in the U. S. Mostly as a result of Christianity and a result of the megachurches in the U.
S. that are influencing things. the smaller churches in Ghana. So the law honestly don't know where it's at. A friend of mine, Carolyn, works for um, an LGBT organization that sends out grants to other LGBT small businesses. And so she was the one who was keeping me abreast with the law. That was trying to go into effect, but I don't know where it's at.
I know that a few, maybe a year ago when I went in March, the LGBT Center had just been raided. People had been put in jail and some people had been hurt. I think there's a vibrant movement in Ghana of LGBT folks, but there's also people who are very scared. And... unwilling to come out and be part of the community because they don't want to lose your jobs or housing or you know, whatever.
Like my mom won't tell anybody about us and it's really sad. Like she doesn't even have us on her mantle in the living room because she doesn't want to have to explain that to anybody. aNd you know, she said to me a couple of times, you know, The neighbor down the road just went to jail. And I don't know if it's the same neighbor or if it's a different neighbor, but she's like, I don't want that to happen to you, especially when you're just visiting, you know?
Yeah. So she won't tell anybody. Which is really sad, you know, because she doesn't get to rejoice in her oldest child being in a pretty solid, healthy relationship, you know? Right. So that is kind of sad. I'm sad for her, you know, not be able to rejoice in that. But
Dalia Kinsey: it wasn't difficult for her to be affirming.
She's just aware of the political
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: environment. I think it was difficult in the beginning. So I came out at 26 or 20, yeah, somewhere in that vicinity. And a lot of it was. Was trial and error, mostly with my best friend who at the time was, we were both in grad school in different, different cities.
And so she and I were hanging out and experimenting and my mom found us one day. And she was mortified. And so that was her journey in that drug. I ended up dating a guy who tragically passed in a motorcycle accident. And I think after that accident, mom thought it was a reaction to that, you know, the accident that I was going back to women.
But I've been with my partner for five years and I feel like at this point she's like, okay, maybe you're not going back to men. And it's okay, you know, so it's, she's had her own journey as well and I think has been, you know, over the years has been working it out working it through. Right. She belongs to a church now that is not accepting and so she will not tell them either.
Yeah, so. A little bit of that, there's, you know, there's a little bit of sadness around, around the high days, but it's really her, her choice and her life, you know, that's the way I look at it.
Dalia Kinsey: Yeah, yeah, family can be. It's
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: just complicated sometimes. Yeah.
Dalia Kinsey: Well, tell me about your journey as an entrepreneur navigating chronic illness.
I wanted to cover that for a little bit because you mentioned we had a little bit of back and forth getting this on the books and you had mentioned that you have MS. So how long have you known that you have it and how does that affect your relationship with such a physical
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: job? I, so with the MS situation, which I call it a situation because I was diagnosed five years ago, and then I was told that the case was complicated and I didn't check all the, The tests weren't positive in the right direction, and so I didn't have it.
And then I had it again by another doctor. So it's just been back and forth, back and forth. Symptoms are there, everything that is in the book, in the textbook is there. But we haven't been able to get a confirmed diagnosis, and so I haven't been able to start treatment. Because with the healthcare system the way it is, They want the doctor to check all the different boxes before they will actually start treatment.
I've been living with pain and just, you know, losing memory and all kinds of other little things that are not so little in when you put them all together, you know? So that's, that's been rough. It's hard some mornings because I cannot get out of bed. And get moving and I have to start market around 4 a.
m. Like, I have to start preparing for market around 4 a. m. So, you know, some days are really difficult and I also worry about the end game. You know, like my mom worries about me and my retirement. Like, when does it get to the point where I can't function anymore? And when do I? Give it up. And what do I do when I, you know, yeah.
So I do think about that a lot. And you know, talking about chronic illness. I also suffer from bipolar disorder. So it's It's really a mix of the two things and just trying to figure out how best to live life and to still rejoice in life and to still move and wake up and want to do what I really want to do, which, which is cook and feed people when my body is like, nope, not today.
So it's, it's quite challenging, especially when it's, invisible, you know, it's just like most people see me and there's just this bright, wonderful person that they see, they don't realize how many, I always tell people, do you know the spoon analogy? Like how many? Yeah, so they don't realize how many spoons it takes to get to that wonderful person that they meet at the conference or, you know um, wherever, for example.
But yeah, invisible disability is, is huge for me. I love, love to talk about how to support other creatives who are going through that. And also I don't mind talking about it because I feel like the more we talk about it the less stigma there is and the less people who are in the closet about it, about chronic illness or invisible disability are able to feel more accepted and open.
Yeah,
Dalia Kinsey: absolutely. Yeah. Well, what are some of the lessons that you've learned about hanging on to that joy, like you said, and not feeling like your body is an enemy because it's still your best ally, even when it doesn't do what you know we want
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: it to do. Yeah. So, I think for me what brings me the most joy is is feeding people, but feeding my partner, for example, because she loves everything I cook, and I could be on my worst day and still fix something.
She's like, Oh, honey, this is so good. Babe, this is amazing, you know? And so it, it just brings me so much joy, yes, but also like encouragement to keep moving, you know? Because I know that she is always there and she will always be there to support and to like encourage and just be like, okay, it's time to get up, especially in the winter when it's really hard up north.
And the depression just kind of feels like it's never gonna end. Right. So she is very supportive in, in helping me. work out the days when my spoons are just not, you know, non existent. Right. I depleted completely. So she is, she is a rock star. She is one of the most important people in my life.
And so she gives me the encouragement, the joy, and you know, the wherewithal to keep going. Yeah. Yeah. What would you tell other
Dalia Kinsey: people, like what they should know about being more supportive of people living with invisible disabilities? Because I do find. Especially in more liberation focused spaces.
People want to stop letting capitalism just destroy our bodies and the bodies of everybody on our team. But then they also feel that pressure to never stop working. But with some people, if they try to make themselves do that, then they're completely incapacitated for weeks at a time. So what would you tell somebody trying to figure out How to be a better ally to people who are not fully able bodied or who, you know, don't have chronic illnesses.
Yeah,
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: I think being an ally to anybody or any any group of people that you're not a part of is a lot of work. And I think that most people don't get into it knowing how much Right. They just think, Oh, it's just not talking bad about black people or not touching their hair or, you know, whatever your baseline is.
Right. I think a lot of folks think that's the first step and maybe that is the first step, but most people don't know that there's more to that and you go deeper and deeper. And when we're not in a room, you stand up for us. Right. So that's the next step, perhaps. And then using your own body as a block, for example, if you're in a situation where you need to do that, right?
But I think being an ally requires more work than most people are aware of or able to provide. And so the challenge is knowing yourself and knowing what you're capable of doing, I think. So working hard to, to teach yourself about the illness or teach yourself, like my partner, for example, like when we first got together, she was so scared.
It's like, Oh my God, it's night and day. This person that I know, I turned into this other person and I'm like, it's the same person, honest to goodness. Right. But there's a lot of education that went into building this relationship, you know, and going to therapy and talking about it and me journaling and sharing the journal with her.
So I think it requires definitely some education, pushing yourself beyond your own comfort zone. And also not, not not always like speaking for us. Like there are moments where you can do that and you're required and you're called on to, to be an advocate. But I think we know the best story of our lives.
And so you not speaking for us is one big lesson to learn as well. You know? Yeah. Yeah, that makes
Dalia Kinsey: a lot of sense. Yeah. And I think it is probably beyond our comprehension sometimes how much different
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: lived experiences change your
Dalia Kinsey: needs and you don't have a way of anticipating it. You really have to hear it from somebody who's been walking that
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: path.
And I have, I have Graves disease, which is. Of the autoimmune disorders
Dalia Kinsey: I could have, I would say, you know, it's not that bad. But when I'm in a flare, the fatigue can be
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: so bad.
Dalia Kinsey: It gets boring, honestly, waiting to get better. And so the temptation is to become productive again, which everybody around you reinforces.
Because they're like, Oh yeah, you've got to get out of bed because if you just lay there, you're not going to get better. Depending on what you have. If you get up, then you're not going to get better. Like
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: sometimes you actually just have to lay there. Lay there. Yeah.
Dalia Kinsey: So it's, it's interesting. I think this is another area where a lot of us need more exposure.
So thank you for being visible and sharing the bipolar diagnosis, because I think it's way more common than a lot of people realize, but a lot of people just don't feel safe enough to
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: disclose.
Dalia Kinsey: Yeah, probably based on a lot of bad experiences, not just something you read about. Right, yeah.
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: Well,
Dalia Kinsey: can you tell everybody where we can find
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: you?
Because I'm hoping
Dalia Kinsey: soon that maybe you'll
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: be releasing Maybe cooking tutorials or a cookbook
Dalia Kinsey: or something. So we want to keep up
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: in case that happens. Okay. So right now, just mostly online Asempa kitchen African food on Facebook and Asempa kitchen with an underscore in between Asempa and kitchen on IG.
And then our website, which is.
I don't have anything in the works yet. I have done online classes during COVID and I'm open and willing to do them again. I just have to have people who want to do them. So if you're interested, let me know. Once this airs, if there are more people interested. We can gather a few people and we can go from there.
So I'm always willing to do them. That is
Dalia Kinsey: actually a really, really good idea. I technically work in food service, food service adjacent. I won't even go down the road too deep, but people are always talking about trying to make our menus more inclusive, but nobody ever says anything about the entire continent.
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: Of Africa. Of Africa. I'm like, that's a very big continent,
Dalia Kinsey: so I don't understand how none of
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: these countries
Dalia Kinsey: cuisines are coming up at all. So yeah, that's, I, I'm going to keep that in mind, that you can do virtual classes if people
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: are ready to vote. Yeah.
Dalia Kinsey: Thank you so much for coming on and for sharing some of your story with us.
If you had one thing that you could say and people would understand it and internalize it forever, like, do you have a final parting piece of wisdom you want to share with
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: everybody? I think I would say, um, whenever you're invited by someone else to eat, someone other than your ethnic group or your community to eat their food.
I think you should always stretch yourself to try some. Yeah. Oh,
Dalia Kinsey: I love
Chef Kuukua Yomekpe: that. Thank you so much. You're welcome. It was nice talking to you as well. Yeah, they might try to put you in a box, tell them that you don't accept. When the world is tripping out, tell them that you love yourself. Hey, hey, smile on them, live your life just how you like it.
It's your party, negativity is not invited. For my queer folk, my trans, people of color, let your voice be heard. Look in the mirror and say that it's time to put me first. You were born to win. Head up high with confidence. This show is for everyone. So I thank you for tuning in. Let's go.
Body Liberation for All Theme
They might try to put you in a box, tell them that you don't accept when the world is tripping out tell them that you love yourself. Hey, Hey, smile on them. Live your life just like you like it
It’s your party negativity is not invited. For my queer folks, for my trans, people of color, let your voice be heard. Look in the mirror and say that it's time to put me first. You were born to win. Head up high with confidence. This show is for everyone. So, I thank you for tuning in. Let's go.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit daliakinsey.substack.com -
Carolyn Jones is a Holistic Health Educator and Chaplain who teaches the art of self-care and practices a ministry of presence. She is licensed by the New York State Chaplain Task Force and serves the community as an herbalist, a certified aromatherapist and reflexologist.
In this episode Carolyn shares her insights on the power of deepening our relationship with plants beyond culinary uses to medicinal and spirtual applications.
This episode we explore:
☀️How to get started with herbalism
☀️Spiritual uses for plants
☀️Medicinal uses for common herbs and spices
☀️Rootworker belief systems
Episode Resources
www.daliakinsey.com
Decolonizing Wellness: A QTBIPOC-Centered Guide to Escape the Diet Trap, Heal Your Self-Image, and Achieve Body Liberation
Connect with Carolyn
https://www.behealed.info/
Episode edited and produced by Unapologetic Amplified
This transcript was generated with the help of AI. Thank you to our supporting members for helping us improve accessibility and pay equitable wages for things like human transcription.
Have you ever wondered why almost all the health and wellness information you see out there is so white, cis able-bodied and het? I know I have. And as a queer black registered dietitian, I gotta tell you, I'm not into it. I believe health and happiness should be accessible to everyone. That is precisely why I wrote Decolonizing Wellness: A QTBIPOC-Centered Guide to Escape the Diet Trap, Heal Your Self-Image, and Achieve Body Liberation and why I host Body Liberation for All.
The road to health and happiness has a couple of extra steps for chronically stressed people, like queer folks and folks of color. But don't worry, my guests and I have got you covered. If you're ready to live the most fierce, liberated, and joyful version of your life, you are in the right place.
Body Liberation for All Theme
They might try to put you in a box, tell them that you don't accept when the world is tripping out tell them that you love yourself. Hey, Hey, smile on them. Live your life just like you like it
It’s your party negativity is not invited. For my queer folks, for my trans, people of color, let your voice be heard. Look in the mirror and say that it's time to put me first. You were born to win. Head up high with confidence. This show is for everyone. So, I thank you for tuning in. Let's go.
Dalia Kinsey: Welcome to the show Carolyn. I'm so glad to have you.
Carolyn Jones: Thank you for having me, Dalia.
Dalia Kinsey: I have been really interested in herbalism for years, but I always felt like I wasn't a plant person. I thought I didn't have a green thumb, and only since 2020 have I realized that I just wasn't slowing down enough to pay attention to when the plants were asking for more water or more light, and just suddenly it feels like being connected to the plants has been a little demystified for me.
But of course, I'm a total. Baby when it comes to understanding herbalism, the spiritual uses of herbs, any of that. So when I saw you recently in a replay of a webinar that you did for another institute that I've been just studying, like their library, I haven't even gotten that deep yet. I was just fascinated that this institute in particular looks at the spiritual aspect of plants in a way that I really had never seen before, but it really resonates with me that the plants are not seen as just something we take things from.
They're not seen as inanimate. They're seen as really powerful and as teachers that are always trying to speak to us. So when I saw your workshop on the African American relationship with herbalism and root work in particular. I was just blown away, and so I'm so glad to have you here to share some of your story with us and maybe how the listeners can get started exploring some of our traditions that maybe feel a little lost to us right now.
Carolyn Jones: Well, I'm so happy that you enjoyed my presentation and I'm even happier that you were interested and curious enough to invite me on so we could talk about this in more depth. I love the subject and we are all babies when it comes to the plant world. We'll never know everything. It's always a learning process.
The interesting thing is, I seemed like I could kill plants to look at them, you know? Oh, wow. I went to a workshop at a Brooklyn Botanic Garden one day, and I said to the gardener, I feel so guilty because it seems like I touch a plant and dies. He said, don't feel guilty. You know how many plants we kill around here?
It becomes like an experiment, but I still feel that sensitivity because for me, the love of plants started early. My mother had a rose garden in the front of the house. We grew up in Bedstuy. I grew up in Bedstuy, born in Harlem. We moved to, uh, Brooklyn when I was six, and in the back she grew corn, tomatoes, college, she had a beautiful garden, you know, a Georgia peach.
So she brought all that knowledge from her sharecropper parents and. Who unfortunately I never got the chance to meet. They died when she was 16, but she certainly took their knowledge seriously and brought it with her as a form of survival. Now, when I was younger, I didn't really pick up on it. Like I loved looking at it, but worms bothered me.
Dalia Kinsey: As much as I love being outside, I really have a thing with spiders. That was another barrier. I thought, if I'm gonna be spending time with plants, I need to be comfortable with everything that's out there. It's good to hear that not necessarily so.
Carolyn Jones: Yes. And I'm gonna tell you, just as of last night, I connected with a neighborhood garden, the Q Garden here in Brooklyn, and I actually sat next to someone who was digging out a pot and centipedes were running all over, and I didn't run screaming into the night.
Dalia Kinsey: How'd you get to that point?
Carolyn Jones: I don't, I don't know how it happened. Okay. When they were talking about a garden bed that had jumping worms, I held a full interview. How do they jump? Where do they jump? Where are they? You know, because I wanted no part of it, but luckily we didn't see any worms. We did see some of, I think it was a Japanese beetle, but that didn't even send me running.
But I was really amazed that I didn't run away from the, well, they didn't get on me. So that's a start. They were on the pot. So being around people, I think who. Are not fearful that way. Mm-hmm. I think some of their courage may rub off. I'm not quite sure. We'll see next week, but you know, for now, so that it kept me from gardening.
It really did. Mm-hmm. So as I began to develop a community of herbalists around me, more experienced herbalists, and they began to explain how medicines are better when you have fresh plants, you know, not always dealing with the dry herbs, then my mind began to open up more and more. So over time, as you expose yourself to people with different levels of knowledge, I guess this transformation takes place that you're really not aware of.
That's the way we grow anyway. You don't think about it unless you really sit down, slow down, as you said. I thought that was very profound. You do have to slow down now. In order to cultivate my love of plants, I started collecting bamboo shoots. I can keep bamboo alive in water. I have like a bamboo garden all the way through the apartment here, the bedroom and living room.
It's in here and they're flourishing. So I feel very happy about that. But I also incorporate that I'm a bereavement chaplain and I incorporate plants into that service as well because I find that plants are very comforting. And I just received a, a picture of someone's memorial garden. She had lost her son.
I was doing some consultation with her and recommended that she use their backyard or the area that they have. Space. They have to designate it as an altar for him and she Oh, that's beautiful. She a picture of him beautiful memorial garden that the family has created in his memory. So plants will bring peace and depending on the type of plant, it will comfort you.
It will dispel loneliness. And it's no secret that you can talk to plants and if you listen, they talk back, you know, energetically.
Dalia Kinsey: How does that usually come through? Okay. Energetically, yes.
Carolyn Jones: As far as we are talking about herbalism and root work, there are a few herbs that are used for root work. Hiss is one, but it also has many whole body wellness properties as well.
It's used for other things.
Dalia Kinsey: So how would you recommend somebody get started? Because that is something that's been intriguing is how vast the uses for a plant can be, and that once you start adding in spiritual uses too, from where I'm standing now, it looks like it might be easier for me. To remember the essence of a plant when I'm looking at it in a spiritual way also.
But when I look at all of the, it's almost like medication with off-label uses. There's so many different things that one plant can do. Mm-hmm. How do you start getting your feet wet with this? Or how would you recommend somebody even start learning?
Carolyn Jones: Most of the healers healing practitioners that I've interviewed, and I must include myself, started from the point of view of how do I want to heal?
How do I need to heal? What could I use to heal myself? Who do I want to be? You know, they ask children, what do you wanna be when you grow up? Who do you wanna be when you grow up spiritually? Not what job you wanna have, how much money you wanna earn. None of that. Who and how do you want to be remembered?
When it's all said and done, in order to ask that question, I found for myself that I had to get in touch with my own mortality and my own immortality. How do I wanna be remembered? When people think of me, how do I want people to feel when they think of me? Oh, that's really telling. I worked at a funeral home for two years at the height of Covid.
Hmm. So I saw a lot of who I consider our libraries. A lot of elders Pass on the kitchen is as Queen of four. I love her. Always taught is your laboratory and having the wisdom to know. Which plant to use for what ailment. Like today, I woke up feeling a little lethargic. I thought I was just a little overtired of something and I saw it was the sun was shining beautifully outside.
I said, okay, come on. You gotta go outside. You can't sit in front of the computer all day. Because I had a lot of writing to do and I went outside and that was good, but I was still dragging a little bit and I had some B propolis in my bag in the form of a spray that I felt a little congested and I sprayed it.
The dosage is three sprays in the throat, and I had spoken to a colleague of mine yesterday, Amy Anthony. She's was my aromatherapy. Well, she will be my aromatherapy teacher for the rest of her life, but she's also my friend now and team member in the clinic. That we manage. And I sprayed the bee propolis down my throat, remembering that she said how highly antibacterial it is.
And next thing you know, everything started clearing up my energy level rose. The congestion expelled itself, and I felt myself again. So the reason that we wanna know about these things from a spiritual point of view and a physical point of view, is for preventative care. When we feel down or lethargic and don't really know where that's coming from to be able to treat yourself, or if you, you're not getting a deep enough sleep to know that you can use lemon balm or mug wart.
You might wanna dream your way to a solution. So you'll drink some mug wart tea or. Use a mug board tincture in your water to enhance your dreams. Mm-hmm. It helps you dream lucid dreams, but it also, I always describe it as helps you sleep beneath that sleep. You know that first layer of sleep well, it helps you get down deep into the sleep and you wake up feeling refreshed.
You don't feel dragged out. I went to do a house call yesterday and you know, she put her aspirins and stuff in front of me. She said, I don't want to take these, you know, so I offered her some Valerian tincture, valerian, and she recognized right away, Valium. I said, right, that's what they make Valium for.
So now you'll not only get rest, but it's gonna help the pain. But I didn't learn that from studying. I learned that. From healed thyself when I called them after surgery and told them I did not wanna take the codeine aspirin and I needed my circulation and my legs to come back. So I had a masseuse come to the house and got a massage for the circulatory problem.
And I was given Valerian teacher and I didn't have to touch the codeine aspirin. So it's just a matter of having the resources and tapping into them, but believing same thing. It's all the same thing with rootwork. And one thing that one of the authors from one of the books that I researched before I came on said that it's not logical.
If you try to think about this logically, then you lose the magic of it.
Dalia Kinsey: See, I wondered if that was an important component, because you mentioned that you thought about what your aromatherapy teacher had said it was good for, as you were essentially giving yourself the medicine. Does that usually go hand in hand?
Carolyn Jones: Well, uh, a reference point is always good, but imagine if you just had a book. The first herbal book that I started studying from was Back to Eden. That was usually the entry point for people from my generation. And then, you know, it expanded and expanded along the way. So now I have book cases of books about self-care for different healing modalities, sound included, color, light included.
But in speaking about herbs, which to me I just love them. My home is overrun with them to know that I have that plant friend that will help me be it for a spiritual reason. Something as simple as sage to, you know, smudge the homes. Yeah. Yes. Or even boil for a bath.
Dalia Kinsey: What are some of the different ways to use it?
So you mentioned tinctures, essences. Mm-hmm. How do you know what you could just boil and drink versus what needs to be a tincture? Or is every plant able to be basically worked with different ways?
Carolyn Jones: I don't wanna say every, because some plants are poisonous, so we are just gonna reference the general look at plants that.
Edible. The reason I mentioned tinctures is because for me, I love tinctures when my schedule gets so busy that I don't really have time to make a cup of tea, but I want to fortify my body so I do have time to open up a bottle and put a couple of droppers full of the tincture in my water or under my tongue to help myself along.
Same way I did with the Be propolis, four sprays in my throat and changed my whole body system and the way I was feeling for the day.
Dalia Kinsey: Okay, that makes sense. I tried to make my first tincture, multiple tutorials made it sound like it can be as simple as you want it to be, but it came out so bitter that now I'm thinking maybe I should try tease.
Carolyn Jones: The thing that we have to know first is our own habit and our own schedule and our own ability to stick to a program, but also have different ways to approach because we change, sometimes I feel like a cup of tea right before bed or in the morning for two weeks, and then I might want tinctures instead, you know?
Or I might put it in a cream. Now you were talking about making the tinctures and how it could be simple depending on the recipe. And Amy and I made, we just strained and bottled about 12 tinctures. Yesterday Rose was the most exciting one for us and she used organic corn spirits for some and I brought Benedictine to the table, which the priest, the Benedictine priest used.
It has 26 herbs in it and it's delicious. Now you mentioned bitter. That's okay. That something is bitter. Bitters are good for the system. Some things need to be bitter 'cause it helps your digestive system. It helps the enzymes in your body and also it helps cleanse your blood. 'cause look at apple cider vinegar.
It's bitter, but it can be mixed with herbs. I know brags actually has a line of drinks that are delicious, but it has a base of apple cider vinegar. They add cinnamon to it. And the main thing people have to remember with that is add water. You know, have more water than the apple cider vinegar 'cause you'll irritate your stomach.
Mm-hmm. But you know, he used as many different flavorings, natural flavorings in his drinks. But when I saw that, I like, I could do that myself. So I recommend to people who need that little bit of boost of taste good because sometimes if someone's having a bitter experience, they don't need to taste something that's bitter as well to compound it.
So you might wanna put a little honey in there, little bit of cinnamon to soothe it out just so that it'll be more inviting to ingest.
Dalia Kinsey: That makes sense. If you've made a tincture and you wanna have it in water, but you want it to be hot or warm, could that destroy what you've already done or.
Temperature's. Not a big deal. You can make something into drink that's hot
Carolyn Jones: if you want to. Yeah. I've added it to my tea. And when I was at a conference one time at a workshop on tincture, I was amazed we were taking tincture, taste of tinctures that had to be about 30 or 35, 1 after the other. We were passing it down, you know, everybody would shoot a drop under their tongue or something, and we kept it going.
So sometimes I will sit on the edge of my bed and pull out my box of tinctures and decide what I'm gonna do for the day, and just take them one by one according to what I wanna do, be it respiratory, digestive, my mood. I learned that Manta was used by the Native Americans for when somebody died. Oh, sof or grief on a handkerchief.
Yes. Well, to dispel spirits. Oh, okay. Mm-hmm. So, it's used and, and each culture, maybe each tribe, each tradition does things differently. So, I don't wanna make a blanket statement that all Native Americans do this or whatever. I'm just saying that as an example because one thing that is stressed in my research it said, be aware of the ceremonial practices of different cultures, how they may differ.
So, you can't make a blanket statement about that. Now I want to talk about frankincense a little bit. 'Cause you know, frankincense was used in mummification and also it was used by the Egyptians for arthritis in an essential oil form. But it is antibacterial. That I was introduced to by Amy, 'cause she made frankincense water.
She put the tears, they're called tears, the resin balls, and she put it in water and did a coal infusion overnight, so it turns the water milky. But you can also to speed it up, heat it. And I remember she served it in class. And I had respiratory issue. Well, really it was sinuses. I couldn't get rid of this sinus congestion, and after I drank that frankincense water, it went away.
So sometimes you discover healing in the process just by trying something new, just by keeping your mind open. As an herbalist, I believe that most of my struggle and the people who work with herbs, so discuss the fact that our biggest struggle and disappointment is when people close their minds and their hearts to nature.
I do believe in integrative medicine, however, when you take an herb, it’s gonna build your body up. The contraindications will come when it is possibly say like St. John's wart. That seems to be the herb with the highest level of contraindications to pharmaceuticals. So, I don't recommend that people, you know, in my consultation, I don't recommend that they ingest it.
I may put it in an oil for them or a cream, you know, add it to a cream 'cause it's great for pain and it's great for soothing and your skin will soak it in so you'll get the effect you need without ingesting it and having it have cause a contra ending in your body.
Dalia Kinsey: Now when you put it in a cream, is that something you could do with it as a dry herb or it's more you make the tincture and then you can put it in a cream?
Carolyn Jones: That would be an oil infusion. Yes. So, in studying aromatherapy, you get to learn base oils and essential oils and how to use them. But also I. You learn about oil infusions in herbalism and tea infusions, so that's with water. But you can also do kitchen herbal infusion like you see garlic oil. Yes. That means that they infuse the oil with garlic or garlic.
Honey, you can make garlic honey infusion. I'm looking forward to doing some make and take courses. I'm especially in love with honey, you know, and that's a great antibiotic as to weather, you know, comes into winter. So you cure the garlic in the honey and then you can add it. To tea or just take a spoonful of it and eat it.
Dalia Kinsey: Yeah. That's one of the few remedies I do remember in a crystal clear way from my grandma, like she never really was big into cough medicine. Like one, she thought it was too expensive and then had a lot of questions about all the unnecessary ingredients and all of the dyes and stuff. But she would say, you need the entire bulb of garlic, not a clove.
She said, put the whole thing in there. Okay. And then a cup of honey. You blend that together and she would put 10 drops of eucalyptus oil and she's like, that's all you need, but when you take it, people will smell you from a mile away. But it tastes delicious to me. So I still do it and people just have to deal with the smell.
Carolyn Jones: That's right. I love garlic. I do. As a matter of fact, I just had some garlic last week. I think I had to talk to someone up close. I was trying to turn my head, but I, I was saying to myself, look, deal with it because I feel great. Well, yeah,
Dalia Kinsey: It really is one of those things where it just tastes so good, you know, it's doing something good for you. And then because it also reminds me of grandma, I just feel like as soon as I'm blending it up, I'm like, I'm already healed, I can just feel it coming. But I've been sitting in an office and heard my coworker come in the front of the building. And she's like, you're at again from the front. So I know it’s pretty loud.
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Well, how do we get into some more of the spiritual uses and what is. Root work really, because I know most of us have probably heard, I guess it really depends on who raised you, whether you heard scary stories about what root work is. Is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? I was always told, I was raised in a very conservative Christian household, and so there was always a high concern about possession and so anything that had to do with plants or nature or.
Spirits that you don't know by name. It was something you're supposed to be very, very careful with and probably stay away from, but I've always been drawn to it. Yes,
Carolyn Jones: yes, because it's a natural curiosity. So I grew up in a very conservative and religious home as well. My mother did allude to spirits a bit.
I'll tell you a story in a minute, but she had a book from Edgar Casey on her bookshelf, the famous psychic healer, and at the age of 10, I was reading this book. So my mind was already opened up and I remember one time my mother told me that we were living in Harlem and in a rooming house, and she saw, this is what she told me.
Now, I don't know. She heard and saw the door open and she heard footsteps. Coming in the room, but nobody, she saw nothing and she pulled the covers over her head. She said, I was in the bed with her. She pulled the covers over her head and she said, Lord, have mercy on me in the name of Jesus. And she heard the footsteps turn around and run out of the room.
I did. I, I had no judgment. I still don't have any judgment if that's what she experienced. 'cause she said she felt the, the covers moving back. If she had that, that's her experience. I don't wanna dispute that in my studying. I love to read books, especially by surgeons who have a certain spiritual sense about them and they talk about death and spiritual phenomenon.
And in my studies, uh, with Robert Moss who died or had a near death, death experience as a child, two or three times, I can't remember right now, but I know it was at least two. And he talks about. Near death experiences a lot, and I read a lot about near death experiences. Who am I to judge if a spirit? Are we not living in a physical form as spirits?
Don't we talk about souls regardless of how we are brought up? I don't know if atheists referred to souls. I've had a couple of atheist students in my lifetime, you know, in academia, and they were very interesting people, you know, very clear minded in their thinking as far as I was concerned. To me, that's a personal, my question is what do you need at the moment of transition?
Have you taken care of feeding your spirit, the spiritual food it needs in order for you to make transition? Also, how do other cultures so-called primitive cultures look at death? From a child, I read National Geographic magazines and my mother would bring them home. And that was a fascination for me as to how other cultures look at death.
I was like, you mean only Baptists are gonna go to heaven? Like, how do other people get there? You know? Right. Heaven full of Baptist. I, I can't imagine. You know, and also, how do you interpret Christianity as an individual? If you're living the principles? Are you living it by convenience? Like you're a Christian one moment and then you're doing something untoward the next whatever untoward is.
I don't know what unto is. You know, everybody has, everybody has their own definition of what untoward could be. But meanwhile, my main concern when I'm seeking a spiritual space, Are the people joyful? Because if you are not joyful to me, your spiritual food is not working because you should not be living a life of despair.
I find it hard to believe that the creator, an all knowing creator, would put all of us here to live in despair.
Dalia Kinsey: Yeah, and it seems like if you, at the end of the day, you get to choose which spiritual tradition is going to feed you, which one is gonna nourish you. I don't really understand why you would pick one that doesn't really support you like in all of your identities, and support your happiness and make your life, enhance your life.
You know, add ease rather than make your life even harder. But I know a lot of people are in traditions that make them feel, I. Burdened.
Carolyn Jones: Yes. I watched it happen to my aunt. My aunt, God rest her soul is the reason why we had lipstick today. Ooh. I thought she was so pretty with the red, bright red lipstick and the straightened hair with the curls and everything.
And all of a sudden she joined this church. And not to say she didn't look good in the natural, but she was dowdy. And by that time, you know, admiring people like Diana Ross and Gina Lola Brita and Sophie Lauren and Diane Carroll and all of them, I'm like, oh, that's not working for me. That look you have now back to that red lipstick.
So I then began to analyze why would somebody allow an institution to make them change their whole being? And what is wrong with having red lips? It's a color. So I have to credit Caribbean people for showing me that wearing vibrant colors was beautiful because back in the day, we were supposed to tone ourselves down, you know?
Mm-hmm. I'm like, no, but I like that right there. Okay. And that's what I'm gonna be, and I'll just have to be the bane of everyone's existence because I'm going to do it the way I wanna do it, you know? And I'm so glad that I was stubborn that way.
Dalia Kinsey: Now, would you say like people were encouraging all women or people assigned female at birth to tone it down, or people putting pressure on black people to turn tone it down?
Carolyn Jones: Not necessarily Black people, you know, like in the corporate world, you had to wear black, blue, dark suits, you know, that's, they never tell you, oh, wear, uh, some orange and pink and light up to the room. You know what I mean? Right. You could tone it down without wearing black and. Maybe a dark brown or something, you know, those are pretty colors.
They're nice and they have their place, but colors change your aura and it helps people see you better, you know, see your soul better. What are you representing? I remember. And, and, um, sure it's not hard to find a toxic person on a job. And what I would do to counter that, to make myself feel better, I would decide what, what, especially when I was studying holism, decide what color I was gonna wear that day to make myself feel healed all day in spite of.
That energy. So it gave me a constant feeling of self care, and this is my message to everyone. Regardless of what you are going through, you deserve to love yourself. And if you don't feel it, act as if my newest emotional wellness package includes salt cave, auricular, massage, flower essences, and aromatherapy to teach people how you don't need a lot of people around you to heal.
You can be by yourself. I want to show people places that they can go and be themselves to heal botanic gardens. Listen to the birds. They're talking. If they're not talking to you, they're talking to each other and they couldn't be cursing each other out. As beautiful as they sound. Maybe they are, I don't know.
But usually when a bird is angry, you could tell, right?
Dalia Kinsey: Yes. We have some really territorial ones that like our bird feeder.
Carolyn Jones: Yeah. So you know, listen to the birds singing and watch the animals, how they're handling their lives. You know, take a lesson from the animals. I had even done some research for this podcast to see how animals were used in the root world.
Would you like to hear some things?
Dalia Kinsey: Oh, yes, please.
Carolyn Jones: The first animal that sim used as a symbol is snakes. Okay. And they're seen as powerful symbols of transformation and wisdom and healing. They're associated with spiritual knowledge and the ability to shed all patterns and emerge renewed. So just having that desire to shed what is not working, be it a relationship.
Don't be afraid. Yes, it's bumpy. Yes, you could lose everything, but look at how much you could gain in the end, because the piece that surpasses all understanding has no monetary. You can't, you can't buy it. It's all internal. You need your peace of mind. I, I often tell this story that one day I was sitting in my living room when I was deep into trying to transform my life.
I was living alone, but I sat down. I had read a book. I used a lot of biblio therapy books to heal myself. I remember just breaking down and crying and resolving that. The next day when I got up, I was going to approach life differently and pick up the pieces where they lay and continued the thread of what was good.
Mm-hmm. About what I was doing before and leave the rest behind. And that was the day that my life began. Its full transformation.
Dalia Kinsey:I do think it's really empowering to know that even when it feels like you don't have any say, that there's probably still some autonomy there and there's probably still a way for you to take control, but it's.
Hard sometimes to see it. I know patterns from childhood can follow you. And it's almost like, I mean, we've, most of us have seen this happen when you train a pet. Mm-hmm. You don't have to always keep the fence locked, they'll just assume it's locked after certain point. And we get stuck in similar patterns.
We don't know that we could make a change. It doesn't even occur to us that there might be something we could do to make our lives a little better.
Carolyn Jones: Yes. And that happens when we, when mistakenly give our power to someone else who has no interest in preserving it, you know? Right. So a lot of times people, Amy and I were laughing about that yesterday.
She said, yeah, Carolyn, you always say, See it for what it is, because Maya Angelou made that statement, when a person shows you who they are, believes them the first time. And I have joked in the past and said, okay, I'm up to about the 16th time now I'm getting there, but now I can honestly say, mm, maybe you have two times.
More than likely you have one. Yeah. You know, so it took years for me to get that way because, you know, we brought up, oh, it don't hurt anybody's feelings, so, you know, but what about your feelings? Why are, do you have to be the sacrificial goat?
Dalia Kinsey: That's a hard one because yeah, some of us are raised to just keep trying to be polite, put other people's feelings.
Ahead of our own. And I know even now as we're all, a lot of people are trying to be more compassionate, more kind. Mm-hmm. They give people a lot of grace and realize like, oh, well maybe someone's coming into this conversation with a lot of trauma, but at what point are you going to prioritize your own wellbeing?
And if you aren't for you, who else is gonna do it? Right? Like that's, that's our job is to prioritize our own care and to prioritize our own feelings. And yeah, you care about other people's feelings too, but not more than your own. And it makes some people really uncomfortable to even say that out loud or.
I've been called selfish many times, and when I was younger it would hurt my little feelings. But now I'm like, oh, well you've been conditioned to think it's bad to look out for number one. Yeah. But I understand that I am best equipped to do it, and I can offer people more love and more care when I do it.
So you can call it selfish. And I guess technically it is because I'm looking out for my own self. Self-care. Self-care. Mm-hmm. Certainly not evil or bad, but some of us were raised to think that it is.
Carolyn Jones: Yes. Mm-hmm. And that's how things got the way they are from that mistaken mindset. You know, and, and I wanna say this, especially with women, you know, I, I was so happy when back in the day, women started burning their brass.
I didn't like 'em anyway. You know, and claiming their own freedom and their own rights, because I didn't think, I never thought that. I thought the phrase old made was misplaced, you know? So what if someone decides they wanna live in their own world as a woman? You know, why should she be powerless? Why should she choose powerlessness in place of her freedom?
The freedom that she has defined that she wants to have? You know, so those old philosophies of what a woman should be or what a man should be, we've just outgrown them. But whether we have learned how to navigate it fully yet is still up for grabs. But at least we're on our way. It seems to me that one has to decide what's more important.
Do you wanna stay and suffer and create the definition that's killing you? Just like Judge Judy said on a reel that I saw, when a woman gives up her ability to earn money and choose her career, she's forced to live in unpleasant circumstances many times. You know? And I guess that could go for men too, but I'm speaking from the point of view of someone who had to make that choice and lose everything.
'cause I didn't wanna lose my soul. Hmm. Because you can get material things back. You, once you get too far out there, you can't call yourself back. And one thing I would not want to do is die not knowing myself and not having nurtured myself and given myself the love that I deserve. So I feel that you're absolutely correct in being able to take care of yourself.
And yes, everyone has had trauma and I don't think it's right for people to compare traumas. Why is the other person's trauma more important than your own? And different traumas, like what is a small trauma in your world, may totally devastate me according to my personages,right?
Dalia Kinsey: Yeah. I recently. Well, maybe a few years ago.
Mm-hmm. Heard somebody explain that trauma isn't a thing that happens, it's how your body responds to something that was too much for you to handle at the time. Mm-hmm. So you could be going through the same experience with a family member, and it is not traumatic to them, but it is traumatic to you. And it doesn't become less significant because someone else says, well, that's not traumatic enough.
That's not big enough. You have to prioritize this other person's emotional experience.
Carolyn Jones: So that's a selfish statement. Oh yeah. That, you know what I mean? To just brush somebody off and say, yeah, all right, but that's, you know, you're a cry baby. We all have our inner child that gets wounded. But that inner child, if it was abused, if you were abused as a child, that inner child is damaged and you as an adult, Need to gain the knowledge and the wisdom it takes to nurture that inner child back to health for your own good.
Dalia Kinsey: How would you speak to a child that is upset or emotionally devastated? Would you tell them you're being stupid for crying or would you try and soothe them? Maybe try to explain to them that they are safe? Can't we give ourselves that? Yes.
Carolyn Jones: Yeah, exactly. We, we, and a lot of people walk around not believing that they deserve that kind of kindness, or maybe they've never seen it.
But that goes back to my point of opening one's, mind expanding one circle, go places that you've never been, that looks like people are. You know, growing through their pain as opposed to remaining stagnant. When I first started studying Kundalini yoga, we would meet every Friday strangers for a community circle.
And I'm proud to claim at least four people still as close friends, even though we don't see each other often. But we grew through our pain and as I look at each person's life, we benefited from that time together. And we know deep down inside when we have a moment to have one, we go through the salt cave together sometimes, or another one, we had tea together lunch.
But that's that connection. It's a lifetime connection where we know that whatever it is we had to come through, we did it together in that time and space. And we can discuss the transformation and we thank each other. For support us during that time, you know, each one of us during that time. So it sounds like it's all about community,
Dalia Kinsey: rSo it sounds like it's both. 'cause you mentioned you want people to understand how much healing they could do alone, but then also there's a lot that you can do in community, right?
Carolyn Jones: Right. It spreads to community eventually. That's how healers and healing practitioners are made. It starts from one trying to heal themselves, and then as the modalities are introduced, then it expands into this big, beautiful world.
Right now, the things that are in my life, I didn't even know they existed 20 years ago, you know? But now it's filled to overflowing and the possibilities are endless. Because each person, as I mentioned, always keeps someone in your life who knows more than you do. That's very important. A lot of people wanna live on ego.
Oh, you know, we know the dialogue. No, that's toxic dialogue. Invite people who know more 'cause they'll know more people and they'll introduce you to new things. Open yourself up to new experiences, worms and all these things have, because I opened up my mind to worms. So many new things have happened and so many new people have come into my life.
Now I can join a community garden, which is a learning garden. So, and it just happened last night where I now know I have a place that I can go and learn. What this is, what this plant looks like, what a jumping worm is, you know, how not to be afraid of it. What other people know and what other people don't know, and how I can fill in the blanks for them and how they can fill in the blanks for me.
Hmm. Yes. Because that's what makes life interesting. Not the part, you know, the part you don't know.
Dalia Kinsey: I think that is wisdom in itself. It, like you said, there's a lot of ego driven or maybe fear driven posturing that people do online where they want to act as though they know everything and they keep reiterating.
I'm an expert. I'm an expert. I'm an expert. When. In reality, we're never done learning. And if we are, then I guarantee you, you have a knowledge deficit if you think you've finished. And it's more wise to understand that it's normal. It's human not to know everything. And everybody knows something you don't know.
And you can learn something from anyone. You can learn something from a child. You can learn something from somebody who's 102 and you think, oh, they're out of touch.
Carolyn Jones: There's always something. My favorites are the seniors that I visit. I'm an elder myself, but they're my seniors. And I visit a woman who is 91 and we play phase 10 together.
You know, she beats me sometimes. Yeah, whatever. And then, you know, I have others in their eighties and so forth who want to live. They want that longevity. And I was just a part of my. Feeling today was I, I lost my friend recently. We would always talk politics and health. Mostly politics because he wasn't taking care of taking care of his health.
He was in his fifties and I found out he died about two months ago and that thing was weighing on me so badly today. I said, I miss my friend. I feel like talking politics 'cause it got so bad at a point we were just saying it's over. That's, that's all we would have to say about politics. We wouldn't even talk about the details anymore.
You know, it is done. That sustains me when I step out of my building and someone's there for me to say, good morning too. We didn't have to wake up or at least take a moment to look at the sky and not worry about whether it's gonna rain or whether the sun is shining. Just. Look into the stratosphere knowing that you didn't create it, but you're a part of it.
Dalia Kinsey: And that looks like a way that some people are using root work, seeing that like everything as having an energy or having life in
Carolyn Jones: it. Yes. And I'm glad you said that because there is something that I grabbed for the purpose of this podcast, the common beliefs of root workers. One, there is one God and angels and ancestors and such support the work of the one God, they supplement religious beliefs.
Okay, two, the Earth is sacred, living and breathing. It's a sacred living, breathing entity, so everything is alive around us. Physical death is not final. Acknowledging that the soul is eternal is what the root worker does, and the future can be foretold with divination. So here's what I wanna share with you.
When I was in my twenties, I don't know, I was walking down the street and this young Caucasian woman was reading poems for $5. I'm like, why not? You know? So I sat down in the chair and gave her my hand. Mine was open. I didn't do it as a skeptic. And she read my palm and she told me, you know, I see a lot of sons here.
I said, but I have daughters. She's like, yeah, but I see sons, you know? And she said, you're gonna have a nice long life, but you're gonna have a lot of hardship and your life is gonna begin to open up after 60. So, you know, I kept all that in the back of my mind, didn't really pay any attention. And then after 60, my life began to open up in such a way, and now I'll be 74 this year.
And it's wildly exciting. Just by virtue of me speaking with you about this topic is wildly exciting to me. You know, so all the things that I would think about, I'm an only child, so I didn't have people to discuss all this stuff with, and a lot of these thoughts that we're discussing today, I usually just keeping to myself and study on my own and have my own feeling about it.
And then when I'm in light company, we have these wonderful conversations that I go back in my shell, my shell about it, because everyone doesn't subscribe to it. And I'm not trying to argue about it. I believe what I believe and let you know. I let other people believe what they want to believe and, and I think that it, it is a private matter that our deepest beliefs are private matters.
You, you know, and it is, our choice is a privilege when somebody shares their belief system with you. Mm-hmm. That's what makes being a death doula so important and being able to help people move to the other side, make their transition in peace. Not in despair, not with regrets, just in peace. It's great work and it's work that people shy away from, but it's spiritual work and I think that is what we are lacking a lot in society today.
We've forgotten to do the spiritual work well.
Dalia Kinsey: People don't wanna do what they would consider the shadowy side of it. They definitely don't wanna think about their own mortality. Generally speaking, I find people don't even wanna consider that this body urine isn't gonna last forever. That's where it's interesting to see all of this fear that people have around like working with what they see as an unknown, which is.
Plants because most of us haven't been raised to really be able to recognize them or forage the way, maybe a few generations back. People might've been able to, they're afraid that they're gonna accidentally kill themselves. And it's like the fear of the unknown and the fear of death. Like it's depicted in like more than what a film, I think about how many movies have I seen where somebody mis identifies a plant and they kill themselves.
Carolyn Jones: Oh, I see.
Dalia Kinsey: You would think that every other plant is poisonous when in reality, depending on what part of the world you live in, it's not that many compared to all the plants that you could ingest. Nature is not as dangerous as some of us think nature is. I mean, sure nature kills people every day.
Mm-hmm. But it's not as dangerous as we think. And then also, when are we going to just lean into living? Are we just gonna focus on fear of death? Are we gonna lean into fully experiencing our life? And for me, that's got to mean fully experiencing nature.
Carolyn Jones: Yes. And including death. Right. How can you accept the death of your pet?
But you can't accept. You might suffer, you might grieve, but you still know the pet's gonna live a certain amount of time, probably less time, you know, probably die in your lifetime. Right. But you don't wanna accept that you are in that same predicament, you know? And it doesn't have to be a predicament based on how you approach it.
There is a, a discussion group that I participate in through the Brooklyn Society of Ethical Culture, where we actually have death discussions. What is that like? It's refreshing, you know. And also there is a museum called The Museum of Morbid Anatomy. They have wonderful workshops, and I took a course through them where you actually had to do an artistic symbol of remembrance for yourself.
Oh wow. And the beautiful things that people are doing who are unafraid to breach and approach these subjects. Right.
Dalia Kinsey: I think it's a real barrier to fully experiencing your life is continually avoiding your own mortality, because it makes you make kind of strange choices if all you're thinking about is just avoiding death.
Instead of thinking about what do I wanna do with my actual time in this particular body? Like you said earlier, getting started with your healing work. No matter what modality you're using, you should know what you're trying to do. What do you wanna do with this life? And if you haven't accepted that, it's finite.
I think it really changes a lot of your choices, like you hear all the time that when people were told that death was near, it suddenly made them feel free. To actually do what they wanted with their life. But if you understood early in life, like in your twenties or in your thirties when a lot of people still feel immortal.
Mm-hmm. If you understand then that you are in fact mortal, that you can go ahead and take that invitation to live your life right now.
Carolyn Jones: Yes. Yes, and I believe that it also helps a person be more empathetic. I think more people should either consider volunteering or have an internship at a funeral home or in a hospital, or even with people who are invalids or even visit some of these senior centers just to make seniors happy.
Everybody, you know, sitting in a wheelchair and, and debilitated in some way or another, they weren't always like that. And you can't look at it as a us and them kind of thing, a me, a, me and them kind of thing. You have to see humanity as. Stand before the grace of God go.
Dalia Kinsey: Right now, you mentioned before we got on the call that you teach a class about kitchen medicine.
So I know a lot of people that there are a lot of people that wanted to explore more natural ways to build up their immune system. Mm-hmm. For just all the time so that they'd have less coals and you know, less inflammation year round. Yeah. But people have been complaining or saying they're concerned that alternative medicine options and herbalism in general is very expensive or difficult for them to access.
But if there's some things that are just common that could be found in any kitchen that we are just not aware of how we could be using it, that seems like a really missed opportunity. So I would love to hear more about what type of plants that are around us all the time. That we're not understanding could also function as medicine.
Carolyn Jones: Okay. To start, you know, we had mentioned sage and things like that before basil cardamon, like what I love about Ayurvedic medicine is that, uh, east Indian modality of medicine, there are three recognized systems of medicine, traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurvedic medicine, and western medicine. So to that end, we can use Ayurvedic medicine because it speaks to mostly how you cook the manifestation.
Stage of a disease is the last stage. Accumulation is the first where we're piling on, and then we are experiencing symptoms. That we don't really pay attention to. It's like, oh, my back hurts, but it'll be okay. It doesn't have to show up the way we expect it to. It could be some other way. Or I'm feeling a little lethargic.
I'm feeling a little dizzy. Right? So we have things like garlic we spoke about before and I like to tell people what it could be used in like, I like to play a a, a game. It's called Did I miss something? So Garlic, we can use that in soups, meats, poultry, sauces, and tea. You know, ginger soups, salads, sauces, fish.
Tea and rice. Today, I just went to a Thai restaurant and had ginger soup and I didn't want them to put any vegetable in other than scallions. I just wanted to cleanse my digestive system and my blood and everything. And I felt for something very light nutmeg. Oh, and by the way, I'm just gonna throw this in there.
When you're making rice, you can squeeze some lemon juice in it and make lemon rice. It's delicious. Mm-hmm. Throw a little parsley. And you know, the thing behind that is learn to love cooking. You know, you don't feel like cooking all the time. True. But at least when you cook, make it count. For your health.
Dalia Kinsey:Now that sounds like a tall order. Learn to love cooking. Did you always like cooking or did you have to get into it?
Carolyn Jones: Well, yeah, I, I always love cooking because I, I mean, I love experimenting and I love to eat, you know.
Dalia Kinsey: So you'd try cooking without a recipe?
Carolyn Jones: I, I always cook without a recipe. Oh, okay.
Because I mean, I feel like how many mistakes can you make once you just know the basic, once you have the seasoning down pat, and you know whether it's gonna be spicy or, you know, you experiment, you might wanna taste a piece of parsley before you use it, or taste a piece of cilantro before you use it.
And also when you go to a restaurant, observe how they season their food. When I go to certain vegan restaurants, I learned, that's how I learned about liquid smoke, the mushroom bacon, and I was spending $8 for a side of mushroom bacon. I said, this has got to stop. I asked waiter one day, what's giving it that taste?
So it made me realize that we are not addicted to pork, we're addicted to the hickory taste of pork. Mm-hmm. Pork has no flavor.
Dalia Kinsey: Yeah, in general, when I think about it, there's very few types of meat that people like to eat with no seasoning. Mm-hmm. It's usually just all preparation. And so you could do that with whatever products you actually wanna eat.
Like I do know some people, maybe they do want to eat meat, but if you don't want to eat meat, but you just are afraid of losing out on the taste. Mm-hmm. It's just a matter of mastering the flavors.
Carolyn Jones: It is. And with mushroom bacon, you slice the mushrooms up real quick and I wanna try it with, there are a couple of other mushrooms that I want to try, but I did it with portobello, slice it thin, put enough oil in the frying pan just to layer, you know, so the mushroom will get brown.
And I throw some garlic, you know, powder, garlic powder onions on there and said, I like to use paprika 'cause I like color in my food. And the last thing is the liquid smoke and it puts that hickory in there and there you have your, your mushroom bacon and it's absolutely delicious. Oh, that sounds pretty easy.
It is. So, you know, a lot of things. It's not like when being a vegetarian and being a vegan, when it, it first started out, the food really was terrible to me. So getting back to what you were saying, Paprika I mentioned meat, dairy, fish, and rice. You could put it on pink Himalayan, sea salt salad, greens, meat, poultry, dairy, rice, fish, soups and sauces and aloe, you know, to cleanse your blood.
And it also helps one move. I mean, look, it doesn't work for everyone. Delicious on poultry, pasta, salad, soups, and also you can make tea. Turmeric helps with inflammation. You could put it in soups. You can make a tea with it with golden milk. That's a five spice formula with turmeric, ginger, nutmeg, and cinnamon, and a touch of black pepper to help the cinnamon and turmeric get through your system.
And that can be used with sauces, poultry, rice, salads, pasta. And you can use it in place of paprika sometimes just to color your food.
Dalia Kinsey: Well, I can taste turmeric. I can't taste paprika.
Carolyn Jones: True. Yeah. Unless it's smoked paprika. Oh yeah. Yeah. That's a nice taste.
Dalia Kinsey: Now what can paprika do? Turmeric's grown in popularity and it's being sold more as a supplement here in the States.
Mm-hmm. But I don't know what medicinal properties paprika has.
Carolyn Jones: Well, first of all, as I mentioned, I love that it colors the food, right? And anytime you make the food look more appetizing, that's always great. But it is also, it has antioxidant properties and you can usually tell when a spice or a fruit or vegetable is red, it has that reddish color.
It works as an antioxidant, like, uh, cherry, you know, the black. The tar cherries that they use to inflammation. Mm-hmm. It improves immunity and alleviates gas. It also is high in vitamin C and E and protects against cardiovascular disease. Once again, looking at the doctrine of signatures, that red color, it helps create healthy red blood cells.
And it reminds me if you wanna talk about that of beats, right? Mm-hmm. Because beats wonders for the blood and, and iron content and everything of the blood. Oh,
Dalia Kinsey: I do remember hearing that. Now. You said the doctrine of signatures. Can you explain what that is?
Carolyn Jones: Well, the doctrine of signatures in is when you can look at a and surmise what organ it, it will help.
So according to the physical, characteristics of the plant, like the shape, the color, texture, and the smell, it could reveal their therapeutic value. And that's a whole, that's a whole study. You know, I can imagine that goes deep. Mm-hmm. It does. So you could look at maybe something like Mullen and look at the leaf, and it may have the shape, or you may see the lung, you know what I mean?
The shape of the lung in there, or various other plants that might be shaped like the organ that it actually helps. So that's what the, the doctrine of signatures is about.
Dalia Kinsey: That's so fascinating to me because it seems like the plants are trying to communicate how they can support us. Visually. But they've looked like that since before we knew what our own lungs look like.
Right. So I wonder how people used to figure it out aside from just experimenting.
Carolyn Jones: Well, that's what fascinated me about this phase of herbalism where I learned that, and I believe it was the Native Americans used to watch the animals to see how they would heal themselves, and then they would use that plant for healing on them.
So really we learned, as I mentioned before, we learn. From each other. And I, we just covered snakes before, but I wanted to share with you about they're associated with wisdom, intuition, and hidden knowledge. So, you know, if you think about it, they're usually used in some type of oc cult setting. Mm-hmm.
And they're often seen as messengers from the spirit realm and guides in navigating the unseen they see in the dark. Tra and cats do too. It's it, it speaks about cats being mysterious. We know that. And it speaks to black cats. You know, how many years it took me to get over that black cat thing, even though I didn't believe it, I never believed it.
'cause I love black cats. I mean, I thought something was wrong with me because I love black cats. They're sweet and they're beautiful, that they're associated with luck, psychic abilities, and spiritual guardianship. I, I, uh, I don't understand when people don't love cats. 'cause I actually love that movement that they do in root work.
Dalia Kinsey: How do people work with totem animals? They're more likely to have an animal around, or they're looking at the animals for notes and messages.
Carolyn Jones: It happens different ways. One audio book that I was listening to in preparation for this interview, I was tickled because the author said that root work evolves over time, mainly because a lot of ingredients.
For the ceremonial activities may not be available unless you know someone with a possum tail laying around. Right? So, you know, there's no telling what what can be used in and everything based on what belief system it comes from. I've had two encounters. The first time I wanted to reverse something that was happening in my life that someone had inflicted upon me, and I went with my girlfriend who was seriously into it.
I won't name the religion or anything type of ceremony, but I got to see people being mounted by spirits and I got to sit with the priests. What I was told to do was, in my mind, untenable. Hmm. So, my girlfriend was very angry with me 'cause she felt like I should do it. But what was very interesting was that life had presented me with a dilemma.
I had a choice of either pudding, $400 out for the work or paying my rent, which was $400. And to me, because of what I was told to do, I felt like it would reverse itself on me. 'cause that was my Christian upbringing, right? That it can bounce back really, right. If you wanna talk about karma, which those words weren't used at that time.
But now I would say I felt that there would be karmic consequences, which would include me losing the roof over my head. My intuition told me this, so I left it alone and I just let her be angry with me. Yeah, so went and paid my rent and dealt with whatever I had to deal with in other ways in so many other ways that didn't include ritual.
Mm-hmm. Except maybe the burning of incense in my home and some other prayers and stuff like that. Something I was comfortable with. Right. I feel that whatever root work one does, you have to be comfortable with it. You can't be scared. I don't believe in viciousness either. It's powerful stuff. The other experience that I had, I've had many, but I'm talking about ritualistic experiences, not like intuitive or psychic experiences.
Those are plentiful, but this particular time I had gone to a love feast. It was African love feast, and it's there that I became a true believer in do not play or do not. Go in like now. I wasn't playing, but when I say play, I mean know what you're doing. So they were dancing, they were doing tribal dances in the ceremony.
And I got up because I'm thinking as a dancer, and when I danced, all of a sudden it's like I lost, I had no hands and feet that I knew of that were operating. You understand? It was just a swirl. Like if you saw water swirling down the the drain. I was just a swirl of energy. And I remember screaming and they gathered me, and I remember I went back to my Christianity.
I said, Lord, that'll do it.
Dalia Kinsey: You're like, this is the demon possession they told me about.
Carolyn Jones: If you allow me to get up and walk outta here, you don't ever have to worry about me again. And you know, like a dough stands up for the first time when it's born. I remember my legs feeling like that and I dowed my way right on out of there, but I never forgot.
And I have a, a healthy respect 'cause it's real. Mm-hmm It's just, you have to choose if that's the route you wanna take to worship. 'cause I see nothing wrong with it for those who understand it. The problem is if you do it and you don't understand it, I believe that initiation is very important when you're dealing with the shamanic world.
Dalia Kinsey: I think that's something that a lot of us have lost access to, I think. Well that's why I think who do appeals to a lot of people. 'cause there's not as many rules around formal initiation. It's like passed on by mouth, by books, by wherever you get it. But yeah, that's a good reminder for everyone to really just slow down and pace yourself and make sure that everything you're doing feels right in your body.
'cause you're going to get information that way too.
Carolyn Jones: That's right. And make sure that you have a trusted teacher if you're going to go the shamanic route. A lot of people are using psychedelics at this time to get in touch with that realm. And all I can say is be sure that you're dealing with trusted individuals.
Dalia Kinsey: Yeah. Thank you so much for coming. God, I think that's great parting advice for everybody.
Carolyn Jones: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Body Liberation for All Theme
They might try to put you in a box, tell them that you don't accept when the world is tripping out tell them that you love yourself. Hey, Hey, smile on them. Live your life just like you like it
It’s your party negativity is not invited. For my queer folks, for my trans, people of color, let your voice be heard. Look in the mirror and say that it's time to put me first. You were born to win. Head up high with confidence. This show is for everyone. So, I thank you for tuning in. Let's go.
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In the face of microaggressions and other stressors, we often encounter the well-meaning yet useless/misguided advice to "just ignore it" or "brush it off." Suppressing emotions can take a heavy toll on our mental and physical well-being. Many of us have been socialized to believe that we aren’t entitled to our emotions and that expressing vulnerability is a sign of weakness, prompting many to habitually hide their feelings. However suppressed emotions do not disappear. In this mini episode, we explore the consequences of heeding the "just ignore it" advice, revealing the importance of granting ourselves permission to feel and express emotions authentically.
This episode we discuss:
🌈Microgressions as a source of chronic toxic stress
🌈Useful ways to support folks coping with microaggressions
🌈Managing microaggressions in a self-compassionate way
🌈Validating your experience as a self-care tool
Episode Resources
www.daliakinsey.com
Decolonizing Wellness: A QTBIPOC-Centered Guide to Escape the Diet Trap, Heal Your Self-Image, and Achieve Body Liberation
Episode edited and produced by Unapologetic Amplified
This transcript was generated with the help of AI. Thank you to our supporting members for helping us improve accessibility and pay equitable wages for things like human transcription.
Have you ever wondered why almost all the health and wellness information you see out there is so white, cis able-bodied and het? I know I have. And as a queer black registered dietitian, I gotta tell you, I'm not into it. I believe health and happiness should be accessible to everyone. That is precisely why I wrote Decolonizing Wellness: A QTBIPOC-Centered Guide to Escape the Diet Trap, Heal Your Self-Image, and Achieve Body Liberation and why I host Body Liberation for All.
The road to health and happiness has a couple of extra steps for chronically stressed people, like queer folks and folks of color. But don't worry, my guests and I have got you covered. If you're ready to live the most fierce, liberated, and joyful version of your life, you are in the right place.
Body Liberation for All Theme
They might try to put you in a box, tell them that you don't accept when the world is tripping out tell them that you love yourself. Hey, Hey, smile on them. Live your life just like you like it
It’s your party negativity is not invited. For my queer folks, for my trans, people of color, let your voice be heard. Look in the mirror and say that it's time to put me first. You were born to win. Head up high with confidence. This show is for everyone. So, I thank you for tuning in. Let's go.
Have you ever tried to explain the nuances of your experience of racism, sexism, homophobia, or transphobia only to hear, well, why don't you just ignore it? You know who you are, why do you pay it any mind?
Are you the type of person who tells your LGBTQIA+ or BIPOC friends to just ignore hate, discrimination, and the subtle reminders they get about the hostile environment they're living in, in the office in the form of microaggressions.
Have you been that person? Was that your stellar advice? Just stop talking about it because, that'll probably make it better or easier for you to manage, or less uncomfortable for me to have to keep listening to. I'm going to explain why “just ignore it” is garbage advice and what we can do in lieu of stuffing down our emotions just for them to pop up in more disturbing forms later on.
So before we get into why “just ignore it” is trash advice. Let's clarify what microaggressions are. A microaggression could be defined as a statement or an action that reveals that someone has internalized bias against you. It doesn't necessarily mean that this person hates the marginalized groups that you belong to, but it does mean that they have unchecked bias, so unchecked that just.
Spills on out during the business day, during regular conversations, microaggressions, while the name makes it sound like they're not that big of a deal, the consequences for the person on the receiving end of this, it is severe. If you're a person who's had that experience of having somebody say something ridiculous to you that reveals they hold one of your marginalized identities in low esteem, like for example, oh, you're so pretty for a black girl.
Oh, you're so pretty for a trans woman. Oh, you're so well spoken. Hmm. What is the underlying implication in all of those statements? Well, you are surprised because you hold this negative belief that all black fem people are unattractive, that all trans women are not attractive. That. Or that people that look like me will not enunciate or be someone you feel like you can understand.
You may think what you've done is given a compliment. What you've done is a backhanded, hurtful comment that actually does harm. Some people have experienced suicidal ideation after. Experiencing microaggression exposure. So the consequences, depending on the emotional state of the person you are speaking to, or the other people that hear it, can in fact be very severe.
The reason why this channel even exists my work exists is because the chronic stress that people experience. When they have parts of their identity not being embraced or celebrated by the world around them, that chronic stress tears the body down and microaggressions are as much a part of that as more overt obvious signs of racism or transphobia or homophobia.
So telling someone to just ignore. Whatever microaggression they've been exposed to in the office because you think it'll cause less of a ruckus or you don't want them to make a scene, you're afraid that they'll end up being victimized if they're seen as a squeaky wheel. All of that is problematic. You are asking for the silence of the person who is the recipient of the abuse, not the abuser.
That's problematic on multiple levels. Number one, how will we put an end to that behavior in your office or in your family, or wherever this has taken place? If we don't confront it and address it? If you observe this, it would be far more helpful for you to validate the. Experience of the person who has been harmed and to ask how you could be helpful.
How would this person like for you to move forward? Do they feel like a formal complaint would be the way to go? What would feel like a proactive step? What can you do to help? No one needs for you to suggest. That they just stay silent about something that was troublesome enough to them, for them to repeat it to you.
Two. Why is this advice horrific? Where do emotions go when we suppress them? Do they just disappear? Do they never trouble us again? Absolutely not. Suppress emotions. Emotions that aren't. Experienced will get stuck in your body and pop up someplace else. When you bottle up emotions, all you're doing is delaying the experience of them, and fair enough, some people will bottle, bottle, bottle and refuse to ever directly confront emotions for their entire lifetime.
You will experience that bottled up stress, that bottled up anxiety in other ways. Sometimes it manifests as physical pain, as chronic tension that also contributes to physical pain, maybe high blood pressure, headaches, a suppressed immune system. You cannot ignore an emotion and. Expect it to dissipate.
That is not how it works. The feeling of anger, the feeling of frustration, it's there to tell you something. Whatever went wrong, you are not being oversensitive. Your feelings are valid. You are having a reaction because what you witnessed, Triggered that reaction. Now, if the people that are currently in your space can't validate your experience, that's okay.
It still needs to be validated and it still needs to be experienced. So maybe that's gonna be something you do. After work, if you are trapped in a space where it isn't safe to express frustration or anger, and if you are a person of color, you've probably had that experience of knowing that there was no way that you could phrase.
Your experience that would be acceptable to the people around you because they're just so comfortable with encouraging marginalized people to suppress their emotions and to never say anything that could possibly inconvenience. Or even slightly stress out the people with more power in the room. If you can sense, it's not a safe space for you to really be honest about what you're experiencing, that's okay.
You could journal at your desk. That's a way to process. You can call a friend on your lunch break. You can take it to the group chat, take it to someone who not only is not going to ask you for receipts or proof that what you heard is a microaggression was indeed inappropriate, but people who maybe have some similar lived experience who understand what that feels like to be stifled, to be silenced when you've been harmed in an environment that probably contributes to your chronic stress.
All the time. If that negative experience is really sticking with you, it could be something to bring up in therapy. There are also physical things that you can do to help you feel your feelings and move through them, especially with more intense feelings like anger. For me, I find deep breathing exercise or physical activity to be really helpful.
Sometimes just going for a walk is going to be enough because you can really relax. Your nervous system and breathe deeply while you're doing that, and sometimes you'll be able to feel it. There's so much pent up energy that you need to do something really intense. Maybe it's jumping jacks in the office, maybe it's running in place.
Maybe you need to go outside and run around the building. You'll be able to feel when those emotions aren't. So stuck anymore. Think about anytime you've seen even an animal have an altercation in nature. You know, they don't have the same resources as we do for processing their feelings, but you'll notice they typically shake it out before they move on.
That is a good note for you and a visual reminder that when you experience feelings appear, it has. A reaction. There's a response throughout your body and part of your processing could be physical. It doesn't necessarily have to be intellectual. If this run in with this person with unconscious bias or straight up obvious bias that they're aware of and they've chosen to do nothing about, has caused you some grief or sadness because it's a reminder that you are not.
In safe spaces as often as you deserve to be and would like to be. Then maybe something more soothing is what you're going to need. Maybe you need to go home early. Maybe you need to cancel whatever you have planned for later on in the day so that you can take a long, relaxing, hot shower so that you can really decompress.
Rest can help. A very calming evening meditation might be nice. Listening to music that you find soothing or that feels like a heart opener for you. What would a heart opener be? The types of songs that make you feel like crying, but you don't even know why, like it softens up your heart center a little bit.
That can be helpful so that maybe you can induce a good cry if that's what you need to move through it and move on. If the encounter left you with more of a sense of not being safe, like a lot of tension and anxiety, then really creating a calming environment when you can, when you get home, when you get out of that space, is going to be very helpful.
You can do this however feels right for you. For some people, aromatherapy or a soothing playlist is really gonna be helpful. Getting cozy with a weighted blanket or a cozy blanket creating an atmosphere that's. Says to you, safety. It says to you, this is a space where I don't have to perform. I don't have to do anything.
All I have to do is just be.
Decolonizing Wellness Ad Break
All of my life. I have been a fan of self-help books, but when I entered adulthood and I started having to deal with chronic stress related to my marginalized identities, I came up empty. When I looked for resources that could help me, I. Find more peace and cultivate joy in my life while living with systems that oppose queer folks, folks of color, finding any peace and having any joy in their lives.
I wrote Decolonizing Wellness because this is the resource that I needed years ago. It is centered on QTBIPOC, and it is designed to help you find peace in your now body, heal your self-image, and feel truly free. In your body, in a world that doesn't support and affirm you the way that it should. And while the book does center QTBIPOC folks, it's been very interesting to me to hear all the positive feedback from cisgender white folks who have found the message liberatory as well.
This is a fabulous resource specifically for folks like myself, but also for anyone who's interested in looking more closely at the role that systemic oppression and chronic stress has on the human body.
So if you haven't already, be sure to pick up your copy of Decolonizing Wellness. You can find it virtually anywhere through any major book retailer right now. But check out dolly kinsey.com and hit the events and media tab so that you can easily find it at your preferred retailer.
Something hands-on and practical like E F T, can also be very helpful. What is EFT? EFT is essentially a series of tapping that you do around the body that helps you release emotions and really helps you bring down anxiety levels. So the goal is to validate your emotional experience, feel your feelings, process them so that you can move on so that you don't store them in your body.
You deserve breaks from all of the stressors that you're constantly being bombarded with, and the only way you're gonna get those breaks is if you do it with intention. You have to take them. You have to create. Space for them. If you find that the self-proclaimed ally in your office isn't capable of holding space for you, no problem.
Move on. There are other sources. There are other people who are deeper into this liberation work than others who will be able to hold space for you, who know that it's inappropriate to ask for silence from the person who's receiving the abuse. What we wanna do is address. The abuser themselves reinforce whatever policies we have in place to protect people from this type of abuse in the workplace and then move forward.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit daliakinsey.substack.com -
In recent months, the United States has seen a surge in anti-trans bills being proposed and voted on in several states. These laws focus on limiting access to gender-affirming health care for transgender folks, as well as preventing trans people from participating in activities like sports and using public restrooms consistent with their gender identity. Proponents of these bills argue that they are necessary to protect “public safety”, while we know that they are an attempt to invalidate trans identities and deny gender diverse folks access to their fundamental (inalienable) rights.
The potential ramifications of these bills becoming law are immense - especially for trans youth. Studies have found that gender-affirming medical treatments can drastically reduce depression, anxiety, and suicide rates among younger transgender individuals. Trans folks and other empathetic humans have logically been overwhelmed by feelings of hopelessness and distress in response to these developments.
I was recently asked how I stay motivated to keep going when it feels as though so many (esp. in positions of power) want to destroy us. This episode is an addendum to my initial jaded / tired person response.
This episode I discuss
🌈Managing stressful news cycles and political changes
🌈Validating and controlling for the toll the current political situation can take on our health
🌈Turning to the body for information to reduce stress and increase or joy during tough times
Episode Resources
www.daliakinsey.com
Decolonizing Wellness: A QTBIPOC-Centered Guide to Escape the Diet Trap, Heal Your Self-Image, and Achieve Body Liberation
Episode edited and produced by Unapologetic Amplified
This transcript was generated with the help of AI. Thank you to our supporting members for helping us improve accessibility and pay equitable wages for things like human transcription.
Have you ever wondered why almost all the health and wellness information you see out there is so white, cis able-bodied and het? I know I have. And as a queer black registered dietitian, I gotta tell you, I'm not into it. I believe health and happiness should be accessible to everyone. That is precisely why I wrote Decolonizing Wellness: A QTBIPOC-Centered Guide to Escape the Diet Trap, Heal Your Self-Image, and Achieve Body Liberation and why I host Body Liberation for All.
The road to health and happiness has a couple of extra steps for chronically stressed people, like queer folks and folks of color. But don't worry, my guests and I have got you covered. If you're ready to live the most fierce, liberated, and joyful version of your life, you are in the right place.
Body Liberation for All Theme
They might try to put you in a box, tell them that you don't accept when the world is tripping out tell them that you love yourself. Hey, Hey, smile on them. Live your life just like you like it
It’s your party negativity is not invited. For my queer folks, for my trans, people of color, let your voice be heard. Look in the mirror and say that it's time to put me first. You were born to win. Head up high with confidence. This show is for everyone. So, I thank you for tuning in. Let's go.
I received a really great question recently and it resonated because that's one that in the past I'd asked myself as well.
Someone asked what motivates me to keep going, even when our political environment seems opposed against our fundamental wellbeing.
