State Of Grace: Liberation and Surrendering the Body's Agreements to Hold onto Trauma | Episode 36
Joshua Young is a spirit-led guided meditation, yoga, and emotional intelligence teacher based in Atlanta, Ga. They guide meditation sessions that merge African Ancestral practices and philosophies to support the reimagining of wellness as we know it today. They empower BIPOC to seek a deeper connection to àṣẹ and Ori by merging guided meditation with what we & our ancestors know. Joshua cultivates practices that provide tools for moving through awakenings that encourage, vulnerability, community building, ritual, and empowerment to take steps towards healing. They contribute content for insight timer and continue to utilize this resource to make meditation more accessible and inclusive for Black, Indigenous, People of color and LGBTQ+ community members.
This episode we discuss
🌈How mindfulness can serve people of color and marginalized folks
🌈The key to releasing feelings from the body
🌈How we've been socialized to reject emotions
🌈The importance of working with healers that honor your lived experience
🌈Using money as a love offering
Episode Resources
https://www.instagram.com/trustyourori/
Body Liberation for All Theme
They might try to put you in a box, tell them that you don't accept when the world is tripping out tell them that you love yourself. Hey, Hey, smile on them. Live your life just like you like it
It’s your party negativity is not invited. For my queer folks, for my trans, people of color, let your voice be heard. Look in the mirror and say that it's time to put me first. You were born to win. Head up high with confidence. This show is for everyone. So, I thank you for tuning in. Let's go.
This transcript was generated with the help of AI. Becoming a supporting member helps us improve accessibility and pay equitable wages for things like human transcription.
This conversation was aired as a livestream just days after the January 6th attack on the capital, a frustrating but by no means surprising reminder of the double standards in this country.
Joshua’s insights about managing high periods of stress felt so relevant in the aftermath of the most recent mass murder of LGBTQIA+ folks in the US that I thought it an excellent time to revisit this conversation.
Dalia: I'm so proud of us right now. Look at us, just mastering the technology. Okay, so we're officially starting now.
Hello everyone, thank you for joining us. You know what time it is. You know how extremely stressful this week has been. We already knew America loved white supremacy, but we might not have known how much and maybe didn't know how we would be affected by watching America show its ass this week.
I know for me; I was so easily triggered this week and just everything pushed me right over the edge. Someone tried to condescend to me, another dietitian on TikTok. And I like literally lost my mind, immediately. She just assumed because I'm a brown person and because I'm in a bigger body that I don't know anything and wanted references at random and I was just like, NOT TODAY.
And I just didn’t want to feel so reactive. So, I was happy that we already had this scheduled. What can you tell us about how you have been processing this week and how long you've been working on your mindfulness and being non-reactive?
Joshua: Yeah, so first off, thank you for having me. This week is interesting.
As a person who's really wanting to be living the life that is wellness, there's a lot of things that happened for me.
And one of the things that I know is that if I'm not making myself a priority, no one else will. And so, this week I had to do what I had to do and that was taking a week off of work.
And I've literally dedicated this whole week to giving something back to myself or connecting to something that's always been really important to me and making that the big news, making that the biggest thing that's happening for me.
That’s been what's serving me. So, I've been like cooking, I've been talking to friends.
I've been just doing my best to exist in the way that I want to exist. And yeah, mindfulness and meditation and all those things show up in those spaces as well because I gotta really know who I am first.
Before I can realize, oh, it takes this, it takes that, it takes this. For me wellness, meditation, mindfulness is the only thing that I have when it comes to existing and being well, when oppression is still a thing. And it's always been.
And when it, you know, as it relates to like my body and what I'm doing with it, how people are perceiving it, wellness is like my medicine. And so, meditation is just my thing. I don't know. It's always been my thing. I think that like very early on in my life that's what I was doing.
I was just sitting, and I was just paying attention to what was happening around me. And you know, family label this as shyness, like, oh, Josh is just shy. I'm not shy. You decided that, and what I decided was that I'm gonna be mindful. I'm gonna be mindful of what's happening around me and how I'm feeling.
And that work just continued and it expanded into this, where I realized like, oh, there's like deep value in that and knowing who I am. Knowing how I feel, being comfortable with it, whether it's something that's really good or not so good. And realizing oh, I can teach people this too.
I'm a great teacher because I've been watching people and understanding how we're learning, how we are retaining information and how we're utilizing it.
So, a lot of things have been on my side when it comes to wellness and meditation. And I'm happy.
Dalia: That's so interesting that you naturally have that inclination.
And I know for some people who, depending on how you process energy and information, it is more intuitive to make the room for introspection.
I also know that for a lot of us who have dealt with so much trauma over our lifetime. We’re afraid of silence and afraid of introspection because if we get in touch with our emotions, it feels like it may just break something loose, and we'll feel outta control, we’ll feel overly distressed, and so we're afraid of it consciously or unconsciously, and we keep avoiding the silence and avoiding things like mindfulness. And this year in particular, it's been very difficult if you've been running from emotions and if you've been suppressing them. It's been hard to keep that running going because there has been so much space and room for introspection.
Joshua: Yeah.
Dalia: But like you mentioned before the call, if you don't feel the feelings and you don't process the feelings, they get stuck. So even when we think we're protecting ourselves by avoiding our emotions, running from them, they can't really be escaped. Can you talk about that more?
Joshua: Yeah. Okay. So first I wanna say this.
When I talk about the experience for people of color or from the lens of people of color, I'm talking from the lens of a Black person. I'm a Black person, and when I think about from the very start, right, learning what the emotions are all about, how to express them when it's appropriate to, what I find in conversation with other people is that we're limited to those experiences.
Sadness is not something that I was like openly allowed to experience. Like people were trying to constantly fix it. People were constantly telling me, boys don't do that. You need to cut that out. You know, this is something that you have to stop. And, you know, it was almost like in this family, you know, space, only certain people at certain levels could experience things.
So I had no room for anger. I was doing something wrong by being angry or by being sad or sometimes like expressing too much joy.
Like, you know, if we're just getting down to the truth of it. This is just, this is just it. This is kind of what's happening in the family dynamics. And so now as a young adult, I've been through it all.
I've had th…
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