Finding Refuge

LaUra Schmidt is the founder of the Good Grief Network and the brain behind the “10-Steps to Resilience & Empowerment in a Chaotic Climate” program and the FLOW Facilitation Training modality. She is a lifelong student, curator, and practitioner of personal and collective resilience strategies. LaUra holds a BS in Environmental Studies, Biology, and Religious Studies and an MS is in Environmental Humanities. LaUra has earned certificates in “Integrative Somatic Trauma Therapy” and “Climate Psychology.”

LaUra’s new book on eco-distress, How to Live in a Chaotic Climate: 10 Steps to Reconnect with Ourselves, Our Communities, and Our Planet, is available through Shambhala Publications. 

Aimee Lewis Reau is the cofounder of the Good Grief Network and the heart behind the “10-Steps to Resilience & Empowerment in a Chaotic Climate” program and the FLOW Facilitation Training. She was born and raised in Adrian, Michigan. Aimee is an edgy & reverent contemplative, healer and yoga/intuitive movement instructor. She also DJs under the name eXis10shAL. 

Aimee received her Bachelor’s degree in English, Poetry, and Religion from Central Michigan University before obtaining her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Georgia College & State University. Aimee's new book on eco-distress, How to Live in a Chaotic Climate: 10 Steps to Reconnect with Ourselves, Our Communities, and Our Planet, is available through Shambhala Publications.

In this special episode, we discuss:

Seeking beauty and gratitude
The birth of Good Grief Network
The universality of grief
Embodiment
Practice
Uncertainty
Liminality
Deconstruction
Grief as a portal
Dreams

Connect with LaUra and Aimee on their website or on Instagram @goodgriefnetwork

Order LaUra and Aimee’s book, How to Live in a Chaotic Climate: 10 Steps to Reconnect with Ourselves, Our Communities, and Our Planet

Podcast music by Charles Kurtz

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Mara Branscombe is a mother, writer, yogi, artist, teacher, mindfulness leader, ceremonialist, and spiritual coach. She is passionate about weaving the art of mindfulness, self-care, creativity, mind–body practices, and earth-based rituals into her life and work, and she has been leading community ceremony since 2000. Mara runs international retreats, corporate leadership programs, and online coaching and personal development courses. Mara has taught yoga, meditation, and mindfulness for over 20 years. She is the published author of “Ritual As Remedy: Embodied Practices for Soul Care”, and “Sage, Huntress, Lover, Queen: Access Your Power and Creativity through Sacred Female Archetypes.” 

An adventurous spirit, Mara has sailed across the Atlantic Ocean, trekked across the Himalayas, studied yoga in India, planted trees in Canada’s north, lived off the grid in a remote cabin in the woods, worked as a Waldorf (Steiner School) teacher, and then found her passion for dance and choreography where she co-founded the professional performance company “The Tomorrow Collective”. All the while yoga, meditation, mysticism, and ritual have been at the heart of Mara’s journey. Her trainings in the Incan Shaman lineage, Yogic studies, Pagan tradition, and Buddhist wisdom teachings have greatly inspired her life’s work of earth-based, ceremonial, intentional, and heart-centered living and loving.

In this special episode, we discuss:

Nature
Honoring the darkness
Grief
Writing
Embodiment
Turning towards shadow
Witnessing
Support teams
Dreamwork
The Sage

Connect with Mara on her website or on Instagram @marabranscombe.

Learn more and purchase Mara’s books, Ritual as Remedy and Sage, Huntress, Lover, Queen.

Podcast music by Charles Kurtz

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Rashid Hughes seeks to bridge the worlds of contemplative practice and collective care. He is a proud graduate of the Howard University Department of Music and the Howard University School of Divinity. Rashid is a certified Mindfulness Teacher, a certified Yoga Instructor, a Restorative Justice Facilitator, and currently in training to become a Fire Pujari. All of Rashid’s perspectives flow from the two wisdom traditions of contemplative and restorative practices.

 In 2019, Rashid co-founded the Heart Refuge Mindfulness Community, a community in Washington, DC that inspires Black, Indigneous, and People of Color (BIPOC) to live with love and courage in the face of systemic inequities and ongoing racial-violence. Out of his unwavering love for community care and healing,  Rashid facilitates weekly mindfulness sessions to support BIPOC in living with joy, while also understanding and resolving the impact of trauma on their bodies and lives.  Due to his interest in challenging the ideas and systems that uphold a culture of patriarchy today, he also facilitates mindfulness sessions for BIPOC masculine & male identifying people who are particularly committed to addressing issues of masculinity and the culture of patriarchy.

