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Cultivating and Sustaining Wellness Through Interconnectedness
24 Plays6 months ago
What are the ideal conditions for sustained youth wellness?
In episode 4, “Cultivating and Sustaining Wellness Through Interconnectedness”, we hear from:
- Aaron Nakai a longtime educator who discusses "mindfulness" as a thread that connects us to each other, our histories, and our futures
- Estrella, a youth expert who vulnerably discusses the factors that compromise her ability to remain connected to her culture and community
- A Q&A with Simple Ant, an educator and activist who introduces us to an idea he calls "fugitive ecology", wisdoms of ecological understandings of freedom and sustainability
- A reflection by healer, scholar and elder Tereza Iñiguez, who mentors us on wellness through a framework of "interconnection"
Drawing From the Well is hosted by Tiffani Marie and is produced by Jon Reyes.
Music by King Most.
DFTW is supported by Community Responsive Education, continue the conversation at youthwellness.com
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Transcript
Ancestral Connection Through Water
00:00:00
Speaker
When I feel the most connected to my ancestors, I think about water, particularly water's ability to move us, to remind us, to cleanse us, to restore us.
00:00:16
Speaker
I think of Oshun, the Yoruba goddess of the waters that represents purity and love. But I also think about the ways in which colonialism not the way we think of it commonly, not as an event, but rather as a structure that's greatly informed our connection to water.
00:00:39
Speaker
I remember and sometimes even feel the pain of my ancestors, those who were forced on ships and had to develop a very different relationship to water, packed, spoon-like, laying in their excrements,
00:00:58
Speaker
violated, beaten, with the soundtrack of the waves blaring amongst them. And so I grieve this forced relationship to the waters, to the natural world.
00:01:11
Speaker
And whether it is water or the wilderness, so many of us, as a result of our histories, have developed traumatic relationships to the natural world.
00:01:24
Speaker
What a tremendous shift to transition from carefree strides with the plants, the mud, the rocks, the stars, toward often fear-ridden sprints amongst those same entities of the natural world.
00:01:41
Speaker
The sweat dripping, the pauses, the heavy breathing, the lookouts, the trauma, the attempts to escape bondage.
00:01:54
Speaker
And those who were captured would serve as a reminder to others of what happens to us in this country when we attempt to straighten our backs, attempt to remember who we are, to access freedom.
00:02:10
Speaker
Those who were captured became pendulums of the natural world, swinging back and forth. from trees simultaneously as lesson and reflection of the time.
00:02:26
Speaker
My great-grandmother had a fear of water. At 13, she was chosen to be the lookout. It was her shift to watch out for the rising water. It was 1927, the year of the high waters in Arkansas, and at 4 a.m.,
00:02:45
Speaker
Everyone around her slept while she watched the water seeping in. She had to wake up everyone so that they could escape death. You see, the flood of 1927 was considered to be one of the most destructive and costly floods in Arkansas history, and really one of the worst in the history of this nation.
00:03:08
Speaker
The flooding was so massive that the levees could not hold the waters that approached my family, and so they fled for their lives. They fled from the consequences of colonialism, industrialization, capitalism, essentially the wrath of the natural world.
00:03:27
Speaker
And so today, so many of us in this country may distance ourselves from the natural world, and we might prefer to spend time amongst architecture, civilization even, that separates us from each other and separates us from the natural world, rightfully.
00:03:51
Speaker
Many of us might still have the epigenetic reminders of our people's experiences in the natural world. Today, however, we seek to extend our memories beyond the waters that brought us to captivity to return to ways of being that function as medicine.
00:04:12
Speaker
And like water, we invite you to allow yourself to let go of form and be formed and shaped by the wisdoms that wash upon the shores of your heart, your mind, your body, and your spirit as you listen to this episode of Drawing from the Well.
Episode Introduction and Guest Panel
00:04:40
Speaker
Welcome to Drawing from the Well. I'm your host, Tiffany Marie. This episode will focus on the significance of interconnectedness, connection to each other, our ancestors, and place as a way to cultivate and sustain wellness.
00:04:56
Speaker
For the next hour, we'll hear from longtime educator, Aaron Nikai, who discusses mindfulness as a thread that connects us to each other, our histories, and our futures.
00:05:08
Speaker
We'll hear from Estrella, youth expert who vulnerably discusses the factors that compromise her ability to remain connected to her culture and community. We have educator and activist Simple Ant, who introduces us to what he calls fugitive ecologies.