My initial answer, in hindsight sounds a little salty. Even though that wasn't my intention. But that feeling, that knowing that you live in a nation, or you live in a social environment where the power structures really are set up to undermine your wellbeing - destroy you, shorten your lifespan. That is not a new experience for Black Americans. It's certainly not a new experience for indigenous people.
So when recently the attacks on trans folks have intensified. And the political undermining of trans wellbeing has been intensifying. It is a familiar feeling. And so my response sounds like that of a tired person. And this could be part of middle age. Feeling that you can relate more to folks who have lived with systemic oppression for years and years during periods of real intensity like the civil rights movement. You can understand why the older folks would say things like ‘nothing's changed, but the weather.’
This is a pattern. This failure to allow room for everyone's humanity. In the U.S. this is a pattern. And it is exhausting.
Sometimes you just feel numb to it. Everyone's reaction is valid but depending on how long, you've been having these feelings, how you process it over time really seems to change.
So, this was a younger person confronting this feeling, maybe for the first time. And it is so valid, how extremely stressful it is to continually receive reminders that your wellbeing isn't guaranteed and there are not as many systems in place to protect you as there are for other people living shoulder to shoulder with you.
I just wanted to share some of the things that I've found helpful. And go beyond my initial answer, which sounded a little old. And give a more comprehensive answer for people who are at different stages of having this experience.
Looking back at my answer part of it does still hold true for me. And that is that I find comfort in knowing that we can't be erased. And that we belong here as much as anyone else belongs here. We don't need permission to exist. We do not need permission to take up space. But the fact remains that when the political environment is saying that you're not valid or you don't exist. You are more vulnerable to other people acting against you in violent ways. And that is unnerving and it only makes sense that your body will respond to it. And that this would elevate your baseline stress levels.
One of the most powerful things I recommend, and I use myself is teaching your body the difference between a present moment, physical danger and stress related to thoughts of what could happen.
If you are sitting alone in your room, watching the news listening to how other people are systematically creating structures that will make your existence, more difficult, more dangerous.
As you ruminate on that, as you take that in, it can become impossible for your body to make the distinction between real and present danger in that room, where you were sitting alone and all of the potential dangers you may face later.
Part of us may wonder, if I don't keep my head on a swivel, if I don't stay on high alert -will I be more vulnerable?
The truth is when the danger is present, you will know.
And you will be able to navigate that situation to the best of your ability in the moment.
You don't have to stay on high alert, 24/7.
Staying on high alert burns you out, runs you down, and robs you of joy that you could be experiencing in the present tense.
It can feel unclear how you teach your body the difference but there are specific things you can do physically to bring yourself into the present moment.
You can also just focus on noticing – Where you're holding the tension in your body, what fear feels like in your body? And how you can make yourself feel safer in the moment?
Realizing that you need breaks from that feeling of fear and stress - searching for ways to give yourself that break.
Watching your body and paying attention to your body will make it easier for you to notice times when that tension lifts or that physical experience of fear lifts. For a lot of us that's going to be in the presence of our friends, our chosen family, and the presence of other people who share similar identities that are being undermined and attacked.
For some of us that'll be when we're completely alone - when we will feel it easier to let go of that tension or fear, because we don't feel like we have to be on high alert.
Look for any area where you experienced those same sensations. That you could potentially opt out of.
Could you use more breaks from social media? Can you strategically manage the time you spend engaging with political content.
I stay tapped in to when it's time to take action.
Follow groups, you can follow activists. Sometimes for me, the best thing is to be on their mailing list. So when there is a call to action, I can take action. But so that I do not constantly get these pings about more bad news in state after state, after state. Because your experience of empathy for people who share your identities could also feel like stress and tension in your body.
And one of the most upsetting things about systemic oppression to me, it isn't even just these horrific displays of violence that people are sometimes subjected to. It's the way your every day, every minute of your life can be taken from you.
If you want to reclaim that and experienced life as you want to. We can't give all of our energy to keeping up with the ways that people are attacking us. Not 24/7.
If there isn't an action to be taken. The question is - Do you need this information right now? How is this information making you feel?
Do you need to expend energy, trying to convince everyone that you exist and that your existence is valid and you deserve a space in the social setting in which you were born?
For me, that's exhausting. I recently had a really nourishing meditation retreat experience.
Something that came up for me. During the retreat is to lean into the energy that I get from focusing on the love that I have for people with whom I feel aligned. And releasing the need to convince or convert the people who are not aligned.
For me, it feels like a weight is lifted when I released the idea of trying to convince the oppressors that they are on the wrong path. That they've chosen a caustic, unloving, harmful path.
It feels more energizing, more joyful, more nourishing -for me to focus on uplifting people who've been made to feel that they don't belong, and doing what I can to nurture them and draw closer to them.
It isn’t that I don't believe that activism on both fronts is necessary. But it doesn't light me up. And so, I'm just not going to do it. I've sacrificed enough minutes of my lifetime trying to convince oppressors that they are on the wrong path, trying to explain to people how they've done harm, trying to explain the nuance of my experience as a Black person, a non-binary person, a queer person. And I don't want to do it anymore. And so, I'm not going to.
This come up as part of my practice of connecting to my body and listening to my body. The level of boredom that I experienced these days when somebody asked me and inclusion 101 level question -it's just exhausting. And that's not the work that I'm here to do.
And when you try and evaluate, well, what are you here to do?
You can check your body for the answer. What is energizing you? Maybe you love explaining things to people that had been spoken about ad nauseum since the 1950s. That's not my jam, but if that's what you want to do, it gives you energy, and it doesn't make you feel tired or frustrated or angry. Than wonderful.
But if you find that while you're doing good work and advocating for others, you are losing joy and I mean, hemorrhaging joy.
It's one thing to experience occasional bouts of frustration in your activism because you take two steps forward and you feel like the pushback is so strong you question -Are we really making progress?
That's normal.
You'll know the difference between burnout because the work is sucking the life out of you and a temporary frustration.
Another thing I recommend is leaning hard into self-care when you are hit with stressful new cycles and stressful political changes that are negatively impacting us.
This could mean taking more time for yourself, time off work if you can. This could mean more meditation, more stretching, more joyful movement, more journaling - or it could mean laying in bed all day on a Saturday watching cartoons or lighthearted things that make you giggle.
Your body needs breaks.
So look for ways to give your body that break.
In summary my answer to the question of how I manage when it feels like the political environment is determined to act against my wellbeing is
1) I identify my stress triggers and I looked for triggers that I can opt out of being exposed to.
2) I connect with my chosen family and people that affirm me so that I can exist in a space where we don't necessarily need to discuss what's happening because we're all experiencing it together and holding space for how that's taking a toll on our mental or physical wellbeing - knowing that if I do feel like I want to process out loud, they'll be able to listen and understand. And it won't turn into an emotionally draining experience where I'm having to do the educating for other people to even know what the issue is.
3) I take extensive breaks from social media, and I strategically manage the time that I spend engaging with political content online.
4) I practice self-care. And for me over the years, that looks like a lot of therapy, lots of meditation and when I need extra support in the past, it has also looked like prescriptions because the goal sometimes is just survival. At some times in your life, you're at a point of thriving. It can be an up and down.
Healing is not linear. And our experience of wellbeing typically isn't linear either. And that is okay.
5) I stay engaged. I advocate for positive changes for my community. When there's an action for me to take, I take it. Sometimes that means writing legislators. Sometimes that means making monetary donations to people who are deep in the work and know how best to leverage resources.
I really hope you're being gentle with yourself during this stressful period.
I remind myself and I encourage everyone else to remember too, that the only constant in life is change. And no matter how dark things are looking in some parts of the country right now, this will also change.
We cannot all be erased.
It is difficult. It is stressful when people try to erase us. But we are entitled to be here and we are entitled to be visible, and comfortable and safe in the environments we were born into.
Eventually things will get better. Because when one of us or two of us is too tired or too heartbroken to take another step, someone else will pick up the mantle. And the growth will just keep on going.
Sending you all my love. Hoping you find some rest and some peace after listening to this. And if you have any questions, please feel free to email them to me or message me at daliakinsey.com. There are also really helpful embodiment exercises in the book (Decolonizing Wellness). That you may find beneficial. So if you already have the book, I encourage you to go back and revisit some of those sections so that you can find peace in your body regardless of what's going on in the world around us.
Until next time.
XOXO
Dalia
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit daliakinsey.substack.com -
Dr. Maiysha Clairborne is an Integrative Family Physician, Master Practitioner & Trainer of Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP), Hypnosis & Time Line Therapy®, & founder of the Mind Re-Mapping Academy. Through her live trainings, Dr. Clairborne teaches individuals and organizations thought and communication mastery helping leader eliminate negative thinking, faulty beliefs, and emotional trauma, while also teaching them to be trauma responsive in their own communication.
Dr. Maiysha specializes in trauma informed communication teaching her clients the power of word, and how our unconscious thoughts and beliefs have an impact on the reality we create. Her trainings combine the mastery of emotional and communication intelligence, teaching leaders that by mastering their language (both internal and external) they can not only be conscious but also responsible for the impact of their words, actions, and behaviors. This ultimately helps them to communicate in a way that transforms creating new connections and outcomes that positively impact the people, community & organizations around them.
This episode we discuss
❤️🩹Why it’s so difficult to let go of beliefs we picked up early in life
❤️🩹How hypnosis and NLP (Neuro-linguistic programming) can be utilized to shift stubborn beliefs
❤️🩹Creating a sustainable/healthy relationship with anger
Episode Resources
http://www.mindremappingacademy.com
Dr. Clairborne’s Podcast Black Mind Garden
www.daliakinsey.com
Decolonizing Wellness: A QTBIPOC-Centered Guide to Escape the Diet Trap, Heal Your Self-Image, and Achieve Body Liberation
Episode edited and produced by Unapologetic Amplified
This transcript was generated with the help of AI.
Have you ever wondered why almost all the health and wellness information you see out there is so white, cis able-bodied and het? I know I have. And as a queer black registered dietitian, I gotta tell you, I'm not into it. I believe health and happiness should be accessible to everyone. That is precisely why I wrote Decolonizing Wellness: A QTBIPOC-Centered Guide to Escape the Diet Trap, Heal Your Self-Image, and Achieve Body Liberation and why I host Body Liberation for All.
The road to health and happiness has a couple of extra steps for chronically stressed people, like queer folks and folks of color. But don't worry, my guests and I have got you covered. If you're ready to live the most fierce, liberated, and joyful version of your life, you are in the right place.
Body Liberation for All Theme
They might try to put you in a box, tell them that you don't accept when the world is tripping out tell them that you love yourself. Hey, Hey, smile on them. Live your life just like you like it
It’s your party negativity is not invited. For my queer folks, for my trans, people of color, let your voice be heard. Look in the mirror and say that it's time to put me first. You were born to win. Head up high with confidence. This show is for everyone. So, I thank you for tuning in. Let's go.
Dalia Kinsey: I am so excited to have you here. Thanks for taking out the time to join us.
Dr. Maiysha Claiborne: I am so excited. We've talked offline. This is a long time coming.
Dalia Kinsey: Yeah. It's no joke where you're trying to navigate multiple commitments, I think this is a fairly universal marginalized experience in the states, we may be out here doing big things, but we're also working, raising kids, doing all the things, taking care of people it can be hard to get things on the calendar. But when it's time, it all falls into place.
Dr. Maiysha Claiborne: It does. Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be having this conversation with you.
Dalia Kinsey: I really wanted to have you on because of your background as a physician, an MD and as someone who uses hypnotherapy to help people, because I've seen so many things out there that make it look like maybe hypnotherapy is a useful tool, maybe not.
Since it's not regulated in the US it seems like it's one of those things, and I think this happens with anything that's not regulated, unfortunately, sometimes really loud people who use the tool are clearly just kind of bootleg running their operation by the seat of their pants, not really together. And so it makes people perceive the tool itself as less credible.
So to see an MD using hypnotherapy was very interesting to me because we all know if you are a marginalized person, you probably have a lot of deep-seated beliefs that you would like to shake, that you maybe have not been able to figure out how to get rid of so if hypnotherapy is real, we really need to know.
So can you tell us a little bit about what drew you to medicine in the first place, and when you felt interested in bringing in hypnotherapy? How did you realize that it could be useful?
Dr. Maiysha Claiborne: Absolutely. I love that you said we have a lot of deep-seated beliefs. What I'll talk about, you know, at some point is the deep-seated beliefs that we also have about these types of disciplines, the deep-seated beliefs that we have about things like hypnotherapy and NLP and why that's the case. So just about me, there wasn't a sentinel event that drew me to medicine. I just decided one day out of an eighth-grade writing assignment that I was going to medical school and it felt sort of random. Although what I'll say is that my dad isn't a retired OBGYN, my mom is a retired dentist, so probably just kind of went into my DNA a little bit and was modeled to me this sort of like passion for caring for others, right. And I'm the oldest child and so I'm naturally a caretaker. So even though I would like to say that I made the decision of my own accord, most likely it was subconsciously, you know, a conversation for many years.
But I think that it really was a natural part of me to really care for people. What drew me to the type of medicine that I practiced, which when I did came out of residency, I'm a family physician by training. Like that's what I trained in after I went to medical school. But I've always been interested in the integrative, the holistic, like how do we go beyond the Western practices of medicine, and pharmaceuticals in order to, to really heal ourselves? And that really started with wanting to understand the mind-body connection. I grew up in a home of domestic violence, witnessing domestic violence. In retrospect, honestly, I think I was a functionally depressed kid, and so I think that that was sort
Dalia Kinsey: Could you say more about that? Because I don't think I've ever heard that term? Yeah. Functionally depressed. What does that mean?
Dr. Maiysha Claiborne: What that means? Thank you for asking me. A lot of times when we think about depression, especially the stigma of depression, and I think this is a lot of times why we deny the experience as, as people of color, as Black people, is that we see depression as, I can't get out of bed.
I, you know, I'm not motivated to do anything at all. I'm crying all the time. I'm, you know, like that sort of thing. But there are some people who live at this sort of low level of sadness, low level of, you know, I'm, I'm just pushing through every day this experience of feeling depressed. , and it may not be connected emotionally, but feeling like a heaviness, but you can get through the day, right?
Dalia Kinsey: Mm-hmm. , that makes sense. No, I thought that was everybody. Is that not everybody?I think I didn't realize until early adulthood and I finally tried an SSRI that worked and did something for me and started talking with other people about their general vibe every day, and I realized like, oh no, everybody else didn't feel like that. Yeah. It's a problem.
Dr. Maiysha Claiborne: It really wasn't until very recently, I mean, I say recently, probably in the last really five to seven years, that I really began to think like, am I experiencing this sort of functional depression? But when I look back and I, when I thought about that, I start looking back on patterns and I'm, and I really think that, you know, there was a lot of, I, I experienced growing up a lot of sadness, a lot of, you know, inner turmoil and I because it was required, you know, at my age, I'll be 48 in April, so I'm of this generation that was raised by baby boomer parents where there wasn't room for being emotional or anything of that nature, holding space for any emotion. It was just pushed through. And so that's what I did most of my life is pushed through, but there was this part of me having witnessed what I witnessed growing up that really wanted to understand like, why?
Why did this person act this way? Why did this, what made him be this way towards my mom? Right? This was a stepfather. I think that's what drove me to major in psychology in college, you know, I took my first psychology class and I was.
You know, hooked to, oh, there's this, what is, what's up with the mind? I took abnormal psych and I thought psychology, and I thought, oh my gosh, this is it. You know, when I started to take behavioral psychology and, and started to understand like conditioning, you know, operant versus classical, oh my gosh, Pavlov and his dogs, and I mean all of those things.
When I talk about conditioning, it's like how we are automatically trained in our brain to do things and it fascinated me. So that's what sort of drew me into the mind body. But then I just really liked the body parts and that's what had me go to medical school. Now fast forward through medical school, through residency.
I'll say that I always was really off the beaten path. Even in medical school. I studied Traditional Chinese Medicine during medical school. I studied essential oils, you know, and then I started my practice out of residency. I was doing a lot of coaching with my clients as I had them on the acupuncture table.
That was one of the things that I did, and I realized there was so much more to them than what was physically going on with them. And I thought if I could get underneath the resistance to shift their lifestyle or the resistance or whatever their stressors are, then I could better assist them with their health.
And that's what got me started on the path of hypnotherapy. I had met a hypnotherapist. I had met a practitioner of neurolinguistic programming. Back in the day when we had practices, we would exchange services. That's how we networked before social media. I'm dating myself, . Even before MySpace. Well, I think we,
Dalia Kinsey: whoa.
Okay. Before MySpace I'm like, wait, were people in the workforce when MySpace was around?
Dr. Maiysha Claiborne: Of course this is me.
Dalia Kinsey: I spend so much time with people younger than me right now that, yeah we're all getting dated. If you feel young at the time, you're listening to this recording, give it a minute. Just blink and someone will be calling you old.
But I'm really fascinated by Traditional Chinese Medicine because I thought it was already built into that knowledge system that emotions and everything can get trapped in the body and I was under the impression that sometimes you could help somebody get past old conditioning physically, you somehow break it loose and it moves, and that sometimes you could achieve that through maybe therapy or something psychologically, and suddenly it will move.
Did you find that you weren't getting the level of relief for your clients that you wanted when you were doing TCM and acupuncture or not so much?
Dr. Maiysha Claiborne: I actually, I'm one of those people that, man, if I am getting this level of results with TCM and acupuncture, what could I do if I brought in another modality to compliment it?
Ah, so for me, it was like, I was already, because I would, I would do a thing that most acupuncturists don't do, which is put the needles in and sit with the. And what they would do is they would talk to me, so it would drum up emotions and I would listen and we would, we would talk back and forth. I would essentially be sort of coaching them, motivational interviewing and that that part, it was very healing for them in addition to the acupuncture and the TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine).
And so I thought, wow, if I'm getting these kinds of results just doing this untrained, maybe I should go get. , right? And then, and then that's what led me into that, down that path. So I, um, I decided to, to become a practitioner of hypnotherapy and, and neurolinguistic programming. Started to see some incredible results.
Really just helping to decrease the resistance to change because people would want to change. People would, you know, that's how we are. Like we know that there's stuff that we wanna change in our minds. And we even sometimes take the actions, but then we come up on these roadblocks that just stop us in our tracks, and we don't always know why.
And so the hypnosis, the hypnotherapy, and the neurolinguistic programming techniques that I use help them to see the connection of the resistance and even release the, the block, the negative emotion or the limiting belief that they didn't know was there.
Dalia Kinsey: See, that's a tricky thing. Yeah. I feel that with clients all the time.
If they've sought you out and they've paid for your time, you know, something in them wants to change and is fed it with how things are, but with some people, , it feels like whatever the old beliefs were that were stopping them from being able to change, they have worked through that or cleared that before they get to you.
And that person makes progress like super, super fast. Mm-hmm. and you get people who haven't figured out what are they getting from this behavior that they wanna change. Is there something that needs to be fed or taken care of or addressed before you can move forward. So then it feels like you're sending for me, sometimes it feels like. There are so many different providers involved.
You come to someone with one thing, but then you find out there's like five other people you need to see before you can really resolve your issue and depending on your bandwidth, that is never gonna happen. So what is NLP and what is hypnosis? When you went in initially, had you seen some research that made you convinced that it would be effective or had lived experience, like received hypnosis and felt a shift, and that made you realize, hey, this could be something I want for my clients.
Dr. Maiysha Claiborne: For me it was lived experience and what I'll say is that my initial view of hypnosis and NLP was a lot of my now people who are learning about it, initial view, like I was like nervous about it.
Like I don't want people in my head, especially if I don't know them, I don't know what they're gonna do, what they're gonna try to manipulate me. You know? Like, I don't know about this N L P. Does it really work? It seems like really kind of woo. You know, like these were some of the thoughts I had.
Well over 10 years ago when I was experiencing it, but to experience, um, having a block from taking action and then, you know, trade with this provider and this provider helped to unlock something in me that was, that was no longer, that I no longer had a fear that I no longer had this belief and was able to then go and perform and make the changes that I need to make was.
Wow. Right. And the hypnotherapist, I actually invited him to a retreat that I was doing at the time and he was doing a demonstration and, and the whole room just by proxy went down into hypnosis. And when we all came back, we felt like we had had the best power nap. And we felt so energized and so empowered and I was like, he, he wasn't even, he wasn't even trying to hypnotize us.
He was demonstrating to us. And I thought, that is very powerful. And I think that's what shifted my view that made me wanna go and learn it because I feel like, I felt like what was I leaving on the table impacting my own patients that I could be utilizing to get them even more deeply, even more quickly to their goals.
Dalia Kinsey: Hmm. Yeah. I love that. What, in a nutshell, I'm sure this will be kind of like a cursory definition, but what is, is it neurolinguistic programming? That's what NLP stands for? Is hypnosis under that umbrella? And are there lots of things underneath the NLP Label or how does that work?
Dr. Maiysha Claiborne: Yeah, so first what I'll do is I'll just sort of define NLP.So neurolinguistic programming is really, it is the way that we utilize language to program and reprogram our minds. And it's not just, you know, words are only 7% of language, so it's language spoken and unspoken. Our verbal, our body language. You know, like if you think about if you are, and I know some people are listening, but if you think about if you, you're slumped in a chair and you suddenly.
Like you feel differently in your body. So that's, that's a language. So how we utilize these various aspects of language to shift how we think and feel and what we believe. That's neurolinguistic programming. And the encompass in that is the conscious use of language, like using language consciously. And also there are actually tools and techniques that you can use that help shift belief and view and things of that nature.
And shift emotions, like helping you to emotionally regulate in those tough moments. Um, so that's neurolinguistic programming. And yes, there are a. Things under the umbrella of neurolinguistic programming. Um, and N L P is sort of in. How do, how do I call it in the lineage of hypnosis? So it all started with hypnosis way back in the days of Egypt, right?
So the hypnosis is nothing, it's not something that's new. It just wasn't called that when, you know, back in the days of drumming, back in the days of chanting. So hypnosis is just, um, the, the process of going into trance. and, and we know kind of what trance is like. You go into a trance, you go into this deep state of focus, this deep state of concentration, and everybody has been in trance.
driving down the street, listening to music, getting someone into your music that you miss your turn or you know, you're dancing, dancing in the kitchen to your favorite music, and someone's like calling you and you don't hear them. You're in trance. You know, runners, high trance, meditation, trance, , you know, like every, yeah, everything is trans.
It's just hypnosis. You have, you have an assisted trance basically for the purposes of being, having someone, or yourself even being able to give your, positive suggestions of empowerment.
Dalia Kinsey: It’s interesting that you mentioned drumming as well, because I was listening to something recently. I'm really into herbalism and plant medicine in general.
Someone was making an observation that you don't see a lot of like psychotropic, drugs being used by our ancestors on the continent. But you see drumming being used to induce a trance-like state. I mean, and there's like one or two um, psychoactive medical type plants I can think of in West Africa that people use, but nothing like the drumming, right?
Everybody uses the drumming and it's interesting that you don't have to know what is happening for it to actually be part of your culture and your knowledge system, and I know I've heard again and again growing up to watch what you say, don't talk it up. I mean that emphasis on words have power and basically, don't be out here saying really hateful things about people cuz something. That might happen to them. I mean, we regarded it sometimes as just like superstition when we were kids. But it really does do a lot of damage when you're speaking negative and hateful things over other people, especially depending on when they hear it.
Yeah. Can you tell us what is the difference between me now oldish hearing something negative, let's say about like Black folks or queer folks versus if I hear that same thing at five years old, what's the difference in my ability to process or filter? What happens?
Dr. Maiysha Claiborne: Well, so for some people there is no difference. I think it's important to say because when we're at our most vulnerable, when people, especially for people close to us when, when people say mean things or when we say mean things to ourselves. So, by the way, when we talk, we're also listening to ourselves, even though we're not, we are not always consciously listening to ourselves when we speak out loud we can hear ourselves and that constitutes suggestions to our own unconscious mind, which is what w why what you said was so important about how words have power and be careful about the use of hateful speaking over others and over oneself. Right.
Dalia Kinsey: That's a really good reminder. Yeah.
Dr. Maiysha Claiborne: So for some, sometimes though, you know, when we're, as we mature, the mind is developed and changes and does have that ability to, to discern what is true or what we, what we want to accept, as true, I should say, and what we choose to reject as true.
In the first 10 years of life, our brains are sponges, so we are sort of indiscriminately accepting suggestions. , you know, the things that our parents say, the things that our siblings say, the things that our teachers say, the things that our aunts and uncles and grandparents say, and the things that we watch on the tube, you know, on well now would be the YouTube, but, but back in the day, it was the TV-tube.
The television, which is why it's really important for us as parents to watch the programming that our kids are watching and what are the unconscious messages that those programs are sending to ours.
Dalia Kinsey: Now that thought in itself, when you think back, everybody listening to the kinds of things you watched as a kid.
Recently because of Covid, you know, we all blew through whatever was in our queue, and we watched any shows we were keeping up with. And you started revisiting shows from your childhood, movies, from your childhood, and you're like, I didn't see all this sexism, whoa, I didn't see all this antisemitism, whoa I didn't notice all the rape culture. I didn't notice how they kept depicting, you know which cartoons these are? Yeah. Where technically no one was racialized, but they clearly coded certain characters and animals as Black. And you wonder, oh, I don't recall a lot of direct in my-face experiences with racism.
but it was in everything I was watching. Mm-hmm., no wonder I got this general impression that like, oh, everybody hates me. I don't know who's safe and who's not safe because people see me and they see dot, dot, dot. Mm-hmm., how many times do you have to be exposed to something when you're in that sponge like phase for it to stick?
Does it have to be repeated or could it honestly be one time?
Dr. Maiysha Claiborne: It really could be one time. I mean, it could be one time and it could, and it could be repeated times, right? Um, but really it only takes once, you know, when I do this, the work of deep release, which through a technique called timeline therapy, and I, I take people back to like release to the first event and because it's sort of like a, you know, it's a, it's a journey, right?
It's an active imaginative experience and oftentimes, it is an event that maybe they didn't remember until that moment that it got brought up by the unconscious. Right. So, it, it was, it was one event.
Dalia Kinsey: That's fascinating. I mean, I've been convinced for the longest time that because I saw Arachnophobia when I wasn't old enough to, cause it was PG-13, I was at the movies to see a different movie and, um, an aunt that didn't feel like being bothered felt like she would just hurt all the kids into finish up that movie.
Mm-hmm., in hindsight, those spiders couldn't look anymore. , the way they code them as malicious out to get you, that's not how things work in nature. Mm-hmm., if a spider gets on you and it scurries up you, it's literally trying to get to a safer place to the spider, a higher place is probably safer. They're thinking maybe you're a tree.
I don't know, but I have not been able to shake this terror of spiders, and I don't ever remember it being a problem prior to seeing that movie at seven years old.
Dr. Maiysha Claiborne: Let me tell you, that's the movie that did it for me as well and I was Thanks a lot adults. Right? It was like, that was actually much later in my life cuz I was not afraid of spiders in that way.
Oh, until, I saw that movie. And even, I will tell you, even as you were talking about the movie, I was having this physiological, skin-crawling experience. And you know, now because I'm like sort of trauma trained, I'm like, oh no, I'm safe., you know, I'm regulated, I'm good, but I could feel my skin tingling.
And I was like, Ooh, yeah, trauma response.
Dalia Kinsey: Wow. I mean, what a mess. Because you know, the people who made that movie, it was to entertain. Yes, but they pushed those buttons a little too
Dr. Maiysha Claiborne: well, yes. Well, you know, I, I mean, what's interesting about that though is that at some point in my life, I mean, I used to watch all the scary movies like the Jasons, the, you know, all the things, right.
And at some point, I realized that that was not good for my mental health. And I've cut out all horror movies, you know, so there are certain, there's that, that's a whole genre that I will no longer watch.
Dalia Kinsey: Now, how can you tell the difference between, hey, this just is not working for my body and the people who seem to be delighted by horror movies?
Dr. Maiysha Claiborne: What do you mean? How can I tell the difference?
Dalia Kinsey: What was the, um, like how do you know if it's harming you or hanging out? Was it like your body telling you, like you just didn't feel good after you watched the movie for a while?
Dr. Maiysha Claiborne: For me, it was definitely the way my body reacted.Of course, it was like rumination in my mind and of course disturbed sleep, you know, things of that nature. Um, being a little bit more hypersensitive to danger and things of that nature, like suspicious looking around. I mean, we're talking about movies like The First Power and you know, like things that were, that could be real, but we knew that weren't real. It was that, that kind of thing.
Dalia Kinsey: Well then that really makes me think about, everybody needs to be careful about how much you take in these black suffering movies.
Dr. Maiysha Claiborne: Yes. I stopped watching those as well. I,
Dalia Kinsey: I realize it just bothered me on an ethical level like, generally, the people making the money off of these films, once again are, it's not us. And it's like, oh, there's something really wrong that like in 2023, maybe you could still be making so much money depicting the suffering of Black humans. In a country where, still, we haven't all, we haven't received the support we need to recover from the suffering that our ancestors dealt with at the hands of folks in this country and it just felt wrong from that standpoint. But then it also felt like it was keeping me in an agitated hyper vigilant state. And it was making it really, really hard for me to give people even like a teaspoon of grace. Yes. If they said anything. Yeah, just slightly off. I couldn't tolerate it, so I had to cut those out.
Dr. Maiysha Claiborne: Absolutely. I mean, it's just very similar for me. Like I, I was angry a lot and when I started to recognize that, when I watch those kinds of movies, I'd be angry for weeks and it would take me a, a just quite a bit to like, come down, come back to neutral.
You know, which is where I need to be in the kind of work that I do, I teach this work. So I teach neurolinguistic programming, I teach that, right? And I have to walk the talk. I mean, I don't have to, but I choose to, right? And then I consult in the equity, diversity, inclusion space, which means I'm teaching white people how to be anti-racist, how to discover the anti-oppressive inside of themselves, how to dismantle the white supremacism through being trauma-informed and trauma-responsive by acknowledging lived experience and being sensitive to and responsive to lived experience, you know?
Dalia Kinsey: Yeah. I would love to hear what applications you see for hypnosis when it comes to releasing your own. Internalized negative bias that's harming you every day because you hold that identity, and also releasing negative bias about identities. You don't hold that in your mind. You know it's not true and you don't wanna believe it, but you know, you keep acting on these old assumptions.
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Dr. Maiysha Claiborne: I think in the corporate space, in the organizational. The NLP has more practical in-the-moment application because what it does is it teaches, it teaches people how to, um, recognize their filters, recognize those biases, and interrupt them in the moment to emotionally regulate the discomfort that's happening.
In interaction so that they can actually listen differently, expand their listening, and respond in a way that is not defensive, you know, or I'm not paternalistic, or you know, like really that's not gaslighting, right? To recognize. And then also to understand that they're in a different model, the world than the person they're speaking with.
And to be able to like imagine stepping into someone else's shoes and how it might occur for them. Which is difficult when you've never had that experience, but at least you can hallucinate something , right? And so this is the, this is how I bring neurolinguistic programming into the corporate space is, is by teaching people how to listen.
Expand their listening, how to communicate in a more trauma sensitive, trauma responsive way. How to emotionally regulate, like really expand their resilience around the discomfort that comes with this work and expand their emotional fluency and emotional intelligence. That's the application and DEI and anti-oppression work.
Dalia Kinsey: Oh, that sounds massive. That sounds like something that's definitely not being addressed by everyone, because humans like to be comfortable. Mm-hmm. . And I think a lot of people, when you come in as a consultant or as a presenter, people have decided that it's on you to make sure they don't experience any discomfort while you're helping them change.
It's an unrealistic expectation. But if you don't address, Hey, feeling uncomfortable is. , you should expect that
Dr. Maiysha Claiborne: mm-hmm and giving them some tools
Dalia Kinsey: Right, right. So what do you find is the most helpful for you personally when you're trying to stay regulated as a Black person in a setting where you might be triggered in the process of doing your DEI work.
So you, cuz you mentioned earlier that watching some of those films was making you angry all the time and that's not compatible with the work that you do. Mm-hmm. , I know some people have expressed that they feel. Sometimes it sounds like guilty about even considering forgiving people. They're all dead anyway, but for their trespasses against their ancestors.
Yeah, basically. Also for forgiving anyone who reminds them or looks as though they have not had the experience of being racialized. You can't always know just from looking at somebody, but you know what I mean, in general. And people don't want to feel angry because it's a really draining emotion.
It's an informative emotion, but it's not supposed to be felt nonstop with no breaks.
Dr. Maiysha Claiborne: Mm-hmm.
Dalia Kinsey: Yeah. Can you explain in your experience, what is the benefit of avoiding staying in that angry space? And if you ever felt any type of way about trying to do that?
Dr. Maiysha Claiborne: It's such a good question because I think that what happens and why people resist forgiveness is because they collapse forgiveness with absolution.
The refusal to forgive or the holding of a resentment is like drinking poison and expecting someone else to die, right?
And so when we un-collapse forgiveness and absolution then we can forgive and release ourselves from the negative emotion while then turning that energy to holding others accountable for their actions.
Right. It preserves our own bodies and then we can also turn the focus on our own traumas and heal from that experience. Heal from the ancestral trauma passed down. Cuz I think that's very important. We can't heal if we're holding onto the anger.
Dalia Kinsey: That's important to know. And be aware of. What feels like anger in your body. It's not doing your body any favors. Right. And when you're in that heightened state, it's also hard to find solutions. So our most powerful point, maybe not totally neutral, but just a non-reactive, energetic space is really where we see solutions and you can see that somebody's messy, shady, not safe, maybe just a general jerk without having any feelings about it, right? I mean, you can, you know, you've had that experience where you're like, oh, I see that person, but you don't feel entangled with it, and how effectively you don't allow that person to do you any harm.
Dr. Maiysha Claiborne: Right. And the thing is, you know, I'm not saying that we won't feel emotion, but there's feeling appropriate anger for the circumstance, and then there's feeling and anger that's connected to the past that really holds us, that grips us, that controls us.
Right. And that's the part we have to release because if someone says something that is angering to me, then I have the right to feel anger. Now, will I feel anger for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks? No. What I will now do having released old anger, is experience the anger, but disconnect enough from it to recognize I'm feeling anger and to be able to speak about it without clapping back, so to speak.
Right. I think it's important to understand, you know, the four responses of trauma, which is fight, flight, freeze, like during the headlights or fawn, which is people pleasing and leaning into and trying to fix it. You can be one or all of them.
Dalia Kinsey: That fawning was a new one for me in adulthood because I think we've all heard about fight or flight, but I kept seeing it in an environment where there was a very abusive leader. And I see certain people will bend over backwards trying to accommodate, that's their natural response. But when you talk to them, they're like really angry about how they're being treated. And I kept wondering like, why do you keep doing so much ?
Why do you keep, like you are, they're superstar. I don't think they even know how much you are upset with how you're being treated. And it wasn't until I was as introduced to the concept that it's not just fight or flight.
My issue has always been fight is definitely my response when I feel unsafe and as a Black person in the office that goes over like a rock.
Yeah. So I've been trained to suppress that since my very first job and so usually, running is like the only option.
Dr. Maiysha Claiborne: It's interesting because when freeze came along, cuz it was fight and flight, then it was fight, flight, freeze. And when freeze came along, I finally felt seen because I was never a fighter or a fleer, I was always the person that was like, like lose my words, mind went blank, shut down, kind of person, and it was closest to the flight, but I didn't feel like it was flight, right? I didn't wanna run away or I couldn't run away.
Dalia Kinsey: Are some of these more common based on what type of adverse childhood experiences you went through? Like a kid? in a dangerous situation, probably having no words or just getting small or fawning, are your safest bets?
Or does it seem like some people like that was always going to be their coping mechanism?
Dr. Maiysha Claiborne: I mean, it's a good question. Honestly, I don't know. I could speculate that that could be true because the other, the, the, the fawning or the people pleasing, you know, I always say I'm a recovering people pleaser, right? The stepping on eggshells, the walking on eggshells is definitely another, contextually speaking, whatever the, the context is, to avoid.
Minefield there was the people pleasing. Right. And so it, I think you could be correct, you know, but I it's hard to, it's hard to, so I wonder if there are any studies on that.
Dalia Kinsey: It would be interesting to know yes that sounds like a good rabbit hole to go down.
Dr. Maiysha Claiborne: Yeah. When Fawn came out, which was, which was, you know, kind of recent.
I too, like I didn't know what it was for a long time and I had to read up and then I was like, oh yeah, this is familiar too. So I think it is important to, to understand that we could be contextually one the other, both depending on what circumstances it is. And some circumstances I really absolutely am fight in some circumstances I'm freeze in some circumstances.
I'm fine. I'm rarely, I'm rarely.
Dalia Kinsey: Well, this is the beauty of in any setting in a team, in an organization, you need all kinds because at some point there's going to be a crisis level situation, and you can't all be that person who everyone's trying to convince you you've got to move. You always say that person in horror movies, right?
I don't know why they represent or they present that one so often. Maybe because it's the worst possible one to have if someone's chasing you with a chainsaw. Freezing is, in that instance, it's not the move. But it's a good thing to be surrounded by people who are self-aware enough to know, oh, when I get activated, this is what I'm going to do.
So y'all can anticipate that and either try and make space for it or just know it's not personal, I got activated and this is what happens.
Dr. Maiysha Claiborne: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And so circling back to the original question, which was like, what are, how do, how do you begin to regulate in that space? And one of the ways that I have done.
Is to, you know, I teach this in some of my workshops, this, this sort of three positions of listening. And so if you're in that unsafe, that involuntary, oh, and by the way, and, and, and I think you have said this, but this, these trauma, these responses, these activations, these trauma responses are a hundred percent involuntary.
And it is only through training, like you said, like you alluded to, that we can move and do different things when our body is doing the, is having the response itself. Right. So as you're having the response, if you could recognize. that you're having a response. Then depending on who you are with, you can either say, I'm having a response just by saying I'm having a response right now.
You have stepped yourself out of the emotional part of it, right? So you step out of yourself almost like an auto body experience to dissociate in the moment, not forever, but in the moment from the emotion. And then seeing that, okay, this is what's happening. You can sort of choose your next action. If you feel like you can speak without moving into, you know, this confrontation, then you speak.
I am having a response right now and what, this is what I heard, and this is what's causing it. If you cannot do that, when you step outside your body, you can walk. I can't, right now, I'm leaving or I'm hanging up the phone. I need to go right . Right . So those, you know, whatever. But it's, it's in the, for me, it's in the stepping outside of myself.
It's in the recognition. And, and someone asked me in the last conference that I was in, like, how do you begin to, how do you know when you're in the trauma response? And it. Practice. So before you can actually act, you have to recognize, and that means being in your body. And for some of us, like me, who live in their heads and are who, like their head is disconnected from their, you know, the, because they're living in their brain, you have to practice being in your body.
And what I'll say about that is, one thing that has really helped me is doing specific embodiment practices like yoga, breathing. . That seems oversimplified, but it is. It's like you can sit and breathe and, and, and feel what you're feeling. Feel the backs of your legs against the chair. You know, look around the room.
Allow yourself to see the colors that are happening. These are sort of feeling being out of your brain and sort of into your body. I do body work, you know, I have. Let's call a structural kinesiologist. Some people call it massage therapist, but it's a person who works deeply with the, with my connective tissue.
But having someone on a regular basis working with my body puts me in my body. , right? So whatever that is for you, whether you do tie massage where the person's stretching you around, you know, dancing puts you in your body. So do things that put you in your body and then you'll start to become more aware of your body and then when things happen that are uncomfortable, instead of immediately sort of dissociating out in like you just sort of recognize this is happening.
And then. Consciously step out and do the next thing. When it feels safe, you can go back and feel the feelings that you need to feel with the person who is safe to feel it
Dalia Kinsey: Now that’s the key. That's the key with the person that would be safe. I do feel like all of this work is incredibly helpful, not just for stress management, but also for people who have a pattern of disordered eating related to trying to regulate with the help of food.
Which a lot of times, especially for binge eaters, it will feel so bad after the binge is over. That you will seek out help, you'll want to change. But until you’ve started to notice what puts you in the state where you felt you needed to disassociate and you didn't wanna feel anything.
I don't know if you can break that habit loop without embodiment.
Dr. Maiysha Claiborne: Yeah. And there's a question that you can ask that my mentor once asked me, or my committed listener, cuz I'd be like, he'd be like, instead of running away, instead of, you know, freezing up and then like just dissociating, you might say something in the moment.
I'm like, well, what if I don't know what I'm feeling? Because some people don't. Like if you, if you are a person who has not occupied your body in a long time and you, you have not connected what happens in your brain to what happens in your body to an emotion. Number one, I suggest an emotions wheel.
That was very helpful for me.
Dalia Kinsey: Well, it's so funny, a bunch of this stuff sounds like, didn't they try and tell us this in elementary school, but we didn't know that we were gonna need it .
Dr. Maiysha Claiborne: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. There's a cool app called the Mood Meter, and I believe it's free, and it can help, it can give you that. It's like the feelings wheel, but what he told me to ask myself, If I want to connect to, you know, what was that?
That the specific thing that activated is, what is it that happened just before you felt the thing that you felt in your body? What happened? Or what did someone say? What did you hear? See, you know, like right before you felt the thing, what did you hear or see? Then that helps to identify what the thing was.
Cuz for me it would be, Something would happen and, and it would, and then I suddenly, I'd sort of feel not quite right, but I wouldn't know why I was feeling not quite right. . Yeah. And then it'd all get blurry and then I'd just be like, well, you know, obviously. And so I would gaslight myself. Oftentimes we do.
I'm like, oh, well it must've just been me, right. and then I would go up out and I would suppress it, and then the next time, if I'd be with the person and the person would do the thing or say the thing, then I would, it would be like .
Dalia Kinsey: Oh yeah. Oh, I've definitely had that experience. It's so interesting, depending on what emotions were safe or normalized in your home, how this could look different on different people. Yeah. I thought for the longest time, oh, my family was so high functioning with great communication. Blah, blah, blah. But as an adult, and in hindsight and in response to recent events, like major losses, like deaths in the family, I realized that it was always okay to be angry.
They felt like, oh, kids get angry, kids throw a tantrums. But nobody wants to see a kid cry. And it's almost even worse if it's for a good reason and it's something nobody can fix it. Like if you're sad that your grandma died and my family, nobody wants to see that.
I didn't realize that a lot of times I would say sometimes that I was angry when I was actually heartbroken, but the idea of saying like, that something hurt my feelings or my heart is breaking, it felt like….
I don't wanna say like dying, you just felt like, why in the world would I wanna feel that incredibly uncomfortable sensation of acknowledging this forbidden emotion that I've come to see as weak and as something you should never have. It's weak. It's bad. It's all these things. Yeah. And I only realized it recently.
I think it's a blessing for my partner that now I am starting to make the distinction between sad and I wanna yell and I'm livid when I'm actually just sad.
Dr. Maiysha Claiborne: Yeah, yeah. Anger is the mask for so many emotions.
Dalia Kinsey: Yeah.Wow. There is, so this all feels like it could. Weeks of interviewing you.
Dr. Maiysha Claiborne: I mean, we, we go deep.
Boy, we've gone deep several times this has been amazing.
Dalia Kinsey: I really appreciate that you took out the time to break down these concepts because if it feels like when you look for new information, sometimes everybody starts talking like you already know what's going on. Where would you recommend people get started if they are curious?
Like if they know there's something they see themselves doing repeatedly, they don't wanna do anymore, and they haven't been able to figure out how to change, how could they connect with you or get a taste of what hypnotherapy feels like or looks like? Or how would you recommend they look for someone in their area.
Dr. Maiysha Claiborne: Well, so, um, what I'll first say is that I do work with people all over the country. If anyone wants to reach out to experience hypnotherapy, to work with me as a coach through the NLP lens to even be trained, you know, I wanna, you can say how you say, okay, I wanna, I wanna do it, but I wanna learn it for myself.
If that's something that you're interested in, then you can go to the website,
https://mindremappingacademy.com/. And I think they'll probably have that in, in the, in the, in the show notes. But what I will would encourage you to do is to listen to my podcast. And the podcast gives you weekly tidbits of how this is applicable in so many areas.
And lately, I've been. Really on the, um, parent and kid and how we interact with our kid, you know, and then honoring the emotional intelligence and building emotional intelligence in our kid's journey because it's, it is a journey that I'm also on. But I do talk a little bit about how this work is useful in, in the equity space, how it's useful in leadership, how it's useful in intimate partnered relationships, different communication tips, so, and everything.
Even when I talk about children, I always say, This is useful in with, with our children, but apply to self because at the end of the day there's a lot of inner child healing that we have to do. and there are many people who are stuck in younger stages of development because we didn't get what we needed. And that's no, um, respect to our parents. It's just where they were at the time and what they were taught and the resources that they had available to them based on what was going on back in the day, which was survival.
Survival was going on back in the day. They didn't have no time for feelings. They don't have no time for emotional intelligence. They have emotions. They're dead. So , you know? Yeah. So it's like, yeah. Yeah.
Dalia Kinsey: I mean, that is such a heavy one. Is so serious because you feel bad sometimes, like going into therapy and you're like, uhoh ny parents are coming up again. And I'm like, I was there though, they were doing a good job. But they were raised by people that were even more. Having to focus on survival only, so technically, since we're all alive and listening to this right now, they, that was the most important job was to keep you alive until adulthood.
And now we are free to work on our stuff.
Dr. Maiysha Claiborne: Yes, yes. Check out the Black Mind Garden podcast. That's what it's called, the Black Mind Garden. And you can find it on your favorite podcast platform, um, on Apple, on Spotify, on Google. Play on all of those. And um, I'll make sure that you have. To that as well. And so that's, those are the two best ways to reach out to, and I'm on all the social media platforms.
Most active on LinkedIn. Probably LinkedIn and Instagram. But I am on Facebook even though. I have a Twitter profile. Don't, don't message me there. I'll never check it. . I know,
Dalia Kinsey: Right? I finally deleted it. I'm like, I've never log in. Maybe there were messages I missed, but I couldn't even be bothered to open it. It was so long ago. Thank you so much. I'll definitely make sure the podcast is linked in the show notes. I know people are gonna want to hear more of these practical applications so they
can go deeper with.
Dr. Maiysha Claiborne: Awesome. Thank you so much for having me. This was an amazing conversation. And by the way, I can't wait to have you on my podcast as well,
Dalia Kinsey: Perfect. So everybody be on the lookout for that because when that happens, you'll see it in your inbox.
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Dr. Sand Chang (they/them/their) is a Chinese American nonbinary clinical psychologist, DEI consultant, and somatic psychotherapist with more than 20 years of experience providing training and mental health services in a variety of settings, including the corporate sphere, startups, community mental health, university counseling, public schools, nonprofits, and medical centers. As a DEI trainer/educator and consultant, Dr. Sand strives to bring an intersectional, trauma-informed perspective to help workplaces create inclusive and psychologically safe(r) environments.
This episode we discuss
🌈Understanding the value of lived experience
🌈Trans-masc and non-binary body image and acceptance barriers
🌈Misgendering and other sources of minority stress
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www.sandchang.com
www.daliakinsey.com
Decolonizing Wellness: A QTBIPOC-Centered Guide to Escape the Diet Trap, Heal Your Self-Image, and Achieve Body Liberation
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Have you ever wondered why almost all the health and wellness information you see out there is so white, cis able-bodied and het? I know I have. And as a queer black registered dietitian, I gotta tell you, I'm not into it. I believe health and happiness should be accessible to everyone. That is precisely why I wrote Decolonizing Wellness: A QTBIPOC-Centered Guide to Escape the Diet Trap, Heal Your Self-Image, and Achieve Body Liberation and why I host Body Liberation for All.
The road to health and happiness has a couple of extra steps for chronically stressed people, like queer folks and folks of color. But don't worry, my guests and I have got you covered. If you're ready to live the most fierce, liberated, and joyful version of your life, you are in the right place.
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Dalia: I'm so happy to have you here. I am always looking for people who are focusing on serving LGBTQIA plus people, preferably BIPOC but it's sometimes really hard to find, I don't know if this happens as much for other folks of color, but among Black folks, the homophobia is next level and the transphobia is like - it just makes you wanna gouge your eyes out. And so, you may struggle just to find a BIPOC person who offers the healing services that you need, but then finding one that's not gonna be transphobic intentionally or unintentionally, cuz that's just not their focus, it's not their interest, it really is a whole nother layer.
It's so exciting to see that you're out here leading with your marginalized identities. How did you get to this point? Because I know for me it wasn't overnight. How do you feel like being a Chinese American person and a non-binary person influenced your worldview?
Dr. Sand: Oh gosh. I mean, that's a big question. I kind of wanna go back cuz what you, something you just said was so real. Like just, you know, within our own communities facing these different aspects of white supremacy, colonialism, oppression, and yeah, you don't have to be white to enact white supremacy. You don't have to, you know, it's like all this stuff is in the air and we're indoctrinated into these systems.
And so, it's sometimes so hard to find like a truly intersectional liberation space and you know, to go to your question, I don't know that I, like ever thought to myself, oh, I wanna do this kind of work. I, I think I just like, as a young person, was really interested in people and trying to understand people and trying to understand dysfunction, to be honest.
you know, the dysfunction that was around me. And I don't even wanna use that language, you know, I kind of feel like that's, in some ways amidst language, but like, let's say like the chaos that that, that I witnessed and wanted to understand. And in coming into these like professionalized spaces, people would come to me and say like, oh, like you, you're Asian.
Like, tell me about Asian people. Or, oh, you're queer. Tell me about queer people.
Dalia: Like all of the Asian people??
Dr. Sand: be the spokesperson, right? And so that's like that burden of representation and the burden of needing to, to, I don't know, somehow be an expert, even if I'm not an expert. I mean, how could I possibly be an expert on all things Asian?
Right.
Dalia: How could one person know all the things about the global majority? Yeah. Like at this point, I don't understand how anybody's., when you really think about it from a global majority perspective, I feel like the response should be, I don't know, get a book like these are really old cultures, it's beyond one person's ability to kind of summarize something so vast, and why should one person have to school people on what the global majority is up to?
Dr. Sand: Right, right. So, there's these expectations. There are a gazillion invitations to be on everyone's diversity committee and all the trauma of those experiences. And there's just the ways that my lived experience shaped me to not be an expert on any kind of population, but to kind of know how to navigate or know what to expect when I'm interacting with these really fucked up systems, right? And so, like, sometimes I say like,I'm not expert on trans people, you know, being a non-binary trans person.
I wouldn't ever say I'm an expert on this, but I do think, like I do have a lot of expertise navigating systems of transphobia and especially working within trans health and working in systems that really enact all these colonialists and white supremacist, you know expectations around gender and gender expression and bodies.
So anyway, I don't know if that's exactly answering the question, but yeah, I didn't, you know, wake up one day and think like, I wanna be a DEI consultant, you know, like, it's actually not really easy work. And sometimes I think it's impossible work. And then I have another part of me that's like, oh no, like there's this hope and there's this vision there for a different kind of world, and how could I contribute to co-creating that in whatever small ways that I can.
But yeah, a lot of days it's, it's hard.
Dalia: It's helpful to hear that from somebody who's been doing this work for so long, because I know, I see all the time things that I want to help maybe individual clients with over time it becomes obvious that it can't be solved on an individual level, it can only be coped with and so, then you feel drawn to try and push against the systems. And so, things like DEI consulting,it feels like a natural step, but then once you actually get into these spaces you don’t find it as positive as you’d hoped.
Dr. Sand: Yeah. I've been thinking a lot about like, what is the trauma you experience in these oppressive contexts that don't even.
what they're doing. And then what is the trauma or the pain of being in performative DEI spaces, like situations where people or organizations try to use white supremacy to solve white supremacy. So, like that's just kind of like encapsulates 2020 up to today.
Dalia: Yeah. Like this, the racial reckoning that was, it was so frustrating while we were in, it was people acting like no one had ever tried to bring these issues to light.
And I'm like, oh, I'm sorry. What? You missed the entire 1960s.
Dr. Sand: Yeah. Yeah.
Dalia: And for people to say they wanted people to express their frustration and heartbreak in a particular way and kept propping up MLK, as this is the proper way for marginalized people to say, stop killing us. And when I refresh people's memory, I'm like, okay and he said it politely the way you wanted him to and what happened to him? How did that end?
There's no way to tell people who are deeply invested in white supremacy the reality of what it does to people, and it be palatable. Like it just isn't if you're attached to it and deeply invested in it.
There’s no way we can say it that would make it easy to swallow. Yeah. And it was just interesting to me how quickly people. Put everything aside. And I don't think I ever noticed, and it could have just been me not paying enough attention, how frequently people will pick up on a social justice movement that's existed for decades and will have to continue to exist because true change has not happened.
But how corporations, businesses, people who aren't directly affected by the problem will act as though they can only focus on one issue at a time. So, when people had BLM on their mind, they were like, oh, anti-Asian violence I can't, I can't understand. I, I, I don't understand how all these issues are connected, and we're only gonna put up, we support Asian folks on these days, and then the other days, we'll pretend we don't hate Black people, and then we'll just rotate.
Dr. Sand: We all just get a month, you know?
Dalia: Yeah. And, and what, how, how do you deal with that as a DEI practitioner.
Dr. Sand:I mean, I really, I really make it clear that I'm interested in having conversations about collective liberation. And so, people are always surprised because oftentimes companies or organizations might latch onto one aspect of my identity, and that's why they've reached out.
They're like, we're looking for an Asian person, or we're looking for a trans person. And then when I come in and I wanna talk about something else, I wanna talk about neurodivergence, or I wanna talk about anti-blackness, they're like, whoa, you know, they like. So, it's just the limitations, you know, the ways that folks are trained.
And I think it is white supremacy like this, like singularity single-minded and, and you know, and intolerance for multiplicity or that kind of complexity, which is human experience.
So yeah my mind is just swirling as I'm thinking about what you said about like, there have been movements for decades longer, there's ancestors, there's no expert that can be hired to come in and, and solve a problem and be like the savior for any organization.
And I think that's oftentimes the expectation is like, can you come and fix this? Except for, we don't wanna tell you about all the shady things that we've been doing and all the things that our employees have already been telling us, because those folks are the experts. Right?
And so, I'm always interested in, okay, well what do people who have these identities here have to say about it?
Cuz that's more than my discovery call could tell me about your organization. So yeah, just like all these histories, and not even histories, but like current lived experiences that get erased because of like very classist, elitist systems of professionalizing and exporting.
So yeah, I go in, I do this work and I'm also like really aware of how challenging it is sometimes to hold that.
Like how do I hold this with care, with respect, in a way that's aligned with my values.
Dalia: And you mentioned earlier that it can be traumatic to be in performative DEI spaces, how do you explain what trauma is?
Because I've heard some people, especially lately who feel like all millennials, even us old elder millennials, that they continually, I don't know when people will stop thinking millennial means young person, but anyway, but people who accuse millennials, Gen Z, people on the cusp, of being snowflakes and being hypersensitive, have had a lot to say about how much people are wanting to explore what trauma really means.
So how could you possibly experience trauma in a professional business setting? You know, you're sitting there with fluorescent lighting and what does trauma really mean?
Dr. Sand: What is trauma? I mean, oh, there's so many different ways to look at it in definitions.
I know what I don't believe, I don't believe that trauma is how it's defined in our current psychiatric and medical systems that say, oh, it was a discreet event. It was life-threatening, you know, these extremes that then serve to deny all the other forms of trauma or other gradations of trauma that people experience.
I think a lot about what was so overwhelming to our systems, whether it's our, how we think about like our internal parts systems or our nervous systems, so overwhelming that it could not be processed at the time. And that there are things that are still held in our psyches, in our, in our bodies, in how we move through the world how we see ourselves.
So, I think about it broadly, as a spectrum.
We don't just heal trauma quickly. There is no thing that can happen. There is no acronym that can fix trauma right there. It's about slowing down. It's about listening. It is about that attunement and having the space. And some of this is challenging because healing spaces or healing practices can be really hard to access.
And so, there's access issues. There's also, when we're looking for spaces where we want to heal trauma, we get re-traumatized. So, these even models that are really effective at healing trauma, they're coming from people who are enacting harmful ideas.
Sometimes it's through cultural appropriations, sometimes it's through just denying that there's a cultural context and that we are just organisms with a nervous system.
So that's something that I feel really passionate about is how do we look towards ways to make healing more accessible and also to challenge systems that really kind of continue to perpetuate under the guise of trauma healing.
Dalia: Yeah,I mean, I know that's one of the things that should set a therapist apart is that a therapist typically, well I'm saying this is a layperson, would have the ability to minimize any damage that could occur when you're re-experiencing or retelling something that was overwhelming for you at the time.
And that's usually something that other people wouldn't have the ability to do. That's my understanding that that's one of the hallmarks of the difference between going to someone who has the ability to hold your hand while you're experiencing things from the past versus maybe some different kind of healer that maybe could help you with things from the present and moving forward, but wouldn't have the capacity to stop you from being farther harmed when you go backwards and look at things that traumatized you, is that one of the distinctions for you when you think about the difference between what a therapist has the power to do versus others?
Dr. Sand: Well, a couple things. One is that, that the word trauma can be so loaded and so pathologized, right? Just the way that I was taught, you know, 20 years ago when I was going through school, like the word trauma was, it always kind of came with this assumption that it was a person's fault, that they were traumatized.
Dalia: like they couldn't handle it well. Yeah. Like, oh, they have trauma, you know, like, and you know, I can think of so many experiences like that where it was just like the, its very victim blaming, right? And so, there's that, and a lot of therapists or healers, I wouldn't say healers, like, like I would say mainstream trained therapists who say, oh, I don't work with trauma.
I'm like, oh, wow, what is that?
Dalia: Oh, I didn't know you avoid it.
Dr. Sand: Yeah. Like, how do you interact with a client. I don't understand, you know? Like, are you working with just real privileged people that have never experienced trauma? So, I was always just like, oh, that's so weird to me.
Like, oh, I don't work with trauma. And then there's the other piece of it is that, most mainstream education for therapists actually teaches a lot of harm, harmful stuff, and I have spent much of my career on learning the things that I learned. And, and so either person are taught harmful things are, they don't actually unlearn the harmful things that they've grown to believe are true.
And then within the context of, let's say, a psychotherapy, harm happens because therapy is a microcosm of the bigger world. However, there's a power dynamic. And there's a way in which like that kind of harm really sticks with someone, right? Because they're going to someone who's supposed to know and I'm not really interested in therapists as the expert on someone else's lived experience, but that's how oftentimes people approach it, right? And for lots of reasons, like I notice that certain folks come to me because culturally they have been told that a doctor is supposed to know things.
And, and you're supposed to, you know, be really like, really defer to anything that that person says or that they must know the truth when in fact most their, all therapists are human. And most of us struggle with our own stuff. Everyone has their own biases. So that kind of harm happens. And I can list off a gazillion examples.
I won't do that, but yeah, that I've heard either from friends or clients, or that I've experienced myself.
Dalia: Hmm. Now, how do you navigate the unlearning? Because one thing that I know is true across the board in all kinds of fields, none of us were taught during our training how to make space for people like us and certainly not for neurodivergent people, other marginalized folks that are still so overlooked, just never centered in education and in the media in general. And people just forget, like, this person could be your client too, and what worked for this neurotypical person maybe wouldn't be appropriate for this person.
And what do you do when the information was not available to you, when you were trained? But we live in a world where lived experience is so devalued. If you learn it on your own, sometimes it feels like it's not real or it's not good enough. Or you maybe worry, I'm projecting, I worry sometimes that someone's gonna ask me to prove like, how do you actually know this when I definitely know it from, you know, 40 plus years of being on the planet, but maybe can't point to a study to validate it.
How do you navigate that? How do you pull in your lived experience and find a way to pull information together that no one has laid out for you?
Dr. Sand: Hmm. There's so many things. There's so many things. Everything. There's so many. Okay. So let me just pause and just say like, just even that lens of like, I need to know the things.
I need to give you a study that usually, like I have to give you a research study that tells us the things that we already know, but now it justifies it. I really am trying to step and move away, from that, which I was very much socialized to, to operate in that kind of system of, you have to sound smart, you have to know all the things, you have to, to prove yourself all that, and to go to what is lived experience and what is the wisdom of our bodies.
I don't believe that my body lies to me. Sometimes I get some information that I'm like is that totally, you know, like, so, so yeah, I gotta check it out and listen, but, you know, like getting away from this way that we pedestal, academia and pedestal having to know things or kind of operate in ways that support subjugating the body.
Like the mind is everything. Rationality is everything. Reason is everything. So just trying to move away from that. And a lot of times when I am providing trainings, I'm aware that I'm offering some knowledge and people are very kind of hungry and thirsty for that knowledge. And then in the Q and A, what happens is people want more of the tell me what to do, the right or wrong kind of stuff.
Like there's this pull towards, if I memorize the things, then I'll get the right answer on the test and that's not how life works and that's not how relationship works.
I often say this, don't memorize me, don't memorize that my pronouns are they/them. I want you to have the flexibility in how you're seeing things or knowing that you might, your perspective might not be a hundred percent true.
It might be a little true. It might be a lot true. It might be, but it's not a hundred percent true. And so, what I'm most interested in is like capacity to pause, reflect, have some kind of critical awareness or understanding capacity to have humility. Those are the things that I'm really interested in.
And not here, let me just tell you a bunch of facts that you memorize so that you can be a good white person or a good cis person, or a good straight person, or whatever the case is.
Dalia: That is such an intense desire that I see in almost everybody that you don't feel safe being wrong, and I don't know if that comes from at some point, apparently in everyone's childhood, people got humiliated or criticized for being wrong and they just don't ever wanna feel that way again.
And it's so hard to get it out of your system, you know it's not productive. You hear all this stuff about a growth mindset and how great it is to have it, but here you are as an adult trying to change something that's so deeply ingrained in you, you don't remember when you learned it. Why is it so hard to let go of things we learned so early in life. We don't recall.
Dr. Sand:Yeah. Oh, okay. I just laughed when you said growth mindset cuz that's such a corporatized way that like people are like, teach us the growth mindset, you know, give it to us. It's a commodity.
And I think, how I wanna answer the question kind of ties into my approach to doing trauma work and mental health work, which is parts work. And the specific school of parts work that I practice is called Internal Family Systems or IFS and I could go on and say a lot about it, but I'll just tell you a little bit about just the way that we see, like how sometimes different parts of us get formed to protect us as a result of experiencing trauma.
So, when we see in a person this like, need to be, right, and I have that part, by the way, I absolutely have that part because I grew up in a family where that was valued. And you win, you win if you're right. A lot of times those parts are protecting us because of ways that we've been harmed, ways that we've been hurt.
Like there was a consequence to not knowing. There was being teased or being not taken seriously, you know, whatever the case. And sometimes much more serious consequences to not knowing or just being someone who doesn't always like show up or present themselves in the world as like, I got it all together.
So, I think a lot of people are moving around with parts that are like, not allowing them to just say, I don't know. Let me think about that. You might be right.
Dalia: Oh, that's really helpful. I see featured on your website that you use, a mix of modalities to help your clients. What draws you toward doing things that way versus maybe just having one, there seems to be limitless modalities people can pull on.
Dr. Sand: Yeah. Oh, I, well, I have a whole take on this, which is, you know, higher education or like graduate training and all these letters and licenses and certifications are already so inaccessible for most people. And then even if you're able to access this kind of education or status, there's still the not good enough that operates.
So people just start collecting more and more methods, trainings, certificates. And I see this in my field in the mental health field, like, just like I got a lot of acronyms on my website, so I must be a really good therapist. And it's like a collection. And I was in that, right? I was like, oh, I'm gonna do EMDR now I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do that.
And thinking that like I was missing something. I don't really feel like I'm missing something anymore. I have kind of more trust in who I am beyond any therapy approach or anything that a white person stole from a Black, Indigenous person, or person of color, and then repackaged and sold to me.
Dalia: Oh, the facts. Oh, the facts. It's so interesting because this year, I've said, my goal is I'm keeping 2023 scam free, because I can't even count how many times, because I didn't fully trust myself. I put out maybe more money than I even had to spend on a training that in the end, turned out to be things I already knew but because it had come from a source that's always devalued, I didn't think it was good enough. Unconsciously I didn't think it was good enough.
Dr. Sand: Yeah. And oftentimes, like, I don't know about you, but like I have taken so many courses and trainings that I thought like, this is where I will learn.
But I am so inundated with microaggressions and traumatic material and really harmful behavior from instructors that like it. I'm paying and I'm also being traumatized and I'm also not learning. So, there's Yes. Tease too.
Dalia: 100%. I remember posting during undergrad that I can't believe that I am paying to be insulted every f*****g day, paying to be insulted. And can't even get people to understand when I have the energy to point it out - or it was just so egregious that I couldn't not say something. That no one could see the problem or hear the problem and at the same time, in my personal life, still be being asked, you know, around the same period of time, have you ever experienced racism?
Dr. Sand: Oh my God. people thinking that. Yeah. So yeah. So, I, I think, oh damn, it's so intense. Yeah, like there's, there's that, right? There's the, you know, I'm not someone who believes there is like, one right way, or this is gonna save us all. And so, like, I've always thought about, about myself as integrative.That being said, I do find more of a home in certain places and approaches that feel more aligned with my values. And so, for me, parts work and specifically doing IFS, I feel like it has the most capacity to center marginalized folks. Does it always? No, but there is like active conversation people who are doing the work, and it's so, there's so many values that I assign or like are connected to this model that feel like, okay, this feels right to me.
Right? There's it's about compassion. It's not about pathologizing. It recognizes that survival, we have to prioritize survival. So, some of the things that may not look, you know they may look unhelpful in according to other people or whatever people think is objective from like a mainstream mental health point of view.
That's pathologized. Right. So, I know you, you, and I both, you know, kind of. Move around in body liberation eating disorder type spaces. And a lot of approaches to eating disorders, as you probably know, are very pathologizing around. I've been joking with people actually just this month about like, you know, in the nineties and the early two thousand we were all trying to kill ed, the eating disorder and like just, I hear things like my disease is out to kill me or out to get me.
These really pathologizing ways and like kind of demonizing parts of us that are really just trying to help us to survive. So, no matter how harmful a behavior or a coping strategy might end up being, I always am interested in what is that positive intention and what is that intention towards survival that's behind that.
So that's a really big part of, and what guides my work regardless of what approach that I'm using. There's a lot of other pieces that I really love around recognizing ancestral and cultural traumas and burdens and the things that we've been carrying that aren't even ours to carry. Acknowledging multiplicity like I've mentioned earlier, and then a lot of it's really like hugely consent based which is not going past the point of where someone is ready and really respecting the protective system that they have.
We're not gonna get to healing if we're in a rush and we're overriding systems that say no.
So that is one of the reasons why I really, really love doing work in this way. That being said, I don't believe any model is perfect. So, I, I believe, and I've said this before, but like I don't really believe that you can have a culturally responsive therapy if you're only, if you only have one tool.
You can't use the same thing on everyone, every issue. And so it makes it so that I have to be flexible and be willing to do what works with each person that I work with.
Dalia: That makes so much sense. When it comes to the intergenerational trauma, are you finding that people have these patterns or maybe like these inherited fears because it just became part of how the family socializes children or is it a combination of, apparently something must have changed in how their body manages this particular type of event, or maybe stress in general. Is it a clear mix of the two? Or how, how do you even help somebody with that?
Dr. Sand: Yeah. I don't know that it's possible to know, right?
We can even, we can even ask people, and sometimes I will ask people like, what percentage of this feels like yours? What percentage of this feels based on your own lived experience? But I don't, I don't know that it, that we can ever truly know, but I, I typically think that it's a combination and few things are really just about an in individual experience.
So, if we think about examples like, maybe if I have a hard time finding a sense of home, it's because I have moved around all my life and been shuffled around all my life, right? That could be just like based on my lived experience. But then if we dig deeper, we could look at, okay, well what happened?
What were the migration patterns of my ancestors? Were these choices? Was this forced migration? So that's something I've been chewing on a lot actually recently, is just like, what is home?
What is the relationship to place to land to land that's not where my ancestors are from? And what does it mean to like, experienced something that I've never experienced in my kind of chronological life from birth to today?
But like in my case, in my examples, like what does it mean that my dad like migrated on foot with his whole village right when there was the Japanese invasion during World War II so, you know, across China. So, what does that mean, like, right? How could, how could that not affect me?
So just kind of holding that, there's a lot of times, histories that people don't even know that are impacting them. There's the story we go in to tell in therapy, and it's not that I don't believe the story is important, but there's so much more that we're carrying that's beyond a story that our, like conscious awareness of the story.
There's so much that's already happened that we will never know.
Dalia: That makes so much sense. I mean, it immediately feels like I can feel it in my gut when you say, you know, what does it mean to feel at home and coming from, I'm the child of an immigrant and a Black American person whose family had been in the States for about the expected amount of time.
And everyone I can think of has that, that sense of is there anywhere I belong or is that something we can never have? Because if you spend time in West Africa where presumably, you know, you're pretty sure you came from, you've been gone too long, you don't fit there anymore, everybody can tell you are not really at home.
And then when you're in the states, even the way that people refer to anyone and everyone who is not majority European in their ancestry tells you, no one thinks we are at home. Even if we were born here. And people don't ever if someone says American, they don't picture either one of us and any time I travel. It's always a thing. People assume, well, you must have your family moved to the US.
People can't comprehend that you're really born there and maybe your parents were too.
Dr. Sand: Yeah. Where are you really from?
Dalia: Exactly. So, you're being told all the time you're not at home. But then the more I even think about my family that started out in Jamaica, then went to Cuba, then went back to Jamaica, then went to Haiti.
Even when you talk to cousins and not far-removed cousins, everybody thinks they are something different. Even though we all feel like family and talk to each other, like family, we don't have the same first languages. And so, it's like, what does it mean? Like, yeah, I feel American. I call myself American because I know having been raised here, so much of my biases are really influenced by.
Being from here, but at the same time, am I really like, what are, what are we, what is anybody? What does nationality even mean? Like, who are we? It just feels like there's no way to feel really grounded when you're constantly being told you don't belong anywhere.
Dr. Sand: Oh yeah. All of that. What does it mean to really feel like you can inhabit a space, not just safely, but like, feel like a sense of like, connection with the people around you know, like oftentimes I think about like, now I'm just getting like really kind of like, maybe a little heady, but just like how there's this idea that we're like at a fixed point and then we transition, we get to another fixed point, and then we transition to another thing. You know, like transition broadly, you know, like just change happens.
We're going from one thing to the next and I just feel like, well I don't know that that's my experience. I feel like the norm is the transition, the norm is the in between space. And that just feels like, yeah, obviously this is something that I'm like grappling with and struggling with in my own way.
And so, yeah. And there was something else I forgot.
I'm just gonna take a pause, okay. I'm trying to remember what's happening. Something about home and oh yeah. Okay. The other thing that was coming up for me that I've also been kinda like chewing on a lot is, you know, in, in DEI spaces and I honestly just don't even, I often put DEI in air quotes cuz it's so like, corporatized.
And you know, diversity isn't enough. Inclusion is like, hmm, do I wanna see it at your table? Equity. Hmm. Like can we, can we solve equity with conversations? Is it about hurt feelings often? So now a lot of people are adding the B, the belonging piece. And I'm like, yeah, I like belonging conceptually feeling like you belong feels good, you know, but then it also assumes like that maybe someone who isn't typically welcomed into a space. Wants to belong with yes t hat I'm like, do, but do I wanna belong,
Dalia: When you look at these turnover turnover rates, you realize people maybe get in and realize yeah, there's no situation in which this would feel like a place I wanna be.
Dr. Sand: Yeah. Yeah. So, my like I'm kinda, I, yeah. I have a part of me that's just a little critical or maybe a lot critical of like all the language that we use in these spaces, cuz belonging. Well, it feels so good, you know, it's and, but it's also a cell and I'm interested in like, well, what good is a sense of belonging if you're not being paid as much as other people, or you can't access the benefits you need, or there's unequal hiring practices or just fucked up s**t that happens and no one does anything about it.
Like and yeah, but just all like the ways that within DEI space, clearly, I'm working something out around my DEI work
Dalia: When did you start to incorporate that into your work?
Dr. Sand: I mean, it's always been, it's always been there. Like I've, like, since pretty much, I mean even when I was in grad school, I was being asked to do, you know, as, as you are when you're like different and interesting. And you have a unique identity, you know, like you're in, you're asked to educate people. So, I've been asked to educate people, you know, before I was even like licensed or graduated. And I think, yeah, that experience, you know, I've always been asked to, to do training and, and to be clear, I do really love facilitating learning, and that's like my number one passion is, is that in workspace, my number one passion outside of work is, is dogs and food and puns.
But yeah, so I mean, I feel like it's just always been part of my work and I never really called myself a DEI consultant, but it's like, it kind of happened in that people were looking for that. It's like there's a lot of languaging that I don't, especially like, and but it's a language and a way for people to locate, right?
And like for example, in trans health, I detest the term gender specialist, yet it's oftentimes like these systems that have power say, okay, well in order to access hormones or surgery, you must go find a gender specialist to write a letter for you. Which I also think, is not the way I want the world to be for trans folks accessing medical care.
