Self-Centered Living™

Nine women across cultures and continents. What their stories revealed about centering yourself — not as an act of selfishness, but as the ground everything else grows from. A Season 1 closing that is also a beginning.

A solo episode weaving together the threads of Season 1 — the seven principles of Self-Centered Living, an expansive definition of who this work centers, and what emerged when each guest chose her own voice over the scripts she was handed. The difference between narrating from a wound and offering wisdom forged from it.

Evey was the student who got it right — head girl, Ivy League, the path everyone around her validated. But somewhere inside the pressure cooker, a question surfaced that none of those achievements could answer.

A young Hong Kong woman navigating cultural expectations, international student pressures, mental health, and the difference between the life you were shaped for and the one you're choosing. A conversation still in formation.

In Louisiana, there are trees that root in the middle of the swamp — no solid ground, just water. MawuLisa has been doing the same thing her whole life. From a Jehovah's Witness childhood to somatic healing, Orisha priesthood, and a commitment to resourcing liberation warriors — this is a woman who finds her ground wherever she stands.

A conversation spanning spiritual lineage, embodied healing, ancestral veneration, and the African and Indigenous roots of practices the Western wellness world rarely credits. What it means to trust your own knowing.

Ria grew up eighth of ten in a rural Indonesian village where a chicken curry took three days and the whole family to prepare. She wanted out — air conditioning, a suit, clean hands. But the thing she left behind turned out to be the thing the world needed most from her.

An Indonesian woman's path from a farming village to the United Nations to Soul Fire Farm in upstate New York. Food sovereignty, ancestral knowledge, and what happens when the life you rejected becomes the life you were meant to build.

https://www.instagram.com/riakitchenmagician

https://www.soulfirefarm.org

https://www.rumahkitchen.com

There was one basket at Diamond Park. If you wanted on the court, you had to play. Faatimah was 12, 5'5", and not leaving. Two decades later, she's still not leaving — she's building what she would have needed and making sure other women have it.

The Bay Area basketball player and founder of the Women's Premier Basketball Association on what basketball gave her and why she's building a development league giving women a place to keep playing and a path toward the WNBA and international leagues.

https://www.womenspba.com

www.instagram.com/faatimah_a

Lower Manhattan, 1988. Dorotea and her friends leave an after-hours club and walk into a Buddhist center mid-sitting. She sits for thirty minutes in silver platforms and glitter. What opened in that contradiction — rebel and meditator, organizer and writer, Filipina immigrant building a full creative life in a country that habitually underestimates the people it can't easily categorize — has never closed.

A Filipina American on duality, and the life that forms when activism, writing, and Zen practice refuse to stay in separate rooms.

https://doroteamendoza.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3zYtjZFAjw

Kyrah doesn't think of her life as chapters. She thinks of it as a trilogy — and the first book is closing. What shaped it: a mother who saw everything before it arrived, schools where she could count the faces that looked like hers, and a confidence she can trace back to one person's belief in her.

A Caribbean American Gen Z woman on navigating an Ivy League education, creating community, finding her advocacy, and the belief system that carried her to the threshold of what comes next.

As a child, Dara had a tent. Whatever happened outside it, no one could touch her in there. That instinct — to build safe ground and then be bold from it — shaped everything that followed. A national food justice coalition. A bus turned into a grocery store. A tank that eventually hit empty. And what came next.

A conversation about food sovereignty, land justice, Black-led organizing, and what it takes to sustain yourself inside work that demands everything. How activism finds flow when the body says it's time to fight differently.

https://www.daracooper.com

https://www.blackfoodjustice.org

Brittani was heading to the WNBA. Up at 4:45am since grade school, on the court since she was 11, AAU, highly recruited. When that identity collapsed, so did everything she thought she knew about herself. What followed was a reckoning — and a homecoming she didn't see coming.

A former D1 and professional basketball player turned documentary filmmaker and cinematographer — the DP behind Juju Watkins' On Your Rise on Peacock — on what happens when the identity you built everything around falls away and what starts to align when you get honest about who you are.

@bazeinteractions

bazeinteractions.com

Two cheap microphones, a best friend, and a show she almost didn't watch. Natasha's path was never a straight line — and the thing everyone dismissed as fun turned out to be the thing that asked the most of her.

A first-generation Jamaican American woman on creativity, entrepreneurship, and what happens when the winding path turns out to be the one that was yours all along.

patreon.com/2blackgirls1rose

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/2-black-girls-1-rose/id1327196317

https://open.spotify.com/show/2BiPtRMmIp4eSIT8Plnwa1