Sense of Soul - Healing Racism from the Inside Out

Episode Date: February 28, 2022

Today on Sense of Soul Podcast we have The Race Healer, Milagros Phillips. Milagros is a recipient of the 2021 NEW THOUGHT WALDEN AWARD for Interfaith/Intercultural Understanding. She is a Ted-X and Keynote Speaker, Sound Therapist, Reiki Master and Teacher, 4 Times Author, and Racial Equity Coach.  Milagros has been facilitating programs on racial healing for more than 30 years and is a teacher of “A Course in Miracles.” She is the creator of “Race Demystified” and does this work because she has a different voice to add to the conversation, one that is centered on a compassionate approach to healing our racial conditioning.  Milagros leads us through a quick but profound meditation to discern racism in our body. Milagros’ newest highly rated  book, “Cracking the Healer's Code: A Prescription for Healing Racism and Finding Wholeness,” is based on her 30+ years of doing racial healing work with people from all walks of life. Her hope is that this book will help to fill in the blanks, give the reader hope and lead them to inspired action against rasicm.
 We highly suggest watching Milagros' powerful Ted Talk here. What is "Race Literacy?" | Milagros Phillips   Where she shares her own personal experiences and the importance of, “Race Literacy,” the knowledge and awareness of the history of race, how one is acculturated into a racial caste system, the impact the system has on us with mind, spirit and emotions and how it all affects us in our daily lives. You can order her books and join her programs like “Race Literacy Lunch and Learn” here at her website www.milagrosphillips.com. Follow her journey on social media.  https://instagram.com/theracehealer?utm_medium=copy_link https://www.facebook.com/theracehealer/ Milagros Phillips - YouTube Watch “Traces of the Trade”, as mentioned in episode, it’s so good! https://vimeo.com/ondemand/tracesofthetrade Visit our website to learn more about us www.mysenseofsoul.com. You can listen to the first episode of Shanna’s ancestral mini series Untangled Roots” at no charge at Sense of Soul Patreon. Join our community of seekers and lightworkers who get exclusive workshops, live events like SOS Sacred Circles, ad free episodes and more. You can also listen to Mande’s mini series about her two NDE’s, Sign up now! https://www.patreon.com/senseofsoul NEW!! SENSE OF SOUL’S NETWORK OF LIGHTWORKERS! Go check out our Affliates page, adding new amazing programs each month. Check it out! https://www.mysenseofsoul.com/sense-of-soul-affiliates-page

Welcome to the Sense of Soul podcast. We are your hosts, Shanna and Mandy. Grab your coffee, open your mind, heart and soul. It's time to awaken. Today we have with us the race healer, Milagros Phillips. She is a TEDx and keynote speaker, sound therapist, Reiki master and teacher, a four-time author, and a racial equity coach. Milagros has been facilitating programs on racial healing for more than 30 years. And we found her TEDx talk to be extremely powerful. And we cannot wait to talk to her about her new book, Cracking the Healer's Code, a Prescription for Healing Racism and Finding Wholeness.

And we are super excited to have her join us today. Nice to meet you. Hi, Mandy. How are you? I'm good. Thank you. And thank you so much for joining us today. And, you know, we always love how divine timing works because a lot of what we had heard in your TED talk and by

researching you just aligns with where we wanted to go this month. So, I mean, it's just perfect. Perfect. Divine timing. There's nothing like it. You're known as the race healer. I didn't think that. Somebody started calling me that. Grace Healer. Like I was telling Nancy this morning, I said, not only does she share the same passion as I do, but also you're spiritual and you do Reiki, which I also do. So, yeah, so excited. I don't know if you know much about my ancestral journey. I don't have you had a chance. Do you want to say something about that?

So it was about six years ago. I had done one of those ancestry tests and I'm from New Orleans. My family's been from New Orleans for as long as I know. And so I figured that I might have some African-American in me. We have people of so many different colors in our family that just pop up in generations. I moved to Colorado when I was younger. And so when I moved here, I was the first person on both sides of my family to ever go to a public school. But people used to always ask me, what are you mixed with? I'm white. What do you mean? Well, to make a long story short, I was not all white. In fact, my family had always told us we're French and Italian. That was it. And that's another thing that I

discovered. In Louisiana, they had German Creoles that came over with the French on those first boats. I had a little French, but nothing, I never knew I had Germany. I was the melting pot of a person. As they say from Louisiana, I come from the Creole people. And I went on a journey to discover why I didn't know this. Well, shortly into building my tree, I hit a roadblock. Couldn't find my great-grandmother. That is because she wasn't who she said she was. I discovered an 85 year old

