- First of all hello, my name is Sanni Brown-Adefope and I would like to personally welcome you to the first event and TPT's Racism Unveiled initiative.

We appreciate you taking out time for your busy schedules to be here with us tonight.

And for those of you who may not be familiar Racism Unveiled is a digital multimedia project focused on the root causes of racial disparities in Minnesota, and the solutions that can lead to a more equitable society.

For more information please visit racismunveiled.org.

Tonight we're turning our focus inward on our own health and wellbeing, this last year has been tough to say the least.

We've lost members of our community to police violence, we've lost friends, family and our jobs to COVID.

And to top it all off, some of the biggest in our country are getting a little loud.

But, this isn't new for us and that is the problem.

For centuries we have been suffering under the weight of a racist society and though we've shown incredible resiliency, all of that trauma has taken a toll on our minds and our bodies.

So over the next hour we'll take some time to acknowledge the historical and present day traumas that affect us all.

And we'll learn some methods to help us heal ourselves as well as our loved ones.

And so the help us do that, we have three wonderful health professionals joining us tonight.

So first we are joined by Aisha Mgemi, a psychotherapist at Therapeace Counseling.

Welcome Aisha.

- Hi welcome, thank you for being here.

- Thank you for being here.

Next up, we have Brandon Jones.

He is a psychotherapist, professor and behavioral health consultant through his organization, Jegna Consulting.

Welcome Brandon.

- Greetings everyone, I'm glad to be here.

- And we are glad to have you here.

And last but not least we welcome Rebeka Ndosi, a practitioner of Chinese medicine, yoga and a meditation teacher trainer and the founder and executive director of Maji Ya Chai, excuse me, Maji Ya Chai Land Sanctuary, welcome Rebecca.

- Thank you so much.

- Rebecca would you mind guiding us on a brief exercise to prepare us for our healing journey this evening?

- I would love to thank you so much Sanni and welcome everyone.

I am Rebecca Ndosi and we're just gonna do a little bit of breathing together with awareness.

So how often do we get to spend time during the day actually focusing on breathing, not trying to do something or pushing too hard but just being able to sit with your breath.

So if that's something that you do regularly, this will feel comfortable for you, if it's something that you don't get a chance to do then hopefully this will be a good experience.

And this is really just meant to have us all come into bringing our energy into the space together, into fullness of the present moment in our bodies right now, so that we can all have a great conversation and experience that will be healthy and healing.

So I'll invite you to get comfortable, if you're in a position where you feel a little bit, like you need to shift or you feel like you can't hold this position, if you're standing, sitting, laying down however you find yourself in this moment, see if you need to do anything to make your body more at ease.

And then I'll invite you to bring your hands up and what we're gonna do is work with, bring our energy from the mental churning and spinning and scrolling that we get into for, I'd say a lot of the day, if not all of the day and bringing it into connection with the rest of our energy centers and the centers of wisdom that we hold.

So bringing your hands up each palm actually connects to one side of your brain.

So your right palm connects to your left brain your left palm connects to your right brain.

And when you stimulate your palm, so we're just gonna rub our pumps together like this, just to make them warm.

That actually helps to balance out both hemispheres of your brain.

So as you do this, just feel how your, the temperature of your hands happens to be right now.

And notice if you are breathing, if you're holding your breath or how fast or slow you may be holding or breathing.

Just take a moment as you rub your hands to also notice that you are breathing.

Good and now, keep rubbing those hands.

Mine are still cold, I don't know about you.

And see if you can allow your belly to relax even more than it is now, so your belly may already be relaxed.

Your belly may be tight or anywhere in between.

And as you continue to breathe, allow that ease and softness in your belly to happen, good.

And take your hands now and place them on your belly, wherever it feels good.

If you feel comfortable closing your eyes, then this would be the time to do it and if not no, worries.

So noticing how you are breathing with the soft belly that you are breathing, take a breath in through your nose or your mouth, whichever one is most comfortable.

And once you have a full breath in, let that breath out again through your nose or your mouth and still with your hands on your belly, let's take two more breaths.

Breathing in, and out.

One more here, breathing in and out, good.

I'm now gonna bring our awareness up to the area, the center of your chest.

And in many practices, we call it the heart center, this spot.

And you can place your hands right here and put some pressure there.

If that feels comfortable, if not you can just relax your hands down.

We'll take three breaths here.

And when you breathe in, breathe in as deeply and easily as you can.

And when you breathe out, imagine that your breath is coming out through your heart.

Just give it a try, breathing in, and out (exhales) Breathe in breathe out.

Last one here, breathe in and breathe out, and we'll do two more breaths and this time, see if you can be aware of that connection from your head to your chest and your heart and your belly being touched by this breath.