00:05:27
Speaker
Wisdoms of Ecological Understandings of Freedom and Sustainability. And we close this episode with healer, scholar, and elder Teresa Iniguez, who mentors us toward higher heights and deeper depths of wellness, all through a framework of interconnection.
00:05:52
Speaker
I think in this question of interconnectedness, it first really began setting in with me when I began studying and practicing Zazen, or sitting meditation.
00:06:05
Speaker
I was really interested in this practice but had never had the opportunity or the space to learn. So when I was living in Japan, I lived around the corner from this thousand-year-old temple.
00:06:17
Speaker
I asked around to the teachers at the school that I was teaching at if anybody knew a place where I could meditate or learn how to meditate and all these kinds of preconceived ideas I had about what that meant.
00:06:30
Speaker
They were actually like, oh yeah, one of our students is the ah priest's son. We'll send you there right away, straight away. I didn't know Japanese, the language beyond greetings or introductions.
00:06:44
Speaker
The priest didn't know any English. We ended up just connecting and sitting, practicing meditation every week.
00:06:54
Speaker
I would just show up and he would continue to be surprised that I would show up. Through our each not knowing how to speak each other's languages, we formed some sort of connection and bond through meditating.
00:07:12
Speaker
It was through some of those lessons with him each time we would sit that he would give me kind of a talk or a lesson before afterwards, and I would struggle to try understand what he was talking about and make sense of what he was saying.
00:07:27
Speaker
It was there that he began to school me on this Buddhist concept of n or interconnection, or interrelationship. And basically was pointing around to all the things in the room, saying, you know, we all have this thread connecting us to the rock, to the teacup, to each other, to the trees.
00:07:51
Speaker
That lesson and those ideas really began to take root with me through this practice of meditation, mindfulness, and also like a cultural reclamation, language reclamation, tradition that i learned.
00:08:08
Speaker
And that happened kind of parallel to me going on this journey to actually find the land and the house that my great grandparents came from.
00:08:21
Speaker
It really taught me a lot about closing some of these loops or completing particular cycles or circles. It made me feel that really was a deep, important part of my own education and just what I felt like education should be about in the sense that it was connected to the lands that some of my people came from.
00:08:47
Speaker
the types of crops, the geography, what they would plant and cultivate. It was connected to learning about all of those things and also helped to have me better understand my own place.
00:09:02
Speaker
It kind of placed me, located me in a certain context and connected me with a lineage, a land, a culture and a language.
00:09:14
Speaker
And it's something that just completely changed my worldview. So when I think about the indigenous concept of land as primary and everything emerges from our connection to the land, our freedom and our liberation must be rooted in land first.
00:09:31
Speaker
Those stories of me returning to that place come to mind.
00:09:39
Speaker
Where are the places you feel your best? My grandpa's house in the Mission District because that's where I grew up and stuff.
00:09:51
Speaker
The culture and stuff. Like my grandma's house is in the Mission. I've done like summer programs and stuff in the Mission. Just I grew there too. So what is it about those places that make you feel like you can be at your best?
00:10:05
Speaker
The people, the way looks like, the colors and stuff. Red, like orange, yellow, brown, like colors like from the earth and stuff.
00:10:19
Speaker
What do you see are threats to wellness? People, bad energy, like if I'm going to talk about the mission, like gentrification and culture appropriation and stuff because they're taking away the culture.
00:10:40
Speaker
And it's like, this is what we have left because of in the past that you guys have taken so much more from us. And this is like the little bit that we have left. Now it's like whole new colonization that's happening.
00:11:01
Speaker
We appreciate Estrella for her critical analysis of the consequences of gentrification, particularly her framing of gentrification as a larger effort to separate her from her culture, her people, and the earth.
00:11:15
Speaker
Next, Simple Ant takes us toward fugitive ecologies, a revolutionary and critical response to gentrification and other colonial efforts invested in our undoing.
00:11:30
Speaker
All right, folks, I am here with the one and only Simple Ant, who's an educator and a lifelong student. But i want to hand it over to you. How would you introduce yourself and why?
00:11:43
Speaker
So I go by the name of Simple Ant because to me, this name both evokes and honors two aspects of my life that have had a real profound influence on how I attempt to live on this earth.
00:11:57
Speaker
The practice of simplicity and simple living being one and then learning from the wisdom of ant communities has really helped me approach each day with intention, focus, and just a deeper feeling that allows me to know that other ways of existing are possible.
00:12:17
Speaker
Nice, nice.
Mindfulness and Healing Practices
00:12:18
Speaker
And so you got into a little bit of how you see the world and why. And I want to continue in that and ask me, how do you describe the nature of your life's work?