secret. And so my journey shifted from understanding that I was an energetic body, that I was multidimensional, and I was really up here to who made this body? Where did I come from? Why is it that someone would deny their culture, their race? And I went deep. And so what I discovered is that I am proof of white privilege. If people ever doubted that that was a thing, here I am whitewashed until I was lighter than a paper bag. Because she chose to pass the one drop rule. Historically, a lot of people did because what it meant was any small amount of privilege was better than none. There were a lot of Jewish families that changed their

name. There were a lot of Italian families that changed their names. It was a little harder for the Irish to do that because of their accent. But as soon as they lost their accent, a lot of them changed their name as well. And no one ever talks about that. You know, so there's this huge thing. I mean, at the beginning of the last century in this country, there were 48 different classifications of race. And they all apply to Western Europeans. So because they were not considered white when they came here. You know, so there's this huge thing around that as well. Yeah. So yeah,

I know I had an aunt that passed and she and her sister didn't speak to each other. My father was very upset about that because in the Dominican Republic, which is where we come from, they didn't do that. They were just sisters. Right. And then they came to the U.S. and my black aunt lived in Brooklyn my wife for lack of a better word lived in Queens and they didn't and my father was livid when they came to the DR to visit and he was just like you know yeah I mean we never even knew she had brothers why do we not know that because of her last name because everyone knows the Creoles only have so many last names. And that's one thing that kind of led me because I was like, why am I related to over 900 people in the New Orleans area I've never heard of? And there's only like four last names. It's such a, it's such a burning fire in me to share my story. I did, I made a mini series about it and I take you through basically

what I discovered and how I was going through it. And it's history that's never been told. That's why I feel the need to tell it. So here they're talking about taking out history and I'm trying to put it in because I'm like the stuff I'm discovering definitely is not taught. And I think that when you learn the truth about the history of racism, it's the history of America. And it is also that empathy that you start to feel in learning the truth. And through that empathy is, I think, healing. Yeah, I have a good friend who did a documentary called Traces of the Trade. And she found out that her family were

the biggest slave owning family in the entire country. And she had no idea until she was in college. And of course, the rest of the family, 250 something of them, a lot of them were very upset with her for the telling of that story because they were a wealthy family that, you know, still enjoyed some of the privilege. Well, how brave of her. Healing. Yeah. Not only was it healing, but, you know, prior to George Floyd being killed in the street in front of America, I was kind of solo on my journey as a white woman. I was like looking for people to share the story and not having so many that wanted to listen. But then all of a sudden, George Floyd came about and brought this to everyone's eyes, right? And it came to the forefront. And you see these younger

generations all coming together, uniting, which I think is beautiful. We're going to actually talk about this now. You know, it's, it's one of those things that's like, when, when you were talking about that, my inside started shaking because I'm like, how sad is something like that has to happen in order for us to be able to talk about it. And if we don't keep evolving and we just put it aside and tuck it under again and go back to being silent, what is it going to take? And you talk about in your TED Talk that silence and risk-taking. Can you talk about that for a moment? Yeah, yeah. So, you know, one of the codes that is part of the racial conditioning that has happened over hundreds of years is for particularly white people to stay silent around this topic. And if we're really going to have an equitable world, we have to be intentional about risk taking, about doing things differently, just generally looking at how am I part of the problem so that you can become part of the solution.

You know, because as long as it's somebody else's problem and there's all those other people out there who are doing this and it has nothing to do with me, we maintain the problem in place as long as we don't talk about it or say anything is, you know, we're just maintaining the dysfunction. And, you know, I love the idea that you're talking about. Basically, you know, people woke up and now people are starting to go back to sleep. And I see it all the time. I had like 500 people used to come to my lunch and learn programs. And now it's dwindled down to a few hardcore. I really want to transform my life and the way that I view the world people, you know, but a lot of people are back asleep. And the other thing is don't make

the mistake of thinking that it's George Floyd one and done. George Floyd was the visible part of what happens every day to people of color. It hasn't stopped. And this is what people need to get through their heads. Just because it's not on the news, that doesn't mean it's no longer happening. It wasn't on the news before and it was happening. And people of color have been telling the world about this for literally hundreds of years. And certainly since the civil rights movement, people have been's one and done. No, this is just the tip of the iceberg. If people could just get through their heads that George Floyd is not a one-time thing, make a lot more progress. It makes me also realize how much our media and our news controls people. Yeah, with all of it. you know, I was thinking about my ancestral journey so deep,