 As a Restorative Justice Facilitator, Rashid holds the title of Restorative Justice Program Specialist at the non-profit SchoolTalk Inc. in Washington, DC. In that role, he collaborates with DC schools to create restorative spaces for youth to envision healing-centered approaches to school discipline, accountability and community building.  When school classrooms went virtual in 2020, Rashid launched SchoolTalk’s Our School Our Voice initiative, a citywide collaboration between SchoolTalk and four schools in the District of Columbia. Our School Our Voice is student-designed, student-led, and rooted in Rashid’s vision of creating peer groups for students to engage with other students from different communities and elevate their voices.

 In 2020, during the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic, Rashid created a contemplative practice,  R.E.S.T.-A Practice for the Tired & Weary, to provide practical means for people to find clarity and confidence in the midst of such devastating and uncertain times.

 In 2021, Rashid expanded the R.E.S.T. practice into a 5-Week Online Course & Practice Group.  In collaboration with the Garrison Institute’s Fellowship Forum, Rashid joined Dr. Angel Acosta in conversation around the intersections of the R.E.S.T. practice, liberation and contemplative practice with a particular focus on how this practice is an antidote to the systems of capitalism and white supremacy.

 Rashid’s writings have been published by Mindful Magazine, Lion’s Roar Magazine, and his first peer reviewed essay on R.E.S.T. was featured in the Journal for Contemplative Inquiry's volume, Transcendent Wisdom and Transformative Action: Reflections from Black Contemplatives,  a “special edition focusing on the insights and wisdom of Black contemplative practitioners, researchers, scholars, educators and artists. Today, Rashid is devoting his time to a new interest, exploring the role of ceremony and contemplative practice in creating the conditions for a more just and caring world.

In this special episode, we discuss:

Freedom and liberation
Fear as a path to clarity
Purpose
Spiritual practice
Authenticity
Reclamation
Shared reality
Consuming chaos
R.E.S.T
A modern wisdom goddess 

Connect with Rashid on his website or on Instagram @justbeandbreathe.

Podcast music by Charles Kurtz

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Shawn J. Moore is a Mindfulness Educator and Coach, Stillness Architect, and Buddhist Dharma practitioner. Residing at the intersection of leadership and mindfulness, Shawn creates sacred spaces for stillness and self-inquiry to help change-makers align their strengths, intention, and impact. Through his integrative approach, he holds transformative containers for self-renewal, personal discovery, and capacity-building that ease clients on their journey towards peace, clarity, and freedom. 

The path to collective growth is rooted firmly in our personal growth. As we work towards collective freedom, Shawn asks: 

How can you begin to support yourself to be able to support others?

Are you pouring into others from the excess of your full cup?

Shawn has an intuitive way of weaving all that he has learned on his path to help those on the inner journey of discovery to reflect on those questions – including meditation, sound healing, yoga nidra, and coaching. 

Shawn has worked in higher education and student affairs for over 10 years, specializing in leadership development, training/program design, and workshop facilitation – with a particular focus on diverse populations.  Reckoning with his own contemplation of burnout, purpose, and alignment, Shawn transitioned out of his role as Associate Dean of Student Life & Leadership at Morehouse College in the fall of 2021 to focus more on mindfulness and stillness-based training programs and workshops.  

While leadership resonates with him deeply, it is his personal and spiritual practices that allows him to continue to show up for himself and others. He is a yoga teacher (E-RYT® 200, RYT® 500, YACEP®), sound and reiki practitioner, meditation teacher, Yoga Nidra facilitator, and Gallup-Certified Strengths Coach, all focused through a Buddhist lens and 17 years of personal practice. In addition to holding community space through classes, he provides training in leadership and strengths-based development, and workshops in mindfulness, meditation and sound healing.  

He has contributed workshops, practices, and educational opportunities for celebrities, like Questlove and Dyllón Burnside, as well as various yoga studios and colleges, Yoga International, Omstars, Melanin Moves Project, the Human Rights Campaign, Spotify and Lululemon.