00:12:29
Speaker
I think I'd say to attempt to move beyond the traps and traumas of colonization and oppression. I try to do this by offering two things. One, ah philosophical meditation that guide how we choose to exist in the wake of civilization.
00:12:49
Speaker
And then two, a series or a set of grounded practices that we can live each and every day in the present that will help us manifest a different alternative reality in the future.
00:13:05
Speaker
So honestly, I'd say my life's work is really to live out a deeper, more interconnected life. That simple. I want to live a life that sees us, whomever that us is, as part of each other and the natural world that we live in and really bring back the wisdom that we all used to know and love that or know and appreciate, I'd say, which is that we don't exist in isolation.
00:13:35
Speaker
We exist because of and for each other. And that to me is a very sacred calling, I guess, if you could call it that. Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I really appreciate how so much of the mindfulness and the interconnection has shown up in some of the work that you've done with our young people.
00:13:53
Speaker
And I know as an educator, you know, you've been doing this work for years. And a lot of our collaborative work is, of course, done outside of schools. Can you talk a little bit about why that is or why you particularly might prefer to do a lot of this work in the natural world and outside of school buildings?
00:14:11
Speaker
Oftentimes, I think a lot of people ask the wrong question. They ask like, how can we make schools healthier for young people? How can we make schools safer? How can we make schools more inclusive environment?
00:14:26
Speaker
And to me, I find that those types of questions are sadly misleading. And I just want to preface this by saying I felt the same for a very long time.
00:14:38
Speaker
I went through the traditional schooling pipeline and got a PhD in education. And it wasn't until i received this doctorate, right, that I realized that I didn't need schooling all along.
00:14:54
Speaker
Because after all, what is schooling? Schooling is an institutionalized form of education whose primary goal is to create so-called productive members of society.
00:15:08
Speaker
But what does it mean to be productive members of society when society is predicated on the death and exploitation of oppressed people and the natural world? So in that sense,
00:15:19
Speaker
I think schools is the antithesis of wellness. Schools is what is making our young folks sick. And because of it, I think a richer, more fulfilling, more in tune approach would be to take our young folks and our students to where life is actually being lived.
00:15:42
Speaker
And that's in the wilderness, in the gardens, in the ecosystems that sustain and support our lives. So that is part of my mission and my calling, especially with young folks, is to let them know that the school, the buildings, the brick walls, the chain fences, that is not what makes us productive members of society.
00:16:03
Speaker
If anything, it keeps us caged into a belief system that only perpetuates and fuels more violence in the societies and in the lives that we live. I really appreciate that your talk about going to where life is. And we know that life, of course, resides in us. But that connection, the interconnection to these other sites of life is immersed entangled in these ecological frameworks that I've seen in your work.
00:16:31
Speaker
And I know you have this idea of fugitive ecologies. Could you take a little bit of time to talk about what it is and share a little bit about the components of fugitive ecology?
00:16:43
Speaker
Yeah. I actually would like to read a passage that I wrote about fugitive ecologies, if that's okay. Yeah, that's great. That's great. Okay. Fugitive ecologies are the practices of being connected with the earth, of moving in tune with the rhythms and seasons.
00:17:03
Speaker
Fugitive ecologies are practices of being home socially, spiritually, and ecologically in an era which criminalizes these connections in favor of carving up land for personal private consumption.
00:17:18
Speaker
When we commit ourselves to fugitive ecologies, we commit ourselves to working to understand the interrelationships between us and all forms of being in the environments in which we live.
00:17:34
Speaker
We are made fugitive by the system and worldviews. We are not the fugitive.
00:17:42
Speaker
Ashe, thank you for that. And when I've heard you talk about fugitive ecologies, you um tell this story, this amazing story, and its connection to Harriet Tubman.
00:17:55
Speaker
And I've never heard that rendering before. Could you talk to us a little bit about the connection between fugitive ecologies, interconnection and freedom in the life of Harriet Tubman?
Lessons from Harriet Tubman on Freedom
00:18:07
Speaker
So I feel like Harriet Tubman's life offers us ways to think, act and exist beyond the traps of colonization and oppression.
00:18:19
Speaker
As she chased freedom, she realized, or she taught us rather, that freedom only becomes possible when we allow the earth to become an extension of ourselves.
00:18:34
Speaker
One story that I'd like to share about Harriet Tubman's life is that in 1849, Harriet escaped the plantation and headed north for the first time.
