EP3: Renegotiating the Relationship between Politics and Spirituality with Sarah Love McCoy and Lindsay Pera
Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee
Release Date: 10/28/2020
S2 EP8: with Camille Leak: Exploring the Intersection of DEI and Trauma
Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee
“Become a witness to yourself.” - Camille Leak In Inclusive Life, we are continually looking at the ways in which we can reach across differences as a path to connection and liberation. We often explore the impediments to being with one another authentically such as defensiveness, perfectionism, guilt, and shame. Camille Leak brings this conversation even deeper. She brings us to what’s beneath these obstacles to connection: trauma. Camille Leak is a DEI practitioner who believes that folks’ inability to be with other people’s differences is their fundamental lack of capacity...
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S2 EP7: with Dr. Crystal Menzies: Finding Inspiration from Maroon Communities to Guide Us Forward
Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee
One of the barriers for well meaning white folks and BIPOC who want to see a better world is this belief in the inevitability of positive outcomes. Dr. Crystal Menzies When Dr. Menzies drops this pearl of insight into the latest Inclusive Life Podcast conversation with Nicole, Nicole names the “inevitability of positive outcomes” as “a uniquely U.S. American specific ‘cultural hiccup.’” The belief that it’ll all work out in the end suggests a reality that doesn’t comport with the history of revolutions. There’s no one “out there” who is going to save us. Dr....
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S2 EP6: A Roadmap for Black Women to Thrive in the Workplace with Ericka Hines
Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee
There is something about the research project that feels a lot like love. It began with a personal need and grew into a much larger question: What would it take for Black women to thrive - not just survive - in the workplace? From this question, a massive project took shape. In this project, Founder of Every Level Leads, Ericka Hines and her team set out to understand Black cis and transgender women and Black gender expansive professionals and their experiences. Their goal was to understand them in all of their complexity. Ericka and Dr. Mako Fitts Ward wrote the report based on findings from...
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S2 EP5: Processing the Post-Roe Reality with the Inclusive Life Team
Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee
This episode of the Inclusive Life Podcast is an intimate conversation between Nicole and two members of her Inclusive Life team, Christina Hernandez and Laura Halpin. We convened to talk about our personal responses to the overturn of Roe v. Wade. We began with our own reactions, exploring our immediate sense of how each of our lives and our loved ones will be impacted. The Dobbs v. Jackson decision impacts all of us, and yet it is vital that we place this decision in a historical, social, and political context: the overturning of Roe v Wade is a massive step in a long history of reproductive...
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S2EP4 Part 2: Fat Phobia is a Social Justice Issue with Dana Sturtevant, HIilary Kinavey, and Sirius Bonner
Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee
“The white gaze is upon us at all times, and the ways in which Black bodies have been destroyed by whiteness are many. But this is just one of them.” - Sirius Bonner One thing to get straight: divorcing yourself from diet culture isn’t just about being fat, loud, and proud. Sirius Bonner, who joins Hilary Kinavey and Dana Sturtevant for Part 2 of this two-part Inclusive Life podcast, drives home the importance of rooting our own relationship with our bodies in the broader political context. The context? Fat bodies are subjected to systemic oppression. Sirius deepens the...
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S2EP4 Part 1: Fat Phobia is a Social Justice Issue with Dana Sturtevant and HIilary Kinavey
Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee
“We all eat for emotional reasons. That’s normal. Food is flavored with complex meanings. It connects us with our culture and our ancestry and heritage. We eat to celebrate. We eat to grieve. Food is an emotional thing for human beings. When we dumb it down to its nutritional components and see it only as a vehicle to give us nutrients, we are missing so much.” - Dana Sturtevant If you haven’t yet considered weight stigma as a social justice issue, today is the day you begin. Diet culture is an insidious arm of white supremacy culture that has removed us from our bodies,...
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S2EP3: Joy & Revolution Now with Jennifer Davis
Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee
"Creativity and engaging in creativity can offer insight into how we move forward." - Jennifer Davis There’s a sturdy and subversive thread woven through Jennifer Davis’s life and work: Where there’s an expectation to do things a certain way, of conformity or straight lines, because that’s how it’s always been done, Jennifer’s life is all about saying, “Nope. I’m doing it differently.” It feels like the “yes” and the path for Jennifer is in the joy, in the curvy unpatterned strokes of her paintbrush, in the “let’s try this and see what...
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S2EP2: Disrupting Business as Usual with Pamela Slim
Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee
“If you’re designing a space for the most marginalized folks, by definition, the entire experience is going to be more inclusive for everybody.” It is a gift to have Pamela Slim as our guest for the official start of Inclusive Life Podcast Season 2. The conversation illuminates Pam’s skills at disrupting business as usual. She points out over and over again the choices business owner’s can make to cultivate one’s business as an ecosystem versus approaching business building as an empire, amassing market power through competition, extraction, and hierarchy....