So a deep breath in and out (exhales) And one last big breath connecting all three centers, breathe in.

And out, good.

You take your hands, shake them a bit.

Maybe tap your head, your face, your shoulders.

Welcome, it's great that you're here.

Sanni back to you.

- Almost find it hard to keep going.

- (laughs) - You got me all relaxed.

Okay, now it's time for opening questions.

So the first one we had tonight is, what areas of our health and wellbeing we need to pay better attention to, that's the perfect question after that breathing exercise.

- Well ideally our mental health, right?

We need to take care of what's happening in our mind, what thoughts are coming up for us, what are inciting our triggering incidents for that.

Were our focus has been if we're focused.

- Absolutely, I would add to that our physical health.

We don't always think about it, but we carry and we hold so much stress and that stress is located in various different parts of our bodies.

Like for myself I carry my stress in my shoulders and my neck.

And I can tell when I'm doing too much or I'm going, you know, a little bit too far, I'm being stretched 'cause I start to feel that stiffness in my neck.

So paying attention to where you feel that stress or even sometimes that trauma in your body is very important.

- Yeah and I would actually, we're really covering so much together today.

I would say the connection between all that we do.

So our mental health and our physical health and our spiritual health are all connected.

And some of them may speak up more than the others at different times, but we're whole people.

And so knowing that whatever is happening for you has a reason behind it.

And that it may not be what you read in the news or in different journal articles or what, however you get your health information, the messages coming through for you are really the real deal for what's happening in your health and so I think that there's an element of self-trust that is essential in just knowing what's happening and advocating for ourselves and our wellbeing.

- I don't wanna move on to the next question but did everybody feel like they (indistinct) I wanna stick to something Brandon said, you talked about feeling trauma in your body and that's a good segue into the next question.

What is historical trauma and how does it manifest our daily lives?

- Yeah well, historical trauma is an event or a situation or a time period where an individual or collective group of people have experienced a traumatic event.

Historical trauma is a piece of what we call intergenerational trauma.

And that's how it shows up today is intergenerationally.

Many of the traumas that many different ethnicity groups have gone through, the people who are living today haven't experienced those traumas but they still have lingering effects from those traumas whether those are epigenetic effects or even sometimes cultural habits and patterns and survival mechanisms from those time periods.

So they show up in many different ways, on many different things, just to quick anecdote how it shows up in my life is just the stress that I hold and my own, what I call racial battle fatigue, being a black man.

And what that means in a state like Minnesota where it's overwhelmingly white and knowing how do I respond in a field like mental health which is dominated by women, primarily white women and understanding the historical lineage between black male and white women relationships adds an extra layer of complexity and grief and stress just for myself when I'm in these spaces, knowing there's not a lot of people that look like me one as a black man and two as just a man in general, so that's one way.

- Wow.

- I waiting for Aisha to go (laughs) - What is it like?

What's the (indistinct) - (indistinct) - Yeah I think the thing that's coming up right now is that yes historical trauma is something that we live with.

And so when that's compounded with the daily traumas of the present time, that makes it even more, you know, even stronger of a situation to work with, especially as folks of color and native folks, like we're working with the systems that are perpetuating the harm that trauma has come from, you know, from generations.

And so it's happening right now, like it lives in our bodies right now.

And then a friend, Brandon was saying there's all of those survival patterns and the ways that we had to survive the ways that our bodies and our energy actually hold these ways of getting through that we may not understand and may seem out of the blue or might it might just seem like it's our culture and the way that we are and it's not, it's just this very ingrained pattern of getting from year to year and generation to generation.

So it's a really important thing to be aware of, you gotta be aware of it first before you can move into how to heal it.

- Yeah and my field I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist.

We do, what's called a genogram.

So when I'm sitting with a client, we have this whole, it's like a family map, like a visual family map of generations.

So you have to do at least three, right?

But you can go back four or five, 10 as far as it can go back to see what was happening with your relatives.

So if you're a great, great, great, great grandmother was born during enslavement and you see that she had issues with breathing or she had issues with walking and you saw that she lived up North and she moved there during the industrial revolution, right?

So there's that context and then maybe you moved down South.

And so now it's not inherent to your area to have asthma or to have like a hypervigilance around being around water, but there's something in your family where like, ah, we don't wanna be around water and we always have some breathing conditions.

And it's a way of picturing and putting things into context, there's some things that are shared across the diaspora, right?

Because we all are descendants of chattel slavery.