00:18:49
Speaker
She left the plantation alone, barefoot, carrying only the clothes that she needed on her back. And when she recounted the decision to flee, what she explained to people was, she said like this, she said, I had reasoned this out in my mind.
00:19:12
Speaker
There was only two things that I had a right to. i had a right to liberty. or death. If I could not have one, and would have the other.
00:19:25
Speaker
For no man should take me alive. And that grit, that determination, that willingness to cast herself out into the unknown is what allowed her to find her freedom in the wilderness.
00:19:44
Speaker
So I think what Harriet teaches us is that when we let go, of these preconceived notions that we have of living outside of and beyond Western civilization, that we'll be fine.
00:20:03
Speaker
We're going to be okay. And we're going to be okay because we have within us and in the planet everything that we need to live a truly just life, a life that is connected because we can see, feel, and experience our connectivity with everything around us.
00:20:36
Speaker
So in that sense, Harriet really blazed the trails for us to follow. i appreciate what you're saying because a lot of what you're talking about, this escape, reminds me so much of what educators, I think, may be experiencing when they hear especially if they listen to our past few episodes, they hear, okay, we want to center young people's wellness.
00:20:56
Speaker
We're noticing many of the practices and procedures of schools compromise that. And now here this guy is, the simple ant guy is coming along and talking to us about fugitivity and escaping and leaving.
00:21:08
Speaker
And think so much of what you're saying is connecting to what many educators are thinking about it. Like, okay, so if not this space, then what? And when we think about these opportune times to leave and to move toward different lifestyles and frameworks of freedom, one of the most prominent sections of fugitive ecology that stands out to me that I think a lot of educators will experience is fear of what to do next, if not this, then what?
00:21:40
Speaker
And can you talk a little tiny bit about, you know, what are the lessons that we can learn either from Harriet Tubman or your time in teaching around holding what you call holding the fear.
00:21:51
Speaker
you ah Fear often arises in all of us because i think humans are predisposed to ah fear the unknown, fear what we can't see, what we can't touch, what we can't smell.
00:22:12
Speaker
And so this kind of ambiguity or the not knowing, the not being certain is what holds us back into a kind of self-preservation mindset, right?
00:22:30
Speaker
But when it comes to education and the way that we educate our young folks, I think fear is also an important tool to sit with and to channel because fear allows us to, I think, manifest something that we envision in the future that is better for us than whatever our current condition is.
00:23:04
Speaker
one of the most important things that we as a society, i think must embrace, especially, you know, like just being real, we're in the last day, second to last day of what for many folks has been the most challenging year you know we've ever lived.
00:23:23
Speaker
And there is a lot of fear and uncertainty in the atmosphere right now. But if you embrace the fear, right if you embrace the not knowing and use it instead as an opportunity or an invitation to bring in something new, then I think that fear gets redirected and the energy that would have been spent being afraid of an outcome instead gets redirected to giving us the fuel and the catalyst needed to manifest a certain reality.
00:24:08
Speaker
So in the case of Harriet Tubman, I wanted to read a section that I wrote on fear that I think hopefully will make sense. And this is fear in terms of escaping and finding ourselves in the wilderness.
00:24:24
Speaker
But I think it's applicable, especially if you think about it in terms of how it relates to the way that we educate each other. in this moment in time. So, the thought of venturing out alone into the wilderness is frightening for many of us because our ancestors were often hunted down and hung in isolation.
00:24:44
Speaker
The terror, brutalities, and traumas that often took place deep within the forest and along rivers at nightfall conjure nightmares as we imagine how only the trees bore witness to the atrocities of the privileged beasts that took our lives.
00:25:08
Speaker
This visceral reality of slavery continues to haunt our collective memories. But when we decide to hold the fear and be with it, exist with it, we can come to realize that the true danger, the true menace, is believing that we were safer as slaves than we are in the wild freedoms of fugitivity.
00:25:36
Speaker
The earth is and always has been our home. The earth is where we all originate. where everyone is born. Each of us living and breathing are the most recent expression of the earth as it is.
00:25:56
Speaker
and we should not let fear keep us from going home and knowing our true selves. When we go deep into the wilderness, we find ourselves again, sometimes for the first time.
00:26:12
Speaker
And really, I think for me there is something deeply moving about confronting or engaging the things that most frighten you because what you see when you really interrogate those fears is that a lot of it was unfounded to begin with and
00:26:45
Speaker
In that encounter, I feel like we're able as people to in a sense transcend through the fear and into some other realm, another place that is more filled with harmony and respect for the other in an educational sense, right?