In this special episode, we discuss:

Self-Inquiry
Friction
Liminal space
Slowing down
Resistance to stillness
Breaking cycles
Stillness as a path to transformational change
Resourcing ourselves
Community
Compassion
Gentleness with ourselves

Connect with Shawn on his website and on Instagram @shawnj_moore

You can purchase Shawn’s Sadhana Decks here.

Podcast music by Charles Kurtz

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Jamilah Pitts is an author, educator, social entrepreneur, and wellness educator whose work centers the liberation, healing and holistic development of communities of the Global majority. Jamilah has worked and served in various roles and spaces to promote racial justice and healing. Jamilah has served as a teacher, coach, dean, and as an Assistant principal. She has worked in domestic and international educational spaces, including Massachusetts, New York, the Dominican Republic, China and in India. 

As the Founder and CEO of Jamilah Pitts Consulting, Jamilah partners with schools, communities, universities and organizations to advance the work of racial, social and intersectional justice through training, coaching, strategic planning and curriculum design. Jamilah is also the Founder of She, Imprints, an organization serving at the intersection of wellness and justice for women and girls of the Global Majority. 

Jamilah’s written work has appeared in the Huffington Post, Learning for Justice, and Edweek. She has presented to audiences of thousands of educators both within the United States and internationally. Jamilah threads her passion for human rights and social justice into her teaching, writing, scholarship and other artistic pursuits. She sees education and healing as her life’s work and calling, and truly believes that education should be an avenue through which empathy, healing and justice are promoted. 

Jamilah is certified as a Yoga Teacher, Reiki Practitioner, Omnoire Retreat Facilitator, and is certified as a Trauma - Conscious Yoga guide. 

Jamilah is a proud alumna of Spelman College where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in English. Jamilah also pursued graduate studies at Boston College and Teachers College, Columbia University. 

Jamilah’s first book Toward Liberation: Educational Practices Rooted in activism, healing and love will be published November 2023.

Jamilah is an avid traveler, serious foodie and dancer. 

In this special episode, we discuss:

The support of stillness and “just being”
Non-linear healing
Changing through the seasons
Dreams
Speaking life into our paths
Choosing work aligned with our soul
Anti-racism and anti-bias work within schools
Truth-telling
Liberation
Loving Blackness
Love as a verb
Our interconnectedness

You can connect with Jamilah on her website or on Instagram @msjamilahpitts.

Purchase Jamilah’s book, Toward Liberation: Educational Practices Rooted in Activism, Healing, and Love.

Podcast music by Charles Kurtz

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This show is very special to me. I wasn’t sure how to end Season 3, but last month on a Saturday evening, my grandmother, Dorothy, sent me on a journey. She sent me to find an interview from 2008. I interviewed her for the National Day of Listening and was called to find the interview and listen to her voice. I heeded her call to locate the interview because when Dorothy asks me to do something, I do it. After searching multiple hard drives, I found her interview. I listened, and it was so lovely to hear her voice. A few days later, I told my mother I wanted to release the interview with Dorothy as my final episode of Season 3. 

So, here you have it, an interview with Dorothy. The interview is, of course, different than other interviews I’ve done on this podcast. My grandmother and I talked about where and how she grew up, her children, President Obama, the depression, and how she met my grandfather, Fred. This interview may not offer lessons to you because it’s simple; it’s a conversation with my grandmother about her way of life. Even so, I thought you might want to hear her voice. I thought you might want to listen to her. So many of you have heard me call her into spaces repeatedly. Many of you have read about her in my books. Now you can listen to her come to life in a different way. Enjoy the episode.

Podcast music by Charles Kurtz

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Ayanna Freedom is an Author, Podcast Host, Yoga Teacher, LICSW, and the Founder of B FREE Wellness. B FREE is a nonprofit organization designed to transform people’s lives by providing free and affordable mental health, movement and mindfulness services to those whose lives are affected by trauma, addiction and oppression.  She has led multiple trauma sensitive and equity and belonging programs.  She is a lover of breath and lives on Cape Cod, MA with her daughter and dog, Sawyer. 

In this special episode, we discuss:

The Process of Getting Liberated
Breaking the Cycle of Trauma
Addiction
The Family System
How Hurt People Can Stop Hurting Others
Intergenerational Trauma
Healing and Recovery
Vulnerability
The Writing Process
Disrupting Urgency
What it Feels Like to Run a Non-Profit
Community Support
Collective Care
Purpose
Intuition
Being Unapologetic 

Connect with Ayanna on her website or on Instagram @ayannanfreedom.

