The new year is a great time to reflect on where we are coming from and where we are going. But instead of hustling into the new year, setting toxic resolutions and unrealistic goals, Octavia Raheem is encouraging us to rest. 

This podcast conversation features author, mentor and yoga teacher, Octavia Raheem. In her new book, Pause, Rest, Be: Stillness Practices for Courage in Times of Change, Octavia offers us a powerful guide to navigating the many changes we are facing with wisdom and ease. Instead of trying to push our way through endings, beginnings, and places of uncertainty, only to find ourselves more confused, more disconnected, more exhausted than ever, Octavia encourages us to lean back and trust in the transformative power of rest. 

“Now” she says” is no ordinary moment in time. Now is a place of startling individual collective endings. Now is the space before something else becomes. Now is both a promise and fulfillment of fresh beginnings”. 

This conversation is a gift to all of us who are navigating the mess of this moment and yearning for so much more. 

Check it out

Connect with Octavia Raheem:

Buy Pause, Rest, Be: Stillness Practices for Courage in Times of Change

Check out Octavia’s rest offerings

Follow Octavia on instagram

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This podcast features Shannon Algeo, author, meditation teacher, therapist and my neighbor :-)

In our conversation, we get personal and reflect on our experience of living together and surviving the many pandemics of the last few years and what it looks like to really look out and care for each other through uncertain times. 

We talked about how having hard conversations and giving critical feedback is actually a radical form of care. It affirms that we matter to each other. And it’s how we build trust and community together.

This conversation is intimate and important in how it invites us to really live into the spirit of community care that we are so desperately trying to co-create.  

Connect with Shannon Algeo

Buy Trust Your Truth: Heal Self-Doubt, Awaken to Your Soul's Purpose, and Live Your Badass Life

Check out Shannon’s work

Follow Shannon on Instagram at @shannon.algeo

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Jacoby Ballard (he/they) is a social justice educator, yoga teacher and author of the new book A Queer Dharma: Yoga and Meditations for Liberation.

Jacoby defines Queer dharma as “a practice that interrogates systems of power and seeks liberation for all”. In our conversation, we talk about the intersections of yoga and capitalism and white supremacy and cultural appropriation while also returning to the wisdom of yoga - that the yoga practice as it was intended provides a visionary pathway forward to a liberated life. 

Jacoby invites us to be in a critical and courageous inquiry around how we resist the straight dharma that we have been fed by dominant culture and embrace the truth of our interdependence and collective wellbeing. 

This conversation is juicy and essential.

Check it out.

Connect with Jacoby Ballard

Buy A Queer Dharma: Yoga and Meditations for Liberation

Visit Jacoby’s website

Follow Jacoby on Instagram at @jacobyballard

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Vivette Jeffries Logan is a lot of things AND she is a force of nature. She’s a powerful and seasoned facilitator of race equity work. And she’s a mother, a chef, a mentor and a citizen of the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation. 

This podcast with her is a whole journey of joy and laughter AND asking really hard questions about who we are and how we heal? 

Together we explore what it means to be curious and critical of how we’ve been shaped by a toxic dominant culture AND how we hold space for our humanness. She invites us to hold the complexity of both/and and embrace our whole, messy and surly (as she calls it) experience of being alive in these times and doing our part to heal ourselves, one another and the land that we come from. 

Vivette inspires us to ask hard questions about who we are and where we come from so that we can take our place in the world and get in ‘right relationship’ with what is needed for collective healing. 

Check it out. 

Connect with Vivette Jeffries-Logan

Visit Vivette’s website

Follow Vivette on Instagram at @tobaccobird65

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Kate Johnson is a buddhist meditation teacher and author of the book Radical Friendship which makes a case for friendship as a radical practice of love, courage and trust, and a path that paves the way for profound social change

Relationship as spiritual practice is often a mirror for what we cannot see or know in isolation. Through each other, deeper truths are revealed that make growth possible. 

On this podcast, you’ll hear Kate and I talk about navigating our own messy experience of conflict and repair and what it is to find each other again after all these years and practice relationship in a different way. 

This conversation was deep and vulnerable and shows us what is possible when we lean into change one relationship at a time.

Check it out.

Connect with Kate Johnson

Visit Kate’s website

Follow Kate on Instagram at @hellokatejohnson

Buy Kate’s book, Radical Friendship, Seven Ways to Love Yourself and Find Your People in an Unjust World

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This week’s courageous conversation is with Hala Khouri, a brilliant yoga teacher and somatic counselor specializing in trauma.

In the podcast, Hala asks “how good are we at repair? Because unless we get good at that, we can't be in this messiness and stay united”

This podcast is about trauma and anxiety, but it is also about how we take care of ourselves and one another, how we navigate the chaos of this moment with creativity, and how we practice change in small and big ways.

Connect with Hala Khouri

Visit her website

Follow her on Instagram at @halayoga

Buy her book, Peace from Anxiety: Get Grounded, Build Resilient, Stay Connected Amidst the Chaos

If this episode resonates with you, we’d love for you to take a screenshot and tag us on Instagram stories @ctznwell, @kkellyyoga and @halayoga

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This week, my dear friend, Michelle Cassandra Johnson is back to help us tend to the shattered parts of ourselves so that we can embrace our wholeness and do the work of healing the collective heart. 

