The Menstruality Podcast - 91. How Cycle Awareness Can Help You Uncover Your Race Story (Dr Sunshine Kamaloni)

Episode Date: June 8, 2023

Understanding how to dismantle racism is a charged and complex topic. So today we’re exploring how  menstrual cycle awareness can be a profound ally as we work to unravel our own unconscious bias, and find our way of deconstructing oppressive systems. My guest is Dr Sunshine Kamaloni who has a PhD in cultural studies and a deep cycle awareness practice. She shares from her own personal journey working with her inner seasons in her equity, inclusion, diversity and belonging work to unpack how the muscles that cycle awareness grow in us can help us to uncover our own personal race story.We explore:What a race story is, how they underpin unconscious bias, and how they impact us differently depending on where we are in the structure of the system. The blessings of inner winter as a time to rest, stop, ground and nourish as we take stock of who we are and how we sit with race, inside a safe container with less charge.How our own inner critic can actually be a supportive force as we uncover our race stories; as a truth-speaker showing us our blindspots and a guide in evaluating our progress. ---Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love---The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [e-mail]---Social media:Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.schoolSophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardyDr Sunshine Kamaloni: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sunshinekamaloni

Welcome to the Menstruality Podcast, where we share inspiring conversations about the power of menstrual cycle awareness and conscious menopause. This podcast is brought to you by Red School, where we're training the menstruality leaders of the future. I'm your host, Sophie Jane Hardy, and I'll be joined often by Red School's founders, Alexandra and Sharni, as well as an inspiring group of pioneers, activists, changemakers and creatives to explore how you can unashamedly claim the power of the menstrual cycle to activate your unique form of leadership for yourself, your community and the world. Hey, welcome back to the podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in today. Understanding how to dismantle racism is a charged and complex topic. So today we're exploring how menstrual cycle awareness can be a profound ally as we work to unravel our own unconscious bias and find our way of deconstructing oppressive systems in our world.

My guest is Dr. Sunshine Cameloni who has a PhD in cultural studies and a really deep cycle awareness practice and she shares from her own personal journey, working with her inner seasons in her equity, inclusion, diversity and belonging work to unpack how the muscles that cycle awareness grows in us can help us to uncover our own personal race story. We explore what a race story is and how race stories underpin unconscious bias and impact us differently depending on where we are in the structure of the system. We look at some of the blessings of inner winter as a time to rest, stop, ground

and nourish as we take stock of who we are and how we sit with race inside the safe container of inner winter which has less charge to it and we look at how our own inner critic can actually be a supportive force as we uncover our race stories both as a truth speaker showing us our blind spots and a guide in evaluating our progress. So I hope you enjoy this conversation, it's so rich and deep and I'm so grateful to Sunshine for everything she shared. Let's get started with how cycle awareness helps us to uncover our race story with Dr Sunshine Sunshine Cameloni. So welcome to the podcast, Sunshine. You know, you and I met around a year ago on the Cyclical Business Program, and I really valued your contributions in that program. I could feel the depth of your cycle awareness practice and then I got to know about

your work and I immediately thought I would love to have a conversation on the podcast with this woman so thank you so much for making the time for this and let's let's dive in the way we always do with a cycle check-in it would be great to hear where you're at how you're doing well so first of all I'm so honored to be on the podcast because this is it's one of my favorite podcasts and I think I've said this to you many times so I feel really delighted to be to be on it because I listen to it all the time and I love it day 14 today so that's in my summer um and i'm feeling soft um a touch of melancholy a bit tired yeah but mostly present and just trying to feel into the energy of summer um so i don't tend to have a lot of energy in terms of you know some most

people experience summer as their action um in a season but for me it's sort of like it's always like this softer kind of energy and yeah some sort of feeling feeling that softness and just trying to settle into it thank you for sharing that that your experience is slightly off the archetypal i'm doing quotation marks here archetypal map of the inner seasons and i think so many of us find ourselves in this territory where it doesn't necessarily fit some of the ways that the seasons are described and i love the the way Alexander and Charlie talk about this, that this is a great invitation to get even closer to our own experience. And remember that the big red rule, like the only rule of red school,

the only rule of menstruality, which is our experience is what matters, you know, and getting closer to that. So that's really interesting, a softness around your ovulation. I'm with you in inner summer. I on day 16 so I'm just I think I ovulated about three days ago and I'm really feeling this allowing that the power of allowing in summer and I'm practicing letting myself be more unfiltered, editing myself less, reaching out based on instinct and intuition to collaborate and build relationships. It's fun. I'm really riding off the energy this month. And I can feel it. There's a lot of charge in me. And if I'm not careful, it's like in a spring,