Podcast music by Charles Kurtz

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This epsiode of Finding Refuge is pure fire! I had the honor and privilege of interviewing Cara Page and Erica Woodland, co-editors of Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation. Read more below about the themes we weaved together during the interview and about Cara and Erica. 

Cara Page is a Black Queer Feminist cultural memory worker & organizer. For the past 30+ years, she has organized with LGBTQI+/Black, Indigenous & People of Color liberation movements in the US & Global South at the intersections of racial, gender & economic justice, healing justice and transformative justice.  She is founder of Changing Frequencies, an abolitionist organizing project that designs cultural memory work to disrupt harms and violence from the Medical Industrial Complex (MIC). She is also co-founder of the Healing Histories Project; a network of abolitionist healers/health practitioners, community organizers, researchers/historians & cultural workers building solidarity to interrupt the medical industrial complex and harmful systems of care.  We generate change through research, action and building collaborative strategies & stories with BIPOC-led communities, institutions and movements organizing for dignified collective care.

As one of the architects of the healing justice political strategy, envisioned by many in the South and deeply rooted in Black Feminist traditions and Southern Black Radical Traditions, she is co-founder and core leadership team member of the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective.  She was the Executive Director of the Audre Lorde Project in New York City and is a former recipient of the OSF Soros Equality Fellowship (2019-2020) and ‘Activist in Residence’ at the Barnard Center for Research on Women. She was also chosen as Yerba Buena Cultural Center’s ‘YBCA100’in 2020. 

Cara has organized and co-created with many political and cultural institutions & organizations nationally & internationally including Center for Documentary Studies, Third World Newsreel, Sins Invalid, Southerners on New Ground (SONG), Project South,  INCITE! Women & Trans People of Color Against Violence, Bettys Daughter Arts Collaborative, and most recently the EqualHealth Campaign Against Racism, the National Queer & Trans Therapist of Color Network, Disability Project of Transgender Law Center, Astraea Lesbians for Justice Foundation and the Anti-Eugenics Project; toward building & resourcing racial, gender & healing justice strategies for our liberation, collective care & safety.  Her forthcoming book, co-edited by Erica Woodland, entitled “Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care & Safety” (North Atlantic Books) will be out in February 2023.

Erica Woodland, LCSW is a Black queer, trans masculine/genderqueer facilitator, consultant, psychotherapist and healing justice practitioner who was born, raised, and is currently based in Baltimore, MD. He has worked at the intersections of movements for racial, gender, economic, trans and queer justice and liberation for more than 20 years. He has extensive experience working with young people, Black, Indigenous and People of Color, LGBTQ people, and people with disabilities across the country, from Baltimore to the San Francisco Bay Area. 

Erica is the Founding Director of the National Queer and Trans Therapists of Color Network (NQTTCN), a healing justice organization that actively works to transform mental health for Queer and Trans Black, Indigenous and People of Color. Under his leadership, NQTTCN has trained and mobilized hundreds of mental health practitioners committed to intervening on the legacy of harm and violence of the medical industrial complex while building liberatory models of care rooted in abolition. 

Erica came into liberation and healing work in the early 2000s by way of harm reduction and abolitionist organizing with survivors of state, community and interpersonal violence. Working at the nexus of collective care and political liberation has been central to his practice as a clinician, facilitator, and healer. Erica has done extensive work in carceral environments including prisons, jails, and psychiatric detention centers as well as in grassroots community based organizations, giving him a wide range of experience to draw from in his liberation work. From 2012-2016, Erica served as the Field Building Director for the Brown Boi Project, a national gender justice organization, where he lead movement building work to transform masculinity and confront sexism, misogyny, and queer/transphobia.

Erica is co-editor of Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care and Safety, with Cara Page (North Atlantic Books, 2023). In 2017, he was awarded the Ford Public Voices Fellowship and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Culture of Health Leaders Fellowship. Erica’s op-eds have been featured in Role Reboot, Yoga International and Truthout and his healing justice work has also been highlighted in Time magazine, CNN, Healthline, Complex, and the New York Times. He is also a principal author of Freeing Ourselves: A Guide to Health and Self Love for Brown Bois (Brown Boi Project, 2011).