because I went to the root of who I was. It wasn't surface work, right? I didn't just talk to somebody about Black Lives Matter. I didn't just watch a show, you know, 13. I literally went and met my ancestors. And no matter who you are and where you come from, if you go back and do this, you are going to find that there was diversity for women, for many races. You know, you might find slave holders, you might find a slave. I mean, I had both in my tree, of course, you know, coming from Creole people. Those things were healing for me at the root. And that's why I feel that ancestry work can be beneficial to anybody. If they want to learn about history, the history is there. And now through the internet, we're able to find out the real true

history through stories and through, I'll tell you what, the Ark Diocese kept better records than the government did. Yeah. You know why? Because they're the ones that started this whole thing. So with you. Yeah. Well, no, they did. And we are still living under the laws that the Vatican put together in the 1400s. Having a sense of that and how people are so unaware that we are still living under those laws and we're a country of laws. Justice is not necessarily about laws. Laws have nothing to do with justice. If you happen to get justice because of the law, goody for you, but they're not written, they're all about control. And the thing to understand is the importance of the role of trauma and generational trauma and intergenerational trauma, how that is such an important role

in understanding all of this stuff, because that's where the control comes in. That's where, you know, people who are traumatized are destabilized and destabilized people are easy to control. And you see it over and over and over again. And people are just not paying attention. I would love to just kind of go back and talk about what you endured as a child. You spoke in, in Talk about kind of an aha moment when you were very young. And Shannon and I both seriously cried listening to your TED Talk. It was very powerful. And we're definitely going to have our listeners watch it. Can you talk about what it was like as a child in an all white classroom and that moment that you had? Oh, yeah. That was when I was in Catholic school.

But the stuff started much earlier. I remember being four years old. I think I was born dancing. I must have been dancing in my mother's belly. I love to dance. And so as a little girl, I used to sing to myself and dance on the front porch. And this neighbor from across the street came over one day and said, what do you want to be when you grow up? And I said, I want to be a ballerina. And she goes, well, you can't be a ballerina because there are no black ballerinas.

And back then, the ballet used to come on every Sunday. And she said on television, she said, why don't you look and see if you see anyone who looks like you when the ballet comes out on Sunday, which of course, you know, I'm this little girl. So I, I did, and I didn't see anyone. And I thought, oh, well then I'll be a singer. So that was the beginning of here's what you can't do, right? Like this is, you know, and so fast forward, when I went to school, I never went to kindergarten. I went to first grade for like two weeks and then they tested me and skipped me. And then I went to second grade and tested.

So anyway, I ended up doing three years, my first year of school. And so my parents, you know, switched me over to Catholic school. So I'm like seven years old and I'm in the fourth grade. And yeah. And, and so in the town where we live, the Catholic school, there was the girls Catholic schools was across the street from the church, the boys Catholic school and the priests. And, and, you know, so the nuns were on one side and the men were on the other side. And I grew up listening to beautiful Gregorian chants. You could hear them all over town, you know, especially when the men, I remember that the men's voices were particularly strong. So you could really like hear it right so anyway um so I'm in Catholic school and they they

put on this play every year and everybody would turn out and it would be all these crafts and embroidery and you know the young women were being taught how to tat lace and like all this these old crafts right that you don't even hear about anymore and um they also would put on a play. And so I said to one of my classmates that I wanted to be in the play. And she goes, well, no, you can't be in the play because, you know, everyone that's, you know, the major parts have been taken already. The only parts that are left are parts for angels and everyone knows there are no black angels, so you can't be in the way. So I'm this little seven-year-old and it wasn't until like my late thirties, I'd gone back to school to get another degree, yet another degree, you know, and I had to write an essay about something that impacted my life. And that's what came up for me

all of a sudden. I hadn't thought about that in years, right? So that comes up. And now as an adult, I'm looking back and I'm unpacking it, right? Like, what did that mean? How did that impact my life? What were some of the things that were coming up for me? What were, you know, like all of this

interesting stuff came up. And one of the things that came up for me, what were, you know, like all of this interesting stuff came up. And one of the things that came up for me was the realization of how from that moment on, I lived my life being very, very good. And to the point where I wouldn't even try things if I couldn't do them perfectly the first time. I'll never forget the first time I ice skated in New York City in Central Park. I didn't fall. Like I just would not make mistakes. I just was not allowed. So when I started to unpack that, I realized that that little seven-year-old girl who in that moment, what I realized was, oh, even God doesn't love little black children. Like that's what I

got in the moment, right? And I made a decision in that moment that I was going to be really, really good. Because as a Catholic child, what I had learned was if you're very, very good, you can get into heaven, right? And so the little child in me was being very very good so I could get into heaven because I was going to kick God out because God was a bigot and an idiot and didn't I mean this is like the little and so i'm like i'm getting into heaven so i can kick god out because obviously god doesn't know what god's doing because god's a bigot you know you're like i'm gonna tell him a few things i'm telling him i was kicking him the heck out of heaven i was just not having it you know so there's where that HRH comes from, right?