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S2EP1: The Russian-Ukrainian Conflict from an Antiracist, Progressive Perspective: a Conversation with Dr. Clarence Lusane
Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee
For many people alarmed at the very visible anti-Black racism at the outset of the Russian invasion of Ukraine two weeks ago, it’s important to understand more about the history of Afro Ukrainians and Africans in Ukraine. This conversation between Dr. Clarence Lusane and Nicole Lee sheds some light. We’ll learn that it is not a new history. Dr. Lusane, who has traveled and taught in Ukraine and all over the world, shared that after Ghana became independent from British colonial rule in 1957, and in 1960 when 17 other African countries gained their independence from colonial rule,...
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EP9: Rest: a Practice to Meet Urgent Times with Jen Lemen
Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee
“There’s a way that we can meet urgent moments without the spirit of urgency. That requires a competency and capacity that comes from deep grounding and regulation. Being able to show up consistently in ritual, rhythm and routine.” This conversation with Jen Lemen feels like strong medicine. With so many of us understandably depleted and exhausted, this topic of rest and sensitively responding to the needs of our bodies is so important and resonant. Jen has learned, through her own relationships forged in times of urgency and danger, to “interrupt” urgency. The interruption can...
info_outline“I’ve got my eye on the future. The future that keeps me going forward is one that is built in a more loving way. A more compassionate world is the one that I keep in my mind’s eye as my guidepost and my true north.” – Sarah Love
Politics and spirituality have a long-standing dysfunctional relationship. In this conversation with artist and writer Sarah Love and Lindsay Pera, founder of the Modern Mystic Institute, we begin to dig for the roots of this dysfunction.
We already know the damage: On the right, spirituality has been manipulated and melded with politics and patriotism to oppress people and rigidly control the narrative about values in our country. The consequences are disempowering. On one hand, we’ve got the “love and light” spiritual practitioners who resist analysis and truth-telling about political and social realities. On the other hand, we have political activists who have rejected spirituality because it’s been used to bypass the harsh realities of white supremacy, cis-hetero patriarchy, and capitalism.
It’s time to rewrite the narrative and to push back on constructs that narrowly define what it means to love and what it means to be a peacemaker. What if we refuse to be divided by the pundits and politicians who insist that protest, patriotism and action have to look just so? That our protestations must be polite and palatable? What if we get super clear amidst the gaslighting about what loving our country looks like?
If we are going to change the trajectory of our country, we’ve got to move forward as whole people, not as people who are compartmentalized, divided and constricted.
It’s time to unapologetically reclaim, redefine and sharpen our tools. We can unapologetically infuse love and spirituality with politics and politics with spirituality.
The Way Station, with Lindsay, Sarah and I as your guides, will take you deeper into this re-tooling and revision of our narrative.
The Way Station is a place for those working to dismantle systems of oppression can gather, refuel, get tools and get grounded in strategy. Participants will be bringing our political expertise as well as our embodied wisdom and intuitive tools.
We will explore the ways in which we can stay active, involved, creative and aligned in this moment of flux and crisis. Expect rigor and magic, love and analysis.
No matter the outcome on November 3rd, our work is not over. We are in it for the long haul of liberation.Please join us.
Sarah, Lindsay and I talked about:
- The ways in which we’ve been socialized to avoid discussing politics and systems of oppression;
- Why politically progressive people shy away from spirituality;
- How spirituality and politics, when used together, have historically been weaponized to oppress people;
- The importance of questioning, pushing back, redefining and expanding our understanding of engaging politically with the tools of faith, peacemaking and love;
- Our “pivot points”: those moments in our lives where we saw more clearly our role as activists and how we could wield spirituality as a powerful force for change;
- Our upcoming retreat, Way Station, on October 30th, which is an opportunity to come together to refuel, get tools, and ground strategies for the work ahead;
- Linday’s and Sarah’s divination on the energies of 2021.
About Sarah and Lindsay:
Sarah Love McCoy is an artist, writer and teacher working on expanding and awakening the power of love in herself and human hearts the world over.
Creator of the “I Stand for Love” Calendar (in its 17th year in print!), Sarah’s best known for her daily nuggets of inspiration.
The belief that healing our inner wounds, learning to trust our hearts, moving energy through our hands (while getting out of our heads) and coming together in a community as a path towards a more loving tomorrow is the philosophy behind Sarah’s mission and purpose.
Lindsay Pera is the CEO of the Modern Mystics Institute and founder of the Mystics Society. As a Mystic mama, tech entrepreneur and intuitive strategist, she’s a sought after contributor and motivator on the topics of health, wealth and transformation.
When she is not extolling the virtues of “Sacred Commerce” or “Resonance” based business, you can find her knocking almonds and generally getting her gratitude on.
Lindsay's new paradigm business community, The Mystic’s Society, is a safe haven for entrepreneurs weaving magic into their *work* in the world. It is her passion to direct resources into the hands of entrepreneurs, creatives, and world changers.
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Thank you so much for joining us!
Our conversation continues on Facebook in our Inclusive Life Community. You can also follow us on Instagram and learn more at www.inclusivelife.co.
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