00:27:07
Speaker
A lot of us say, okay, we fear the collapse of the educational system as we know it. Because what will our kids do in the absence of this structure that schooling has created?
00:27:21
Speaker
Right. And that is a very real fear. Right. Because parents have work to go to. They need their young folks to be doing something.
00:27:33
Speaker
Right. And then, well, what is that something? And I find that if we take a step back, right, and we are honest with what schooling has meant for young folks in this country,
00:27:53
Speaker
in the 200 plus years that K through 12 education has been a thing, right? And if we're honest about that, we can see how truly devastating it is to have a system of compulsory schooling that has, in a sense, brainwashed or altered in a very narrow way our sense of what is and isn't valuable, right?
00:28:25
Speaker
And if we were to take the perspective of, well, life and living and getting up and having to know how to be responsible since we're all in our homes, right? Thinking domestically like the responsibility of cooking food, of preparing the meal, of then cleaning up and doing the dishes and making sure that you know you water the plants if you're blessed enough to have plants around you
00:28:59
Speaker
All of these things that we do in our waking life our teachable moments that help us make sense and give us the skills necessary to be deeply connected, not only in our close-knit familial structures, but then also what it means to be in a communal relationship between us people and the more than beyond human
00:29:31
Speaker
environment that we find ourselves in every day. That is education. Being okay with that, being comfortable with that is part of relaxing the fear that comes from not knowing what is on the other side of traditional schooling, as it were.
00:29:52
Speaker
Let's say we hold the fear and we attempt to engage in these practices of interconnection to the natural world to the spiritual realm. and How does any of this connect to youth wellness?
00:30:08
Speaker
How does it curate wellness for young people? Because wellness is all about understanding yourself. For me, wellness is being able to connect yourself, myself to other people.
00:30:29
Speaker
and other beings that are external to me, right? And finding those points of shared commonality, shared responsibility, shared engagement that gives you the feeling and the sense that you're contributing to something a lot greater than yourself.
00:30:55
Speaker
And yet, you retain your sense of identity and that identity is valued in the communities in which you live.
00:31:08
Speaker
So this idea of holding the fear, of holding the unknown, what that does is it draws you closer to what actually truly matters in your life.
00:31:26
Speaker
and allows that to be the center of how you work out the art of living. Just to circle back, I think that is why I'm known as Simple Ant, because of that wisdom that ants carry with them. you know and I didn't talk about this at the beginning, but for those that are unaware,
00:31:56
Speaker
Ents beautiful, beautiful creatures who create entire communities that are non-hierarchical and where everyone has a chance to contribute their particular skill and their insight to create a cohesive unit, you know.
00:32:24
Speaker
They're also a species that is matriarchal so they are guided by the wisdom and knowledge of the women in their communities.
00:32:44
Speaker
And ants are fascinating because, you know, you think of an ant, right? An ant is tiny, very, very small. And you would think, you know, one ant doesn't amount to much in this world, but they have a gift or a way of channeling what we would call a collective consciousness, right? Where one ant literally can multiply and become thousands of ants all moving together for the same cause and the same reason.
00:33:23
Speaker
You see that when they move, right? When they move their home base from point A to point B, right? And there's like a mass of energy that's moving through the world with a singular purpose and yet each individual person or ant is moving at his or her own rhythm but still moving collectively. Yeah, ants are incredibly resilient and adaptive creatures that really help me at least to think and see the world in a way that is
00:34:05
Speaker
fundamentally different from a value standpoint, from a cultural standpoint, from a normative standpoint than the top-down, hierarchical, compartmentalized, individualist world that we've created for our young folks.
00:34:25
Speaker
And I think there are not only ants but other species that you find that are this way in nature. And so the more that we immerse our young folks in the natural world, the more I think these connections and intra-connections between species really become evident, right?
00:34:53
Speaker
So I think for me, that's such a deep part of the equation.
Nature, Collaboration, and Universal Wellness
00:34:57
Speaker
o You cover so much and I appreciate that. And a lot of it, I think, which is really hard is you cover the, one of the most complicated elements of this work is the stillness required to listen and to make connections to the natural world for next steps. And I think in academia, in our work, we're often pushed to know the answer, habit um and to and to present that framework.
00:35:31
Speaker
And none of that actually made made sense for Harriet Tubman to do that. it It didn't make sense for her to at least have it and to share it. um That's danger in and of itself.
00:35:42
Speaker
But also, um part of it came from part of the vision for what's next. And I think you talked about this is that ah every trip she took a different route because it made more sense in that way for the work that she was doing to be sustainable.