The human race healer. Never mind. For royal highness, heads will roll. So, you know, this was passed down. Mother was a healer. You said your sister was a healer. Generations probably of healers. Am I right?

Yeah. And even in my, you know, my father was an amazing healer in his own right, but he was a tech guy. For him, everything was about technology. But I, like my grandmother, I remember, you know, being a little girl and, you know, you get sick and my grandmother and my sister would go in the backyard dig up roots and yeah well them and and then they have to like literally hold you down pinch your nose you open your mouth so they pull that right my grandma always had no commandesia oh i remember that too it was like oh yeah you know, they did all that stuff and you got better pretty quick.

You know, I guess it was one of those get better or die. You know, but I just, you know, I came at this from the doors of healing and transformation. And all of my work, like all of my seminars and workshops on race are based on a course in miracles all of my work is really grounded in spirituality and you know I remember in the 90s when we were finally able to talk about some of these things in corporate America how I literally learned to translate the course in Miracles into corporate language so that

I could speak about the course without speaking about the course, you know? Yeah. Right. Yeah. That's hard because it's, you know, it's a lot to wrap your mind around. Like it's one of those things you got to read over and over and over and over and over, at least for me. I got the dummy version, the course of miracles for dummies. That's what I got. Cause I opened that book and was like, there's too many words in this book. But you know, and I was the exact opposite. I loved it. A friend of mine introduced me to it in the early nineties. And I was just like, you know, like I couldn't get enough of opposite. I loved it. A friend of mine introduced me to it in the early 90s. And I was just like, you know, like, I couldn't get enough of it. I went, I read through the whole thing. And then I realized, you know, and then I joined a group, and then I started teaching it.

And, you know, I absolutely love it, because it speaks with a singular language. And really, it speaks with a language of love. And that's what I love about it. It's, it's not this convoluted, you know, stuff. It's, it's really either this or that, if it's not fear, it's love. If it's love, it's not fear. And so it makes it really clear, really simple. You know, it's like anyone can get it. Right. And so um so i absolutely love it because this this work one of the reasons we haven't progressed as much as we could is because there is no consciousness around love when it comes yeah there's so many conditions people think they love but it's not unconditional and i remember when that came to me wow that was

one of my biggest awakenings and how it came to me first was the conditions that I had for myself because once I could understand that then I could understand that how much I was having that project outside of me as well like I'll love you if you do this I love you as long as you are this exactly if you feel a certain way and you act a certain way and you do the things that I need for you to do or want you to do or whatever uh which none of which has anything to do with love but but well and the fact that love is only felt within you cannot feel it outside of you. And you know, it's, you can only feel it here in your heart. And that to me became my source of what I considered God should be that loving fire that I felt inside of me. And so everything I thought God was, I thought God would, God was

to a white man sitting on throne with a long long beard. That's what I thought. And I too went to Catholic school. So I don't know what they're teaching. I don't know. Maybe they've changed. All of my family was forced to be Catholic when I did my ancestry. That was one of the things that really stuck out, not only through the black code, but also before they got in the boats before they went to the port of New Orleans. And I had an ancestor who was actually, that was his job. He was a witness to this before they got on the boats. And then I also had Shaman ancestor who is known as the apostate from Canada. He was the Cajun lineage that I had. And all of those people, they relocated him. Great. Now you're going to have to go down to

that church over there and baptize your children. And so that it gave me a realization of why the deeply rooted Catholicism was within my family. When I discovered I had Marie Laveau in my tree as an aunt, and I have her two ways in my tree, one through her father and one through her husband or not her husband because she didn't marry him but one through her children's father her last children's father and and supposedly she's buried with him too I don't know for sure say thoughts after debate but I thought maybe that was why my family had denied who they were because I grew up thinking she was the boogeyman, the boogeyman. And I researched for a year on Ray Laveau. Um, and I found so many things about myself as, as a Reiki teacher and healer. And I was like, she just does what I do. Yeah. She wasn't burning anybody alive or, you know oh my god yeah and that's so important because

people um you know part of maintaining the dysfunction is keeping the fear between people yeah because people segregate it and as long as people are segregated they're not learning about each other and learning from each other and so then there's the stranger without right that has nothing to do with who's right here okay there's the separation thing that happens can you imagine in the 1800s, she was a Black woman feared by people. She had to have been pretty powerful. You have to remember that they did that to the Haitians as well. Or Lady Angela's from St. Joseph. Exactly.