if I'm not careful, it becomes anxiety. So I was just chatting with you before we started this. I'm breathing deep. This is excitement. This breathing deep this is excitement excitement big day ahead and this big conversation we're going to have I'd love to dive in by asking you where this work where your work began for you and what is it rooted in and what do you love about working for justice and diversity and inclusion and belonging what's your yeah what's driving this for you I think I've always been interested in justice or questions around justice because I've always been interested in people and culture. And I remember growing up in, I grew up in Zambia, which is in the southern part of Africa. And it's a very collective culture.

So you sort of grow up with your, in big families, extended families, and then like communities. And so there's a sense of togetherness that sort of is part of the culture itself. And so I was very curious about people and curious about the ways that we lived. And so I think it came from that, that that that grounded desire to to know um to know people and also just a curiosity about the world like different parts of the world and um and then so it was interesting for me as i left home and moved to i moved to south africa first before I moved to Australia, like my different, I started tracking my experiences in how, you know, the different cultures, the kind of people I met, the way communities were set up, the way just structures, all of those things have always been, I've always just had a natural curiosity about those things. And so it was fascinating to me.

I really came into this work from a place of, like, excitement and curiosity that's, you know, like, wow, this is like, you know, people from different, oh, different parts of the world and different, you know, cultures and differences. So difference was just something that I really gravitated towards because it just fascinated me. But when I moved, when I moved countries,

I started experiencing, of course, I've always known there was, you know, racism because I've also been very scholarly in my pursuits, very interested in history and the formation of culture and history. And so I had that awareness, but it was a different experience having to actually be a recipient of those ideologies and ideas about how we think about people, how we think about difference in our world. So experiencing racism, experiencing like that kind of discrimination was also fundamental in helping me want to understand what was at the core of these kinds of structural issues or these interrelational issues. And so I went into my studies in my undergraduate studies

with that interest because I was also experiencing those things that I was interested in and so I wanted to understand and I did my PhD in the same area because I was you know I really wanted I was just hungry to to know and understand why why racism was such an issue and why was it persisting why haven't we overcome it despite all the work despite all the studies it's like it's still this continuing issue and so yeah so part of me was like it was just that curiosity and they're wanting to solve the problem i remember telling my my phd advisor I was gonna change the world you know I would be the person yes to do this but then two years into my research I was like oh my goodness this is much more

complicated than I thought it's much more complex um and I actually I have to then begin to face my own challenges in terms of putting myself at the centre of my research and my work and trying to understand how. personal embodied way because I think a lot of academic work as useful as it is has a tendency to obscure the experience of the body and I think there's a lot in that work around the embodied experience of diversity and difference that actually is the key to changing a lot of the ways that we have structured ourselves and our communities around race so and that's the part of the work that I feel just deeply resonates with me and and I love because it brings in a lot of different aspects. And this is partly why even psycho-awareness is very useful in this work because psycho-awareness is about a kind of embodiment that's like paying attention to your own experience with your cycle. And so bringing those skills into the work of diversity, equity and inclusion, it's just, yeah, it adds so much power and so much depth to it.

And transformation is possible from that place. Yes. Wow, you've said so much there sunshine and firstly I want to say how delightful and delicious it is to be sitting with a woman totally in her calling I can see it in your face as you're speaking like your eyes are so bright and secondly yeah so interesting to hear the way you speak about you entering your PhD and you came in I'm sort of thinking of the creative process here and the cyclical process of creativity that you came in with that inner spring yes joy and zest and passion and like big goals and big dreams and then got into the summer of the work like really getting down and exploring this vast and complex and deeply difficult topic of racism

the innocence that you came in with of you know we can solve this come on this this can't how is this still happening and then to get into that autumn place of oh okay this work is big and into the complexity and the difficulty and your your own personal experience and how that intersects you know that kind of via negativa deep part and to feel you in that process is is really fascinating and I hadn't thought of it that way so I love this framing that you put around it because that's exactly the process that I went through and where do you find yourself now like how is your especially as you've got deeper into cycle awareness how is that informing your work and sort of where are you what season are you in with your work right now I would say I've been in a deep winter with my work and even having when you and I worked together