But there's also something that's regional, there's also something that maybe your grandfather worked in the factory and was exposed to asbestos and so now there's a heavy cancer in your lineage, maybe at the time of your birth, your mother was living in the Caribbean and she had like a very different experience with her mind and her body.

And so the genes that became recessive or dominant for you are very different than your siblings who were born, you know down South or born over on the East coast.

All of that plays a role in it and then seeing the patterns, the family and the context of it, give us a better understanding of why we are the way we are.

- Okay, so all three of you just explained trauma that sounds like it's really deeply ingrained.

And so that leads to my next question, is that even possible to reverse or eliminate generational trauma?

Since it seems like some of the stuff is DNA, some of the stuff is behavioral, some of the stuff is environmental.

Like I could see the environmental, but like what do you do with like the genetic stuff?

Like, can you reverse that or can you eliminate that?

- I think reverse and eliminate are two tricky words that I would not necessarily use to describe, I think you can cope and heal or quote unquote, going in your healing journey from the trauma.

You can't reverse history, you can't eliminate history, these things happen.

These are a part of our lineage unfortunately, especially as you know, many BiPAP people especially for African-American folks we have a legacy of trauma, we can't just escape that.

And unfortunately, part of our healing journey is accepting that pain but also figuring out ways to cope and deal with it which we have over time.

Some of those ways being very constructive and some of those ways being not so constructive.

So one of my suggestions has always been to realize what has happened in our past, don't be ashamed of it.

But also pay attention to what's going on in our present and start building your healing journey for the future.

Some of those things where your healing journey is figuring out, balancing your life, you know, making sure you're taking good care of yourself, lifestyle is a very big part of our healing journey and this are the things we talked about, getting spiritually well, getting mentally and emotionally well, getting physically well, making sure that you're doing things financially to be as well as you can be, are all important things to do on this healing journey, but also not negating the fact that we've gone through a pretty dark history and an unfortunate history as a collective.

- If I could piggyback off of Brandon and who I think summed it up amazingly.

Think of it like our environmental crisis, right?

90% of our pollution is coming from companies.

But the messages that we get are like don't use plastic straws and you know plastic straw use counts for less than 1% of that damage.

So is it important?

Yes, is it important that we do what we need to do that we're taking our rest, that we're caring about our bodies, that we're taking care of our mental health, all of that is important and it matters until we deal with the institutionalized racism that impacts every facet of our life.

When we're talking about the inequitable medical care, even understanding of, you know, our bodies and compare to other people's bodies, the educational system, the access to affordable housing, the access to fair wages to purchase things, we're not going to be able to fully tackle that.

So, you know, I'm working in the narrow scope that I can, does that help my lineage?

Yes.

Does that improve my DNA?

Yes.

Is it going to make a massive change?

No.

- Yeah and I think that it's, you know, there's a lot of storytelling here.

Like Aisha was saying before, finding out that what the stories have been of how your family and your community has have lived and whether or not there are patterns in you that you can see from that storytelling.

And then thinking about what is my story, what is and what story do I want for future generations, for my children, for my grandchildren, for my future community.

Because the story that I think we might not say but that we get all the time is that we are our trauma.

And so a large part of healing is discerning is like knowing, seeing that what is true and what's not true about me and about us.

So what's not true is trauma, trauma is not our truth, right?

I mean, it's our truth, in fact, it has, it's a reality, right?

But it's not who I am.

And so asking that question, who am I?

And who do I want to be and what choices do I want to make, given what I want to have control over, to make those changes to interrupt some patterns that were passed on to me that I can see and then make a different choice and to really be able to follow what we want the story to be in the future that will, that creates that healing journey that affects future generations.

- Aisha you mentioned medical equity and that's the next question, except it's more around health equity.

What does health equity look like?

- It looks like research being dedicated across the board to people and conditions, not making the standard white and middle class and trying to apply that universally.

It looks like adequate change training for doctors and medical professionals that give a broader perspective.

Like if you take the profession of dermatology, the foundation of it and how they know about how rashes look or how to improve skin is based on white skin.

And so if you, the closer proximity that you have to it the better care that you get, the more understanding, the more the resources dedicated to that.

And the further away you are from it a lot of things are being missed.

I mean, for a while, there's this kind of myth that black people couldn't get skin cancer and we do it just looks different.

And if you haven't been trained to see looking different then oftentimes we're not seeing it or understanding it until it's at, you know a stage four or until it's spread into something else.

And so it looks like attacking it on every level, looking at it from the educational standpoint, research, funding education of doctors and holding accountability for that.

Not allowing people to just only do their research or work with a certain population.

And then, you know, like run off into the suburbs.