And you have to understand why they did that. The Haitians were the first people in the so-called New world to set themselves free from enslavement. Yeah. And as early as 1804, they fought off the French. They killed off whoever was left on that island that was French. And the French were in boats outside the island, trying to come back in to take over. And, you know, they weren't't having it and the powers that be didn't want anybody else knowing what had happened in Haiti and how and so what they did was they created this story about the Haitians which had nothing to do with the truth and the reality the truth and the reality was that they were powerful they were were strong, they fought for their independence. They did it. The reason why I know that story is because I have an ancestor.

His name was Manuel Andri. And after that happened in Haiti, the word got back to the slaves in Louisiana. And they were like, we can do this too. They got together, you know, a few hundred people. They grabbed all of the tools out of the sheds and they said, we're going to stand up to these people. Well, they went to Manuel Andrews plantation first, which was the Woodland plantation. This is my grandfather. I had no idea. So they go to his house and they killed his son and then they hit him on the head with an ax,

but they didn't kill him. Boy, they should have, because then he sent word back to New Orleans, this is going on. After everything was done, they had only damaged a few plantations up and down River Road. And then he demanded, I have the letter that he wrote. He demanded their heads to be decapitated, and he hung them up and down the Mississippi. Yeah. Yeah. That's an old European thing. They were all, they always used to do that because the idea was every time they chopped somebody's head off or hung someone or whatever, they would parade their heads through town because the idea was to traumatize to destabilize to control the masses and so and so that's your great great grandfather whoever did this he did that because it would traumatize

the rest of the enslaved people which allows them to be destabilized and then they can be controlled again yeah to say you're not going to do that here. And that's, that is a true story. Okay. This is not like a rumor. I know it's not in your history books, but I actually have the paper and actually Mandy can tell you many of the things that I discovered were in French and I could read it for some reason. And I would hand it over to my daughter and be like, can you read this? And she's like, no, it's in French. And I'm like, you can't read it at all. Like try. And she's like, no, I'm like, I can fully read that shit. I don't know why. Yeah. Me too. Very interesting. Yep. I just love how you brought it back around.

It comes back to that fear again, right? Creating that fear. So what do we do today to get out of letting that fear control us? Yeah. Well, the first thing is people need to become conscious. They need to become aware. They need to understand what trauma is, how trauma works, how it gets passed down from generation to generation, how we have generational trauma. So let's say in this lifetime, you're afraid of snakes. We can use raccoons. Okay. Whatever it is, right? Whatever it is. And you just don't understand that fear. Like it doesn't make sense to you, right? Once you understand its impact and where it's impacting you in your body and what's been happening with you around that particular fear. You literally can find what the fear, the original fear was that happened in your lineage that got passed

down to you. And now you're acting, reacting and interacting out of that fear. One of the things that I do with people in my seminars, they help them to find racism in their bodies, where it actually lives in their bodies. I have a program based on my latest book, which is Cracking the Healer's Code, a prescription for healing racism and finding wholeness. That program is something that I have been doing over time since the year 2001, where I take people through this process of healing and transformation so that they literally become liberated from the vows, laws, and all of the things that have been holding them hostage without them being aware of it because the ancestry was held hostage to it so it doesn't matter what color your skin is

everybody has a stake yeah so in those 15 weeks people are all of that stuff gets peeled away so that people find their true power oh my god everyone should do this yeah you're talking about being held hostage to whatever your lineage is this isn't just a this isn't just a race program uh this is about like me it is a race program no it is a race program because here's the thing we are one human race yeah one human family living on in one global village on one planet. Okay. I loved how you said that in your Ted talk race is not biology. Yes, exactly. And so having an understanding of how this stuff impacts all of us, regardless of, I don't care if you're a white male, this stuff still impacts you. The fact that you can't talk about it, that you don't want to talk about it, that you're not even talking about it,

tells you something's wrong. And so the program is set up for everyone and anyone who wants to do a really deep dive into healing. And with the understanding that when you do this healing right here, right now, you, you help to heal your entire lineage. Yeah, it's so true. I mean, I cry and I usually can't even get it out. I'm going to cry right now just thinking about it. and prayed that one day her daughters, her granddaughters would be able to speak up, to speak up, to be loved, to marry someone and not be judged of the color of their skin. And to be able to be free enough to talk about this and to share, you know, the stories and not have to

continue to whitewash in fear. And what I find is so amazing is that I did the Harvard explicit bias test. And I was so shocked. I was devastated. I was I was like, how can my soul in my, in my thoughts not align? Like, how is this in me? And I didn't even know people believe me, we all have it. Right. But when you said finding it in you, can you give an example? Because I'm, I love that so much. I would, I would love to even know how to do this to help others, you know, to find this within themselves. Yeah. So all you have to do is just say the word racism to yourself and notice what happens. And just sit with your body. Yeah. And then, you know, and then you can say peace and you see, you feel the difference between those two.