on the cyclical business course I was just entering I think my whole life was entering this you know this deep winter because there was so many changes um happening at the time and so I feel like I still am but maybe I'm coming to the cast like to the end of it not just the cast but about to break break forth into some kind of spring but I still feel like I'm I'm still in that stage where I'm grounding myself and getting nourishment for the work and myself as a business owner and as a person and as a human. Because, yeah, like there's been the changes, like there's just been a lot of things happening. And so I've had to stop, like literally I had to stop which is what winter is all about like it's just this you know I have to pause a lot of things and then

think about how do I make this work more my own how do I infuse myself in this work and let it not be just, yeah, just doing it for the sake of doing it. Like how do I, because I want it to be meaningful to myself and also to the people that it lands on. And so that's, I think that's where I've been and still am in that stage. I really relate to that stage. And it speaks to me of the depth of your calling like there is a way that you want to express this through you and I can feel your loyalty to that. One of the approaches that you take that really I feel is so beautiful in the way it opens doors is you invite people to explore their race story

knowing that that is what is underpinning so much of the unconscious bias that can drive the racism in our world could you walk us into that your your way of understanding what a race story is and how it impacts us. Yeah. So the way that I think about a race story is like a collection of all of your history, your experiences, the thoughts and feelings, perceptions, ideas that you have about race. And this can be conscious or unconscious. And so I think of it as everything that gets activated in us

whenever race is put on the table is also part of that story um and i yeah and i guess the the point of stressing is the the point of um is this the part where it's it's both like i said it's both the conscious things the things that we're aware of and the things that we are not aware of so the unconscious so and this goes into the arena of the unconscious bias um so yeah so it's just all of that like everything you think and feel um have ever thought and felt and experienced about race and not just your own race but the race of other people as well so it's similar to how people talk about the money story everything that comes up whenever people mention money so in it's kind of a similar concept so everything that comes up for you when you think about race or you know your reactions actions and wow it feels like a very expansive personal intimate way to approach

anti-racism work or justice work or inclusion and belonging work bringing it right back home to what's okay what's going on in me where am I activated and then doing the deeper work which is a long slow process that takes time and yeah could you could you share what that looks like when you're walking someone through the uncovering and unearthing of their race story I I think what you just said, Sophie, the slowness bit is one of the things that I try to highlight, that the reason we're going slow is so that we can pay attention. And I think that that's a critical aspect or a critical skill in being able to sit with these whatever, you know,

these sometimes very complex and charged emotions that come up when we deal with race. So it's important for me that first of all we create a safe space for people to be able to sit with these things that come up their race story to be able to wrestle with what comes up so a safe space is what I try to in fact I think it's the most it's the single most important thing that I do is to just have this space where people can be able to unpack what their race story is. And then also allowing that slowness to be able to be –

it's kind of a superpower because when we go slow, we can notice and we can track what's happening as we kind of ask the deep questions, the intimate questions. So I do have like a process that I walk people through, the certain aspects that we focus on so there's a reflection which is like you like you said it's about that intimacy with yourself and asking questions um and so reflecting on your your own um thoughts and and ideas and and anything that comes up around race and And then there's also, we move on to perspective, which is we explore or like I sort of guide the client to explore the self in relation to others. And so this is where a lot of questions about how do you see yourself in relation to other human beings, your neighbour, as far as race is concerned.

Those questions get sort of answered in this section. And then I also have a third part of that process is what I call intention. And this is where whatever we have uncovered as we've reflected and thought about your perspective and things that have shifted how do you want them to take those things and use them out in the world how do you want to contribute to making the world a more a more racially inclusive space and I do see how that process sort of aligns with the at least i've made i've thought about since you and i have had this discussion i've been thinking about how those that that process aligns with the different inner seasons and the kinds of skills that you know the cycle

awareness gives us that opens us up to being able to um deal with a lot of the work that I do in helping people identify what their story is yeah you were saying in our conversation in preparation for this that the same skills or metaphorical muscles that we're building through cycle awareness are the same skills and muscles that are needed to do the uncovering of the race story work so I'm really excited to get into this and we'll go in a season by in a season to look at these these muscles before we do that I'd love to ask and I guess it's tapping into this inner winter place that you're in at the moment. I'd love to ask, what is the potential impact of this when each of us does do this work to uncover the race story?