And like, I don't see these people, so I don't have to focus on this, like putting forth CUs and things where you have to maintain a competency, if you wanna keep your license if you wanna be able to practice, you have to competency across the board and not just with what your comfort is.

- Yeah, health equity it's, like most of the other systems that are, continue to fail us as (indistinct) folks and native folks, it's like we gotta unravel it to its very core.

It's hard to point to just one or two things, it's how it has come to be as a system.

So the health care system will need to be reinvisioned and we need to be centered in that in order for an equitable system to be created because doing a little bit here and a little bit there, it's just not gonna cut it.

- All right now it's time for the individual questions.

- (laughs) - So thank you guys for sharing all of your expert information, I know I'm just moderating, but I am taking notes, so thank you.

So Aisha, our typical approach to healthcare usually addresses only the symptoms, but your work addresses the root cause of those symptoms as well.

Can you explain the importance of finding and addressing the origin?

- I think just kind of like in the basic terms of like origin, where did it start, right?

So where are we coming from?

What are we looking at?

A lot of my work, root and origin, our way of phrasing it but I tend to think of it as a process versus symptoms, we're not just looking at the after effects.

So one of the after effects of having a systemic racism is that I'm angry a lot.

You know, I present as angry, I'm seen as angry, I'm seen as aggressive.

If we're looking at the process behind it, what's fueling that?

What's coming from that?

Is anger the only emotion that I'm expressing?

Am I feeling frustrated?

Am I in a situation in which I'm doing everything I can, I'm buying into this American dream and I can't advance, I can't take care of my family.

I can't get access to good healthcare, I have poor insurance and feel there's certain people who won't even see me because of it.

I'm living in an area, that's not a great school district or maybe it wasn't one point, but you know, the redistricting of it have changed the dynamics of the school and the money that's coming in.

So I'm facing all of these different things and I need to put things into context.

I'm not just an angry individual who needs to go to anger management because I don't know how to emotionally regulate.

My anger is justified, my anger is righteous.

My anger is a natural consequence of my environment.

So do we seek to change that or do we seek to understand the circumstances and validate it, right?

So when we're looking at the root and we're looking at the origin of problems, that's the focus.

Is this a just a, I don't know how to emotionally regulate myself or is this I have all these things happening for me and I need to find a way to exist in this world.

Be able to express my anger and also be able to thrive.

- Can you talk a bit about the importance of access to mental health support for children?

What happens if children don't get the help that they need?

- Is paramount.

Childhood is where you develop your rules and your lessons and your understanding of life.

When we're talking about the unconscious mind, it reads like a toddler and we create rules for life.

Who do I trust?

Who don't I trust?

What's safe, what's unsafe?

Where are my limitations and where are my strengths?

All of that is created when we're young.

And then we seek to either confirm those experiences or challenge those experiences and it's usually confirmation.

So if I'm young and I'm at home and the police come and they beat up my father in front of me I learned that police officers aren't safe.

I learned that I can't rely on them.

And so all of my interactions going forth are going to compare to that.

Now I may not just say police officers, I may conflate any kind of authority over me, so maybe that's my boss.

You know, maybe that's someone who now looks like they're in a position of authority.

And I do that so I know how to navigate my world, so I can remain safe so I can get my needs met.

- Okay, thank you Aisha for your answers, thank you.

Brandon got questions for you.

Okay, can you give us an overview of ACE and how that affects us as adults?

- Oh, absolutely.

So ACE is an acronym for, is ACEs, Adverse Childhood Experiences.

ACEs was a study that was done in the late 1990s by Dr. Anda and Dr. Felitti.

These are two medical doctors from U Cal Berkeley.

They teamed up with the CDC and Kaiser Permanente which is a pretty well to do insurance company.

And they surveyed over 17,000 participants to look at this thing we now known as Adverse Child Experiences.

So they asked 10 questions to all these individuals to see what type of adversity they experienced as a child, They broke those 10 questions up into three categories, neglect, abuse and then household dysfunction.

And what ended up happening was, from the results of that study they were able to identify if people had a significant amount which they labeled as four.

If you answered yes to four of the 10 questions you were in this high probability of having these health risk outcomes later on in life.

Those health risk outcomes are both health-related and social disparity related.

But one thing that we have to keep in mind when you look at BiPAP individuals is that particular study was not culturally responsive at all.

The first question on the study was, has an adult ever pushed, shoved, insulted or sore at you?

And when I was trained in as a Minnesota state facilitator for their study, they had us take that test.

And I just started laughing at the first question 'cause I, from the community I come from, every adult has yelled at me, insulted me cursed at me and popped me upside my head and said, boy get in line, right?