It means something different to me now that I say. I think if I would have said this before all the work, it would have felt, I would have felt a lot. I would have felt a lot. Yeah. You can surprise how people just, you still feel it and you still find it in your body, you know? And the thing about it is that based on where you find it in your body, it tells you what kind of illness is running your family. Mine's my throat and right in between my ribs right here in my stomach. Did you say your throat? Yeah. My throat. and then right here in my solar plexus.

Yeah. So your throat is your expression, your creativity and your speech, right? Along with other things, right? And so your speech is directly tied to your power, your center of power, your solar planet. And so with you, like that's not the same for everybody, your center of power, your solar planet. And so with you, like that's not the same for everybody, but for you specifically, that you probably have a family history of ulcers, of bowel problems, of digestive problems, and things like that. You also probably have a family history of sore throat, people having trouble speaking up, speaking in public,

people in your family have probably a family history of locked jaw issues with their teeth and those kinds of things. I just want to say that everything you just said was on point. I love how you connected the two. So you connected the speaking to your power. Yeah. And so here's where the healing comes in. Once you have an awareness of that, then you can start clearing the energy field between here and here, between your, you know, your solar plexus and because that whole area is affected, right? And so, so what happens is that your power gets usurped by your ability to speak up. Mandy, isn't this amazing? Because what started my journey was I realized my root chakra was going backwards. And I about shit my pants. I'm like, I've done so much work, what's happening? I sat with my root chakra, sat with my, and all of a sudden the whole ancestral thing just opened up. That was, that's very, and my hips were hurting. My legs were hurting. I was going to the ER because I

had all of this deep, deep, just agonizing pain in my legs. It was calling me. My body literally was calling me to give awareness and heal my lineage. Yeah. And the whole thing around hips, the hips of the cradle, that's, that's the first, our first cradle is our hips. And so you can see that as a connection to your ancestry, because that it's, it's about birthing and who birthed. So I have severe lung problems. I've had respiratory failure twice in my life. So, I mean, I have asthma to the point where it affects me every day. I don't breathe.

Right. Wow. I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. It's yeah, no, it's amazing. The thing about healing is that once you become aware, awareness really helps people to heal because awareness allows you to make different choices. And when you make different choices, you literally are accessing a different energy field.

One that you're currently and consistently existing. Conscious too. And you're choosing to do it consciously. I would love to challenge our listeners right now and like go deeper. You know, some may be just coming into their spiritual journeys and some people may be in the midst of it. But, you know, no matter where you are, you should be always learning and continuing to grow. So I would love to just like right now, like if,

can you bring them to a discernment to maybe connect to that? Yeah, sure. Yeah. I mean, all you have to do is just take a nice deep breath and if it makes you more comfortable, you can close your eyes and, and just become aware of your feet. How do your feet feel on the floor or in your socks or in your shoes? And just be with that awareness of your feet for a minute, and then bring your awareness up to your knees and notice how your knees are bent. If you're sitting down or if they're straight because you're lying down. And then bring your awareness all the way up to your head.

And then you take a nice deep breath and blow it out. And then bring your awareness down into your chest. And just notice your heart, how your heart is beating inside of your chest. And anything else you notice, and just be aware of that. And then silently to yourself, without speaking out loud, simply say to yourself, racism. Racism. Racism. racism. And see if you notice anything in your body, in your chest, in your heart.

Take a nice deep breath. Blow it out. And simply say to yourself, peace. Peace. Peace. Take a nice deep breath. Blow it out. And see if you notice a difference between the words racism and the word peace in your body. And what was that difference and where did you notice it

first of all thank you so much i felt it in my heart so much and it almost felt like an immediate heaviness on my heart and then when when you said for me to say peace, I got very emotional. Yeah. And what did you feel the peace? I felt it universally. What about you, Mandy? the difference was so intense the when I was saying racism I literally felt nauseous yeah there's your solar plexus yeah really really nauseous and like I couldn't breathe like a lump in my throat again and then when I said peace it was almost as if i felt like air flowing through through me circulating naturally around me like my aura just opened up a little yeah i felt more open like i could breathe yeah yeah and that's just a simple example of changing states of consciousness. You went from one state of consciousness to another,

you did it just like that. And it shifted your body because the body makes a chemistry for everything. It shifted the way your body felt inside, inside. And so just think about what can happen if you make a practice of peace. Peace is not something that's out there, that's somewhere that other people control. Even wars cannot control peace. Okay. I know that's going to sound weird. Right.