What can that open up for us individually and us collectively? Wow, I love that question. I almost want to answer it in in a very simplistic way it could change the world yes back to that inner spring yeah I know yeah I feel that deeply that if we all did this work it would change how we see ourselves, first of all, and that would then change how we see other people and how we relate to them. And that's just at that level, but then that also has a ripple effect in changing the collective experience of our humanity and our experience of each other as people who share the planet,

which is something that's very, it's very personal and important to me. I, because I do talk a lot about responsibility and part of this responsibility is grounded in my understanding of the planet, the earth, as a shared space. So if I don't own the earth a sense of responsibility to think about other beings that are sharing the planet with me and how I can be in communion with them in a way that is not only beneficial for myself but for them as well. Yeah, so I think this work has a potential to make our world, make our relationships a bit more equitable,

a bit more real. I feel there's just a sense of realness. That's when we're able to be without differences and other people's differences. It just changes the dynamic and we can, instead of vilifying difference, we can see the value of it and celebrate it and then and i want to live in a world like that where you know where difference is

actually a superpower it's it's it's recognized for what it is and not and not something to be feared it just motivates me and inspires me to to want to do better because of course I want I want wellness for myself and I want wellness for my my neighbors and my friends and the people that I love thank you me too I want that too so something came up on my Instagram feed this morning, which to me really illustrates the importance of doing this work and the post said that the man the white man who killed him two million dollars had been raised for his legal fund whereas the fund for Jordan's family was only a hundred thousand dollars so we see there the huge inequality and also the depth of the racist and white supremacist beliefs that are absolutely alive in our world um and sometimes people especially white people i hear this from can think that we're in some kind of post-racial world and I think it's important it's very hard

but it's really important to look at the reality of the situation it's very hard obviously I mean it's it's hard for me and I know it's hard for a lot of people understand i i struggle to understand actually how that can be but then i when i think about the power that is because racism is about power essentially it's about access and privilege all of those concepts have to do with with power and so who has the power to determine who's worthy and who's not who's worthy of life and who's not worthy of life and and i think if we're operating from that basis from the base that some people are more worthy than others some people are more important than others and and race is just it's just it's just the cover of that and the hierarchy is it's real and i think this is one of the challenges i've had in talking to being a black woman myself from africa according

to the hierarchy you know i'm right at the bottom of that hierarchy which places white people right at the top and so one of the challenges that I've had in having conversations with particularly my white women colleagues and friends is that lack of I think I don't know if it's a lack of understanding but the pushback is always I am suffering too I have problems too and so it's very hard to have that conversation because the assumption is that we're all operating under an equal like the the you know like an equal base and i think that's the dismantling that idea that we all have the same access to opportunities same access to power is, I think, one of the key things that makes this issue very volatile and very hard to resolve.

So as long as we don't agree that there's a difference in where we're positioned in society and in the structure we would never agree on how hard it is for me for example as a black woman to exist in a world that is mostly created for white bodied people and from that perspective it makes sense that you would have more money raised for for the people that killed jordan than his side yeah it's oh it's very i find it very hard to wrap my brain around yeah I feel like this brings us back to the intimacy of the race story because so many of us can feel powerless in the face of these very negative toxic harmful forces in the world. And this work of coming home to ourselves and cultivating intimacy with ourselves

when it comes to our race and how we relate to other people can have a powerful impact because it's changing us, which changes our relationships with other people, which changes the world slowly and it's also not it's um I see some people kind of jump in to conversations about race with a lot of aggression that kind of seems to come from an unworked place you know I've been there I'm

gonna like own that I've definitely been there and doing this intimate work seems to help people come from a place that is less polarizing is that what you're seeing? Absolutely yes very much so and and I yeah I I I'm thinking now of the work that the, like that psycho awareness, in my view, and at least what I've learned from psycho trackingawareness can act as a container for holding big emotions and big feelings, often contradictory feelings. And those are the same skills that we bring to this intimate work of discovering and working with our race stories that that ability to be able to hold these very big emotions that come up when we talk about race we talk of guilt shame fear anger all of these things and because we're doing that work, we can come to the conversation from that place of being able to

hold it in, not to say you're ignoring it, but you're just holding it and being aware of it. And from that place, I think we can contribute a much more, in an open, more honest, very raw kind of like contributions to the conversation without kind of shying away or kind of like blazing our way through just because we're so angry or so fearful that we just um we can't even hold ourself present for the conversation so i love how that skill that psycho awareness gives us of being able to hold those big emotions is also the same similar to having um when we when we walk through the race story that's one of the things that we're learning to do, that how can I arrive at the table and have this very difficult conversation, still hold my own, but also be vulnerable enough to show myself. So I love that bit of the alignment of those two and the other thing about psycho awareness that i found really useful