So automatically I had one ACE, but it wasn't, you know, that was a cultural norm that wasn't done in harm, it was a cultural norm that keep me aligned that comes from historical trauma as we talked about before to make sure that young black boys and young black girls stayed safe because the environments outside of the home and environments outside of the community were quite dangerous.

So it wasn't, as you know, my family was trying to inflict trauma on me, it was more of a custom that was passed on from one generation onto the next.

So the ACEs study is an important foundational study for us to understand trauma, but there's a lot of work that needs to be done with the ACEs study, and there has been work done over time.

You know, the Philadelphia study is one of the more popular ones that looked at more of an urban population.

And with that particular study, they asked more culturally responsive questions such as have you ever been in foster care?

Do you feel like you've been bullied?

Do you feel like you live in a war zone?

Do you feel like you've faced oppression in your community?

And they had different results from that?

But the essence of the ACE study is good to know that when children from conception to 17 years old go through adversity, it does have a lasting impact on their mental, emotional and physical state later on in life.

- I believe there's a question from the community.

- Let's do it.

- It says, let me see, I kind of got messed up.

Do you think trauma work in elementary schools is necessary and beneficial?

- Absolutely, but it has to involve families and community, it can't just be just with the children.

I think that, I think we should think of all schooling as trauma informed, especially elementary school even if they're perceived to be no trauma present.

One of the biggest things that we can do is sensory.

You know, young kids learn by their environment, so making sure their environments are set up to enhance their learning.

Making sure we use language that children understand making sure that there's representation around the school of all the kids in the world, really not even if it represents the school, 'cause you should be seeing different types of people.

All of those are trauma-informed ways of approaching things, but also I think that there needs to be training not just for teachers, all faculty and staff and admission to understand cultural differences and attempts to make sure that that representation is there to make sure that you have a premium learning environment for children.

- Can I add to that?

- Absolutely.

- I totally agree with both what Brandon said and what Aisha has has written.

I also think that the teachers in schools and staff in schools need to be doing their own trauma work.

Because if you have folks who are in a position of power, who are reacting to their own stress and their own trauma that's not being worked on and healed, they're not, if they're just gonna be reactive like that.

If they're working with their own racist tendencies or bias or whatever it is that, is gonna affect the kids around them, even if they're just working with trauma, that's outside of the racial spectrum, whatever.

Trauma is going to affect everyone, everybody is affected by trauma.

But if we're expecting teachers to care for our kids, they're not gonna be able to do that even if they're trained in trauma informed work, they're not gonna be able to do that if they're not also bringing in their own awareness and healing, what it is that's hurt them, because it's real 'cause we're all human ultimately.

So they also, I believe that teachers also need to be doing their own trauma work and healing.

- Brandon, here's your second question.

In what ways do we mirror our parents techniques in child rearing and how can we break that cycle?

- (laughs)You know I tend to see us mirroring our parents, parenting styles in two different ways.

Either we run from it or we mirror it almost exactly.

It's one of those two extremes, it's never somewhere in the middle for whatever reason.

And that doesn't mean that you have bad parenting because you felt like your parents cause harm to you or that you have good parenting because you didn't.

Because one thing that I've learned about parenting is that you have to parent from an agile standpoint, no child is the same.

Even my two girls, they're very different personalities and I have to adjust my parenting style to meet my children.

So when I look at my parents and how they parents me, I take a little bit of what worked from both of them and what didn't work from both of them and I applied to my own parenting style.

I think, you know, there is no cookie cutter way to be a parent and no one's ever prepared to be a parent.

You can read every parent book, go to every webinar or watch every YouTube video.

You're still not gonna be ready because parenting shifts and changes over time.

But it's important to understand that if your parents did do something or did things when you were younger that were traumatic or very stressful, those are things for you to avoid.

And if you see yourself repeating those same patterns it'd be a good thing for you to seek some help, whether that's a parenting group.

It might be picking up a parenting book, it might be talking to other parents and creating that social support.

But those are patterns that you don't wanna pick up and trust me, I picked up some of those patterns that I said, I'll never say that to my kid, or I'll never do that.

And next thing you know, I'm like man I sound like my mama.

It's like it's crazy because that's in us, that's how we developed, that's how we grow as folks.

But one thing that I also wanted to add whether it's parenting or teachers and I had seen it in the chat and I meant to mention this but I kind of breezed over it is social emotional learning and social emotional development.

Both for parents and for professionals who work with young kids is important because when you're working on your social emotional intelligence skills, you're able to teach it a lot better as well.

And children pick up on those things and that's how they relate.

So it's an important tool, so if you're not familiar with social emotional intelligence or social emotional learning do some Googling, 'cause there's some good tips and skills that you can learn for yourself and for the ones around you.