Don't think that people should have to access letters. But I digress. That's a whole nother thing that I could really, really go on about. But yeah, sometimes there's that languaging and that code switching that happens.
And then I, you know, I'm always sort of trying to interrogate, you know, how much do I wanna actually perpetuate using certain languaging that doesn't feel right for me?
Dalia: Yeah, and that feels like it applies in so many ways. You have to accept the reality of what is, what are people actually looking for? Well, most people are probably not at the point that you're at because you think about this all of the time, and language in general is so constricting and limiting. I had this conversation with my brother just this week.
I feel like he and I both have probably always been pretty flexible or fluid about our understanding of gender since childhood. But I really gravitated toward the new language in English anyway, trying to explain to the world how I feel about gender or how I experience it in my body. But at the end of the day, I still don't really think the words are enough.
And so, from an outside perspective, if later on there's new terminology in the zeitgeist that resonates more, maybe I'll make a shift. Other people will think this is you, typical trans person, flip flopping. Y'all don't know who you are. When maybe the words that were available before were never quite it, but we didn't have anything else.
Dr. Sand: And I see this all as creativity, resilience, and empowerment is when words don't fit for you, you create ones that do. And I mean like there's lots of terms that I use all the time for myself that don't actually, resonate so much for me. Like gender queers, you know, I came out as gender queer, what, you know, early two thousands and that did resonate for me. But like the idea that my gender was queer would not exist unless there was a world that thought there was a normal way to have a gender. Right? Or like non-binary wouldn't have to be used if we didn't live in a binary world, right? Where that's a default or the expectation and so, I say non-binary, it's shorthand. People kind of get it.
Do I feel tied deeply to that word? No. Do I feel tied deeply to they them? Yes. In some ways, cuz I want my pronouns respected, but no, in the sense that, you know, it's mostly because he and she don't work for me. There's not an easy, you know, other pronoun that actually fits, they is not neutral for me, you know?
And so anyway, there's a lot I could say about pronouns, shmonouns.
Dalia: Well, that's where I got to the point that I felt like the only thing that felt right to me was no pronouns at all. And then, and you mentioned this in one of your interviews, how the stress of being misgendered can impact your mental health.
And I talk a lot and think a lot about minority stress, and that's one area where I feel like I even undermine myself and how stressful it is for me because I know before I took a stance on, oh no, just name only, then when somebody would apply, they them or she heard to me, I didn't feel that gut punch.
But now that I've said that's what I want, every time somebody misgenders me, I feel sick. And then I get in my own head and I'm like, did I do this to myself? And why am I so attached to it? Did I create this situation? What's going on when we have that kind of experience?
Dr. Sand: Yeah. I'm just thinking about so many people.
I know clients, other folks who just like, feel scared or hesitant to ask for their pronouns. Like to, to be respected or to ask for different pronouns because of the risk of the disappointment or the backlash from people who don't get it and don't wanna get it and won't try to get it. So, there's that.
There's just like, what does it mean to ask to be respected? And is asking for respect inherently violent towards those who are fragile?
So, I mean, I know the answer is no, but that's how it's received, right? It's received as an attack. And then people go on the defense. So yeah, being misgendered is hugely stressful.
It's not about ouch, you hurt my feelings. It's about do you see me and respect me for the person that I am versus the person that you are projecting onto me. Am I only an object of your perception or am I someone who has autonomy and sovereignty and the right to self-determination?
A lot of times there's backlash people who say like, you're too sensitive, or people who, you know, will come up with all sorts of reasons why excuses rationalizations and blaming anything to bypass accountability and true change. And then in the end there's like oftentimes just so much emotional labor.
And then yeah, the recovery that happens behind the scenes, there's like what this interaction was for a split second for that person. They're going on living their life. They're probably not even thinking about it, they've forgotten it by then, but for the person who's experienced it, which is, you know, often me, you know, right.
Like, oh, that's a lot, that's a lot of extra energy. Right. And that, and I wouldn't say that's me because of this one thing. It is anyone who has a marginalized or minoritized identity that has to do all that trauma recovery, emotional labor and you know, any kind of recovery in order to then show up in spaces where other people can just take for granted that they're safe.
Dalia: Yes. Yes. Oof. Yeah. One of the things that you feature in the services that you offer or the things that you treat is helping people manage the damage that systemic oppression has done to their mental health. What does that look like?
Is that teaching coping mechanisms? Because it's something that's not over, it just keeps on and on and on.
Dr. Sand: I feel like coping is helpful, but it's never enough. Like sometimes when we, and I think a lot of therapies do this. Like, oh, you're experiencing a shitty experience in the world. Let's help you cope. You know, let's help you assimilate or acclimate in some way. That is oppressive, that is putting all the responsibility on the individual.
It's not helpful. I think it sets things up so that therapists or providers feel this great responsibility to like, as if we can fix the, all the things that are happening in the outside world and that clients feel like there's something wrong with them cuz they're not coping as well as the next person.
Like, wow, that trans person looks okay, that Black person looks okay, that Asian person looks okay so, you know, like, oh, what's wrong with me? Right. So, I, I think coping is never enough and you know, there's really no individual therapy that can erase systemic oppression.
I just think about often think about this like, I don't know 10, 15 years ago, I took this non-violent communication course, and it was called Transforming Oppression. And I just find it kind of so hilarious now because it was like transforming oppression in 10 weeks through NVC. And, you know, I, I think NVC has some helpful things to it. I have other critiques of it for sure.
And, but the course itself was like pretty traumatizing for those of us who are like QTBIPOC, and I just think about like how these this is so common for people who kind of own or found certain approaches that are then like copyrighted or like, there's like ownership of something that a lot of times developmentally in the course of, oh, this could help a person, then gets to this grandiose place of, if everyone did this, we would solve war and like poverty and all these things.
And I just don't really believe that to be true. I don't believe that, oh, you can teach an acronym, and everyone will get it and all of the sudden, the world will be a utopian place.
So, I think obviously I do what I do because I believe it is helpful and valuable in some way. But my hope is that people being able to access a sense of self access like connection to who they are and to their own power and agency, that also connects to being empowered to, you know, work within to change well, not, not within, outside of systems, you know, creating new systems a lot of the time. And yeah, like that, that larger systems change and advocacy, that's the stuff that needs, that, that needs to happen, right? Like, there's no amount of therapy leads to financial redistribution.
So, yes and just I think a lot about like the impossibility of, of all of it. Yeah. Wow.
Dalia: Well man, there's so, so, so much I would love to go into, but I don't wanna keep you here all day. One of the main things that stood out to me was with all of the other training you already have, you also decided to study Body Trust, and I'd like to know, why that was something you felt like you wanted to dig into and why it's something that you knew would be of service to your target population that you're already serving.
Dr. Sand: Yeah. I talk about this a lot in my, in my writing and other podcasts or other trainings and platforms that I've spoken into. And you know, I'm very out as someone who has a lived experience with an eating disorder, long-term recovery, many, many layers, and stages of recovery and for me, I was, I was really kind of misled around what it meant to have an eating disorder, first of all, and what does a recovery look like? And very indoctrinated into like healthism and, you know you know, all the ways that like our wellness culture can really focus more on like, this is an individual issue, you know, like the choices you make are going to, you know, create this health landscape for you. And yes, it has an impact, but as we know, social determinants of health have a much greater impact than individual choices and behaviors.
So, any case I kind of came into after a pretty severe restrictive relapse for, you know, a year or two came into this place of, oh my gosh, I have not been in recovery. The way that like, I have not been in full recovery, you know? And so, for me it was finding HAES, anti-diet approaches.
I think I learned about Body Trust through hearing Hillary and Dana on Christie Harrison's Food Psych podcast which had a really big impact on me. And so yeah, I was just interested. I really, body trust appealed to me because I just really connected with the idea that there's something that I've lost, like the, a relationship I have lost to myself and the like lesson capacity to listen to myself because of all this really loud noise out there that tells me who I am and what I should do and even what I should eat and how I should move my body and all that stuff.
So just the concept of Body Trust really resonated with me and for me, again, like any other model, Body Trust is not perfect. And I will always say that like, yes, I really love Body Trust in many ways and none of these models are perfect. And so, but it is one that just makes sense to me and also really understands that the individual exists in a context, in a cultural context, in an anti-d diet world, in a white supremacist, anti-black world, in a fat phobic world. So, I really love that. Is that unique to Body Trust? No, not at all. You know but it is one that I've, I've really appreciated and so, yeah, it's just a really big part of my practice and, and I think aligns really, really well with my IFS work.
Dalia: When you're helping people who are TGNC who are dealing with how limiting. people are in their view of like, what does a feminine person look like? What does a masculine person look like? And knowing that people feminize fat in general, how do you help people? This is something I struggle to reconcile with because as a person who feels like in my body, gender does not exist in my body.
Even with that sometimes I find myself compelled to do things that will project how I want people to understand what gender is to me. And so sometimes that means maybe dressing even more masculine than I feel like on a particular day because I think it'll reduce the chances of somebody, she/her-ing me.
What do you do when the reality is we're dealing with other people's perceptions and that does affect our behavior sometimes and the truth that gender shouldn't have to look a certain way, that you could be a non-binary person who is in a very large body and having large breasts doesn't mean you're not trans masculine.
How do you help people reconcile with both of those things?
Dr. Sand: I mean, I'm really interested in helping people to kind of deconstruct and challenge these ideas they've internalized about what it means to perform gender correctly, to perform being a man, perform being a woman, perform being trans, perform being non-binary.
Non-binary doesn't mean androgynous. Non-binary doesn't mean whatever like these ideas are that are usually based on very like white, thin ideals. Part of it is for myself and for the people I work with trying to challenge and move past that and take the risks of not having to perform within that system.
And then there's that other reality that we are in that system. So, I think the choice might vary day to day. And what I do today might be different from what I do tomorrow. And that you know, there's this, there's something I wrote about like. is authenticity.
Do we moralize about authenticity when we live in a world that doesn't make it safe to be authentic all the time?
And sometimes I do make choices that I end up feeling some amount of, like, a little bit of like, oh, am I selling out? Like, is there a little bit of shame around making this choice while also knowing that sometimes I do need to do this to take care of myself in a specific place.
So exactly what you said, like there are lots of times where working, even when it within the field of trans health, I had to, you know, masculinize in a way that actually didn't feel right for me as a gender fluid person, as someone who I, I don't have a binary gender.
And even though I think of myself as trans masc, I also consider myself femme. And that is very confusing for a lot of people. To me it makes perfect sense, right? So yeah. That's a reality. And so, like I always just tell my clients and tell anyone else that like,
there should be no shame in making choices that serve you in terms of your safety.
And yeah, sometimes you're just doing what you can do to, to avoid people projecting their stuff onto you and having a really, really uncomfortable yucky interaction. So, I really get that. And that kind of, I don't know, is it code switching? Is it like just making choices to center? What feels most important in the moment?
That doesn't like invalidate an identity. Like no, no shape of clothing I put on myself or hairstyle or whatever is going to tell you who I am and if nothing is going to invalidate who I've already told you I am. So, but yeah, that, that, that's a whole, that's complicated.
Dalia: Yeah. Well, and that feels like that's the takeaway is that life and humanity, it's all more complicated than what the systems most of us live in, want to recognize, or allow. So maybe we're feeling like we're wrong when in reality everything is just a lot more nuanced and individual and complex than other folks are letting on.
If there was one thing that you could leave the listeners with that magically, we would all understand it, internalize it, and carry it with us for the rest of our lives, what would you want us to know?
Dr. Sand: Oh my gosh, these kinds of questions are so hard, I'm like, say something smart.
What's coming into my mind is this idea of like, stop pushing. Stop trying, stop fixing, stop, like just having to jump to a conclusion. A lot of these things that happen because, you know, things that are, that are hurtful or harmful or just not ideal happen because we're moving so fast and we're not checking ourselves and we're not challenging these systems that we've been indoctrinated into.
I feel like a lot of the stuff we've talked about kind of touches upon that theme, and maybe that's just what's on my mind these days. So yeah, I don't, I think that's it.
Dalia: Even that is helpful when somebody who's obviously brilliant can transparently say in this moment, I feel like, I should say something smart,
Dr. Sand: Well, that's there, right? That's a part of me. Say something smart, you know? And like, it's like, I don't know. Sometimes I will say things that have an impact in some way a positive impact or, you know and sometimes I'm just go, I'm sometimes I'm just talking. A lot of times I'm just talking, you know, I talk, I talk, talk a lot, so.
Yeah.
Dalia: And that's okay too. Thank you so much for coming on. Where is the best place for people to keep up with you and read more of your writing, check out the book that you co-authored?
Dr. Sand: Yeah, so you can find me on my website, it's sandchang.com. I'm also on Instagram @heydrsand. I don't do a ton of social media. I have ambivalent relationship with it, but I do sometimes feel like sometimes I have like, oh, I wanna say a thing. So yeah. So sometimes I'm on there.
Dalia: I love that. Thank you so much.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit daliakinsey.substack.com -
Have you ever wondered why almost all the health and wellness information you see out there is so white, cis able-bodied and het? I know I have. And as a queer black registered dietitian, I gotta tell you, I'm not into it. I believe health and happiness should be accessible to everyone. That is precisely why I wrote Decolonizing Wellness: A QTBIPOC-Centered Guide to Escape the Diet Trap, Heal Your Self-Image, and Achieve Body Liberation and why I host Body Liberation for All.
The road to health and happiness has a couple of extra steps for chronically stressed people, like queer folks and folks of color. But don't worry, my guests and I have got you covered. If you're ready to live the most fierce, liberated, and joyful version of your life, you are in the right place.
This episode we discuss
🌈Setting intentions that are personally meaningful
🌈Evaluating our relationship with productivity and wellbeing
🌈Auditing your life for joy
Episode Resources
www.daliakinsey.com
Decolonizing Wellness: A QTBIPOC-Centered Guide to Escape the Diet Trap, Heal Your Self-Image, and Achieve Body Liberation
Episode edited and produced by Unapologetic Amplified
New Year Intention Setting Download
Body Liberation for All Theme
They might try to put you in a box, tell them that you don't accept when the world is tripping out tell them that you love yourself. Hey, Hey, smile on them. Live your life just like you like it
It’s your party negativity is not invited. For my queer folks, for my trans, people of color, let your voice be heard. Look in the mirror and say that it's time to put me first. You were born to win. Head up high with confidence. This show is for everyone. So, I thank you for tuning in. Let's go.
This transcript was generated with the help of AI. Becoming a supporting member helps us improve accessibility and pay equitable wages for things like human transcription.
Hello, welcome to our first solo episode of the year. As promised, I will be doing solo episodes this year so that you and I have more time together to dig a little deeper with some of my core themes, which includes the belief that stress is one of the greatest threats to our health of our time, and that marginalized people are the most vulnerable to chronic stress because homophobia, racism, ableism, all of the things, transphobia, these are chronic stressors that can have a really negative impact on our health.
Stress is one of the greatest threats to health of our time
My focus is always going to be things that can positively impact your health but not exacerbate your stress at the same time. I love to have guests on the show, so we're definitely not getting rid of that element. I do have some special guests in mind for the show this year, so those will still be coming, but you and I are going to be spending a lot more time together on the show from now going forward.
In line with the understanding that chronic stress is the enemy to our health, most wellness outlets are really not concerned about your liberation and are not open to massive paradigm shifts, like considering the possibility that toxic capitalism undermines your wellbeing, and we have to reevaluate our relationship with productivity and striving to be better in order to really be well and to reevaluate what wellbeing looks like to us.
You'll notice that frequently wellbeing is just a reframe for ready to be super productive in the work place. It’s not really about what is meaningful to the individual and certainly not inclusive of other cultures or other world views outside of this belief that you are here to be productive - you must always be doing in order to be a valid expression of humanity.
If you want for your wellness to be liberatory, a really important thing to do is to question where your assumptions come from and whether or not these assumptions are still serving you. When everywhere you look, everyone is saying the same thing, it isn't natural for you to think to question things that seem like a given.
A perfect example of that is New Year's resolutions and all of the mindset that comes with and the thoughts that are at the foundation of the belief that we need to be fixed.
I'm here to challenge that and posit that you do not need to be fixed. Anything that we imagine to be an indicator of a flaw when we're looking at our own bodies oftentimes is a sign that something is wrong, and our socialization prevents us from seeing that.
So what do I mean by that. I had a conversation with someone about this recently, but it comes up all the time with friends, family, and clients. The person I was speaking to said ‘I'm doing everything I'm supposed to do, but I still feel so unwell. I feel so tired, so run down’ . Everything that they were being told by the coaches, they were going to, the physicians, they were going to kept focusing on what else they could be doing to make themself feel more, well for them to recapture the energy level that they had before, which is what this person was missing. The question was what should you be doing to get back to where you were before? But my question was, is there a possibility that you are doing more than enough and that your feelings of burn out, tiredness and exhaustion are not indicators that you're not doing enough, but actually a warning that you're doing way too much. Could it be in this case that your feelings of fatigue, your feelings of malaise, are linked to the fact that you do not feel you have permission to slow down, you don't feel it is safe to slow down?
And I don't know the details of your life. Maybe it isn't. This is what I want us to focus on this year instead of the typical New Year's resolutions that encourage you to strive, that operate off the assumption that something is wrong with you, that you're deeply flawed. What I want us to look at is the possibility that we are doing too much and in the new year doing less could increase our wellbeing.
What if the secret to bringing more wellness into your life this year is doing less not more?
How are you going to evaluate this before you start setting intentions? Before you think about goals? First, do an audit of your life. This doesn't have to be very time consuming. You really wanna tap into what your body is telling you as you're going through these questions.
This isn't meant to pick every part of your life apart. It's meant to get at what immediately comes to mind, because these are the things that are most pressing or bugging you that you haven't given yourself permission to change. As you're doing your life audit one of the questions that I want you to ask yourself is what do you feel right now in your life in general? What are a few words that capture how you're feeling?
I know for me, when I did the exercise at the start of the month, there was overwhelm, grief, gratitude, and inspired. In some areas of my life I've really been feeling aligned, like I am living my mission through my business. I'm living my mission in so many areas, but the overwhelm is coming from still juggling a nine to five, and my business, which is far more meaningful to me, far more inspiring and the grief comes from the managing loss and a lot of shifts and a lot of changes at the end of 2022.
I lost my last grandparent. That was a trigger for a lot of reevaluation. Looking at all of the wonderful things she did with her life, all of the caretaking, all the ways in which you can see the through line in her life is that of love, caretaking, selflessness, and also of great understanding of how to nurture and take care of herself even though she was raised in a time when no one was being encouraged to do that, not in a mainstream way anyway, at a time that everyone assigned female at birth was being told you're here to serve. I didn't ever see any messaging even in the early eighties and nineties, that that could also mean you should take care of yourself.
I now offer inclusive wellness solutions for individuals and organizations. If you like myself, believe that health and happiness should be accessible to everyone, and you're looking for someone to help you make your programs more inclusive, or you're looking for an inclusive wellness specialist to come in with solutions tailored to your team's needs, then visit daliakinsey.com.
The link is in the show notes to learn more about how we can work together.
Another excellent question to ask yourself is what are you doing now on a regular basis that every time you do it, you're filled with dread? Every time you see it on your calendar, you feel like, ugh, this again. Now, what does that do for you? Why is it still on your list? For me, it’s the 9-5. Monday rolls around and all of the energy that I had to work all day on Saturday, doing things that are meaningful to me, that light me up, that energy, has disappeared.
So why am I still doing that? What is it doing for me? Well, it's giving me a feeling of stability so I don't have to be super thirsty as the business grows and I can continue making decisions that are aligned instead of accidentally recreating all of the toxicity and all of the negative overworking patterns that came from the 9 to 5, which is what most of us are used to. A lot of people do this, they'll recreate the same things that were killing them in corporate. They'll recreate it in their own business, like pointless meetings or things that don't really move the needle forward, but give you a sense of being busy, especially if your sense of worth is connected to productivity, that's an easy trap to fall into.
After you establish why are you still doing this thing that makes you feel zapped, that makes you feel full of dread then you can question, can you get rid of it? If that doesn't feel feasible at this time, can you reframe it? Instead of thinking, oh, I have to do this, could you start thinking more in terms of I get to do this and it is enabling me to do dot, dot, dot.
So the fact that I'm able to do this job, the schedule, the amount of days I have off, the amount of leave I've accrued, it is pretty easy for me to continue operating and growing my business while having that sense of stability and security and while working to strengthen my mindset and my belief in the sustainability of something that isn't as regimented or structured as a nine to five.
The next question, once you've thought about, can you reframe it, if you're able to do the reframe, but it still feels sticky, ask yourself, what change can you make to make it feel more aligned? So something that I've shifted in my days at work, I use a portion of my break to do something that feels aligned, whether it's something that's more aligned personally, like using some of my free time to touch bases with a friend and reinvest in relationships that nourish me or whether it's using the lunch break, a portion of the lunch break to get fresh air, to give space for fresh ideas to come up related to a future blog post, related to a future article, whatever. Getting that fresh air, getting a walk every day, that really makes me feel so much more grounded throughout the day, and it feels like part of the day is dedicated to me that the entire business day doesn't just go into some pointless abyss.
And on those rainy days when I don't feel like getting outside, I spend time doing something aligned in my office so that again, it breaks up that sense that, oh, my entire day went to something that doesn't light me up and doesn't feel meaningful to me. I only do meaningful things when I get out of this wretched place.
It breaks it up and it reminds me my days really are my own, and I'm there because I choose to be there. It doesn't always feel like, oh, I'm making that choice. But the reality is I have made that decision. The exit plan is in motion. Everything is as I've designed it, so there's no reason for me to feel trapped every day.
So the question is what can I do during the day to remind myself that I am free to leave at any time, but I’m there for a reason. I have a mission. It's serving a purpose. Beyond that, start reevaluating you yeses. Have you committed to anything that's an ongoing commitment that you are tired of, burned out on? It's not lighting you up?
Can you, going forward, be a little slower with your yeses? Give yourself some room instead of agreeing to things right away, promise to check your calendar, evaluate your commitments, and get back to the person. Maybe promising to reevaluate when you have more bandwidth but just defaulting to no. That's something to consider if your plate is totally full.
Remember, whenever you say yes to something, you are saying no to something else. There are only so many hours in the day, and whenever we mindlessly agree to something, we're pushing out an opportunity to do something else.
I hope as you take the time to reevaluate where your time and energy is going, you can see opportunities to make tweaks that will make your 2023 feel more relaxed, nourishing, and abundant, rather than setting rigid goals and resolutions.
What I find a lot more helpful is focusing on how I want to feel overall, what I want the shifts to be in my year, and then periodically auditing how I'm feeling, auditing my life to see what I could change to get more of that feeling that I was desiring back into my life. So my themes for 2023 are convenience, intuition, power.
I've set the intention to magnify my sense of power to keep focusing on ways in which I can feel more powerful, whether that is saying no, when no is the right answer for me, whether that is saying yes to things that are going to make me feel more grounded and present in my body. Growing my intuition by continually doing my mindful eating work and my spiritual work and listening to myself in business and in my personal life.
And the convenience factor is related to me getting to a point where I no longer have any interest in trying to save a couple of pennies in exchange for sacrificing time and energy. Generally everything is going to cost you. Even things that appear to be free or low cost, it generally means you're paying for it in time or in energy, or your physical effort.
I’ve noticed that especially in relation to travel I frequently in the past would opt to save small amounts of money and then end up spending so much more of my personal energy, giving up convenience. It just doesn't make any sense in my life at this point, the way I want to use my energy for things that are more meaningful, more scalable, and that impact more people.
I'm no longer willing to sacrifice my energy to save a couple of bucks, so I am going to be on the lookout for ways that I keep falling into that trap. That old pattern from my financial situation in my youth and as a child did dictate, yeah, if you have to choose between paying for this with time or paying with money, I frequently had to pay with time.
A perfect example would be tolerating long layover to save like $200 on a flight or something that made sense at a point in my life. It doesn't make sense anymore and it's not serving me anymore. So that's something that I'm going to be looking at because it's cutting into areas that are more meaningful for me, and it's something that needs to be reevaluated.
This is something that's going to come up again throughout the year. This is something I see across the board even in how some people are relating to food as adults. It's so heavily influenced by how they had to relate to food as children. So sometimes not having enough as a child continues to influence how you make decisions as an adult, even if your current circumstances no longer call for it. It's something to be aware of not something to beat ourselves up about.
So glad you were able to join me for this episode. I hope you will dig a little deeper with the workbook I've made for you. The link is in the show notes. Please feel free to reach out if you know there's something you really want for me to dig into this year. I'm always available through the site or you can just email me [email protected]. I frame my episodes based on what I see coming up for clients and for people around me. But it's even more helpful to hear directly from you.
All right, I'll see you next time.
Body Liberation for All Theme
They might try to put you in a box, tell them that you don't accept when the world is tripping out tell them that you love yourself. Hey, Hey, smile on them. Live your life just like you like it
It’s your party negativity is not invited. For my queer folks, for my trans, people of color, let your voice be heard. Look in the mirror and say that it's time to put me first. You were born to win. Head up high with confidence. This show is for everyone. So, I thank you for tuning in. Let's go.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit daliakinsey.substack.com -
Over 20 years ago an offensive racial identity discussion at Harvard pushed Misasha Suzuki Graham and Sara Blanchard to simultaneously walk out of the room and kick off their decades-long friendship. As biracial women and parents of multiracial children, they have been uniquely aware of the impact that our nation’s legacy of racism has on all racialized people.
In their book and podcast, “Dear White Women,” Suzuki Graham and Blanchard answer the litany of questions that seemingly well-intentioned White folks have been asking people of color throughout this second wave of the civil rights movement.
I don’t know about you but I’m tired of explaining that racism wasn’t solved during Obama’s presidency. I’m thrilled to have a resource to share/chuck at the next person that pretends they desperately want to be part of the solution but only if it requires less effort than a Google search. 🙄🙄🙄🙄
If you've ever asked or been asked "What can I do to help combat racism?" then Dear White Women: Let's Get (Un)comfortable Talking About Racism is a priceless tool you’ll want to add to your personal library.
This episode we discuss
* Claiming your wholeness as a multiracial person in monoracial spaces
* Balancing protecting your energy and giving grace to problematic “friends”
* The legacy of anti-Asian sentiment in the US
* The compound stress of racism and sexism
* Harnessing the power of privilege to uproot systemic racism
Episode Resources
www.dearwhitewomen.com/
Buy Your Copy of Dear White Women
www.daliakinsey.com
Decolonizing Wellness: A QTBIPOC-Centered Guide to Escape the Diet Trap, Heal Your Self-Image, and Achieve Body Liberation
Episode edited and produced by Unapologetic Amplified
Body Liberation for All Theme
They might try to put you in a box, tell them that you don't accept when the world is tripping out tell them that you love yourself. Hey, Hey, smile on them. Live your life just like you like it
It’s your party negativity is not invited. For my queer folks, for my trans, people of color, let your voice be heard. Look in the mirror and say that it's time to put me first. You were born to win. Head up high with confidence. This show is for everyone. So, I thank you for tuning in. Let's go.
This transcript was generated with the help of AI. Becoming a supporting member helps us improve accessibility and pay equitable wages for things like human transcription.
Dalia Kinsey: Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Misasha Suzuki: We're so excited to be here.
Sara Blanchard: Thanks for having us. Yes, thank you.
Dalia Kinsey: I've been cyberstalking, both of you in addition to fawning over the book and looking at my favorite sections. Again, even though I'm not the target person for the book, it feels like a really good resource for me to share with other people who want me to explain to them how to not be problematic.
And just knowing that I have a resource for that feels like a relief because so many people act like they want to know what to do and will suck you dry energy wise, but if you tell them, you could probably find another resource for that. They'll come up with more ways to keep pulling on your energy, and I love that now I can just be like, no seriously read this, and if you're not willing to do that, you don't really wanna know. So that's very helpful. Can you tell us about why you felt like now was the time for your book?
Misasha Suzuki: It's a great question and I think we've had, so we've had the podcast by the same name, Dear White Women for close to three years now. It's hard to, hard to imagine, that when we started back in April of 2019, that anyone save like the five family members that we could have strong to listening to it.
Dalia Kinsey: You were able to get family to listen? It's literally impossible to get friends and family to listen.
Misasha Suzuki: As it was coming outta my mouth I thought well not immediate family. Ok. Sometimes my mom will listen. And then she'll be like, why did you say that? And I'm like, oh, ok, you listened to that episode I think we recognize that not all people are podcast listeners and I'm staring at one, on the screen right now (points at Sara)
Sara Blanchard: Sort of bad, I know
Misasha Suzuki: I'll still send her like episodes every once in a while and feel like 50 50 shot that she'll listen.
But we thought that also the message and the platform that we have was really important to get out to a larger audience. Besides just the podcast, right? In different mediums. And people learn different ways in different ways and people reflect in different ways. And so we sort of came to the realization around the fall of 2020 that, we wanted to do this book.
And of course, you know, there was just a few things happening in 2020. So, you know, Sarah asked me at that time cause we were homeschooling our kids and, you know, trying to handle everything else. If like why, why we should write the book. And I said in that moment, and it was my most honest truth in that moment that I think we should write it because I'm trying to save my kids' lives. And you know, it's one of those sort of responses when you're do the speed round of like questions. And it is, it is the thing that comes to your mind first. But that is, My truth. Right? And I, I feel to this day that if one person reads this book and that person has the ability in some way to make a decision as to whether my sons live or die, right? Or anyone else who looks like my sons live or die like that, and they make a different decision than they would have, that is enough, right? That is more than enough. And I think that about the podcast too. But the book is something that's so tangible and is similar yet different to the podcast that I feel like that's the goal.
That's a singular goal. And so that's why, yeah.
Dalia Kinsey: Yeah. That's a huge motivation. I know there are a lot of people who, when they get into activism, they. Motivators that are not stable or consistent. So like maybe they are empathizing with someone they're friends with, but if that friendship goes sour, they may also lose interest in the movement.
So it's certainly a different thing when it's blood relatives who you're worried about or whether it's just intrinsic to you to be concerned about everyone's safety, which is also another motivating force for a lot of people. And those things are stable, whereas just because someone you have befriended is suffering.
You know, I don't know that that's a motivation that would really last. And I've seen like fair weather activists, especially in 2020 that couldn't even hang in there for a year. And like you mentioned, you started the podcast long before this second wave of the civil rights movement.
Sara Blanchard: Ooh. I like that you called it the second wave of the civil rights movement.
The it, it
Dalia Kinsey: feels like, yeah, like no one WA was framing it that way. It was so interesting to me how many people acted like B L M was brand new when these are precisely the same issues that we've had since reconstruction, like the US loves to do. They say they're going in to. People that are suffering when it's really a play for money or resources, like they do that overseas over all the time.
That's also what it looks like. Maybe I'm biased because I was told it was a war of Northern aggression, which, you know, that's a whole nother thing. But like the perspective is, well they came down here for resources and for power, not for humanitarian reasons, which vibes with how the US generally is, and then left too soon as they always do.
Like before any area stabilized and people just started murdering black folks left and right. Any time they had two red scents to rub together and decided that maybe they should be treated like equals, it was always a problem. And the police have been part of enforcing systemic racism. In my part of the country, at least since reconstruction.
And so for anyone to think it was a new problem was just so bizarre to me when it's the same thing we've been dealing with since the beginning of this country being formed.
Misasha Suzuki: I I love, I love that you said that, and Sarah knows, like, I, I will continually like hammer this point home on the podcast because I, I think that people completely think this just came out of nowhere, right?
Or this is like, we were doing just fine cuz we had this civil rights movement in the sixties and like, we fixed it, you know, and, and once the Civil War was over, we also fixed that, right? And so there's periods that we've fixed. And so why is there such an issue now? And I think that shows up in, in, you know, a lot of different ways.
You're absolutely right in that it was sort of, it has been baked into the founding of our country. And that reconstruction in particular was sort of designed to be this fix, but it never, it didn't go down that way. And in fact, people were still trying to sort of create the world that, that existed before reconstruction, right?
Just without using the word slavery. And so I think that that is so important to understand that history because those are the cycles that keep repeating. And if we don't understand that, we're continually looking at it like it's this new issue. And that, you know, oh, we've got this new problem. We've got this B l m movement, or we've got, you know Asian hate and all of this is so new, but it's not.
And I think that, I, so I love that
Dalia Kinsey: you said that. That's a great, I'm glad that you mentioned Asian hate thinking that maybe that's new because I was not aware of, I, of course, I knew about, Internment camps and Japanese people being robbed of their property. But I didn't realize that the legacy of anti-Asian sentiment was even older than that.
And I guess I never fully processed that. The US never apologized or did any kind of reparations for that. And the idea that you can just steal people's property and no one have an issue with it. In a country that claims it's all about you being able to pull yourself up from your bootstraps and get what you've worked for.
But it's okay to rob certain people of what they've worked their whole lives to get so, It's interesting when you're not directly affected by something or you think you're not affected by something, how you will think something's brand new, and how frustrating that is for people who've been saying the whole time, this is a problem.
How did you experience that with. One Asian parent. I wanted to start with the book because, you know, with podcasts you never know if somebody's gonna hear the beginning, the middle of the end. So I wanted to let everybody know, dear White women is available for purchase. There's an excellent resource for you to share with allies or people who are pretending to be allies.
That need to show that they're willing to put forth some effort to make changes because it really is work to be sincere when it comes to anti-racism. This isn't just something you can do casually. It's going to require you read, be willing to read at least a book. Right. But going back to your motivation for starting the podcast and your experience as multiracial people, can you talk a little bit about what your experience with race and your Japanese culture was growing up?
Yeah, I think we have.
Sara Blanchard: Both similar and slightly different experiences with that. I grew up on the East Coast to a Japanese immigrant mom and a white dad. And I grew up going to Japanese Saturday school to like every Saturday at least 11 years of my schooling life I was spending in Queens or with, you know, in a different community than where I was growing up.
I would spend summers in Japan with my grandparents. So being Japanese and biracial was a very, like, foundational part of my identity. I was very clearly Japanese and white with, you know, eating my mom's, like the Japanese food that she made for our home and, and all of that sort of stuff. So I never really felt like I, I was always the quirky independent kid because I never really felt like I fit in with the kids at like western, like at American school.
but I was always liked enough, you know, and then I also had this other crowd where I wasn't quite Japanese enough. And so I felt like I understood that there were so many different perspectives and they, and by virtue of spending summers in Japan growing up instead of summer camp, my mom was like, you have to go spend time with your grandparents.
You're gonna go see them. And I would just go to Japan. I knew that the American way was not the only way from a very young age. When the anti-Asian hate came up, I have to say, like, even for myself, I didn't realize the history of it because where I grew up, Japanese people were like, there was a lot of Japanese people, like all these New York City had a lot of Japanese companies.
And at that point, Japan was at its economic heyday and it felt viscerally, like it was very respected. So the fact that I would be so scared that my mom was gonna go to the supermarket and I was afraid that she grabbed the produce that someone else wanted and they might punch her in the face, like I, I, it was really.
A different experience going through that during the pandemic. When, when this wave of vitriol and, and hate was retargeted at the Asian population in this country,
Dalia Kinsey: how did your mother respond? Because a lot of times I find when I'm surprised by intense racially motivated violence that the generation before me is confused as to why I'm surprised.
How was your mom's reaction? I
Sara Blanchard: mean, my mom does color her hair blonde. Like she's got light hair. Like she's, if you didn't look at her face you from behind, you wouldn't know. Right. From certain perspectives, my mom, she was an immigrant, so she or she is an immigrant, so it's not like she's had she's had the 40 something years of experience living in this country, but didn't grow up here to experience it in her foundational years, any racism against her?
And I think she was just kind of like, I'll be careful. I just won't go out to whatever places. And I, I'm just, she was careful because of Covid anyway. But I think not, no, I don't think she'll listen to this particular podcast cuz she doesn't necessarily listen to her. So I'll speak more freely. But, you know, I don't think she's ever felt like she fully belongs in the us.
I think after my dad died at her funeral, she was like, oh, people, people came and talked to me. Like, I'm not just the wife of like, they actually wanna maintain a friendship and a relationship with me. So I think th there was an element for her as an immigrant too, of not fully feeling rooted here. And, and I don't think she had explicitly racist things done to her necessarily when she lived in the us but I don't think that she ever felt like she fully belonged either.
Yeah. But I don't think she felt physically threatened being.
Dalia Kinsey: Where she is. Did you feel a sense of belonging when you would visit Japan to spend time with your grandma? I look so
Sara Blanchard: foreign to them. Oh, I remember being so by, they would send me to Japanese summer school. Like it wasn't summer school, it was the school year.
But they wanted me to experience school in Japan, and their school doesn't let out in the summer like American schools do. So I remember being there for a month and like walking with the kids to go to the local school and the principal like, like I, I loved my classmates. They were all fascinated at the scrunchies that American kids wear at that point and, and all this stuff.
But I stood outside with the school principal at dismissal one time because he wanted to make sure that other kids knew that I was there. And even in front of the school principal, they would shout out like, foreigner, go home. You don't like, you don't belong.
Dalia Kinsey: Oh, no.
Sara Blanchard: So, no, the Japan is a very homogenous society and especially if you get outside of the big cities, people literally may have never seen someone who's not ethnically Japanese in their lives.
So yeah, that, I definitely didn't belong there, but I guess in some ways, you know, the upside is you learn to navigate your own path pretty early on when you grow up in, in those sort of
Dalia Kinsey: ways. Yeah. My little brother lives in Japan and he and his wife just had a baby at the end of last month, and I'm just wondering what her experience will be like because his wife was explaining that there even are, there's a word for someone who is Japanese, who has lived outside of Japan.
So that even that makes you different, different enough for there to be a name for it. So it will, I think, require a lot of love and attention for that, not to damage the baby psychologically. What was your experience like Sasha?
Misasha Suzuki: Yeah. So as Sarah mentioned, there are some similarities in our experiences.
So I grew up in, on the west coast, and I'm the daughter of a Japanese immigrant father who happens to be six two as well, which is not so like from the start, our family is not sort of your stereotypic Japanese family, right. So, he's incredibly tall. The whole family is, which was great cuz like on subway platforms in Japan, I could see my whole family over everyone else.
Now people are getting taller, so it's not as easy. But anyway, you know, and, and to a white mother right from Seattle and who happens to be the, she was a daughter of a civil war historian. So that's also why I love like, just tying it to history. But growing up in Los Angeles, there was a very clear Japanese American identity there, right?
Because the of the internment camps and what had happened historically to Japanese Americans who were basically told when that executive order was signed by Roosevelt, that like, Hey, we know you're Americans, but we're, we're actually gonna just put you in camps and we're just gonna, you know, because we're at war with Japan, so we'll just take all of your property and you get a suitcase and you go and live in sort of these barracks like horse barracks.
We'll just do that till the end of the war and let's see, you know, how that goes. And so there was very much that cultural history in Los Angeles. And at the same time you have my father who's an immigrant, who grew up in post-war Japan. And so his. Japanese identity was very much not that right?
Not the Japanese American, cultural identity. So it's very clear in our house he was Japanese, you know, we were Japanese and American, but we were not Japanese American, if that makes sense. Just culturally. So, yes. Mm-hmm. , we spent a lot of time in Little Tokyo, which again was sort of different from my dad too because he was like, oh, this is very culturally Japanese American.
He is like, I want to go to the Japanese grocery store, you know, I want to go buy these things. And my dad was also going back to Japan and still does even through Covid, you know, like regularly cuz all of his family is still there and all my extended family, so I did spend summers in Japan.
I escaped Japanese school cause I was doing ballet on Saturdays. And so that was like my trade off as long as I was doing ballet. And I think then I sort of aged outta Japanese school, so. Managed well. Is your Japanese still strong? It is. But that was due to a lot of work later on. So I was, sad at the time, which is why my kids now are taking Japanese and have completely gone that same route and said like, oh, I will, I will never thank you for you know, this.
And I'm like, wrong, you will thank me later on. Maybe not today as you're writing your condu, like your characters like, but you'll, but I think for me growing up and having the last name Suzuki, right, it was everyone was kind of trying to figure out, and also my parents made up my first name cuz they thought like, you know, this'll be great.
All Japanese will think it's Japanese. All Americans will think it's American. And that was a total fail cuz all Japanese think it's American. And they're like, oh that must be, it's not Japanese names, it's probably American name. And all Americans were like, Hmm, that's vaguely Eastern European. Like, are you Russian?
And I'm like, all right. Like , no one wins in this scenario. But you know, it was my parents good after they had, they had some good intentions over there. So with the made up first name and a Japanese last name, like, first of all, you could always tell during roll call when my name would come cuz everyone would be like, mm.
Like hmm. And so there'd be a big pause and I'm just like, Hmm. Ok. But also it really. Roots you in who you are. Because like Sarah, I was not white enough for white spaces at times. I was not Japanese enough for Japanese spaces. I definitely wasn't Japanese enough in Japan. And then people would ask, you know, once I got to a certain age is your husband Japanese?
And they're like, no, my dad is. They're like, oh, so you're, you are Japanese, you understand the Japanese need for whatever. Which was very strange. So it was continually, people were trying to put you in a box. And once people, enough people try to do that, you're like, no, I'm just gonna build my own box.
So being very clearly rooted in both identities has been something that is, has been important for me, my entire life. And so it resulted in giving my kids Japanese first names, which everyone now I've done the same thing to my kids. Everyone's like, Hmm, this name, this kid, . I don't know what's going on here.
So in Japan, in the us like it is, it is a challenge. But they too are very strong in who they are. cause that's the gift I'm trying to give them. Although they might not thank me for that now either.
Dalia Kinsey: When did you experience that, that clarity, that even if the rest of the world is acting like we don't know what a multiracial person is, when there are lots of multiracial people, when did you realize like, you don't need other people to get it.
You are who you are and you don't have to explain yourself to anybody?
Misasha Suzuki: I mean, I would like to say like super young, right? But that, that's not the truth. I think it was probably really college, I think when I was very, I remember going to an Asian Student Association meeting when I was a freshman, like one of those, you know, welcome new students kind of meetings.
And I walked in and I felt people very clearly looking at me like, why are you here? And maybe some of that I projected but some of that I, you can feel right, you feel when people don't think you should be in a space and then I was like, why am I so concerned about how Asian they think I am?
Right? Because I know how Asian I am, right? I, I know. And so yeah, I think from that point on, I was very, very clear about wanting and clearly going to be both, rather than either or, you know, and trying to fit. . Yeah.
Dalia Kinsey: Now, since we're all in the US we've probably spent a lot of time in majority white spaces.
Did you feel comfortable in those spaces or did you generally have to deal with microaggressions or hearing people say nasty things about Asian people not remembering that you are also Japanese?
Sara Blanchard: I SOAs and I talk about the difference in our social circles sometimes because I, and I have to do some thinking on whether this was applicable, like pre moving to predominantly white states.
But I definitely spent a lot of time living in Midwestern to like, like Colorado is where I'm at now. They are very predominantly white states. I've never had a, like I have a lot of white friends. I have, it was only this year actually that I, was it this year? Yeah. Time warp. I think it was this year that Atlanta happened and I finally sort of recaptured my wholeness, if you will, could be, because I think the first half of my life was so heavily in Asian and multicultural settings.
And then I spent basically the last 15 years living in Arizona and in Colorado. And I think I just dropped part of my Asian identity. It was not it was sort of, you know, when you see what's reflected around you, like absolutely felt very comfortable. And I've never seen people say anything about Asian people in my presence at least.
You know, my kiddo has experienced that and I'm really impressed that she stood up to someone was like, what do you mean by that? And she's sort of 12 talking to her friends about race and the fact that she's Asian and leading that discussion. But, but to me, with adults, that's never happened. Oh, that's
Dalia Kinsey: nice.
Misasha Suzuki: So Sarah and I do have very different friend circles. I don't actually spend a lot of time in now by choice in solely white female spaces. It is not where I feel really comfortable. I think throughout the years I have though. But because of who my immediate family is it is less comfortable for me because I feel like there is a lot of judgment that happens in the, in those circles and ones that, I just, I feel like I can't really be myself.
So as I was telling Sarah, like I can code switch , you know, in, in those spaces, and I mean, I owned a fitness studio for a while, so I was definitely in a white female space in that, but yeah, whether I, I can move through those spaces and have sort of superficial discussions is one thing, but whether I feel really grounded in them is another.
So the people that are, except with the, a couple exceptions, the people who are largely like even at our, who come to our house, I mean, no one really comes to our house these days because of Covid, but the people who are in that closer circle are generally people of color.
Sara Blanchard: And I wanna add to that, what you just said, because I completely actually reflect or I feel the way you feel.
I'm not saying if I really am honest. It's not that I feel grounded or comfortable or fully seen, it's just those are the default people that I've hung out. For so long because of the kids' parents, you know, the, the people that are in our circles. But it explains to me a little bit why I think I've constantly been a little unsettled in our friend group since we moved out here.
And so I, when I have found, I do feel way more at home in many multiracial communities, I for sure feel better.
Dalia Kinsey: I love that you, yeah. You can hear, feel that and say it, because I think sometimes people feel guilt around not feeling super close or safe sometimes in white friends circles, but they're just so many things that you know, are not safe to discuss and.
It just feels so much more comfortable where you can be somewhere where you're just a multifaceted human being instead of the person of color who's like the authority on all P o C things or the person who can give you permission to use certain words. It's funny, when I was reer listening to other interviews you've done, I find it fascinating how many white people want to know why they can't use the N word.
And my question would be, why do you care so much like that sense of entitlement that you are used to having access to literally everything that you're going to lose sleep over? Not being able to use a racial slur without being criticized. Like seriously, let's look at the question, but the fact that people are asking that so often.
It's, it's trippy, and I have people ask me that, well, pre pandemic, but the stress of the pandemic, I was like, I don't even have time for the types of white, I used to call 'em friends. Now I'll say acquaintances that would ruin my Saturday night like that. I just don't have the. Energy for it, but it is very nuanced deciding who you want to make room for and who you have room to give grace to.
And for me it would have to be people who've also poured a lot of energy into me as an individual. So it's not that those acquaintances are canceled, there's just like a million other things I'd rather do than hang out with them
But you know, I feel like I was being kind by not telling them that to their face. And if they really feel like growing, I feel like they're bright people, they can figure it out on their own. It's about desire. How have you balanced that understanding that there's some people in your life that they're good people?
Cuz I mean, nobody's all good, nobody's all bad, but they're never going to understand your level of commitment or interest in social justice. They just don't care. How do you. Grapple with that or have you come to a point that you're just willing to accept some people as they are, but maybe limit your exposure?
Or have you been graced with not knowing anybody like that??
Sara Blanchard: I think you'd have to, I think everybody knows people like that in this, in this country. I think everybody does, but I think it's a tricky time for, for me to answer that question cuz I feel like the pandemic brought relationships like to the forefront where you could you, I really felt like I had very limited capacity to interact with a lot of people on a personal basis because my kids were constantly home.
My partner was constantly home. You know, we were all worried about health and some basic stuff. And so like you just said, if I would rather read a book by myself at night than hang out with you, like at this point I'm not making that time and effort. But that's not to say that I wouldn't be interested in people.
Like if you, if you run into people in passing, like I feel like I really do have a lot of love to give and a lot of care about what's happening and understand that there is a lot going on for everybody in this world. But I'm really still in the midst of reevaluating and rebuilding as we, I mean now with this next variant, like, I don't know where we are in this cycle of ability to interact with people regularly.
And I've been using almost like these virtual connections talking with you, Dalia, and like a lot of other people in, in places that aren't necessarily here where I'm at physically in as a human being in, in face-to-face interactions. And so there's been a lot of self-reflection about what it means to.
Healthier social circle, how much of that has to be in person versus can you get support that you need from people virtually, you know, what does the composition of that group look like? In order for me to fully feel seen and be able to be vulnerable and move forward in a really like, strong way, while also, you know, I, I kind of want people to add to my life at this stage.
Because, you know, there's a lot going on and, and my heart is with those that I love, my kids, my family, you know, like I, I want to live in a much more intentional way with new friendship groups included. That might have been a very long circum like
Dalia Kinsey: circular answer to that. No, I love that. That's so helpful cuz I think a lot of people are so depleted right now energetically because living through the pandemic is traumatizing by itself.
And like you said, that. Lack of energy is really revealing all the weak spots like everywhere in the office, in relationships at home. It's really bringing a lot of things to the surface that we typically could ignore and now we just don't have capacity for tolerating it. So I think it's more important now than ever to put your own wellbeing first.
Well, I think, cuz you said, and if that means you can't hang out with people, then, then, then you can. It's what? It's right.
Sara Blanchard: You want to be able to have the full bucket in order to give out. And I think all of the work that we do, I mean, Sasha and I regularly talk about the need for boundaries and how we're feeling because these are not light topics that we all talk about.
You know, I, I wanna get better at it. I used to do this cult like a community revision once a year, like a review of, and it was from this book take Time For Your Life by Cheryl Richardson. And you classify people in the six categories and you do that they can only show up in one category, whether it's friend, children, or sorry, family, children, your career community, spiritual community your acquaintances and your really close friends that you would pour your hat out to anybody like, about everything with.
And, and then once you list this conscious dump of everybody, you sort of go through and you're like, how do I feel about all, all these people? Do I want more of this person? Do I want less of this person? I did that at the start of the pandemic and then I just rediscovered the list recently and I was like, I think I wanna just burn this and start again cuz it feels so different.
Dalia Kinsey: Hmm.
Sara Blanchard: Having sort of hole into my survival cocoon for a while. And so I bet the acquaintance list would be very, very long at this stage for, for a lot of us probably. And who do we wanna move back into the buckets that fuel us again. And would those people meet our social justice? Like, like the open-mindedness.
Cause I think that, to me is the biggest thing at this stage, even if they're not interested in understanding the history of slavery per se, and how that has, you know, continued on to impact our institutions today if they're interested in introspection, in human growth, in connecting with humanity in a deeper way, in respecting people's pronouns in, in all of these things.
And I think that doesn't matter so much where they are on the journey, if they're, if they're practicing the soft skills to bring to this sort of work, I think is what I'm looking for right now.
Dalia Kinsey: Yeah. That resonate. That desire, that interest in connecting on a deeper level. They're just some people that don't live that way and that doesn't appeal to them, and they don't wanna make more space for other people to feel a sense of belonging.
They just want everything to conform to them. They're really self-centered or ethnocentric or, or just all about themselves. You know, I, I have no interest in spending a lot of time with that vibe.
Misasha Suzuki: When you ask that question, I think that what it fundamentally comes down to is that people who don't necessarily understand how I feel about this or why this work is there don't really understand.
Who I am, right? Or my family. And because it's so personal and those fears and the concerns and the warrior are so prevalent, the joy and the happiness and just celebrating all of who, my family is like you. I think one of the great things about humanity is that we really do have this curiosity about each other and want to learn about each other.
And if we don't have that, then they're, that doesn't make for a friendship, right? Or a relationship that I want to intentionally cultivate. I think that, you know, that is the thing about the pandemic, right? It has to be very intentional because you can't. You know, grab a coffee with someone necessarily without, you know, 12 steps that have to happen before that.
And, you know, that's assuming everything else is fine. So I have been very intentional about how I sp and I would say I, I am that way generally speaking, but it starts nodding your head like Yeah, obviously. But it's even more so now, right? Because I think that because of this work I need to carve out more space to make sure that I am okay.
So that I can show up for my family how I, how I need to show up for my family an extended family. And so who I want to spend time with are those people who I also wanna make sure that they're okay and they wanna make sure I'm okay, you know? And so, and we do that in, in different ways and at different times.
And sometimes it's not always an equal relationship, right? Sometimes I might be more concerned about them, they might be more concerned about me. But I think that we continue to know that we are there for each other. Those are the people that I want to, to cultivate. Not the people who will reach out maybe once like let's say in June of 2020.
And then, you know, disappear like, cause stuff gets hard, right? And you know, you, it's got stuff to do. not that, right? It is more like the people that I know, we are in this together, right? And they know we are in this together. And so we can, we, we have each other in that. .
Dalia Kinsey: Yeah. As an introvert, did you find it was hard to balance needing people like that in your life who just make space for you and how overstimulated you were at home parenting with the partner in the house?
Yeah,
Misasha Suzuki: Like I have no better answer. I have to say my Kindle is like my greatest friend. Cause sometimes I'll just be like, just need some time. Like I've started reading my Kindle like first thing in the morning so that I can just, just sort of have these, this moment before everyone, you know, sort of needs something.
And I think for me it was really, cuz I am that type of person too, who even sort of cultivating those relationships at times is hard for me. Cuz I'm not necessarily the person who will. Reach out and be like, Hey, do you wanna get together? or Hey, do you wanna even get on a call? I'm not, I think I've gotten better at that for the people I really wanna see, but I, I am not good at that.
So I think that I got worse at it for a time because I just felt like so many people, like namely the three people who live in my house with me, just needed so much all the time, that if there was any time left, I would just be sort of in a corner by myself hoping that, or like a closet, let's say. So hoping that no one would find me for 10 solid minutes.
Yeah, it's, it's a tricky's
Dalia Kinsey: exactly how I imagine parenting
Misasha Suzuki: today. . It's all true. It's true. Like all the rumors, those are true .
Dalia Kinsey: But I'm sure like in hindsight, once your kids finally get to an age where they want personal space, they'll be like, wow, I just. Smothered mom smothered, no self-awareness,
Misasha Suzuki: like, I don't know.
Will they get to that stage? Like when is that stage give you some hope? Like
Dalia Kinsey: Yeah, I don't know. Maybe it depends on the person. Maybe they never will. That's hilarious. I, yeah. I had a question. I wondered if you noticed a difference in how gender roles played out in your experience of Japanese culture with one of you having a Japanese father and you having a Japanese mother.
I know in my house, mom pretty much is the one who determines food culture exposure. So there are all these southern dishes I have either never had, or I dunno how to make because my mom was the non-American in the house. And I know had it been different that, you know, the opposite would be true. Yeah,
Sara Blanchard: a hundred percent on the food side of things.
Totally agree and it's funny, when I go back to visit my mom too, I know I'm there because my breakfast selection is like fish with miso soup and rice and the pickled vegetables, like that's breakfast. And that actually agrees with my body way better than western breakfasts do, for example. And so there was a lot for me to unpack with gender roles and my mom.
And then growing up in America, because my mom was a stay-at-home mom, Japanese immigrant, did all the home stuff. And then as I was basically getting ready to like get my late teens, she went back to work. And then to contrast that with American culture, that was like, as a woman, you must work, you, your identity is tied to how and in this culture, like how much money you make and what your title is.
And especially because, you know, Meash and I both went to Harvard and that pressure also is, is real of like, I was told once when I left my corporate job to go be in just like to stop and, and reevaluate my life. After my dad passed, I was working in a coffee shop and several old colleagues were like, you're not living up to your potential.
Sara Blanchard: I'm not saying this is my life's aspiration, but if it was, what's wrong with that? You know? And who are you to judge that? And so there was both explicit and implicit pressure to like do what my mom had not done until she decided to go back to work when, you know, when the necessitated it for, for home stuff.
And so I still, I think, am unpacking that. I think there's a reason that I am enough is this, like the tag that's right there that resonates so much with me, Sonya, Renee Taylor's work on, you know, being inherently enough and that it's okay for us to carve out space so that we are functional in order to pull, you know, Pour our love into others and take care of others and do this work.
I think I have fallen down and, and continue to have to come back to remind myself that my bucket is worth filling up. And so that has been a great reminder and I continue to have to work on that. Every time I get to that place of like, Ooh, I should have stopped and before I got this flattened out.
Right. I, I should have kept my soul round, like my grandmother had beautifully told me a long time ago that, that that is what we want is to have a fully round soul so that you can just offer it around. I sort of pancake myself on several occasions and have to keep reminding myself to look.
Dalia Kinsey: That's a beautiful way to explain it. Fill up. Yeah. So that's a great visual. That makes so much sense. Yeah.
Sara Blanchard: So I don't know. I w I don't know how much of that is my mom's role, but like it's, it's how we see parents and, and all of that legacy does sort of affect us. And so without, I think examination, that was a great question.
I think you asked, I don't know. , there must be other ways that, that the j the Japanese, the immigration role has played in how my gender stuff has shown up too. Hmm.
Misasha Suzuki: I love that question cuz I love my parents. My dad hopefully my mom isn't gonna hear this one, but my dad is the better cook.
Even though my mom is the white parent, we had a very Japanese household and there was a lot of pressure that is sort of associated with growing up Asian in America, stereotypically that existed in my household and I didn't have the Asian female. Role model though in, in my family until I was sent to Japan for the summers, and then my aunts and my grandmother would just be like, oh, like you are Japanese, so we need to do all these things.
I did have was the very Japanese father who was so strict about anything related to like, I mean like curfew is the first thing that comes to mind because he would, he was like, well, I talked to his brother of my uncle and you know, your cousins had a curfew of seven till they were married.
And I was like, all right. Like, let's what ? And so like my dad was like, prom, what's this thing called prom? You know, like, who would, this just seems totally made up in this American, like, you know, ridiculousness. Like you're gonna be home at like nine. And so, you know, there was a lot of sort of that and being the oldest, which Sarah and I both are, and then my brother So I only have a younger brother, you know, sort of came through and they get away with everything.
It was completely like, oh, he didn't have that feeling. My brother's like rolling in it too, you know, like it's, yeah. Oh wow. Like, I mean, they could have just, maybe I continued to like, push their boundaries so much. They're like, whatever. Like he can just do whatever. Cause you know, we, we wore ourselves out with me, Sasha, but, but it was very, like, the expectations were very, very different.
And then it was really interesting cause I wrote my thesis in college on the equal employment Opportunity law and how women and men were being treated so differently in Japan and how this law was coming to like, sort of create this equality in the workplace. And like, my thesis was it wasn't gonna work because there wasn't enforcement principles.
And then I got to go there and live my thesis for two full years where I was like, oh. Funnily enough, it doesn't work. There are no enforcement, but it was for those two years, I really thought about how gender played a role for me in growing up. How it was playing a role for me in being in Japan and how did, how, if I am both white and Japanese, like how do I, how do I fit into these what I'm being shown?
That's a great question. Yeah. Now, is that going? I know
Sara Blanchard: I have all these thoughts that I'm unpacking now about how I was treated so differently than my brothers in that way. I do remember there being a lot of pressure as a girl in Japan, I had to look a certain way to be acceptable to leave the house.
And so I had to tuck, just to walk to the 7-Eleven. What I was wearing was not good enough, and I had to change and do my hair, oh boy. And then put tuck to shirt in. Like it had to be a certain. Appearance to be able to leave the house. And I don't think my brothers got any of that stuff they were about to roll out and whatever.
Dalia Kinsey: It's so funny, even now, I am still discovering ways in which my brother and I were treated differently and he didn't even know it either. Like I've never received a gift from my aunts, like I can't remember a gift, maybe like something small for graduation, but that's once in 18 years. And he recently revealed that he would get cash and gifts every time they visited, but he was the only nephew for years until someone else finally had a boy.
And it's super irritating because you realize. The levels of discrimination that you've experienced, they're so profound. You can't even know how much has happened to you. So for there to be anybody out there who's like, is sexism still a problem? And were you really harassed? Or why weren't you, why didn't you feel flattered when this person said that to you?
And why is it so offensive for someone to tell you to smile? It's like the depth of being treated different is so profound for anyone to question you. Getting touchy when someone reminds you. The fact that some of us have to fight for everything, not literally everything, but we have to fight a lot more than other people do.
It's just super. I don't have any other words. Yeah. Well, and it reminds
Sara Blanchard: me again about like the, the idea of our buckets and all the more depletion is happening when you have more of these marginalized identities, and so we have to pay even more attention. I love like the NA ministry comes to mind and just this idea of we want rest is an act of rebellion sometimes.
Dalia Kinsey: So necessary. Yeah. And you really realize during times of high stress how exhausted you actually are. So I think everybody's been having that learning curve this year. I only have a couple more questions. I know it's getting late. I wanted to know how you dealt with the stress of being told you're not Asian.
When you started coming into podcasting and speaking up about a a p I issues, or has that not been part of adulthood? Was that more of a childhood thing
Sara Blanchard: in adulthood For me I haven't, I was told things more explicitly when I was a child, and now I think a lot of it is either the echoes of those voices or subtle nuance, but it's in my head a lot of the time.
But I think, you know, massage and I, I love having her as my like sounding board. I don't know how people can do some of this work alone, because there's times where I'm like, literally, there's a Bipo Podcasters community on Facebook and I'm like , are we bipo? Like do we qualify? I don't know.
Are we Asian enough for the Asian American podcasting group? Where do we. Feel Okay, asserting our identity and where might it be more prudent if we say no? Like that group's intention is for really marginalized groups and we still have our foot in the door with the white cultures.
So do we want to impose our presence in some of these groups? You know? So even little things like joining face group book groups just do our work leads to heavy discussion. But I don't think anybody's explicitly said anything. I just have vibes that I pick up in certain settings. I
Dalia Kinsey: never even thought about, well, a couple of people did mention that to me in a.
Bipo group for entrepreneurs that they didn't know whether or not they belonged there. And I thought, well, of course you do. Just because I always thought that Asian folks were people of color, but that some Asian folks didn't know, like hadn't gotten the news, which I think happens when you're raised in a country for people who actually moved here.
If you got to be part of the majority, since race is a social construct, you wouldn't really know what all of those dynamics are like until you get here. So I could understand that, but then I, I don't know. It's really interesting the divisions between. Marginalized groups inside the US because I was excited to see Bipo as a big umbrella term so people could feel more cohesive under that umbrella.
But then I also hear people feeling erased by the umbrella. Like they don't wanna be, they think they're being sucked into, some kind of different label when I saw it as just an umbrella term, not a new term. Yeah. I think that, oh,
Sara Blanchard: sorry, go ahead. No, go
Misasha Suzuki: ahead. Go ahead.
Sara Blanchard: I mean, on that point, I think that's where it really feels like we have to remember that everybody's experiences, these terms and these labels and the sense of belonging and, and how they identify themselves individually.
Because I know some Asian people who've been like, oh, I don't really think about my Asian experience. I just, I, I hang out with a lot of white people, so I don't really consider myself Asian. I've heard that all the way to. , like I'm very much Asian and I lean into my, my identity as an, the child of an immigrant parent who moved over here.
And, and I think the same thing goes with, with terms like bipo. Some people want are comfortable with it and other people don't know, understand yet how they want to relate to that word in their own identities. So I just think, again, it just reminds me of that need for us to listen to people individually and not just lump 'em into a bucket.
Dalia Kinsey: Cuz it's easier for us, you know? But you can't scale that. So how will I make , I know, I know fast assumptions about people and do the least, and use like, no energy at all to socialize with marginalized folks.
Misasha Suzuki: It's a good point, right? If you, you can't scale it, so you will have to be intentional. And I know that's a turn off from some people along the way.
I agree. Maybe this comes with being in my forties too, where I don't particularly care how you are going to define me, cuz I'm going to define myself. And I think it goes back to that part of the conversation where it was, you know, people, especially with being biracial, right?
Or multiracial, everyone's always trying to even the census, right? Told 2000, you were other, right? Mm-hmm. you weren't, you couldn't even pick more than one race.
Sure you can, I mean, you can question, but I know who I am and I'm telling you who I am. So either you're listening and then we can have this conversation or you are not going to listen and then we're not going to be able to have this conversation. That's sort of like a, a good gauge for me, right?
If I can tell if people because then they'll look at my kids and my kids are, black, Japanese, and white. So then we have an even bigger conversation if we're gonna try to pick just one, you know? I am hopeful that as when Sarah and I were growing up being biracial, it wasn't common, right?
You would find like the couple people who were maybe biracial that you knew and sort of, recognize each other you know, yourselves than each other. But now it's way more common, I think, to be biracial, to be multiracial. And so hopefully, you know, it's not going to be people trying to fit people into a box so easily.
And I know we wanna fit people into a box, cuz you know, that's the way to generalize and that's the way to scale it and just make sense of, of things. But sometimes there are things that we shouldn't be making sense of, right? We can't. Bring it smaller. We have to make it larger. And so I think this race and identity is one of those things.
Dalia Kinsey: Yeah. Oh, that makes so much sense. But before we go, can you give everybody a little bit of a rundown of what the goal is of Dear White women? What transformation do you want your readers to experience? And also why do you focus on white women with your social justice work?
Sara Blanchard: I mean, I can, I'll take the first part of that about the transformation.
There has been this increasing divide in this country between people who expect perfectionism and abide by cancel culture. And this idea of you make a mistake and you'll be defined by that for the rest of your life. And what I hope is a growing trend of people who understand that there are a lot of nuances and that we can be heart led and that we aren't all taught evenly about our history, about ourselves, about how to think critically and so we can meet people where they are and move people along in a more loving manner.
And what we want people to understand who are new to this conversation about race or who want to level set again and understand a little bit more about people's stories, about our country's history and about what they can do differently, is that it doesn't have to be so difficult. You don't have to be so scared of making a mistake and being canceled because there's another way to approach this and we give you this.
It's like a, I've really appreciated Dalia, what you said at the beginning of this show about it being a book you can use as a resource. Because we go through scenario by scenario and we give specific action steps, which was something that wasn't coming out of a lot of the books after 2020 that was very theoretical.
And we really felt like we wanted to help answer the question we were always getting, which is, what do I do? And so we give you specific steps doing this, you know, that you can apply at your kitchen table that you can do in your, you know, your workplace right away. So it's not this big, scary, huge thing you're trying to do, but it can be little things that will absolutely make a difference and have ripple effects in your daily life.
And so we want people to feel both hopeful and armed with information to start making change right away. Hmm.
Misasha Suzuki: Love that. And Sarah always makes me answer the second part of this question, which is why white women? Right. While the book is not just for white women, , our platform is called Dear White Women, and that is the question we get asked the most, cuz I think people sometimes have a very hard time with, why are we singling out white women?
Or why are we calling people white in the first place as sort of this, baseline question that we get sometimes because we've been called racist for calling people white, which is confusing because I saw your, I'm sure, yes. . Yeah. I'm not sure what else we, we are gonna be calling people if we're okay calling people black and Asian.
They must be so
Dalia Kinsey: nice to like, for that to be like, your biggest issue with racism is that like, oh, people call me white. Like, really? Must be nice. That's all I can say to that.
Misasha Suzuki: Yeah, we have, we have sort of the similar eye roll but you know, so it's, it's kind of a twofold answer, right? First of all, we know by virtue not only of.
Being women, but also knowing women. The inherent power that women have in, in this society, it is often really undervalued, or devalued or, a lot of our lives we have sometimes been told that we are not, we don't really matter or, you know, we're not going back to that the gender and sexism issues.
We've always been put in this sort of box, but there is so much power that women have in their communities, right? In their homes at wor their workplaces with wallet power, let's, you know, even that controlling spending for their households to make change. And so that's something that we really, really wanted to tap into.
And secondly, white women, because white women, by virtue of being white in this country have white privilege, right? And. Experience life differently because they are white in, in, in this way that they are heard in spaces where other voices are silenced at times and sometimes they're the ones doing the silencing, but sometimes they, that the, that voice that they have can be a really powerful voice for change.
And white women have experienced that sexism that we've talked about but also have this power. So what if we could harness that power, right? This is a power that has that can really, you know, uproot systemic racism, which is literally the tagline of our show, like helping white women use their.
Privilege to uproot systemic racism. Because if we can hook, and I remembered it this time, like I didn't actually have to write out our tagline . That's why I'm smiling. I saw you smiling cuz I always think Sarah say the tagline cuz I always forget it. I'm like, there's a lot of words in there. But, but this is, this is that group that has for so long sort of been that connection, right?
Between sort of this white supremist supremacy culture and divesting from it, right? And I was just reading, you know, these Bell Hooks quotes this morning where she has this and, and like the first one that I was reading was really about that, that the role of white women, right? If we are going to be, if all women are going to be unified together, then that is an issue of white women stepping away from white supremacy and choosing a different path.
And so that's what we're trying to do here through education, through narrative through action, right? Because. because racism affects and hurts all of us. So we can, if we can get to that understanding, then, then we look forward, right? We look forward towards that change.
Dalia Kinsey: I know my upbringing would've been entirely different if I had come across women, white women who had done any kind of anti-racism work, because the white folks in positions of power that you mainly have to deal with as a child of color are white, female or femme presenting educators, and they were the ones saying slavery wasn't that bad.
And also knowing the age bracket of like the boomers that educated me. These were also people who most likely protested integration and clearly didn't want us there, even though integration happened maybe 20 years prior to my birth. In my town probably. That's about it. So the major role that white women have played in upholding white supremacy culture in this country has been downplayed a lot in the past, but I see now people being called to task and just the multitude of Karen memes on the net show us what violence.
Women who have bought into white supremacy culture are capable of. So this is really important work and I am glad you're here to do it because this is not, you know how you have energy for some types of activism and absolutely not for others. I absolutely , I can't. So glad y'all are here to do the work.
I can hand people the book and that's it. So where can everybody find out more about you and the work that you're doing and your show?
Sara Blanchard: Thanks for this. You can find all of our information lodged at our website, dear white women.com. And you can listen to our podcast on the website or anywhere you listen to podcasts, whether it's Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or Google Player, wherever.
You can read our book, and the best is if you can leave us an Amazon review after you read it. But you can buy it from your independent bookstores. And of course you can also buy it from any major, bookstore and you can request it at your library. And I think our social media handles.
That's right. Twitter at dww podcast and Instagram at Dear White Women podcast is where
Dalia Kinsey: you can find us. Thank you so much. If there was one thing you could tell everyone who's listening, they would understand it, internalize it, and carry it with them forever, what would
Sara Blanchard: it be? What I feel is coming up for me is that your life is better if you spend time.
reflecting on yourself and who you are and being the best version of yourself first, as opposed to just buying the story and the Kool-Aid from society about pursuing money and power
Dalia Kinsey: first. I love that. I thought you were gonna say you are now .
Sara Blanchard: Cause I should do that. , your bucket is worth billing. You are also Let's do that.
Yes. You are also inha. You are
Misasha Suzuki: inherently enough. Mine is gonna be, keep asking why. Cause I think a lot of times, and I have young kids, so I've found myself saying, yeah, I have one kid who will never stop asking that. But I've been thinking about this more and more and I think we have largely, as a society stopped asking why.
And we have just taken stuff that is being told to us and, but what we have also seen along the way is that what has been told to us, all along has not been the full story. Sometimes it's not been the correct the truth period, but at least most of the time it's not the full story. And I think if we continue to ask why, then we continue to look for something better, right?
The full, the full answer. We look to be inclusive of everyone. We start to question what is being told to us. That critical thinking skill is something that we value in kids and we forget in adults, and we absolutely cannot forget that as adults.
Dalia Kinsey: That's perfect. Thank you so much.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit daliakinsey.substack.com -
Joshua Young is a spirit-led guided meditation, yoga, and emotional intelligence teacher based in Atlanta, Ga. They guide meditation sessions that merge African Ancestral practices and philosophies to support the reimagining of wellness as we know it today. They empower BIPOC to seek a deeper connection to àṣẹ and Ori by merging guided meditation with what we & our ancestors know. Joshua cultivates practices that provide tools for moving through awakenings that encourage, vulnerability, community building, ritual, and empowerment to take steps towards healing. They contribute content for insight timer and continue to utilize this resource to make meditation more accessible and inclusive for Black, Indigenous, People of color and LGBTQ+ community members.
This episode we discuss
🌈How mindfulness can serve people of color and marginalized folks
🌈The key to releasing feelings from the body
🌈How we've been socialized to reject emotions
🌈The importance of working with healers that honor your lived experience
🌈Using money as a love offering
Episode Resources
http://trustyourori.com/
https://www.instagram.com/trustyourori/
www.daliakinsey.com
Decolonizing Wellness: A QTBIPOC-Centered Guide to Escape the Diet Trap, Heal Your Self-Image, and Achieve Body Liberation
Body Liberation for All Theme
They might try to put you in a box, tell them that you don't accept when the world is tripping out tell them that you love yourself. Hey, Hey, smile on them. Live your life just like you like it
It’s your party negativity is not invited. For my queer folks, for my trans, people of color, let your voice be heard. Look in the mirror and say that it's time to put me first. You were born to win. Head up high with confidence. This show is for everyone. So, I thank you for tuning in. Let's go.
This transcript was generated with the help of AI. Becoming a supporting member helps us improve accessibility and pay equitable wages for things like human transcription.
This conversation was aired as a livestream just days after the January 6th attack on the capital, a frustrating but by no means surprising reminder of the double standards in this country.
Joshua’s insights about managing high periods of stress felt so relevant in the aftermath of the most recent mass murder of LGBTQIA+ folks in the US that I thought it an excellent time to revisit this conversation.
Dalia: I'm so proud of us right now. Look at us, just mastering the technology. Okay, so we're officially starting now.
Hello everyone, thank you for joining us. You know what time it is. You know how extremely stressful this week has been. We already knew America loved white supremacy, but we might not have known how much and maybe didn't know how we would be affected by watching America show its ass this week.