But peace is one of those inalienable parts of our humanity. Peace is always with us it never goes anywhere we have access to it any given moment of the day but we have to choose it it's an actual choice and the more you choose peace the more your body becomes comfortable being in that state. And once that state becomes part of who you are, it's harder for you to be disturbed. And it's easier for you to work through your traumas. And it's easier for you to become resilient. Because your resilience comes from the same place that peace comes from there's something greater in you that whole states of consciousness that allow you to be

whatever it is you want to be in this moment and nobody else has power over that. No one. Yeah. So now after George Floyd was murdered by Chauvin, I realized that people were traumatized. And so I created a program to help people move through that trauma. We did it for about a year and a half and it's a lunch and learn, but I'm doing them once a month now. So it's the first Monday of every month at 12 noon Eastern. I teach about a subject that's related to race and then we have conversations and it's called the Race Literacy Lunch and Learn. And that program has now been open to organizations so that organizations can sponsor the program and send their employees once a month. We have this powerful transformative conversation. We talk about equity, which a lot of organizations don't seem to understand what equity really

is and how you can't have equity in an organization if you don't understand race. And so that program is open to any organization that wants to sponsor, but it's also open to individuals who want to come. You can join on a monthly basis or you can join for the year. And if you join for the year, you'll have access to the videos because we record all the programs. And so that's something that people can do. I've written five books, if you count the journal, on the subject of race. My latest book is Cracking the Healer's Code, a prescription for healing racism and finding wholeness. And you can get that book, any of my books, you can get them on Amazon. Let's see what else. Oh, there's

the 15 week program, which is transformative. And in order to qualify for that program, you have to have read cracking the healer's code or attended my two day seminar, which is a two day intensive that I've been doing for the past 20 years that people just never see race the same way again. And you could just go on my website and there are a lot of programs and things like that. And if anyone would like for me to come and speak at their organization, I do keynotes and I'm also a coach and I'm the only coach that I know of who coaches people around the issue of race leaders because leaders, even when their hearts are in the right place, they often don't know what to do, especially when it comes to this particular issue. So yeah. So lots of good stuff

happening. Oh my gosh. So much good stuff. Wow. And what is your website? It's milagrosphillips.com. It's just my name.com. Awesome. As they always say, it's all in the delivery and you deliver it with such love that I feel like so many people can receive it and need to receive it. So thank you for that because it's so important. Thank you so much, Mandy.

Yeah. I'm so grateful to have met the two of you and excited to have shared this time with you. This is beautiful. Please join us in our lunch and learn. We are going to be there. Share it with your community because it really is transforming lives. Wow. Thank you so much for doing what you're doing. And now it's time for break that shit down.

Let yourself become race literate. It'll transform your life. It'll transform the way you view the world. It'll transform the way you vote. It'll transform the way that you teach your children. It'll transform everything. Because it is one problem that the human race can actually solve. But we just need to become conscious and we need to choose to do it. Oh, thank you. Because what are we going to do when the aliens come? We're going to have to go through that too. There you go. That's right. Thank you so much. Thank you. Honored to have you. It's been my pleasure and an honor to be with the two of you. Thank you so much. Who would we be as Americans if, along with reading, writing, and arithmetic, we were also educated to be race literate? I was born in the land where the Middle Passage began.

When Columbus sailed the ocean blue and he was headed back to Spain from Quisqueya, also known as La Española, also known as the Dominican Republic in Haiti, he took with him gold, silver, fruits, vegetables, spices, and human cargo in the form of Tainos. The Tainos were an Arawak people living on that island, on Quisqueya, when he discovered it. It was an interesting journey for Columbus. Imagine sailing the dark waters of the ocean for months, looking for a way to India and landing on this. To say the least, the man was seriously lost. When I was learning about slavery in the Dominican Republic, I remember being about seven years old. I was in Catholic school. And the stories literally made me sick to my stomach. The history books were filled with very unpleasant stories about slavery.

And I remember feeling disconnected, feeling hurt, upset, and not knowing quite what to do with myself. I was about 10 years old when I came to the United States, and the stories that I learned about slavery were not that much different from what I had learned. No one ever told me that the people who were being kidnapped from the African continent, with the help of the Africans,

were actually warriors, that they were kings and queens, that they were basket weavers, astronomers, architects, that a lot of them were highly educated, that the first university in the world was the University of Timbuktu. It's very interesting the things that we've left out of history and the difference that they make when we know them. America has an interesting history with immigrants and also with natives. The Native Americans were forcibly removed from their lands. Our government broke over 200 treaties with them.