I wanna say that Rebeka, and you got the next questions Rebecca, but I wanna say, I wanted to say that how you said teachers and people in position of power need to be working on their own stuff so that they can show up.

I wanted to say so that they can also exemplify, hey I, this is how I've worked on my trauma and the children can see it in the same way Brandon just use that as an example, so I'm glad you said that.

- Absolutely, yeah.

- Okay, so Rebecca, your question is how can Eastern medicine and embodied and energetic practices help us beyond the Western model?

- Yeah well, I mean the way that I would describe the Western model and it has shifted a bit, but still very much where it is now is that it takes us, it divides us into parts and pieces.

And so much like our lives are expected to be separate, like your work life needs to be separate from your home life and your friends may be separate from your family and of course there's a range of that in different people's lives.

That is that disjointed piece is very, very limited and we are so much more so Eastern medicine and culturally rooted ways of medicine and healing are all taking into account who we are as whole systems, as whole human beings in relationship both with each other, within ourselves and also connected to the environment and everything that's going on around us.

How we are effected by seasons, how we are affected by the different times in our lives, by different, you know, by how the moon changes.

And we feel it, right?

The tides change and we feel it.

So I think that Western medicine can really take some really good cues from both Eastern medicine and culturally grounded and rooted practices because it, because they really honor us as full people and honestly focus more on being well and prevention and less so on and also on community and help and not being isolated and that we are all in this together.

And those are some things that I think the Western medical model could really benefit from.

- What are some simple ways to bring balance in to our lives and how can those things prevent poor health?

- Simple ways to bring balance?

Well, the first thing is awareness of how you're doing.

So I think that because we're so busy and life can be so overwhelming for different reasons at different times.

Sometimes constantly that taking time to check in with yourself and that could be while you are doing dishes, while you are maybe taking a walk maybe you're, you know, counting something or organizing something or, but something or just standing and doing nothing and taking time to check in to say how am I feeling?

It could be checking with your body, could be checking in with your mind.

It could be checking in with your spirit and your energy.

That awareness is really important and then trusting yourself.

So when you're paying attention to where you can, you find ease, rest and joy and those may be totally different from person to person but those are cues for what is true for you.

And following those cues are what can bring you more and more into different practices and things that you surround yourself with that can help your healing journey and help you to really be in right relationship and balance with yourself.

So I could say all sorts of things like yoga and you know, meditation, mindfulness, no, it's, even before that, it's really just finding those places where you really feel like you, those senses, those experiences of, maybe it's a song or something where you find joy, where you can relax and where you can laugh.

All right, so now I believe we have an activity for the community.

What tools, I believe this is for everyone to be able to share in the chat.

So feel free to share your answer to this question in the chat.

What tools have you found to be helpful in navigating through your own personal experiences?

Maybe the panelists could answer, while people are sharing in the chat, if you feel, if your so moved.

- Yeah, I have a daily practice which sometimes is longer and sometimes it's shorter, but for me a meditative practice which sounds way more precious than it has to be.

It could be just sitting and focusing on my breath, sometimes it's a song, words.

Sometimes it's listening to a guided meditation, but sometimes it's just scanning through my body to check in but I have practices that I've had to learn what works for me over years.

Yoga also, walking in nature, petting my dogs, you know, these things, connecting in with people who I trust and sometimes keeping a journal.

But for me, having something that I can do consistently each day to connect in with my spirit is the number one thing that helps me.

And that has changed over the years and it's never, you know, it's never this long thing or this perfect thing but it's something that I know I can do at least a little bit each day.

Thank you for saying that it changes and that it took you a little while to find it, 'cause I think if you, even some of the things we're hearing, I think you might get caught up like, well it doesn't sound like what Aisha or Brandon or Rebeka said (indistinct) - Exactly.

- Thank you for adding that in there.

Okay, all right.

- I wanna add something.

- Okay, go for it, please.

- I think being intentional with your joy is very important and that looks different for different people as a bipod person and the people that I talked to were very auditory storytelling type of people.

So putting on a good pair of headphones, listening to a podcast or a YouTube video or just some music can be relieving.

I don't think that, I think people underestimate the beauty in listening.

Sometimes taking off the headphones and just going outside and just listening to nature, even if you live by a train track could be relieving as well.

So, you know, it's important for us to find time but being intentional with providing space for ourselves.

I know one of the two things that happened during COVID that I was like, I'm gonna need this for myself.

The one thing that I did was I started taking naps, now that I have less time traveling to work and things like that, I should probably try to rest my body, I'm a guy who never takes naps.

Naps are for kids, right?

That's what my thought process was.

