Each of us, if we live long enough, is going to experience trauma. Trauma is a Greek word that means injury to the body, mind or spirit. Parents, grandparents die, we may have major disappointments at work, we may get divorced, partners may die. So that's traumatic. I think we have to recover that understanding that trauma is a part of life. Collective trauma is what we're all experiencing right now. So you know, a mod arbor. In February, Brianna Taylor, in March, George Floyd in the Midsummer. We're getting reminders again that even in the midst of a pandemic, the pandemic of American racism is still steadily beating forward. It's not an individualized thing. This is a systemic thing. It's not an individualized experience of trauma. This is rooted in our countries. His three. Hi everyone, I'm Katie Kuric, and this is next question. It has been a brutal year, not only for the loss, heartache and isolation this pandemic has brought, but also because of everything else. It is the nightmare that America, I'm an especially African Americans country are living and experiencing over and over. She dialoged it in the comfort of her own home and over again. A mob, supporting and encouraged by President Trump, storm the US capital. We will never give up. We will never concede. It doesn't happen. You don't concede. Whether who would have ever believed we would see anything like this now to a disturbing rise and attacks on Asian Americans from California to New York. Six of his eight alleged victims were Asian women, viciously attacked in broad day lights. Tensions are already high in the city where the trial of former police officer Derek Showing. Even as the trial was going on, protests are raging once again in Minneapolis over the killing of another unarmed black man. Don't right, remembers the jury. I understand you have a verdict. It's a trauma. We the jury in the above entitled manner as to count one unintentional second degree murder while committing a felony, buying the defendant guilty, a brave young woman, a smartphone camera, a crowd that was traumatized, as to count two third degree murder, perpetrating and eminently dangerous act, find the defendant guilty. We saw how traumatic and exhausting just watching the trial was for so many people. Count three second degree manslaughter culpable negligence creating an unreasonable risk buying the defendant guilty of that verdict agree too. On top of the fear so many people of color live with every day when they go to sleep at night and pray for the safety of themselves and their loved ones. It's been painful, and even though we're starting to inch out of the shadow cast by this pandemic, depending on what you've experienced or witnessed this past year, the light that greets you may not be much comfort. So for now, in today's podcast, we want to acknowledge the trauma, the individual traumas, and the uniquely shared trauma of this past year, and how we can begin to heal. I think healing looks like honoring black culture and tradition, honoring our bodies. We have to see this as a public health emergency. When you're so used to being told that you are in the margins, and that you're supposed to be grateful for that slot in the margins, it's it's really liberating to learn that that is false and that you are capable of creating and living your own truth. Today, we'll hear from three healing practitioners, a psychiatrist, a parenting advocate, and a sewing group leader, each of them devoted to transforming trauma in their own way, and with their help will understand what share trauma means, how it's experienced, and how we can move forward. We'll start with the psychiatrist. Well, you know, psychiatry is all about trauma. Dr James Gordon is the founder and executive director of the nonprofit Center for Mind Body Medicine in Washington, d C. The origins of modern psychiatry with Freud and Broyer and Jane at the end of the nineteenth century, and what they understood is the power of psychological trauma, particularly early in life, to affect us later in life and to produce all the anguish and the symptoms of psychiatrist Saul. Dr Gordon is known for dealing specifically with popular latianwide psychological trauma from the effects of war, school shootings, or natural disasters, and he's using his new book, Transforming Trauma, The Path to Hope and Healing to pass on his decade's worth of knowledge to give people a step by step guide book to coming into balance and then using your imagination and reaching out to other people. Now. I met Dr Gordon, or Jim as I know him, in after Haiti's devastating earthquake. I was traveling down to Port of Prince frequently to report on the aftermath and recovery, and Jim was there with his center to work with Hades children, many of whom had been orphaned and their homes destroyed. Jim says that earthquake is a good example of a massive event that brings about not only individual trauma, but trauma that the community has to grapple with together. That's collective trauma. And we could see as we talked with those kids whom we were meeting at the hospital, each of those kids also had an individual problem physical injury, loss of a family member, but the whole society was effective and that's what we're seeing here. First and foremost I want to say before we dive into this pandemic which has resulted in so much collective trauma. Jim is, I'm so sorry about your brother who died at the beginning of the pandemic. Do you mind sharing