I know for me; I was so easily triggered this week and just everything pushed me right over the edge. Someone tried to condescend to me, another dietitian on TikTok. And I like literally lost my mind, immediately. She just assumed because I'm a brown person and because I'm in a bigger body that I don't know anything and wanted references at random and I was just like, NOT TODAY.
And I just didn’t want to feel so reactive. So, I was happy that we already had this scheduled. What can you tell us about how you have been processing this week and how long you've been working on your mindfulness and being non-reactive?
Joshua: Yeah, so first off, thank you for having me. This week is interesting.
As a person who's really wanting to be living the life that is wellness, there's a lot of things that happened for me.
And one of the things that I know is that if I'm not making myself a priority, no one else will. And so, this week I had to do what I had to do and that was taking a week off of work.
And I've literally dedicated this whole week to giving something back to myself or connecting to something that's always been really important to me and making that the big news, making that the biggest thing that's happening for me.
That’s been what's serving me. So, I've been like cooking, I've been talking to friends.
I've been just doing my best to exist in the way that I want to exist. And yeah, mindfulness and meditation and all those things show up in those spaces as well because I gotta really know who I am first.
Before I can realize, oh, it takes this, it takes that, it takes this. For me wellness, meditation, mindfulness is the only thing that I have when it comes to existing and being well, when oppression is still a thing. And it's always been.
And when it, you know, as it relates to like my body and what I'm doing with it, how people are perceiving it, wellness is like my medicine. And so, meditation is just my thing. I don't know. It's always been my thing. I think that like very early on in my life that's what I was doing.
I was just sitting, and I was just paying attention to what was happening around me. And you know, family label this as shyness, like, oh, Josh is just shy. I'm not shy. You decided that, and what I decided was that I'm gonna be mindful. I'm gonna be mindful of what's happening around me and how I'm feeling.
And that work just continued and it expanded into this, where I realized like, oh, there's like deep value in that and knowing who I am. Knowing how I feel, being comfortable with it, whether it's something that's really good or not so good. And realizing oh, I can teach people this too.
I'm a great teacher because I've been watching people and understanding how we're learning, how we are retaining information and how we're utilizing it.
So, a lot of things have been on my side when it comes to wellness and meditation. And I'm happy.
Dalia: That's so interesting that you naturally have that inclination.
And I know for some people who, depending on how you process energy and information, it is more intuitive to make the room for introspection.
I also know that for a lot of us who have dealt with so much trauma over our lifetime. We’re afraid of silence and afraid of introspection because if we get in touch with our emotions, it feels like it may just break something loose, and we'll feel outta control, we’ll feel overly distressed, and so we're afraid of it consciously or unconsciously, and we keep avoiding the silence and avoiding things like mindfulness. And this year in particular, it's been very difficult if you've been running from emotions and if you've been suppressing them. It's been hard to keep that running going because there has been so much space and room for introspection.
Joshua: Yeah.
Dalia: But like you mentioned before the call, if you don't feel the feelings and you don't process the feelings, they get stuck. So even when we think we're protecting ourselves by avoiding our emotions, running from them, they can't really be escaped. Can you talk about that more?
Joshua: Yeah. Okay. So first I wanna say this.
When I talk about the experience for people of color or from the lens of people of color, I'm talking from the lens of a Black person. I'm a Black person, and when I think about from the very start, right, learning what the emotions are all about, how to express them when it's appropriate to, what I find in conversation with other people is that we're limited to those experiences.
Sadness is not something that I was like openly allowed to experience. Like people were trying to constantly fix it. People were constantly telling me, boys don't do that. You need to cut that out. You know, this is something that you have to stop. And, you know, it was almost like in this family, you know, space, only certain people at certain levels could experience things.
So I had no room for anger. I was doing something wrong by being angry or by being sad or sometimes like expressing too much joy.
Like, you know, if we're just getting down to the truth of it. This is just, this is just it. This is kind of what's happening in the family dynamics. And so now as a young adult, I've been through it all.
I've had the anxiety attacks; I've gone through the depression. I’ve had all those experiences and I guess what I'm realizing right now is every single thing that I've ever experienced from the beginning, I'm still carrying with me in some way. So, when I'm feeling anxiousness in my stomach, or if it's getting really crazy and now it's in my heart and in my chest, it's the same thing I was feeling when I first experienced it.
So, it's just in this space and it's sitting. And so, when we are doing the work of being honest with ourselves, being open with ourselves, loving on ourselves, being, seeking out that liberation, what we're doing is we're finding the opportunities to say, hey, you are here. I don't really know why or I could know why or I could be like turning a blind eye to it.
But you're here and it's my responsibility to step into that knowing that you're here and to do something about it. Like, you can live here, I guess but personally, I'm not willing to take anything from this year into the next year with me. And the reason I'm not willing to do that is because when I do that, I am attaching myself to my past.
And it's like this thing, this chain, this connection where no matter what happens, this is always gonna be my experience. And when I'm diving into these practices, I'm giving myself the opportunity to be free.
I'm unwilling at this point to, you know, have the first experience with sadness continue to be the reminder that this is what sadness is all based on this one experience.
You can go to therapy all you want to, you can talk about it all you want to, but I'm in here and I'm gonna stay in here until you do something about it. So that, that's a lot of what like the emotional intelligence piece of my work is all about is like getting to that saying, hey, you can go if you want to.
You know, like creating the gentle invitation to just like leave. And then usually we find that that's not the case. Like it's there, it's been there and then the other invitation comes where we say like, okay, so what does liberation look like for you? Like there's something, some little part of me, some inner child that's holding onto something. How do I free that up for you? And, and that is what I'm offering people.
Dalia: Oh, I love that. When you developed your most current offering, was it this year in response to this year or what triggered it? Why state of grace and why now?
Joshua: Yeah. It's so interesting, all of the people who know me, on a very personal level they know that like the one thing that I crave more than anything is quality time, but in that quality time, peace - peace within, peace within those around me. I really jumped into teaching guided meditation and emotional intelligence this year.
I’ve already gone through the yoga teachers training, meditation trainings, like all the things, and it felt like the right time to jump in. What I realized was that when COVID was happening, it was starting, people were freaking out - I don't know how I'm gonna be at home by myself. I don't know how I can be with my thoughts for this long.
It was a lot. And so, for me it was like I do this all the time, when no one's paying attention to me, I'm sitting in a conference room in a meeting and I'm thinking about myself. I'm figuring something out about me.
And when I'm doing something like that with ease and all the time, and it’s like my natural thing, why not be sharing it with people, you know? And so, this time was the birth of private sessions, where I was one on one with people and giving them a real opportunity to say, I'm terrified. I don't know what to do.
Who am I? If I'm not working, if that's not my purpose, then what is my purpose? This is a lot of what was coming up. And so, this course you know, it's just like the thing that needed to happen. I, outside of this work, I work at a therapeutic boarding school. And so, it's like all these kids, all these emotions, and I'm like a lot of people's moms and I'm a lot of people's dads.
In that space, I've been learning how to hold space in a real way, in like, this live action its happening in front of me way, you know, I have to be thinking on my toes. And, and what I realize is like, I even walk in that space with grace. People can be yelling, screaming, destroying things, and I'm there saying, if that's what you gotta do, you know, let it out.
Like don't hold onto it. And so, I create this course, with that understanding like, things are happening, and people's responses are their responses, but the real work is figuring out how to support them in letting it go. And how to be liberated from it and how to do that with, with grace.
Dalia: The prospect of liberation, even though oppression it's just beautiful. For some of us it might feel unattainable, but I'm excited to see so many healers of color and Black healers in particular, because the amount of abuse we have sustained in this country is just, it's astronomical. Sometimes it almost seems like fiction. It's unbelievable the crimes against humanity that have been perpetrated against Black people in this country. And people are continually trying to gaslight us and say, it's not that bad. I'm like, what are you talking about? Have you ever read a book?
But to know that no matter what happens, we are going to be all right. We are able to not just survive, but to thrive and to even do healing that the generations before us didn't have the space for. It's wonderful to see how many people are dedicating time and energy to that work. And it does make me feel more aligned this year, now that I've made that shift myself to really focusing on serving marginalized people.
And if someone who isn't in those marginalized categories resonates with the message the way my boundaries are, I'm still comfortable working with them. But anybody who doesn't resonate with the message of serving the most vulnerable, serving the people with the largest amount of trauma from daily threats against our safety, constant undermining of our identities.
And then it gets even more complex and then there are more layers when we look at being somebody who's queer and Black and not finding safe places easily.
It's a whole thing.
How did you get to the point that you realized not only was it safe to integrate all of your identities into work, but that it would be healing for people?
Joshua: Yeah. Well, I wanna say something about what you just said, cuz like that is a huge part of why I'm doing the work. When I started to practice meditation, the first person of color that I ever saw doing meditation was on a TV show called Run's House. It's like Reverend Run, he's like trying to sell to Black people, like meditation's a thing.
And that was like the first Black person. And so, every person before that had been like a straight white person, like male or female, didn't matter. And they are going and like going to India and they're like bringing back this knowledge and wisdom and they're the ones who are teaching it for some reason.
Not to say that what they're teaching is not credible. But it's like this is what they're teaching. And so, in, in that meditation space where I'm like, oh, I'm starting out, I'm learning. I'm like sitting in meditation for the first time. They're like, okay, close your eyes and let everything go. And I'm like, everything, what do you mean?
I'm, I'm barely holding onto what I have. What do you mean let go of everything? And the messages of like, yeah, what's happening on the outside world, like that doesn't matter. And I'm like, but it does, you know, like there's, you're missing something here. And I think what was missing was like the other experience.
Which is like the, the people who look like me, right, who are living like me, you're missing our experience. And there are rarely times where we can say, oh yeah, nothing matters. Like, I'm the only thing in the world that matters right now. That's virtually impossible. When we think about the typical structures of our families, when we think about how we show up to workspaces, how we show up in our friend group.
Like, Nah, that's just not possible. And so, I was disconnected from meditation for a long time. I was like, I'm not listening to a white woman tell me I don't need to worry about what's happening.
Dalia: Just don’t worry about it, yeah that’s like the mantra of the white healer/coach. Just don't worry about it. That's your ego. That doesn't matter.
Joshua: I don't know. It's, it's really crazy to think that we are now just kind of stepping into this understanding of like, oh, people have different experiences, and we must be creating offerings and spaces that welcome them.
How we're just getting to that understanding, I have no clue. This has always been something that I've understood, but it's taken a lot of work on myself, right, to realize like, this is true. And no matter if the world is saying this is true, Black Lives Matter, that doesn't mean that it's not real.
This is a real thing and it always has been. And so, what I'm, what I'm really hoping to be doing is supporting people and realizing like your ideas of wellness, they're not luxury.
They've been sold to us as luxury. I talked to a homegirl and I'm like, yeah girl, things are getting heavy, like you are telling me a lot but like, I can't hold onto that. Have you ever considered a therapist? And she's like a therapist??? You know, and it's not like I would never speak to anyone about my issues cuz like, you're doing that with me. It's more of like, well, why would I invest my time in that, my money in that? And really when we think about it, when you do prioritize yourself, like you get all this stuff back, like everything comes back to you and you are the one who's prioritized.
So, I don't think I answered your question. And I think I like lost it in that,
Dalia: you know, I really get about, just following your train of thought. It just makes so much sense that so many of us have trouble prioritizing our own emotional needs because we were raised by people who really had to work hard to keep us alive and to keep themselves alive.
And when survival is your number one priority, you don't make room for that type of emotional work. You can't prioritize releasing those negative emotions, you have trust trapped in your body and you can't prioritize really developing a practice of cultivating happiness in a hostile environment because first you have to feel safe enough to be able to do those things.
And so, no one modeled these things for us. And you're right, I always saw meditation and self-care put out there as luxury items. And when you don't see anyone Black or anybody who you know is suffering some from some kind of systemic oppression modeling, like I use this for self-care because number one, these tradition traditions originally were practiced by people who were suffering from different degrees of marginalization, even while it was being introduced to the west.
A lot of people have been using this for centuries. It's not connected to privilege really, but that's just how we've seen it used here. So, when you use these deep ancient practices to help wealthy White people feel better about themselves. Mm-hmm, it's not that like the practice is trash, it just isn't applicable to all of us because of the lens that it’s coming through.
So good for you. You get to feel better about your life as you process the human experience, which is very trying. But we are going through the same human experience with all these additional layers of systemic oppression. And your superficial spiritual practice isn't gonna do anything for me. I need something deeper.
I need something that goes beyond just this whitewashed, capitalistic kind of vapid thing, you know? And there definitely some people who are part of the dominant culture and are privileged, who are profoundly spiritual people.
But you'll notice that they would have the wisdom to say, you know, maybe I don't have all the tools I need to really help
Maybe I should bring in a guest or collab with someone else with relevant lived experience. It's just so interesting. The people that are the most irresponsible about how they, you know, help heal. Are the ones that are the most visible. And so, yes, that's my experience as well. Like everyone who was trying to sell yoga to sell meditation wasn't aware of the fact that there's more than one type of human on the planet. We're not all cis white het.
Joshua: Right. Yeah that's so true. So, when I show up in these spaces, like yeah, I show up in the spaces and I give everything that I can give.
You know, but like the challenge is like all of those people I'm still up against. So, I'll share this with you because I think this needs to be said. I do guided meditations on Insight Timer, which is like the meditation app, the number one in the world. So, I'm like contributing meditations and COVID hits.
And I watched every single person who had been working super hard, like I was giving as much as I could. I watched all those people get knocked off and then like these big names show up. And I'm like, wait, wait a minute. Like I've been here doing the work and these big names have not been contributed to anything.
How are they being the priority in this space when like, I've been the one giving to the community? And you know, it's things like that which continue the process of, hey, we're this white guy. He has really long hair, so you know, like he can put it in a bun. That's kind of like what Buddha has on his head.
Like, you know, like, and then like close your eyes with him. Like he knows . He has the vision. He's calm, he’s peaceful. Yeah. But he's also not oppressed in any way. Right. His oppression to him, right from his perspective is like us being upset. . It's like us saying Black Lives matter. That's his oppression, right.
and it still doesn't affect him because somehow, he's still making his way to the front cover. While him doing that and taking up a space that should be for me and supporting the people who I've been supporting and loving, like, I don't know, it's confusing. So, we have companies and organizations that are ran by White people who really, really, like, don't get it, like, I'm still sending them emails like, y'all better figure this out.
I'm not gonna sit around here, you know, while y'all are prioritizing white faces and I'm doing the work out here. That's not, that's not what I'm doing. Nah, I can't do that.
Dalia: % I'm just agreeing with people in the comments. First of all, the comments are cracking me up. Your, the people, I think these are mostly your followers,they love you and someone has shouted you out during the early days COVID.
It is incredibly frustrating though when you know you've been doing the work and you see someone else get like pushed ahead of you. It's just sickening to know that you have to do twice as much sometimes to get one eight of the recognition.
Yeah. So, it, it's justifiable to be angry, to know, hey, I've been doing this work and I've been giving all this love, and what do I get in response? You know, just like a spit in the face at a kick in the stomach - not very nice. But what I like is the concept of now that's a concept of now that so many of us are working on decolonization, there are more of us who are not going to contribute to that.
We're not gonna keep doing that to each other. And when we're focusing on serving other marginalized people who really are dedicated to decolonization, when we show up for our people, we are getting that love and response.
And I love the idea of being able to see my money energetically and that I put my money toward the people, the things, the programs, the practices that I want to see more of, and that it really is a love offering.
And I want for healers of color and LGBTQIA+ healers, who actually are gonna ask, what are your pronouns? Who actually are going to ask? What has your experience through this major civil rights movement been like? And how is that affecting your work? That's who I wanna work with. That's who I wanna give my money to.
That's who I wanna support. And we know that there is a way to be ethical in how we do business, but we haven't really seen it modeled for us a lot. And so, some people have this idea that, oh, if you have a gift or you do healing, you must take a vow of poverty and live on the street or something.
I just don't think that's sustainable. And then my question would be how are we modeling thriving for the people that we want to support?
So I definitely want to have healers that I can showcase like you to show what programs and offerings they have that are specifically tailored to us, that we can give them love offerings for in the form of money and receive a level of healing that other people, honestly, even if they could do it, they obviously aren't concerned about it because the way people have been pretending at the llth hour that they don't hate Black people.
Did you see the Aunt Jamimah people saying, oh, we just realized this might mammy/enslaved person imagery might be problematic. And then when AMC was like, we just realized that maybe Black people are tired of us playing Gone with the Wind every two minutes. Oh, we just realized that y'all are tired of, all this mammy stuffy, we care we really care.
You know, like you were so late on that we're not falling for it. And no you can't have my money anymore. I can make my own cereal, or I can buy it from like, somebody who is being oppressed in the same way as me or maybe being oppressed in another way. I'll take all adjacent suffering people.
Joshua: Yes. You know, so like the, the idea of stepping into the space and like needing to have to work harder, that's real. And so, for me, like what I realize is like, even in that hardness, of like, you're making this real difficult, but like, there are a couple things that I know. The first thing I know is that when I'm in this space, even if you're saying, oh, you gotta wait, you gotta hold on.
That's cute, that's fine, because all I'm doing is like deepening my intentions for the work. So, like, while you might think you're holding me back, you're not right. I am still diving into my practices as deeply as I can because now, I'm doing it with the purpose, which is when it is time for me to show up, no one can deny that I am doing the work.
This is not just me putting on the face smiling, crossing my legs, closing my eyes. This is me struggling with myself, with what's happening within me, what's happening as it relates to the world. And so, when my offerings come, they cannot be duplicated. You can try to hold a course that is guided meditation and emotional intelligence, and that's gonna be real cute. But the truth of the matter is, when it comes to the work that I'm doing, I am doing this for myself. And so, what I know I'm doing is creating opportunities for those who look like me or who are experiencing similar things to me, or even not experiencing similar things to me to get the healing right.
Dalia: That’s a powerful way to … it's not even a reframe, it's just accepting the full reality of the situation is that it is making you stronger. It is making you a more powerful healer and you can't duplicate it. That is powerful because I know almost everybody who's tried to do anything or even ever gone to work has had that experience of someone who just isn't you, try to rip off your idea and you're just like, that's what you came up with. And even if you see people celebrate it because the information came in the package, they wanted, - the person had straighter hair, or they had loosely curled hair, they had lighter skin or whatever. And people were like, oh, it's so great coming from you. But you knew that compared to what you generated; it was a really bad copy. That environment may not get you and appreciate you, but the more you lean into just being yourself and who you are meant to be, the more you realize that there is no such thing as competition because there's only one you.
And people who want to work with you or who want to be close to you, they know there's no substitute. That’s why you can say with confidence, oh, that's real cute, but you're not gonna nail it, you can't copy me. Cause there's only one.
Joshua: Yeah. So, when I'm doing the work of really understanding my connections to the emotions, I can look, I can literally be in a room, and this has happened before.
I've been in a room, I have said something and five minutes go by, minutes go by and someone says the exact same thing. And like, it's like, oh, oh, perfect, that is the solution. And because I am doing the work of loving on myself and prioritizing myself in my healing. I'm sitting there with grace, like, yeah, it is, it's a great idea.
But like, the idea is great, but what you're missing is like my plan. So, you can like say, oh, let's do this just because you heard me say it, but you don't know my thoughts behind it. You don't know how to get there.
Dalia: I've had that experience. What would you do at work? So, if somebody snatches your idea like that, are you just like, oh yeah, sure, but then you don't give, you don't collaborate anymore, you take ownership of that. Good luck.
Joshua: Yeah. You know, it's an inside laugh, like inner joy. Like damn you was right. You know? Whether anyone wants to open their mouth and say it. Yes. Now I just sit back, and I be entertained.
Like, this is when I watch you scramble. And you realize, oh, I stole this idea, but I don't even know how to bring this to life. And so now I'm watching you do too much. While I'm in the back and I'm like, I mean, skin's moisturized, I’m drinking water.
Dalia: This is my goal; this is my goal.
It sounds a little petty. And I say that with positive connotations because sometimes pettiness just, it gives me a level of joy I just can't explain. But I wanna be petty and not bothered at the same time. Is that a spiritual concept or am I deluding myself?
Joshua: I love that question.
Yeah, that's grace. That’s knowing like that you right and they're wrong and enjoying the fact that now they need to figure it out. We’ve been using pettiness as like this terrible thing. We’re framing it as ego.
Right. And if we're really doing it from a space where we're like, I am prioritizing myself, like I'm taking care of myself. I know that was my thing. I don't have to fight to know that was my thing. And so, I'm showing up and I'm being petty, but like, as long as I'm putting some grace into it, like, yes, I don’t feel bad about it.
Dalia: Yes! unbothered. I just love that. That made my day. That's the takeaway everybody. You can be petty in a spiritual way. I love that. Yes. Tell us about, for a lot of us who maybe were raised in really Christian traditions, we might not know about traditional African religions. Yeah. And so not everybody's gonna be familiar with ‘trust your ori’.
Can you tell us what Ori is and how do you bring traditional African practices or philosophies into your work.
Joshua: Yeah. Okay. So super interesting. We know traditionally African people, the African traditions are you know, like really against queerness. This is like the thing that I think I've always been up against as it relates to like being African or understanding my heritage and connection to it.
And so, a part of building that I don't know, like building that energy, or building that connection, is realizing like, well, I'm gonna come into this space and I'm gonna bring in whatever I got. And my hope is to shift it. So that people can get this idea that queerness is un-African out of the picture.
Because it's not necessary. And so, for me I practice Ifa. Which is the philosophy\tradition that is based in West Africa. And ori is like in the front of the practice. So, when you, when we think about the practice, we typically hear about like, aha.
It's like, oh Oshun, Elgua, and Chango. These are that are being pushed in front, like these are the most important things about the tradition. And as I've continued to learn and explore and really dive into the practice, what I realize is that the tradition is based on principles, but there are a couple that like really stand out. So, one of the things that stands out is that before we come into this world, we have already decided our destiny. And so, it's like in, in the realm of spirit, like before you show up in flesh, you already know what you're coming here to do.
You already know how to do it. And the work that that is, I'm just needing to recall. I just need to remember what it is I need to do, how I need to do it. All of it is like stored in the top of the head, like in the Ori like this is the space, the inner wisdom.
This is where we are divinely connected to our forces. And so, trust your, ori is trust that space where I do my best to remind you like, yeah, you are going through something, but you've probably gone through it before. It probably looked like something else, and you already know what to do.
And so, this is, this is what the practice is based on. And so, you know, there's a lot of, like, I was expecting for a lot more people to get it and then I was like, oh wait. But like the orisha are so much more like what people are looking for. We as Black people and people of color we love to put someone else in front of us.
Oh, let's look at Beyonce, oh, you know, like let's look at like all of these different people as people to model. And when we are focusing first on ourselves, which is what this work is all about, and we're focusing on this inner knowing, then what we're doing is we are developing ourselves and really doing it so that we're creating this opportunity to show up with good character.
Like that that is like what this is all about. It’s not about going to the ocean. It's not about the river. It's so much about building yourself to be the best person that you can be and doing that work from within, right before you step out and go into the world to do it.
Dalia: I love the idea of having all of that wisdom inside you the whole time.
So, many different faiths encourage you to look outwardly for guidance. And they give lists of rules instead of principles.
Joshua: Yeah.
Dalia: Do you find people are uncomfortable with having to navigate morality or what is the right thing to do on their own?
Joshua: Yeah, definitely. I think what I, so I find two things.
One of the first things I find is that people are willing to try it. Which is like shocking to me. I'm like, wow, like people are willing to do this. Like not realizing, you know, the work that it takes. On the other end of this, people do struggle, with is this right. You know, what will my mom think? Like my aunt saying like, this is like devil worship. There’s a lot that's happening. It's even happening within my own circles. And you know, what I'm finding is that people are fearing things that they don't know.
People are fearing things that they don't understand. And when we allow White people to be the voice of our practices, our purpose, our intentions, our philosophies, our traditions. They will make it look however they see it. And, this is what we see like in the media. Where, you know, Black people doing all of this stuff, you know, to themselves or leaving offerings at the river and the ocean, like what are they doing?
This is demonic. And really, it's not. Really, if we think about it, this work is so centered around connecting to and understanding and showing gratitude to the forces of nature that are with us and within us. We can do all that work within ourselves. I don't need an ancestor alter.
Like they're already here. I am them. They're sitting in me somewhere. It's my responsibility to do the work of revealing that truth to myself and of making space. And so, this is like what all of the work that I'm offering is all about. Let's go in there, let's see what's happening.
Let's make some space. So that, I don't know, you know, just so that spirit has room.
Dalia: I love that concept of not having to do a lot of external things because I know that's one thing that's always intimidating to me. When I look at other religious practices I feel like there is so much I don’t know. There's all these things I would know that if I was raised with this - how do you make an altar? How do you do this? How do you do that? And how do you integrate those traditional practices? If you do still love Christianity, how do you mingle the two? Cause plenty of people have done that. Entire nations have done it, but it feels like, oh, it's so much to learn.
But I love the concept of the wisdom being within you and your work being to reconnect to that and that it doesn't have to be complicated. and it is within your reach. That's definitely a new framing for me and so much with really traditional Western religions, is that there is a process for indoctrination.
So, if you're afraid of doing things wrong, we've all been raised to be afraid of doing things wrong. They have a process, you know up front what classes you're gonna take and what things you have to do before they're gonna welcome you into the new congregation or baptize you or do whatever. There's a whole thing. But with these other religions, they're almost so, and maybe more philosophies than religions.
They're so broad that it's scary. I think a lot of us are like, where are the rules? Is an ancestor gonna get really mad at me because I didn't face this offering toward the east or something like that.
Joshua: Yeah all of those, those ideas, there are principles.
And one of the principles is you need have no fear.
And so, all of those things that have me thinking like, oh I could be doing this wrong. If we understand the principles, which are super simple, then we can realize like, oh yeah, if I am focusing on the fact that I'm prioritizing what I'm not doing right as it relates to my own connection to the divine, that's fear.
I'm afraid to be doing something wrong. I'm afraid that something bad will happen to me. What I'm finding is that the fact that people are afraid to do things for themselves is the part that makes it scary. When it comes to doing the work for ourselves, like we have to find within ourselves, the confidence and the courage to say, you know what?
I know I gotta try this. I'm gonna dive in deep. I'm gonna see what happens.
I can shift, I can adjust, I can make changes if I need to.
And it all starts within. I can read the books, I can do whatever, but if I'm doing something and I feel like this is just not right, then it's probably just not right.
Dalia:I love that, that concept that it's gonna be about building your connection to your intuition. So, tell us who is the ideal person for the current offering? Who needs this grace work?
Joshua: State of Grace is a guided meditation and emotional intelligence course. And the people who need this are people who are ready to take this energy, this new energy of trusting the self into their communities. The idea for this course is that we are showing up for whoever shows up. People are literally signing up from all around the world and we're showing up in this space.
And in this space, I am being vulnerable. I'm building community. I am building a conversation with myself, with those who might not be like me or who might be like me. What I'm really doing is I am creating this opportunity to go within. And so we are in this course, people are invited to go as deep into their past as they want to.
And people are allowed to stay on the surface as long as they want to. Right. But the people who this course has been created for are the people who realize there is room for more of myself and I am unwilling to continue carrying all of these things, or I'm just willing to understand myself a little bit more.
When we take a look at like what's been happening in the world, and I mean the election alone, like I was watching people have at it. People were screaming, crying. So much was happening and it's like, why am I doing that? Why is that my response to my experience?
And so, this course is so much about redeveloping and renegotiating, my emotional responses. Like how am I showing up in the space? And when I'm doing that with intention, when I'm doing that with understanding, and when I'm doing that with grace, nothing can take me away from the power of spirit.
Like this is all me, you know, that stuff can happen, and it will happen whether we want it to or not. But how I'm dealing with it, how it's taking place in my body is another story. And so, this is like the people who are wanting to undo oppressions from within. We are starting inside the earliest thing that's ever happened, we're doing our best to undo that to liberate ourselves from those experiences.
So, I hope that answered your question.
Dalia: Unraveling our internalized depression, that's massive. I don't know anyone else who is focusing their meditation work around unraveling, internalized oppression. Our blocks, I know for me personally, come from internalized depression and I started getting coaching this year from a decolonization business coach, a fem of color, who is also a queer person.
The number of ways in which people of color are in their own way in business related to internalized oppression and related to us being cut off from our own body and our own intuition and from spirit, because we have been told, you need to be able to prove everything, you gotta justify it, you gotta test it, you gotta do everything in this very colonized way. But still, even after all this time and all assimilating that we've done, it doesn't resonate with us. And then we find ourselves procrastinating, working against ourselves, because we don't wanna fully lean into these practices that don't feel right because we haven't done our decolonization work.
But honestly, before this year, I would've been like, what is decolonization work? I didn’t know anyone who was doing that. I certainly didn't see people doing it around specific things like business and relationships and how you deal with people if you're working for other people. So, I feel like as much as this year has been a monster, because no one ever told us how awkward, uncomfortable, and traumatic it is to live through a major civil rights movement.
Nobody mentioned it. It was too painful. They never mentioned it. Even like I know one of my parents was living, well, he is from down south. He was here and he was in high school, early in high school when they integrated. He has never talked about it. My dad is such a communicator, that lets you know it was a s**t show.
It was a freaking nightmare.
This time because of technology we can process together, and we can make shifts in what we offer to serve us in a way that helps us move through all this. It's beautiful to see. So, I could see this workshop being useful for anyone who's trying to see how are my issues with internalized oppression, making my life more difficult than it has to be?
Joshua: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. That's real. So, let's talk about medicine. Let's practice a little bit, if that's all right with you. And so first I wanna say this yeah, the piece of like, I didn't realize until you just said it, like we are, I'm living through a civil rights movement.
Like I was trying to like not look at it for a second or didn't even realize I was turning my eyes away, but that's true. And so, one of the things that's been medicine is a seat at the table, like Solange's album, that's medicine. I'm listening and I'm like, you, yes, you forecasted the weather correctly, someone should be paying you for doing that in particular.
But that's medicine, I'm listening to that, and I am understanding this is what it can sound like to be in a space of undoing that from within, because that is what the album was all about. It was like, I'm going within, I gotta figure this out for myself.
And this is, this is the aftermath. This is what it looks like and its beautiful medicine. So, if you're not listening to that, have not listened to that. Get your medicine. Okay. But I do want to guide us through like maybe a minute practice. I know we're kind of coming to the end of our time.
Dalia: That would great.
Joshua: Cool. Okay. So, wherever you are, just try to get comfortable.
So, if you've been sitting, like, we've been sitting for a while, so if you need to move your spine, whatever you gotta do, get yourself comfortable and then just notice what your breath feels like.
So, you're just breathing in and out through the nose, noticing what that feels like.
And whenever you're ready, just take a look at everything that you can see in front of you, and then just gently close your eyes,
So, you're just taking a mental picture of what's in your space, where you are, and when you close the eyes. Just continue connecting to your breath.
You're feeling into the breath from the inside, you might notice that on your inhale, the belly's expanding. You're filling up and, on the exhale, the belly is dropping back towards your spine,
Just rest in that space.
Noticing what it feels like to exist, knowing what it feels like to be in this space as you are.
Not needing to change, not needing to shift. Not needing to meet any expectations.
We're gonna move into the body and just notice whatever's happening, however we show up. That means we're not undoing any tension. We're not changing, shifting, adjusting. If those things happen naturally with the exhale, then just allow those things to go.
Start at the top of the head and just allow the, the attention to just move down, all the way down to the feet.
You're passing the face and the arms, the chest in the back, the thighs, the butt, the groin, the legs, the feet,
Just let the attention move throughout the body freely.
Again, just taking this as your opportunity to notice what's happening for you right in this moment.
And so, I want you to notice the body as deeply as you can. And I want you to notice any subtle changes, any shifts in the body, no matter their size when you hear the word sadness, noticing if anything is different, noticing if anything's changed.
I want you to go into this space that is most noticeable. Whatever space was the loudest. Just go right there and then take the next few moments just to look at what's happening where in the body it’s showing up and what that feels like.
Take this as your opportunity to offer up surrender. So, you might just say, hey, I surrender you. You can go.
And notice if it's still there. Notice, if it's just sitting. If it's like, mm, I'm here. Mm-hmm, it's not enough.
And, continue paying attention to it. Taking in as much information as you can about the feeling.
And so, then I want you to continue being in the space. And this time I want you to tap into your inner wisdom. And so, you're just gonna say to the space, what is it that I can do to liberate you?
And then just gently listen for the answer. It might be a word, it might be a sentence, it might be a full plan.
And when you feel like you've heard or you've gotten the message, be in the space just a little bit longer and take this as your opportunity to show gratitude. Right. This could be. Thank you for letting me know.
And you can bring a hand to the belly, a hand to the heart.
And when you get your hands there, just press them into the space, just like a little weight on these spaces.
Feeling the connection into the space that is still moving, even in your moment of stillness, feeling into the place and space that is a constant anchor in our existence.
And take a deep inhale through your nose and you can let it all out through your mouth.
And then when you're ready, you can blink the eyes open, coming back into the space as gently as you can, and with grace.
Dalia: That was just beautiful. Thank you so much for coming on today and thank you to everybody who joined us. If you’re watching this on IG, you can already see Josh's handle and you can connect through the bio. I'm sure you have your workshop link in the bio. Yeah, watching this on YouTube, I'm gonna put all of the relevant links in the notes, and they've also been popping up on the screen.
I love featuring healers of color. If you want to see more content like this, you should visit. My YouTube channel, and it's just Dalia Kinsey. Make sure you hit the alarm bell, the little bell so that you get a notification whenever something new is out there. And my podcast is also centered on BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ health and happiness.
This is absolutely my favorite type of content that's focused on real, tangible things that we can use to thrive, not just to get by and in spaces where we're not just tolerated, we're celebrated, we're centered, and we're welcome. So, thank you so much for creating this space with me today.
Joshua: Yeah, thank you for having me. It's beautiful to be in a space where we can have these conversations and to do it with knowing like, these just need to be had. So, thank you for creating this space too.
Dalia: Absolutely. I will absolutely be keeping in touch. I feel like we should do something like this again.
Joshua: Yeah, let's do it.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit daliakinsey.substack.com -
Larissa is a queer, cis, biracial, Black movement teacher and mom to twins. She teaches intelligent movement strategies that help you feel connected, curious, and joyful in your body, and specializes in core & pelvic floor dysfunction. She is an ardent believer in the idea that connecting to your body is a pathway to joy, and joy is a pathway to justice and liberation.
This episode we discuss
* learning to sense joy and the full range of human emotion in your body
* reestablishing a connection to the pelvic floor
* the benefits of seeing a pelvic physical therapist
* freedom and clarity that comes with middle age
* living at multiple identity intersections and cultivating friendships
Episode Resources
www.larissaparson.com
www.daliakinsey.com
Decolonizing Wellness: A QTBIPOC-Centered Guide to Escape the Diet Trap, Heal Your Self-Image, and Achieve Body Liberation
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Dalia: This is so exciting. It's been forever since I've recorded an episode. Originally, I said I was just going to take a couple of months off. Mm-hmm. to just get my life in order, post covid and post finishing the book. And it is month six. And I'm not entirely sure when I'm gonna release this one, but I am excited to be recording again. I know that season two is gonna start the 1st of January and honoring rest and really liberating myself from that need to be productive all the time. I realized that I only wanted to podcast once a month.
It just felt so right in my entire body. Yes. And when I was looking at what you do, when we first met, it was at the Together Thriving conference. Yes, yes. And then you were talking about pelvic floor health. So, I thought your focus was on. Reproductive wellness. Mm-hmm. and that part of the body for people born with a uterus.
Right. And didn't realize that it's so much more than that, that it's embodiment work. When I was looking at your site and it talked about embodying joy, but also embodying justice, that really struck me because I realized I wasn't even sure what. Justice might feel like in the body. I'm just now getting to the point where I could feel in my body that podcasting once a month was a hell yes.
Per my entire body. Yeah. But there's still some things I think I wouldn't even recognize. So why do you lead with that on your site?
Larissa: That's such a good question. You know, so I was and still am really interested in and focused on doing core and pelvic floor rehab work. It's one of the things that. I love nerding out about hardcore, but what I found was, this is like the most circuitous way to get to the answer to your question, by the way.
But what I found was that the more that I worked with people and the more that we kind of went on this pelvic floor journey together, where they started developing more awareness of their bodies' habits and patterns, and the more work I was doing with the folks, the more I got to this like realization that.
At the bottom, if you imagine the work we're doing as a cereal box, or like a box of Cracker Jack or something, there's like this prize in the bottom of the box and that is like this body liberation stuff. Mm-hmm. And I decided I was tired of having it be the secret. Mm. I was tired of it being like the thing that we got to at the end of a series or after working together for a few months.
And I really wanted to lead with it because I feel very strongly. Like, like I say on my website, that the body is a home for joy because we feel joy in our bodies and our bodies are homes for justice because we feel injustice acted on our bodies and we feel it with our bodies, and we feel it in the ways that we make choices about our bodies.
And so, if we can get in more touch with our bodies, if we can really embody our bodies, feel like our bodies are our homes, then our bodies become a site for justice instead of injustice.
Dalia: I love that you lead with it, and everything resonates. I felt like the copy was so beautiful the way you phrased everything.
Thank you. But then I also thought, I am kind of a rare. Not that I'm a special snowflake, even though low key, I do think that I am, I felt like with my own messaging where I struggled the most was trying to give people something they needed that they would recognize. Yeah. So, with the pelvic floor, people recognized they need that.
Cuz when I first heard that, I was like, Yes, I'm gonna be front and center for your presentation so I can figure out how. Stop pee when I laugh. I used to think that was only for people who'd had children, and now I realize it's for like literally everybody. Uhhuh as you get a little older and no one's told you like what to do to strengthen your pelvic floor.
Yeah, but then when you talk about the end goal, which, because I kind of think that way, what I wanna do for people is make them feel comfortable in their bodies and confident that their life is best led by them in every single way. But when you say that I think a lot of people don't know whether or not they need that.
I know even in the coaching contain, we weren't in this program together, but we are active in the same group. Yeah. So, one of the coaches that I've had, when I went to her, I did not know I needed what she actually offers. Yes. But she's such a master of marketing she presented something that I thought I needed, but what I needed, like you said, was at the bottom of the cereal another prize. It was confidence, it was mindset. But I never would've signed up for anyone who said they did mindset coaching. I would've been like, Oh, for what? Sounds impractical. So, have you had any issues finding your ideal person when you changed your marketing?
Larissa: That's such an interesting question because I'm kind of in this in between space where I've changed the copy on my website and I'm still also teaching a lot of the same stuff and marketing it very in a very similar way. So, I would say I haven't really had a hard time finding folks to work with. And the folks who really wanna do this work who show up in my membership, for example, are really interested in the way that we're doing this together.
When we are working together in that space at least, we have coaching conversations where we talk about all those little things that are going on in our lives that are taking away our sense of joy or adding to our sense of joy. But then we also do movement practices. So, we're really doing this embodiment work together and really experiencing, Okay the, the question that I think a lot of people can't answer all the time is, what does joy feel like in your body? Like what does joy feel like? Everyday? Joy. Not like, not like I just felt the best massage of my life.
Dalia: Well, see, I wondered about that. When you say everyday joy, that's really Yeah. Helpful because I could definitely think about periods of like transcendent period.
Yeah. And it doesn't have to be anything major. It's usually. Any kind of dancing exercise. It might happen if I do it for long enough. But a friend of mine I think saw, maybe it was your post asking like, what does, do I feel like in your body or someone else make, but I'm pretty sure it was you. And they said, oh my goodness, I don't know.
And that was the first time they'd really thought about that. And I thought, Oh no, that’s a little heartbreaking. Yeah. And I feel like they are a joyful person, but they, like so many of us, folks of color, spend a lot of time thinking about survival. Yep. And not thinking about joy. Yes. Yes. So where do you start with that?
If you don't know what joy feels like in your body, and why do we need to know?
Larissa: So, I usually start with something, actually, I think I wanna answer the second question first. I was gonna say, I have this thing we start with, but let's answer the second question first. So, like, why do we need to know what joy feels like in our body?
Because life is hard and because every system of oppression wants to steal our joy and so, I see joy as being revolutionary, not unlike rest. Rest comes along with joy. Like they, they go together. They're very important parts of the whole picture. We need to know what joy feels like because we know what struggle feels like.
Mm. We know what suffering feels like. We know what sadness, anger, frustration. We know what all of those things feel like and to not be able to also access things like joy, pleasure, delight. That is not okay. That's not a full spectrum of feelings for a human. And humans need to feel all the feelings. So, it doesn't mean that you're never angry if you, you're living a joyful, delighted life.
It just means that when you're angry, you know that you have reasons for your anger a lot of the time, and that the feeling will pass. And that we can come back to Joy eventually. And I don't see joy as like this, like peak experience necessarily. I really think of it as the practice of cultivating attention to things that we love that we find pleasurable, that we find delightful.
Dalia: Where would you see the concept of fun in relation to joy? Because I think that people probably all know what fun feels like. Yes. But what is the difference, and is this more like contentment than it is fun? Hmm.
Larissa: I would say fun has a big role to play in getting joy in your life. I think that fun is a type of joy. I really think play and curiosity are a big part of this also. We can't be joyful if we're just kind of like focused all the time and working hard all the time, grinding all the time. Unless you really have fun grinding on your work and I don't know anybody who has fun just deleting things from their inbox all day.
It's satisfying on some level maybe to watch it to diminish, but that's not always the case. So, I think that doing things that feel fun is great. Let's do more of those. Let's have as many of those as we can. Can we notice that the fun stuff is part of our joy? Maybe for some people doing things that, like going dancing or hula hooping or roller skating or things like that, that feel like play maybe that's part of your joy too.
Like I don't, I don't see them as having to be distinct from each other necessarily. It's more like, are you noticing how you're feeling about it? Mm. Or are you just doing it because you're doing it, you know?
Dalia: Yeah. Oh, that makes a lot of sense. Paying attention to it. Mm-hmm. So, when it comes to justice now, that's the one where I feel the disconnect.
Yeah. And I like that you clarified. We know it struggle feels like we know what anger feels like, what frustration feels like, what does justice feel like?
Larissa: What does justice feel like? I think it feels like, I was gonna say the opposite of injustice, but that's just a, that's a lazy answer, let's be real. Justice to me feels like a sense that my body.
Has worth and value on its own without needing to be supported by the systems that oppress me. There's a difference between saying, well, my body has value because I've assigned it this value in my capitalistic system.
Or my body has value because I'm pushing back against the patriarchy for sure. Right. But my body has inherent value and worth, and that those systems of oppression that I am liberating myself from the systems of oppression, not necessarily gonna be able to burn it all down as much as I would like to.
But I have found the people in my life, I have the support systems I need so that those systems do not grind me down every single day all day. And justice isn't just my individual thing justice is something that we want for everybody. So, if I can get to that point where I'm like, okay I can feel the water, I can tell I'm swimming in it.
I can tell who is my community, who's with me, and we are also working to make this water of oppression move away from everyone else too. So, is it a feeling that I can say I feel justice in my heart? I don't know, but there is a feeling of righteousness and a felt sense of safety in the body.
That is what I want everybody to be able to feel, and that to me is where justice is flowing.
Dalia: Oh, I love that. I love that concept. What role do you think oppression in terms of the patriarchy has in deteriorating or undermining the health of people born with a uterus?
Larissa: Where do I start?
Dalia: You know, I guess I didn't even, I'm saying that I'm like, I like a white dude to ask you a crazy question, but I really meant, cause I'm like, I'm thinking about reproductive health and all the ways that they block. Yes. But then I'm thinking, beyond all that, let's say you're in a position where you're in a state where you can get an abortion, where you need one, awesome.
You're in a state where if you were born with a uterus, but you are a man, it's not a non-issue. Like assuming that all those things are taken care of, just psychologically. What do you think it does? Because I know for myself, I think it's ridiculous that I knew nothing about what to expect. Mm-hmm. from my pelvic floor as I aged mm-hmm.
Anything that has to do with a fem body, you aren't gonna get information on because nobody cares. And all of the research is generally done on cis men. Yep. And things have changed a little bit, but not really. And then you notice that if it's affecting the health of men, people may be inherently motivated to resolve it.
Yes. If it's affecting the health of people born with a uterus, then if it generates a lot of money, probably for men, they will be motivated to at least look like they're trying to resolve it. Like I think about all of the money that gets thrown at breast cancer research. And it's just this money-making machine and volunteer labor is really taken advantage of in a way that I just can't imagine happening with anything that maybe was cis male health concern. So, like on a deeper level, where have you noticed it kind of creeps into your life?
Larissa: I would say, Okay. Let's assume that you can get all the medical care that you need and want and that you are not gaslit at the doctor for your endometriosis symptoms and that you are able to have a birthing experience where your body is cared for as much as your child. If we take the medical complex out of it a little bit and just go to like, how do we feel? Do we still feel shame and stigma around having a body? Do we have shame and stigma around having a body that menstruates? Do we have shame and stigma around talking about pelvic floor issues so that people understand that you don't have to ever carry a fetus in order to have pelvic floor issues. And should you give birth, the type of birth doesn't necessarily determine whether you're gonna have pelvic floor issues later in life. It's like, okay, technically the statistics say that they're a little bit higher for a vaginal birth, but regardless something like 70 or 80% of people with a uterus will experience pelvic floor issues in their lifetime. That's a lot of people. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel like that's where the impact is still coming in, where it's dirty. To talk about having a uterus to talk about, having a body to talk about dysfunction in our body.
It's not just the patriarchy there. I think that we're also looking to a certain extent at a little bit of ableism, trickling in as well. Like this idea that your body always functions in one particular way, and there's one particular ideal way for your body to function throughout your life. And why would your body be different at 60 than it is at 20?
Dalia: Yeah. Oh, that's such a good point. And considering how common it is, it is really strange that some things, they're kept so hush hush. Yes. That you literally don't know it's a thing until you experience it. Yeah. But it's amazing the difference that mentioning it might make because for some people they may not feel a sense of shame about it, that like plagues them every day when they put on their poise, whatever.
Right. But they still don't feel like it's something you could bring up in conversation. Yeah, casually, like they would feel it might be unsafe, but if you mention it, then it's been interesting because I work with almost all women. If everybody's laughing and somebody says like, oh my goodness, stop, I'm gonna pee. Yes. Other people are like, Already did it. Nobody cares.
Larissa: Right, right, right. Or like, I, I took my kids to, when I was first starting this work, I took my kids to trampoline park with a friend and she texted me and she was like, make sure that you, you know, wear some pads for this. And I was like, oh, I don't pee my pants when I go down the trampoline, but you know, I can help you with that.
And it comes up. I used to like anytime, you know, in the before times when you could walk into a room full of random people. I used to walk into the room, and I would say, oh, this is what I do. And people would kind of like, at first, they might whisper, depends on what, you know, who's in the room.
If it's a small enough group, they, they're like, oh yeah, I saw a PT. It was the best thing I ever did. You know, there's just a lot of conversation around it. It's just hidden and quiet, and I think that's changing a lot. Or that, or my Instagram feed is just full of lots of pelvic floor nerds like me.,
Dalia: It is revolutionary to find out that there are things that we've accepted as part of the aging process that really it has nothing to do with that. It's about how you're treating your body. Mm-hmm, how you're nurturing it, or whether or not you're getting the information you need about what types of exercises could be helpful. Yeah. You know it that is, it's revolutionary to find out something that you were told there's nothing to do about this, and to find out that that isn't always true. That it frequently is not true. I know when I had rounds during my internship in an assisted living facility and in a long-term care facility. We came across a lot of elderly people with uterus as that had such severe bladder infections that it looked like dementia. Mm-hmm. It caused such confusion, but because it's so common, that's one of the first things they'll check for in a long-term care facility. Yeah. And because sometimes the infection, you know, it's sort of affect the kidneys. Yep. But people just out in the world when it happens, it can go so far before anybody recognizes it.
No one thinks about. If you think people aren't thinking about a middle-aged person's vagina, you can forget about it once you are an elderly person. Yes. Like no one's gonna ask you anything, even if that's crucial information. So, what should we be doing now if we're concerned about feeling disconnected from that part of our bodies?
Mm-hmm and feeling like it's changing in ways that we were not expecting.
Larissa: I think the first thing I would say is any sort of movement or embodiment practice, even just mindfully walking more slowly to the kitchen will start connecting you with your body. And like, you don't have to take my class, you can take whatever it feels good to your body and just start connecting to. Does my body feel like right now? Like those little, tiny things. If you're feeling pain or discomfort, oh, what does that feel like? What else is going on in my life when I'm having this? Pain? And discomfort too, can be part of the picture.
Noticing patterns, noticing. Whatever is going on in your body. Noticing whether there's for folks who have cycles, is there a cyclical pattern to it? So, I know that a lot of folks who have pelvic organ prolapse tend to feel their symptoms get worse at certain times, and then they get better depending on where they are in their cycle.
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So that would be my first thing is just start paying attention to. Thing you're in, like what does it feel like to be in my body when it's feeling pretty? Okay. If you're starting to feel symptoms of some kind. I really recommend everybody gets to go see a pelvic PT at least once in their life because they will assess what's going on.
Some PTs will do internal assessments as well as external assessments. They'll do hands on assessments of what's going on with the muscles in your pelvic floor, and a really good PT will actually look at how your whole body is moving. They'll assess you in different positions, won't just have you lie down on a table.
So that's what I recommend for most folks when they're starting to have maybe like some symptoms that they're really noticing, and pelvic floor symptoms can be all over the place. You could have low back pain; you could have something weird in your hips. A pelvic PT can help with that. You could have pain during sex. You could have constipation. You could have like all kinds. And then there's the leaking, right? We talk about the leaking, a feeling of heaviness in the pelvic floor, like something's falling out of your vagina, like that kind of feeling. In folks who have penises, the symptoms are also often constipation or difficulty urinating or like dribbling and things like that, or difficulty with getting an erection. Those kinds of things can be pelvic floor problems. They can be indicative of lots of other things as well, but those can be pelvic floor problems. I think that a lot of people don't know just how extensive that is, but if you think about your body and you think about where your pelvic floor is, it's at the bottom of your pelvis.
It's a bunch of different muscles lining your pelvis, and everything is stacked up on top of that. If the pelvic floor isn't feeling pretty balanced and functional and reflexive, then of course it's gonna move up and down the whole rest of your body. Tight jaws is one of the really interesting ones is that a lot of folks who have really over hypertonic pelvic floors is what we call it also tend to have some jaw tension. It doesn't mean if you have jaw tension that your pelvic floor is also tight. It just means that sometimes. There's a
Dalia: correlation. That's really interesting considering the distance from your jaw to the pelvic floor.
Yes, it's all connected. Everything is connected. So many times, especially the way medicine works here in the States, everyone deals with one little piece of the body, so it gives you the impression that it is separate because there's a person you go to for your ear. There's a person you go to for your eyes.
There's a person for every little part, right? How do you even find a pelvic floor PT? Are PTs generally specialists?
Larissa: Yes and no. Every PT I've ever interacted with has been a bit of a specialist, even if they're kind of generalists to begin with. I had to rehab my knees a few years ago and the guy I worked with was a really specialized in getting people back to running and was really good with knees and ankles,
Dalia: So, it's something you end up as you work you get the niche down.
Larissa: Yeah. PTs have to go through specialized training, and I'm not a PT myself. really talk to a lot of them. They have to go through specialized training after PT school. I also find that Pelvic Health OTs are a really fantastic resource.
They also do, they can take the, like they can go take the same training after school and OT will have more of an activities of daily life focus.
Dalia: So, Okay. That's an occupational therapist.
Larissa: Yeah, sorry. Occupational therapist. Physical therapist, occupational therapist. They're both great. You can look them up online.
You can Google Pelvic Health, PT or pelvic health, OT that will usually find you people in your area. And if anybody needs to know who to go see in the Raleigh Durham area, I got like six people for you.
Dalia: Now, this type of exercising, is that also part of what you help people with inside your slow burn community?
Larissa: Within that community, we do, in addition to kind of talking about pushing away the systems of oppression, we also do movement classes. And in those classes I tend to focus less on the core and more on the periphery. So, like I was saying, jaw attention and pelvic floor attention often go hand in hand.
And I don't just sit around talking about hands and feet, but it's not quite that peripheral. But we'll do a little bit of core work. But mostly we're working on whole body exercises that support core and pelvic floor health. Or whole-body exercises that help your body just get grounded and relaxed.
Or sometimes we lie on the floor and just release our bodies over things. There are so many different components to feeling comfortable moving in your body that you can go strength training, you can do some core work, you can do some relaxation, and it's all good. Mm.
Dalia: I love that. Something you mentioned on your site that jumped out at me is that you said in your forties you felt comfortable to carve out your own space and I just turned 40 on December 3rd, I keep on being dazzled by the freedom that I feel like I'm experiencing. And it hasn't even been a month, but, and I don't know if it's just in my head because I heard for so many years as a child that the older you get, you know, you just open up and you feel free to do what you want to do to say what you need to say. And I heard that it starts in your forties and look out for your fifties. It's gonna be amazing. So maybe I just internalized that and believed it so much that I've around here setting boundaries left and right. Even walked out of a meeting yesterday.
Not angry. I was just tired of being in there. Mm-hmm. and nobody said anything, and I swear. Before I turned 40, somebody would've been like, where do you think you're going? But it's the confidence with which I got up and I was just like, I'm done. Bye. No questions. They just, I'm just in shock. So, what did it feel like for you?
What shifted? What made you realize it was time to carve out your own space? And when you say you were looking for a place where you fit in that stage of your life, what did that look like?
Larissa: So, I think there are a lot of a lot of things to talk about with that. I started teaching movement up.
About just right before I turned 40, cause I'm turning 45 next month. Yeah. And, and I'm right in the middle of the forties now. The not caring what people think just keeps going.
Dalia: Extremely exciting.
Larissa: I mean, I do care, right? I care a lot about what people think. I care that people get treated with respect and dignity and are heard and seen and listened to.
Of course, but also, I just don't have time for any of that BS, the rest of it.
Dalia: So, you're not as invested or invested in other people's approval anymore.
Larissa: I mean, I probably still am working on that. That's like, I don't wanna hear that. I want to hear that at 45 it's completely gone.
Working on throwing it out the window. I'm way less invested in other people's approval. I'm way more in touch with a sense of, again, what feels right for me. That's a very embodied sense of rightness. It's not kind of this up in my head. I've gone through all the options and this and that, and this and that, and this and that.
It's like my body says yes, my body says no, and then I'm done. And I would say, you know, for me, I've spent my entire life at many, many intersections, so many intersections when we talk about identity, and I'm not gonna like lay them all out cuz just to draw Ven diagram of all the intersections I put me in the middle.
Dalia: That's what, that's my favorite type of person to work with. And because I feel like as a first gen kid, a pansexual person, a black person, A person with one non-American parent, which I guess I cover with first gen. It just feels like a lot when you're surrounded by people who are part of the racial majority in the country, or who are straight or who are cis.
Mm-hmm. It just feels like, Could I get any weird. As a kid, that's what it feels like.
Larissa: I'm cis and I can own that. And I feel really settled in that part of my identity. Everything else is just up for grabs. but like, yeah, I think it's really hard to find a place and, but what I've found is my places with other people like me, like other folks who have lots of intersections, and that is really where
I find it to be a comfortable place because we all get it that there's a fluidity.
Dalia: Yeah. I feel that when I find I'm with people like that because it seems like people rarely talk to us. I don't know what you would say, to let those people know, Hey, I'm over here. Aside from just slowly word of mouth, you know, getting to know people one on one.
Yeah. Because when people never talk to you in content, you don't even look for stuff that's for you. It wouldn't even occur to you because before you look, you know it's not there.
Larissa: Hmm. I don't have a good answer for that, but I'm like, now I need to make some more content about being in the middle of all the intersections.
Dalia: Yes. Yes. Well, I wanna see that. I feel like it's going to be coming, because I know through the second wave of the civil rights movement, I heard more about the biracial experience than ever before. Yeah. And it feels. Anything up until then that I was hearing about the biracial experience was being told by people who are not biracial.
Mm-hmm. So, like a lot of tropes in movies from the fifties and they just make it look like, oh, it's so tragic to be multiracial. Yes. And you know, from that lens of like being white, so great, it's so sad to be fair skinned, but not white. Like, okay, fine, from your white supremacist perspective, I'm sure it is very tragic, but you know, have you ever spoken to anybody biracial to see what was really going on?
But to hear about the stressors of living through a civil rights movement when you have people who encourage you to erase or gloss over that part of yourself was really interesting. So, I feel like it's coming. Yeah. It may be the Gen Z people who start making more content available for people that are living at multiple intersections.
Larissa: Could be. I mean, I definitely, that what you just said about listening to more stories of people who have to, like gloss over half of their parentage. I'm like, That's me. Oh, yeah, I know that story. Or, you know, Yeah, there's just, and, and there's so many contexts where I'm like, oh, I can, I can go into this room or that room, and if I go into the white room, people are like, Oh, you're the friendly black lady.
You know,
Dalia: like this feeling like there is no room for you. Yeah,
Larissa: there's no, there is no room for me. And that's why I feel like making my own room is the easiest way to get there and to feel and to find people who understand and resonate with that experience. And it does take time. It takes a really long time.
I think. I think it's not something that's super easy, like might be easier to find joy in my body from hula hooping than to find like five other biracial people to hang out with.
Dalia: maybe in, in the part of the world that you're living in, maybe.
Larissa: Maybe North Carolina's weird. Well
Dalia: see. And I don't know, there's so many people who, it’s so interesting, I've been finding this as I've been spending more time making an effort to seek out the company and community of other folks of color.
Like you mentioned, like liberation happens in community and yes, being separated from. People who are likeminded, who have similar backgrounds is part of being treated like an other than person and being taught to reject yourself and therefore you have trouble connecting with other people with the same marginalized identities as you.
And it goes on and on. But what I kept finding was, And I already knew this on a level, but when I was focusing on building community, it really jumped out at me that just because somebody shares the identities doesn't mean they've gotten to a point to where they can be a safer space for you. Absolutely.
Absolutely. Yeah. So that's even more people to filter through. Yes, yes. Are you could find five and like three of them could be really weird, like still working through a lot of internalized racism.
Larissa: Absolutely. Or so internalized healthism and fatphobia. And wow, I do not wanna sit around and listen to you talk about your diet.
That is not my thing. So, yeah, I think finding the right people is hard, and we know when we're with the right people because they feel right. because we're in tune with how our bodies respond, because we're in tune with like, oh, this conversation could go on all night. That feeling of really deep connection and the fact that they're respecting your boundaries, they're listening to you, they're validating you.
They're not just kind of half listening and thinking about the next thing they're gonna say, like all of those things. When we find those people, it's so, so good.
Dalia: Mm. What has the trick been to finding those people?
Larissa: Being a raging extrovert.
Dalia: I wanna give the introverts some hope too, if they can muster up the energy. I myself am introverted.
Larissa: Yeah. I'm like half again, let's take those intersections. I'm like half every time I take the test. I'm extroverted by nature, but especially as a parent, I have deep needs for solitude. I really understand that. And I really don't like parties where I don't know anyone.
So, like I really get that. I think finding the people you connect most with. For me has been, it's come about through being part of communities, smaller groups. Yeah, with common interest, whether that's an entrepreneurial group or a yoga class, or my Aikido Dojo or wherever, like the places that you go, whether they're online or in person, where you get time to connect with people in an authentic way with a shared something.
I don't know what, that's something that's interest. We can call it an interest. And then for me it's really been a process of deliberately cultivating friendships with people where I feel like we, we connect and where I feel like it's meaningful and that we have a shared, shared enough value system where we're not gonna be constantly disagreeing about everything.
But where maybe sometimes there's a little push and pull where I might say something and they don't agree with me, or they're like, Well, what about from this perspective? That's, that's been it. And it's really hard as an adult to make friends. Like it's, it's hard. We're not just thrown together in a building with, with lots of people all day long.
Dalia: Yeah. I think it could be more challenging depending on how much free time you have, how much energy you have left. Cause like you said, cultivating I think is the key. And I find that people who have a lot of responsibilities Yep. Who are caretakers, whether that's for a parent or for their own children.
Yep. They don't have the energy sometimes to cultivate friend. Yeah, and that's where even when they find a connection maybe it kind of withers on the vine because they don't get to tend to it.
Larissa: I do feel like that's often true. I also really. Focus on like a very small number of people to cultivate those connections with.
Like, and we just have walking dates or phone dates or group chat where it's, the group chat is great for those of us who are in caregiving positions where we can't maybe get away to go do something cuz I can text my group chat at 10 30 at night or one in the morning. And I know that nobody's got their notifications dinging.
So, it's okay. And then I can get that support and I can get that connection that I need. And that's really, really helpful. And it's hard and it takes a lot of time. I don't think that that we recognize sometimes how long it takes and how much intention it takes to be friends with people. Even for my kids, I see it happen where they have to intentionally spend time together regularly so that there's an ease in the relationship where they don't have to constantly negotiate boundaries all the time.
Like, yes, we all negotiate boundaries all the time, but if I take my, my friend Elizabeth, and we go for a coffee and I'm gonna be late, she can order me a coffee and I don't necessarily have to tell her what to get me because we've cultivated that relationship.
Dalia: Yeah, I think it's something you definitely don't notice. When you're younger, because the people that you're friends with are people that you're around all the time. Yeah. So not having that time is a non-issue. And you also think friendships last forever because they do last for years when you're a kid, if you're staying in the same town, same school, same church or something, you're around each other all the time.
But you really do start to notice as people move away in your early twenties. Oh, we weren't friends because we were in the same physical location. Right. You're not the types of friends that survive distance. Yeah. And then you learn like how to find people that are willing to invest as much time or to invest as much time in the relationship as you need. And I think that's something that also your body will let you know when something is not working for you anymore.
Larissa: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And I will say that we often just ignore those cues from our body for a really long time, especially in a time when we can stay connected.
People that we grew apart from 25 years ago on Facebook, and they're like, liking your posts and you're like, Oh, how nice. We don't actually have to maintain those connections that don't really work for us anymore. And we can bolster up those connections that do work for us. I, I just, I think that's actually one of the things the 40s really gives you is, oh, I don't actually have to spend my time on all of these people. I can spend my time on the people I want to spend my time with, and I can choose, like to go back to kind of justice and liberation stuff. I can choose how I wanna spend my energy in the world. Do I have the resources today to engage with this person from my high school who whatever they've done, whatever the thing is that they said. And you know, y'all know there's something they said, do you have the resources to really engage with that? Or will you just get angry and shut down? And, and that, I feel like those are the choices that I get to have now that I might not have thought I had before.
Dalia: Yeah. I've gotten a lot more selective about how I wanna use these spoons.
Larissa: Cause spoons are limited, and you don't know tomorrow you're gonna have the same number.
Dalia: Yes, exactly. And just going through the pandemic, being reminded, I'm not someone who shies away from the concept of mortality. But it's helpful, at least it has been helpful for me to have that reminder that I keep thinking, oh, I have like 40 more years. Says who is the thing, right? Yeah. So why can't I prioritize my joy in real time? Remembering that joy is also a compass. It isn't a luxury. Yes. It helps you discern which direction you should be moving in.
Mm-hmm. And also, you physically need a break from all of those other states for your wellness, for you to be able to do all the other things in life that you think are important. Yep. Spending more time in a joy state will help you with everything else you're trying to do.
Larissa: Absolutely. Absolutely. If you're doing community organizing, I hope you're having a dance party at some point because, because we can't stay in that state of a nervous system arousal that like heightened state indefinitely. That's not how our bodies work best. and yeah, I'm certainly gonna be the last person to say, oh, we all owe each other health, but we do owe it to ourselves to put ourselves at the center of our worlds and to really focus on our own joy and doing that gives us more spoons.
Yeah. Maybe not as many as you want. Sometimes I as someone living with chronic illness. I'm like, Oh. No spoons today.
Dalia: Yeah, another intersection. And another one of those things that people don't talk about cuz even people who are chronically ill like to pass as people who are not or maybe need to for safety or an employment type of thing.
So no, no judgment there. But thank you for reducing the stigma by letting that be part of your identities that you share with the world, so people understand while this looks like many different forms and with hidden illnesses, people tend to undermine them and not understand the severity.
So, it's just helpful when people actually share some of their experience for other people to know, you know, the amount of struggling that you're doing is actually normal and there's still plenty of room for joy and purpose and you just have to pace.
Larissa: Exactly. Exactly. You are just a little bit at a time.
Dalia: Yeah. If there was one thing you could tell everyone that they would internalize magically, instantly, and never forget, what would you want everyone to know?
Larissa: Ugh. I feel like I could quote a bunch of people on this and say something like, your body is not a problem to be solved. It is your home.
Dalia: Oh, I really love that. Who said that?
Larissa: So, your body is not a problem to be solved. It's like something that a lot of different people have said. I have it on a tank top from an artist whose name is Rascal Honey, I think.
I don't remember their actual name, but that's the name of their brand. Your body's your Home is something that lots of people said and something I say. So that's actually, yeah, that's mine.
Dalia: Oh, I love that. I love it all together. Yes. It goes together. Yeah. Ugh. Beautiful. So, what is the best way for people to get in touch with you?
Larissa: So, you can follow me on Instagram @larissa_parson. You could check out my website, which is www.larissaparson.com. Those are the best ways to find me.
Dalia: Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on.
Larissa: Thank you so much. This was just delightful.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit daliakinsey.substack.com -
Yael R Rosenstock Gonzalez (she/her) is a sex educator, sex coach, researcher, author, speaker, curriculum developer, and workshop facilitator. As a queer, polyamorous, white-presenting Nuyorican Jew, Yael has always been interested in understanding the multi-level experiences of individuals. This led her to found Kaleidoscope Vibrations, LLC, a company dedicated to supporting and creating spaces for individuals to explore and find community in their identities. Through her company, she facilitates workshops, develops curriculum, offers Identity Exploration Coaching, and publishes narratives often left out of mainstream publishing.
This episode we explore:
* Honoring boundaries in community spaces and navigating POC spaces as a white presenting person
* Finding belonging and claiming identity as a multi-ethnic person
* Diversity in the Jewish diaspora
* Promoting inclusive representations of human experience in publishing
Episode Resources
www.daliakinsey.com
Decolonizing Wellness: A QTBIPOC-Centered Guide to Escape the Diet Trap, Heal Your Self-Image, and Achieve Body Liberation
https://kvibrations.com/
https://www.sexpositiveyou.com/
https://www.instagram.com/yaelthesexgeek/
https://www.tiktok.com/@yaelthesexgeek
Hello and welcome to another episode of Body Liberation for All. I'm your host, Dalia Kinsey, holistic registered dietitian, and the author of Decolonizing Wellness.
My work is centered on amplifying the health and happiness of LGBTQI+ and BIPOC people. And that is also what we do here at Body Liberation for All.
I wanna remind you, I am hosting the Decolonizing Wellness Eco-Luxury QTBIPOC retreat in Bali in March. So if you are a person who loves the plan way in advance, like I do. This is when you want to book. This is a great time to give yourself plenty of room to break the trip into payments and to get all of your ducks in a row.
If you aren’t going to be able to join us, but you know someone who this retreat could be life changing for, please make sure you share it.
Substack makes sharing so easy on their platform. So if you visit daliakinsey.substack.com to listen to this episode you'll see it's just a click of a button.
Today's guest, the Yael Rosenstock has so much knowledge in different areas that we cover a lot of territory in this conversation. There was still so much more that we could have dug into that hopefully at a later date we'll get to revisit.
Today we explore a little bit of the lived experience of being a white presenting person who lives shoulder to shoulder with POC within the family, but out in the world is not having the same experience as the family members that have a darker complexion.
Since we already know race is not actually real from a scientific perspective, it's totally a social construct, your skin color itself will to a large extent determine how much lived experience you have as a person of color or as a white person, regardless of what the socialization inside of your house is like because so much of the POC experience, if you're living in a colonized country, if you're living in a country that has its roots in white supremacy, so much of the experience is informed by the anti-Blackness or the anti-POCness that you're going to encounter out in the world.
That does not in any way invalidate the cultural uniqueness of people who are in these very blended families and happen to have pale skin or white skin. So it's interesting to me to hear directly from somebody having this experience. It's an interesting concept to look at on an individual level. What does the fact that race is fictional and totally social have? How does that all play out - when you know you are culturally different from the white folks who do not have POC blood relatives that they live with and are close with but at the same time you know that you're not experiencing the same level of marginalization. What is that like?
I rarely bother to claim my Latinx heritage. Because the anti-blackness that I have encountered in a lot of Spanish-speaking circles here in the US is so intense it doesn't make any logical sense for me to keep trying to be somewhere that I don't feel welcome.
Some of these themes that Yael shares, the feeling of not enoughness when you are more than one thing or when you've only been presented with a narrow definition of what it means to hold a particular identity, is so relatable. I know not just to us, it's so relatable to so many people, because the ways that we define certain identities are so narrow it naturally leaves out a large number of people.
The work that Yael is doing to promote the authentic representation of a wide variety of human experience at her publishing company feels like such a natural extension of this lived experience that she has of knowing how difficult it can be to really claim and embody our identities when we haven't seen anything similar reflected back to us.
I love this. Entire conversation. I know you will too. Let's jump right into it.
Body Liberation for All Theme
Yeah. They might try to put you in a box, tell them that you don't accept when the world is tripping out tell them that you love yourself. Hey, Hey, smile on them live your life just like you like it is.
It’s your party negativity is not invited. For my queer folks, for my trans, people of color, let your voice be heard. Look in the mirror and say that it's time to put me first. You born to win. Head up high with confidence. This show is for everyone. So, I thank you for tuning in. Let's go.
Dalia: I definitely wanted to cover the concept of white passing fragility. But then I want to definitely talk about your other projects and just what you're doing with intersectionality.
Yael: Okay. I do want to warn that there's a very good chance that that will not. Some people will really like that idea of the white passing fragility, but others won't because right. The author of that book has become super famous and super rich off of a book around racism as a white woman. And just giving you a fair warning that this may or may not be taken so well.
Dalia: And then that's so interesting too, because it seems like people should be compensated for good work or things that they do with good intentions.
Dalia: But so often people who are in social justice are on the struggle bus financially, but, and that almost seems to be the expectation. Like you have to be a martyr to break down systems of oppression. But then I also am conflicted because it seems like all the time, white people continue to profit off of pain from people of color and especially Black people in this country. Even when you look at who makes money off of depictions of just Black suffering in general, whether it's another movie about slavery, even if it's a "fun" spin on it, like the Django or something, which I refuse to watch, I just don't understand how we're not seeing how problematic that is, but at least hers originally started out with intentions that seemed more educational.
Dalia: Like I think it's a little more sketch to create a film or a piece of entertainment that centered on Black pain. And then all the money goes to somebody who's not Black. I mean, not at all, but the majority, most of it, right. It seems less sketchy, but it is sketchy nonetheless.
Dalia: And I've been having a lot of feelings around these white savior complexes that are popping out these days. And people not understanding that, hey, maybe people want to be the hero of their own damn story and guess what, maybe they are ready are.
Yael: But you're in the way
Dalia: I know. Right? Or like you just exhausting people showing up to the March and explaining to everybody how, you know, you're being white the right way. I don't know if you've seen that play out in real life where people try constantly schooling other white people on how to be more. Down, I guess is the expression, but it doesn't really translate, but it's so rare that people confront people like that because their competition or the people that you have to compare them to you sometimes are so problematic that by comparison, they seem amazing.
Yael: Yeah, I like this better.
Dalia: So it's like, should I even say anything?
Dalia: So I don't know.
Yael: Considering that most of my spaces are POC and or Latin. I don't have that many white saviors.
Dalia: Smart. Okay. Is that by design or is that coincidental?
Yael: Well, I think at first it's coincidental, right? Just like growing up in a mixed neighborhood with a mixed family.
Yael: It just is what happened. I was in a school with folks of different groups. And so that just continued. And then when I did reach middle school and there were white people who were just white, not Latin, like, I mean, there were a couple in elementary, but not many. And. I just felt really uncomfortable in the space.
Yael: And that was like my assigned group. Cause I wasn't dark enough to be in the Latin group, I think. And also like the Latin group was like ghetto fab. Like I also wore my hair back slicked back. I also had the lip liner, and I had the big hoop earrings as well,
Dalia: But like it wasn't enough.
Yael: It was a, it was a browner Latin group. And so I felt like I shouldn't be part of it. Like I was friends with them, but I shouldn't be part of it because I didn't look the same. And so I just like ended up, even though I was friends with all the other groups, I ended up in the white girl group and I was just like, this is uncomfortable. Like, I don't agree with the things they say.
Yael: I like rebelled a bit and basically got kicked out. And so I think after that, I was just like, I'm going to try and choose. So I don't think I've ever been like, I'm unwilling to be friends with white people because that doesn't seem nice either. But the same reason that folks have affinity groups, right?