is which you've been talking about sophie's how psycho awareness helps us meet us the differences in in our own cycle but in ourselves as well like the you meet your own shadows as you as you cycle track and and and you learn how to be with those difficult parts of yourself that you just want to banish, but they're there, they're part of you. And so being able to meet them and be with them is so valuable also for this work, this intimate intimate work around diversity equity and inclusion because when you can do that then you can be with your own difference your own race and also be with

other people's differences and race so i yeah i i can see how just all the skills like the superpowers that we learn from psycho awareness are the same superpowers that we can bring to our race story and and to this work in a much more softer tender way that I I think is actually much more transformative than simply doing a workshop or attending a talk so it's this is like really deep work I'm so grateful to Sunshine for the generosity of her teaching and sharing and the emotional labor it takes to educate like this around our race stories. Sunshine's book Understanding Racism in a Post-Racial World is available online wherever books are sold and I'll put a link to the book in the show notes at redschool.net forward slash podcast. I met Sunshine during our Your Cyclical Business course and I'm looking

forward to journeying with her again during our upcoming second live round of the course alongside an amazing group of cycle aware business owners looking to run and grow their businesses in a way that honors our bodies, our nervous systems and our full humanity. We begin on June the 9th and you can find out more and take your seat if you'd like to join us at yourcyclicalbusiness.com. Like you were talking about earlier, we can come at this from an academic place from a place of learning facts or like you said attending a workshop and feeling like we know something so a very cranial brain approach yes and then cycle awareness is helping us take that very short but very time-consuming walk from the head to the heart and into the body

to actually feel and to integrate and to know ourselves you've done this really you've segued us really beautifully sunshine into like going season by season because I feel like a lot of what you shared was very inner autumn muscles allowing ourselves to be tenderized and allowing ourselves to be worked by the questions. Inner autumn is hallowed ground, in my opinion. It's like the place where I land. It's the home for the inner critic, isn't it? And so I think it can get hard too, internally and emotionally, because your inner critic is active. You're also meeting your shadows here, like seeing all the places

where maybe you could have done better. You haven't. It's like the editing part. So it's like you have all this information and all of these experiences and now it's time to be with them and see how you can use them or what is it that you need to do. And so I feel like there's a clarity in inner autumn that's grounded in a wisdom because there's also the inner critic is a truth teller i i've really come to appreciate how that the inner critic is not just trying to destroy me or destroy my life it's actually it's valuable in that it can bring real insight and so i find that this corresponds very well to part of the race story that where I talk about the intention and this is where because we're right at the end it's almost at the end of the cycle we've sort of gone through winter spring summer so we have a lot of information about how we've gone through the seasons. And so in autumn, we can evaluate our intention for the work

and we can reflect and see how everything that we've done, everything that we've learned, how do we want to use that moving forward I think of them as ongoing embodied practices so in my mind this is where they sit in just an inner autumn it's just that editing season revising and then thinking about how can I do better in the next cycle. Poetry, it was making me reflect on some of the truth that my inner autumn has been delivering to me around this work because I've been reflecting a lot on colonisation and my ancestry there as a white woman and what I've been noticing is

the persecutor in me which is not a part of me that I want to look at or embrace at all I'm much more comfortable relating to the victim in me that can come up in the inner autumn which kind of speaks to some of what you were speaking about earlier around but I have problems too and I'm noticing how especially with my clear and it's difficult to come home to that and to see how that legacy of colonization is alive in me today so yeah that truth teller is we need to listen to it yeah such powerful insights of the I I'm just sitting with that because I I feel that and I feel the the challenge of that I find one of the beauties of the race story process is that very similar again to psycho awareness like it gets you to a place where

you're able to see something like that something so big like how am I a product of these big things that had nothing to do with me and yet it's like you it kind of reflects back on on you as a as a person or you know whatever your race is for me for example it was meeting myself and having to wrestle with my own inferiority because I think as a black woman I'm just nothing there's I've had no value to the world. And so having to confront those ideas that have been inculcated in us. And I've worked with white women who have to wrestle with the guilt of privilege. It's very hard. And yet it can also be softened so that we're able to see those things as not us you know like you said you're not you're not a colonizer I mean you're not and but without

awareness I could perpetuate that correct yes I think this is where slowing down and seeing the nuances of this, the complexity of how we can take on the image and the characteristics of these big oppressive powers and continue perpetuating the issues. And then I think this is where people would say, but I'm not doing anything and people get angry and and yeah it can be it can be quite complex but helpful to be able to to go in and actually look at these things and and unpack them so thank you inner autumn for Thank you, Inner Autumn, for helping us to do that. And then we move into Inner Winter. And yeah, how can Inner Winter support us in this work?