what happened with us now what happened? I may start crying so because I'm missing so much. What what is might owner brother younger by thirteen years, and he had some kind of respiratory problem sinus infection. Is living in Dallas, Texas. He was doing okay, and the doctor said he was doing okay. He just declined. Nobody pushed him to go see a doctor. Everybody was staying home at that point, and so he just died. He died alone at home, and it was tragic for for me and for my other brother and for a lot of people who loved him. And we never were positive it was COVID, but but it certainly looked like it was COVID nineteen. Were never able to get a test. And I think that in addition to it being almost certainly COVID nineteen, the fact that nobody checked up on it was a product of the pandemic as well, so that nobody would go Nobody went over to to see how he was doing, even when he didn't respond that he was very responsive person. And then, of course after he died, we weren't really able to gather together two mourn so my other brother took care of the business that had to be taken care of. What's important, aside from the personal loss and maybe helpful to other people, is that I gave Eve myself time to mourn. So every day for months after he died, I cried, and I set aside time since I got up every morning and I could feel the weight in my chest, and I allowed myself to take some time to cry and sometimes yell and scream you know, why did this have to happen? Why? You know? And I miss him so much, and I gave myself time to mourn. So even though I couldn't do it in person with other people, I was able to go through that experience. And that's crucial, I think. And this is one of the things that people are deprived of during this pandemic, is that talk to Morton. This is just one of a myriad of ways I think, Jim, that the pandemic has affected us individually and collectively. Some people have lost their loved ones. Some people have lost their jobs. Some people, quite frankly, have lost both. Some have lost the experience of working outside the home and feel restricted in their environments. Some people have the loss of their children. Getting a kind of more traditional conventional education, UM it seems there have been such varying degrees of loss, and yet collectively it's had a huge impact on all of us. Can you can you talk about that? Well? I think there is a sense of uncertainty among all of us, and the ones who manifest it, particularly that I've observed are young people who are coming out of college or going into college, But there is a feeling of what's going to happen, what's the world going to be like? Is there a place for me? Plus they're being deprived of what we have in our society, that the rights of passage, that we ordinarily have, the rights of graduation, of problems of being together away from home, them away from family at college or university, or or in fact at work. So there is a sense of being thrown off. And I think those young people have an eighteen year old son and I can see and feel it in him very much, and they are kind of the canaries in this coal mine of collective trauma right now. The the other group that's experiencing it are the most obvious, perhaps our healthcare providers, frontline healthcare providers. So not only are they being traumatized by the threats the physical threats to their health and well being. They're also overwhelmed by what they have to deal with, by that the quantity of death, and by their inability to do very much about it. That's what I hear again and again from them. We you know, we we feel so, you know, we were trained to help people, and there's so little we can do in this circumstan. And also anybody who is a member of a minority, anybody who is operating on a marginal uh you know income, they're all traumatized because you know, there's been a whole lot of hostility against people who are black or brown Native people and they're dying at much higher right, So it brings rates, I'm sorry, So it brings up that previous trauma as well. So it's it's seeping through the whole society. And when those of us who are more fortunate perhaps and are able to do work from home, we're feeling it too, because it's like the the lion is just outside the gates. There's there's an anxiety about going out and when can I do and what can I do? So I would say there's a general uncertainty, and of course the political situation has compounded that uncertainty, what's going to happen and what is it going to look like in the future, and people just understandably, we simply don't know what happens with communal trauma when everyone is affected, how does it impact the community, because it seems to me there are all kinds of of psychological issues that are bubbling very close to the surface, if not exploding through. Well. I think the first thing is to understand that trauma affects us on a biological level, and the two basic responses that we have two loss of someone, to threats from outside, to worries about the economy, to lack of control. By the way, lack of control is, it's a threat and it's a and we react. We humans react to these sort of psychological, social, as well as physical threats as if it were a threat to our life, and we go into fight or flight response, just as if a lion were actually chasing us. It may be, you know, we're scared about what's going to happen with our work, or we're worried about COVID nineteen, and we become Our heart races, our