Yael: The same reason we hang out with queer people as queer people, the same reason you hang out with Latin people if you're Latin or Black and Black is because you don't want to have to explain certain things. And I'm tired. And so I don't go into all white spaces cause I get nervous about why are they all white?
Yael: Like what's the intention behind this group. Is there an ulterior motive and I, yeah, I just like, I don't want to have to explain things that I end up becoming that white person, the white savior being like, that's not how. I joined a book club once. And they were talking about how, like, it didn't make sense that this person was referencing their dreams.
Yael: Like it's not like a real thing. And I was like, this person is Mexican. And I don't know that much about Mexicans, but in like Caribbean culture dreams can be really important.
Dalia: Oh wait. They were saying like a literal dream, not goals that they were struggling with finding meaning in their dream and they thought that was weird?
Yael: Yeah. He was writing a memoir and he was referencing how he thought his dream was related to the, like what was happening in his life and that he had seen a Wolf or something. Right. He has indigenous culture roots, right as a Mexican-American. But they were just like, no, that's like, he's just making that up from the memoir.
Dalia: But no, because that's extremely common.
Yael: Yeah. Like they couldn't fathom it.
Dalia: That is fascinating. So this is so interesting, can you share your marginalized identities? Because I think the experience of being white presenting is interesting in that you may be exposed to things that I might never hear, because I didn't even know that, I didn't even notice that white people weren't doing that all the time too.
Dalia: Because at work at the moment I'm working in a majority Black office. And people are constantly talking about, you know, oh, I saw this, I wonder if it's a sign and we all have different religious backgrounds too. Somebody even started wearing a hair net because they're afraid somebody might get some of their hair that was shedding and put roots on them. None of us thought that was weird. We were all like, oh, if you feel it's necessary, you do that. You make sure you're not,
Yael: You save yourself. It may or may not be real. It may or may not be. I'm always like, I rather be careful then sorry.
Dalia: Exactly. Absolutely. Nobody said anything when I came into the room to sage it because I thought that we had some bad mojo in there.
Dalia: People said, make sure you get my desk.. Someone came in with holy water. Like we had a very problematic coworker , and we were like, get all the stuff we're clapping in the corners.
Yael: I was friends with one of the custodians where I used to work and she's an older woman. She was like the age of maybe like between mother and grandmother.
Yael: And she brought me a bracelet because she was. You're very joyful and you're pretty. And I just think that someone's going to send you a curse. made me a bracelet to protect me from maldiciones. She just didn't want me to get hurt.
Dalia: And you immediately put it on. You're like, okay, thanks.
Yael: I mean, first off, like I appreciate that you're caring about me and no, I don't think it's weird.
Yael: I've worn, evil eyes before, you know, like, to me, I think that the bigger thing for us is like whether or not we participate or whether or not we're like, yes, this is real when I talk about ghost stories, I share all the ghost stories. I know. Was I there? No. Was it real? I don't know. Cause I wasn't there, but it could be .
Dalia: It's so dismissive to be like, oh, that's so dumb. What? Who says that -only people who are very sheltered and are under the impression that their way is the only way.
Yael: This was a group about social justice. The people are lovely and the ones who hosted, I actually adore. They are fantastic.
Yael: And they weren't the ones who were having this question, but I remember one person in particular, she was just totally dismissive. And I was just like, I don't understand. And I didn't show up for a couple of years, but then I came back and I was like, okay, my role is going to be giving the perspective of not these people in the case that this comes up again, because they keep reading books by people of color. And like, I don't have the same perspective. Like I said, I'm not Mexican. I don't know what they do. But I have a feeling that this is like something that's shared, like it's a native American thing.
Yael: It's a Latin thing. It's a Black thing. Like I just feel, you know, Asian cultures, everyone, actually.
Dalia: I know this is whats so bizarre.
Yael: There are definitely white people who also have that as a practice and Jews, a lot of us who do pass it are white or pass as white, like that's also part of our culture.
Dalia: And that's another thing. So this is one of my big questions. So, you identify as Latin X?
Yael: Yes, I'm Latina
Dalia: You're Latina and you're Jewish. And so does that mean your mother is your Jewish parent.
Yael: That is actually, so...
Dalia: does that matter or is that like out of date or…
Yael: No, that is an excellent question. My parents tried to enroll me in what's called Yeshiva because they didn't like the local public school.
Yael: And so they wanted to put me in a Jewish school and I got rejected because my mother is Catholic and my father is Jewish. And as you like are insinuating, like the religion follows the mother. Now that school accepts muts like me of my form. They no longer discriminate against us, but because my parents couldn't put me in the Jewish school.
Yael: I went to an Episcopalian school.
Dalia: Oh, wow, you were all over the place.
Yael: Yeah. So I got a good Christian education .
Dalia: Oh, and how did your dad manage,, was he a little heartbroken? Like, Ooh, not what I had in mind.
Yael: Well, it was a small school. There wasn't a religion class, but like every morning we started with prayers and every Wednesday we had mass and I just, I didn't know they wanted me to be Jewish. I thought they were saying, here are our religions. You go to Sunday Jewish school. You go to day school with Christians. Figure out your path. And so I very confidently figured out my path. I was like, I am Jewish. And like, I am now very knowledgeable about Christian stuff. But actually they did want me to be Jewish and they had warned the school that that was what they wanted.
Dalia: I was under the impression, and this may not be accurate. Is that like a modern Jewish person may be a little more secular and maybe they know some of the traditions and then maybe they go to synagogue for special events or, but still feel that strong cultural identity.
Dalia: And then don't really feel, I feel like they should be dropped into that white American bucket with everybody else because they're separate as an ethnic group. Whereas other white ethnic groups (in America) gave up their separateness for the most part.
Yael: Interesting. So I haven't done much study into the question, but I have a friend who sent me, who sends me lots of articles, Catherine.
Yael: And she sent me an article about whether or not Jews are white and my coworker, Asia Gray, who does our anti-racism curriculum and what have you. One of the books was, how antisemitism was the original racism. And so that's part of the way that she talks about oppression and like structural oppressions and what have you.
Yael: And she starts that story there and it's like Jews became white if you are white, but there are Black Jews. There are like plenty of Middle Eastern Jews that have more color there are Russian Jews, the Sephardic Jews, the Mizrahi in general. So there are plenty of Jews of color and then they're like me Ashkenazi, which are of German roots, right. German and certain parts of Russia, roots and Poland and all that kind of stuff. And so, yeah. Yes, it is a different, I agree. It's different ethnic group. Like you can trace us back when I did that blood test, I literally come out 49% Ashkenazi. I'm from Germany, even though I can, I can trace my roots on a family tree that's physical to the 15 hundreds. It says I'm Ashkenazi. Wasn't mentioned Germany because the Jewish blood is what it picks up. And so, yes, I agree. Like there's like this ethnic thing there and that's why you can be a secular person of a religion.
Yael: I mean, there are plenty of secular Christians, right. That celebrate Christmas and what have you. But there's like this certain level of like the foods that you eat and the mannerisms that you have and like certain cultural values. I don't identify it as a secular Jew I identify as reform, which is like a less observant Jew.
Dalia: Now, how did you feel your queer identity meshes with Judaism? It's rumored to be an easier mesh. Is that true? Are Christians just being jealous?
Yael: I think it is an easier, easier. I mean, I know plenty of Christians that are queer, but my synagogue, I don't remember how old I was, but she bat mitzvah'd me so young enough for that had a lesbian rabbai.
Yael: And she got married at our synagogue and we were just a regular reform synagogue. Right. We weren't like, ah, where the most social justice progressive synogauge, we were just a reform synagogue. And we did lose some of the older parishioners and I imagine some other age ones, when she joined as the rabbi, but for the most part, everyone was like, love who you love.
Yael: Right? Like that's not an issue. And she was a woman rabbi and my next rabbi was also a woman, right? So like that's super common. It's even starting very slowly in the Orthodox community, which is one of the more observant sects of Judaism to have women rabbis. And so overall I think that shift is, is more common in our space .
Dalia: The idea of there being Jewish people of color is interesting to me, because it seems like in the states, people are under the impression that that's not a thing. Can you tell us about the work that you're doing for representation, and as far as intersectionality goes as a very fair skin person of color.
Yael: Sure so I think the most thing that the thing that directly relates is that I'm part of the diverse bodies project. The idea is a nude photo interview series, intended to increase representation of who gets seen and photograph naked and how you want to be represented.
Yael: So it's not that you had to do a sexy shot or you had to do a serious shot that people get to bring their personalities in through the photographs and show who they are. And that was really important to us and something that we did because it's been taken us forever. But the mini books that we've already released is the Jews flying the rainbow flag mini books.
Yael: And so it's got five different Jews and we had plenty of Jews participate but featured five different Jews ranging from like early twenties to, I think, sixties and out of the five of them. Two of them are Black. One of the Black Jews is also Latin, so she's Afro Dominican. And the point of that was to be like folks exist, you know, and it's so common for you to be like, this is what a Jew looks like when.
Yael: Yeah, sure a lot of us do look like me. There are Black Jews. There are Latin Jews, there are Asian Jews, there are all the types. And so that was really important to us that we highlight that these are two queer Black Jewish women and they get as much space in this little book as anyone else.
Yael: I will say part of my work and that's what we got into the white white passing fragility talk is that I don't identify as a person of color. And who knows, maybe I'll change that at some point. I choose not to identify that way. Cause it feels appropriative. And to be like, just because I have another language or just because my family may have a bunch of people of color and it doesn't mean that I'm existing as a person of color.
Yael: And so when I walked through the street, people see me as white and that's just true. But I do enter, and I was asked this question recently, so why do I enter people of color spaces? And it's cause I'm, I'm feel safer there. I feel more connected there. I don't feel blegh there. And so if people are willing to have me, which they generally are, most people of color spaces are open to white presenting Latin folk. Then I just asked permission and I join.
Dalia: That's interesting and I knew that, and I forgot that when I said that, because I know I'm very used to- anybody who says they're a person of color. I was just like, okay, like, it's the response? Because especially, you know, Black American, no, actually.
Dalia: Latin people even more than Black Americans come in all kinds of shades and colors, and you can't look at somebody and have any clue what even their parents look like. And that a lot of times really informs their experience as far as how they were treated growing up, because it is funny to me how depending on who you're sitting beside, people may perceive your color differently, which just goes to show how arbitrary our understanding of race is..
Dalia: Like number one, we know it's not a real biological thing, but like you said, it's the experience that creates the cultural differences. It's the lived experience that matters. So if, when you are out in the world, people treat you as though you are white well then you are having the white experience.
Dalia: And that is really the key difference. But I have biracial friends who, if they were with their brown parent, they get treated differently and are even perceived differently versus with the other parent, which I just think is fascinating.
Yael: Well, my parents are both white. My dad is white Ashkenazi and my mother is a white presenting Latina.
Yael: My uncle, my abuela they would have been identified as POC, but not my mother. And so when I'm with my mother, it was the same thing. People don't realize she speaks Spanish. She's been spoken about by people who were like checking her out.
Dalia: Well, it's just interesting to me. And I don't know if this happens everywhere or if it's some of our American brainwashing, but like all the time people act as though Spanish is. Secret language. And I'm like, what is wrong with you? It is so, so common. And the people who speak it look so many different ways and you don't have to only speak English, your heart language, or your first language.
Dalia: Like, that's another thing I'm like, you do realize that maybe she can speak Spanish as a second language or not all latin people look the same. I really don't understand the disconnect with that because I've been spoken about in Spanish to my frigging face so many times, and I do speak Spanish. And usually, I mean, unless they're saying something really rude, usually people are trying to guess whether or not the person I'm with is my husband or my what's the male form of mistress.
Dalia: I bet there isn't one, right? Oh,
Yael: Lover
Dalia: Yeah, it just goes to show like, if there isn't a word that connotes, not a legitimate partner, because you're not married to them that's some more sexist shenanigans, but yeah, it's just interesting to me that people make that assumption so often. So what has your experience been like trying to stay connected to your Latin roots when so often people are very narrow about what they consider to be Latin?
Yael: So it's funny because all of our countries have folks, all the Latin countries have folks that look like me. And like most of the countries have folks that look like you, right? It's not, we're not anomalies in these spaces.
Yael: And so I actually, I was convinced I needed to prove myself. Like my mother, I felt counted as real Latina because she was raised in Puerto Rico. Her first language is Spanish. Like that seems to me like check that counts. But me I'm half Ashkenazi. I look, the way that I do my Spanish for awhile was pretty crappy.
Yael: And so I, I felt the need to prove myself. All my friends were Latina and I was like, I must be more Latina. I must speak this fluently. And I must eat the food. And I am an incredible salsa dancer at this point. So, but that was all me. Right. And perhaps white people and perhaps Black people who weren't Latin.
Yael: Right. And that, if I said I was. The response was always like, oh really? Unless I turned around and then they're like, I see it in your butt now I know that you're Latin because of your butt, like, literally the number of times people have been like, I believe you because of your shape. Otherwise I wouldn't have counted you.
Yael: Whereas on the flip side with Latin folks, there's really not much surprise. They don't assume I'm Latina. But if I start speaking Spanish or they see me dancing or whatever, like they ask me, where are you from? They don't ask me, are you at the end of the ask me? Oh, okay. Yeah. Right. Assume that I am. And they're right, because for them, it's not so surprising to see someone who looks like me, but I think, and it's when you think of immigration, you're going to assume that more white Latins are going to migrate because of mean.
Yael: Whereas you have browner and Blacker people migrating because of need. And so if you're hanging out with folks from your same social class, which will end up being also your same racial categorization, because those are very linked to whether or not we all want to admit it in the Americas as well.
Yael: And all the Americas. So like, I think that that's part of it, right? You're used to hanging out with other brown people. And so even though your country has plenty people who look like me, you never associated with associated with them. Either. They were from a different region or they were from a different social class.
Yael: And so they went to different schools and they had different access. And so I think that's more it, but like Latin people never not include me.
Dalia: Oh, that's interesting. So it was really more just internal.
Yael: Yeah. I was like in TV, none of the Latinas looked like me. All of my friends were darker than me.
Yael: And so I was like, I need to be darker. And my abuela ? When I went to go visit her, she was like, no sunscreen. We need to get you more dark.
Dalia: That is so interesting to me because that I've seen more often the opposite experience. So first I think when I turn on Univision, everybody's white and the housekeeper looks like she has some indigenous ancestry.
Dalia: She doesn't get to say anything, except like, let me get that for you.
Yael: They're white almost. They're like what I call exotic white. Like they have, what's considered what I consider the stereotypical, Latin of means look, which is like, they have very heavily European race roots, but they were at some point mixed with other races.
Yael: And so they have like olive tone skin, dark hair, like certain whatever. And I don't have. It's like, I'm actually just white passing.
Dalia: Yeah. Oh yeah. That makes sense. That distinction. Yeah. I can see that for sure. Like a Sophia Vergara type of, yeah.
Dalia: But at the same time I'm sure when she is home, she would be called white, but it's just, when you weave and you come here, then you you've turned into some exotic white.
Yael: Yes. And that like that to me is like an interesting thing too. Like if in your own country you are white and then you come here and you're like, I'm a person of color.
Yael: What changed? And it's true. Our racial dynamics are very different in each country, but it's interesting to me that, like, I mean, you don't necessarily, people don't identify necessarily as white or Black or what have you. That's not part of, most of the country's ways of self. They just don't do that. And then some countries that like became illegal like you don't put that stuff on the birth certificates, like you just don't name race. But in my head, I'm like you can recognize hopefully that people look different in your country and that you're having different experiences based on that. So when you come to this country, why do you claim this identity?
Yael: Or if your family came to this country, why do you claim this identity when you were still white passing?
Dalia: Well, yeah, that is really interesting. And what is funny to me, especially for Dominicans, just because I hear this from them more than anybody else, that your race, it feels like it did change during the flight because your treatment was completely different.
Dalia: And maybe back home, you were part of the dominant group culturally and power structure wise. And this is the first time people are treating you as though you're an other. And so maybe your identity will shift them because race really is a social construct. So you can make a flight and your race changes.
Yael: Yes, totally agree. But also those are Afro Dominican, right? Then being put into a category that is on the lower end of, or possibly the lowest end of our racial categories in the U S. And so they're going from being the norm to going to being the most marginalized population in the country. Whereas if you are a light skinned or white passing Latina you were going from being the highest, probably social class in your country to be not too far down. You might feel like you're all of a sudden, like super oppressed, because you're not used to any form of oppressio n
Dalia: that see, that really says a lot. And it is the author, speaking of white passing fragility, the writer of white fragility says, you know, like 97% feels like a horrible loss or injustice when you're used to a hundred percent.
Yael: Oh, wow. Nice quote.
Dalia: And I say that, and I'm like, she probably said some other numbers, but don't look it up. Trust me. I love the idea of that perspective of asking for permission to go into these other spaces because you feel comfortable, but then also not internalizing the rejection. If somebody says, I really, I don't think it's a fit.
Dalia: How did you get to that point? And how do you suggest other people who are white presenting, but feel more comfortable in browner spaces? How should they reconcile that?
Yael: So I think there's like tying back with like that white savior thing that like, I need to be here.
Yael: Don't get me wrong, communities are important. And again, like a lot of my community is POC and that is important to me. And also I recognize that not every space is for me. If you were going to have a men's group, I don't belong in it. When I was helping facilitate a peer sex education group, I was like, we need a leader for the abstinence and virginity group, because I am neither abstinent nor identify as a virgin, but I am a super sexual human being.
Yael: And so I don't belong in this space. It does not make the space safe. This is a group led by and for folks with a certain experience. And so when you recognize that that's the point, right? Like women's groups, you don't want men. And normally we don't question that we're not like, oh, how exclusionary what's exclusionary is if you don't allow all women.
Yael: All women belong in women's groups, whether they're CIS or trans. But you don't allow men because it's a woman's space. And the point is to create a space that feels safe for that population. So they can be heard, feel seen and not have to explain things that they would have to explain to someone who doesn't understand.
Yael: And so to me, that is what often POC spaces are. And there's so much I can understand because I'm surrounded by POC and because my family has POC and there's so much I can't understand because I will never live it.
Yael: And so if the space would be safer without my presence, then why would I want to put myself in a spot that will cause others harm when then the intension is for them to have a good space.
Yael: Not every space is like that, right? Like if you go to school, if you go somewhere most spaces, unless you're like at historically Black university, right? Like you're going to be surrounded by white folks and like, no, one's questioning that. And so why shouldn't you get to be surrounded by the people you want to be surrounded with for this time period that is yours. It's your time, it's your space. And so I think for me, it's just like thinking about what is your intentions about entering it? Are you trying to contribute in a way that is helpful and wholesome and caring and supportive. Great. Is it wanted? Yes. Enter. Is it not. Go somewhere else. You can still hang out with those same people just not in that particular space that was designated at this time for this purpose.
Dalia: And when you say it that way, not at this time and not this space, because I feel like a lot of people who seek out those spaces, that isn't how most of their day is, you know, it's just a little refuge and it certainly isn't that they don't want to have a fully integrated intersectional life.
Dalia: Like you said, it's a break from having to explain certain things. And what's interesting is when sometimes you try and make things more and more broad. There's just more potential for issues because I have seen more on reality TV than in real life. Yes. White presenting, Latin people using certain racial slurs saying it's okay for them because they're down or whatever. And I'm like, yeah, but you're not of the group that gets to use that word and they just kept on defending it. I'm just like, okay, we're just, you're canceled. We're moving on. So there are, there can be issues where people who you would expect to not be problematic come in and are.
Dalia: And so maybe some people have been burned. A few times, and now they're just, they're exhausted and they don't want to put the energy into fielding out who is safe and who is not safe.
Yael: And there's nothing wrong with that. Like it's not necessarily personal, it could be personal if you're one of those people, but even the question, right?
Yael: Like I wanted to advertise a job position and so I seek to advertise them first in places of color and queer spaces. And so I contacted several different groups. Oh. And then, sorry, I remember there was a posting for a DEI position at a Jewish organization. And so I started to contact the admin of different POC, Jewish groups, like a Black Jewish group, or what have you.
Yael: And I said, listen, I filled out their form to enter, but I was like, I don't actually want to enter. I'm wondering if you can share this link. So folks can see the job. I am a white presenting, a Latino Jew. I ended up getting messaged even by the Black group. And they're like, oh, you can join. I was like, Black is not part of my identity.
Yael: Like we, because of the Caribbean, we have those roots as well. But like I don't claim that.
Dalia: It's funny. I do feel like Black people in my experience. That's why I was so I've been surprised when people have told me, they were bullied. Black kids in school who are other POC is it's always surprising to me because the town that I was raised in and the part of the south that I'm from, people still were in that space of, if you we're different enough to maybe not be able to get into a whites only area, or if the clain would have targeted you too, cause clan is not down. They're very antisemitic, they're anti everything. But then you were welcome. Like if you wanted to sit at that table, you were always welcome. Just anybody who is being othered the policy was come on in. If you have nowhere else to go, we'll take you.
Yael: That's lovely. I definitely know that that's not always true. And again, it's okay. I mean, the bullying is not okay. Deciding who's in your space is, but yeah, exactly. So like I was welcomed and obviously everyone's Jewish because it's a Jewish group.
Yael: And so it's, it was specifically a space built for Jews, Black Jews and some Jews of color to have a reprieve from the white Jews. White Jews often mean, well, right? Like we fill up social justice spaces, like hardcores. I've spoken to people about this, that like insofar as percentage of folks who are involved in social justice by group, I imagine that our group is one of the most heavily social justice oriented.
Yael: Cause we're so small and people are like you're everywhere, but it doesn't mean that we're doing it well or that we're doing it right. And so it can be exhausting to have white Jews around because we are those white saviory types.
Yael: And yeah. So I was, I was surprised and I was like, well, okay. Like I will post it myself then afterwards. And she had, she had posted already and she had written my name and giving me credit. And like I said, this person wanted to let us all know about this job.
Dalia: That's very cool. It's nice to find community, but it's also very nice to know that when you're trying to create a safe space around certain parts of our identity, that there are people who understand and support, because I'm sure it's hard for some people to hold that space.
Dalia: And to not feel guilty about saying no sometimes. So it's nice to know that even if not everybody understands, some people totally understand and they're not gonna lose any sleep over it. They're just going to move on to the next Facebook group and they'll be fine. And maybe you'll run into each other in another space.
Dalia: That's centered around an identity that you have in common.
Yael: Yeah. Exactly. And so I think that's just like, it's kinda like building resilience and you might actually be in another POC group together, but not necessarily that one.
Yael: And make everybody safe because I would hate to go into a space where I was told, Hey, women are welcome. Like this happens a lot. Well, not now that everybody's at home groups are really growing and there's like a group for everything. But previously it just felt like, like in the nineties, everything that was gay or LGBTQ was CIS male dominated.
Dalia: Tell us about your company and what made you want to form a publishing company and what your vision is for that company?
Yael: Sure. So my company's name is Kaleidoscope Vibrations, LLC . And for anyone who's an owner, kaleidoscope is it's like this toy that had all these like gems on the bottom and you'd move your hands in opposite directions around this tuby thing. And you'd look inside and it would be create new, pretty color combinations.
Yael: And so the idea is that every vibration or event in your life creates a new beautiful you, and that our identities are always forming and they're always developing. And the reason I created this company was because I was this like Jew that wasn't Jewish enough. I was this Latina that I didn't think that I looked enough or counted enough.
Yael: I was queer, but not queer enough. You know, like there are all these ways and this, I, I didn't feel like I should count. And that's, that's different, right? Like that's different than choosing whether or not you belong in a space as to whether or not you feel like you matter enough to be in a space or if you, you belong.
Yael: And so I created this company to help people find confidence in their identities and find their communities. So maybe. You don't belong to blank community, but you do belong to another one and then you can find the people that you need so you have a supportive, loving environment that understands you.
Yael: And so I do workshops, I do identity coaching, curriculum development like inclusivity in the workspace across different identities and what have you. But we also have a publishing sect, and that's the purpose is to uplift different narratives that aren't necessarily heard. And so the first book was mine, which is An Intro Guide to a Sex Positive You.
Yael: Sex is not necessarily something you think of and you're like, oh, this is not inclusive, but it really is. And so my book, I know I had someone read it, who was like, I've been looking for a book that validated my experiences as a queer person while reading it that wasn't heteronormative, right. That wasn't geared towards straight people.
Yael: And it's not that my book has hetero exclusive. You can be whatever matched you with. I just don't assume what you're going to match. And so I don't add genders into my conversations in the book and that like that in and of itself, apparently at the time was somewhat revolutionary for some folks. And the next book was Luna, Luna Si, Luna.
Yael: Yes. Maybe it's that Luna? Yes. Luna Si. And it is a book about two little sisters who are Latino it's in English and in Spanish. And the younger sister has autism. And she is 40% verbal. And so we often see representations of savants, right? So, and they tend to be white males. And so you have these kids who have really incredible abilities to count numbers or to memorize things, or what have you.
Yael: And they often do have very good verbal capacities. They have awkward social cues because they have trouble reading it, but that's like the extent to how they represent autism. Whereas in this case, like you see how she, how she is able to communicate the form that her language takes. And you do learn about like the kinds of things that she can do.
Yael: You learn about stems. So like ticks that people do to keep themselves calm and well. And that was the intention, right? link that autism comes in all colors, all ethnicities, that there are varying levels of how much people can communicate and what, you know, how much need or help they might require.
Yael: And yeah, and it just, that's, it it's a story about sisters and how they love each other and how they communicate and also one of them has autism. And so that intention of bringing those to the surface and yeah, we're working on a bunch of other different possibilities as well. Another one's about anxiety.
Yael: So another bilingual book, but a little girl's anxiety and what that's looked like for her.
Dalia: That's really helpful. I think that more and more children are experiencing anxiety earlier. So that's definitely needed. And it is interesting how ableism racism, xenophobia, how it all plays together and how you really don't see representation of people living with a diagnosis that aren't white it's. I mean, it's almost always going to be white to the extent that when you meet someone with something as common as down syndrome, who's Asian, you're like, wow. Like, oh, I didn't know. Obviously we can all get whatever we can be born, any kind of way, human diversity, it's just what we choose to feature. That makes it seem like we aren't as diverse as we are.
Yael: But then it's also the like racism that exists within the publishing space. And so even when you do have some books that are more representative in that, like the pictures have kids of all different colors, it doesn't necessarily that the author is a person of color.
Yael: And so with my company, you have to have either the identities that you are discussing or someone in your like close family, someone in your close life, and you have lived this with them, right. That you are experiencing this with them. So like the author of the book autism, t he person with autism, didn't write this.
Yael: She doesn't write. But her sister wrote it. And so she has lived with her sister, her, the younger one's entire life, the one who has autism so entire life. And so that was like the perspective that we were able to take. And so it's very important to me that the people who are writing the stories also have lived experience.
Yael: And it's not just about like, oh yeah, we need to mix A and B and with number 3 so that we can count in this diversity world where like, you're supposed to do this. Now it's about like, this is my story, and I want you to hear it.
Dalia: And the way that people tell their own story is so different from how it's told by an observer.
Dalia: And people can feel that difference. Sometimes it's so subtle, but you definitely, some things just they're very difficult to fake and so right now, a lot of companies. In all sectors, not just publishing people are faking the funk right now, and it's not pretty. So it falls flat. It's all kind of, oh, this just came to me.
Dalia: Did you see that woman who has been saying that? She's...
Yael: who said that she was Black from the Bronx in the Bronx and is a white Jew from Kansas.
Dalia: Yes, she got the hoop earrings, she got the tan and she was like, I'm ready to rock. I do not understand how this has happened more than once in such a widely publicized way in my lifetime.
Yael: So I actually, let's, let's break that down a bit. So first off, she's a, she is a white Jew, right? My friend is also a white Jew. Neither of them actually presents white. Like, if you look at them, that's not the identity you're going to give them because they were darker skin tones. Right. And so it's also interesting how whiteness works that like, because they are Jewish, they are given.
Yael: Right. It just, that is also so interesting. But I remember someone commented, like how did no one realize like Afro Latinas don't come that light? And I was like, hold up a second way lighter than that woman. Right. There are people who identify as Black. That is their identity. Who are way lighter than this faker.
Yael: And so my thing was, you should not fake who you are, but the fact that people believed her makes total sense to me.
Dalia: But it seemed like to me, what was the most damning is how. Some of her clothing choices and accessory choices, maybe they speak to her, they were so sterotypical. It just seemed a little performative.
Yael: She faked three different identities.
Dalia: Oh, I didn't see that part.
Yael: Afro Latina was her latest identity. The one before that was Black American, the one before that was north African. Okay. She moved across the globe.
Yael: No one tracked this?! Like at one point she was north African and now she's Black and now she's Afro Latina from the Bronx specifically.
Dalia: That's interesting too, that extra, that, that was so important for her to feature that what trips me out about it. And I think what really troubles a lot of people about it is to know that.
Dalia: Race is not real to the extent that whatever you say could literally change your experience. You just have to keep saying it and buy some hoops and you can be another person. Like, it just, she went overboard with the, just so stereotypical, but you're right. It easily could have been true going off of skin color alone.
Dalia: And some people do still dress that way, even though it's not the nineties anymore.
Yael: But I love my hoops in the nineties.
Dalia: I did too, you know, but they're like more modern with the embellishment. It has that like handcrafted feel. I don't know what happened with the hoops. It went out for me with letting my eyebrows finally try and grow back in, but I did use to be so, so into that. But at one point I also had a Jheri curl.
Dalia: So I really shouldn't talk about anybody else's since its style, I've made many mistakes over the years. I really appreciate you sharing your perspective and coming on. Where can people find you? Sure.
Yael: So my main thing is that I'm @yaelthesexgeek I'm a sexologist, sex coach, a sex educator.
Yael: @yaelthesexgeek on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. My website is sexpositiveyou.com, so pretty easy. And then my company is kvibrations.com. And so you can find most of my things through there.
Dalia: Awesome. You are doing so many different things. We didn't even touch on the sex positivity, maybe that's for another day.
Dalia: Are you thinking of revisiting that book now that you know, we're kind of all in a different place as a country and as queer people? Or are there things you'd like to add? Are you going to revise that addition or write something new?
Yael: Yeah. So the book is only two years old, but things change and shift so much, right? Like now there is so much more language outside of queer spaces around pronouns, but I think even in 2018, like the idea of talking about pronouns outside of queer spaces was still foreign for most, so. Yes, there are definitely, I've looked back and I'm like, oh, overall, I'm like, this is a good book.
Yael: Just so you know, like people love my book and I go back, I'm like, oh, this was, this was better than you thought it was. Yes, there are, of course things I want to change, but I I'm looking into doing a teen workbook version of it. Because I wrote it for my 14 year old self, but I don't think parents of 14 year olds would be thrilled to have their kids read this book..
Yael: And I think it's more of like a 16 and up kind of book. And I want to be able to reach people when they're younger because sexual trauma and boundary making and self pleasure and all of that is important before you are 18 or 16. And I also started, but I'm not going to have time right now, the nerds guide.
Yael: So this is the intro guide and the nerds guide goes into the socio historical and psychological backgrounds. And so when you talk about things, Gender. I want to be able to talk about that are six sexes and genders are present in the Talmud in ancient Jewish text, rich and written 1500 years ago. I want to talk about the hijra in India, and that they have like that as a third gender that's established that how different native American communities have two spirit or don't have two spirit identities.
Yael: And like, what does that mean and how do they conceptualize it? And just like, recognizing that there's so much more beyond what we talk about.
Dalia: Yeah, that sounds really fascinating.
Yael: Yeah. But that's going to take awhile. It's going to take research and I'm doing a PhD right now.
Dalia: The list just keeps going.
Yael: And that's on the back burner, that's like maybe if someone gives me a book deal, I'll work on that.
Dalia: I love it. Oh, excellent. Thank you so much for coming on.
Yael: Thank you for having me.
Yael: I always, I really enjoy talking with you and Dalia.
Dalia: Same here. Same here. You'll have to come back when you finish your nerd book or I'm sure, actually you're doing many things. I'm sure it'll be before then. Sounds good.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit daliakinsey.substack.com -
Nhakia Outland (she/her/hers) is the founder of Prevention Meets Fashion Inc. She is a Black, queer, single mother of three. She is a social worker, sex educator, sex therapist in training and professor at Temple University with an extensive background in advocacy, consulting and community organizing who is passionate about finding creative ways to engage Black, LGBTIA+ communities. Nhakia’s work focuses on addressing stigma and inequalities in sexual health and reproductive health (SRH) through fashion, advocacy, community and education (F.A.C.E).This episode we explore
* The impact affirming clothing can have on mental health
* Finding and celebrating your aesthetic
* The connection between sexual health and fashion
Episode Resources
https://www.preventionmeetsfashion.org/
https://secure.givelively.org/donate/prevention-meets-fashion
https://www.thecrownact.com/
www.daliakinsey.com
Decolonizing Wellness: A QTBIPOC-Centered Guide to Escape the Diet Trap, Heal Your Self-Image, and Achieve Body Liberation
Bali Retreat March 19-25 2023
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Body Liberation for All. I'm your host, Dalia Kinsey holistic registered dietitian and author of Decolonizing Wellness.
This show and my work overall is dedicated to amplifying the health and happiness of BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ people.
Today we're joined by Nhakia Outland. The founder of Prevention Meets Fashion. She's a black queer, single mother of three. She's a social worker, sex educator, sex therapist in training, and a professor at Temple University with an extensive background in advocacy consulting and community organizing. She's passionate about finding creative ways to engage Black, LGBTQ+ communities.
Nhakia's work focuses on addressing stigma and inequalities in sexual health and reproductive health through fashion advocacy, community, and education.
Nhakia and I had this conversation quite a while ago, so I'm excited to be able to bring it to you today. At the time of the episode was recorded the website for Prevention Meets Fashion wasn’t up but now it is. So you can see that in the show notes and check out the events calendar. I love that the condom streetwear fashion show is an annual event.
Nhakia has a lot of fabulous things going on through this nonprofit. And it was really interesting to hear about her creative process and what brought her to form the nonprofit.
Before we jump into that conversation. I want to remind you that I will be hosting my first in-person retreat in Bali next March, that's March 2023. If you're hearing this and it's pre March, 2023, there may still be space. So be sure check out daliakinsey.com/retreat to see the details.
It’s going to be an amazing event. As always it will be centered on LGBTQIA+ BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color). However, if you are not an LGBTQIA+ BIPOC person, that doesn't mean that you can't come to the retreat.
There will be a couple of healing circle events. That'll be sacred spaces for QTBIPOC folks. So those will not be events where everybody can come in and take up space. However, there will be plenty of other events that are for everyone. So if you were interested in taking a more liberatory approach to your wellness and you've done a lot of work on your own and you feel like this could be a catalyst for your growth then definitely check it out.
It isn't going to be a beginner oriented event as far as healing work goes. If you've never done therapy, if you've never, read a self-help book, if you've never been in any sort of coaching situation and you're kind of new to the concept of systemic oppression having an impact on your wellness, then it's probably not the place for you to start.
The retreat really is designed for people who already have an awareness of these things and are wanting to dig deeper and really wanting to be in a space where they can totally unwind and focus on the physical experience of comfort and freedom in their body. So that it's something we'll be able to re-create with ease when we get back home.
The facilities are gorgeous. We'll have a chef cooking for us three meals a day. There are lots of excursions planned. We’ll have one-on-one time with a Balinese healer. There will be massages. It's going to be really luxurious, but then at the same time, a little crunchy, which is totally my vibe. We’ll have a touch of the outdoors. We'll be in an eco-friendly setting, but then at the same time, we're going to have access to all of our creature comforts.
It’s going to be great. If you can join us, you absolutely should. Go to daliakinsey.com/retreat to reserve your spot.
Alright, let's get on into this conversation.
Body Liberation for All Theme
Yeah. They might try to put you in a box, tell them that you don't accept when the world is tripping out tell them that you love yourself. Hey, Hey, smile on them live your life just like you like it is.
It’s your party negativity is not invited. For my queer folks, for my trans, people of color, let your voice be heard. Look in the mirror and say that it's time to put me first. You born to win. Head up high with confidence. This show is for everyone. So, I thank you for tuning in. Let's go.
My name is Nhakia Outland. I am the founder and president of Prevention Meets Fashion Incorporated. We are a 501C3 nonprofit based in Philadelphia, but we will go anywhere. And our mission is to increase sexual health and knowledge in communities of color Black, LGBTQIA and nonbinary communities through fashion advocacy, community education, which stands for FACE. It is a model that I created to be able to look at the intersections of sexual health, reproductive health, racial injustice, disability rights all of these other what I call social determines of health as well into one model, instead of just naming them all the time.
We look at the intersections of how many of those can be placed in fashion. How any of those could be placed in advocacy and in community and education, which to our advantage came out as face, which is a ballroom category. Which we're very excited about because my favorite category in ballroom is face.
I just love when the community comes out and shines that way like, it seems like nothing else matters, but that person's face. And to see that in community that's really been, you know, hurt so many times again and again especially Black LGBTQ folks that just lights my world up when I go to ballroom competitions.
But yes, I'm so excited to finally be a nonprofit. What a lot of people don't know is that we've actually been around for four years. Once I really started getting into the nitty gritty of Prevention Meets Fashion, I realized that it would, it would be so much better in a nonprofit structure to be able to open ourselves to getting grants, to getting more support to writing more curriculum and programming. So a lot of folks that follow us on Instagram and they just, you know, sometimes think that we just post, but that's the labor of love of hours of research putting snippets together to have those words in the little, in the little caption.
I actually take the time my interns take the time my volunteers take the time to research things, to make sure that we're getting our perspective right.
To make sure that we're getting voices heard. On our Instagram, we take it very seriously, I once said when I started this, that to me, that Instagram is just not a place for us to post pretty pictures it really is more than that for us.
I remember when I first started, I talked about how I used fashion come out to my family over a certain, a number of years as queer.
And I showed a picture of when I got my hair shaved on one side and how freeing that was to me for many aspects for one, I had just lost my partner.
So you weren't a kid, you were an adult living outside of the home.
Yes. And so I had just lost my partner and, you know so when I had shaved the side of my head, it was a freeing moment. Not only for me verbalizing my queer identity, but also that that I was shedding something that reminded me of my partner, cause they always liked my hair.
So I was talking about that and someone took my whole face, whole caption, put it on there, their Instagram and people were tagging me like this is your face.
And I'm like, do you know that I'm a real person? And they literally were using it. The message was correct. I think before that, but I'm a real person like you use my whole face and my whole story.
Was this person, a member of the community?
Yes! This person was a member of the community and a fellow, a sex educator. And this was not the first time that they did this. They actually. Took other posts and I had to call him out on it, you know, and I don't what to do that, but at least give me my credit, especially when it's my face. So I stopped a little bit from actually using my images. And the purpose of me using my images, was one, for people to know that I'm a real person, but for, two to show representation to y'all queer Black folks out there that that don't get seen as much.
And to let them know that, you know, we're here, we're in every profession. You know, come and visit us, you know, and as I was like, really taken back by this, so I stopped showing my image for a while, but then the pandemic happened and people were, were like, you know, I don't think people know that you're Black owned or queer owned at all because you don't have no pictures of yourself anymore.
So I began posting pictures of myself, again, posting pictures of my interns, posting pictures of my community stuff that I was doing. I do admit that I am a little bit shy and I don't give myself enough credit with Prevention Meets Fashion
I'm a social worker by trade and I decided to take everything, all of my experience and I absolutely adore the meaning behind fashion. And how has been used in black communities. How is being used in queer communities? Oftentimes when our voices were silenced, our clothes were loud.
Interesting that you made the point though, that people don't understand how damaging it is to a small creator, small business to steal ideas, but that is the story of the Black creative's life. Like that's the story of small queer businesses. Cause you think about all the ways in which queer folks, especially queer folks of color lead the way with culture and with fashion.
And how often is that stolen? And the original designer creator doesn't ever see the profits that come from their original baby, their original idea.
And I, I struggled too, along the lines, just to piggyback off of that. I struggle with the Black designers who have made it.
And a lot of them, you listen to a lot of them speak and how they built this from the ground up. And then they make it sort of speak and then they give credit to the Italian designer. So the white designer, oh, about what's underneath their fish and house. Then my name wouldn't be out here. The same thing with music.
Like why do we feel like we have to partner with someone that don't look like us to make us big. Right. And I struggle with it.
Can you speak to that? Because I've seen that issue even in myself, even as I've decided to center my show, to center my work around my queer identity and my POC identity, I still find myself being drawn when people like dangle something in front of me, that's not serving the community that I believe I'm meant to serve and I'm called to serve. I still feel like, oh, it's a shiny object because I, like so many people, was raised to think proximity to whiteness is proximity to success. And even though, especially the way things are shifting now, we definitely don't need them.
People need us, but because we're the ones who've been socialized to believe the opposite, we keep falling for it. So what do you do when you see that in yourself? Is that something that can only be addressed on a systemic level? Where you never affected by that?
I think I would be lying if I say I wasn't affected by that. Even if you look at my identity as a social worker, right. I was trained as a social worker, a lot of the curriculum is based on white supremacist thoughts and ideas and racism. And it wasn't until last year that I found out that there is a whole curriculum around African centered social work. I've been a social worker for over 15 years and I never, ever outside of the Black NASW (The National Association of Black Social Workers), I never knew it was a social work curriculum around African centered and how to work with Black and African community.
And so I started taking those courses and webinars during the pandemic to help myself unlearn the white supremacist culture and ideologies, that I was perpetuating, you know. The whole fact that white supremacy culture values, individualism, right? And then you make it and worry about everything else later. For Black community and Black queer communities, what’s innate to us is to have a village behind us, but yet I was pushing back on this because it's like, I was conditioned and raised to you're an individual. We get on the young rappers, these young kids when they make it and they bring their village with them. Yes. It's some folks that you don't necessarily need to bring with you and that's a different story, but the fact that we get on known for bringing their community with them, that's something that's innate to them and they don't know it.
You know? I was even talking about how we was taught to look at pouring liquor out as being something bad. Right. And it wasn't until I started really looking into our culture that we did this historically, we did this to our ancestors. We do that when we do libations right. I've even looked into fashion and, and death and how cultures around the world use fashion to symbolize death and how our young folks do that with t-shirts.
Right? So the t-shirts is so much more powerful. And I, I talked about this on my Instagram and how a t-shirt is not just a t-shirt. It has a lot of social justice and a lot of racism behind the t-shirt. Because if you think about it, t-shirts were made out of cotton Black folks pick the cotton, what Black folks couldn't afford to have the whitest of the white.
So when you could afford the whitest of the white, you know, it was valued. So you, you didn't go outside, you didn't get dirty. And those, you know, those was your Sunday's best. That was for you dressing up to put on this image that we're not poor, that we're not these feeble-minded people, that people, that don't look like us, that we were.
So if you look at that today, think about how we get dressed up to go to work. Think about how we get dressed up to go in, in town. You know, all of those things, whether it be young folks or either of us know that we're doing it, it has historical roots and that's what we want to bring to Prevention Meets Fashion.
And we really want folks to understand that fashion is not frivolous. It means a lot. And to look at it as such is doing it a disservice, you know us wanting nice things comes from a historical racist background, you know, we want it, our parents, our grandparents, our great, great grandparents wanted us to have nice things.
Nice things meant something.
I don't know if you've had a chance to visit the African-American history museum in DC. So there's the way they've got it set up. It's basically, you start out at the lowest/roughest points in Black American history. And then as you go up in the building, you know, we bounce back. So you're like traumatized at the start. Then they have this resting area it's really pretty where people break down, you know, there's water flowing where you can just relax and recover and then you continue on up and you get to where people are clearly developing their own culture, which is a blend of who we were before we were brought to the United States and who we became here.
And there's this big section on fashion after the civil war, among Black Americans being so incredibly important as not just a status marker, but part of that desire to prove and validate your humanity through things that people can see as soon as they look at you.
So part of that was definitely beautiful when you think about the intentions behind it, but then heartbreaking when you think about how many of us internalize that belief that we have to prove and validate our humanity instead of just letting white supremacy be a white supremacist problem. But it really explains why that's such a big part of Black American culture to be well-dressed and why we still give people the side eye when they come to church and holey jeans and flip flops, how that's like beyond most Black folks comprehension, but you see it all the time and white American churches, but they don't have to validate their humanity.
So they don't have that same tradition of you need to try and wear your status markers.
Last month on the 20th, we had our annual fashion condom show and our theme was Wearing Social Justice. And so we had the designers who are novice designers from the community. Everything that we do at Prevention Meets Fashion is community based and community led.
And so we had these designers and we wanted to see their interpretations of wearing social justice. So folks picked to do condom designs as bell-bottoms condom designs as denim, as pocketbooks that resembled like the disco ball for music and the best in hair, because, you know, right now we're going through hair discrimination laws, and in Pennsylvania, they still haven't signed on to the Crown Act.
And so it was amazing.
What is that? I don't think I know about that.
So the Crown Act is a bill that is trying to get passed in each state to ban hair discrimination among black folk. So the right to wear our own hair. So we have to get a law to have to be able to on hair and to be able to close this out that we created for creativity, for style or survival, we have to have a law to be able to do that.
Wow. I mean, I knew that that was needed. I didn't think we were anywhere near that point. So I didn't even know because you see, I have my hair dreaded, but I live in a very black area and a lot of the stigma has fallen away. But I know when I first dreaded my hair, people still told me, oh, you won't ever be able to get a job with your hair dreaded.
But I actually told HR I was doing it before I did it, which is ridiculous that I would have to, because it's such a natural style, but it was never an issue. But everyone around me kept saying it would be. And that wasn't because they were paranoid. That was based on real experiences they had.
Yeah. And, and like what you said, like unpacking what you said about you having to go to HR to see if you could lock your hair. And I don't ever think I’ve heard of a conversation where someone that wasn't black had to go to HR and say, can I dye my hair blonde? We think about things like that.
I remember when I first started coloring my hair, which I was well into my career. I've always wanted to color my hair, but that held me back because I needed a job. You know, I had kids I needed to provide for myself when I got to this point in my life where I just said F it, like, I want to color my hair.
So I went to the extreme, the first thing I did was dye my hair blue, and then it went to green and then it went to blonde. I was affirmed at my job because it's an LGBTQ organization, but I don't think if I would've stayed in counseling, that would have been appropriate. Right.
And I don't know if I would have been as happy because that's the way I express myself through my hair. I express myself through my clothes. So those jobs where I had to wear suits and shoes all day, I just couldn't do it.
I really couldn't like I have no problem wearing a suit but I want to put on sneakers with it, you know, on a platform with it. Or I want to wear a military boot. I don't want to have to, to look at or to appear as people think women identifying folks should
look.
Yes. Well, and that's a whole nother layer. I think with identity and clothing is if you don't identify in this super binary way that. It creates even more anxiety for you to be in work environments that are really rigid about how they want people to dress, because it's an important, maybe to some people it's not important at all. But to me, even the fact that I've really like plain clothes is a big part of my identity.
It required some level of awarenesst about how much I detested dresses to get to this plain point that we're at right now. This was a process. So in your experience professionally, how much does the stress of having to dress in ways that don't suit you? How negative of an impact can that have on people?
Well, it definitely could have a negative impact on your mental health. I mean, it does have an impact on your mental health, right? Because I think we throw around a term if you look good, you feel good a lot, but it's actually true. It's actually when you look good and feel good, it's actually science behind it and the endorphins and everything that's in your, that feel good in your body.
It increases it. You know? I know that when, you know, my eyebrows are not done or my hair not done, I feel completely down and you can tell in my clothes because I dress that way as well. And then when I get my eyebrows done, I feel like everything is better.
It definitely has a connection. And I've talked about it numerous times on our Instagram and in person. And so, so even like what you said, even the folks who get up and don't want to iron and just throw something on you're intentionally thinking whether you realize it or not, that's your aesthetic, you're intentionally doing that.
That's what you like to wear, you know? So I, I really don't like when folks say, they can't dress. Some folks dress to what they think they should be dressing like or what someone told them, they look nice in and then they keep repeating it over and over. Instead of looking inside and figuring out what do I like, what do I look nice in and taking that component and then building upon it.
So, what we want to teach people to do is what, first off, like what, what makes you feel good? Let's start there, right? Don't look in this magazine or social media or whatever you're looking at. And, and copy someone else's feel-good outfit because most of the time that's a stylist put that on that person.
They might not even like what they, what they put on a stylist, put that on them. Right. So what makes you feel good? And let's build upon that. And this is your look. There is no one way to be or dress queer. And I think when we Google, how to dress queer, you get white, skinny folks, you know, you don't get, or if you do get a Black image is always us in this masc of center look right.
You don't get that androgynous type person. And I consider my aesthetic very androgynous and athletic. You don't get that. I'm a chameleon, my clothes you will get anything from super sexy to super athletic wear. And I merge them somehow because that's me, you know, but it took me years to figure that out.
It took me years to be comfortable with it.
Tell me more about your journey to this point, because I know for a lot of people, fashion is so problematic because it's been linked to promoting only one body type as attractive. Promoting a lot of classism and a lot of fixation on really just keeping the fashion machine going.
So we think about fast fashion and there was a time in US history where it would have been normal to get clothes from someone who made them in the community. And these would be clothes that would last you a very long time. They were probably cut to fit your particular body, the way you wanted it to fit.
And you could wear it for years. Whereas now you see a lot of manipulation in the marketing to push people to say, this is what you should be wearing right now. And it just doesn't feel like a good place to a lot of people when it comes to self-expression. So what was your journey like with your relationship with fashion and when did you see the connection between your social work and the sexual health background that you have and what you're doing now?
My connection to fashion began early on. My parents were military parents. And so when they got out the military and I was old enough to be able to look at things and, and see and understand their military background, we would look in these huge photo albums. And I would just like adore my mom and like her bell bottoms and her afro, I have finer hair, as you can see really loose wave, like type thing.
My mom has really coarse hair. I always envy not being able to have an Afro, I've never had that type of hair, like, you know? And so and I joke my dad doesn't have hair anymore, but my mom, like, you have his side of the family hair.
And so I'm like, okay. I grew up looking at these photo albums and looking at my mom and bell bottoms and, you know, clogs and artists other stuff. So I would like, I immediately gravitated towards all of that because of course I wanted to look like my mom. But slowly but surely my mom took this to the extreme and started putting me in girly, girly stuff.
Like, you know, all the lace and everything was one color. And I rebelled. And so she started taking me to the store and like, what do you want? And I'm very close to my brother. And so I'm like, I want to look like my brother. And so I would pick out sweatpants and like a real big shirt and I had body self-conscious issues. I didn't realize until I got older, like why boys and men like, now I know that they were sexualizing me.
So I didn't like that attention. I started putting on baggier clothes, but yet I would still put on a heel. So I would wear the baggy, this is the style you see now I did back in the nineties. Right. And so I didn't see that it's a Mary J came out and I literally broke down and cry because I was like, here's this woman who was like wearing baggy jeans, wearing baggy shirts. But people still liked her.
I didn't even think of that as a turning point, but yeah. Now that you say it, that totally resonates.
So, you know, it was first that Little Kim stage, that overly sexy stage. I went through that and my mom allowed me to, like, I credit my mom a lot for allowing me to, to develop who I am today. Overtime. I, again, I started coming into my fashion aesthetic, which obviously I went back to the athletic wear. But as I was developing, that was where I was leaning towards. And it was this point in my life where I know I started realizing that I was attracted to other genders other than the opposite gender.
I didn't really act on it when I was younger. Because Me wearing the sweatpants and shirts. Like I remember the first time someone called me a dyke and I cried. So I stopped dressing like that and went overly sexy again.
Right. Totally not me. And I was trying so hard.
And that was even before you started noticing that you were also attracted to women. Oh, that's interesting.
And so then, you know, it was my brother who was like, you know, stop this, you know, he's younger a year younger than me. He's like, stop this. You be you.
Like, so what, like, if they call you a dyke, you be the best dyke. it doesn't even matter. Like you, you be, you, you don't, you don't change for no one else. You don't do you. You dress the way you want to dress. So then, you know, I started dialing down the bagginess and came to a happy medium.
But over that time, I started realizing that I was using my fashion to come out. I was using my fashion to display my mood. Fashion would actually help my mood. I was really depressed when I was younger.
I was a teen mom twice, but when I became a mom at 17, of course, that dialed back because now I had to put that money into my child. And I remember friends that went to high school with me was like oh, she fell off, you know, I knew it wasn't going to last, like, it was almost like they was waiting for it to like, I knew that wasn't going to dress this way anymore.
You know, now she's a mom and I'm like, no, it's the opposite. I could still afford it, but is it worth it? You know, my priorities started to shift now it was on to my two children that I had to raise. Right. And so it wasn't that I fell off.
I grew up. I think folks they grow up at their own. And so when I see folks spending all this money on stuff and making them happy,I'm like, do you, who cares what anyone else is saying? You want to spend $400 on a belt spend it, you know, but just make sure that your priorities, they're straight as well.
As a social worker, how do you tell the difference between a maladaptive coping mechanism that is hurting the person and they probably actually need something else, something more sustainable and something that just, it doesn't hurt, you know, or it really is something that brings them joy? How do you recognize the difference in yourself even?
I mean, well, of course I did self-assessment but for clients, I do a little assessment. Right. And I don't shame them. I remember it was this client who, and I just told this story, but I remember it was a client who just got diagnosed with HIV. I remembered this and she was a young mother, had three cute little boys and she was living in an abandoned minivan and she just wanted to keep buying her sons these Jordans.
And of course Jordan's are a hundred dollars to, depending on the size of your feet, a piece. So she was spending close to $500 every couple of months or sneakers, but yet living in abandoned minivan. And so I didn't shame her for it, but when she came in, I, you know, I said, oh, those are really nice sneakers, but what would that look like if you had took just a hundred dollars a day and went to the sneaker store and let's say for some Nike, some $40 Nike's for each of your kids or target some light up sneakers.
Cause they were little. What would that have looked like? And then save the rest for you to be able to get a hotel room. So you can have all your kids in one space or save up to get an apartment so that you can have running water and heat. What would that have looked like? So I challenged this client without shaming them to look at how they were spending their money.
Yes. That made you feel good because you needed that you needed to feel good about your situation that you was in. So it made you feel good to be able to buy your kids, these sneakers, to be able to have your kids look like other kids, but in the interim, you were hurting yourself and you were hurting your kids because you really didn't have it.
And so I take approaches like that with clients, especially when they use fashion as a coping tool. Fashion does not solve everything. You can put on a million dollars worth of clothes and still be sad and depressed or hate your body. We need to fix that. And then you can add those other layers on for some folks, you know, clothing protects them, but that protection is temporary.
When you take that off, then what you just, you, you have to be satisfied with who you're looking at in a mirror. So it is definitely as much deeper, you know, and so through that we created our Affirming Fashion program, which is a program where we give clients clothing on emergency basis.
So we don't have an income threshold or anything. If you need clothing, you need clothing, and if we have it, we're going to give it to you. We also do groups about affirming fashion and surveys to get the community feel on what affirms you. You know, we have a lot of gender non-conforming non-binary folks that follow us and it's affirming to them to have fashion that affirms their identity.
And so we want to do that. We want to be this resource. So we, we definitely talk about how fashion is affirming, how fashion is self-care and how fashion is more than a look at Prevention Meets Fashion.
I think affirming clothes can be really tough if you're still a kid and you don't get to make those decisions, or maybe you just don't have the money to dress yourself the way you want to. I've seen a couple of nonprofits helping with things like binders, but then I've also wondered for younger kids too how do you guide people on dressing in a way that affirms your gender that can't also hurt you? Because some people are so deeply uncomfortable and they're not in a position to get surgery now and they want to bind 24 hours a day.
You know, does the nonprofit also deal with education around that piece? Sometimes you can't get a hundred percent there with what it's going to take for you to really be comfortable and be yourself, but in the meantime, you don't want to hurt yourself.
Yes, we actually do, but we actually bring folks in to talk about that. I could read a million books on binding and what it's like, but part of being a community organization is getting those folks with that lived experience. So we absolutely bring folks in or connect folks to resources that they can then ask those questions to someone. I never want to speak on something that I haven't really experienced or feel that I don't know enough about.
And binding is one of those things. Like I know that it can be affirming, but I also know from the medical side, how damaging it can be. Right. So I definitely connect folks to the needed resources that they need to get those questions, especially with younger kids, because they shouldn't be binding 24 hours a day.
You know, I do know that it's a time limit depending on how old you are with how long you should be binding or even if it is appropriate to bind at that age, whatever age it is. As far as clothes go, I really haven't hit any younger parents really talk to me about that is mainly teenagers and up, but younger folks, I really haven't had anyone.
And now that you brought it up, but watch I get a call I really haven't had any younger folks or parents talk to me about how they can dress their younger kids and affirm from them. For one, I commend a parent if they do reach out to me, because then that means that they are a step ahead of parents who absolutely will not be having it at all.
Right. And so I definitely want to guide them in the right direction. As far as affirming fashion and, and wearing the clothes that affirms the youth, but also we got a small grant to hire community members to teach technical skills, such as sewing and crochet. The premise behind it was to also get LGBTQ folks and Black folks involved in stem and how STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) can be a part of fashion, you know, taking that A and doing something with it, but also to give folks a starter for how you can make your own clothes, if you can't afford.
Because that's beyond, as affirming clothes cost a lot, you know, androgynous type clothes or all those clothes. They cost a lot.
Yeah. There was a time in the nineties when remember almost everybody still was sewing as a hobby and there were craft stores everywhere, and fabric was not expensive, but as fast fashion got cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, it became more expensive to make your own clothes. There were always clothes that you could of course shop in the men's section, which I used to do a lot before puberty, before these inconvenient curves got in the way that make men's wear implausible sometimes without altering. Altering is a really, really handy skill because if you thrift, then you could alter your clothes to make them more gender-affirming.
And that's the premise behind the sewing. And so Daisy is our instructor who's coming on board and they use, she, and they pronouns.
They are all about like teaching mending and how to up-cycle. And that's something that we want because let's say you get clothes from my Affirming Fashion program, or you go to another, like a trans clothing closet or a thrift store or whatever. And you want to make it your own. Now you have these soft skills to be able to make this outfit your own using other stuff that's in your house. So they talk about how you can take a t-shirt apart and use parts of it to make this how you can. If you have jeans that are really old how you can take the pockets off and make something else out of it, or make a pocketbook out of it, or a book bag or bag or whatever you want to call it.
So using what you have to be able to lessen that financial barrier that's out there. Because right now, as you said, a few minutes ago, it's very performative. Every designer right now has a genderless fashion line right now, because again, they think that folks like you and I are trends and we're, we're not.
It's heartbreaking to know that if you're someone who may be hasn't thought it through, or you're kind of new to the concept that like this always happens, you know, a smaller group of people has a need and the dominant culture refuses to fill it or address it. And the smaller group creates their own solution. And then everybody sees the sales and swoop in and put the smaller companies out of business.
So I could see some people thinking, oh, this is great. Look at what Zara is doing all of the sudden and thinking, oh, this company supports me. They see me. Maybe they do. Maybe they don't like, I'm not trying to throw any shade at them in particular. But think of all the other companies who have to charge higher prices because they've got smaller production and maybe also they have ethical production, it just happens to cost more money.
There are so many levels to the benefits and really thinking about, oh, what's a garment that's going to last once your sense of fashion kind of levels out. I mean, there are some people who just love to continually buy accessories, but I feel like as I've gotten older now that I know exactly what I feel best in, I don't really have any desire to keep adding things to my wardrobe.
I pretty much wear things til the wheels fall off and then replace them with something that almost looks exactly the same.
Well, you definitely I'm blanking on the term, but I think it is called a repetitive fashion and you're not the only one that does it. Like Simon Cowl does it. Right. White t-shirts basic pants. Right. You're not the only one that does that. And this is actually the psychology behind why folks do that, you know, it's cause people remember that. That's your brand, that's your look. So people think that they think that they're being not intentional, but they are being intentional, if that makes sense.
And another thing about the pandemic, like over pandemic, I started posting about shopping your own closet, right? So a lot of times we have those staples in our closet. But because we keep adding stuff on top of stuff, they get buried, they get buried. So I've challenged people to go into their closet, take everything out and look at everything right.
And put it into I wore it. I don't wear it, you know, needs to be donated type of piles. And I've even challenged myself to do it. Cause I'm one of those people that see something like, oh, I don't have this. And then I go in my closet and like, oh shoot. I do, you know, because I wasn't organized. And so I challenged myself to get organized and to look at what I had in my closet and just add staples that I didn't have instead of rebuying, rebuying and rebuying.
And I donated a lot. I gave a lot as well. I am a fan of clothing swaps, but of course when COVID happened, a lot of folks, you know, weren't able to do that. A lot of folks. Especially with the information going out that COVID can live on your clothes. It couldn't, you know, people were really afraid to like swap clothes and stuff like that, but I'm a fan of it.
Because you know, I can give someone something that I no longer wear and gets something that's essentially new. Cause that's what you're looking for. Right. That's the feeling that you're looking for, that you're getting something new that you're getting a package. And I know you asked earlier, how does that lead to sexual health?
And that is one of the love languages, right to receive stuff. So I think that's why also gravitate towards fashion and, and stuff like that because that's something you can receive. And I noticed my love language I love to receive and I love to give right. So that's how it also relates to sexual health.
But also we've been talking about how it relates to sexual health since we began this conversation since we're talking about identities and expression, and all of that is tied up with sexual health. Sexual health is not just about sex. It's about the mind, body and spirit it's about everything. And so when you look good, you feel good when you're comfortable in what you're in, you're able to express that and have that confidence with your partner or partners.
You know, a lot of times people don't wear lingerie or don't wear, you know, cute underwear because they're not happy with their body. Right. And what would that look like to have a partner? That's been like, you know what? You, you look nice in those boxers. It doesn't have to be based on what you see on TV or any of it.
You look good in those boxers. And just that one little thing could change someone's whole mood and feeling, you know, instead of them looking at what society projects as appealing or whether it's, you know, a male or female gaze, you know? I know I've had to personally check people because I don't like to see cutesy underwear.
I don't like it. Give me a pair of boxers in a heartbeat. I will, I will wear boxers. Like I like boys shorts. I like boxers. I like full-coverage underwear. I don't have thongs. And, and again, as a, as someone who studies sexual health, that's not good for folks with vaginas anyway it can cause micro lesions, like it's just not sanitary.
Oh. So underwear like that, that's not good for vaginal health could probably increase your risk for STI because you'll have more tiny cuts that you can't say. Now that's a bigger sham. That's a, I think of all the layers, because the part of the country where I was raised in sex ed in the school system was basically abstinence.
And that was also kind of the story at home. So certainly didn't get any kind of sex ed that would be useful for same sex couples. And even when you go to a physician, even now in 2021, No one seems to know anything about STIs between women. No one seems to know, like there's just not enough research there, or maybe people aren't going to continuing ed classes.
I don't know what's going on, but there are so many knowledge deficits that I feel we have. And then there's so many things that culturally cis women in particular have been trained to do that compromise your sexual health even further, like removing all of your pubic hair. That was another barrier that could help prevent STI and oh wow.
And nobody tells you this stuff before you remove it. And what if you removed it permanently? Which a lot of people did when that became
Well people to today still don't care. I go in our, during our condo Fisher show, I did a condom party and I talked about. All things condoms. Cause we always do that for our condom party. And someone that was on the Zoom was like, well, I was showing them a dental dam and showing them how to use a dental dam. And they were like, well, the person I'm with need to remove their hair. And I said, why? You know? And they couldn't tell me why, because I just always thought they need to remove their hair before oral sex.
Right. I'm like, no, do you remove your hair before you ask for oral sex? This was a male, someone with a penis and I'm like, do you remove your hair before you ask for, so why are you asking your partner, who they disclose was a cis female to remove their hair? If you're not removing your hair? When like, think of the double standards there.
You know, and this is also what images you see. Right? You see you see these images of getting waxed then and everything for female-identified folks, but you never see melody, identify folks get waxed. And if you do, they put them in, they automatically put them into the gay category. They're get like, no, you know, waxing is not an identity.
Right. You know, it's a choice, like either you wax or you don't, but that should be someone's choice. I've told people too, if that's something that you want to do wax or shave, use it as a partner activity, like use it as eroticism. Like you shave me, I'll shave you.
Like, you know what I mean?
Well, I had a question about that, so, and this may be completely bogus or outdated, but. Back in the day, they used to say don't shave don't floss the day before an encounter with a partner that you're not in a closed relationship with or who you've been tested with. Is there any truth to that?
It is. It actually is. So again, when you're, when you get waxed or you shave, you want to at least give yourself 24 to 48 hours, because again, you don't know nicked yourself anywhere. You want to give the skin a chance to heal a little bit because you can get infections flossing, your gums, and brushing your teeth.
Yes, we do say don't do that as a risk reduction, even though it's a low, a low risk when you're looking at the HIV scale. So it was high, medium, and low. It's a low. It's still a risk. And so, you know, you want to make sure that you're giving people all the information too, so that they can make an informed decision.
And I think that's why I don't carry the line anymore, but I used to carry a line of flavored lubes and this particular company actually worked with a dental hygienist to come up with do, that was flavored. That was actually good for your teeth and gums and stuff, because people were worried about their breakfast stuff like this.
So they actually came up with one that was really good for oral sex that, so that people wouldn't have to worry about the, the breath,
Oh, after tasting like that after,
So you ate something or whatever like that it was, it was, yeah. So I thought that was really cool. I, I don't carry them anymore because it upends them mimic.
Like I just wasn't, you know, pushing products and I don't have a website anymore. So hopefully once I get my website up and running, I could be able to offer tools like that. Cause I don't think people know that there's options out there, like what it is. Actually. I love debunking myths and you know, a lot of myths come with truth.
And if people just know the right thing, then you know, you're doing your due diligence,
Yeah. I mean, it's really helpful to have all the information because to me, things that you do to groom your body and fashion, like it's all part of the same thing and everybody has their own aesthetic, but then you, sometimes you form these preferences without knowing what other things you might be sacrificing.
So for you, if you can still grow your bush back, you might want it. Like, I don't know, once you weigh it all out, plus, you know, fashion goes in cycles. There was a time when everybody wanted to be totally bare and then people started doing more designs and then some people just want to go all the way back natural.
It's interesting though. Once you think about all the different images we're exposed to about this is the ideal body ageism is definitely is a big issue because I don't know that I've ever seen gray body hair depicted anywhere. People get gray hair everywhere, but you just never see it. It seems like people usually don't discover that that doesn't click until they get their first gray body hair and they're like, oh, whoa, whoa, whoa. I didn't know this was going to happen.
Or they shave or they dye it. You know, it's just like this, this scary thing to people that you're aging. And I never looked at it that way when I was little, I used to tell my grandma, I can't wait to get, you know, salt and pepper hair like you.
And everybody's like, well, I would dye my hair and I'm like, no, like I love my grandma. I can't wait to look like my grandma. Right. But people try to hide things. And of course I had, I was so happy when I got like two strands and then I cut my hair and it went away and never grew back. So hopefully, hopefully as I age, I get my grandma’s salt and pepper hair.
I would love that, you know you know, also as remembering her, she passed away, three years ago in April. So yeah, I would love that, you know, I've always embraced my body hair, which I had a conversation with someone is really a touchy subject for me because I'm Muslim and you really can't have body hair.
And so it's, so, you know, when I chose to have or keep my body here and my, and if my partners was Muslim, that was an issue. Right. Men and women, both can’t have body hair. And so and so that was a huge issue for me in advocating, especially in the sexual health space, where you have advocates, like, yeah, keep your hair.
And I'm like, you're not, again, you're not thinking culturally on how something. Cool because of religion.
I literally never heard of that before. And I know so many Muslim people.
Cleanliness and being clean cleanse for your partner, for your, so yeah, I definitely struggled with things, you know a lot. I get dinged every now and again on it, but yeah, but again, being in public health is like, is, is needed, right?
I am a person with a vagina. I don't want infections. I don't want any bacteria. When I'm in the community, I'm walking more. So now you have sweat and, you know materials rubbing against, and that's a barrier. I don't want to shave it.
You know, all these different things that you know, that we don't think about. Pubic hair does for us and shields us from.
Right, right. That's a really good point. That's so, it's so interesting too. When you think about the things that are going to change in the body as you age, that people don't generally discuss, because they're so cagey about aging, it's it can be very handy for other reasons, too, just as all muscles begin to relax, you know, not everything is going to stay in the same position it was when you were a teenager. So just something else to think about.
Where can people connect with your brand now? And when you have people come in doing the tutorials, you said you're not just bound to your state, are these something that people can sign up for online?
Yeah. So right now where, you know, obviously I'm trying to raise money so that we can create a website and have a more.
This have more of a reach for folks, but right now we're on Instagram, @preventionmeets fashion, and we have a link tree and all of our events all of our donation buttons, everything that we're doing is, is dumped into our link tree. Also you can find me on LinkedIn under my name, Nhakia T Outland MSW.
I believe that's how it is on here. Fun fact, I had to change it because I started getting messages from young, white teenagers, like on, on LinkedIn and come to find out, we laughed about it. I met the young man, but he had the same initials as me, cause mines used to be N T Outland and he had the same initials.
So all his friends were like DMing me and stuff. So it was really cool. We all got to meet. So now is NT Outland MSW. But yes, you can find me on LinkedIn. You can find my business on Instagram @preventionmeetsfashion.
And we look forward to connecting with folks and following us and being in community. I love being around people.
Thank you so much. If there was one thing that you could share with everyone and they would instantly understand it, internalize it and carry it with them for the rest of their lives, what would you want to tell people? What would you want people to know?
I think what I will want people to know is something I say all the time and that's, be yourself. There's nothing wrong with being yourself. Society tells us so much that we need to be and act like someone else, but what would it look like if we all just were ourselves? I say that all the time, you know, just be yourself. Personally with me, I always say, I am me and people be like, oh, that's problematic.
It's not because I am me. I bring me everywhere. I bring me to corporate meetings. I bring me to community meetings. I bring me to parent teacher meetings. I bring me to the bar. You're getting Nhakia. Like you don't get a different version. You're getting me. And that's easiest for me because I don't have to worry about code-switching or remembering what I said or didn't say here or whatever like that.
The only thing you might get as you heard on this call is you might get a different outfit. That's about it. You might get a different hair color or a different look. But other than that I'm just me.
I love that. Oh, that's beautiful.
Body Liberation for All Theme
Yeah. They might try to put you in a box, tell them that you don't accept when the world is tripping out tell them that you love yourself. Hey, Hey, smile on them live your life just like you like it is.
It’s your party negativity is not invited. For my queer folks, for my trans, people of color, let your voice be heard. Look in the mirror and say that it's time to put me first. You born to win. Head up high with confidence. This show is for everyone. So, I thank you for tuning in. Let's go.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit daliakinsey.substack.com -
Angela Ocampo is an intuitive guide, Curandera in training, ancestral wisdom keeper, healer, writer, and old soul. She is devoted to activating, facilitating, and opening portals for others to remember the truths and medicine that lie within us.
Through intuitive channeling, energy work, ritual, ancestral healing, Earth medicine, shadow love, and embodiment, Angela works to help others explore and reclaim the forgotten divine parts of the self, including peace, mysticism, ancestral gifts, power, light, and liberation. This episode we explore
* Sitting with the truth of combined colonized and colonizer ancestry
* Using ancestral remembrance to unearth the ancient wisdom that lies within you
* Using embodied grounding tools
* Connecting to the body as a source of power
Episode Resources
https://www.instagram.com/iamangelajo/
https://www.subscribepage.com/ancestralconnection
Decolonizing Wellness: A QTBIPOC-Centered Guide to Escape the Diet Trap, Heal Your Self-Image, and Achieve Body Liberation
Bali Retreat March 19-25 2023
I was raised in a super conservative, slightly fundamentalist Christian situation and over the last five years or so, it has brought me so much joy to pursue traditional spiritual practices that are more connected to my ancestry and that aren't directly connected to colonization and the transatlantic slave trade that said there's a lot of resistance in my part of the world anyway, to ancestor veneration or ancestor worship or ancestor remembrance practices.
I have found that while ancestor veneration exists all over the world, people's understanding of it really varies from culture to culture and from person to person, quite frankly, whether or not people actually believe their ancestors can hear them and are directly responding to them, whether people see their ancestors as intermediaries between people who are living and actual deities, or whether people think it's just something that you do that is deeply embedded in the culture and that it is good for you psychologically to remember the people that came before you, but no one can actually hear you.
So it certainly varies, but I personally I've gotten so much comfort and joy from exploring ancestor veneration that I'm thrilled to have Angela Ocampo with us today who's going to introduce us to ancestor remembrance practices.
Angela is coming to us from an indigenous Colombian perspective. And she is going to share with us, her understanding of ancestor remembrance practices. The value that it’s had in her life and the healing potential that it has. Angela is an intuitive and uses embodiment work and dancing to reconnect people to their own intuition and to their own truth. A lot of times when you feel like you don't know which way to go in life and what's up and what's down. The truth is you do know, but you no longer are feeling confident in acknowledging what you know intuitively and you're seeking ways to validate or prove your opinions rather than just feeling them and going with them. So one of Angela's gifts is helping people get around that feeling of stuckness.