00:36:02
Speaker
And that required an immense connection to the natural world that required an immense level of stillness and openness to that collaborative vision. And the fact that the collaborators were the that The collaborators were the trees. The collaborators were the people who were willing to be uncomfortable, who were willing to not always know what the plan was for the next day, but to know that they were all centered in one kind of universal thing, which is wellness for all living beings, including those a part of the natural world.
00:36:36
Speaker
So I appreciate that. and appreciate all of what you presented today. my Really, my last question is just, is there anything that you want to leave um listeners with as it relates to anything we've talked about today or anything that you feel like is really crucial as we hold the fear, the mud and the stars.
00:36:55
Speaker
If you're listening to this, I want you to know and believe that something greater is possible. That the experience of life that we've lived, especially if you live in the U.S. and you're a U.S. citizen,
00:37:14
Speaker
This is not the only way to live. And the more that we embrace and seek out a connection to the earth as it exists, the more that our life, that our internal compass will really make sense and stop feeling as manic and crazy because we live in a society that is trying to enforce a very rigid way of structuring our life that is not in tune or in connection with the way that life truly is, right? And the way that it ebbs and flows and changes.
00:38:09
Speaker
And to learn to move with those changes, I think that's part of the reason why we're having such a hard time with this pandemic, because we aren't used to having to live in a way that necessitates us to really ebb and flow with each day as it comes.
00:38:34
Speaker
And I think that's a lesson that we're learning right now. And then to wrap it up, I think that to be free, Harriet, like us, could not run from the dark.
00:38:48
Speaker
She could not hide from the mud. She could not wish away her fears. She could not unsee the stars. Harriet had to move with the slower rhythms of deep time.
00:39:06
Speaker
A practice which allows us to live in the present moment with the earth and all around us. Without pretext, without filters.
00:39:21
Speaker
As we chase freedom in a world built by slaves, the way we achieve it are just as important as the reasons why.
00:39:33
Speaker
Simple Ant. You have truly been a pleasure today. Thank you for being here with us. Thank you so much for having me.
00:39:49
Speaker
Simple Ant reminds us to hold the dark, hold the fear, and hold the stars. Ultimately, he encourages us to embrace the discomfort that accompanies a shift in our thinking and existing.
00:40:04
Speaker
Finally, healer and elder Teresa Iniguez helps us to understand the greater outcomes of embracing such discomfort. You had this little experience just a couple of days ago with this young This little boy and his mom, you know, do my morning walks and i saw them walking in front of me at a very slow pace and I can feel the heaviness that they were carrying with them, whatever their story might have been.
00:40:34
Speaker
But as I approached them, ah keeping my social distance, I looked over at the little boy and he looked over at me and I said, hi. And he goes, hi. And I said to him, did you have a good Christmas?
00:40:48
Speaker
And he says, no. And as as he flapped his arms and hit his thighs with his arms, I says, why didn't you have a good Christmas? He says, we didn't have a Christmas tree.
00:41:02
Speaker
And then his mom says, no, had a good Christmas. no we didn't. And he was so frustrated. And I says, well, New Year's is coming. We're going to have a new year.
00:41:13
Speaker
And he says, oh no, new a new year oh no, a new year And he flaps his arms against his thighs again and his mom chuckles. And I said, you are so smart.
00:41:28
Speaker
You're so smart. How old are you? And he says, I'm three. and so i says, well, I know it's going to get better. And I walked on. And I thought to myself, how did a three-year-old know that this was a bad Christmas because they didn't have a Christmas tree?
00:41:46
Speaker
How did this little child dread a new year coming? And so I paid attention to that as I continued my walk. And I started to think about how it is that we hand information over to our youth.
00:42:01
Speaker
How it is, and you know even I had a conversation with my husband about this. And he says, yeah, well, you know, the campaigning that they do on television is you know nothing changed on the commercials. Nothing changed. Nothing was about social distancing.
00:42:15
Speaker
So there's an expectation to what we're supposed to be in life. And when we can't be that in life, then there's something broken in us. There's something wrong in us.
00:42:26
Speaker
And so when I think about that and think about my own life, coming here into this country as an immigrant at a very young age, living, you know, again, as most immigrants do when they come to this country with very little finances being a struggle for our families and growing up in neighborhoods where we're not wanted and then going to schools where there's a lack of in the schools that I went to. you know, I grew up just on the other side of Bayview-Hunters Point. And so the public schools that I went to, there were communities that came in from Bayview-Hunters Point, that came in from Bernal Heights,
00:43:04
Speaker
And the schools didn't give us what we deserved. The teachers didn't give us what we deserved. And so we grow up knowing we're undeserving.