In this episode, we discuss:

The Need for Healing Back, Now and Into the Future
The Ecosystem of Healing Justice Work and Practice
Accountability
What we Need to Listen to Now
Ancestors
Honoring Our Lineages
Relationship to Place
Destiny
Harriet Tubman
Collective Care
Movement Work 
The Disorienting Nature of This Time
The Process of Being Led to Write a Book
Collective Liberation
Dreaming
A Collective Dream for Our Future 
And More!

You can connect with Cara on her website and Erica on his website.

Purchase their book, Healing Justice Lineages, here.

Podcast music by Charles Kurtz

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Ariella Daly is a natural beekeeper, dream weaver, and teacher living in Northern California.   Devoted to the bee in both the physical world and the spirit world, she synthesizes natural beekeeping, animism, dreamwork, and earth activism through writing, workshops, and teaching. Her work with the bee came through a lifelong interest in human connection with the non-human world.

She is trained a European animistic folk tradition with the bee and the serpent as its central motifs.  Within this tradition, she is versed in the healing and seership modality known as the Pollen Method.  Her work is a fusion of her love for the natural world and embodied, womb-centric practices.  

Ariella seeks to foster a deeper relationship between humans and the natural world through honey bees and sees the bee as a bridge species between our domestic lives and the wild, both within and around us. She is a lover of wild places, liminal spaces, and the song of the land. 

In this special episode, we discuss:

The Liminal Space
The Loss of a Parent
Grief
Animism
The Honeybees
Healing One’s Spirit with Nature
Ancestors
The Crooked Path
Death
Birth
Rebirth
A Love Affair with the Natural World 
What It Means to be in Relationship with Everything
Daring to Love
Dreaming Our Way Into a New Way of Being
Dreaming for the collective 
Stretching the Imagination 
Love 

Connect with Ariella here on her website or Instagram @beekeepinginskirts

Podcast music by Charles Kurtz

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Phyllis "Sweet Potato"  Jeffers-Coly aka Ta Ta Phyllis is the co-founder and co-owner of DIASPORIC SOUL, which she and her husband, Eddy "Professor Onion Sauce" Coly, established in 2016. DIASPORIC SOUL offers heritage and healing experiences that integrate both culture (SOUL) and contemplative practices.  DIASPORIC SOUL Heritage & Healing Experiences hold space for Black people to deepen their capacity to practice self-care and for healing and restoration, resilience and resistance.  

Phyllis is the author of We Got Soul; We Can Heal: Overcoming Racial Trauma Through Leadership, Community and Resilience.  She is also the author of “When Grandma Comes to Visit: Exploring How Communion with Our Ancestors & Nature Deepens Our Capacity for Healing, Restoration, Resilience, and Resistance” that was recently published in Transcendent Wisdom and Transformative Action: Reflections from Black Contemplatives  Journal of Contemplative Inquiry (19 April 2022). Phyllis is also co-author of "They Are Coming to Get Something”: A Qualitative Study of African American Male Community College Students’ Education Abroad Experience in Senegal, West Africa" in Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad (August 2022).

As celebrated in Chapter XI|#LoveHeals of We Got Soul; We Can Heal, she is a proud North Carolina native and graduate of North Carolina Central University where she majored in English Language & Literature and served as the Shut Em Down SGA President and Editor of Ex Umbra literary magazine.  Jeffers-Coly's love for HBCUs is reflected in her six year tenure as Dean of Enrollment Management at Central State University where she held space for primarily first-generation, Pell-eligible Black students who lovingly referred to her as Ma Dean   She completed her M.A. in English Language & Literature at the University of Maryland.

Phyllis is a certified yoga instructor (600-hour) and continues to explore ways that culture (SOUL) and contemplative practices can allow us to experience healing and restoration. 

In this special episode, we discuss:

Collective Care
Showing Up For Each Other
Ancestors
Prayer
Grief
Visioning
Dreaming
Creating a Space For Belonging
Who Do You Belong to?
We Belong To Each Other
Affirming Black People
The Resonance of Slavery and Liberation Held Within Geography
Falling Apart and Piecing Oneself Back Together
The Importance of a Practice 

You can connect with Phyllis Jeffers-Coly on her website or on Instagram @diasporicsoul

Podcast music by Charles Kurtz

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