Thoughtful Conversations About Whiteness with Good Friends and Cats

Episode Summary

My guest today is the divine Devi Ward.  She is the Founder of the Institute of Authentic Tantra Education, is the host of the podcast Sex is Medicine, is an author and has been featured as a Tantra and Female Sexuality Expert in countless articles and over 30 different radio and television networks world-wide.  We will be exploring what it means to look at the white race in relation to racism, why it is uncomfortable for white people to talk about race and how we are mostly uninformed and uneducated when it comes to discussions about race, even with the best of intentions.  It is my hope to open up a conversation about this to normalize it so more conversations start happening, which will affect bigger change.  I want to bridge the taboo gap by sharing experiences and truths to help us all discover where we may have been misled or misplaced in our own upbringing or experience.  The cats are there because as Devi has said previously when engaging in these conversations, cats make everything better.

Show Notes:

This episode was the most vulnerable I’ve been and that is exactly what drives me to share it with the world.  We as white people need to push past those feelings of vulnerability in regard to race and seek out the very best ways that we can implement change in a system entrenched in extreme bias and privilege.  My guest shares very deep wounds as a result of racial trauma and I’m so grateful to her for opening up in such a public platform to share her experience with us about the very real impact it has had on her life.  Thank you for holding the space for her to put a voice to these wounds.  Please do check out the very valuable resources listed below.  I will tell you right not that since doing my own research for this interview I have had several conversations that have led to others discovering the importance of becoming educated and talking with their children early on.  I just returned from a powerful retreat experience where I offered my Awakening Your Life Force workshop and surfing lessons as a piece to the whole movement.  What we talked about most is how the reaction we may feel listening to another’s experience can be a very helpful tool as a mirror or reflection of ourselves to explore.  I encourage you to listen with an open mind and heart that is really willing to look past your personal experience and into the much deeper wound racism has inflicted on our entire culture.  

* Our history, how we met

* The system is broken

* Receiving the message that I was defective, "If I would have been born 5 years earlier I would have been illegal"

* Childhood education, deep-seeded beliefs

* Exploring the belief that if you talk about race, you are racist

* Color blindness and the destructive outcome in that school of thought

* Dominant culture sets the values of that culture

* Generational trauma of racism

* Racial trauma, family trauma, growing up bi-racial in an affluent white neighborhood

* The almost fatal result of the accumulative trauma of being a person of color in America

* The danger of the binary assumption the a bad person is racist and a good person is not.

* Racism if the air we breathe, it's not personal

* Test your implicit bias

* Systemic barriers demonstrated in a bird cage analogy

* The structure is a reflection of the mind, change starts within

* Who is your dream guest and why?

Links Mentioned:

* Devi Ward

* https://www.authentictantra.com

* White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo

* htt...