When the Italians and the Irish first started to arrive on our shores, they had a difficult time getting hired. Nina was often seen not just in the advertising for jobs, but also in storefronts. Nina meant no Irish need apply. The Chinese were run after one town after another, and in some cases lynched after they helped to build the railroads. The Japanese were given just a few days to sell everything they had and were interned for years during the Second World War. We are a very interesting nation. The Jews have been attacked in one place and another,

and the Mexicans have been discriminated against all over this nation. One of the things that is really interesting or certainly was very interesting to me as I was learning about slavery, was that what I was learning felt like oppression, even though I didn't have that language at the time, and tyranny. The other interesting thing was that I was the only dark-skinned child in that classroom when I was first learning about slavery in the Dominican Republic. And while I was absorbing and internalizing the tyranny and the oppression, my white classmates were receiving the same exact story, but they were internalizing it from the perspective of superiority and supremacy, even though no one ever said that to them. The thing about being racially illiterate is that it blinds us to the various forms of oppression. While it's obvious how people of

color are oppressed, it's not always so obvious and visible when oppression is hidden behind privilege and tucked under the loss of community, wealth, and power. So what do we do? How do we become more race literate? Well, you have to be curious. You have to start asking questions. You need to engage in conversations and take risks and sometimes those risks are you're gonna make mistakes. Ask for pardon but don't stay silent. Silence is killing all of us. Race literacy is something that affects pretty much all of us

because for the most part, we have been very misinformed about race. And those who are misinformed are bound to miscreate. So what is race literacy? Here's how I define it and I had to come up with a definition because I didn't find one in any books that I read. So my definition is race literacy is the knowledge and awareness of the history of race, how one is acculturated into a racial caste, the systems in the nation state that support race as a human divide, and the impact of all of the above on our current events and individual lives. So what are the things that are impacted by race? Well, there's education.

When we separate African American history, Native American history from American history, what we're saying is that those people didn't contribute. And so therefore their history is not important and not worth telling. When we do that, the inference is that those people are not important. What about health care? Well, race literacy could determine whether a health care provider will include intergenerational and historical trauma in creating a treatment

plan for you. The Institute of Medicine did a research project that was actually, the members of Congress had asked for this in 1999. And what they found was that racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare exist. And because they're associated with worse outcomes, in many cases, are unacceptable. A healthcare provider will actually determine what they're going to say to you, how much information they will give you based on race, which is why the members of Congress asked for that study. The disparities exist. How about in organizations? Well, race affects hiring, firing, mentoring, company policies,

and ultimately, the bottom line. In February of 2017, there was an article in the Washington Post and it read that Silicon Valley companies, companies that fail to diversify from management right on down, risk hurting their bottom line. We all know how diversity affects an organization. It makes the organization more innovative, and it makes the organization much more open and able to receive more people of color. What about at the national level? How does race affect us there? Well, race determines who runs for office, who gets funded for running for office. It determines our laws and how those laws are made.

In November of 2013, a report released by the Alterum Institute and funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation informs us that minorities continue to suffer systemic discrimination that weaken the U.S. economy and that closing the earnings gap between whites and people of color would actually boost the economy by $1 trillion. So why become race literate? If we are serious about becoming racially awake, racially aware, and changing the culture of our country, then race literacy needs to be part of our educational system. Race literacy informs how we treat one another. It helps us to understand the past.

And when we understand the past, we're able to understand the present. When we understand the present, we can get creative about how to be more equitable and create a more equitable society. How do we enhance our race literacy? We enhance our race literacy by reading more, asking more questions, engaging in conversations. We literally need to open ourselves up to new possibilities, creating new friendships, going to new and different places. But most of all, we need to become risk takers. It's absolutely worth it. Because when enough of us take our personal brick out of the wall of separation, the wall will crumble, and we can recycle those bricks to build a more equitable path.

In closing, I want to say that race is not biology. There's only one human race, one human family. Genetically, we are all related. Cuz. But the truth about racism is that racism is real, and it affects all of us. I want to close by leaving you with two questions. Who would we be as Americans

if all of us were educated to be race literate? And what can you do today, on this very day, to enhance your race literacy? Thank you. Thank you. Join me on my ancestral journey as I untangle my roots and set out to uncover the stories of a forgotten culture and discover true history never told. Hop on Sense of Soul Patreon right now and sign up. Thanks for being with us today.

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