blood pressure goes up, our muscles get tense. The part of our brain responsible for fear and anger fires off more parts of our brain responsible for thoughtful decision making and self awareness, and compassion shuts down. It's harder to connect with other people. And then if you play that out in the social realm, if you're more anxious and irritable, you're gonna deal with people in a more anxious and irritable way. It's going to be harder to connect with them. Plus, you're in a state, if you're in a fight or flight state where your biology is saying, you know, your life is at stake, it's not so easy to connect with other people. So the individual response to trauma, that individual fighter light response also manifests in social and collective ways. Well, if that part of your brain that helps you understand and have compassion isn't working so well, it tends to contribute to the polarization that we see in our society, the fear of the other. And I think, I think, you know, people have ways of looking at the world that they've held long before this pandemic. But I think with the trauma of the pandemic and of uh, you know, very visible, palpable political division that's exacerbating the situation that's that's throwing that, that's lighting the fire. The gasoline was there, but this is the match that's made people so both so fearful and so angry, and made it even more difficult to connect with and have compassion for the other. So I think the trauma has precipitated a lot of the difficulties that we see socially and lyrically, and certainly for people of color, it's made them far more fearful. It's also made them more likely to be targets of, you know, whether it's a white supremacists or of anxious police. We work a lot with police at the center from Mind body Medicine. They're very much on edge there on the front lines, and that doesn't improve their judgment, doesn't improve their capacity to deal with really challenging situations with the calm and understanding that that's needed. What about generational trauma? You know, we hear about you know, trauma being passed down and I'm curious, is there a physiological aspect to this or is it, uh, you know, just shared collective memory. What have you learned about that? It's it's both. So, for example, if you are a black person in the United States, you're dealing if what's been passed down through the family, but what people who are telling you about what happened to ancestor slavery and what happened during reconstruction and what happened more recently during Jim Crow era, and then you're experiencing it in your life now because there is still systemic racism in our society. So that's and then every incident exacerbates that pain and that trauma. In addition, there is this biological passing down of trauma, and the way it seems to go is that when we are traumatized, often there are changes in structures in our chromosomes that in turn affect the genes. So this is not like what we learned about in eighth grade science, where X rays you create physical damage to the genes. These are changes in molecules that are on the chromosomes, in the chromosomes, and they're called epigenetic changes. EPI means above and Greek, and these changes in these molecules, one of them is the methyl molecule one carbon three hydrogen atoms. When those changes occur, it affects the way the genes act in the body. So let's say we've experienced a major trauma, that may those epigenetic changes affect genes that help us to deal with stress. So if I've been traumatized before, I may have more difficulty dealing with stress because of these changes in my chromosomes. Now that's in this lifetime. When women are pregnant and have been traumatized, those changes are transmitted to the child in utero, and those children have these epigenetic changes not always but often. And also, and this is positively biblical, the changes can be transmitted through three generations. We have seen this. This research that was done in New York, very striking research by Rachel Yehuda Non Sinai Medical School on the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. And even these children and grandchildren, many of them at the same epigenetic changes in their chromosomes which made them more vulnerable to stress. And what was so striking about the research is that you could see the same changes even in children and grandchildren who grew up apart from the Holocaust. So it wasn't social interpersonal influence. This is a biological change that happens. How can you begin to heal from trauma? How can you be in a better balance, and what are the tools that everyone can can take advantage of. The first understanding is that trauma does affect us, and then it's going to come sooner or later to all of us. Doesn't mean you're crazy, doesn't mean you're abnormal. That you need to pay attention to the way the trauma has affected you, whether it's present trauma or past trauma. The second piece that's really important is to understand that it is possible to change, to move through and beyond the trauma. And that's one of the reasons that I tell stories in the book of people who have done that, who have gone from being horribly traumatized, whether it's by wars or by terrible physical and sexual abuse when they were children, who have grown up to be remarkable adults, or who have as adults changed profoundly, and then giving people very practical tools I teach people. And you're breathing slowly and deeply