00:43:18
Speaker
So as I did this work, I began this work in my 30s. And as I did this work, I began to see how the trauma affects our body, affects our mind, affects our heart, affects just how we feel we belong on this planet, who we are.
Connecting with Nature for Healing and Belonging
00:43:40
Speaker
When I reached the age of 19 is when I came to an awareness that the life that was being given to me by the outside world was completely broken. And I wasn't broken.
00:43:51
Speaker
The outside world was broken. And so all the information they gave me was wrong. I had to find my connection, my truth.
00:44:03
Speaker
And so I searched. And the first thing that I walked towards was talk therapy. But again, at that time period, who were the therapists? People that didn't understand me.
00:44:15
Speaker
They meant well. They meant well. They came in with open hearts to help people like me, the unfortunate, the disposable. But they weren't taught.
00:44:29
Speaker
to bring me into a level of really accepting who I was and my work. So the information that I was receiving from them was that my family was broken, that my culture was broken, that everything about me was broken.
00:44:48
Speaker
And so I knew that this was not the way to go because it was only going to cause me more harm. So I continued walking, continued walking. And then one day a friend invited me to go to a sweat lodge.
00:45:00
Speaker
And I was probably really close to 30 at that point. I went to my first sweat lodge, but I couldn't even go into the sweat lodge because I was on my moon cycle. And so I laid out in nature. And I didn't have a blanket to lay on or any of those things that, you know, makes us feel comfortable to be in nature.
00:45:21
Speaker
I just kind of laid it out in nature in this field way up because I had to sit at a distance away from the sweat lodge. But when the drumming and the songs began and the sun beaming over me,
00:45:35
Speaker
And I am just disappearing into Mother Nature, laying on her nature all around me, the weeds around me covering my body.
00:45:45
Speaker
i realized at that moment I was home. I realized I finally found my way home. I felt a connection to life that was missing.
00:45:58
Speaker
I knew this was my path. I knew i belonged. Once I knew I belong and the world began to open up for me, began to show me how I belonged, I gained my voice.
00:46:14
Speaker
I discovered my voice. I began to give and share my voice with others who were lost. Then I realized we have to do a lot of healing, a lot of healing to find our way home.
00:46:32
Speaker
I began to look at my communities that i lived in, people from my communities, and realizing, it's showing up in their bodies. It's showing up in their way of thinking.
00:46:45
Speaker
It's showing up in the way that they express themselves. It's showing up with violence, with addictions. It's showing up in so many ways. It's hurting us.
00:46:56
Speaker
It's really hurting us. It's destroying us. And being who I am also, ah I did a lot of reading and I did a lot of just following history and the politics of this country and what their investment was in not allowing us to progress and to really know who we were. I understood all this.
00:47:20
Speaker
So when i look at the big picture, and the big picture, I needed to focus on my communities. And I couldn't do this alone. It took a long time for me to be able to build the communities that I wanted because also there was another piece happening.
00:47:37
Speaker
In order for me to do this in the way that our community support was being given to us, it was still it still had a layer of not allowing us to step in fully and take care of our communities in the way that we should be taking care of our communities.
00:47:53
Speaker
There were these guidelines that we were given on how to take care of our communities. And I knew that I didn't want to be a part of that because it was still limiting us to what we can do. Now, I wasn't alone in this movement because there were people who were very much doing the same thing and people I didn't know.
00:48:14
Speaker
and there are a lot of people of my generation that have done a lot of fabulous work around bringing truth to our communities and bringing empowerment to our communities.
00:48:25
Speaker
And so what does it mean? What does it mean? means the first step is we have to know we belong. We have to know that we are worth.
00:48:38
Speaker
We are worth something valuable.
00:48:43
Speaker
We have to bring a different awareness to this society that has kept telling us that we are not safe, that we are not good, that we are not worthy.
00:48:56
Speaker
We have to come to a place of realizing as a community of color, we are not looking for crumbs or charity. We're looking for what is rightfully ours, what we have been denied for so many generations.
00:49:15
Speaker
And we need to come in with an intelligent mind. We need to come in knowing who we are, We need to come in knowing where we come from because when we look at the history, ancient history, our ancestors were intelligent people.
00:49:37
Speaker
Our ancestors had an understanding to life. They have taken that memory away from us. They have pulled us so far away that we don't even know what the stars and what the moon and what the trees and what the wind and what the fire and what the water means to our existence.