In the podcast, she says, what's needed in this moment isn’t to get back to normal or to get back to work or to get back being busy and productive. What's needed is to acknowledge what we’ve gone through and what has been lost. We must feel in order to heal. 

Her new book, refuge.com">Finding Refuge: Heartwork for Healing Collective Grief, is a radical invitation for those of us who feel brokenhearted, helpless, confused, powerless, and desperate in this moment to embrace the lost art of grieving as an essential component of healing. This book moved me and made me feel new depths and dimensions of my grief that I honestly didn't know was there. It made me reflect on how I, like many others, have attempted to manage my grief behind closed doors - alone and isolated. But Michelle reminds us that we don’t grieve in isolation in the same way that we don’t heal in isolation. 

This podcast is a beautiful and joyful reminder that despite the difficult and uncertain times we are facing - we are resilient together and have the capacity to meet this moment with an open heart that can heal us forward.

Connect with Michelle Cassandra Johnson

Visit her website

Follow her on Instagram at @skillinaction

Buy her book, refuge.com">Finding Refuge: Heartwork for Healing Collective Grief

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Kicking off this season is the powerful Tracee Stanley, yoga teacher, author and who’s new book Radiant Rest: Yoga Nidra for Deep Relaxation & Awakened Clarity, has been a lifeline for me in the last couple months. 

In the book, Tracee says that rest is our birthright, and when we are able to embrace that - we begin to see how we have been asleep in our lives. It is an essential practice in a moment when dominant culture is telling us to get back to normal and perform being woke. We practice rest so that we can remain awake - awake to the reality of our interdependence and collective survival. 

Connect with Tracee Stanley

Visit her website

Follow her on Instagram at @tracee_stanley

Buy her book, Radiant Rest: Yoga Nidra for Deep Relaxation & Awakened Clarity

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This conversation is really timely as it explores how we reach for each other across distance so that we can build beloved communities in these unique times. It features Minister Lauren Cunningham, Francisca Porchas Coronado, Rev Brandon Wrencher and Minister leea allen and offers a really cool behind the scenes perspective by leaders who are innovating and adapting community spaces for healing and grieving and transformation.

One of the things Lauren reminds us of is that “there is no end to what a living world will demand of you”. Even while our presence is reduced to screens and keystrokes, muting and unmuting - we are still alive and the world demands we live. 

Imagining new ways of being together and healing together and growing together is what this moment is calling for. And this episode is a good start.

Connect with Reverend Lauren Cunningham:

Follow Lauren on Instagram

Connect with Francisca Porchas Coronado:

Follow Francisca on Instagram

Check out La Cura Podcast

Connect with Minister leea allen:

Follow leea on twitter

Connect with Reverend Brandon Wrencher:

Follow Rev Brandon on Facebook

Check out Good Neighbor Movement

Connect with Faith Matters Network:

Follow them on instagram @faithmattersnetwork

Check out the Daring Compassion Course

Donate to their Nurture Brave Space fundraising campaign

If this episode resonates with you, we’d love for you to take a screenshot and tag us on Instagram stories @ctznwell @kkellyyoga @electricladymsj @franciscaporchas @leeavallen @goodneighbormovement @livin_as_lauren

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This episode is from a three-part series called “How We Get Through: Collective Resilience in a World on Fire” from our friends at Faith Matters Network. It aired in the Fall of 2020 which was a time in our country where we were literally on fire - California and other parts of the country were raging during the time of this series. But we were also amidst many pandemics at once - the pandemic of covid, the pandemic that is structural and cultural racism, the pandemic of record inequality and of course the pandemic that is climate change.  

And what is different about this series - besides the fact that it features brilliant movement leaders - is that it explores not just what we DO in the face of this fire but how we BE together; how we keep going and meet whatever comes next so that we can bring about the future that we all deserve.

This particular conversation featuring Kazu Haga, Xan West, organizers from the chilean movement La Coordinadora Feminista 8M and Carinne Luck explores how movements in and of themselves are healing - how healing has been woven in from building relationships in small teams to exploring how to create containers for rage and healing in the streets and bring in intentional joy. 

It is a provocative conversation about reclaiming our power to heal ourselves and one another.

Connect with Kazu Haga

Follow Kazu on Facebook

Buy his book Healing Resistance

Check out East Point Peace Academy

Connect with Xan West:

Follow Xan on Instagram

Check out their work at One Life Institute

Connect with LCF8M:

Check out their website

Connect with Carinne Luck:

Follow Carinne on Twitter

Connect with Faith Matters:

Follow them on instagram @faithmattersnetwork

Check out the Daring Compassion Course

Donate to their Nurture Brave Space fundraising campaign

If this episode resonates with you, we’d love for you to take a screenshot and tag us on Instagram stories @ctznwell, @kkellyyoga, @carinne luck @XanWest @eastpointpeaceacademy

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