But I started forcing myself to take at least a 30 minute nap and just shut my whole body down.

The second thing I did with my partner., and it's funny because we thought that this was a crazy idea, but we decided to have intentional time away from each other.

So now that we are together all the time in the same household, we actually scheduled time to be away from each other.

We try to do it at least two hours a week, but we you have your time, I have my time 'cause when we are in this, when we are living at work, instead of working from home, we need to be able to split away from each other as best as possible just to have that separation.

- Yes, as a couples therapist, yes.

I'm like, yes do all those things please.

And you'll see like how, especially when we're on top of each other in these quarantined type situations, you'll see that.

And I think it's also important to do honest check-ins with yourself.

How am I feeling?

How am I showing up in my own world?

What do I need and then answer those needs.

- I'm getting prompts about what the questions were gonna do (laughs) Could each of you share one word that describes how you feel after us having this conversation?

What resonates now when you think about health and healing?

- Are you saying the attendees or the panelists?

The panelists, the panelists, if you could share that describes how you feel after having this conversation.

I mean, you guys are the one pouring into everybody, how does that feel?

- I'll dive out again.

I try to do ladies first but the ladies, you know, they're pretty quiet, so I'll dive.

- Very reflective.

- I would say my word would be intrigued.

I'm seeing a lot of comments in the comment section of people who are doing really well.

I think we don't give ourselves enough credit on how we do take care of ourselves 'cause we feel like we don't take the best care of ourselves.

And honestly, I think that's part of how we were taught how to do self care.

We've been taught self care in a very reactionary way.

Something bad happens in the day, go meditate, go get your steps in for your Fitbit.

Go drink your fancy tea.

But sometimes it's about being more proactive in your self care.

And I think we are more proactive than we think we are.

So I'm intrigued to learn how people are taking care of themselves, but don't think that it ends there.

You know, healing is a journey, it's not a destination.

So we always have to find new creative ways to just, you know and discover things to take the best care of ourselves, so I'm very intrigued.

- I would say compassion, I had like three words, compassion, community, connected.

Just I can't say enough to folks who I work with and I work with a lot of individuals and a lot of groups.

Just how important it is to give yourself compassion at every turn, especially right now.

But even before right now, I think it's something that it's easier to give others, the question that I ask groups a lot, what is something that you give other people that you don't give yourself, but you don't allow yourself to have.

And a lot of the time it's like I don't allow myself to, I don't give myself the compassion and love and permission and grace that I give other people.

And so I can't say it enough, like having compassion for yourself, it is, there is no formula that is the thing, none of this is precious.

You know, none of this is like you can only do it if it's X, Y, and Z and you can't ever fall down and get back up again.

No, it's, this is real.

I mean, life is challenging and working with trauma and healing that and life people it's challenging and it's worth it.

We gotta walk with compassion for ourselves.

- I would say, my word is hopeful Every time we have these conversations it springs up hope for me that we're listening and we're paying attention.

And this is not just to be like, oh, that was interesting and we're gonna go about our lives, but to apply it.

So I'm always hopeful that maybe the only thing you heard is I need to take naps and good yes take naps.

Maybe the only thing you heard is I need to look into my stuff, that's fine.

It doesn't have to be a holding of all of this information which could feel very heavy at times, so I am hopeful.

I'm hopeful that we're not going to be reactive that we're gonna be more proactive.

I'm hopeful that our self-care is going to be true and honest and not performative.

You know, it's not gonna tell you how many steps I've walked when it doesn't really correlate to what I need in my life.

I am hopeful that people are not just going to look at this as a BiPAP problem but a collective issue that impacts everyone.

You know, if one of us isn't doing well none of us are doing well and we need to change our barometer of how we measure that.

- Thank you Aisha, thank you Rebeka, thank you Brandon.

We've got some community questions for you all.

Brandon we'll start with you.

This a good one.

What are the effects of racism on the mind and the body?

It has a huge effect.

I mentioned a term earlier, racial battle fatigue, and I, and we live in a world that is extremely race focused a society that is extremely race focused.

So when we show up, we can't show up without considering who we are.

Sometimes we consider who we are before we even show up to places.

We're thinking about how we should wear our hair, should I wear this shirt?

Should I wear these shoes?

We're are overcompensated on thought based on the racial interactions that we have especially as black folks.

So it's very important for us to understand that that carries a load of toxic stress.

You know, earlier we were talking about health and when you break down by ethnicity and race and you look at stress related health issues, black folks and indigenous folks are usually one and two on the list.

That's not by accident, that's due to that historical trauma.