So this is an excellent episode. Near the latter portion of the episode, Angela even shares a short meditation with us. So when you get to that section, you're going to want to make sure you're not driving. And that you're in a position where it's going to be safe to get a little relaxed and comfortable. And even though the meditation is brief, don't worry Angela's website is up now and you can visit https://www.angelaocampo.com/ and get a longer version of that meditation.
I also have a pretty exciting announcement. I will be hosting my first ever in-person retreat in Bali next March. So that'll be spring break for a lot of people. So hopefully you have that time off and you'll be able to join us as well.
There are a lot of exciting excursions planned its going to be focused on teaching you to relax your nervous system and to recover more quickly from any of the stressors you might encounter at home or at work. And for you to really develop recovery practices so that while you're feeling totally relapsed, Totally calm, totally at home in your body, on the trip. You don't have to worry that when you go back home when you fight your way through the airport, you'll completely lose all of that peace.
No, you'll be going home with recovery practices. So you can keep returning to that sense of calm so that your nervous system. can stay in the zone that it's meant to be in. We're not meant to constantly be keyed up, stressed out, clenching your teeth, waiting for the other shoe to drop. So it's going to be a wonderful week. It is very far away if you live on the east coast of the us, but I know it's going to be so beautiful and so refreshing. There'll be more details to come. But if you are super excited about the idea of actually hanging out in a wellness space, that's centered on people of color and queer folks and you want to go ahead and check it out and put your deposit in, just visit https://www.daliakinsey.com/retreat, and you'll see the details there.
Al right. Let's get on into today's episode.
Body Liberation for All Theme
Yeah. They might try to put you in a box, tell them that you don't accept when the world is tripping out tell them that you love yourself. Hey, Hey, smile on them live your life just like you like it is.
It’s your party negativity is not invited. For my queer folks, for my trans, people of color, let your voice be heard. Look in the mirror and say that it's time to put me first. You born to win. Head up high with confidence. This show is for everyone. So, I thank you for tuning in. Let's go.
Dalia: Hi, Angela. Thank you so much for coming on.
Angela: Hi, thank you so much for having me.
Dalia: When I got your email, I signed up for it and listened to the meditation for connecting to your ancestors. I immediately thought people needed to know about this and needed to hear about the work that you're doing.
Dalia: Let's start with, what are your marginalized identities and what does connecting to your ancestors mean for you?
Angela: Yeah. So I am, a cisgender woman. I'm heterosexual as well. I come from Columbia, I'm a woman of color. I also have indigenous ancestry. So for me, it has been kind of like a rediscovery journey to meet with my ancestors and connect with them. Because my indigenous ancestry was colonized, a lot of their culture was taken away from them.
Angela: And so a lot of the things weren't passed down to, to my family, to my lineage. So I think there was always a disconnect for me where I felt called, you know, to be on the earth and be outside. But I, I just didn't know why. And maybe like a little bit of stories from my family was passed down, but I, I just always felt called.
Angela: So when I found ancestral work, I just felt into my body. This is what I need. As, as someone who, you know, was on a spiritual journey anyway, I was always somewhat of a seeker I always wanna find out the truth and just go deep.
Angela: So ancestral healing has, has been able to connect me again with like my roots and where I come from. And it creates this sense of belonging. And it creates a sense of just peace in a way, because you are You are discovering who, who you really are, what is your blood?
Angela: And you're creating these pathways of remembrance. And that will not only help you, but it's gonna help the generations that come after you.
Dalia: Now that's fascinating because almost all of us are descendants of people who were colonized. When you look at how much of the planet was colonized it is mind boggling.
Dalia: As their children, we are both descendants of the colonized and the colonizer.
Dalia: Did you feel any sort of conflict around that when you connect to your ancestors, do you feel like you belong to them, but you don't feel called to connect to colonizer ancestors?
Angela: Yeah. That is a duality that I have been facing. Right. It's it's a confronting duality. And I think I pushed it away for so long. I only wanted to see, yeah, yeah I have indigenous blood, but then that was like the other side, like I needed to face it because that is part of me.
Angela: And so I do feel like before I felt more resistance to it and I feel that for, for some reason I have a really strong connection to my indigenous ancestry more it's probably because the stories that I know are mostly from that side of the family. And I feel that the more that I connect with that side I'm opening up the pathway of connecting to that other side, who is the colonizer.
Angela: And I feel there's a sense of kind of like reclamation. And I do feel It's kind of confronting because the colonizer had, you know, they didn't have great intentions, you know, there was violence and there was just a lot of harmful things to, to our colonized ancestors.
Angela: So I think approaching it in a way where it's it's intentionally saying to, to the energies, like, I wanna connect with the ancestors who have divine intentions and that in a way already sets like the boundaries and knowing that, you know, when people cross over, they. They tend to, you know, like it's, it's a clearing, right?
Angela: That they have like kind of like the karma falls down and, and they, they could become pure, but at the same time, some people don't like some, some, some souls, you know, get stuck or so I feel that it's important, even when. When I do get to that point about my social remembrance journey to connect with the colonizer side, to know that I have protection over my own energy.
Angela: I have protection of what I live in and I can choose to connect to the good side of them because I like to believe that there was some good in them regardless, and, you know, they did horrible things, but they're still part of me. So I have to like come to terms with that as well.
Dalia: I like that framing and that you can set a boundary for what type of energy you want to draw in and which ancestors you want to hear from.
Angela: I think that that's helpful to know too, because I think ancestral healing is sometimes it, it can be scary for people because of the fact that a lot of us have ancestors who weren't, you know, the most pure people on the earth, right? Like they, they probably did a lot of harmful things and and so it can, it can bring up a lot.
Angela: And that's why I'm also a huge advocate while doing ancestral healing work to have some sort of tools that ground you and that will help, you know, clear any energy that is moving through you because a lot of it can be confronting, especially if you're just new to it. And so that's like, tools basically like dancing I love dancing and it connects me to my ancestors as well.
Angela: And so anything that, that allows you to release anything that may come up. I believe our bodies hold so much wisdom and our bodies have our ancestors' blood. So I really love working with the body to, to come to a neutralized point of when you're doing that ancestral work, cuz a lot can come up for sure.
Dalia: Would you say that the greatest tool that you have for connecting to your ancestors is your own body?
Angela: I actually, I do believe that because I like to believe that I'm very in tune with my body and I think everyone can get there. I think society kind of programs us into thinking like, oh, we're so disconnected or our intuition is, is wrong.
Angela: But really like, as, as if you're being, when you came to this earth, like you. As a baby, like you, you knew what your body needed and that's why you like cried and you were hungry. Ever since we come out out of the womb, like we are very in tune with our bodies and it's just that programming and conditioning that disconnects us.
Angela: The oppressor wants us to be disconnected from our bodies because that is how we lose our power. So I believe getting into our bodies and using it as a tool for ancestor work is a way that we take our power back. And I feel that also meditation, like going through deep meditations allows me to use my body to kind of just like spark that, that like connection.
Angela: Like I mentioned, it brings, it has so much wisdom sometimes. I like I'm in, I'm in nature or like, I listen to a song and like, I feel it, and my body, like this deep, like a tingling sensation. It's, it's not something that my mind can really like give a meaning to, but it's like my body knows first.
Angela: Right. I feel too that because our soul is, is connected to our body. It it's like holding our body. The body is one of the, the greatest allies, because it speaks directly. Like it doesn't allow the mind, the mind that allows, that sometimes tells us that we're overthinking it, or, you know, it puts like doubts in our head.
Angela: I think the body comes from a place of pureness.
Dalia: Hmm. I love that framing because my first thought was, well, how do you know that you can connect to your ancestors? So my first reaction was how do we process this intellectually? How do we know that we can even do this? And that ancestral work is something that we can all access. Because when you don't have access to a lot of the traditions that your ancestors practiced.
Dalia: I know, sometimes you feel anxiety around, like, am I doing this correctly? Can I recreate traditions that are lost? But what is your take on that? I would imagine that if the body is the guide, then there are many ways, even if you don't have any way to know the exact traditions that were used, that there are many ways to tap into this power.
Angela: Correct. Yeah. I, I believe our intuition is our biggest guide. And the body, like the body, what it feels the sensations. So for anyone that doesn't have access to, you know, who your ancestors were, I say, the first thing is like, what do you feel inclined to? That is the first thing that you wanna attempt into. A lot of us have, we love things that don't have.
Angela: Maybe we just don't realize like why we love what that certain thing, but we just do. So like tapping into that because we we hold so much wisdom that we might not be conscious of, but sometimes we're just drawn to things. So I would say for those people that don't have accesses to really lean into what you're drawn to, what calls your attention and really experiment, right?
Angela: If, if you know, for example, if you know, you, you have ancestry from Africa, start listening to some African music. What are you called to, there's just so much music that you, that you can tap into and there's different kinds. So like start tapping into that. Maybe seek out some recipes and start seeing like what you really love, what you don't really like.
Angela: And, and maybe like seeing maybe if you really love a dish or a certain song, like start researching the roots, where does it come from? Who are the artists that created it? So I think we can really use our intuition to see what we're naturally drawn to, because again, our ancestors are in our blood they're even if we're not conscious of it, they're guiding us and they're speaking through us.
Angela: Even if it seems like we're, we're not, we're not in communication with them. They're always trying to, to tap in. So that's what I would recommend to start like diving in for sure.
Dalia: I love that- so approachable. When you say the ancestors always speaking through us and guiding us, does that communication go in both directions?
Dalia: Do you think it matters how you live your life as far as resolving previous hurts that maybe your ancestors weren't able to resolve in their lifetime?
Angela: Yeah. So yes, I think it is, it is both ways. I actually believe in calling them in intentionally and that is how I started on my journey I did a meditation that kind of like opened up the portal for me.
Angela: And from there, I just started to call them in and speak to them, pray to them. It's like another relationship, it has to be nourished. It takes some work to, to, to let them in, like you have free will as a human. So they're not going to just be like, Hey, you know, and barge in on you.
Angela: You have to open up that door and you have to open up the lines of communication. If you wanna have consciously a relationship with them. And so in terms of like healing, the wounding, I think it's, it's gonna be definitely a journey and it's not gonna happen overnight.
Angela: I think it's, it's something that if you feel called to ancestral work, this is definitely like you were chosen by your ancestors because they're. There are things and, and resources that they didn't have in order to heal. And now, as a, as a generation that has a ton of resources, you know, we have resources to therapy to just reeducation.
Angela: I feel Google is just a resource on its own. We're also coming into this time of, of awakening just as a society, as a collective and as a wanting to also liberation, especially for BIPOC people. And so I think. That's why so many people have been wanting to connect with the ancestors because they know that they will give them the strength and the wisdom and the guidance that they need to heal those woundings that have permeated so much of their familial lineage. I think that's why we crave that connection, because again, it gives us a sense of belonging. It gives us a sense of strength and a wisdom that, that maybe, you know, if, if you're just starting your spiritual journey or like your reclamation journey maybe you haven't found it anywhere else.
Angela: And I feel like ancestors give you just. Very grounded and, you know, they come from the earth, right? So they give you a very grounded wisdom and strength. And so I really believe yeah, that, that they support you on healing, that those booming, and we can definitely call them in and call their energy in it simply starts by opening yourself up to that, to that relationship.
Dalia: Have you learned any of the names of your ancestors? Did you do a combination of trying to call them in and accessing information you could find about them?
Angela: Yeah, so I actually have a spirit guide. Spirit guides for me are just a team of souls of spiritual souls that, that protect me and support me.
Angela: And so we all have this, we all have a team. And so sometimes we have ancestors who are also our spirit guides. So I have one her name is Esmeralda and she is my ancestor from a very long time ago. So from the indigenous lineage and I met her through going through a meditation and wanting to meet other people in my spirit team.
Angela: I had already met a few of them, but I knew I had a feeling that there was an, a sister there and I really wanted to tap into her energy. So, so that's how I met her. And other than that I've been doing also research. I actually just found out where my grandma from my mom's side was born was the land that she was born on.
Angela: And she's the one that carries that, that indigenous blood. And so I was doing some research on the plants or just like anything, anything that I could find to connect me. So I'm actively trying to find more names. Sometimes I do get like, when I'm doing deep meditations or just like breathwork, breathwork is really great too in taking you really deep.
Angela: Sometimes I don't even go intentionally trying to meet with my ancestors. They just find a way to, to enter because I have this open portal for them and they're welcome to come into my energy. So, so I have encounters with them like that.
Angela: And I've, I've been able to get some, I can't remember now the exact name, but I, they do have very tribal indigenous names. And so it's been really healing and just also very empowering and, and beautiful to, to have those experiences with them and, and kind of like see a part of myself reflected in them.
Dalia: So that brings up a couple of questions for me. I had wondered how do you get into that deeper meditative state? When you say breath work, what does that mean?
Angela: Yeah, so breathwork is is just, it's another modality. There are breathwork practitioners. So it's it's I do it like that. Breathwork where you're taking three breaths. So you take the first breath taking an air from your belly, then your chest, and out through your mouth. And it takes you into a very meditative state.
Angela: You just kind of get out of your head. And so these processes are usually around 30 to an hour. And so. There are breathwork tracks online that you can try. I found some on YouTube and I also have friends who are breathwork practitioners who, who use this service as a healing modality. So I recommend that because it's really powerful and using our breath to really get into our bodies and get out of our heads. And it's also a very healing modality for also any trauma that you have experienced. So I really I'm a fan of breath work and in terms of another modality that I really love any deep meditation. I find them on YouTube.
Angela: For people that are maybe just starting out, maybe a guided meditation would be the best way to just, you know, maybe not, not one with a lot of words or just something to get you in the deep like relaxed state. And I think before you go to bed is like one of the best things, maybe like creating like a little nighttime routine. Yeah, maybe sitting at the edge of your bed before going to sleep. I think the nighttime is like a really good time to, to take advantage of just like your body is already getting into a meditative state because sleep is a meditative state.
Angela: And even saying like a prayer. Call in your ancestors before you go to sleep and invite them into your dreams. Cause they can come into your dreams and kind of just do the work for you. You don't really have to do a meditation. Those are three ways that I would recommend to, to go into a deep meditative state.
Dalia: When you're looking online for meditations how can you tell the difference between one that will take you deeper and maybe something that's more superficial, or what is the opposite of a deep meditation?
Angela: Yeah, I personally don't like the ones that are short, the ones that are just like five to 10 min 10 minutes, because I feel like I need more time to, to really dive in.
Angela: So the, the longer ones that have they usually have the music like singing bowls . So I think those, so I would look for ones that are around.
Angela: I would say at least 25 minutes. Because that really allows you to give your mind time, to really soak, soak it and, and, and sit into that meditation. And so that's what I look for. And I look for ones that. I don't have so much of words, so many. I, I like to kind of go on my own and I like to create my own imagery in my head.
Angela: But if people do like the guided ones, if that works better for you, then, then that's something that you can do. Just anything that maybe takes you into a relaxed day that creates some peace would be helpful.
Dalia: Can you describe your concept of the afterlife? when you are calling the ancestors, what do you imagine they're doing? Are they not going to move on to some other place or some other thing? Where are they?
Angela: Yeah. So that's a really great question. So I think when people move on into the afterlife, they become an infinite kind of energy. So they can really be everywhere at once. So I believe that they, they come into the energy that when they are invited into the energy. Once I really started to, okay, I'm going through a spiritual awakening and I'm really gonna dedicate myself to it.
Angela: And once I made that decision, that's when. All the ancestral healing just like, started to, like, I started seeing it's just coming everywhere. And so it was signs, right? I think as soon as I opened myself up to they started to enter my energy space.
Angela: When I call them in, because I know that they can be everywhere at once. They're just kind of like there, but when they, when I call on them I can feel them. Because I am so tuned into that. That's how I view what happens to a soul after and afterlife.
Angela: It's about that opening being open to, to know that their energy is infinite. Hmm.
Dalia: Now the people that are around you or the spirits that are around you that are a team that guide you, are they all blood relatives or can you have no children while you're here and end up as an ancestor.
Angela: For me, it's it's mostly my family, but I, I tend to connect mostly with my. The ancestors that lived a very long time ago. So the indigenous ancestors I can connect with with the people that let's say my grandma from one generation ago, but I, I feel that. The I'm for some reason, I feel very connected to the indigenous part and that's probably cuz something in me wants to be activated through that.
Angela: My work usually involves the family, like the, the blood relatives, but I have heard other. Other people that do ancestral work and ancestral remembrance that also consider the people that steward their land like ancestors or just people that were close to the family. So it doesn't necessarily have to be blood relatives.
Angela: I do know other people that are considered ancestors that are exactly related to blood. So I think it's really anyone that you, that you, that you or your family, or just anything that, that was surrounding that you felt very connected to. I think a big thing is also like the ancestors of the land.
Angela: I would definitely consider, you know, the people that steward the land that I stand on as ancestors, because they took care of our land and they, we have this place to live because of them.
Angela: And so I think it's like an emotional connection there. I think ancestors don't have to be necessarily blood it just needs to have a connection. Like what connection do you have there with them?
Dalia: You mentioned that you do readings for people. Can you describe your gifts to us more and how you use them to help other people and to guide you in how you live your life?
Angela: Yeah, so I connect with the energies around you. So I can connect to your spirit guides. I can connect to your ancestor lineage or through mediumship or an a past ancestor. I can also connect to your highest self, your soul. I use this as a way to kind of gain clarity for people so people come to me when they're not sure, they're kind of like a little bit in their heads and, and they feel kind of disconnected, they're not sure if they're the right path or how to really embody more of their soul.
Angela: I use my gifts to tap into their spiritual team and to give them the guidance right from a pure place, from a place that knows them all and, and supports them in everything. A lot of the time the, the spirits are funny because, or just like the spiritual realm, because they tend to like lead you back to yourself.
Angela: It's kind of like, you know the answer and you have the answers inside of you, but they do try to, you know, give you the, the clarity and the direction that you need to find a way. So I feel like the, that journey, they always seem to have this saying where it's kind of like you are right here right now for purpose and this obstacle, this challenge that you're going through right now it's taking you to where you need to go. It's kind of like the journey is needed here so you can get to your highest self , to your true self and to your most pure self, to your most whole self.
Angela: So that is what I do in my readings. I go with the intention of the client, what they need if they're going through a transition or if they really wanna reconnect with, you know, their lineage. So we go in there and we get as much information as we can to really give them that clarity and also the comfort in knowing that they are supported.
Angela: And they're actually a pure being that has so much guidance available to them.
Dalia: That sounds incredible. I know today you came prepared to offer us a little entry point into a meditation or having an ancestral remembrance practice. Can you introduce us to that?
Angela: Yes. Yeah. Okay. Perfect. Okay. So. Let's dive right in.
Angela: So if you can I invite you to close your eyes. If you can't close your eyes, just simply focus on a certain spot around you. And I want you to invite you to go ahead and take three deep breaths.
Angela: And when you exhale, I want you to make a sigh or make an audible sound.
Angela: Alright now, I'm gonna invite you to go ahead and just move your body the way that it wants to just give yourself a little wiggle. Maybe you have some tight spots. Maybe you've just been sitting after a long day. Just give yourself some movement so we can really get into the body and allow spirit to move through us.
Angela: When you're ready, I want you to go ahead and just place your hands, wherever it feels right. So maybe, maybe on your heart, maybe on your stomach, maybe on your legs, whatever makes you feel most comfortable. And I want you to go ahead and imagine a white light coming in from the crown of your head all the way down to your toes.
Angela: So you're gonna imagine it slowly cleansing your entire body. So going through your throat, going through your heart, through your stomach, through your legs, and exiting out through your toes.
Angela: And from here, I want you to imagine a yellow golden light right in the middle of your eyebrows. And this is where your third eye lies, this is where your intuition lies, and you're gonna notice this light just permeating your entire forehead, then you're gonna see it extend out into your body. And now to the surroundings, and you are gonna see it extend out as far as you can imagine out into the earth.
Angela: And as you see it connect to the earth, you're going to thank the earth just internally for her healing presence for supporting you and supporting your lineage and activating this connection that we're about to embark on.
Angela: And now that the earth has reflected this beautiful energy back into your aura. You're gonna see this light coming back into your surroundings, coming back into your body, coming back into your aura, and coming back into your third eye.
Angela: And now I'm gonna invite you to do a prayer, to call in your ancestors. So you can repeat this prayer internally or externally. Do whatever feels right. Whatever feels right is perfect. So we're gonna go ahead and say, I invite in my ancestors right now. I call in their presence. I call in their guidance. I call in their strength.
Angela: I call in their wisdom.
Angela: I invite the ancestors with divine intention to make contact with me in the way that they know they can. I open up myself to receive their wisdom and their guidance and any moment that is available to me.
Angela: I trust that I am supported and guided by my ancestors, who long to make connection with me. And I open myself up to receive their magic.
Angela: And just let that permeate every inch of your being.
Angela: And now I invite you to simply say, thank you. Thank you for this moment. Thank you to your ancestors for bringing you here. In this moment for giving you what you have for giving you the wisdom and the strength to make it to where you are today.
Angela: And now from here, you can trust that this relationship with your ancestors is officially opened. As you have opened up your heart to them and to receive their guidance.
Angela: Alright. So we're gonna just go ahead and quickly close by taking another, just three deep breaths. And remember to just make a sound to just let out any energy that might have moved through when you exhale.
Angela: Alright. When you're ready, just go ahead and open your eyes and come back into the space.
Dalia: Thank you so much for that.
Angela: You're welcome.
Dalia: You mentioned you're welcomed that dancing could be a way to ground yourself. Can you give us a couple of other things that can ground you?
Angela: Yes. So I do have some tools in my toolbox, so I really love just simply breathing. Like we just did the breathing, filling up your belly and bringing it up to your chest and, and exhaling with a sound has been so grounding for me, especially because I noticed that throughout the day my breath is very shallow.
Angela: And so really taking the moment to just let the breath fill my body up with life is one, one beautiful way to ground yourself. And especially if you find yourself in triggering moments breath bringing your attention back into the breath is, is really grounding. Another thing for me, I, I also recommend music, music, especially something that, that is tied to your ancestral lineage.
Angela: So anything that, that kind of just reminds you of home is, is something that I love to. To just, you know, put everything away and just kind of like sit in my bed and listen to music. I feel so grounded in that as well as nature. Nature is a natural resource. If you don't live in the city, you can just go outside and just be like on the grass. Taking off your shoes and putting your your feet on the earth is, is incredibly healing because you're taking in that the Earth's frequency. So those are like my few favorite ways. I also obviously like meditation as well, and just sitting in silence and noticing, you know, I think people have the misconception that meditation is about clearing your mind. I really just like to, to use it as a way for self self-awareness when I'm just doing meditations by myself. because it just allows me to drop in. Okay. Like what's in my head right now.
Angela: How can I bring myself back to center? And it just kind of creates this again, this relationship with myself. So those are like a few of my tools to get grounded.
Dalia: that is so helpful. Where can people find you if they'd like to learn more or wanna know how to work with you? Yeah, so I hang out a lot on Instagram.
Angela: My Instagram handle is @iamangelajo. It stands for my middle name. And then I am working on my website. I don't ha I don't have website currently, but on Instagram you can find any links and, and you can find out how to work me, work with me there.
Dalia: Perfect. Thank you so much.
Angela: Thank you so much for having me.
I hope you enjoyed that and that you will take out the time to connect with Angela's work. If you are still on Instagram, check her out there, or you can just jump on her mailing list, visit her site and grab that meditation. I loved the invitation to the ancestors to connect and that she included that prayer for us really resonated to me and felt really helpful. You would think when it comes to spiritual things, we wouldn't be worried about doing things the right way all the time or thinking that things need to be prescribed. But a lot of the religious traditions that we have grown up with are very prescribed and they don't feel accessible. And there was generally another person there to tell you precisely how things should go or someone who serves as an intermediary. So it is a little bit of a reach sometimes when you start exploring spiritual practices that are more independent.
And that actually allow you more freedom. Sometimes you get freedom at you don't know exactly what to do with it. So I really appreciate that she modeled that for us. And that she offered such a simple entry point to starting to explore ancestor remembrance practices. If that's something we feel called to do.
Remember if you haven't already picked up your copy of Decolonizing Wellness it is now available all over the place. The book is full of helpful exercises that you can do to feel more present in your body to feel more connected to your intuition and to your whole self, instead of just little parts of ourselves that have been deemed worthy or acceptable by the world around us.
If you are listening to this episode on a podcast player, and you're not listening to on Substack. I highly encourage you to follow the show on https://daliakinsey.substack.com/ because, in addition to getting this episode every month, there is a blog post on the 15th of every month. And for people who are supporting members of the show, there's also a bonus.
As always, thank you so much for being here. I'll see you next time.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit daliakinsey.substack.com -
Are you a leader of color who wants to lead and empower in revolutionary ways? Then you need Gieselle Allen...Gieselle works with revolutionary leaders of color to support them in expanding their businesses, team, and leadership, while also ensuring their needs are met in the process. In her mindset-first approach, she combines mindset, trauma healing and intuition to help her clients create and expand their businesses and revolutionary leadership practices.
If discovering the confidence that comes with: decolonizing your thoughts, owning your identity, and building a thriving life that reflects your values and resonates with your core sounds like a vibe, you don’t want to miss this conversation. This episode we explore
* What having a revolutionary business entails
* The role that safety plays in learning and healing
* Getting comfortable with having more than enough
* Overcoming fear to answer a call to liberatory work
Episode Resources
https://www.instagram.com/gieselleallen/
https://gieselleallen.com/
Decolonizing Wellness: A QTBIPOC-Centered Guide to Escape the Diet Trap, Heal Your Self-Image, and Achieve Body Liberation
Hello and welcome to another episode of Body Liberation for All. I am so excited about today's guest. If you are a leader of color who wants to lead and empower in revolutionary ways you need Gieselle Allen, I was in Gieselle’s coaching program now almost a year plus ago. And the changes that I experienced in the program were enough to sell me on it, but the way it served as a catalyst for growth throughout 2020 was just beyond amazing. Gieselle works with revolutionary leaders of color to support them in expanding their businesses, their teams, and their leadership while making sure all of their needs are met in the process. And this is something that unfortunately, a lot of us have never had the opportunity to experience.
So, the ways in which your socialization has affected the way you approach business, the way you approach speaking up, the way you approach really leaning into your identities and feeling safe is something that a lot of us haven't visited before.
Having a coach that will specifically address the ways in which your socialization as a person of color has set up barriers that you can step around and circumvent, once you're aware of them its absolutely life changing because this is not the type of instruction or care we're used to.
Sometimes it's hard to even know how much of a difference it would make to have somebody tailor an educational program, a coaching program specifically to you and to address the challenges the other people for so long have been pretending don't even exist.
I love this conversation with Gieselle. Let's jump right in
Body Liberation for All Theme
Yeah. They might try to put you in a box, tell them that you don't accept when the world is tripping out tell them that you love yourself. Hey, Hey, smile on them live your life just like you like it is.
It’s your party negativity is not invited. For my queer folks, for my trans, people of color, let your voice be heard. Look in the mirror and say that it's time to put me first. You born to win. Head up high with confidence. This show is for everyone. So, I thank you for tuning in. Let's go.
Dalia: I am so excited to have you here.
Gieselle: I'm really excited to be here. I'm thrilled. I've been like, I was, I've been like eyeing your podcast for forever. And I was like, when am I, when am I gonna be on this podcast? Like a baby. So, I'm really glad it's working out and that we're here.
Dalia: This is awesome.
Dalia: I'm glad you asked because as you know, for people who haven't already listened to the episode that I was on with someone else who was in the same coaching group as me, when I worked with you, Gieselle basically is out here changing lives and liberating people in ways that you don't even see it coming.
Dalia: So, you think you're just stuck in your business and really, that's not the problem. The problem is mindset, and how we've been socialized is behind it. But I'd gotten a ton of coaching from containers that weren't made for me. and they really didn't get to the root of my problem. So maybe they got to the root of like Becky's issue and like, oh, why don't I feel comfortable?
Dalia: Cuz my Lululemon’s are too tight or whatever, and worked on her visibility problems, but didn't get to me being socialized to not take up space don't challenge authority, and don't you dare do anything culturally distinct because we will. Beat you for it, we'll punish you for it. So being in your container was life changing.
Dalia: And Sarah came on the show and discussed how much the changes ripple out as time goes by. But even though I feel like I've grown so much since the container, I still would've thought Gieselle doesn't wanna be on my podcast. like Gieselle's too big, and too busy, doesn't have time.
Gieselle: Well, you know, what's funny is I feel like I'm just moving into a season where I have the capacity to like be out and, in the world, and on people's podcasts there, it's not about me being too big.
Gieselle: I'm still really small and like the grand scheme, I'm small, I'm intimate. I'm exclusive.
Dalia: I love that. Take on it. Yes.
Gieselle: Yeah. I'm exclusive. I, and I wanna be exclusive, like, that's my whole thing. I'm the kind of person where like when white folks follow me on Instagram, I delete 'em and like, I'm not gonna respond to your you' like random comment on my stuff.
Gieselle: Like, I'm not gonna engage with you if you're white, like I'm very much like I'm for I'm for who I'm for. And if it's not you then like, I'm cool with it. There's enough people in the world. And I don't need that many to be in my community.
Dalia: Wow. I mean, even that, how, what had to change for you to be able to get to a point that it feels safe to say that and that you don't feel compelled to explain this doesn't mean I don't like white people. It means my business is not for white people.
Gieselle: Yeah. That's a really great question. What had to change? I think what had to change is that scarcity that we've all been sold and the devaluing of folks of color that we've all been sold. Right. Where people, you know, I remember when I was gonna make this change and like a big thing I was scared of and a big thing that like, people still, mostly just my dad at this point, but like people still say to me is like, oh, like how much more money could you make if you are working with white folks?
Like we're missing out on those white dollars?
Dalia: Those spend better apparently
Gieselle: Apparently, but here's the truth about like, you know, focusing exclusively on BIPOC folks in business and in anything is that BIPOC folks and I know this because I used to work in TV back in the day. And so like, I understand how, I understand all the things we are, the most loyal people ever.
We support our people like tirelessly, especially Black folks. Like it's like what, you're a Black person, you're doing a thing I'm gonna, I'm gonna work with you. You know? And so, recognizing that, recognizing how loyal we are recognizing that we are the people of global majority in this world, there are more than enough of us was really huge for me.
But I think, I think the thing that it really took for me transparently was recognizing that I'm enough and that like, I was the right kind of Black person to do this work because that was honestly my biggest hurdle. And I think that's the biggest hurdle for a lot of us in being in communities of color, is that we've, we ex exclude we've like inherited these toxic traits in our communities that make us, that make us exclude each other.
Gieselle: And we've systemically been ripped from each other through the prison system, slavery, we can even talk about like immigration and the American dream. Like we've been ripped apart from our communities and culture. And so, it doesn't feel, we don't feel like we fit in with them because we're all kind of this like weird hodgepodge.
Gieselle: But recognizing long story short that I was enough and that my experience was enough, and that people resonated with it that's really what made the big change for me.
Dalia: That is something that I think is a uniquely Black American experience and I could be wrong, but I really haven't heard that message from other folks of color because they did not necessarily experience as much of the deliberate breakdown of community because it's been targeted.
Dalia: It's been targeted and not just during the transatlantic slave trade, but it's also been targeted in more recent history, the deliberate creating of more divisions in the Black community. Yeah. So, we don't even recognize each other sometimes. And we can't seem to be cohesive or find common ground even because I've even lately been watching a TikTok’s where there's this running trend where people are explaining when white folks misunderstand them, they take something literally that's from like African American vernacular English, but I know a fraction of them.
Dalia: And in the past that would've made me feel, oh, this is more proof, I'm not Black enough. I'm not the right kind of Black. Yeah. And because I'm in a multi, well was from a multiethnic household, even though both of my parents are very Black and very into their Blackness, their Blackness was in no way, similar
Dalia: And so, we came out a hodgepodge of their two cultures. And so, I may know random Caribbean expressions that no one's ever heard. And I think, oh, everybody says that. And then not understand. I only learned, oh, you really put your foot in it like two years ago. And I've slowly been using it. And seeing if people can tell, like, I'm waiting to see if I did it right.
Dalia: But it really is a thing when you feel like. especially in public school, I was told, again and again, that I wasn't talking Black enough. Yep. Totally. And that, because I like to go to the library and inline skate that I was enjoying activities that weren't Black enough.
Gieselle: and I, I, I completely had that experience growing up.
Gieselle: One thing I wanna name for the like non-Black POCs that are listening, just to honor them, is that this experience definitely isn't unique to us as Black folks. Like I've seen this so many times in Latin culture, my husband is from Ecuador, but he's white. And so, there's like this strange, but like, it's like whenever he goes to Latin events, he's always like, it's just this big, like contest of, do you speak Spanish?
Gieselle: Do you speak Spanish well enough? Do you have an accent with your Spanish? Like how long did you live in whatever country you were from? Oh, you're you were born in America. Like there's all this thing. Asian folks have the same thing. South Asian folks. So, I was like, it's, it's all of us in different ways.
Gieselle: The systems that ripped us apart are completely different though, you know?
Dalia: Yeah. That makes me really sad because I wanted to believe that other people -somebody's, you know, feeling a sense of belonging in this country that won't allow them to experience a sense of belonging. I was hoping that somebody was out there saying I know exactly who I am and where I fit in. And, but yeah, I definitely have seen that with like how much do you speak the language, and do you have an accent?
Gieselle: And how much like how much from your culture do you practice in your daily life? I think that comes up a lot in like non-Black spaces. Cause I think like Black culture, at least as a Black American, like our culture is just. It's pervasive. It's in there. Like you practice it. It's also what creates all other culture in America.
Dalia: Absolutely.
Gieselle: But yeah, there's so many elements to do I belong as a person of color. Do I belong in this space? Am I enough? And then like, don't even like, then we, we can't even bring like the intersection of like queerness into it. Right. Cause it's like, yeah, well I'm like Blackity, Black, Black, but I'm queer.
And that does not roll either in a lot of families and not a lot of places.
Dalia: It feels like in the whole country, like not at all. I already had issues with the transphobia and the homophobia and the Black community being another one of the things that would sometimes feel like a reason why I'm not Black enough or the right kind of Black, the Black that people are looking for.
And then when I won't even dignify this man by saying his name, but things that happen in the news cycle, remind me of how pervasive it is. Even when I've started to really make an effort to curate my bubble, I'll find that people who say they accept my queerness and accept me and they have queer family will, when someone, you know, is being super transphobic and saying that somehow Black issues, trans issues are two separate things forgetting that there are plenty of people living at both intersections.
Dalia: And then they'll explain how well I do kind of think, you know, it's tearing down the community or I think people really are choosing, and they're just seeing it too much and it's exposing them. And these are people that I vetted already. So, they said the right things, but then when they get triggered by something that really is part of the Black American cultural experience then they go back to what they were trained to believe their entire childhood, that queerness is deviant. And it's a tool that the man is using to tear us all down. and that you're not born this way and you can somehow suppress it and you're better than everyone else.
Dalia: If you're straight, basically and you're even better than, you're better than everybody if you're a straight cis Black man and everyone else's needs need to rank below that. And if you do anything to even challenge the authority of a straight Black man, well, of course you got hit of course you maybe got murdered because you're not allowed, and even though no one's gonna say out loud, well, they deserve to be murdered. The messaging is to stop questioning straight Black men.
Gieselle: and this is, this is, this is like so many layers to what you just said. But I wanna name, like, especially when we're talking about these people that you vetted and that you're like, I like did all the things I was supposed to do, and you're still showing this like deep transphobia and queerphobia.
Gieselle: Right. This is why it's so important for spaces where like, it's just folks who share our marginalized identities, whether it's spaces for BIPOC folks, whether it's spaces for queer BIPOC folks for trans BIPOC folks. Right. That's so important because. That that's why like, even in the most well-meaning of spaces that s**t goes down because people are deeply committed to upholding their privileges, you know, and especially, I mean, I love us as BIPOC folks, but I feel like BIPOC folks are really, but, you know, I will say it's not just BIPOC folks.
Gieselle: Cause this is like white women are the pinnacle of this, where it's like, you hold one marginalized identity and you hold onto that with everything you've got and you refuse to acknowledge like, hey, I've got all these other privileges. So, I wanted to name that piece. There was something else that was coming up for me, but I can't even remember.
Gieselle: So, I'm just gonna let it go. It wasn't that important.
Dalia: that, that is really important to point out. I think, cuz I think when people have a hard time understanding why you would just delete a white person when they follow you, is that because people's brainwash is so deeply ingrained you may intend to be a safe space, but you can't promise that to anybody.
Dalia: And even you can't, when you are holding the same identity, someone else, you may bring your toxic internalized s**t to the table. Yep. But it's so much easier to work on that when that's the intention or you've set the tone for the space and I really appreciate you putting in the work to keep the container safe, which I find a lot of people, they have all these good intentions for inclusion, but they.
Dalia: Either don't have the capacity, the understanding or the desire to keep the container safe. It's not safe to challenge people when it's unsafe and they don't put anything in place to make it less scary or traumatic for you to express a concern. It's like, there was no thought that went into things are going to go sideways because this is what happens when you get more than one person in a room.
Gieselle: well, and this is something that we talked about. We recently talked about a lot in Revolutionary Rising, which is my program for BIPOC folks. Because like community, we had this moment where a lot of people were joining for community specifically. Like I think when you joined the program and most of y'all joined to work with me, and we had a moment where everyone was joining for community, but when, but like the problem with that, not the problem, but like the challenge with that is that as BIPOC folks, like we've talked about, we've been ripped from, we've been ripped from community.
Gieselle: We've all been othered within our communities, unless we fit the very narrow stereotype of what we are supposed to be. And what is the right kind of Black person, Asian person, south Asian person, Latina person. Right. And so, we come into these spaces and even though it's like, okay, I wanted this community.
Gieselle: I wanna believe that these BIPOC folks have me. I'm completely shut down. I'm completely triggered and I'm actually completely unable to be here. And so, something that we are in conversation around in the community is difficulty and how like, that's, it's the thing that I feel like we all are trained to avoid in community, but it's actually the thing that brings us together and really creates community is knowing that, like you said, I can show up, I can say this s**t isn’t working for me.
Gieselle: That was fucked up, like all of the things and knowing that someone's gonna hold that and see it and say, okay, let's, let's make this right for you. But it's hard. It's really, really hard, especially when none of us like. Literally, none of us on this earth, I think, or very few people on this earth really know and know how to do community and have a wide capacity to do community in the way that it was intentionally meant to be.
Dalia: And then it makes me wonder too, are some of our concepts of scaling and like how a business must grow incompatible with community. Because I wondered, I noticed and some other people noticed too, the bigger the group got, the less people were engaging. And I didn't know if it was because they didn't feel safe anymore because it felt like you're in a room, but people keep coming in.
Dalia: And it has nothing to do with who those people are. It's just that they weren't there a few minutes ago. You're just like, whoa, who's that? You know, it's like this natural response or is it that people think once we get to a certain size, well, someone else will comment on it. And I'll just pop in when I need something.
Dalia:
Gieselle: I think it's so many things. It's so, so many things, and it's been a big learning and process for us over this past year. Me and Olivia, our lead coach, but what I think it really comes down to is safety. Like, even like in the way you said it, right? It's like, oh, there's a new person. It's like your nervous
Gieselle: system's like, oh no, who's there? What is this? And I didn't think of that. And the person who taught me this strategy was spoiler alert, white and not creating safe spaces. Right? Like really just creating. I don't know, spaces, you know, for lack of better words. And so, we had to really look at and reevaluate.
Gieselle: Okay. How are we bringing people in? Who are we bringing in? And how can we bring new people into this space without it feeling like horrible on folks, nervous system and making it even more difficult for them to step into this space? Because the reality is that even if it was like six people for a year, it would still be a hurdle for most people to show up in that space and feel safe.
Gieselle: At least for the first like three to six months, because you just need time to build community. And I think that's one of the hard things, like when you are running a business, when you are building communities do you, you know, something that we've been really thinking about is the word community, and there's so many things you need.
Gieselle: And one of the things is, is time is like, do you actually have the time to build the community in the well-intentioned way that you want to? I don't know. So yeah, long story short, we've been really thinking about that for ourselves in scaling and recognizing that. Yeah, it's harder. My, I was just talking to my coach about this yesterday.
Gieselle: And I still want to find the way to make it bigger. Not for money's sake, but because I genuinely want there to be a beautiful thriving community of women and femmes of color interacting with each other. Right. And supporting each other and loving up on each other, but we've gotta find the way.
Gieselle: And that's just the reality of it is that like, it's gonna be a process to find our way there, but I believe we can get there. And I also have to expand my capacity to hold that as well.
Dalia: That makes sense. It's really interesting to see you open, not totally openly, but pretty openly growing even after you've reached a point of success that so many of us are just trying to get to so what has that been like?
Dalia: Understanding that it's never over. And what, let you know that you had the wrong people in the container. I know there's like five questions and one. And how did you feel safe enough to say there's enough money out there? There's enough people out there for me to set you free, like, not necessarily fire a client, but like set you free to find a table that's right for you at this point in your life and with your growth.
Gieselle: Yeah. So, one thing I will say, like, let's talk about like the firing of folks or not the firing folks, but like, because usually I would say it's mutual. Like it's just, ain't working. And for me as a person, like I, there's no amount of money that's worth working with somebody who's not a fit for the work that I do. Because as a coach specifically, if you don't trust me, if you are not down for the work we're doing, you're not gonna get results. And when you don't get results, it makes me miserable. Because I question if I'm a decent coach, like, or even a good, you know, so for me, it's just not worth it.
Gieselle: And it's not fun at the end of the day, nobody starts a business to do, to be miserable. We, none of us did that. And so, I want it to be fun. I want there to be trust. I want there to be love if that can't be there. And that's not, if you're not either ready for it, if you realize it's not gonna happen with me or whatever happens then, like, I, I want you to go eat just as much as just as much as you wanna go.
Gieselle: So that's the thing for me. And it's a great question about recognizing that, but I, I do wanna bring in like the abundance piece of it, because I think that's something that a lot of folks struggle with, especially when they're in the earlier stages of business, cuz it doesn't always feel abundant. It does not always feel abundant.
Gieselle: And I think the truth is I'm like I'm sitting with this question cause I'm like, when did I get to the point where I knew that.
Gieselle: I think it was when I got to a point where. I knew that even if I didn't generate like a billion manillion dollars, that I could strip everything down and do a workshop and still bring in some leads and bring in some folks who were interested in working with me recognizing that it doesn't have to be big.
Gieselle: It just has to be a couple people. And that something else is coming. And I think if you're, you know, if we're talking to folks who are even newer where you're like, I'm not even at that stage, like, I, I can't build a workshop. I can't bring in a couple people. Like I'm still before that. What I would tell you is that everything's a building block and that's something that I've learned and that, and that's something that I'm trying to lean into.
Gieselle: And so it's like every, no is a building block to a, yes, every silent post is a building block to a post that actually gets like one, like, you know, it's all a building block. And so that's something that I try to look towards as well and believe as well. Alongside the fact that like, we don't have these like, callings because they're not supposed to work. Like, that's just not like the universe, our ancestors, like all the things that give us these callings, they, they are not cruel. And so, it's supposed to work. We've just gotta keep building the blocks and then it will.
Dalia: I was going to ask, like, what's the difference between a revolutionary entrepreneur?
Dalia: what else we see out there, but I'm hearing some themes already, cuz you definitely don't hear love, fun, and a calling really emphasized like sometimes you hear people throw out calling like kind of in a cavalier way, but in the container, I really felt like. I, I already knew this intuitively at least for me, maybe it's not true for everybody that your business can be an extension of your spiritual practice.
Dalia: And that, that also might be beneficial for someone who is used to the concept of throwing your worries or questioning on your deity or your ancestors. And that sometimes that's the only way you can move forward because you can focus on, well, what can I do? And I'm just gonna trust that the other things will fall into place, which even if you don't believe that you know, that taking action versus doing nothing is gonna get you different results.
Dalia: But for you, what are the main differences between the way you believe if you're really called to do something, you should look at business or can look at business versus what's usually taught to us.
Gieselle: Yeah. I love what you caught that should cause I was like, well, there's no should but for me, revolutionary business
Gieselle: it's all about at, at its like simplest terms, wanting to do things differently. And when I say differently, like wanting to do things in ways that are human, that respect not just your needs as an individual, but the needs of your people. And it's a business that prioritizes people over profits at the end of the day.
Gieselle: I actually think that would truly be it in its simplest of forms. But it can look a lot of different ways. So, for example, you know, one thing that I do in my sales process is my sales process is intentionally I've intentionally slowed it down so much because. I wanna know you deeply, and I want you to know me deeply and I wanna feel really, really good when you come into my space.
Gieselle: And I want us to both feel, to feel on an alignment. Something that I feel is revolutionary is pricing your offers, not just based on like what you can charge people, but what you need and letting there be a limit. A lot of times these days, when I tell folks my one-on-one prices, I mean, they're still like pretty decent.
Gieselle: But a lot of times when I tell folks my one-on-one prices, they're like, oh, I was expecting it to be more. And I was like, I just don't need more. I just don't like, there's no reason to charge you thousands upon thousands of dollars for something that, I mean, I hate, I probably shouldn't say this as a coach, but I just don't think there's coaching.
Gieselle: That's worth a hundred thousand dollars, unless you are a straight up millionaire. Revolutionary business is one that prior, like I said, prioritizes your body. And so, what that means is you leave space for your cycles, your ebbs and your flows, and you do things slowly and you aren't working 24 7.
Gieselle: That's what I think of when I think of revolutionary business. And it's one where at the end of the day, it's really for the collective liberation of folks of color. Like that's, that's what I think about. Like, even if you know, not anyone listening to us is white, but like, even if you're white at the end of the day, like your revolution should start with the, with the collective liberation of folks of color.
Gieselle: That's where everything starts at the end of the day. So that's what I think of when I think of when I think of revolutionary business.
Dalia: Oh, I love that. And we would probably be surprised because that was something that I think I learned in the program, but also had reinforced by white friends who said, they have to be told don't come in for them to, for it to even occur to them that maybe not all spaces are for them.
Dalia: Totally. So, they said, they would absolutely still go into a conference that says African American, blah, blah. They said it wouldn't even occur to them that maybe they're not supposed to go in there. And so, we may very well have a lot of white listeners, you know, because luckily for them they've been socialized to feel welcome everywhere they go.
Dalia: Just so y'all know that it's not a universal experience. And all I can say is, must be nice, but it's interesting how
Gieselle: like literally kicking my feet in joy at that must be nice
Dalia: but it has been interesting starting to accept more how much like you said, everything is a building block and how much of our experiences, while of course you don't wanna suffer for the sake of suffering.
Dalia: But it is interesting how much, if you survive and experience, it is a catalyst for growth. And that even though systemic oppression blows and racism sucks, it does help you build skills. And it creates an opportunity for you to get to know yourself in a way that people are not likely to experience if their existence isn't constantly challenged. And if their worth isn't constantly challenged. But the thing is, you get to opt out of doing that. Like you can just suffer and not grow. And sometimes depending on your trauma, that is where people hang out. And that's been one of my biggest challenges with wanting to work with people who have a lot of racialized trauma or who have a lot of trauma around gender identity and community is some people are in a place, like you said, where they're totally shut down. They can't connect. And so, you show up and you do things and all the people that come forward don't have the trauma that you were seeking to help them with and you're like, is anybody listening?
Dalia: So, was there ever a point in your work where you started to wonder, is this going to work? Should I give up or should I pivot?
Gieselle: Every day literally every day. I won't say it's a rational thought. I think that that hasn't been a rational thought for me in a really long time. But I actually did do a little bit of a pivot this year.
Gieselle: Because for the past year, I've been speaking specifically to revolutionary business for folks of color. And then I did this small pivot to expand the message for like all change makers, all revolutionaries. And I did that and it was like crickets, absolute crickets. And I was like, okay,
Gieselle: something funky is happening here. It also didn't feel quite right to me if I'm like looking back at it. It just, I knew here's what I knew about my work is that at the end of the day, what I, what I love about the work is not what context and what, like situation we're talking about, talking about. It is like, I love working with great BIPOC folks.
Gieselle: And so, and I want this work to impact as many incredible BIPOC folks who are ready for it and need it as it can be. So that's why I made that. Like I opened it up for a little bit and then after having that experience of like, okay, thriving stuff, like it's kind of radio silence, like not fully working, it's not feeling fully aligned.
Gieselle: That's when I came back to, okay, its still revolutionary business, but it's just a different level. It's people who are even who are more resourced, not resourced. And when I say resourced, I mean resourced in their somatic capacity and their like ability to do the work and because we can go deeper and further.
Gieselle: And because, you know, as I'm working with leaders, like you talked about earlier, it ripples. And so, the more impact I make with leaders, the more they're gonna go out into their individual revolutions and be able to serve more, more, more and more. Long story short, I think about pivoting every day.
Gieselle: Not right now, right now. I'm like, but I wonder I'm like, I don't know, is I, is anything happening even though I know it's just the crazy space. I do know that for myself.
Dalia: And did it feel scary to feel like, oh, I'm, niching down even more to people who clearly have the capacity. It makes sense if there were people in the container that weren't ready for it yet, but I would imagine it would also feel like ekk now I'm narrowing in even more.
Gieselle: It feels really scary and really vulnerable. Every time you make a change in your business, there's no place where you're going to get. If you are someone where you've been generating income, even if you're not generating it at the level, you want to, you know, that when push comes to shove, you'll be able to generate some income.
Gieselle: So, it's less scary for me because I know that my business could really, truly, never die. I mean, maybe like I'm gonna knock on this bamboo, what I've got over here. but. I have the skill sets to revive it if something were funky were to happen but making that change feels really vulnerable and putting out my new season of my podcast, it's all around revolutionary leadership and it, it, it is interesting.
Gieselle: You know, I know I have those revolutionary leaders in my audience. I know so many of my folks wanna be those revolutionary leaders as well. And so, it's just about me believing, and this is really at the end of the day, this is all of it. And this is what brought me to serving BIPOC folks. This is what brought me to serving BIPOC folks in that way.
Gieselle: It's just about believing that if you have the calling for it, if you feel it, if it feels right to you, it's right. And even if you don't fully believe it in the moment, even if your head is like, should we jump ship every single day? It's about knowing like, no, I'm still gonna like, hold my feet to the fire because I know that this is what is right.
Gieselle: And this is what's meant for me. I just have to wait for it to actually come to fruition.
Dalia: How do you get back to that place when you're in a position where you feel like you're doubting? There's a lot of people out there who are so good at communicating what they do. and which is basically marketing that they know, Hey, I can just, you know, Put up a tent somewhere and I can sell some things and there's a lot of people who don't have that and they don't have that confidence, but business comes to you in different ways and that's okay too.
Dalia: But what do you do when you can't seem to reconnect to that belief that, oh, this was an actual calling. How do you stay connected to that? Mm
Gieselle: that's a great question. I tap into like, something that I really work to do every day is like to tap into some kind of divination tool or something that like does ground me in my spirituality.
Gieselle: So, like right now I'm playing with tarot. I'm like getting to know the tarot again. And so, I'm pulling tarot cards or some things that like, honestly, the most important thing for me, like aside from like the spirituality, cause even that sometimes like can't fully ground me is having space held for me where I can name all of the fears and be reoriented and shown different perspectives. And so, for me, coaching is really helpful. I know that's like such a coach thing to say, but it's the truth is that like, I wouldn't be able to do like all of the things that I've done in my business, all of the shifts and changes and pivots and growth that I've had would never have happened without having like a really good coach.
Gieselle: And when I'm talking about coaching, I'm not talking about people who just like showed up one day and said that there are coach, like I'm talking about like real skilled coaches who can hold space powerfully, who aren't trying to tell you what to do, but really understand the sole job of a coach, a true coach is to ground you back into that knowing and that feeling.
Gieselle: So, someone that can bring you back there even more powerfully than you might be able to in that moment that's, that's been like the most helpful thing for me is so even if you're like, I'm not resourced enough to have a coach right now, having someone who it is capable of supporting you in a way where they step aside.
Gieselle: And it's just about you, because I think that's the problem with relying on friends and family and stuff is that you always have energetic connection, like even with a coach, right. But it's, it's like their interests are somehow still intertwined with yours when you are talking to a friend or a family member.
Gieselle: So, if you have someone who's able to like step back and be like, I literally don't matter here and you can feel safe just like, and we'll just dance with it from your space, then that can work too.
Dalia: Yeah, it's really tricky learning how so I am in the process. I've already done my 125 hours, but I have not done all the coaching practice hours that I need to finish my PCC, but I should be done by this summer.
Gieselle: Look at you go.
Dalia: But it's been interesting seeing in the training, the biggest problem that I needed to suppress was the desire to offer a fix. When I felt like I knew exactly what they should do and how often they had an answer. That was not my answer. That was the perfect answer for them. and how, even in the practice sessions.
Dalia: I might say what I hear you saying is, and there's one word that I added that changes the tone that they're like, well, I don't really think it's that, but it reflects how I perceive their problem. and usually it's because I don't relate to it. And I'm like, I'm imagining that this is how people must feel when they have these kinds of problems.
Dalia: Or it could be that I relate to it so much that I'm projecting. It's just been interesting. Practicing, listening just to reflect back to the person what they're saying and what they actually want, not to help them with anything.
Gieselle: It's so rare that we get that in this world. And I feel like that's so often all we crave at the end of the day, right.
Is someone to see us and to it's really just for someone to see us. And that's 99% of what coaching is and being, and I wanna like take it outta the context of coaching and like being truly supported is right. It's like knowing that someone sees you and they're with you. It's like, if you're an, if you're sobbing, it's like, I don't have to sob, but like I'm here.
Or if you're elated, it's like, I'm also there. But it's hard. It's hard to do because we're so used to, like, I'm sure you, you notice that someone who's like getting their PCC, but even as like a friend and an individual, right. It's like, oh no, this person's got something going on. How do I fix it? I'm like, what do I do?
Dalia: Absolutely. And I've become more aware of when I want to fix it. Or I wanna bring in all this previous knowledge I have about the friend. And tell them, like I, in this case, do know what's right for you because I've known you for like 30 years . And trying to understand that that still doesn't make me the authority on their life. They are the authority. And the best thing I could do for them as a friend is try and help them see that they are the authority , but usually in reality these days, I'm like, I'm gonna tell you what to do first. And then I'm gonna ask you, like, what do you think you really wanna do? It's just so hard.
Dalia: you're so to turn it off, I'm like, you know, I'm gonna be right. It can take years, but you'll come back. but the, the true training has been so helpful. But one thing I did wonder about is how did you survive coaching training and all the different containers you've been in that were not made for people of color.
And come out with a skillset that is so perfectly tailored for folks of color.
Gieselle: Yeah. That's a really great question. So, I will say I'll be like completely honest where my journey to like decolonizing and like being where I'm at, it's pretty, fairly recent. Like it was like a deep dive and like a going straight, to the deep end.
Gieselle: But when I did my coach training, I can't remember what year years are gone to me, but like four or five years, five years ago, I think at this point. I was not bothered by being in fully white spaces yet because I was so used to it. And we were still at that point in society where like, I think we were still in that point where everyone was pretending like life was post racial, like Obama was president and like, like it's all good.
Gieselle: And, you know, I was just starting to get, I had actually just had my first real life experience where I genuinely felt like my success was impacted by being Black, where I had never well, I will say I had never felt like I had that experience before. Like I feel like I was lucky for the most part.
Gieselle: And I still found where I was able to go despite being Black. That being said, I really like these days, I really hate when people say that. Cause I'm like, yeah, yeah, right like Blackness, like never came into play in your success.
Dalia: Well, what's so funny is the conditioning is so good in some areas. That you don't know, you don't know exactly you and you may end up doing the same things as your white peers. But what you don't know is how much more you had to do to get it. Exactly. Cause I even look back at what I've had to do for certain credentials. and I never, in a million years would've thought to go to the professor and say, I'm just overwhelmed.
And they say, don't worry about it. Or you can turn in a fraction of it. Or you can turn everything in late with no penalty. I did not know these things were a thing and then they start being revealed and I'm like, oh, I didn't even know how differently I was being treated.
Dalia: Or when people only network with their white students, they don't announce that they're going to network with them. You know? So, it's interesting how sometimes you may not have felt it or noticed it, but definitely doesn't mean it didn't happen, but at least you didn't lose sleep over it.
Gieselle: I didn't get sleep over it for sure.
Gieselle: And so that was like my initial coach training. So, like, I didn't. So, like then I was like, oh, I don't know. Like, but I was really lucky. And, and when I say lucky, I mean, like it's obvious in retrospect that the majority of my clients this entire time have been folks of color. So like, to this day, if you get on a sales call with me and you don't tell me your like racial or ethnic identity, I mean, I can't go like as granular as country, but I can typically tell you like, okay, you are you've been an American for a few generations, one generation you are an immigrant, you are Latina, you are Asian, you are south Asian.
Gieselle: Cuz like I just worked with that many people and I've seen like the typical, like there are typical things that come from each culture. And they manifest in different ways. So that's what really created my experience was just doing the work and doing it with the people.
Gieselle: But I have had experiences where I didn't survive the container. And one of those was the precursor to creating. My to like creating my work in the shape that it is now where like long story short, I was doing this leadership program, which it's one of those things whereas a person of color, I look back at that leadership program and I'm like, so mad that it's so exclusive because it was great.
Gieselle: But it was, it was my first experience being in a white space and feeling suffocated by whiteness. Like, I literally felt like I was losing my mind. And I remember my husband he's very rarely like actually great with these things. Juan is racially white, ethnically Latino, but it's, he's like very, he's very rarely good with these things.
Gieselle: And he very rarely can like actually relate to my experience as a person of color. Cuz he is white, he reads is white. And so, but I like called him crying and I was like, I'm losing my mind out here. It didn't help that this program had, this program was one of those many like white spiritual programs where it had borrowed from a lot of different cultures.
Gieselle: And they just felt like if they had the right intention that we should be able to do all of the things. And people had started talking about race because because they were using the word tribe and they refused to like, just let it go. Why white people insist on keeping words that aren't theirs, it never ceases to amaze me.
Gieselle: Like I just don't understand it at all.
Dalia: That's so interesting, cuz I was gonna ask like how was it suffocating you?
Gieselle: So yeah, it was like, we were constantly having conversations about race that the people of color had to carry. And like I, as the sole Black person, there's a difference right in what you carry because as the Black person, everyone turns to you first around these things and then there's everyone else. And in the space, everyone only wanted to talk to me about racial things sometimes. Like we did this exercise, oh my God, this exercise. So, we did this exercise, which I actually think is a really beautiful exercise, but it's basically like assuming that your thoughts around people like your judgments around people and how they feel about you are probably incorrect.
Gieselle: So, you clear it, you just say like, Hey, I feel like you think I might be talking too much and it's like, they don't need to respond. They don't need to do anything cuz you know, it's all about you. It's all in your head. Right. And you just release it. But everyone's the teachers literally said do not go up to Gieselle and every time say, say something about race.
Gieselle: like, they literally said that and 90% of people still came up and did it anyways, did it anyways thinking they were special little butterfly.
Dalia: That's so interesting. Like that goes back to it almost being impossible to keep certain environments just are not going to be safe. They're inherently unsafe.
Dalia: So maybe the people who led it, maybe the people on stage, if it had just been you and them, it would've been fine. But all these other random, oh,
Gieselle: not even them. not even that the woman who led it, white woman teared me the first day. And, and we talked about holding onto your marginalized identities, she's Jewish.
Gieselle: And so she was like very much holding onto the like marginalization that Jewish people feel and like incapable of seeing like her impact in other ways .
Gieselle: So, yeah, it, it was inherently unsafe and it was something that I didn't know going in, but it's known about this program. I think there are so many spaces that we all know, like I think about MFA programs sometimes I think about getting my MFA. I'm like nonfiction or fiction. And, but I'm not willing to intentionally go into unsafe spaces anymore. But we, we do that all the time as folks of color.
Gieselle: We intentionally step in unsafe spaces because we wanna get that information. We wanna get the knowledge and the only way to get it, sometimes it feels like is to make yourself on
Dalia: Set yourself on fire. Yeah. That is interesting because in the end, even when you're not recognizing that what's happening to you is unfair and there's a disparity there, the stress that you carry and how hard just thinking about how much harder somebody has to work when every time they go into a space, they feel unsafe.
Versus if you come in the space and you feel like totally at home and comfortable, just the amount of emotional and cognitive energy that goes into learning and staying on alert.
Gieselle: Absolutely. Well, and when we talk about the way that, like our nervous system functions and our brain functions, when you are at alert, you don't have access to the higher parts of your brain that can process information, analyze information, like and so it, it really is impactful.
Gieselle: It really is a detriment because you are not physically capable of taking in the same amount of information as someone who feels a hundred percent safe. And like, this is why I do my work. Because if you don't feel safe in the places where you're being supported, you can't actually get the support you need.
Gieselle: Like you're only getting a percentage of it because you're like trying to navigate being in a space instead of just actually allowing yourself to let go and be.
Dalia: That resonates so much. And that really explains how you can go into healing space and get virtually nothing out of it. Because the space itself was not safe.
Dalia: Like I went into a container that a white friend recommended and they said, oh, he's so great. He's so intersectional. He's so progressive. So this is another person who had multiple marginalized identities, but still cis white man . And I will say he did feel like a very safe person, but his container, you can't control these people.
Dalia: No one said anything that was blatantly problematic, but I only went to one live meeting. Cause I was like, I am too tired to even deal with people, treating me like seeing me is some kind of event, you know, totally or recommending other Black resources to me when I didn't ask them for that. Like, people can't conceive of how peculiar that feels.
Dalia: When somebody, you meet someone, you don't know them from Adam and they're not a person of color. And they're like, oh, you're this color. Here's this resource. What makes you think I need you to come rescue me? What makes you think you're an expert on what kind of community I need?
Dalia: And did I ask you? I don't know you like that. What makes you think I take referrals from just anybody? And that's another thing that I feel like is unique maybe not across the board, but it's a necessary function of being in a country that's always like trying to kill you or make you feel like s**t is that, you know, better than to just take referrals from just anybody.
Dalia: Like you don't know this person and they don't have the same lived experience as you for all I know she just saw a flyer somewhere or I could show up and they could, it could be 100% hoteps all the way through everybody transphobic and bananas, and to just not know that you really just shouldn't be offering all this information, willy nilly to people of color.
Dalia: Who said we would respond to that? So that was just enough for me to feel like, oh, well, I'm a freak show here. And everyone is aware of my color and no one's just seeing me as a person. So these other people, you're just meeting a person. And when you are meeting me, all you're seeing is this is a Black person.
Dalia: And you're trying to think about what you're saying or you're trying to do the right thing. It just felt hella awkward. And I was like, I don't have time for this s**t.
Gieselle: And this is like the problem. Yes. I, number one, I see you. I completely see you and like, this is the problem, right? Because it's not that we don't wanna be seen as Black or whatever we are.
Gieselle: It's like we wanna be seen in all of our identities and we don't want to be special or fetishized or marginalized because of them. And there's so very few people in very few spaces that are capable of holding both. I see you in the beauty of your identities and also you're still just a person than me.
You know, like you're still just a regular degular person and those get to coexist and yeah, it's really hard to find that. And that's where I think we see a lot of folks. I see so many folks of color being like, I don't want people to see me as Black. I don't want them to see me as this thing first.
Gieselle: It, and it's like, well, no, like, I think you do. like, I think you want them to like, acknowledge who you are because you know, when it comes to like, I, I feel like racial identity and I think, yeah, well, I'll, I'll just stick with racial identity cuz that's where I'm most well versed, but it's like, it's one of the most important identities to you.
If not the most important identity to you, cuz there's so much culture and love and joy baked into that.
Dalia: Most people really take issue with people saying they're colorblind because , that reads as I refuse to acknowledge your cultural distinctness, in any way, I am not capable of celebrating that you have a culture.
And that's a problem as well and acting like, oh, I'm gonna give you permission to assimilate is some kind of a gift doesn't vibe with me. But I would like to be seen as like a whole ass person, like, yes, I am Black. And guess what? There's something that comes after that. but people are so used to this really flattened image of anyone.
Dalia: Who's not like them. that they don't always understand. This is a complete person. This is not a caricature. You don't know anything about me if all you've done is look at me. You literally don't know anything about me. You wouldn't look at somebody white and think, oh, you know, I know most likely where they live, how much money they make, but other people make all these assumptions.
Dalia: And all they've done is look at you. And they're convinced that they don't have a problem. And in a lot of these containers, you can't convince them of otherwise. . So when did your interest in leadership become really clear for you? And I know you mentioned that because you can have the greatest impact with people who are leaders.
Dalia: What does that even mean to you? Who is a leader?
Dalia: That's
Gieselle: such a good question. Everyone's a leader first and foremost. I mean, we really are, right. Like, even if you're just leading yourself, like, first of all, leading yourself, isn't just leading yourself because the way that you show up does impact other people and the way that they show up.
Gieselle: But sometimes leadership is like being a supporter. Sometimes leadership is being a mother sometimes, or a parent. Sometimes leadership is just being a sibling or a friend or the person who says, Hey, let's get pizza tonight. You know? So I, I wanna say that that leadership is everyone. And also what I.
Gieselle: The reason why I decided to lean into revolutionary leadership. And the definition that I am leaning towards with it, which is folks who have been on this train, right? They're on a decolonial train. They've been UNlearning. They've been doing all the things. They're in the process of creating an impact.
Gieselle: They have a revolution that they likely are already leading. The reason why I decided to work with them is cuz I wanted to . Oh, I
Dalia: love that answer. That's not what I expected.
Gieselle: It's and I will say it just feels right. To me, it really, I think something for me, because I think at the end of the day leaders, the leaders that I'm most excited to work with are coaches, healers, guides, like people who are really in the, in the trenches serving 24 7, or who have some kind of like deeper calling.
Gieselle: I've always been fo been focused on people who have a calling. So like creatives, I love working with creatives as well. I, I completely forgot what I wanted to say. So I don't know. It's a half thought.
Dalia: I, I was thinking the other day, like something I realized, well, a friend helped me realize, and I think I was afraid to step into this or accept it is that the work that I do also is not for beginners. Yes, but because of my fear of there not being enough people or my fear of nieching down too much, or really having a laser focus that it would hurt me.
Dalia: I kept accepting people who were nowhere near ready. Yes. Like if you haven't done any healing work, I'm not for you. . If you have no concept of the fact that you can internalize messaging, that doesn't serve you, that works an opposition to your identities, then we're not ready to work together.
Dalia: If I'm having to convince you that it's safe to start trusting your body, we're not ready for each other. Like if we're not, you are at the point where you believe it, but you're trying to get there. You have some concept of it and you're looking for an opportunity to do deeper work, then we're ready. Yep.
Dalia: But it's just been tricky for me to acknowledge too, because of how marketing generally works or is presented to people what I am always hearing about is like how to just speak to pain points. And I think the pain points for somebody who's deeper in the work is gonna be different. And it probably won't sound as, I don't wanna say dramatic, but the person might not even recognize it as a problem.
Gieselle: Yes, absolutely. Because you've already done healing work. Right. And like, I mean, I always try to stay away from pain points in general because like it's manipulative and it's based in like sales psychology, which is like just manipulating our brain. Really when you're working with someone who isn't a beginner.
Gieselle: And I think that's really what I, what made me want to move more towards leaders and people who like already have this language are already thinking about these things. They're like thinking deeply. And we're just exploring in a deeper way. Same as you is that it's just more fun. It's just more fun.
Gieselle: And they're actually ready for the work that you're capable of doing and that you wanna do with people. But what you're getting to expand them into is something that I think as folks of color, we don't get to expand into enough, which is just having more, like more than enough. You know, I think it's tough with like both of the kinds of works that we do, cuz it's not just like, oh, well I'm gonna go make you like $10,000 in one day.
Gieselle: And like for your work, because you're doing wellness in a decolonized way, you might not lose weight or you might not do this thing that that you think you want, it's not the sexy thing. And also it's allowing you to expand into this moreness this space that we very rarely allow ourselves to even dream of, because it feels so hard to access as a person of color.
Gieselle: We're always just fighting for enough. We're fighting for the scraps, the thought of having abundance and more, it's hard for us, especially as revolutionaries where, I mean, we could even talk about the concept of more it's like, well, how much is too much and then when are we hoarding and blah, blah, blah. So yeah, this it's this really difficult concept for us that comes into play..
Dalia: Yeah, that brings up, this is one of my big questions. How do you reconcile the fact that some people feel like everything has to be accessible to everyone? And the people who will feel kind of like butt hurt because it's for advanced people or it's for people who have more resources and the people who feel like thriving rates, shouldn't be a thing.
I was listening to something Sonya Renee Taylor was explaining was that she's not trying to be out in these streets, starving, you know, dying with an unmarked grave or doing some Zora Neale Hurston type of s**t. Like we are not, you don't have to do that. But the criticism that comes at you, especially if you're assigned female at birth, if you are not like, Hey, I just wanna bleed and give, give, give, give, give, I don't need anything.
Dalia: I'm just gonna eat s**t and say, thank you. Like, how do you reconcile the part of you that does want to help and the part of you that you were not called to do entry level s**t. and like, do you explain that to people or do you just let it go? You just say like, Hey, there's a bunch of tables out there go find another one. Like, how do you
Gieselle: handle that?
Gieselle: Well I'll say first and foremost that I do not have the kind of personality where people feel comfortable stepping to me in that kind of way, like in any way, shape or form. So I'd never worry about someone actually saying that to my face, but to, for people who are thinking that, you know, I know that in my work, cuz people tell me all the time, like I have fundamentally shifted the way that people think just from my free content and just from the emails I sent and the Instagram posts I make in my Facebook group, like I'm constantly educating there, perspective shifting there.
Gieselle: And there is so much available to you and so much growth available to you if you just hang out in my world. Which I'm always shocked by because because like at the end of the day, like I know that the real juice is in the actual coaching and then at least that's how I've always felt. Right. But there are so many people who tell me, like, I think about this thing completely differently because of these emails or this, that, so that's what I say is that like, my work is a hundred percent accessible.
Gieselle: If you follow me for free, if you go to my stuff there's an abundance of information for you to sit with to process, like, sure you're not getting the like coaching side of it, but for, it's not, it's also, that's not always necessary for every single person. Like some people really just need to hear something a different way.
Gieselle: And then it just like changes everything for you. And the last thing I would say to anyone who's like coming at me with that, is that what are you doing, policing what I do with my money and my and my life. Like, I am not a billionaire. I think that there's a really interesting societal, like investigation we can do here.
Gieselle: Right. Because we actually so very rarely interrogate billionaires around this kind of thing. We are just like, well, they worked really hard
Dalia: and they
Gieselle: deserve it. They're a genius. And then us like the people who are out here doing like the real work to help liberate people were expected to bleed and to do it happily.
Gieselle: And that's just an, I, I would really tell anyone like, If you're gonna be like coming for somebody, go to Jeff Bezos, don't be stepping to me talking about how I should charge $1. And you're still ordering s**t off of amazon.com. Okay.
Dalia: Yeah, that really says something because you'll hear people even argue like, well, the more money you send in that person's direction is gonna generate jobs.
Well, who says that I wouldn't be a good steward of that money. Cause so there's multiple layers there. What makes you think the money isn't better off in my hands than someone else. And why would you want me to have to work insane hours at a job that supports me so that I can keep bleeding for you doing labor for free, like sure.
Dalia: It's a labor of love, even podcasting but the key word there is labor.
Gieselle: well, and this like comes all, it, it comes back to all of our relationships with capitalism, right? It's we all are so used to living in a system where we're supposed to work 24 7, and we're supposed to exploit ourselves for someone else's gain that.
Gieselle: It feels right to people and it feels it, well, let me rephrase this. It feels wrong to people when you honor yourself and your needs, that is actually like, feels wrong in like a problem to them. And so that's the real issue around it is that there's some deep internalized capitalism that anyone who's questioning that really needs to look at.
Gieselle: And question, if they're coming to any person of color questioning what they're charging and they're thriving because we are all owed so much more than we could ever get in this lifetime. I don't know, maybe not Oprah. Like she's good, but but everyone, but everyone else, like, no, we we've got more than enough coming to us.
Gieselle: There is, we got more than enough generations of wealth that we deserve. And if we want it, I'm not someone where I'm like out here trying to generate tons of generational wealth or things like that. That's not really what I care about at the end of the day. But if that is what you care about, and that's something that you're wanting for yourself, I support you.
Gieselle: And I love you because you deserve that thriving. And it's been stripped of us for so long. Get it while, get it in this lifetime. If it feels right for you.
Dalia: I love the freedom that you give people to find their own solutions and understand that the answer might not be right for everybody because we know it in general, the way things are set up now it's predatory.
Dalia: Yep. People aren't prioritized, but there are a lot of people out there acting like, well, you need to burn it all down and you shouldn't accept money for anything. And you should just like live under bridge. Well, why are you out here trying to take people's freedom of choice away from them to decide like, do I wanna try and thrive?