So Inner Winter is resting, stopping, grounding and nourishing so i see it as a all of these twos that um are about taking stock of and listening really listening to everything that's coming up in our reflections about who we are how we sit with race um what are the places of comfort and discomfort for us when race comes up in conversations our experience of it um so there's yeah i think just that allowing for that deep wisdom of inner winter to infuse us and to to nourish us um and yeah so that exploration of the self and the and your identity is is really i find is what inner winter is all about because it's you're in a soft place in terms of like you're opened up in a way that is very unique because of that, I guess, the nourishing and the grounding. And so you're able to see yourself in a less, I guess,

less charged in a way. You're safe. You're really, you're in this container. So you're kind of held very gently. And so you can look at yourself and all of these challenging places yeah the nourishing and the wisdom wow I love those four words that you shared at the beginning resting stopping grounding nourishing the mantra of the well that's the work in in a winter isn't it the work although it's not work

that's the that's what we can yield into and soften into and open up to and I love that how you highlighted the safety there because when we look out at the world and we see things like the story of what happened to Jordan the the world can feel very unsafe. And I speak as a white woman there, holding the privilege and the power that I do. So for people of colour, for black people, the lack of safety that can happen out in the world is a hugely destabilising force.

And knowing that menstruation is there as shani always talks about receiving the mother hug of menstruation so to know that that's there for us so that we can feel our safety as beings on earth i don't know if this is a trite thing to say but to have a moment outside of human culture and to feel ourselves as as natural and safe on that deep level um to fuel us up and again I speak as a white woman here to fuel me up to go out and change the structures that create the lack of safety for sure and I i think that that's actually one of the ways that the system perpetuates these injustices is by not giving us the spaces to stop and rest and so we end up having these conversations in this very charged very like um volatile spaces and no one's listening to anyone else.

We all just want to like speak into the, into the void. And, and yeah, so this, I think having the space, safe spaces where we can actually just unfurl and be, be ourselves and, and, and, and bring, of course, be angry, of course, bring all the emotions and allow them to heal. I think this has been important to me as a Black woman. And I realized I had to actually decide to create that space for myself because you're right, there's just not a lot of spaces in

the in the world where we can do that yeah and one of the ways that our white listeners who are wanting to contribute in a meaningful way can help is to provide support for especially the black and the people of color who are educating here. And I see this conversation happening a lot. There's a woman called Myesha T. Hill who runs Check Your Privilege. And she was calling for support to rest for a month because she works hard. And, you know, her followers rose up and contributed so that she could have a rest fund and I'm also thinking of the work of the NAP ministry and Tricia Hersey like incredible work grounded like you in years and years and years of research and study and learning and she highly she she posts these photos of social justice civil rights activists sleeping napping

in between their activism and so like it's so important to create to create space for rest here yeah because when we're rested then we can there's a power in that isn't there that we can't access when we're tired and just overwrought with emotions so i do yeah and i do see i do see the value of my inner winter um i mean thanks to the red school because i used to i i just had a very tumultuous experience or relationship with menstruation and in a winter in particular, but being able to tap into these strengths and these, just this gift, this gift that the rest allows me and anchoring down and has also transformed how I think about my work as a yeah my work in diversity and inclusion

okay let's take a quick pop into spring and summer to see how the the medicines and the powers of these seasons can help yeah I love how you spoke about the the different kind of clarity that arises in spring that's not from wisdom but actually from openness and curiosity I think it's that freshness isn't it the freshness of like the newness and so the the innocence of spring is akin to the innocence of a child. And so there's a sense of wonder in that curiosity. And so I think we can bring that same curiosity to our work with race because I think it infuses a newness of life and it brings us to a place where where we think about it not as a thing to be feared but as a thing to be curious about and to be like excited to to discover