And the epigenetics that I was talking about earlier, that not only are those stress hormones passed down and we have these high levels of cortisol which is a stress hormone, but then those things are embedded in an environment that supports it and keeps us at a toxic stress level on a consistent basis.

And we have to fight these battles every day to go to school, to live in neighborhoods, to go to work even virtually.

And that is a hard thing for mini people to deal with.

The craziest part about it is many of us we've been doing it so long and we've seen our parents do it we don't even realize it.

So when we talk about toxic stress, we talk about historical trauma.

Many of us don't even realize the way that we've developed culture has been from a position of responding to racism, white supremacy and structural institutional racism.

- Thank you, Brandon.

- Okay Rebecca, you got the next question.

- Okay.

- How can Eastern medicine practices inform the way we approach equity in health care.

- How can Eastern medicine practices informed the way we approach equity?

- In healthcare.

- In healthcare specifically.

Yes, I think that that whole person piece, I mean, I think that the, again the philosophies and the practices that are ancestral and rooted.

And so, you know, I think the question was asked about Eastern medicine because I'm a Chinese medicine practitioner, but I'm also a practitioner of (indistinct) healing of yoga and meditation which is not just from the places that we call Eastern.

So and cultural practices from East Africa.

So, I think that not being afraid of the roots of where we come from, I think is really something that will help with equity and seeing that there isn't a cookie cutter thing for anyone.

I think that the balance and the recognition that we are not the center of everything can, as like humans, but then as colonizer humans, right?

Not the center of everything.

And if we try to be that it throws the, it throws everything out of balance.

So even if that's what you wanna hold on to just wait because it's gonna unravel, even for you it's gonna unravel when the rest of us have been dealing with the unravel, with not getting being supported by the systems that are there.

So I think that that finding your proper place in the entire spectrum of our living ecosystem is something that can really help to inform the health equity.

- Thank you, Rebecca and Aisha you get the last question.

There has been a lot of community level trauma this past year, on top of our individual experiences.

How do we work through these moments and where can we seek help?

- I think everything starts with being honest about where you are and how you feel unapologetically, especially when we're talking about people with marginalized identities.

As a black woman, it's not okay for me to be upset, right?

Everyone's trying to make sure that they police my tone and how I present even my anger.

And I think it's just the opposite, I should be able to express it and be angry and be indignant.

I think that me acknowledging where I'm at and what I need.

Sometimes I have days where I'm like, I can't interact and I'm not going to.

There are other days when I love creating teachable moments and there are some times where I'm just like Google is free.

You can look up anything that you want, there are a million resources, they're people who said it more eloquently who have a better tone, who can do it in whatever framework you want.

So I think like first starting with that, 'cause the healing is like not being everything to everybody, when you are experiencing things real time.

And then connecting with people who make you feel safe and we're not talking about like don't hold you accountable, but like I can speak freely with you.

I can be in present, if I am depressed, I can present as that, I don't have to put a smile on my face.

Seeking out elders in your community who will guide you, like they've been here before and they can they can help you with that seeking out people who will just let you be who you are.

I love the moments where I just get to be Aisha.

In my quirky, weirdness, fun.

And I don't have to present with every identity upfront and be confronted with that.

And then seeking out professionals, because as much as our friends and our family love us, they are not here to hold the weight of the traumas that we are experiencing our reactions to them.

That's what Brandon and I do, that's what Rebecca does.

You know, we are here for that.

We are, you know, we love doing that.

We've made careers, but we're passionate about that.

Let someone do that, who is objective, you're not gonna see me at the cookout.

You know, you can be completely honest with me in a way that you're not honest with anyone else so that you can actually get towards true and authentic healing.

- Well, thank you Aisha and thank you Brandon and thank you Rebecca.

And thank you everybody for your questions.

This concludes our evening.

I would like to thank each of our panelists for joining us tonight and sharing their wisdom.

We'd like to thank the Otto Bremer Foundation and health partners for funding Racism Unveiled and making this work possible.

Thank you to our events team at TPT for keeping this event running smoothly.

And finally, I'd like to thank Cassandra Fenlon and senior strategic partnerships manager at TPT for putting this event together and bringing us all together tonight.

We're gonna share Cassandra's contact information in the chat if you'd like to be more informed of future Racism Unveiled events, or if you have ideas to share for our programming.

We also invite you to fill out the poll, we're sharing right now to let us know how this event resonated with you.

Once again, we thank you for joining us tonight and we hope you all have a wonderful rest of your evening.

Good night and God bless.

And I just wanna say thank you Rebecca, Aisha and Brandon one more time 'cause y'all poured into me.

Again I say, I know I'm the moderator, but y'all was dropping gems and thank you, thank you, thank you.