Dalia: Do I feel like I can do more if I make sure my revolution is sustainable and maybe your revolution looks different and we don't have to put that on other people. And that's, to me, that's also a sign of really quality, authentic coaching is that you give people more choices, not less.
Gieselle: I completely agree.
Gieselle: You know, my thing with all of this and with, with everything in life, not just around this money piece of it is that we're all on different stages of the journey. We're all in different places. It's like when we talk about who we work with, right? Like someone's at this beginning space, there's no, nothing wrong with that.
Gieselle: I'm just not for them. Right. When it comes to, you know, an being anti-capitalist and your feelings around money, Again, we're in different spaces. We have different traumas, different lived experiences. Who am I to say, where you should be? You're where you're ready to be and where you're supposed to be in this moment.
Gieselle: If you're meant to get to this other place, you'll get there. If you aren't, you aren't and that's okay. Like I do not believe that I am the pinnacle of information of inclusion of like all of the things I'm working on it. It's something that I'm constantly thinking about. But at the end of the day, I'm at the beginning of my journey still in so many ways, I think we all are and I'm gonna grow, I'm gonna shift and I'm gonna look back as s**t I'm doing now and be like, how was I doing that? Oh my God, I could die just thinking about it. And that, that gets to be okay. And where I'm at, right.
Dalia: Ooh. I love that. Where can everybody find you? Where's the best place to catch you on these internet
Gieselle: streets
Gieselle: So you can find me over on Instagram. I'm just, I keep it simple. I'm Gieselle Allen over there, but make sure you don't miss that first E after the I and Gieselle or else you will miss me. I'm also, if you are a fan of podcasts, I've got the Revolutionary Rising podcast. It's over well, anywhere where you listen to podcast . You can also go to my website and hang out with me there, get on my newsletter. My newsletter is like the most reliable place to hang out with me because I will disappear like really quickly from everywhere else. But I will hang out on my email list until the day I die.
Gieselle: So yeah.
Dalia: Yeah. We've seen it happen. We've seen it happen. If there was one thing that you could say, as we wrap up and everyone would understand it, internalize it, believe it for the rest of their lives, what would it be? Hmm.
Gieselle: You are important. You are wanted and you are loved. That's it. And if you don't believe those things right now, it's not because it's not true.
Gieselle: It's because you might be surrounded by the wrong people, or you might be in a space where you have some healing to do and both of those are okay. And you'll get there.
Dalia: I love that. Thank you so much for coming on.
Gieselle: Thank you for having me. It's been such a fun conversation.
I needed to hear so much of this conversation, the concept of not being able to be all things to all people and that not only being okay but being natural and by design, maybe you were called to do something very specific. We don't need to apologize or continually question what our intuition is telling us, learning to trust what you want, learning to trust that you also know what you need is really a process. It is just amazing to see how often we are, the ones that hold the answer to questions that have been plaguing us for years. Working with a great coach is so helpful in getting that clarity and learning that you can trust your gut. You can trust your body.
You can trust your wants and desires. It sounds so simple. But after a literal lifetime of being socialized to question everything that comes naturally to you it really isn't that simple. And it isn't something that's gonna happen in just a moment when you're growing, there's always gonna be ebbs and flows. There will be times when you feel like you're making tremendous progress with self-acceptance and you're moving forward. And then there will be times when you feel like you've taken a few steps back and that is okay. That's just how it goes. So it's so helpful to see someone who's done so much growing share that the growth process is not over and it continues and that's a good thing it isn't something that we have to feel shame or distress over.
If you are really feeling these themes of liberation and self-trust, then Decolonizing Wellness is 100% for you. Check out the links in the show notes and order your copy now, this is the book that I needed no other self-help bod-pos book I read, addressed my intersectional identities. As a queer gender fluid pansexual person, Black, raised in the south, assigned female at birth, I didn't see anything out there that took those identities into consideration when talking about the healing that has to occur for you to fully feel at home in your body and for you to be able to trust that you know how to feed yourself, you know, how to care for yourself. After reading this book, you'll have the tools. Practical tangible tools that you need to really get started on internalizing and embodying self trust and self-acceptance when it comes to wellness and feeding yourself.
So, make sure you order it, get a copy for your friends and be sure to post if you love it. I absolutely adore public speaking, and I'm so excited to start talking about the themes that I really dug into in the book all over the place. If you are with a group or an organization that you feel like could really use that message, please reach out to me so we can get you on the calendar. Alight, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you so much for joining me. I will see you next time.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit daliakinsey.substack.com -
Kris Henry (they/them/theirs) is a radical Jamaican nonbinary creative, an Obeah enby, and an Aborisha in the Lukumì tradition. Kris creates art in many forms—centering their twerk as a spiritual safe space for Black queer, trans and intersex folx. They seek to create authentically empowering, ancestrally connected healing experiences that bring a sense of agency and sovereignty back to the historically marginalized from the inside out. Kris’ first published project is a collection of poetry titled “Love LETTERS”, and their second project, Warri(O)racle, is an online chapbook.
Their latest creative baby is The Spiritual Abolitionist Oracle Deck: a radical, Black and queer centered divination tool to affirm the spiritual safety and wellness of Black queer, trans and intersex folx. You can find their projects at www.thespiritualabolitionist.com and follow them on Instagram @kriswithakcreates and @thespiritualabolitionist to see what they’re up to next.
This episode we discuss
🏳🌈Connecting with your ancestors and trancestors
🏳🌈Honoring our queer ancestors with visibility
🏳🌈Gender in the spirit world
🏳🌈Protecting your spiritual energy
Episode Resources
www.daliakinsey.com
Decolonizing Wellness: A QTBIPOC-Centered Guide to Escape the Diet Trap, Heal Your Self-Image, and Achieve Body Liberation
www.thespiritualabolitionist.com
This episode is too good to keep all to yourself.
Hello. Welcome to another episode of body liberation for all. I'm your host, Dalia Kinsey your Black, queer, holistic registered dietitian and the author of Decolonizing Wellness A QTBIPOC-Centered Guide to Escape the Diet Trap, Heal Your Self-Image, and Achieve Body Liberation.
Like I've covered on the show before and like I covered the book, healing, growth, there's no end to it. If you are a curious person, if you are a person who's really interested in being as free as possible, you know there is no end point. As soon as you dig in deep and heal one area of your life, another layer appears. It's never over.
And something that I have been working on a lot lately is my relationship with spirituality and my reluctance to openly talk about the spiritual traditions that I feel most closely tied to and realizing that I have been socialized/ colonized to normalize Christian beliefs and to not think it's strange when someone believes wholeheartedly in the rapture or in the second coming of Christ, all of that seems perfectly normal. And all the time in the United States, you see people who are professionals, who are academics, blending their Christian belief system and the work that they do all the time, you see therapists doing their work through a Christian lens. And I don't often find people criticizing that, but that may also be because I'm in Georgia.
That said I've been taking a closer look at my reluctance to dig in, to traditional African spirituality in a public way and questioning why do I think that people may see me as less professional if I openly share my spiritual beliefs?
What are the assumptions that I'm making? What are the assumptions that I have internalized that make it seem complex to me, to both be a person who believes in science and a person who believes in ancestor veneration? Why does it seem like those two things don't go together? Where does that come from? And what can I do to uproot those beliefs from my own consciousness?
So, this conversation is coming from a bit of a vulnerable place because it's something I'm still working through. And I know that at some point I'll face that challenge of not feeling compelled to defend my spiritual beliefs or to counter. Any ignorant statements that imply the ancestor veneration is somehow more primitive than Christianity or somehow less logical than Christianity.
Now for any of the atheist fam that's listening. I am sure that it all seems maybe about the same level of illogical. But I will say you were warned that my approach is holistic mind, body, spirit.
And this episode, we're leaning heavily into the spirit aspect of that. I do think it is very important for your wellness to have a view to have a belief system that supports who you are as a full person.
One of the things that is most nourishing about the traditions I've been exploring lately is that they don't have an element of proselytization. So, you are free to believe whatever affirms you and whatever feels good for you. And that doesn't affect me, and it doesn't have to affect my belief system.
That is an enormous departure from the form of Christianity that I practiced in my youth. But it is a deeply liberating approach to spirituality. So, there's room for everyone. And if you already know in your gut, this episode is not for you.
Then I'll see you on the 15th. Today am joined by Kris Henry.
Kris is a spiritualist and they identify as an Obeah ENBY and an Olorisha in the Lukumi tradition. So, a lot of the insights that Kris brings us today are coming through that lens. You have to check out their site, www.thespiritualabolitionist.com If you don't immediately fall in love when you see them using twerk in place of work throughout the branding of the site and centering Black queer trans and intersex folks, I don't understand you. They are a fascinating person their book of poetry, entitled love letters, I absolutely love, and I've gotten so much value out of there oracle deck. I love using oracle decks, tarot decks as journaling prompts so that I can really connect to my own will whenever I'm at a crossroads.
I've started working with Kris myself and the more I honor ancestral practices, the more empowered I feel in the present tense.
I deeply resonate with their goal to create authentically empowering ancestrally connected healing practices that bring a sense of agency and sovereignty back to the historically marginalized from the inside out. Doesn't that just hit you in the heart? Their work is beautiful. This conversation was lovely.
Let's get into it
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Dalia: Thanks for coming on the show today, Kris.
Kris: Thank you for having me.
Dalia: I'm so excited.
I got my oracle card deck. So originally this is how we met. I saw you posted something on Facebook about your deck pre-sales being ready to go live and what really just grabbed my attention was that it's specifically from the perspective of a queer nonbinary Black person. And how many times is that even an option? Because I know even when I was just looking for a tarot deck or an oracle deck actually made by a Black person, I couldn't find, but a few. And there were others out there where they had Black characters depicted on the card, but it was clearly like exactly the same images from something else.
I don't know if you've ever tried to buy a Black Santa, but anybody who has knows the struggle. So sometimes you'll find a quote unquote, Black Santa, but it is the white Santa who's been painted. And sometimes it even has the audacity to chip before Christmas is over. So, it was the same thing. Some of these, I was like, all y'all did was paint these same characters, Black or even worse.
I saw a couple from non-Black artists. And it was their concept of Blackness, which we'll just say it was off. It wasn't, it wasn't accurate. So anyway,
Kris: Hashtag problematic
Dalia: Thank you! Then I actually saw you promoting your own art. I was just fascinated. So, I would love to hear about your journey into spiritualism and how you got to the point that you created this for the rest of us, who've been dying to have something exactly like this.
Kris: Oh my gosh, you don't even know how many back flips my heart just did that you said that because, I mean, I felt the same way to be totally honest with you.
I was looking for a deck that really resonated with me. And I was like, I don't want to feel like a part of me is left out. Like, this is very like cis- het in premise, even though it's Black or this is non-Black, but it's queer kind of thing. And yeah, so that really just warmed my heart. I just had to say, thank you.
Thank you for that. So, my journey into spiritualism, well, I was like a very devout Christian when I was in high school and nobody made me go to church or anything. I think like some part of me just knew I needed something spiritual in my life. And then in college I started having like a crisis of faith and just started really questioning a lot of things about the foundations of Christianity.
So I was in more of a place where I was like, I don't know what I believe. But in that time, my father's mother passed, and I started seeing and hearing her. And that was my introduction into ancestors, I would say. And that's probably the foundation of where like all my other connections with different spirits and energies and stuff really started.
Dalia: How did you feel when that first happened? Because I know me growing up in a, I was made to go to church, so difference there, and there was always a lot of fear around anything that had to do with the dead. At least what I was told was that if you think you heard a deceased, loved one, it's a demon pretending to be them.
So, I would have been alarmed, had that happen to me. But what was your experience?
Kris: I think what this really came down to is that I was blessed to have relationships with both of my grandmothers while they were alive. So, it was like, I knew their energies. Both of them, like when they passed, I knew it was, they knew it was me kind of thing.
And like right before my grandma passed a few months earlier, when we kind of found out that she wasn't going to make it and they were like, just take her home so she can be comfortable for however long she has left kind of thing. She started saying something very like random to me about like asking me what size shoe I wear.
And she was like, I just have a feeling you're going to have to wear my shoes. But she was like this hardcore prayer warrior. And there were so many things that she used to do that I didn't understand as a kid, or I thought like, she's just really, really into this and not quite as much as me kind of thing.
And, but it's like, they're really like some foundations for spiritual ism and that side of my family, despite being very devoutly, Christian, they're very superstitious about things that kind of let me know. There was other things that folks started hiding in Christianity on that side of my family. So, I think between those two things, I just knew it was her.
I literally felt it in the moment that she let go of her existence in this life. And I felt her come to me and then I just started feeling her. It'd be like, grab this while you're at the store. And I would need it like six months later and stuff like that. And then eventually she was like, I need you to make me, she didn't describe it as an altar.
Other people call them alters, but she described it as a landing pad. She was like, I need you to make me a landing pad. I need to introduce you some other ancestors. And so that was how she basically taught me how to make an altar. And so I'm spirit taught in a lot of the things that I do, like different spirits, just kind of introduce themselves to me cause they know that like I won't get freaked out and I kind of, you know how to communicate and learn them.
I think the foundation of that is that I knew her while she was alive. And so, it was like, I got to be in her energy while she was alive. And I knew it was her when she passed. Yeah.
Dalia: That really resonates the idea that even in families that have become very deeply interested in Christianity or that's the only religious practice they associate with that doesn't mean that all of the old spiritual practices are gone.
And it's something that I've seen pop up a lot of places, the accusation or the false idea that Black Americans who are descendants of enslaved people have no culture because slavery interrupted all of that. And somehow, we just magically became nothing but property. And there are even some Black Americans who believe that, like we have nothing, but it's not true.
It may be took different forms and our culture has evolved to be something that you don't find on the continent. It has become something else, but at no point, did we become culture free or spirituality free and only have the option of what, you know, your oppressor offered you. It always becomes some kind of hybrid version of what we were before and who we are now.
So, I've been reading more about hoodoo and how you can see a lot of practices you see, and who do come from specific indigenous practices that people might still practice a little bit in Africa, not as much because colonization also affected people's relationship with indigenous religions there, but you can see that people were brought here and then became like an amalgamation of all the different religious practices.
It wasn't coming from one specific area. So, it becomes a reflection of the diaspora and you find it everywhere. You just don't always recognize where it came from.
Kris: Exactly. And that was what I would actually go to say that that applies to Black people globally. Cause my family is actually Jamaican. And I like work with Christian spirits, but I also practice Obeah and those two things are treated like they're totally different.
And Obeah is still like illegal because it's associated with curses and hexes, but people don't know that a lot of those laws came from when Obeah men were giving slaves poison to poison their masters and were giving slaves or enslaved people, rather because I'm like reprogramming that one in my brain.
But we're giving them tokens for a courage to rebel and things like that. Because before that white people were still going to Obeah men in Jamaica too. So, it was just like, but it's different when you start using this stuff to mess with their systems. Right? So that's where a lot of like the witchcraft laws around
really began. It's like rooted in this tradition of rebellion. And I don't know, it just never felt mutually exclusive for me because both of my grandmas were Christians. And so, it's like, despite the fact that Obeah is really what connects me to my ancestors and through my ancestors connects me to a lot of other stuff.
It's like, I know that like a lot of Christian spirits have my back because my grandmother is prayed over me, like to them too
Dalia: So, some of these other spirits are not deceased blood relatives. They could be spirits who have been looking out for your family for a while.
Kris: Exactly. And that's the thing for a lot of Black people globally like that.
I really try to impart is that. You can be the one who is restoring some tradition from 600 years ago and developing a new way of relating to this spirit that could just recognize like, oh, hey, you know, you're a descendant of this like bloodline that I have like a pact with or whatever. So as a lot of people are really waking up to these things, you know, a lot of these spirits are like, oh, you might actually be open to be in the one I can talk to you now.
Dalia: Now when it comes to that, was there a recognizable alter in hindsight, in your grandma's house?
The one who said she needed a landing pad; did she have one?
Kris: So, both of my grandmothers had like these just different like display case things with everybody's funeral programs or like a wall wave and yeah, one time actually, when my mom on. On my mom's side, she basically says like, yeah, I like to keep everybody's programs.
Cause my mom used to do it. Like, and one time she saw my altar and she totally rearranged it somewhere else. She like brought me something and she didn't go, this was my author. She was just like, well, I just saw you had this right here. And I thought it made sense to do it like this. And she completely like perfectly made an altar and she knows nothing about that stuff just from seeing it so many times without a name though.
Dalia: That's so interesting because I never thought about that saving the programs. And that is so interesting. Yes, absolutely. I have a ton of relatives who do that, who feel very Christian and that's all they are, but like my mother is half Jamaican and half Cuban and I know just, they worked so hard to break people away from their traditional ways that feels like even in the family members, there is this fear around all things that aren't recognizable as part of Catholicism or part of another branch of Christianity. Even the family members that, you know, in Cuba, the mixing of Santeria and Catholicism,
but then some people are like, oh no. Even if their neighbors and the rest of the town says, this is normal, and this is what we do here. So have you had any tension like that with anybody in the family or you've been able to just stay focused on what you knew was right? And you were affirmed by your two grandmas?
Kris: Yeah, it's definitely more so the second one, I like. I don't know that I've really been like super close to a whole bunch of my family. Like, as I just got older, because I was just more so in community where I was, and my family didn't necessarily live near me, you know? So, I wouldn't necessarily be the person who was like traveling across the country for a bunch of family events.
So, in that way, it's like, I mean, if somebody does have a problem with me, they probably just keep their distance. And I don't know, but the family members that I'm close to are all really, really cool about it, but also just because they know me as a person. So, it's like, nobody's looking at me like, oh, Kris is just evil.
Dalia: That's a blessing in itself. You don't need that extra, heat from family.
Kris: Yeah. And so, I don't know. I feel like if I have a feeling like somebody does feel like that, I just kind of keep my distance from them. And I do think internally I had to work, lose some things like both with my queerness and with my spirituality on that front.
But over time, like my sister burns ancestor money now she'll hit me up. Like, what should I do to like, thank the ancestor because this money burns has just brought in some clients, like what's going on.
And I had a cousin hit me up one time was like, what's this aura cleanse business about?
Definitely some of like my family's minds have open or they felt led into just trying some stuff and seeing how they can work their realities and things based off seeing me. So that's been really good.
Dalia: I love that, like you said, other ancestors or other spirits in general might recognize that you are the entry point into helping the family reclaim old practices, but then it also seems like living family may recognize you are the entry point to reconnecting to something that they've lost.
Kris: Wow. I hadn't really thought about it like that, but yeah.
Dalia: With the queerness, when did that come into your awareness? So, you were voluntarily, actively experiencing spirituality in high school, through a Christian Church where you aware of your queerness then, or were you in a church where that wasn't a problem.
Kris: So, I don't think I was really aware of my queerness in high school, at least not like consciously. I think I became aware of my friend sometime in college around my junior year of college, I would say when I was just like dating more and hoeing more so, and senior year was my first queer relationship and we were together for a little while.
And so, when it became like, just kind of clear that that was serious, that I wasn't like experimenting, I was really embracing like, no, I can just, I'm like just queer, you know, I can, I can have really queer relationships. At that point, I was like, all right, well, I'm gonna have to tell my family.
They, cause I'm not like I'm obviously not going to like hide my relationships and stuff like that. Like that was just my mentality at that time was just, well, if like where there's going to be some problems, we might as well just find out now, you know? But I don't think anybody was really like actively homophobic or at least not like intentionally, because I do come from a Jamaican family.
Like my mom sometimes will say like really insensitive stuff and I'll be like, Ooh, that was like really hurtful. But in hindsight, I can see like, she's trying, you know, she was trying, but there's like a cultural learning curve and stuff. And she wouldn't like, when I learned how to just communicate, like this hurts me, she would adjust her behavior rather than being like super reactive.
So even looking back with that, like things where I would've been like, yeah, I was dealing with homophobia and stuff from my family, it was more like from a place of ignorance, it wasn't from a place of like malice or like anybody was going to disown me or anything like that, you know? And so, yeah. And then when I came out as non-binary, that was in 2019.
So that was more recently that I came out to myself and then like to my family and stuff. Oh, it was a lot harder with my pronouns.
Dalia: Oh my goodness. The struggle is real. How, what was that process like for you? Because I feel like in hindsight, so I was born in 81. I'm going to be 40 this year.
And so, we didn't have a lot of language that we have now in English. And its weird how language can kind of bind you. It's hard to conceive of a concept that doesn't exist in your language, but at the same time, this is the colonizer's language. Unfortunately, I don't have access to any of my ancestors’ indigenous languages, even though I speak Spanish because of my Cuban ancestry.
Again, that's another colonizers language. So, I'm sure there was more room and gender wasn't as binary and some of these languages, because I know culturally the binary was not a thing in a lot of the cultures that we are linked to by blood, but for me, even trying to express, I knew I was never hyper femme. I always hated hyper fem things, but then I also thought, well, what part of this is just how we're socialized to think about femininity?
And for a while, it was just like, well, I'm just a bunchy woman, but then in relationships with women, they were like, hmmm, you're absolutely not that. And then I'm like, oh, I'm an aggressive femme. Just trying to find the language and then trying to find which pronouns are mine, it's been such a journey.
I find sometimes I'll even mis-gender myself, but lately what's been feeling right is no pronouns at all. And my mother growing up, even though she, her are her pronouns, she was always told us you never use someone's pronouns while they're in the room. Like, if I would say her talking about my mother, she would pop me in the head, not like super hard, but like, I'm right here.
I'm your mother. I'm right here. Don't talk about me like I'm not here. And she said that it was a Jamaican thing, but I have not heard that consistently.
I'm like, is it, where does that come from? Have you heard that before? Like being a thing, that even cis people say don't use pronouns while I'm standing right here?
Kris: No, not in my family, but I'm so intrigued when I hear stuff like that, because it does sound like indigenous in nature.
Dalia: It's weird. And then I mentioned it just someone else trying to explain, I don't use any pronouns at all, but some people, mostly straight people have been reading no pronouns as hostile to LGBTQIA+ people, but I'd heard other people saying it too.
So I don't know I'm in like this weird place of like didn't we always know we were non-binary, but we just weren't using the word non-binary and isn't that just a big ass umbrella. And that's why so many of us are like, am I in the right place? Cause it's like such a big room.
Kris: Exactly. Yeah. I because I think if I had the language, I probably would've started going by.
Non-binary when I started going by Kris when I was 12, because I didn't have language for it, but I was like, it just sounds less like a girl's name, you know? Cause like my birth name was Kristen and so my family would call me Kristin, but everybody else in my life had called me Kris since that age, you know?
And so it was like, I was thinking about it. I was like, if I would've had the language back then that probably would have been the moment that I would have been like, yeah, no, this is it's because this is like who I am and just feeling very much outside of a lot of the language and almost feeling like I existed just outside of a lot of people's concepts of what masculine feminine are and like, and I think that's divine.
You know, and I think my connections with all these different spirits and all these different realms has just continued to affirm that. Like when you really start seeing the vast variety of realms that there are, it makes sense. How many of us are probably connected to all of these realms that are really just figuring out a new way to exist and new ways to express ourselves.
But you're also not the first person ever I've known who doesn't use any pronouns and is just like, I know two people who just use their first initials and they're like, my pronouns are K you know.
Dalia: That gives me an idea, that actually is really helpful. It can be hard for people to get used to it, not because they're trying to be difficult. It's just a bigger shift than them accepting your queerness and learning how to not be offensive to you, but asking people to use the correct pronouns when that's just not how the language has worked in their experience up until now. It's a struggle.
So then when you ask somebody don't use any pronouns at all, they feel like they're saying your name entirely too much in a sentence. It feels very strange to them.
Kris: Oh goodness. That's wild. Yeah. I think like, I'm just, I just know so many different queer people that I'm not programmed to just assume anything about anybody.
So I'm very much like when somebody tells me, like, if somebody was like refer to me as it, I'm like, okay, that's just, you, you know,
Dalia: It's not a problem with queer people because when people use Neo pronouns, I'm just like, okay, okay. I write it down. I put it next to their name in my phone and I get it. And I know to look at it again before we start talking so that I will use the correct ones.
It's not that hard.
Kris: Exactly. So, I think like being in community, you kind of learn to let people tell you who they are, rather than assuming anything about them. So it didn't like strike me as anything when I saw no pronouns. So I was just like, all right.
Dalia: You see this is why spending time in community is so crucial. I really want to know more about when you look back, even thinking about your ancestors and the gendered language around like, oh, that was your great, great grandma, but was it, we don't know. You didn't meet, like we don't really know. Have you had any epiphanies that specific people have brought to you or once people get out of their physical body, is there less attachment to things like that?
Because spirit never has a gender, right? At least that's what I thought that spirit is always gender free.
Kris: Because this is a freewill universe. They can take on like any like forms and fashions that they want. That's why, like, even with our Orisha, you'll have different paths, like there's different lifetimes of them that will look different and we're different.
And just because multidimensionality is a very real thing when it comes to spirits. And a lot of like, just the fact that energy does recycle in all these different ways. So you will have a lot of gender neutral entities that are like, I'm just like a universal energy. Like I don't, but then you will also have like goddesses or, you know, who are just like, no, I like really lean into what we would say is femininity now. But even within the, like, you've seen the deck, like I really break down how, like, these things are really formless energy concepts that can manifest in different ways. So there's no way to define it except to connect to it for yourself and decide what proportion of that you resonate with, you know?
Just like, there's all different types of like identities that humans are realizing that we have it's very similar for spirits.
Dalia: Interesting, because I had assumed that, especially when we're here in the west, a lot of times you're always dealing with some kind of male cis-gender God.
I started to think it was always a projection that humans are putting on spirit, this gendered thing. But I never thought about, you know, the spirit itself or himself or herself may decide. This is the energy that I want to put out there. And then people pick up on that energy and understand this is a goddess, or this is just spirit with no gender.
Kris: Right. And sometimes like, just depending on where your conception is, spirits won't necessarily have attachments to being seen a certain way. So if they have to take on a certain form to be comprehensible, then that's what they'll do. Like there's this one Veda where Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita where Krishna shows somebody Krishna’s universal form and it freaked the person out.
Like the whole thing is like, I went through wonder, I went through total fear.... and then Krishna turned back into like a humanoid thing. So yeah that's like what I really look like. And you just aren't ready.
Dalia: I wonder if that's why, so a while ago I got a reading, an ancestor reading. I was under the impression maybe something broke down in communication, but I thought that my ancestors were going to be, making bold, visible moves within a certain timeframe and that it didn't happen.
But then when I went back for a follow-up reading, the person that had the reading, when they said, I think it's you, you are not ready and they know you're not ready and they're not here to freak anybody out. They know that if you really start hearing them and seeing them, you're going to have a little meltdown, even though you keep saying, show yourself, show yourself.
They're like, ummmm, but you're not ready. So that all makes sense.
Kris: Yeah, absolutely. Cause my spirits definitely know there's only certain times that I can deal with visuals. Other times it's like do not just pop up in the corner of my eye when I just woke up. Y'all like, don't do that. I don't have a problem with hearing anybody like that for some reason, that just never really freaked me out. So I'm like send a sound like before you send an image, if you see like I'm doing any meditation, I can look at you.
Dalia: I love the idea of being able to set boundaries even with non-human entities.,
Kris: You have to, or they'll run your life. Like they'll get away with as much as you let them get away with, but then you also have some, like, that's why I think ancestors, it's really important to connect with them before you start connecting with other entities because you are them.
So they really understand your human limits a lot more than other spirits. Like some of them, it's not that they don't care, but they don't exist in this body. So they don't understand that you're tired unless you just say like, Hey, not right now, like I'm tired. Or if you're like, they don't come at me like that, like this is not a productive way to communicate.
Like, okay, I understand that this is urgent, but you can't do this right now. This is hurting my ears. Like that kind of thing. You know?
Dalia: How do you make sure that you specifically stick to your ancestors? Is it just by asking that only they come through or are there tools you would stay away from.
Is that your experience? Are there certain tools we should save for later or save for never?
Kris: So tricksters will definitely like, especially if the spirit doesn't recognize you. So it's if you haven't been initiated into something and you're like, oh, I'm just going to light this candle and summon and so-and-so and tricksters there definitely will be like, well, s**t, I'm just gonna answer cause like so-and-so's obviously not coming.
Cause you don't know what you're doing. And they will just come and talk to you, like give me attention, give me energy. I think, well, number one, like either starting with somebody that you knew in life or somebody that you just heard a lot of stories about when it comes to ancestors and letting them be your entryway into other ancestors.
And when it comes to branching out into other spirits, like, because when spirits realize you can hear them, a lot of different things, we'll just kind of like try to flood you sometimes. And so you do have to know how to say no . When I feel like somebody, I like haven't like consciously interacted with before it's coming.
The first thing that I do is like ask, do you mean me my highest good. And if the answer is at all shaky, cause like a trickster will try to lie, but you can kind of feel, it feels like when a person's lying a little bit, you know, like there's just something shaky. You didn't know how to answer that directly.
But then when I get a really direct response, the responses like, yes, like obviously like then it's like, okay, so now we can like talk.
Dalia: That's really helpful. Do you, in your experience, does everyone who passes, like if you're thinking of a close relative that died, but in life they were super, super Christian and all they ever envisioned was going straight to heaven no in-between is everybody available to be called out to, or are there some people that based on what they said when you knew them.
They probably have moved on and they can't hear you anymore.
Kris: It really depends. Some ancestors are earth bound. Like for some reason they just couldn't cross over. They can't let go. And some really didn't have something just deeply unhealed in them. That just still plagues them as a spirit.
So different situational things like that will affect even if you say like, let me speak with my honorable ancestors or my righteous ancestors, then like certain ancestors, aren't going to be able to answer that. And that is how you want to start. You don't want to start with like your unhealed ancestors giving you a bunch of discouraging advice. I think one thing when people talk about this separation though, is that eventually you can reach a point where you can do healing work with those ancestors, but you really have to have a solid foundation with the ones who mean you your highest good first, you know, so that like you can really see that distinction and know the kind of healing work that you're doing.
Because a lot of the things with your unhealed ancestors are also unhealed in you. So that's a very vulnerable thing.
Dalia: Can you help them do healing without directly interacting with them? If you do your own healing work does that go backwards, and forwards like with your other relatives?
Kris: Yeah. I think anytime anybody heals themselves, it heals around and backwards and forwards.
The present is in conversation with all things, whatever current present you're choosing is in conversation with alternate realities, it's in conversation with the future and it's in conversation with the past. And so, yeah, you can definitely do things to elevate ancestors who need elevating and help bring them peace, but you need to be in a solid place and have a solid, hold on those things within yourself first, you know?
Dalia: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense to me. I've been thinking a lot lately about, well, not lately, probably like forever about intergenerational trauma and how it physically is passed on to you through DNA. But then also wondering if sometimes if you feel like a high level of rage or just general being super, super high strung in a way that indicates you're a descendant of survivors of trauma, but also could be that you're still feeling their energy and all this unresolved rage that they died with because they were subjected to countless injustices and just all the disappointment you can even imagine.
If you get to a point where you're spending your time in silence and you feel like your nervous system is less agitated all the time, would that also be going out to them or does that not necessarily mean anything's happened beyond you?
Kris: Oh, it absolutely does. Like, your DNA is like a continuation of that, you know?
And so yeah, the intergenerational healing definitely does impact the experiences of intergenerational trauma, because it starts activating the things that the trauma deactivated within the bloodline too, you know, like these connections with all these other spirits. That's why sometimes when you move through something that does take up a whole lot of weight, because trauma is like a really heavy energy, wherever you experience it.
Right. And when you clear that it makes room for like a whole lot of subtle energy that was once there before, you know.
I think you said something earlier about like ancestors who conceptualize gender differently that I wanted to touch on because a lot of the people will say it was the great mothers were the original humans, but they like it when I say the great ancestors, because so many of them did not resonate with womanhood.
Like there were trans men, they were folks who in today's terms would identify as non-binary. And that's why like Black queer trans and intersex folks do have like a lot of unseen forces that are so in supportive us, like being visible and being out.
Dalia: That makes me wonder too, when you spoke about ancestors that are invested in the wellbeing of your family, not because you're blood relatives, but because they had a commitment with your blood line.
I immediately thought that this could also be like folks who never decided to have children of their own or couldn't for whatever reason also being part of our extended family. Family isn't just blood family in this life or in any other.
Kris: Yeah, absolutely. And that's where like the whole concept of trancestors comes from too.
Like a lot of
Dalia: Ohhh tell me about that I haven't heard that.
Kris: I feel like my first trancestors were Monte Carlo and Keywan they pass they were really like really integral in the Atlanta community. But they were two of the first, like people who had passed that my ancestors were like, okay, you have to help them transition.
You have to work with them and stuff like that. So I actually bonded with them, in depth and wound up really involved in doing a lot of like death doula work and helping community members like grieve and like sending messages from them and things like that. And it really has deeply connected me to a lot of trancestors who really their family and this life was community, you know?
And so they, they look over communities still.
Dalia: Oh, wow. That's beautiful. So the things that you offer to the community as a spiritualist, you do death doula work, and you also have created the Oracle deck for us. What are the other things that you do?
Kris: I'm also just a deeply creative person, so there's a lot of like just creative stuff that I do as well. I paint, I do poetry. I've been a career spoken word artists. And so I would say that while it's not necessarily my career, it is another deep, part of my calling is to be a creative soul.
But the spiritual abolitionist definitely is and the cosmic reparations fund and just making myself available as a universal, spiritual support system for Black queer trans and intersex people who sees them like for who they are, you know? And I think it's deeply meaningful to receive spiritual support and healing protection tools, prosperity tools.
Everything in my shop is really geared towards things to make our lives easier, given all the s**t that goes on in this system. So when there was a lot going on with police action against Black people, I dropped the f**k around and find out protection blend was like, okay. So if a white person is trying to kill you with the cops clot then went this, you know, like, but then also like when I see people crowdfunding like, oh, Hey, here's some ancestor money burn this as you crowd fund and help manifest more funds for you.
You know? The higher love potion, which is like a roll-on oil is like, I see a lot of folks going through stuff emotionally. So this is going to help with calling in your spirits who can help with emotional support, you know so it's deeply rooted. Just everything that I do. I'm open for aura cleanses and for divinations this month as well.
The deck really came out of like, I was like, I can't really like divine for everybody all the time, but I think this is literally a way that I can, you know, and when I realized that like that Oracle deck did not exist, that was for like Black queer trans and intersex folks. I was like, all right, well, I need to create, it was basically what spirit was just like, it doesn't exist yet.
Cause you didn't make it like you paint, you write you've been a collective channel, what's stopping you they were just like, why haven't you made it already?
Dalia: I love that. I love that. And for anybody who doesn't know the difference between tarot and oracle cards, what is the difference to you as someone who actually has made it.
Kris: Yeah. So tarot is a regimented system. So even though you'll have them with different themes and using different things to express them, there's still basic things about numbers and the elements and stuff that just applies to tarot and the major Arcana also. And so it's more regimented in that way, you're going to have the same number of cards you're going to have the same archetypes. Oracle decks are a lot more open-ended even in how you can read with them.
with this one, they, it went through like several different editing processes kind of, because I was initially gonna like, have a lot more keys and they were just like, why? Just like, like you said, everything you need to say, like stop trying to like rub your nose against the grind stone.
Basically.
Dalia: When you say it could be read different ways to, how do you recommend somebody use a deck?
Kris: So you can pretty much approach it anyway, that was one thing about the reason that I. Went to different primordial, just universal energies but I more so consulted the universal energies who were conscious of marginalization and of the spiritual warfare on the mental and emotional wellbeing of Black queer trans and intersex folks every day, because we're seeing it more.
And I started just seeing a lot of things that folks were going to have to be dealing with in the next 10 to 25 years. And it was like, yo, I need the guidance that's really going to help, folks to do the inner work, do the outer work or whatever to be prepared. And a lot of us who can really feel that new ways of existence need to, are going to need to be existing sometime soon.
You know, I was like a lot of these oracle decks are very frilly and love and lighty and don't necessarily acknowledge like, no, revolution is coming. It's really here in the spiritual realms, you know?
Dalia: Oh, yeah, that resonates so deeply. So much is missing in these mainstream spiritual practices that have hijacked some indigenous traditions and over simplified them.
And everything's about 'love and light love and light', and the insinuation is if you really are a spiritual person that you're only aware of positive things, and every time something negative, you know, starts to come toward you, you're just like positive vibes only. And then magically that negative force just poof disappears.
We know from living in these Black bodies, that's not a f*****g thing. And that you could be bursting with positive energy and spiritual power and you will still have to deal with whatever the fuckery is of the day, whether that's somebody's homophobia f*****g up your employment situation, or somebody's transphobia f*****g you over, or somebody racism, it really is a thing.
So when you just now said it's spiritual warfare, can you talk about that? Because I would love to hear from a spiritual perspective, that's focused on abolition and liberation. What is really going on?
Kris: Oh, okay. I'm going to have to like talk about this kind of broadly and you're going to find this getting fucked.
So my, my word that I like to use is Babylon for the powers that used to be, I'm just going to say, cause they're really scrambling to hold onto power now. Because I think so many Black people are waking up and kind of realizing when you feel very drained because of a lot of these things, your energy is going somewhere.
It's powering things. And so a lot of the times, like when there's like these really subtle stories, these news stories, that these are the ones that everybody's seeing everywhere of, like, like I was telling somebody the other day, I've marched for a lot of people who did not make the news. And now all of a sudden it has to be a news story.
And the video footage has to be on your timeline and stuff like that. And just things that like will fundamentally make you feel unsafe and make your spirit feel unsafe in your body. That energy goes somewhere. So that stuff is very much intentional, just like in terms of trying to degrade our mental and emotional wellness to distract us from getting messages about what we need to be doing and ways that we can be prepared and things that we're meant to be doing on this earth right now to deal with this stuff, you know. For a while
I was just like going around doing healing, work with different places in the land where there are a lot of Black American earthbound ancestors who just died in such horrific ways that they're not at peace . And so I would just go out and do healing work. That was where, like the term, the spiritual abolitionist really came from, was it felt like helping free them and free these ancestors that were bound.
But those were ritual sacrifices. You see what I'm saying? Like the KKK is a ritualistic group. And so even when those things, like they're deeply embedded in a lot of the folks who are at the top of these corporations and stuff like there's ritual symbolism and things like that, that they're really trying to do to wage war on us all the time, and to keep us blind to our power, you know?
But the thing is a lot of us, we are we're master manifesters or we have spirits who are master manifesters like, we have spirits who will make ways for us and stuff like that. And spirits who will give us strength like High John the Conqueror is one that a lot of people will use because he's really big on emotional uplift and on helping you find ways to outwit them and outwit situations and stuff.
And so I like, as a shadow seer, I can see like certain like ritualistic things that are going on and are very background when certain things start circulating like that. And so I'll also see like, okay, this will be emotionally manipulating this kind of stuff. So then my channelings will be like, Hey, do this kind of inner healing work, focus on this in this time, you know?
To try to send messages from energies that are trying to balance and neutralize and not allow certain outcomes to happen to folks. And so that also definitely went into the creation of the deck was just teaching people how to protect themselves on a small scale when people are throwing crap at you or just evil eye and stuff, but also on a larger scale with the stuff that the state is just doing every day to try to f**k with us, you know?
Dalia: I've been hearing lately from almost everybody I know at this point in my life, everybody, they told you on a regular basis is involved in some kind of social justice work in some area, whether it's trying to get equal access to healthcare for fat people, whether it's trying to get people to stop murdering Asian people, everybody's in some kind of liberation work and everyone has been so demoralized lately that at the end of every conversation, it's just like, I guess my new objective is just to survive. Like repeatedly friends, keep saying, when I asked, well, how are you doing? And they know, I don't mean just give me some surface level. I mean, how are you really doing?
How are you doing? They're like, well, I'm still alive. And that's about it. Early 2020, it felt like momentum and there was new life into this second wave of the civil rights movement.
And then it started to feel like the constant news coverage, became an energy drain. And then you heard even well meaning folks of color saying you can't look away and don't forget their names. And basically if you don't have the strength to keep watching it, like who the f**k do you think you are? I mean, they died.
Kris: It's like guilting people into consuming. Especially I dislike it when people do that to Black people and like I'm Black every day, you know?
Dalia: Right, right. Do I really have to keep watching something that's going to make me feel like I don't have any energy left to do anything?
Kris: And to be honest, I was an organizer before I was a spiritualist. And I think that was one thing that I saw. I was like, I can't help, but feel like the way this is modeled currently, we're not modeled to model wellness and model wellness as an essential part of doing that kind of work, you know, like modeling, having inner peace as an essential part of going to war with things. Because you can't be out of balance and those energies either, or you'll just be popping off and giving your energy to everything and mental health matters.
You know, mental health is deeply connected to spiritual health. We had so many ancestral practices that were for mental, spiritual, and emotional health that I feel like are coming back in a lot of these ways. I am prioritizing, like, I've seen a lot of Hoodoo apothecaries with like, anti-anxiety herbs for Black folks, you know, and different stuff like that.
I mean, in my opinion, you should be in your liberation work out of love and not obligation. If you are doing what you're doing, because somebody is telling you to feel obligated to it. That's not really coming from your heart. That might not even necessarily be what you are meant to do. I do think they try to condition us to burn ourselves out so that we're not effective.
And so that is a large part of what spurred me into becoming a healer and doing aura cleanses and things like that. And helping people release those things at an energy level ,receive these visions from spirit at an energy level, you know, like cultivate that self love on an energy level so that you have like a level of psychic shielding.
And you know, when to use that when you're dealing with these things.
Dalia: That framing is extremely helpful. Doing the work out of love. From your posts online, you seem very intersectional, but your work is focused on the liberation of queer Black folks, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're elevating the people you're serving above other people, but that's what you were called to do.
Kris: Right, I center Black queer trans and intersex folks because there's just such a big question with spiritualists all the time. Is that a safe space for me personally, as a Black queer, trans and intersex person, like, am I going to have to deal with some kind of microaggressive b******t while I'm coming to you for a healing service, you know, It's not that I don't also like do service with cis people. It's not that I don't also, you know, do service with white people. I do, I have a reparations fund and I asked that any white person who benefits from my work contribute to that consistently. Like, so if you are going to take benefit from me as a white person, I need you to be a benefit to my community by sponsoring community healing services and sponsoring products for community members.
But I do think it's important as a spiritualist that I do center myself that way to always make it like clear first and foremost to community members who need that heal at work the most like I'm in a safe space for you.
Dalia: Yeah. Oh, that makes so much sense to me. Oh my goodness. I'm sure there's like a million other questions I'm going to of later, but...
Kris: Do you want me to see if the deck has anything to say?
Dalia: Yessss, let's see!
Kris: Something just popped out.
Dalia: Is that the one that wants to be read?
Kris: Yes. So it is the birth key and for people who this is their first time seeing it, they're kind of like flashcards. So there's no books you have to sift through. When you pull a card, it's just going to tell you what it means.
The birth key unveils that you can either consciously sit down or get sat down by spirit because you have a new creation to labor into existence. The only thing blocking this creation from coming to you is the fact that you are not honoring your labor and prioritizing your creative baby. Only share your energy with those who can support you in your focus and allow the universe to remove anyone else from your life.
Allow spirit to use you in your co-creation process. Creation is spiritual labor surrender fully to this blessing. Focus on your focus and abundance will flow in what follows.
Dalia: That might've been specifically for me. I don't know if it's for the conversation.
Kris: It’s wild because it's a new moon. Yeah, it was yesterday. So that's manifestation time. So it felt like this feels kind of specific. I don't know. This might be like the perfect astrological time for you to.
Dalia: Yeah, sometimes it's ridiculous how many different ways spirit tries to tell me something. And I'm still like, what do I do?
I got that message a lot yesterday. And I was like, huh, I don't know. I'm still feeling lost. And now here it is.
Kris: Oh, I love that. And I've been loving that with the feedback specifically for Black queer and trans folks about the deck, just like, oh my gosh, it's so straight forward. And that was my goal. I was like, I don't want this to be a super confusing deck.
I want it to really just call out the energy so that you can see it like, oh yeah, like
Dalia: That's so interesting. There's something about the way that it's written too. And I always, I struggled with this because I felt very disconnected from Black American culture growing up because I was raised in a very white centered church.
I didn't get to engage with the music. And the church is such a big part of Black American culture. If you didn't at least get to go as a kid, I feel like you're missing out on a lot of references. There's all kinds of songs you don't know. And then so many of these songs also have messaging that bridges, spiritualism and Christianity.
And so I'm always concerned that I won't get it. That something specifically for Black people might just go right over my head. But what I do find is when somebody is more connected to the diaspora in general, and your worldview is expanded because of the queerness and the focus on the trans folks and the intersex folks, that's the language that I understand.
Like I maybe wouldn't have understood it if it was written by cis femme Black woman from the US who got to grow up in the church. That she might use language that I'd be like, I don't know the references, but when I've been going through the deck, I find myself asking, why do I feel like these were all written for me?
Kris: Yes. And I've heard that from several Black gender expansive folks too, just like this feels really affirming with like language that I can get behind. And that was so the goal I'm so glad.
Dalia: Yeah. Thank you so much for making and then modeling for everybody that there's just a lot of stuff that we're here to do, but sometimes you feel like you can't do it because you think there aren't enough people that need it.
Like, you know, you could have used it, but you're like, how many of me are there out there more than you think, because people's voices are constantly being suppressed and people are still finding their way to clearly identifying who they are for themselves. Like coming out to yourself first, like you said, as a non-binary person,
that is a step. You don't hear people talk about it a lot, but that's like the most important step.
Kris: Exactly. And it's a process.
Dalia: It doesn't happen just like that.
Kris: It's a decolonization process really.
Dalia: Yeah.
Kris: Just decolonizing your concept of new.
Dalia: Wow. That really hits. Where do we go to hear more of this? Where did we go to hear more of what Kris is putting out into the world?
Kris: So I have a podcast where I do collective channelings. If it ever seems like s**t is really going to like hit the fan. I dust out my old telepathic hotline with the universe and pull out messages.
And that's called The Liberation Station Podcast. you can find me at www.thespiritualabolitionist.com. There you'll find links to the podcast, to my shop, with all my products, including the deck and my art and all my different spiritual tools and the cosmic reparations fund for any white and non-Black folks who have heard this and would like to sponsor healing products and services and emergency funds for community members.
All of that can be found on my website. I'm also on Instagram @thespiritualabolitionist and @kriswithakcreates. That's more so like my personal, like splash, just like putting out different creative things that I'm working on. Just for fun for. Yeah, I think that's pretty much everywhere that you can find me dropping my little gems.
I try to put out different little like memes and stuff about the, how to handle the astrological weather on my Instagram.
Dalia: That's what I feel like is really missing for me. A lot of times they're like a practical approach. There's so much spiritual stuff out there and sometimes it just kind of feels like you're on the receiving end of a fire hose and you're like, well, what should I do right now?
Presenting it and in a meme form sounds very digestible.
Kris: Yeah, I did a really, I did a really fun one with a living single scene the other day. And I was like, Max equals how I'm going to be this mercury retrograde. And it was a scene where everybody was arguing in the kitchen and Max just walked in and got handed the cookie and got handed a glass of milk and tried to reach for another cookie and just walked out.
Dalia: Yeah, this is what we need. This is what we need. Understandable. Something you can internalize.
Yeah, we remember Max. I keep seeing all this stuff about the Friends anniversary or reunion or whatever, and
Kris: you mean white Living Single?
Dalia: Thank you. I'm like, oh, that thing that was a derivative form of a show that it just resonates so much more.
It's funny because at the time the environment I was in, all I ever saw was Friends. And then I get to watch Living Single, as a binge, as an adult. And I'm like, wow this clearly was first.
Kris: I literally can quote every single episode. I'm going to be writing an article at one day where I break down every Friend's episode.
That's can you link directly back to a Living Single episode. Stay tuned. Cause that's been in the back of my head cause I grew up in a Friends household too, and I started rewatching it, but I watched living single all the time.
Dalia: Yeah. That really says something for anybody who's thinking from an artistic standpoint.
Oh, I can't do ... because it's so derivative. But can't you though? Because how successful was Friends? But can't you though? It really depends on who's going to be consuming it in the end.
Kris: It's true. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Dalia: Thank you so much for coming on. Yeah, not that we want to encourage or validate the constant theft of Black culture.
Kris: I was like white folks that wasn't necessarily for you to go appropriating anything.
Dalia: If anything, all what I can say is it was on brand.
Kris: So true. So true
Dalia: Taking, taking, taking, taking, and what I've been seeing so much lately is how both straight Black American culture and white popular culture is just constantly stealing Black, queer cultural things like left, right and center.
A friend was telling me about a show that they're enjoying, but I had decided not to watch it because the news behind the scenes was basically like, hey, there were ancestors who put in a ton of time into ballroom that got passed over vs the person we selected, you know, while they're a person of color, they're very fair skinned and they have straight hair, they're not any of the things that the people who started ballroom are. And while they are queer and I'm definitely not invalidating their queerness. It's different to be queer and not engage with the culture. It's not the same.
Kris: With a lot of these celebrities that come out and it's like, okay, wait, you definitely aren't having the same experience as a lot of the rest of us.
And you're not in community with all these other queer people in the streets, which is where queerness really developed.
Dalia: If you were you’d have known to just sit your ass down. When this opportunity came up, if you actually were an active member of the community, it never would have crossed your mind to take this spot from a trans person with dark skin, who has been doing the damn thing since before you were f*****g born. It never would have entered your consciousness.
Kris: We have that issue in academia too, with folks who develop those things in academia, who aren't actually in the streets. And don't actually have respect for a lot of the dark skinned, Black, queer, and trans folks who model these accountability, things that you're now making millions off of books about I'm side eyeing somebody with the initials AMB on that one, because your publishing team is really trying to crush it.
There even is a story on that with you not compensating, dark skinned, Black, queer, and trans folks whose essays are the basis for your books. And now you're the authority on transformative justice.
Dalia: Alright. Cute. It's amazing when you start to hear about the layers. You suspect there's more b******t, but sometimes you don't know, cause it's not the area you function in.
That's really interesting to me and I am pan, bi/pan. Pan feels more right now, but bi is what people said a million years ago because I'm old. But I would never presume that I could lead the way in helping dark skinned trans femme folks, get liberation. If there was a show that was specifically for Black trans femmes, I would never think that that was my spot.
Or even if it was something that was supposed to be centered on cis gay Black men, because their lives and their experience of homophobia and transphobia is a million times higher than what I experience when it comes to homophobia because people keep assuming I'm straight.
I keep having to tell people I'm not straight and I don't have to worry about somebody throwing a brick at me if I'm holding hands with someone who, as people walk by, they think they see an opposite gender couple, it's not the same. So then why would I try and push myself to the front.
Kris: Centering yourself in an experience that you’re not living in the streets. Exactly. And you can so tell, but that's why I feel like it's so important that a lot of us just manifest our own s**t at this point. That's so much of why I try to get people tapped into like getting that spiritual support to manifest in your own s**t. I was a Black queer and trans person. You know,
Dalia: We’re going to leave it on that note to manifesting your own s**t everybody.
Kris: That's pretty much what the birth key is all about.
Dalia: Oh my God. I love that.
Oh, isn't Kris, just a breath of fresh air. I would love to hear what your greatest takeaways are from this episode. Supporting members on Substack have access to group posts and that is an excellent place to share. I recently decided that social media was just taking so much more away from me than it was giving and because my energy is needed elsewhere.
I just decided to let it all go.
Now the best way to connect with me online is on Substack.
So, if you want to chat about the episode checkout daliakinsey.substack.com and consider the supporting a member option.
Substack makes it super easy for you to share episodes that you love. So if you got a lot out of today's conversation and you feel like a friend of yours would too, please be sure to forward it to them.
Thank you so much for joining me. I'll see you next time.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit daliakinsey.substack.com -
Today we're joined by Jade Eloise. Jade self identifies as a fat Black, queer, artist, writer, and spiritual healer. Jade breaks down for us in this episode what body positivity truly means, what its roots are. Jade is a mental health and self-love advocate, but in this episode, breaks down the distinction between self-love and body positivity in its truest form.
This episode we explore:
The true definition of body positivity
Separating our worth from productivity
Intersections of identity and creative freedom
Pushing back against social programing/conditioning
This episode is too good to keep all to yourself.
Episode Resources
www.etsy.com/uk/shop/ArtbyBodiposipoet
www.instagram.com/reclaimingbopo/
www.daliakinsey.com
Get your copy of Decolonizing Wellness A QTBIPOC-Centered Guide to Escape the Diet Trap, Heal Your Self-Image, and Achieve Body Liberation
Dalia: Hello and welcome to another episode of Body Liberation for All. I'm your host and decolonized wellness and body image coach Dalia Kinsey. I help queer folks of color heal their struggles with shame and self-acceptance through nutrition and self-care so they can live the most fierce, liberated, and joyful version of their lives.
Today we're joined by Jade Eloise Jade self identifies as a fat Black, queer, artist, writer, and spiritual healer. A bunch of my favorite things there back-to-back. So, this is a fabulous conversation, Jade breaks down for us in this episode what body positivity truly means, what its roots are. Jade is a mental health and self-love advocate, but in this episode, breaks down the distinction between self-love and body positivity in its truest form. This was a really informative interview when it was originally recorded and listening to it again.
So that I could transcribe it before it posted it here on sub stack. I got so much more out of some of these observations Jade shared about entrepreneurship.
I've been learning so much about myself in terms of what a affirming business space looks like for me and what type of marketing feels authentic and genuine and natural for me as I continue to promote Decolonizing Wellness, I have had such a time reckoning with the difference between what success is in terms of what I wanted from this project- which is to share, to use it as another tool, to reduce the suffering of all kinds of folks with marginalized identities that have a difficult relationship with their bodies because of the systems that we've been raised in but then also having a lot of residual hang-ups from how I was taught to measure success as a child in the public school system, in the United States and in general as a working class person. So. It has definitely uncovered a lot of areas for more growth. And while I've accepted that growth as an ongoing thing, it's even something that I discussed in the book that it's really crucial for us to get comfortable with that fact that there is no finish line in order for revolutionary change to really have a chance to take hold in our lives.
But still I've been finding this particular experience to be a real catalyst for growth sometimes in an uncomfortable way but listening back to Jade's take on what it really looks like to do something creative or entrepreneurial was really helpful for me. So, I hope you enjoy this episode as well.
If you love it, please be sure to share it with other people. Now that the podcast is on the Substack it's so easy to forward this episode to others. Alright, let's get right into it.
Body Liberation for All Theme
Yeah. They might try to put you in a box, tell them that you don't accept when the world is tripping out tell them that you love yourself. Hey, Hey, smile on them live your life just like you like it is.
It’s your party negativity is not invited. For my queer folks, for my trans, people of color, let your voice be heard. Look in the mirror and say that it's time to put me first. You born to win. Head up high with confidence. This show is for everyone. So I thank you for tuning in. Let's go.
Dalia: Hello. Thank you so much for taking out the time to come on the show.
Jade: Thank you for having me. I'm so happy to be here.
Dalia: When we did the livestream, I had nothing but positive feedback and there was just so much more that we could get into. But, you know, I didn't want us to make like a massive four-hour recording.
So, I'm so grateful that you're able to come back again. So, we could talk about a couple of other areas. So, we already know that you're a gifted artist and that you are really leading the way and helping us reclaim body positivity. Can you give us a little bit of a rundown of where body positivity started?
Then what happened to it? Like how it got hijacked and what you're working on now?
Jade: Yeah. So, I think the general kind of misconception about body positivity is that it is synonymous with self-love. It's all about reclaiming your body image for yourself and learning to love yourself. And obviously self-love is so, so important.
I'm a huge advocate for self-love. And I know how it affects your wellbeing. Actually, learn to love yourself. But body positivity is not in fact similar sort self-love. What if acidity is born from fat liberation movements which started to kind of back in the 20th century mid to late and it was mostly led by Black fat women and fat women in general as well, just leading the way in actually reclaiming their bodies.
And just making the world know that they were tired of not having their needs as fat woman looked after of you know, medical discrimination, stopping them from getting the care that they needed of constantly being told that their bodies were wrong and needed fixing And, you know, moving into kind of the early 2000s, and then obviously the rise of social media platforms and Instagram in particular, that sort of led to this movement of Black fat women and fat women and femmes and people who lived in marginalized bodies actually saying, do you know what, we want to show people what our lives are like, that we're proud to live in our fat bodies and that we're reclaiming them for ourselves. So, then body positivity was then born into this community of people online just saying we're here. We deserve to be here. And look at us just living our best lives in our bodies exactly as they are.
Which was beautiful for the time that it lasted. But with a lot of big movements, it always comes to the point where capitalism sweeps in, and corporations always try to find ways to make money out of movements. And I think, you know, that was the start of the decline of body positivity where of course, you know, we want fat people to get the bag and, you know, making their money from their movements.
And that was great at the start, but actually as it started to being capitalized on, it also started being co-opted. And that was when we started to see the body positivity that we have today, where if you search body positivity online, you're mostly see slim white able-bodied women claiming self-love and claiming body positivity without knowing what body positivity really means.
Dalia: That just makes so much sense. And it brings up a really big question. When it comes to people who are trying to do work, you're part of a movement. It affects you. It affects a population you belong to, but as we all know anybody who's trying to affect change in the world around them it can be very time-consuming.
So, for it to be sustainable, it's really helpful if you're also able to earn an income working in that area. But how do you strike that balance of the need to survive, the fact that we all deserve to be able to take care of ourselves and live somewhat comfortably, and the desire to stop capitalism from completely running our lives.
Someone made a point to me online recently that they personally didn't believe that there's any way to ethically make money because you're participating in a really broken system. But I also thought that was very convenient for them to say, because they have access to generational wealth. So, they technically can opt out of actively trying to support themselves.
And so, it's like, okay. So where does that leave the rest of us who also know what it's like to live with intergenerational poverty and knowing that that is not it. Like that is not where we want to be.
And you're also so limited as far as how much energy you can put into effecting larger change when you don't know where your next meal is coming from or how to keep a roof over your head from one week to the next.
Jade: Yeah, I think, you know, that is a lot of problem for a lot of activists and advocates in all sorts of movements. There is no one right answer. Honestly, everyone is just doing their best to stand by their beliefs and their morals and the goals that they have. Whilst also caring for their own needs and the needs of their family.
I think for me, I've realized that when I first started within self-love and then into body positivity movements. I was in that mindset of, you know, any opportunity that comes my way. I just want to grab it because I'm helping to perpetuate the message that I want to get out there whilst also looking after my financial needs.
But then actually there's a beautiful woman on social media @michellehopewell over the last year. She's really inspired me to be looking at, actually am I questioning the companies and the people that I want to work with and looking into what are their morals, what are their ethics? Are they standing by the communities they claim to be standing by what are the motivations behind the campaigns and the things that they want to be running?
And actually, realizing that I'm empowered to question that and by questioning that and by looking into in great depth the people that I want to work with, I can be selective about the work that I take on. And actually, you know, choose to work with communities and seek out communities that I want to work with.
But of course, again, I understand that there's a huge amount of privilege within that, to be able to pick and choose who you work with. I would say to people, if you have that ability to actually turn down work, when it comes up if you feel like that there's some ethical issues surrounding that, then that is a choice you might consider it.
But at the end of the day, it's all about you as an individual and what you're doing for the communities that you're trying to work for. So as long as you're standing by the morals and as long as you're conveying those within your work. I think that's the most you can do.
Dalia: I think that answer's really helpful. And the nuance there, that's one of the biggest differences between kind of a white supremacy culture, very misogynistic or patriarchal way of viewing everything is that under that system, there's a definitive right, a definitive best. And then everything else is trash, right?
When in reality, everything is more nuanced than that. And all of our lived experiences are so distinct. We need to give ourselves room to make individualized decisions and understand that maybe the right answer for you will shift and change over time as you have changes in other areas of your life, maybe with income, maybe with having better support, having better options.
And that's okay too. It doesn't really serve us to beat ourselves up for trying to do good things worrying, am I doing good things the absolute perfect way, the right way?
There is no absolute perfect or right way to do much of anything. So, yeah, I think that's a really helpful answer is to understand that there is no one answer.
Jade: Yeah, I think we've lost this understanding and you know, honoring the gray area in a lot of topics there is everything isn't always yes or no, black or white, it isn't always, you know, there was a correct answer and there's a wrong answer in reality that everything in life, it's a spectrum. And, you know, we can only do our best to seek out the right answer for us.
We can only do our best to stand by our communities. You know, and also, you know, the whole idea of cancel culture and, you know, you did one thing wrong and now you instantly have to be ashamed of yourself and there is no redeeming yourself from it. We're always learning. We're always growing. And I think so long as we're always striving to do our best, and it's almost, we're always willing to listen and learn and always do better than that is the best that we can do.
Dalia: Yeah. And I think it's really helpful when, when your goal is to communicate with someone or to try to do something collaborative with someone and, you know, you'll have to deal with them on an ongoing basis. So, let's say. You know, it's a coworker or it's a family member or someone that, you know, you can't just cancel them and keep it moving.
We really want to call people in and give people room to make mistakes and be imperfect. And at the same time, I'm all about the accountability, like you said with companies and individuals reaching out to you, being able to look and see, do you really seem sincere based on your previous behavior? And even then you're looking at a pattern of behavior, not necessarily cutting off opportunities or people based on one thing, but just the same, you know, if it feels like a hard no for you and a boundary, and it's not like this person or entity or organization has to be in your life, you know, you can dismiss them and make more room for other folks. So again, it's like, both its yes and instead of just one or the other, which is really interesting to me, I saw some, well, you're always seeing so much pushback and back and forth about the concept of cancel culture and some people really just wanting to never be held accountable for anything.
But at the same time also seeing some people going over the top and asking people who are being preyed upon by a system to be held responsible for responding to the system. So again, so much more nuanced and complicated than what most people want to deal with.
Yeah,
Jade: absolutely. I think things like that, they always have their place, you know, we do have to hold people accountable and people should want to be held accountable as well, because again, If you're striving to be better and do better in everything you do, you cannot expect to be above reproach and actually, you know, be told what you're doing in this situation isn't okay where you can do better. If you're not open to that I would question why I would question why, and are you really aware of the privilege that you hold in these situations? You know, so it, I definitely think that it does have this place It's again, it's, it's just nuances. It's about understanding that everything is not yes or no. It's like you say yes, and.
Dalia: Yeah. Speaking of everything not being yes or no. Before the call started, we were talking about the beauty and the challenges of trying to be self-sufficient in your business, living off of your talents or your gifts and it always being put out there at least to millennials and gen Z as the ultimate dream, because, you know, later in the gen X era, people were starting to have the freedom and the time to even think about, maybe my work should light me up.
Maybe my work should be an extension of my life's purpose. Right. And then we lead even harder into that. And we're like, if this job doesn't light me up, I got to get out of here. It's trash and I need to be self-employed and everything's going to be great once I'm self-employed. And then once we actually get into trying to live the dream. We realize it's really challenging as well. And yeah. Can you speak to a little bit of your journey with realizing number one, that your art could be used to support a bigger social movement? And even maybe before that realizing that art was going to be a big part of your life, what did that look like for you?
Jade: Oh, well, I never thought that art would be a big part of my life in terms of my personal wellbeing and my mental health it always has been because it's always been an escape for me and a way to express myself. I mean, even when I was a child I did art therapy for a time just to help me cope with the feelings and emotions I didn't necessarily understand always been quite artistic as opposed to a more logical person so in that respect, it has always been important to me, but in terms of my financial security, I never felt that art would play a part in that because it was kind of drilled into me that that was impossible.
In terms of schooling and things like that, you know, it was always look for the logical career options. You know, the types of careers that people are expected to go for rather than the creative type, you know, that sort of wishy-washy career, as people seem to think it is, especially here in the UK. So, you know, I didn't think that I'd be able to do art as a career and actually it was only when I think about a year and a half ago, I started to get back into my art. And at the time I was teaching myself, I didn't have to be a perfectionist and that I could love my art for what it is rather than trying to make it something that it just wasn't. And I just had a real sense of fulfillment from just allowing myself to express myself through my art.
And you know, I had people express that they actually really appreciated my art for what it was, and that was really affirming for me. Okay, well, maybe there might be more people out there who might be interested in what I do. And so, as a creative expression medium body positivity obviously is incredibly important to me.
So, it just felt natural to incorporate the two. In fact, I didn't even realize I was doing it until people were saying to me, wow, you know, I haven't seen fat bodies and Black bodies depicted in this way before, or at least not as much as we should be seeing it. And I was like, wow, I didn't even realize I was doing it.
Dalia: Oh, that is so, so cool. That's definitely not the answer I expected, but then when you make the point that, of course everyone had told you, like artists starve, I don't know why that didn't occur to me because I keep seeing people make it work. Maybe like over the last 10 years, I almost forgot that that's what we were all told.
I wanted to be a writer since elementary school, even though I grew up in an incredibly racist public school system, even in that environment, teachers kept telling me, oh, I feel like, you know, she's going to be a writer, but all of the adults in my life are like, ha ha. Why? Because you want to starve like that doesn't even make sense.
Don't listen to them. They're just blowing smoke. Don't pay attention to that and it's taken almost. 30 years to come back around to what I wanted to do in the first place, which is very, very strange. So, kudos to you for coming back so quickly before you got like deep, deep, deep, into a career that maybe didn't light you up as much.
The way it's usually depicted in movies and in books is that artists have a tortured relationship with their art. And since you were using art as a self-expression and self-soothing tool, have you had any stickiness around your relationship with your art?
Jade: I think in terms of art was always really personal for me.
So, I'm trying to make it into a career and make it productive. Oh, I hate productivity. I hate it with a passion. So, you know, when it sort of felt like I had to do things on a schedule and I had to jump. Create create, create and create for other people rather than creating for myself. I had a moment of do I even want to do this anymore?
But actually, I tried to pull myself back out of that again, and I'm not creating to a schedule. My Etsy store I had planned to update it every two months. It has been three. I still have not updated it because, you know, I haven't created what I want to create yet. And I'm just leaving space for myself to create as I want to.
And not as I feel like I should, or I have to because I always find that the art that I create on a whim is art that other people appreciate the most. And the art that I love the most. So. I'm sort of sticking to that, but of course, in terms of actually being financially sustainable, that's, you know, not quite as sustainable as I would like it to be, but, you know, again, that's what we were talking about before people don't talk about those elements of creative careers in terms of, you know, living the dream, you know, if you're self-employed, then you're living the dream, but actually in reality it is very stressful and very unpredictable.
And there's parts of that I absolutely love, but there's parts of it that keeps you up at night, completely stressed out of my mind. So, you know, there's two elements to it.
Dalia: Yeah. I can understand now why some people, they have their passions, but they know for a fact that they want to work for someone else.
They know that they want to be able to demand their paycheck when its due regardless of what has changed in the world around them, right? Like you don't get to decide whether or not you pay your employees. They know that check is coming on a schedule. And when you're self-employed, you know, there's just so many different things that can affect what your income is going to be like from one month to the next.
When I was a kid, my parents always it's, it's funny because. It seems like, no matter what your parents tell you, you're probably going to be skeptical about it. Like, so you hear like some kids who are raised by very creative parents who always lived off of their own talents, pushing their kids to do the same.
And they're like, I don't know about that. And then they decide I want to go work for the man and then vice versa. But my dad had a really stable job, but it was for fairly large organization. And so when they went through a period of deciding to tighten their belts and get rid of people who had more experience, so they could pay younger people half as much to do the same thing, he ended up deciding to go his own way, took his severance package and decided self-employment was a better fit for how he and my mom wanted to live.
And they've always tried to stress us that the security you feel when you're waiting on that one check from your company is an illusion, like we've seen living through this global pandemic. Checks that seemed really, really dependable evaporated into thin air. And in theory, when you work for yourself and you have multiple clients or multiple contracts, you lose one, but you're not down to zero income, but at the same time, it just is a lot of mental work to accept that instability and flexibility are normal and have to be part of our lives as adults if we ever want to have any sense of peace around our income. It's such a struggle because when you do work for someone else and you get that check at the same time every month, you completely buy into the illusion that you have security.
Jade: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I just, I think there is no one right answer when it comes to either working for yourself, working with someone else or finding that balance between the two. I think for me having a bit of both works really well because the stresses I get from one or alleviated by the other and vice versa.
So, I worked part-time for someone else and I worked part-time for myself. And I always know, as far as I'm aware that I'm getting my monthly to check from working for someone else, but I always have my business to fall back on should that something ever go wrong with that role. And you know, when it comes to creating, it does give me more creative license.
Because it means that I'm not relying on my income from my own business, you know, to get me through the month. And I think we have this sort of expectation on people when they are self-employed that, you know, you have to focus, you always see those things, you know, those like motivational quotes and things online when they're like, you know, you have to dedicate your whole time, like stop splitting your focus, just focus on the thing that you want.
Go out there, grab it, manifest it, all these other things. And you know, it's like, that's great. I love that mentality, but is it realistic? Because I know the stresses that my business brings me and, you know, If I focused on it full time, I don't know if I could deal with that overwhelming stress of not knowing if I was financially, financially secure.
So, I think you have to have a little bit of understanding for people, regardless of what a job is, regardless if they're working for someone else or work for themselves, it's great to have dreams and hopes and motivations, but I think realism also does play a part. And you know, not just expecting people to give up security for the sake of creative freedom, I think it is no, it's just.
You can't, it's not sustainable and it's a lovely dream, but I just don't know if we can always obtain it straight away. But we can take those steps to obtaining it further in the future.
Dalia: Yeah, I think that's one of the biggest gaps is that it's presented as something that we can make happen in a really narrow window of time when I think in reality it's normal for a business to be in the red and the negative for maybe the first three years. Like that used to be an understanding that that's normal, but because the internet supports the illusions that are like, zeitgeist we think that people wake up one day and realize, you know, that the hustle culture is where it's at and the magically by the end of the week, they're making millions of dollars.
And I don't think that's really a thing. And it really makes sense to me, especially for people who hold identities that are being marginalized in that environment, that they're living in to understand that if you are under a lot of stress or pressure, that may be additional stress from having to work through fears around security and stability is going to be a major obstacle for you. That may be the person who wrote that post about like staying focused and manifesting your dreams. Maybe they didn't have those other factors. And that statement made perfect sense to them and their life. And you even think about how will people regard you if you're in a large body and you have brown skin and you are an artist and you're living off of that art and things, don't go quite as planned and you go to get support from some social system or safety net that exists in your country, how will you be perceived versus someone doing exactly the same thing as you and a smaller body with white skin? You know, even the reluctance to be in a position where you might need help is influenced by our identities.
It
Jade: really is. I mean, you know, up until.
Literally this month I was on benefits. I was on called universal credit. And you know, in a lot of ways, if I wasn't on benefits, I wouldn't be able to start my business because they actually helped me to get the initial funding to do that. But that was a source of shame or embarrassment for me because I'm very much hyper aware of how people might perceive me because of my body. And I didn't want to live up to that fat, lazy stereotype of, oh, you'd rather just live on benefits rather than working hard. I think for me, because I, I am disabled. I have chronic illnesses. And also, I am, you know, I have a creative mindset, you know, I'm, I'm not someone who can be hyper-focused on manual activities my brain just doesn't work that way.
And, you know, people might think that's an excuse, but really that is just how my brain works and how my body works. We're all different in those ways. So, for me, you know, working for myself has provided me with the opportunity of working in a way that suits me and looks at myself. No, I'm not interested in hustle.
And I think people would be horrified, but you know, oh, you don't want to work hard. You just want to be lazy, whatever. And again, I feel that stereotype, especially living in a larger body and especially with being disabled as well, because again, I know within the working classes in the UK, there is this idea of if you're on any sort of disability benefit that you're just trying to scam the government out of money.
So, there's all these stereotypes around different body types. Hustling doesn't interest me. I think we have this very odd colonialist mindset that you have to work yourself into the ground, but you have to work until you, you, your health has just deteriorated and only then are you benefiting society only then are you worthwhile.
My wellbeing matters to me. I'm not interested in stressing myself out in making myself ill. So yeah, I want to work hard, but my perception of what working hard is not someone else's perception. And I think when it comes to things like being self-employed, there's this idea again, that if you're not working 60, 80 a hundred-hour weeks that you're not working hard enough. So, your failures are caused by you. It's no, that's all I can say to that. No, because we have to look after ourselves. You know, we're not just here to be placed on this earth to work. And then for that to be it, we have to live. We have to look after ourselves.
We have to find purpose in whatever way it works for us. So, hustle is great if someone's, if someone loves hustling absolutely go for it. Do that thing. For me, I want to look after myself. I want to enjoy whatever it is that I do in all capacities. And often that just means slowing down.
Dalia: Yeah. Oh, that's such a, that is a whole word like that is such a crucial message.
And what's so funny is when you really look at how people perform at their peak, following your body signals and knowing when to slow down and knowing when you're just not feeling it, you know, you sit down to write something, you sit down to record something, and your energy is not there. If you make yourself sit there for eight hours, it doesn't get any better.