what is it about race about my race that is um wonderful or what is it that makes me feel icky or like it's just that very openness and freshness that I really value with spring and that I can and I try to encourage my clients to think about it that way like it's don't be afraid I know it's a big scary thing when you look at it but when we enter it in when we enter into it it can also be something very wonderful because we're you're learning about something um or seeing something from a very different perspective and that's all that newness of life and um so I like how those skills of spring can actually help us that perspective can help us with this work as well in much the same way yeah it feels like it creates a lot of permission to explore and experiment and get things wrong because we will get things wrong as in we will have an impact which might

be harmful without us meaning to and then you get an opportunity to uh apologize and carry on and there's something about the quality of spring of you know try do your best try experiment explore from that place of curiosity that has a lot of permission in it yes oh absolutely and I see how like we even moving into summer because I I feel like summer is actually this place where um you take all of the all of the experimentation that you have that came up for you in spring and you take them out into the arena to act them out and i so i i see summer as the the place where you get to play because this is like of course it's the action it's um you're blossoming. It's like you're not afraid to just be yourself. Like you said, like you just not, you don't want to filter yourself.

You just want to, you know, you have that energy, you have that desire. So I do see summer as having a very special place because it kind of allows you to work on two things at the same time like work on the internal like the internal work but also the external side of the work which is you going out into the world and putting into practice what you've been working on internally and I think this is also the place where you're going to make mistakes and so the other gift of summer which I love is accept like acceptance that that trying not to be perfect like accepting yourself as you are, blossoming, showing up as you are and not trying to be perfect.

I think that's an important skill here because you will make mistakes in this work because it is sensitive for most people. And sometimes we say things that we didn't mean to say or we didn't say them correctly. And so I think the fear is that, you know, people will, I will say the wrong thing and I'll get cancelled. Or like, there's just so much. I find that there's a lot of fear around doing the work in this space. But I also think that if we approach the work from a place of curiosity

and also showing up as we are and just simply wanting to do the work, like the right motivation the right intention then even if we make a mistake we will we will want to learn from that mistake we will like you said apologize or um learn to do it in a different way um so i yeah i i just i do i i see I see summer as just that very wonderful space of exploration, acceptance, and awareness of also like the external, which here it brings into this awareness of the fact that we're not just dealing with our own unconscious biases. We're also dealing with a world that's structured in a particular way so um awareness of that is also valuable

wow thank you sunshine i feel like we've covered so much in an hour together i'm amazed and so grateful to you and i would love to ask if people are interested in working with you how can they do that thank you they can just contact me I am on LinkedIn I can be reached via LinkedIn I can also be reached through email I don't have a website at the moment. Great. So I'll drop your contact details in the show notes so that people can reach out to you. Or you can always email me at sophie at redschool.net and I can connect you to Sunshine. So thank you so much. This has been been incredibly rich and as we mentioned at the beginning this work is long and slow and deep but I feel like we have been able to

open some doors and plant some seeds here and I'm just I'm amazed by the depth of your passion for this by the depth of your understanding and this, by the depth of your understanding and how much time and energy and study and effort you've put into building this knowledge. And so that's the kind of cranial brain piece and then, and how you're embodying it through your body, how and how you're understanding it

through your cycle and how you're supporting others too. It moves me deeply and I'm very, very grateful for you and for your work thank you sunshine oh thank you so much Sophie that means a lot to me because it's it's work that I'm that I'm passionate about and it's also work that I, yeah, I hope that you will leave not so much an impact on the world, but I do want to make the world a little less dark, a little less hard and oppressive for people. And so it is special for me to be able to contribute in that way. So I'm really grateful for this opportunity to

talk with you I could talk to you all day because I really love your insights and just sharing this conversation with you thank you for having me thanks sunshine thanks Sophie ah wow i really appreciate sunshine's approach to dismantling racism through this lens of uncovering our race stories and if you'd like to explore her work you can find her book understanding racism in a post-racial world wherever books are sold. You can look at our show notes at redschool.net forward slash podcast or get in touch with me at sophie at redschool.net and I can connect you to Sunshine to do deeper work with her. And I also really recommend the work of Myesha T. Hill at Check Your Privilege and Tricia Hersey at The Nap Ministry and you can find both of those links in the show notes too. All right thank you so much for joining me today, thank you

for being part of the community that's gathered around this podcast, there's over 125,000 downloads of our episodes now and it's just so wonderful to feel the connection that we have together and I look forward to being with you again next week and until then keep living life according to your own brilliant rhythm. I love it how Frodo always snores, did you hear him? How he always snores in that bit, yes keep living life according to your own brilliant rhythm.