00:50:03
Speaker
They have pulled us so far away that all we could think about is survival instead of living.
00:50:14
Speaker
When we think about the trauma that a child goes through in our communities, how in the world can this child bloom into his fullest capacity when he is navigating so much at a very early age?
00:50:31
Speaker
It's going to be very difficult for us to completely dissolve a system that was built with having the bottom layer of our society that that bottom layer needed to be unfortunate disposable community.
00:50:53
Speaker
It's going to be very difficult to dissolve that system. But there are many of us who have found our way through all those obstacles.
00:51:04
Speaker
And it is up to us to be creative. It's up to us to use our intelligent minds to create a new system. And we need to come from a different place of thinking, not following the guidelines that have been given to us, but moving further, expanding further from those guidelines that have been given to us. We have to expand further out.
00:51:29
Speaker
We have to see it further out. So we're not looking at it from within. we need to step out. and look from the outside in, we need a totally different perception of what it is that we need to do to be able to heal this infection that has caused us not to flourish into our potential.
00:51:50
Speaker
Now, I am looking at a lot of young people. beautiful young people of color that are coming into life right now. And yes, like that little three-year-old, they're coming in with a different awareness. They're coming in with a strong voice.
00:52:06
Speaker
They're coming in with a knowing. Now, when i gather information that comes further out than what human voices can give me, when I sit to listen to that information,
00:52:23
Speaker
I sit in silence. I connect to the universe. I connect to the earth. I connect to the elements of life. And I ask for the information to come in.
00:52:39
Speaker
And when that information comes in it tells me things that opens up, expands me, it expands my mind, it expands my heart, it expands my wisdom.
00:52:52
Speaker
And so in those moments of sitting, one of the things that they have said is that in order for us to be able to know who we are, we need to know where we come from.
Honoring Ancestral Dreams for Unity
00:53:07
Speaker
We definitely need to know all the layers of our history. And we We are here in this present time because our ancestors dreamt us.
00:53:21
Speaker
They dreamt each and every one of us that are here to be present in this moment because they knew that we would be here in this moment of change and shift.
00:53:33
Speaker
But we can't just sit here and be our ancestors' dream. We need to take action so that we too can become the dreamers of the future, so that we too can dream another generation that's coming in front of us that will really make a shift and a change, so that we begin to create a world of unity, of equality, of voice, of sharing instead of separation.
00:54:10
Speaker
instead of individual thought and individual gain, instead of fear, instead of controlling for power and gain. In one of my walks with a circle that I was with, we were out in nature,
00:54:28
Speaker
We were out by land's end and in this woman that was walking with me in this circle that we were holding, a healing circle in nature. She says to me, wow what are we doing to Mother Earth?
00:54:43
Speaker
And I said to her, you know, Mother Earth will survive. But us, the human beings who are on this Mother Earth, we may not Mother Earth will survive.
00:54:55
Speaker
But do we want to survive in the same way that we have been surviving? Or do we want to participate in and being part of Mother Earth in a beautiful way? And I may not be here to see the the end of all that I have lived to give back for all the lessons and and all the experiences that I've had.
00:55:16
Speaker
You know, I've dedicated my adult years into helping people open that door into their knowing and their walk. And so I may not be around to see everything flourish, not in a human life, but I definitely will be here in spirit form to see it.
00:55:42
Speaker
Today's guests remind me the larger calling before us. We are called toward new relationships with each other, histories, and the natural world.
00:55:54
Speaker
We are called to critically remember. And want to close in a similar fashion to the way in which we opened.
Closing Reflections on Ancestral Wisdom
00:56:03
Speaker
I want to close with water.
00:56:06
Speaker
Toni Morrison once said, You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places to make room for houses and livable acreage.
00:56:17
Speaker
Occasionally, the rivers flood the places. Floods is the word they use, but in fact, it is not flooding. It is remembering.
00:56:30
Speaker
Remembering where it used to be. All water has perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Today's episode has taught us, if nothing else, that amongst the devastation of colonialism, the discomfort of fugitive ecological frameworks, we must not lose sight of the greater calling toward a return to ancestral wisdom and ways of being, a return to sacred connection with each other,
00:57:03
Speaker
with the land, with our histories, and that our respect and reverence of these entities reflects our greatest chance at getting back to cultural perpetuity, getting back to sustainable living, essentially return to wellness.
00:57:35
Speaker
Thank you for listening to this episode of Drawing from the Well. I'm your host, Tiffany Marie. This podcast was produced by John Reyes. Join us as we continue the conversation at youthwellness.com.