Sometimes what you need to do to get the best product is to leave. Stop what you're doing. Go do something different. Do something that activates a different part of your consciousness. Relax. Sometimes you find, when you sit down to do something that you thought you'd been putting off, you'd actually been ruminating on it in a positive way, in the back of your mind all week.
And then when you sat down all the information you have been kind of letting simmer comes back to the surface. So sometimes even, or concepts of what is working, it doesn't fit the reality of the situation. You don't have to be working in a way that someone walking by would be able to validate, you know, if you have your own creative process and you honor that and you're willing to respect yourself enough to tailor your life to what works for you. Then your productivity may actually surprise you like how much better your productivity is when you respect your body.
Jade: Yeah. And I also think it's really important to have a really strong sense of self and to work on understanding of self, because a lot of people, again, will look at you and tell you things about yourself.
You know, you're not working hard enough, you're not working in the right way, but if you understand yourself, you can acknowledge those times when you are actually, you know, being productive without being physically productive.
And also knowing the ways that you work might be different to other people and that those ways are completely valid. So, you know, a lot of things, when I was younger things that people would say, speak of me, quite negative things about the way I worked. But for instance saying that I'm, you know, flaky or I don't commit to certain projects and I felt that for a long time and I am still working through those feelings now, but what I recognize now is those things that might make someone consider me to be flaky or to not commit are also the things that on new projects get me to absolutely push through and bring ideas together and pull them into something and, you know, birth them into the world in a way that I wouldn't have been able to perceive if I didn't have those qualities, they allow me to multitask.
They gave me the energy and the drive. You know, when I have short deadlines, I am never more committed when I have a short deadline, because that's how my mindset works. So, we all work in different ways and all those ways are completely valid. And actually, when it comes to then collaborating on projects, you know, you get to work with people who have work in different ways to you and you all compliment each other.
So just because you don't work in the same way that someone else does doesn't mean that you're not valid, actually it makes you an amazing team member and an amazing contributor once you know what those qualities are and how to make them work for you for the better.
Dalia: That's the key is knowing what those qualities are.
And I appreciate that you acknowledge that maybe you've been trained to devalue working style or your creativity, maybe that is not just something you're going to be able to wake up and say, oh, now I know that this is valid. Maybe it will be a process. Maybe you'll really have to push to work through it.
And with some of the obstacles, we have mindset obstacles from childhood. This may be something we're always working through. You know, you kind of go in cycles, you go through phases where you understand your worthiness and then something rocks you and you take a couple steps back and then a couple of steps forward.
That's natural too. Thinking we're going to magically erase everything that conditioning has done to us up until now isn't really realistic. And I think that also ties back into how there's no nuance in a lot of the bod pos things we see out there that you're going to erase all of your conditioning and love yourself completely every single day and want all these pictures of yourself from strange angles and want to share them with the world. Like that’s just, just not the reality for most people. It may not even be the reality for the people posting those photos and some people. And I don't say this to be a hater, but some people aren't even posting images that they haven't tampered with.
So that's something to consider too, just because someone puts out an image and they use all the right hashtags and it looks like, oh, they're revealing something that it's brave of them to show like that one roll. That doesn't mean there was no airbrushing in other areas. Everything could be an illusion, right.
And whatever that person is comfortable with, that's fine. But at the same time, if we internalize that I have to be at this point where I've just going to take pictures from all these angles and post them and feel great about it not understanding that that person curated that image too, that puts you in a really tough spot.
And you will end up being too hard on yourself as you try and work toward greater self-acceptance.
Jade: Yeah. And you know, like in terms of social media it’s a highlight reel, regardless of the types of content that people are posting, you know, whether it be body positivity and all the different forms of what people perceive as body positivity.
People are posting the highlights of their journey with their bodies and with the, you know, overcoming conditioning they don't share those moments when they've actually, you know, reverted to an old mindset, or they're still trying to overcome old patterns because it doesn't fit into the image of ourselves that we've curated online. And actually, this idea that we overcome conditioning, but we're still living in that conditioning. It is constantly being forced at us all the time. So, I think there's no way to overcome the conditioning all we're doing is constantly pushing back against it and finding ways to rewrite the narrative for ourselves and for others in particular within body positivity.
And I think, again, that's another mistake that people make in this comparison to body positivity and self-love because if I was gonna compare body positivity to anything, which I don't like to do, but if I was going to, it would be body neutrality.
Body positivity is the understanding that all bodies are equal and deserve to be treated equitably within our society.
There is no good or bad within body positivity. It's not about creating a beauty ideal, in which all bodies are accepted. What it's actually about is removing the body ideal understanding that we shouldn't be hierarchically categorizing bodies. Bodies are just bodies. You know, they don't define us, and we can't put moral value on them.
And I think body neutrality is far more important in that sense than self-love because it's understanding that you don't have to look at yourself every morning and go, oh my God, I love myself. Let me take a selfie immediately from all these different angles. It's not actually saying I am neither here nor there about my body, because I'm know that I'm more than my body.
I am most important. And people might perceive things about me because of my body but as long as I understand how I perceive my body is enough, that is what matters. And as long as I am carving out space, for my body to be seen and heard and valued for exactly what it is and as long as I'm searching for equal treatment within any space that I take up, that is what's important.
So, I think, you know, even if we take away the fact that body positivity has been co-opted, the fact that it's being compared to self-love again, is really problematic in that sense of making people feel like they have to love themselves in order to be body positive. Cause they don't.
Dalia: That's such a helpful reframe and that makes so much more sense with the reality of our lives and the fact that we're still in environments that are hostile to our bodies. So pushing back is the goal like, and that is as far as it's probably going to get for a while and seeing the ways in which corporations and other people want to use our sense of self to commodify us is really helpful when it comes to understanding that it's most important that we have a strong relationship with our sense of self and knowing that we are more than our body and more than these individual things that marketers want us to focus on correcting and taking your body back and really living in it on your own terms. It's a vehicle for you to do all the things that you're on this planet to do it isn't a self-improvement project to spend all your days on.
Jade: Absolutely. Yeah. I, I know that's a concept that when I'm talking to people about body positivity, I often try to get them to understand that your body is a vessel. It is a vehicle for navigating with the world, for communicating with the world.
It is not the be-all and end-all of who and what you are. We place so much worth on aesthetics of a body when the ascetics of the body are the least important, part of all the functions that it has for us. And sure, I think that's a deeper conversation that doesn't really go into body positivity, but in terms of understanding self-worth and having a strong sense of self, it is a really important concept to grasp.
Because on days when I am not happy with my body because I understand that it doesn't fit into these Eurocentric beauty ideas that we have and that, you know, for the rest of my life, I have to deal with the fact that maybe we'll never get to a point within society in my lifetime where my body is accepted. But what I can do for myself is understand that regardless of what society is telling me about my body and about my worth because of my body, I can push back against that because I understand deeper than that, that the conditioning that we are facing does not define us.
Dalia: Yeah, that's extremely helpful when it comes to work. In online spaces, knowing that it's a highlight reel and also knowing that people are in different stages of their journey toward understanding the things that you're teaching about, how do you navigate creating boundaries and creating safer spaces for the people in your community?
Jade: I think the first thing is that I don't engage in any kind of troll like behavior. I used to, I used to feel like because of the privilege that my body holds in certain senses I want it to have the capacity to be able to speak for those who might not be able to have the resources and tools to speak for themselves in these situations and actually try and reeducate people wherever possible in whatever way they were coming at me.
So, when I used to have people comment on the things that I was doing online or engaged with members of my community, under my posts, I would always try and reeducate and engage in conversation. But I realized that there are people who don't want to engage in these conversations they're either so wrapped up in the conditioning that they've faced, that their self-hatred is pouring outwards onto other people or, they really do have a deep disdain for my communities. That's, that's none of my business, you know, if, if that is how they want to present themselves to the world, I don't need to engage with that. So, I've set a really strong boundary in that sense of actually saying it's not my responsibility to engage with that person.
So, I don't at all. I block any comments that come up, which are clearly antagonistic. And I focus my energy on engaging with the people who want to be there and who are searching for better for themselves. And it's also not just to protect me, but it's to protect anyone who comes onto my page because they don't need to be subject to the nasty, cruel comments that people feel the need to express.
So that's sort of a hard boundary that I have recently had set in the last year, kind of a firm for myself that that's not my business to be doing that. And then in terms of, you know, sometimes I don't have the tools and resources to help people through something because I'm working for it myself.
And often you'll find in community spaces that you're always triggering things for each other areas of your life that need healing, which is wonderful and it's really important for continued self-growth and self-development. But also, you have the hold space to yourself first. So, in those instances, I'll often say to people, I really appreciate you coming to me with this.
Unfortunately, I can't help you with this right now, but you know, please continue to be in this space and it's not because I don't want to be there for you in this moment. It's just that I don't have the resources myself to do that.
Dalia: That's really helpful knowing that you have to hold space for yourself first and knowing that that is the nature of community, is that we continually hold up mirrors to other people and trigger growth in them, and sometimes it doesn't feel great. So that can make being in community a challenge, but it really is a place where so much healing happens, but where I've seen it go kind of off the rails is where you don't have someone who's leading the conversation who can help guide the community with community agreements, community standards, like what we don't entertain here, what the space is not for.
I've seen a lot of people lately, especially who say they want to grow. And I believe they believe they want to grow, but they're going to all the wrong places, asking for people to guide them when there are so many people who have created resources meant for those folks who are on that one-on-one level stuff with their anti-racism, with their body liberation, with their fat liberation.
There are places dedicated to that. There are resources dedicated to that. And when you jump into a community where people have gotten beyond the concept of, oh, are these types of humans worthy of care and respect? That's not the place for you to show up asking, like, but are you sure though? Because I heard that bodies have to be this one way to be worthy of belonging and respect.
Jade: Yeah. And I think, you know, I would hope, expect, I guess, from any community members that show up in my space, that they have an understanding of that. And obviously that's not always the case. And depending on what's been going on for me and how many instances I've had of people maybe overstepping their boundaries in certain spaces.
I do have time to talk to people and just say, you know, maybe it's good for you to go away and do some research on this before you come back into this community space, because we've moved beyond this conversation. Sometimes I don't have the kind of emotional freedom and I don't have the emotional capacity to be able to have those conversations.
In which case I just step away from it. Because again, I, I created this space for myself first for my own self-healing first, and then it moved beyond that and it moved into advocacy, but I will never put my mental health into detriment because of dealing with other people. But again, that's not to say that people can't get things wrong sometimes, which is why I always try and give people the benefit of the doubt.
But, you know, if someone's continuing to show up into a space and they've been told multiple times, we're not having this conversation and they continue to have that conversation. Yeah, I just, you know, I have, I have a limit when it comes to that.
Dalia: That's a good model for the rest of us, that it is okay and crucial if you want to do advocacy work and if you want to lead community spaces to prioritize your own wellbeing. Because the work is not sustainable without that.
Jade: Yeah. And I would expect. Or hope for that for anyone sharing the body positivity space and the online space. I think we do have to be looking after our mental health, because it can become overwhelming.
We can expect too much from ourselves. We can expect perfection from ourselves. And I think when it gets to that point of expecting perfection from ourselves, I've seen instances where people start to create another false sense of identity where they don't even realize when they might be causing problems and being problematic within the communities that they are trying to be a voice of reason within.
So, checking back in with yourself and reconnecting with yourself and understanding, you know, maybe I don't have the right words, the right tools for this situation, because we're never going to be completely perfect, we're always learning. I don't know everything about body positivity because I wasn't around for its conception.
I've had to learn and research all the things that I know about it as a community member and grow with it over time. So, when there are instances where I don't know things, either I go out of my way to research it and bring back the information that I found or I just have to turn around and say, I don't know.
I really don't know. I need to do this work for myself before I can bring you into this space with me. And you do see instances of people in different communities, not just body positivity where that's not being done, because we trick ourselves into this thinking, we have to be perfect. And we have to know everything because this expectation has been placed upon us.
It's not, it's just not realistic. And I think reconnecting with yourself and holding space for yourself helps to prevent that as much as possible. And also, then being open to accountability and being open to being told, maybe you're wrong in this instance is also important for keeping our privilege in check and for making sure that we're doing the work that we want to be doing rather than what we think we're doing.
Dalia: Yes, do you have any practices that you can share that are good for restoring your sense of being grounded? Like after you've had a negative interaction with somebody online
Jade: For me, I, I have lots of little silly sort of practices that I do because I think they're so human that they sort of, they just make sense to me.
They might not make sense from people, but little things. Like whenever I pass a mirror, I always make sure to make a face at myself. And this seems like such an odd thing when I tell this to people. It takes away the seriousness of all connection mural reflection, because I don't think it's normal for us to see our reflection as much as we do.
It's not really. Ingrained within us to be staring at mirrors all the time or seeing pictures of ourselves all the time. So, whenever I see my reflection, I'll just pull a face or a smile at myself. Just little things like that, that creates a positive interaction with my reflection and grounds me within myself to be like, whatever stresses are going on, whatever kind of negative interactions that I've had that might make me feel negatively about my self-worth or about my body they're sort of irrelevant on the grand scheme of things. That one interaction does not define me, does not define my work. And so just doing little small things like that to connect with myself really make a big difference. And then as kind of a spiritual healer for me doing things like meditation and doing things like you can visualize body scans and connecting with your body and just feeling at home in your own skin.
Those sorts of things are really great for just feeling grounded within yourself. And also, being outside whenever possible, obviously is really helpful as well, just for connecting with the world on a wider scale, rather than focusing on the internet, because it is still a very small community, even though it seems like it connects us to everything, it can become a bit of an echo chamber.
So, stepping outside of that and back into the real world is definitely, really helpful as well.
Dalia: Yeah. Oh, that really resonates with the body scans. Do you guide people through those or is it, can you show us how to do that?
Jade: It's a little bit of a longer process that I'd be able to share with you right now.
But in terms of I was running meditation classes and it will be something that I'm doing again. But you can find body scans and guided meditation during a body scan online. Or if you just search on YouTube, there's lots of wonderful ones. When it comes to meditation, I think the voice is the most important.
So, finding a voice that resonates with you and that you feel comfortable and secure with, because it is mostly auditory led. So, you have to find one that works for you. Often people find one meditation, don't connect with it and then think they hate meditation. But in reality, it's just, they haven't connected with the right person.
So just keep searching for one that works for you or write your own, just focus on connecting with the body, the sensations that are around you. I like to imagine my energy coming together as a ball of light in my chest, and then that light moving to different areas of my body and just allowing myself to feel that, connecting with the ground, those sorts of things.
They just help to center you. And help you see your body as more than its aesthetics and actually understanding all the things that our body does for us on a day-to-day basis. And that's, you know, as someone with chronic illnesses, it can be difficult to appreciate your body when you feel like it's almost working against you.
But those little moments of connecting back with myself really helped me to have appreciation for all the things that my body does do as opposed to kind of berating it for the things that it doesn't do.
Dalia: That's really helpful. Where do people keep up with you so that they can be in touch when you start offering those again?
Jade: So, I do have a Facebook page it's called a Safe Space to Grow. There hasn't been much on there for a few months. Cause we were talking about before we started I kind of needed to create space for myself to focus on certain projects. So that has taken a back seat to now. I do also share sort of mini meditations to my Instagram page @bodiposipoet. I'm hoping to start showing them short.
Really short one-minute snippets as well to TikTok at some point, just to add a little bit of sort of body positivity and grounding into that space as well, because it can be a little bit chaotic at times.
Dalia: Yeah, absolutely. Just a few people who've done that really creatively since, you know, the video just starts over and over again, the way they did it, it feels like a full meditation, like as long as you want it to be because of where starts over. So, I love that idea. We'll be looking out for that. Are you, is it the same handle on TikTok?
Jade: Yes. It's actually @artbybodiposipoet, because I was originally using it for my artwork and will continue to use it for that purpose as well. But yeah, I'm sure if anyone wants to find it, they should be able to.
Dalia: Wonderful, thank you so much for coming on. I'll definitely have the links to your Etsy store and all of those other places.
Jade: Oh, thank you so much for having me. I love that every time we talk, there's always something new and different that comes out of the conversation. So, yeah, I've loved it. Thank you so much.
Okay. I know it wasn't just me. Was that, or was that not just packed full of gems? Jade really dropped a lot of knowledge on us in this episode. Be sure to look for Jade on TikTok and on Etsy. I am really pulling back with social media these days thinking about how to use my energy in the most effective way for all of the things that I want to do so you probably won't find me on social media.
But you will be able to find me in the comments on Substack. I'm working on building community there, doing coaching asynchronously there because that's a way to make myself accessible to a lot more people at once. So, I hope you will check out that option that is for the supporting members. Of the show and the body liberation for all community in general.
I will have links below in the show notes to give you more details about that. If you feel called to check it out. Thank you so much for joining me. I will talk to you next time.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit daliakinsey.substack.com -
Consider this as an invitation to take your healing journey and personal development journey to the next level.
Marina Nabão is embodiment coach dedicated to supporting people through a trauma-informed journey of somatic healing and empowerment. She is a Brazilian, biracial, Black, cis-woman living in the SF Bay Area, CA.
As a daughter of a psychologist and a philosopher, curiosity and the search for a broader understanding of life is her natural state. So it’s no surprise that her own search to understand her inner world and grow in all areas of life – professional, relational, affective, sexual, and spiritual – have taken her on a very rich journey.
This episode we discuss
* How trauma remains in the body
* Stages of healing
* Healing through meaningful self-connection
* Somatic work for non-binary folx
Episode Resources
https://marinanabao.com/
www.daliakinsey.com
Decolonizing Wellness: A QTBIPOC-Centered Guide to Escape the Diet Trap, Heal Your Self-Image, and Achieve Body Liberation
Dalia: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Body Liberation for All. I'm your host and decolonize wellness and body image coach Dalia Kinsey. I help queer folks of color heal their struggles with shame self-acceptance through nutrition and self-care so they can live the most fierce, liberated, and joyful version of their lives.
Today I have a special guest on the show to talk about a subject that's really been calling my attention a lot lately. I have been rereading The Body Keeps the Score and thinking about the ways that trauma and unprocessed emotions get trapped in the body.
I've noticed myself some very strong reactions to seemingly minor incidents in my life at work clearly connected to previous negative experiences and racialized trauma is just like any other kind of trauma. You can have issues with purging these negative sensations from your body and having a very powerful instantaneous, negative trauma, like response to anything that reminds you of these past experiences.
So, embodiment work and focusing on the body and those sensations and moving them along so that I can have a reaction that feels manageable to stressful things is what I'm focused on right now. So, I’m so excited to have Marina here, Marina works with them, body meant and trauma of all kinds. The things that Marina discusses, and this episode will be useful for everyone, but very useful for somebody working with trauma, you've already gotten other treatment for that you still aren't feeling peace around, because the embodiment piece has been missing from your healing work so far.
This is such a good conversation. Let's jump right in.
Body Liberation for All Theme
Yeah. They might try to put you in a box, tell them that you don't accept when the world is tripping out tell them that you love yourself. Hey, Hey, smile on them live your life just like you like it is.
It’s your party negativity is not invited. For my queer folks, for my trans, people of color, let your voice be heard. Look in the mirror and say that it's time to put me first. You born to win. Head up high with confidence. This show is for everyone. So I thank you for tuning in. Let's go.
Dalia: Hello. Thank you for being on the show.
Marina: Yeah. Thanks for having me so excited to have this conversation.
Dalia: I am excited, always to connect with other folks of color from all over the world, but in particular folks of color that do healing work that come from different cultural backgrounds, especially anybody connected to the diaspora. I just get super excited about that, because it's interesting to me to see how as you change, as you kind of become part of the country that your ancestors were pulled into and you become a blend of the different peoples that are from there. And then the people who colonize that area, we all have really interesting ways of manifesting some of the old healing traditions, you know, that we have no possible conscious way of connecting to.
It's just beautiful to see how nothing is ever lost and keep coming back to the surface and it looks different on different people and in different parts of the world.
Marina: Yeah. I love that cause I love that integration of the different ways that we can approach healing and really reclaiming the old ways of healing that have big been parts of generations of the original people of the planet.
Dalia: Right. Right, exactly. So I know you're based in the U S now and you're on the west coast. But can you tell us a little bit about where you were raised and when you were growing up, did you have a connection to healing practices or what was that relationship like with you?
Marina: Yeah. Yeah, so I was raised in Brazil that's where I'm from and I think that's part of my upbringing was connected to receiving what we can call unusual healing. There are many people who are, I don't even know how to say this in English I think it would be something like ‘the blessers’. So these old grandmas who actually developed such a beautiful connection with themselves and their intuition and their spiritual guides that they can bless other people. And we’d go there to receive a blessing. Then they share something that they feel called to share around the ways that you are treating yourself. The food you are eating the people that you're hanging out with and things that you could do so that you would find more balance in your life.
So this is a big thing in Brazil, especially in communities where people are more integrated socially. So like Black communities, people who live in what we can call marginalized neighborhoods or something. And this has always been part of my life. I never even thought of a life without it.
That's what you do. You feel you're feeling off. You're not so sure. You are feeling sad then you communicate with one of these grandmas, they will share their wisdom. So that is one thing, the other is that my mom was always into what we can call integrative medicine.
She was always into floral therapy, healing, our body and spirit, good eating habits, macrobiotic, whole food products, and things like that. So for me, I think part of my growing up was learning that our bodies have this self-healing capacity. That it's a matter of us being patient enough and aware enough to connect with it intentionally so that we can find ways to notice what a disease is trying to tell us, what a discomfort is trying to show us. To find ways to address the environment that is creating the disease, the environment that is creating discomfort not just the symptoms.
Dalia: Now it makes so much sense, but you said something really crucial it's being patient enough to wait for it to work because that I think is one of the hallmarks between western medication when we approach our symptoms that way. And sometimes those don't even work as quickly as you want them to, but typically you can expect to see a change maybe that day, maybe in a week, maybe two weeks and a lot of other approaches because you're not just putting a band-aid on one symptom, you're trying to get to the root of the problem, it can take longer. So in a culture where we feel like we don't even have time to sit down and feel unwell. We don't have time to take one day off, then what do we do? So, what has it been like for you coming to the U.S. do you feel a big difference in the pace that we're living at running counter to the way the human body actually functions and thrives?
Marina: Oh my God. That was shocking. That was really shocking. To really notice this shift in the speed at which things happen here. Right. So, I don't know if I can speak for all Brazilians, but in our culture in general, we have this idea of the U.S as the land of opportunity, right? Hollywood sales that so beautifully to us.
So you come here, you're nobody, you come with a dollar in your pocket and then you become this millionaire, blah, blah, blah. You know, and also the fact that in order to do so, there are no boundaries, no limits to the amount of work that you do. Because if you want to be a self-made millionaire you have to put all of yourself in it.
Right? So there is this image, at least for me about the U.S. but it was not until I actually moved in here, and I didn't come here for work or anything. I came to the U.S. for love because my husband is American and that's how we ended up here. So it was very interesting to notice that everything is so fast.
It's boom, boom, boom. Now, now, now, yesterday, it's not today its yesterday. And no wonder people are so stressed out. No wonder people are so disconnected from themselves. No wonder people feel so lonely because they can not even connect with themselves much less meaningfully connect with others, right?
So, when you say that here people don't have the time to rest or to take a day off. I would say, well, maybe that's actually why people are getting so sick. Maybe that's actually why people are feeling so, so many discomforts on a physical level, but also on a mental health level.
Dalia: Yeah. I mean, that makes a lot of sense. And when we look at, when scientists look at other cultural groups that are living a lot longer than the average person in the United States, that's always a factor like prioritizing connecting to people, communicating with people and not prioritizing work over all other things, but that is a very, very American thing.
If you're not working, then who are you? And even when people introduce themselves, their identity centered around, do you do? And I can understand that if what you do is something that you were called to do like if your healer, your preacher, your something that's central to your belief system.
Okay, fine. I can understand that. But a lot of times people leave. Something that just signals to other people. I earn money and I work long hours because it has become a value here.
You mentioned something really interesting when we were talking before the call, when we were just getting to know each other, after we'd come across each other in a group it's focused on decolonizing your mindset around business, and it's led by an American person who really has made a difference in my life in how she explains how so much of what we believe about how business must be done. It's not the only way. And talking to you and hearing about how you've noticed that people who can't seem to get into their body who have issues with embodiment and that causes problems throughout your life.
And maybe on some level, I knew that, but nowhere near the level that you were explaining. So can you tell us about the work that you do and then we'll talk about how did he ended up doing this?
Marina: Yeah, so I like to call myself an embodiment coach and a somatic healer. The work that I do, basically it should help people reconnect with their bodies. It is to walk back into this connection with self with intention, with awareness, with patients, with care that this body is sharing information all the time. That this body is much wiser than the mind at times and it's telling us what to do, how to do at what pace we should be doing things.
If we learn to integrate that that with the mind, the work that I do doesn't mean this disregarding the mind, it's about integration. It's about the combination of mind and body, and of course, giving space to spirituality in that connection. But to really allow people to notice that we can not just function from the neck up.
We can not just live our lives, thinking that we can think ourselves out of a disease, out of a discomfort out of, you know, all the things that people have been experience thing in terms of physical and mental. We actually need to be able to feel those in our bodies and from this space, learn to reconnect to make the changes that our bodies need so that we can lead a healthier life.
That is the gist of it. The big part, the big picture of it. And there is the trauma healing component of my work, because if we study what research has been showing us trauma lives in our bodies, right?
Trauma is not the experience. Trauma is actually our body's perception of or reaction to a life-threatening experience, to something that was too intense, too overwhelming, too difficult to handle.
And then our bodies trap that information and start responding to events, freeze, fight, flight, fawn mode. So in order to heal evil trauma also should integrate the the body. We cannot talk ourselves out of trauma, right? Talking about trauma is only a piece of the healing process that happens when you're a further ahead in your healing.
First it's around connecting with your body, noticing how your body's responding to traumatic experiences and then finding ways to regulate your nervous system to discharge some of the energy of that trauma so that your body can find balance again. Right? So, but the beginning has to be about embodiment. It has to start with recognizing tension in the body and then from there we develop a somatic to healing trauma. If that makes sense…
Dalia: It does make sense. When I read The Body Keeps the Score. I felt like some of it, maybe we all knew intuitively, tiny bit. Right. But then to see someone study how deep the lasting effect is on the physical body when you're in a situation where you feel you have no control, or you literally have no control, and you're afraid you're going to die, that you could even lose sensation in extremities that had nothing to do with the incident. And we all heard about adverse childhood experiences and how that shortens your lifespan, not as a rule, but your chances are higher if you never have an opportunity to heal what that experience did to your body, how your body internalized, all of that fear. How did you even realize this was an area you wanted to work in? Because even if you interacted a lot with healers as a child, sometimes it's hard to see yourself that way, especially if those healers were like people almost had to live the experience, like you said, they're old grandmas, so it's like they took years and years and years to get it. So when did you understand that you, as a young person could also be working in a healing space?
Marina: Yeah. Well, I think it's a combination of factors first. My mom is a psychologist, which is a healing modality in a way. So I had that beautiful example and home. And I have been to healers myself to view my body, to heal my own traumas and to actually get to know myself better because healing is also about self-development. It's not just about feeling one specific thing, right? It's about learning more about ourselves. And for me, when I started, I was always curious about so many things in life.
And I started learning more about holistic sexuality. I've started doing workshops and programs and courses to learn, to recognize my body in a more loving and even spiritual perspective of this body as a sacred temple. And to for me to really tap into the deeper knowing of who I am in the deeper knowing of who I am in my mind, that leads me to reconnect with my spiritual self, right.
And by doing so I've found so much healing for myself. I've found so much empowerment for myself as a Black woman in a Latin country. Empowerment is a big, big word for us, right? Because of that so many things started shifting for me in terms of how I perceived myself, how I perceived the relationships that I had not just with other men, but the relationships that I had with friends, with family, the relationships I had that work. And so I was an executive in the corporate world that is dominated by white, straight, very conservative man, interesting place. And then noticing that I didn't fit there anymore.
That environment was not fulfilling me anymore. And, then I had this inner calling, this inner knowing that, you know, my life is going to change a lot and actually I want to dedicate myself to supporting other women and non-binary people who have vulvas, because that's what I understand more of the female body that the vulvaed body.
And then I started transitioning and studying. I already had the business MBA because I was in business for 14 years and then started shifting gears into coaching. I did the ontological coaching training in Brazil at the same time. I got married to move here and did my sex love and relationship coaching training here.
And I've been supporting people since then. And it's been fabulous. And the idea that coming back to the body and connecting with sexuality, sexual desires, eroticism, what I understood that most people would come up with, come across traumas there, you know, things even that were healed or that were forgotten, because that's how the mind works as well.
Our brains protect us so much that they make us forget some of the traumatic experiences that so many of us have gone through. And this became a very big passion of mine to really be able to support women, to feel their central traumas. And it's been a very beautiful journey for me, very humbling as well. I feel very honored to be supporting people in, in this path and yeah, that's what I've been doing.
Dalia: It's amazing to me, how many entry points there can be to starting to reconnect to your body and how deep the symptoms go when you are disconnected. Because even though with my work as a holistic dietitian, I'm helping people use food and listening to their hunger, physical, and emotional hunger to reconnect to what their body's trying to tell them.
I had never thought about how many relationships will need to fall away if you actually start listening to what your body's telling you. And that, that in itself might be a reason why some people don't want to reconnect to their body because they wonder how will my life have to change if I actually listen to myself.
And what will that feel like? Is that something that is a source of resistance you come across and people
Marina: Yeah so much. I can see the faces of some people with shared that with me, like, oh, well who will I become then? If I go this deep into myself, I will have to face things that I am comfortably hiding under a rug, you know, so that I can live the way I've been living.
It's a path of truth. It’s a path of really facing the truth of who we are. And once you've faced the truths, making that judgements that we need to make in life to live in a way that is more fulfilling, right, and more fulfilling for whatever it looks like to a given person.
It's a path of tapping into one's authenticity. And I don't think everybody's prepared for that and that's okay. That's okay.
Dalia: Now, how long did it take you to accept that? Because that's something I feel like I struggle with. When I'm not ready to change, then it's fine. But when other people aren’t ready to change and I see where something could be of service. I'm just like, I don't get it. I don't get it. So when did you understand that?
Marina: When I really started understanding trauma, so I'm taking the somatic experiencing training, and this is focused on trauma healing from a somatic perspective. The deeper I went into understanding how trauma acts in our bodies and our minds in our behaviors in the way that we are enabled to lead our lives the more compassion I felt in my heart for myself and for those around me. So when I'm aware that trauma exists. So many people have trauma and they have no idea so there is a space in my heart that can easily understand why it is so scary to go through change.
Why it is so scary to connect with your body because your body has overwhelming and difficult memories stored there. So it makes a lot of sense for me when a person shares, Well, I, I don't know if I can live more lovingly, you know, this is not good. I'm not happy, but that's the way I've been living for so many years for so many decades. And I don't wish I can make that change.
When I hear someone say that for me, it's like, huh, there is some wound there that might be so scary and so painful that this person is ready to touch it. For me, that's invites my radical acceptance of who people are and where they're on their journeys. Because it is not easy, right?
It's not easy repeating patterns over and over again that are painful, that are harmful, that hurts you, that keep you small and keep you in abusive relationships for that matter. But it's also not easy to break free of that. Right? I think there is a path that can only happen when people are ready.
So like whenever I'm talking to someone who wants to work with me for the first time and heal child wounds, most people working with me are focusing on healing sexual trauma. My first questions is why now, so I can understand the motivation that the person has. Like some people live with a traumatic memory for 20 years, 30 years, and then they come okay, I want to, I want to look at it and I want to heal this. My question is why now?
What shows you that you're prepared to deal with it right now? And a lot of times it is because people have had the opportunity to walk through a path of self-development or some lighter kind of healing and then they see that they can handle this, this big transformation.
And I think that when people say, oh, I'm scared. I don't know what's going to happen. What I will become? Maybe they have some steps to take before Does that make sense?
Dalia: That makes so much sense.
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Dalia: I saw recently online someone who does consulting, not necessarily healing work, made a point that just because someone isn't ready to work with you, it doesn't mean they don't think that what you offer is powerful or valuable.
But if it's a service that requires a partnership with the client that requires them to also participate in the process, they may not want to work with you because they don't yet believe they can complete their end of the relationship. And I had never really thought about some of us offer services that are not for people at the start of their journey.
And that's also incredibly important. So I see things all the time where I'm like, wow, this is so popular. Something that someone's offering, but I'm like, but it feels like it's on the surface. And for me, it wouldn't take me deep enough to get to another level, but I've been obsessed with personal development and healing since I was in my early, early teens.
So of course that stuff doesn't appeal to me anymore because that's not where I am on my journey. So learning to respect where people are and to stop wanting to kind of force healing on people has been a process.
Marina: Yeah. Yeah. And it makes so much sense because everybody has to start somewhere really. And also there is a part of me, I don't want people were not ready to do the work to actually hire me 'cause then it's not effective.
You know, if people are not ready to take responsibility for their healing to understand that the healing process is bumpy, it's not like a walk in the park, it’s not full of flowers, right? It's, it's hard at times, depending on the amount of trauma there, the depth of the wounds it's hard.
And if people don't have some of, even that stability in their lives to hold them through that. I prefer that first they do some other work. Some foundational work. And then they come when they're ready, because that's where I can serve them in my best. I can really be of service to them as opposed to someone who is not ready.
Dalia: Right. What might that foundational work look like for some people? Cause I have heard from some people that are really worried about their own health, someone who's multiple people because you know, so many people have survived, sexual abuse as children. So, so many people and a lot of these people in my personal life are tired of living with the effects of having to distance themselves from their body to be safe and to feel comfortable, but they don't feel ready and they want to be ready and they don't know what that in-between space looks like.
How do you bridge that gap or figure out what might be a step for you?
Marina: Yeah. So I am going to use the same book.
That you brought us as an example. The Body Keeps the Score, which is an amazing read Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk wrote the book. He mentioned that yoga, theater, acting classes, dancing, classes in like martial arts, things that involve the body are great ways for people to start befriending their bodies and coming back in a connection that it's not targeted at healing, their trauma.
So it's not a therapeutic work, but it is bringing them back. So if you're doing yoga poses you need to be aware of what you're doing. If you're acting you're aware not just of yourself, but of the, all their actors around you, in your positioning in relation to them on stage. All of this contributes for a person to slowly come back to a possible relationship with their bodies, even when their bodies are still carrying so much memories of trauma. They're coming to a more deep work into embodiment work in somatic healing. That makes a lot of sense to me.
Dalia: Yeah.
Marina: For some people, it's actually some talk therapy, some workshops, women's circles, community circles, you know, things that invite people to connect little by little to who they are, their feelings, their emotions, their expectations of community, relationships. Even if it’s a more shallow level, even if it's not very deep, but it opens the way to come to an environment for somatic healing being a little bit more prepared, if that makes sense.
Dalia: Yeah, that does.
Marina: If you look at The Body Keeps the Score he's sharing some amazing results of clients and patients who are suffering like post-traumatic syndrome. I don't like to say disorder. I think it's an injury. It's not a disorder. And being able to know slowly come back to themselves with yoga, acting, martial arts, qigong and things like that.
So that would be my suggestion for people who want to start. You know, start light, but with things that are inviting you inwards, You know, and then you go into a deeper process. If that makes sense.
Dalia: That does make sense. Have you found that for people who are maybe feeling uncomfortable in their body because their gender identity and their assigned gender doesn't match are the same interventions helpful?
And if so, how do people get to that point where, okay, maybe you still have other things you need to do to feel totally at home in your body, like maybe gender affirming surgeries and your future, but you can't do it now.
How do you make friends with the body that you feel like isn't yours and you know?
Marina: My training in somatic experience is such a beautiful invitation to reconnecting befriending and getting curious with the body and the physiology and the nervous system regulation and all of it that I can only imagine how a person who is not, who doesn’t feel this body really represents their identity and how they want to express in the world. This would be like invaluable for someone to have a space with a qualified professional to explore how they feel about their bodies. Right?
So for example, for a person who was born with a vagina in actually would prefer to have a penis. Perhaps exploring the relationship with that vagina first so they can get into the core, the deepest part of their desire for a penis, then from that, knowing that it's not just a rational knowing, but it's a felt knowing in their bodies start making, you know, designing the steps to get what they want.
So I know many practitioners who specialize in trans and gender nonconforming and non-binary people doing somatic work and the things that they share is like, it's amazing. It's amazing. This populations could benefit a lot from somatic work, because there's so much about the gender identity and expansion that is stuck in the body. Right.
So how can we, again, how can we have these conversations while we actually ignore the body, while we actually ignore the object of our discomfort of our disalignment? Right? So if we're, if I have boobs and I'm uncomfortable with boobs, it's not just thinking about this, it’s really addressing the boobs in the body, how do you feel about it. What is some sensations that comes to you when you connect with that?Right. And from there finding what it is that this body really wants to express.
And for people who cannot go and have surgery and make the changes that they want right away, I think, I think then the coaching way of addressing things. It's like, okay, what can we do now that can be helpful for now that can be supportive for now.
And what are the steps that we need to take in order for you to achieve this bigger desire to do whatever it is that you want to, you know, and then I think it's really about the coaching way of reaching a goal of connecting with the desires that are within the desire that that's living the wisdom of the body.
Dalia: Yeah. Oh, that makes sense to me. And I think has people don't talk about the experience of being gender nonconforming, but finding a way to still connect to your body 'cause they don't talk about it enough. It almost feels like, oh, well, what if it's not possible for me to be friendly with my body while I feel like simultaneously it betrayed me around the time of puberty, but it's encouraging to know that other people who are trans, who are non-binary are doing this work and feeling the benefits.
Marina: Yeah. It's really, it is really powerful. It is really powerful because then all the transformations that you end up performing in your body come from a place of deep understanding, acceptance and love for who you are. Right. And then the body starts reflecting that.
So as opposed to a place of rejection, you know, it's really all honoring who you are, your real identity. And then the body is slowly, starts conforming to the way that we want the world to perceive you, that you want to see yourself. But yeah,
Dalia: That feels so subtle, but that resonates the idea that, it's just so interesting, I think it's that framing from kind of a binary perspective that it almost has to be rejection, but in reality, it is simultaneously a deep acceptance of who you are of knowing that you are not cis-gender person and allowing that to take form in your life. However it's supposed to take form for you.
Yeah. That's a, that's a powerful perspective shift. Yeah.
Marina: It's, it's shaped seeing through the lens of love. And for me, that's where the beauty lives. So I love who I am. And although the world thought, because I have a vagina and I should be a woman, I say no to that. And out of love for who I am, I express my gender the way that it makes sense to me, that the way that is true, not only in my life but in the core of who I am in the core of my body. And this is expressing from a place of love, pure love, radical love, actually.
Dalia: Yeah. Ooh, that is powerful. In an actual session what might somatic healing look like when you do it with a guide? What is that?
Marina: Yeah, it can look like a lot of things, but basically. A session can start with a conversation.
So for example, if I'm working with someone keening sexual trauma, it's not a conversation about what happened, you know, revisiting the past. It's not about that. It's about noticing the patterns, how you are feeling. What are things that are working for you? What are things that are not working?
So many people who experienced sexual trauma have a very and hard time with relationships with romantic relationships, with intimacy, with having sex.Right? So we will have a conversation around that and then invite the body to the conversation. So when you think about relating to someone new, how does your body react? Oh, I noticed contraction. I noticed that heartbeat goes high and I feel the temperature change.
All right. And then from there addressing the sensations. Right? So giving space for those sensations first to be felt to be seen, to be prepared and also using some somatic, um, movement, sounds, breathing, making movements with your body, shaking, dancing, all kinds of things so that those sensations can have a space to, to be really well not just released, but to be moved, to be expressed, and then coming back into stillness and laying and giving space and the time for your nervous system to find some regulation, to discharge some of the energy that it is ready to discharge. And then another way, what else are we talking about and how are we going to address this? So it's, it's always, um, almost like a back and forth conversation. So the rational mind, you know, storytelling narratives and then noticing the body, what is happening here? Right?
Of course, this is a very simplistic way of saying how this works, but in reality, this takes people into such a deep place of inner knowing of inner understanding. And that's where healing is. You know, healing is not in my hands as the somatic healer. Healing is inside the person looking for it.
So as a somatic healer I guide the person into noticing into being. And of course, using my own way of doing that, really allowing the person to know that it's okay to feel what they're feeling. But they have confidence that they're not alone.
And that the body is so wise it's so wise and knows what to do. And slowly because we're healing the present because we're healing our relationships to ourselves right here right now, slowly we build some strength in our emotional body, our physical body in the ways that we can experience intense sensations, thoughts, emotions, feelings, that's going back into past traumatic memories become possible.
And then we can find integration. We can renegotiate that experience if that makes sense. So healing trauma, it's about feeling now healing the body now so that you can renegotiate what's happened in the past.
Dalia: Oh yeah. That's such a clear description. I know. As we age, we stop using our bodies are moving our bodies and ways that are maybe unpredictable.
So I could see you would need a guide to even do that. You can see children intuitively release tension after unpleasant things happen to them. Assuming it's a small and manageable negative experience, you know, but they do it in ways that you would never think to do in an office setting. After you have a conversation that makes you feel some type of way.
So it's fascinating to know who we can go to, to recapture those skills that we forgotten and probably a bunch we've never heard of before as well. Where do people find you?
Marina: I invite everybody to come to my website https://marinanabao.com/. I think you're going to type this.
Dalia: I'll put it in the show notes.
Marina: Yes. I'm a little bit old school. I really like keeping my website updated. All the information is there. And also Instagram @marinanabao. I'm not there every day, but I'm there every week. Sharing a little bits of inspiration, little bits of what I do. And for folks will want to get to know my work better if you are called to work with me I offer a free conversation so that we can get to know each other.
I can understand what people are looking for. We can see find the best person for them and from there we can start a coaching and somatic healing process.
Dalia: Thank you so much for coming on. I only have one final question. If there was one thing that you could say, and everyone would instantly understand it and internalize it for the rest of their lives.
What's something you would like for everyone to know?
Marina: the chains of trauma don't need to be the way that you lead your life forever. You have right here right now, regardless of what happened, regardless of how hard it was, you have the capacity to heal, to live a life that is filled with joy, with radiance, with vitality, and you can fully thrive. I think that knowing that we have this self-healing capacity and that our bodies are the key to that our bodies are pure medicine, that is what I really want people to know.
Dalia: That’s beautiful.
I love being able to discuss things that really aren't on everybody's radar as a healing tool, and very often and indigenous cultures you'll notice that healing work always involves a physical element, an embodied element, but because many of us live in areas where disconnection from the body is the status quo it's frequently left out of the healing process.
I love the idea of reclaiming our connection to our old ways and also incorporating information from the collective. Because the African diaspora is now spread all over the world, all of us have integrated with the local cultures in many different ways. Thanks to the internet as well, we are able to create hybrid versions of healing practices that work for us that are grounded in what our ancestors did, but are also a blend of what people in our part of the world are using. This is something that can evolve over time using your intuition and doing what feels right for you.
I personally use all kinds of quote unquote modern healing tools like cognitive behavioral therapy, pharmaceuticals that support mental wellbeing and embodiment work and meditation. I approach my wildness with all cylinders firing. I am interested in anything that has the potential to enhance my experience of life with a minimal to acceptable level of risk. Even holistic health practices sometimes come with a little bit of brisk, but I love how many different embodiment practices are totally gentle with minimal risk. So this is an under-utilized tool that I'm sure we're going to see more and more of.
Be sure to check out Marina. I have the link to her website in the show notes. Marina is doing amazing work and is taking on clients at this time. https://marinanabao.com/
Remember the only fee for the show is that you share it with others. Anytime you hear something useful, and around here, that is every episode.
So feel free to share the episode on IG on Facebook, wherever you hangout online and let everybody know what you got out of the episode. Also, you can always like, and review the show on iTunes so that it's easy for other people to find.
Thank you in advance for helping this message reach more folks that need it.
Also Decolonizing Wellness is now available for pre-order. If you're listening to this after February of 2022, it's just available to be ordered. So check that link out in the show notes and get your copy. www.daliakinsey.com/book
Decolonizing Wellness is perfect for you if you enjoy the themes I talk about here, it's focused on QTBIPOC looking to heal their relationship with their self image and their relationship with food. Even if you feel like you have a peaceful relationship with food I go a little deeper there and look at using food and eating as a mindfulness tool and a self-empowerment tool.
So there's something there for all of us.
I hope you'll check it out and let me know what you thought. Okay. Thank you for joining me. I will see you next time.
Body Liberation for All Theme
Yeah. They might try to put you in a box, tell them that you don't accept when the world is tripping out tell them that you love yourself. Hey, Hey, smile on them live your life just like you like it is.
It’s your party negativity is not invited. For my queer folks, for my trans, people of color, let your voice be heard. Look in the mirror and say that it's time to put me first. You born to win. Head up high with confidence. This show is for everyone. So I thank you for tuning in. Let's go.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit daliakinsey.substack.com -
This episode is a gift. Charlotte James and Dre Wright, the co-founders of The Ancestor Project share their knowledge of using sacred earth medicine as a tool for liberation. Dre and Charlotte make it clear that there is no such thing as a magic pill/cure all for the ills that systemic oppression cause us, but sacred earth medicine can be a life changing catalyst for growth. In the end the magic is within you. But if you’ve been feeling called to discover what role plant medicine can play in your healing journey you are going to love this episode.
This episode we discuss
* Using plant medicine or sacred earth medicine in your healing journey
* Radical self-love as a major step in spiritual work
* Safety and the importance of BIPOC integration circles
* Catalysts for growth vs magic pills
* Recognizing your lineage and ancestral healing tools
Episode Resources
https://www.theancestorproject.com/
www.daliakinsey.com
Decolonizing Wellness: A QTBIPOC-Centered Guide to Escape the Diet Trap, Heal Your Self-Image, and Achieve Body Liberation
Dalia: Hello and welcome to another episode of Body Liberation for All. I'm your host and decolonized wellness and body image coach Dalia Kinsey. I help queer folks of color heal their struggles with shame and self-acceptance through nutrition and self-care so they can live the most fierce, liberated, and joyful version of their lives.
I have been interested in instant enlightenment for a really long time and through research and personal growth, I realized that there's no such thing, but that doesn't stop me from being distracted by or enthralled with any promise of short cutting personal and spiritual growth. So when I started hearing more about plant medicine and hearing all these over the top dramatic stories about how it's changed people's lives in one session, of course, I was interested.
So this has been something I have had some personal lived experience with. And what has become really clear is that just like any area of wellness, where people have monetized something that does have true healing potential, you have to be an educated consumer. It's extremely helpful from the standpoint of a healer to encourage people, to keep their expectations in check, because just the way the human brain works and how susceptible so many of us are to suggestion there is massive potential for disappointment when we create specific expectations fir experiences that yield wildly varying results.
I'm so happy today to share with you a conversation with two healers that really are invested in the liberation and the growth of the people that they work, who aren't just out here selling big promises. They're about the healing work and transformation. Dre and Charlotte from The Ancestor Project, give us some really helpful tips in this episode that I think will help anyone who's considering using plant medicine or sacred earth medicine to continue moving forward in their healing journey.
I'm sure you're going to enjoy this conversation. Let's jump right.
Theme Song
Yeah, they might try to put you in a box, tell them that you don't accept. When the world is tripping out, tell them that you love yourself.
Hey, Hey, smile on them. Live your life just how you like it. It’s your party negativity is not invited.
For my queer folks, my trans, people of color, let your voice be heard.
Look in the mirror and say it’s time to put me first, you were born win. Head up high with confidence. This show is for everyone, so I thank you for tuning in.
Let's go!
Dre: I am a spiritual being, having a human experience. My fundamental nature is pure creative power and unconditional love. I'm Dre a co-founders of the Sabina Project and we actually changed our name to The Ancestor Project, but we're honored to be here and yeah. Thank you.
Charlotte: And I am Charlotte James, the co-founder of the now Ancestor Project.
Dalia: Thank you so much for being here. That new name really resonates. I had to do a little research to try and understand where Sabina was coming from, but can you tell us about that? And what made you feel like a name change was more in alignment?
Dre: You know, as healers, a big part of, being in our opinion to be an effective healer is to do a lot of self-reflection.
So when we came up with the name, The Sabina Project, who was because we were Charlotte was at a talk and there was, uh, there was a mention of Maria Sabina. But it was mentioned in a very, like, they, they spend a lot of time deifying and all these white men and, you know, acting as if they discovered mushrooms and the, and these traditions and oh yeah we want to give a shout out to Maria Sabina.
Right. And there's a, there's an important backstory behind that actually, you know, see there was a tremendous amount of pain and suffering. That she experienced, uh, after sharing this medicine with Watson who lied to her to get her to share a ceremony. You know, one of her children was murdered. The house was burned down. The Mexican government treated her like a drug dealer. It wasn't a good experience. Right. Watson came down there. He had an experience. He was supposed to keep it secret, but then he wrote this article in Life magazine and then all these westerners besieged her home village.
And that was not good for the family. So knowing that, Charlotte stood up and started breaking this down. Like, oh, we couldn't, you need to do a little bit better job of venerating this ancestor. And so after the talk we were thinking about a name, she was like we wanted to name it Sabina Project.
This was a great example of cultural appropriation, right. And how the west takes advantage. However, we didn't ask Sabina for permission to use her name. Right. We thought it was a good idea. And even though our intentions were good, we were in fact doing the same thing we're calling out in other individuals.
So in self-reflection the changing.
Charlotte: Yep. Yeah. It is some soul searching, some ego checking. Um, and yeah, we want to continue to be an example, um, in the psychedelic space and to not just talk the talk, but walk the walk. And also, you know, as we expand in this work, the truth is that the traditions that we practice, that we learned from that we venerate and that we come from are not just one tradition.
And so we wanted to have a name that was more inclusive of all of the ancestors that brought us to where we are now. So yeah, we're The Ancestor Project.
Dalia: That's fascinating that it came up for you in that context. What initially led you to be interested in using plant medicine as a healing tool?
Was it first a tool you used personally? Or something you just wanted to explore because of some other reasons.
Charlotte: So we definitely work off of the mindset that the medicine calls you in, and it happens in a number of different ways for different people. We both have really seemingly like on the surface, very different introductions into our path in this.
I first started using cannabis when I was 14. I know that it was incredibly supportive in helping sort of chill out some unrecognized, high functioning anxiety tendencies. And really supported me and like moving through high school and college I think at that point, my mind was already very open.
Uh, I had had a lot of mind expanding experiences. And so when other psychedelics or plant medicines like were offered up, I was open to the idea of exploring that. And yeah, whether I was doing it incredibly intentionally back then, it certainly was like key to getting me into where I am as a person today.
Dalia: I know for me personally, it's always felt like everyone around me who is part of the dominant culture uses drugs recreationally at some point in their lives without fear of it completely changing the course of their life. But I always felt like I better not touch any of that with a 10 foot pole because the minute I even think about something that's restricted, I imagine the man's just going to pop through a wall or something like that.
That was always my concern. And it feels even more outrageous that a lot of these medicines were in the hands of the people that now are not allowed to use it. On a level, the narrative is still that, oh, this is restricted, but no, it's only really restricted for some people. So how do you encourage folks of color who want to access the healing potential of plant medicine to do so?
Because they know there are some things that are legal here in the states that maybe aren't as highly publicized, that could also be useful. And then there are places you could travel to where you can explore other types of medicine without as much worry.
And then there's different worry about like, can you trust the provider? How do you set the setting? What advice would you give someone who is just starting to think about possibly exploring plant medicine?
Dre: Good question. Great question. And then, you know, the answer is layered.
You know, back to what Charlotte said before the medicine calls you when you're ready to answer, right? These medicines are millions of years old and wise. So that’s the first thing, the second thing is understand that all of the information that you have learned has been information that's been shared to you by the person who did and is currently imprisoning your black body, right. So why would you trust them? Right. And you should start asking the question. Why, why is it that, you know, an African-American male has, is 900% more likely to be arrested for simple possession of cannabis in the state like Maryland used to before it was legal.
When in the United States, we use cannabis at a lower rate. So the reality is too, that there is a significant difference in the types of punishments that we receive or how these laws are enforced. Right. On the other hand we will not liberate ourselves from this oppression logically, right? We have to use both sides of our brain.
Our superpower is from getting connected with these medicines. It is the path to our collective liberation. So if you want to spend another generation, explaining to your children, why they have to act differently and be treated differently because of their color, then you go ahead and do that. If you want to be on the liberation train, you're going to have to use some tools outside of the ones that we've all tried that have not worked.
We've had a black president we've, you know, how much evidence do we need to have before you, before we realized that what we're doing, protesting and all that in fact, that's not really the answer, right. But there is an answer, right? And it's, it is our ancestors. This medicine comes from my ancestors.
And they will get us to a place of liberation. Right? If that's important to you and some folks, you know, this lifetime, some aren’t ready to be liberated for those that are, this is the way this is the path.
And then how do you approach these medicines? Well, I would say surrender to the idea that these medicines can support you and then you will, well, what tends to happen is the universe will open up for you and provide you with access. The pathways will come to you. When the student is ready, the teacher will appear, the first thing that you have to get past is the fear of these constructs.
You know, this is the same government, if you think about most of the medications that you've been given that, that call quote unquote alright. Again the thought process and the belief systems that you have in you have been inculcated with nonsense.
For example, they spread ideas like black people are lazy. But they used our black bodies for free to work. So clearly, you know, its the transfer of their sins onto us. So we've got to stop believing or at the very least question, their ideas, philosophies, and belief systems and start seeing them for how corrupt they really are.
I would say that would be the first step, right. It's just like really, you begin to deconstruct your colonization. They don't have to actually control your body anymore. They've got control of your mind.
Dalia: So is that why for you this is such a key part of the liberation process is because at this point, a lot of the feelings of imprisonment are just ingrained mentally and they're not physically there anymore.
A lot of the barriers are gone, but it's hard to see them.
Dre: Colonization is self-replicating. Patriarchy is self-replicating. These abuse constructs are self-replicating. So all you need to do is brainwash one generation. We still, as people of color, talk about light skin and dark skin in our communication.
In so many dysfunctional ways, you know, we still, we are more religious about Abrahamic traditions, we hold on to those traditions tighter than they do. Right. We've got to take deep breaths. Right. And just realize that you can make different choices in our lives.
And then once you start tapping into that stream of consciousness, all the opportunities that connect with these medicines, will be available.
Dalia: You radiate calmness. This has been a really trying time for everyone. And you're also working as healers experiencing a lot of stress because of what people bring to you. And also because people want to block you from doing your work. There’s so many levels in what you just shared. I can hear the balance. In the last webinar that I attended, I saw that there were clearly colonizer descendants present as well, but you're able to face the fact of the horrors of the damage that colonization has done and allow descendants into the space. How do you find that place of, I guess, equanimity where you can hold room for both.
Charlotte: If I could start on that one.
I think part of what we recognize and also teach, especially when we focus on anti-racism work is that we have actually all been colonized away from our animistic and indigenous shamonic traditions. And this is oftentimes the root cause of cultural appropriation to bring it full circle is that folks are so disconnected from their own traditions that they begin to take from others and do so in a disrespectful and non reverential way.
So we hold, you know, our like first true. community offering that we still carry through is our BIPOC integration circle that we do twice a month. And that's a time for us to come together with our BIPOC family and just talk about our experiences with the medicine and our experiences in the world.
Reintegrating, the insights that the medicine gives us into a world in which we do exist within structures that are built to oppress us. Outside of that, our space is open to those who are willing to sit in their discomfort and face the role that their ancestors played in getting us into the place that we are now, and also the role that they play in perpetuating it.
I know you, I think you came to the microdosing to dismantle oppression, workshop or masterclass, and you know, the whole, our conversation around working with these medicines for personal transformation is working to dismantle the systems of oppression that we've internalized so that we can stop projecting them and replicating the systems of abuse externally.
And so, you know, we keep our community open to that conversation. I also, you know, I'm a biracial person and so I have to contest with that in my own identity as well. You know, I think it's important to be authentic to our lineages and our experiences in this space as Black folks with many different backgrounds and nationalities and heritages.
Dalia: Yeah, I was recently reading, you know, the historian and the person who specializes in genealogy, that's always on PBS with famous folls, I think it's Henry Louis. Right? So it's so interesting in his book, he points out that so many Black families have these stories of Native American or first nations ancestry.
And it's almost never the case. It's almost always European ancestry. And so this is something that a lot of Black Americans struggle with reconciling that no one is a hundred percent anything. That's just literally not a thing. And because of how binary race is seen in the states in particular, that can be really difficult for people to deal with because how we're socialized is typically going to be one or the other, like people don't let you just fully be yourself.
So how has the medicine affected your ability to maintain your peace every day dealing with all the layers and all the work that you have to do to fully accept yourself in a world that makes that a little tricky.
Dre: Yeah. Some, some good questions today. I got this Black dude, you know, the word that keeps coming up for me, the question, the last question is low, right?
So we start from there. We are homo sapiens so 4% or so of our DNA might be Neanderthal. We are homo sapiens the species. Okay. We are also carbon based creatures and everything in the universe is mostly carbon. Every one of us is relatives.
At the end of the day, this, the conversation we'll have is specifically now is about a 3d reality. The illusion that we walk around, the walking dead, I like to call it this, this illusion, we do live in a very abusive experience.
Right. But we have the ability to transcend this reality, right. And then bring back that power back to this 3d world. Instead of us being the genius that the genius moves through us. Right. And for us, and that the universe inspires on, our behalf. Right. I think one of the reasons why the Abrahamic traditions and colonization have been so successful is that they got us disconnected from the other part of our brain.
You've been using that logical, linear pathway that only distorted information and got us disconnected with the other side of ourselves. Right. And so what we are encouraging every human to do is understand the name that you chose before your parents were born. Right. And this reality, right? Yeah. So I think really at the end of the day, deep healing starts with having deep radical self-love for yourself, not defining yourself by anyone else's ideas, except for yourself, your true essence, right? And then when you are radically deeply in love with yourself, they have so much compassion and love. Most of the trauma that we are experiencing in humans most is from other humans is not from disease.
And most of that trauma is simply the word. That another human uses towards us. Right? It's that? It's that dad, your dad not telling you, he loved you when you were six and now you're 80 and you're still traumatized by that experience. That's when most of us, so we'll want to get deeply in love with ourselves, right?
And then once you’re loving yourself and really understanding your true essence, the medicines allow you to get out of your own way and allow you to heal the experience.
Dalia: That sounds like deep spiritual work. Does it matter what traditions accompany this type of healing?
Well, first, can you kind of tell us what animism is because that isn't something we hear about a lot in the west.
Dre: So the easiest way to think about it is this is begin to seeing yourself as part of this great collective that we call the earth. I, and you you're one of many different organisms and you're related to all these things, right.
And to develop a deep reverence and respect for those things for yourself. That's what all hunter gatherer traditions share, connection. Some of it was aligned with the food they were eating as well and how they survived. There was a deep connection and reverence for yourself. And then the other part of that was.
So if you have both of those two things aligned, that's the practice. Find our ancestors practice, these ways, the flow.
Charlotte: Yeah.
That's this idea that every living and even what we would consider a non-living beings on this planet is alive and that we are an intrinsic part of that. I don't know if you've ever seen the graphic and it's like one side will say ego and there's like a little person on top and then various different kinds of animals underneath the person.
And then on the right side, it will say eco. And it's like the person as part of, in a circle with all of these. Beings. And so it's the idea. Shamanism is really the idea of going from a dominion model, which is your right, like where there's a dominant culture, there's norms that are accepted as a dominant way of life to living in.
I forget the term that, that like shamanism uses. To living in, in equanimity with everything around us. And you can find that tradition on the continent of Africa, in the Amazon, and also in Nordic tradition and Viking tradition in Russian tradition. So that's not something that is specific to Black and brown cultures, something that was specific to indigenous culture and there's indigenous culture around the world.
But I thought that the question you asked around, like, does it matter what traditions you focus on in this like realm of healing or sort of sacred earth medicine healing space.
I think a lot of what we talk about is educating folks on the lineages that these medicines and traditions come from, because you'll see now that there's a lot of research being done around how these medicines work and what they heal and can cure.
And really our ancestors already did the research on how to safely and effectively use these medicines to support our collective liberation. And so for us, it's important to learn from these traditions to understand the context of the medicine. But again, circling back to this, you know, idea that we all now are very, like, sort of pluralistic in our identity.
It also means that you can work with more than one tradition and there is not any sort of dogma around that aspect of it. And there's not even that much dogma within the traditions frequently.
Dalia: Thats refreshing. And that's very different from like a colonizer perspective. Everything's always very one or the other confined. So I have noticed that, especially here in the states, it just seems like members of the dominant culture are running this healing space. What have you noticed is the difference in how folks of color, or maybe not even folks of color in general, just how you specifically, how is this tool different when it comes to.
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Dre: Ancestral practices.
You know, we, both of us had been in the dominant white spaces before, and there's a lot of forms of sensationalism, the medicine itself and the proper what's the dose. And I saw this, but when you get around predominantly BIPOC there tends to be a conversation around practice, around respect, around reverence and connection with your ancestors, which is really beautiful and fresh.
And I don't think we've done last year. We did. I dunno, we did every first and third, Sunday, we do integration circle and I don't think we've ever had a conversation about an experience asking what was the dose and all that type of stuff, you know, sensationalized experience.
Dalia: Well, my partner checked me yesterday.
I think it was a few days ago because they are part of the dominant culture. And they're like, every time I walked by the off you are saying something about colonizers. He didn’t feel like it’s a blanket term people can connect to now. And I said, well, maybe I need to start looking for ways to address the reality of the situation is that we are dealing with fallout from colonization.
But then also, like you said, it happened to everyone really but I think it's clear who is suffering on the more violent end. But everyone is suffering. So I'm experimenting with that, that term.
Dre: Yeah. It's also interesting because we are using, you know, that try to have these conversations, but ultimately they used in our colonization.
Right. Which is very unlimited. Right. And it ultimately pushes us to put ourselves in these silos where we separate, you know, like whiteness is not actually real and we've been perpetuating this nonsense, black and white forever. And it just separates us and keeps us from not focusing, you know, that the reality is that even your light brothers and sisters out there, most of those folks, all those folks have been victims of colonization.
If you think about, you know, what the pilgrims suffered, right before they came over here, they were setting those folks on fire and putting them on crosses for their belief systems. Right. So we've all suffered the tremendous amount of abuse. And then what happens is, you know, the usage is heavy and it's tremendous.
And so you, you begin to see. When we notice in our own communities where folks have self-hatred and they treat their own folks worse, than the perceived dominant culture does.
Dalia: There's so many levels.
When did you become clear on your personal dedication to being liberated? And wanting to liberate others
Dre: When I get there, I’ll let you know. Now every day, every day I realize in how many ways I am complicit in the abuse. Just a real simple example, for years, I would teach young men how to survive a police encounter, you know, roll, crack your window, put your hands on the steering wheel, ask for permission, you know, how to survive a police encounter. And during that time, it must've been like 10 years. I was teaching straight, very proud of all this training and never occurred to me that in addition to doing that, I should be dismantling the system that causes me to have to teach Black boys to act differently in a police encounter.
Right. So we all completely, I joined the military, right. So, you know, I've been brainwashed just like the rest of us, you know?
Charlotte: I feel like that's part of, even that is part of this narrative, right. That we like compare our trauma to each other, to say who was more or less traumatized. And that means I should be in this place or that place on my journey.
No, we all respond to trauma differently. And we all have been tried in the same way. We've all been colonized. We've all been traumatized at different degrees. I think it's just like we are we're humans, you know, like we, we may do medicine work or be at a different place in our medicine journey, but like we still come back to the 3D every time and have to deal with the human stuff.
Dalia: Yeah. I think that's really helpful because sometimes from the outside, you think that people who seem really far ahead of you in their spiritual journey have an easier time, or maybe we're less traumatized and less brainwashed than you
Charlotte: Actually this story circles back to one of your earlier questions that we didn't necessarily answer completely, which was this question of like how you begin a relationship with the medicine or how you find a practitioner or a facilitator or a scent, a retreat center that is going to be safe and support.
So we do our virtual BIPOC circles twice a month. We do masterclasses for surely around once a month. And sometimes you do series as well and then in person, we work with Kambo medicine and Rapé which are two legal, sacred earth medicines. And so they support us in being able to support our community and in a way that we can like talk about very publicly because they are legal medicines and Rapé is a medicine that you can begin building a relationship with on your own.
So we do virtual ceremonies where we send out medicine to people, and then we gather together on Zoom. Teach them how to administer that medicine and work with it.
Dalia: Tell me about the services that you have available right now and what people who live in your area can do with you and what people who are farther away can work with you on.
Charlotte: So I think it's a couple of things. It's funny what you said. There's that meme of like a kid trying to step like six steps up the stairs at once. And you know, the first couple of rungs are like meditation drinking a gallon of water a day, breath work, and then like rung six is psychedelics. And he's like trying to hop through.
Nothing's a magic pill and that is why we focus a lot on the preparation and integration because it's about taking the downloads that you receive in ceremony and then turning those into daily action, because what we are not encouraging is like constantly running back to the medicine without doing the work, to integrate the lessons.
So, yeah, there's question around being committed. Once you answer the call of the medicine, making a commitment like a holistic commitment to your wellbeing is what is going to move the journey along, but like coming to the medicine and then not changing any of your habits or behaviors or belief systems is like not, not going to work.
Dalia: Now with that type of plant medicine, the experiences that you're going to have, are they more subtle? And it's more like a supportive aid versus there's some other things, you know, everybody always wants to shortcut and myself included. There's some things that you fantasize that, oh, I'm going to take this thing and we're going to go on this retreat and I'm going to be enlightened by the end of the weekend.
Pretty sure that is not a thing ever. What do you find people have the most resistance around? Is it that it's still a journey? That it's still a lot of work or that we have all these really hyped up fictional perceptions of what plant medicine is going to be like?
Dre: I mean, we have that example today, right?
Just lots of people in the I'm not comfortable with the word dominant, what you see is people doing lots of psychedelics and lots of mushrooms and LSD and all those types of things. And then they create companies that churn out more abuse, right. They, you know, like in silicone valley is it's popular to do, to microdose so that you can work harder, longer, right.
And create more apps to create more addictions to us. So clearly doing these medicines without the right set and setting the right guidance is not effective. And the difference, the big difference is in the west, what you have is young people, traditionally experimenting or leading the way in this conversation. Our ancestors, the elders would bring the young ones to a right of passage, when it’s time for you to take on a new role and responsibility as part, a member of this community and they would do ceremony to move them to that next level. So there was a reason, there was a why, and there was a how to do these things, not folks, you know, dropping acid and drinking alcohol.
There is no magic. And just like the movie matrix, you know, why don't you take that pill? And you realize how you are complicit in everyone's abuse to include your own trauma that you're reliving daily, the stories that you tell yourself, the poison that you've ingested and that you're living in and the embodiment of that poison over and over again, the person told you you were unloved, unlovable, and unworthy.
And now every morning when you wake up, you tell yourself that story over and over again, you reinforce it. But is that the reality? So you could potentially have what they call a rebirth experience, your very first ceremony. Sure, but all that would mean is that you would realize how many more layers of work you need to do.
And then there's your ancestors you need to support. Lets say your parents, and their struggles and your ancestors and there's the rest of the community that needs to be healed. We encourage you to take the pill, but it is definitely not a magic pill. It's just the beginning.
It's just the beginning of many, many layers of learning how to love yourself, deeply compassionately and love other people deeply compassionately and passionately at the same time.
Dalia: .Where are the downloads coming from when you're in ceremony? Is it from you and your subconscious or to some part of you that's connected to something bigger like an ancestor or like a God?
Dre: Yeah. So I'm not going to just say, normally this is the first time I've done this. We're not going to answer that question because I think it's like a spoiler, right? Right. I think the west has this tendency of asking what’s right. But in a number of practices, you know, your job is to experience. You spend years watching and listening and observing, right.
This is the thing it's about the experience. The experience will, will clarify me so, right, but I don't want to give you too much information. And then you, and then it becomes a, well, I just heard it someplace. So maybe this is how do I know that this is even real for me. Right? Cause I heard it.
So, you know, what I can tell you is is that every person who has had a mystical experience with these medicines say it as one of the top five experiences in life. I will tell you for me as a person, the birth of my daughter was a greatest honor and privilege of my life to see her being born. the first five minutes of skin to skin.
It was a seminal experience, but sitting down with ayahuasca was the most important decision I've ever made. I would not be half the father I am, or the human I am if it was not from sitting with and surrendering to these medicines.
Charlotte: Yeah, thank you for, for saying that joy, because I think this goes back to, you know, the difference of what we see in our integration circles. And one of our key group agreements, not interpreting other people's journeys, but I think we also don't really hear it. Like in circle, people are not really saying, like giving a play by play of what they saw, what they heard, what they, whatever.
It's so much more about building this relationship of trust with yourself and the medicine, so that you're open to receiving whatever the medicine brings. And the medicine always brings what you need, not necessarily what you want. It can be challenging, but it does always bring you what you need.
Dre: Yeah, for sure.
Absolutely. Now I will give you a little hit. Right. So part of what this is about is asking a better question. And the question is what are the habits, beliefs, ideas, and people that no longer serve me, that I'm excited to let go. And what are the habits, beliefs, people, and ideas I'm excited to attract. Notice it's not you doing something like you creating something.
It’s simply just allowing the universe to conspire and attract those things into your life. So that question is how do you begin to develop a deep and powerful intention in your ceremony?
And then after you have the awareness, then you're now it's time to do the work.
Charlotte: Yes. Thank you for saying that. That is what I like distracted myself, but I think also in not answering that question too directly, it's like, we don't want to set expectations because the whole purpose is to come with strong intentions and have no expectation of the medicine
Dalia: When people are trying to do their integration do they ask themselves those questions again, or look for ways to just get clear on what revelations they think they had?
Dre: Great question. So if a person is privileged enough to do a ceremony, part of it is that you come to it with lots of reverence and a little bit of concern.
This is a big, it's a big deal. And thoughtfulness a tremendous amount of thoughtfulness in the setting and getting prepared for this thing. And then the goal is to live a life of ceremony, right? Live a life of thoughtfulness and prayer and reverence and connection to yourself, the daily.
It's the paying attention to your compulsion's and not reacting to compulsion's when reacting to the thing isn’t the highest best choice for yourself. And to these medicines, we're hoping, again, to understand the name that you chose before your parents were born.
The ego part of ourselves, is the self that can be the deceiver. Oh, I really need that sugar or I need alcohol. All those are things because I'm feeling I need to fill a hole. Right. And to take some external source to do it, but then when you're radically in love with yourself, that isn't it. There's no hole to fill, I'm in love.
Listen, the only thing I need, continuing to nourish myself and connect with others in creating an environment a nourishing one. That's my role. Okay.
Dalia: Is that the purpose of your life, do you feel?
Dre: All of our lives. And then, you know, the question, those questions you asked me, I would say you ask that question daily.
Like this was the daily inventory. A good morning practice when you get up is to do an inventory of all those aspects of yourself, really beautiful when you realized that you are now not all on autopilot, right? Just going, you know, just living the life that other people told you. And now you're in control of your movie, your story, your experience today, that's really super exciting and also scary too.
Because now you can't point things to anybody else.You have to really take new steps. It is nuanced though, because remember in the 3D reality that we live in the are still structures, there is a governmental system that, you know, is quite oppressive towards people of color.
And so that is not just here in America, but all over the world. So all this will have to pay attention to that reality as well.
Dalia: If there is just one thing you could say to the listeners and they would understand it instantly and carry it with them for the rest of their lives, what would you want for people to know?
Dre: Every one of us has super superpowers. It is true that you're probably never going to tap into those superpowers until you can connect with these plant medicines and surrender. They're older and wiser than you as a homo sapien will ever be, they have knowledge and traditions and teachings enlist them as your oldest relatives.
So sit with those relatives and they will open a doorway or pathway to healing and liberation like you never could dream it. We don't need to continue to perpetuate this idea that we are victims. We’re kings and queens that have to step into our power.
This is your path.
Charlotte: I would say, give yourself the gift of living your life.
Dalia: That's really powerful. That was so good. Thank you so much for coming on. How do you think is the best way for people to connect with you?
Charlotte: Right now you can find us on Instagram as @thesabinaproject and our site i
https://www.instagram.com/theancestorproject/
https://www.theancestorproject.com/
That will be changing soon, but you'll still be able to find us it'll reroute to where you need to go.
Dalia: Okay. Perfect. I’ll make sure to put those in the show notes as well. Thank you so much for being here.
Dre: Yeah. Thank you for having us. We're honored to be here.
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Dalia: I love how grounded and realistic the insights and advice Dre and Charlotte offered are. I encourage you to check out The Ancestor Project on social media and also check out their integration service. That's specifically for BIPOC who are working with plant medicine, maybe on their own, and need a place to get the most out of their experiences and to fully integrate what they've learned in their daily life.
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