right now. I know because I know what you're gonna say, and I but I want to do it and I need to do it. We are talking about meditation or mindfulness exercises. What I teach is so simple, it's so easy. Just breathe slowly and deeply, in through the nose and out through the mouth, with your belly soft and relaxed. That is the antidote to the fight or flight response. That's what begins to bring our brains fully back online. We decrease activity in that o magdala in the center of fear and anger. We increase activity in our frontal cortex in the areas of thoughtful decision making and self awareness and compassion, and simply relaxing with our breath makes it easier to connect with each other. So that's one technique. Second one that's really important is movement, moving the body excers. I know you know this. The the enormous value of moving our bodies and decreasing our level of stress and in proving our mood. Exercise is is good a treatment for anxiety and depression as anything we have available on the plat. And then we teach them expressive meditations because one of the things that terrible things that happens with trauma is in addition to going into fight or flight, which continues sometimes if the trauma is overwhelming and inescapable, as it has been for many people during this period of pandemic is they just shut down. They freeze because there's nothing to do. So at that point we shut down physically and I'm sort of punching over a little here. We shut down emotionally. We gnumb ourselves to the pain. And expressive meditations shaking and dancing, fast, deep breathing, laugh and jumping up and down, shouting, crying, those helped to break up the freeze response, so we come back into balance. And the more balance, the more we're in a state of Balt's, the easier it is to use all the self care techniques, The easier it is to use guided mental imagery to help us solve problems and I think through issues that are confounding. The easier it is you to express ourselves in words or drawings, or the more we can get out of doing something simple like watching a TV show or reading a book or reading a newspaper. We're relaxed, We're getting more out of it, We're moving back into a more balanced vote normal life. Coming up the share trauma of parenting through racism that's right after this. There's a telling similarity in the deaths of George Floyd last May and Dante write this past April It's a detail that may not have gone unnoticed by parents, particularly those raising black children, that in the final moments of their lives, Dante Wright called his mom and George Floyd yelled out for his Raising black children in the United States can be really scary. Trina Green Brown is an activist and mother of two in Los Angeles. My son reminded me a lot of Trey von Martin in Tamir Rice, and so when those cases came to the forefront and we began proclaiming black lives matter, I began parenting from a place of fear. So the experiences of Tamir Rice planning a park and being gunned down in less than a minute by law officer impacted the way that I was parenting my little black boy, that he could no longer go out to a park without me being present. The impact of Trey Von Martin being murdered while wearing a hoodie made me take all hoodies out of my house. And so I really lies after a while that I was beginning to parent from a place of fear, fear that my child could be the next Mirror Rights or the next trade By Martin. But my fear was not only my fear was pushing me to be the police in my own house, like there was no police, but I started to police. I was allowing white supremacy to show up in my parenting because I was so afraid, and I didn't want that to happen. And so it was in those moments when I would look into my son's eyes and see him be afraid, are nervous because my fear was being projected onto him. I knew I didn't want that for him. I knew I wanted him to feel pride. I wanted him to feel powerful. I wanted him to feel a sense of agency. I didn't want him to be afraid and feel less than. And so I knew I needed to shift the way that I was orienting myself in my parenting. In two thousand sixteen, Trina founded Parenting for Liberation, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to help encourage resilient and joyful Black families. Parenting for Liberation is a nonprofit organization that really supports black parents and raising liberated children, and we do that through healing Justice as our framework that really looks at the impacts of intergenerational trauma, ongoing trauma, systemic trauma and violence that are experienced by folks who are black in the United States. What that looked like was me connecting with other black parents and learning from them about how did they practice liberation in their parenting UM reading books and learning about post traumatic slave syndrome and how that actually impacts the way that we parent our children. And I wanted to make a commitment to parents for liberation and like in my home operationalized liberation and also through my parenting, raised a liberated child and that resists all of the negative and harmful narratives about what it means to be black in this country. So literally, our existence and raising our child in this way is a form of liberation. The organization uses a whole range of resources like books, of podcasts, and workshops to connect with and celebrate black parents. I think healing looks like honoring Black culture and traditions, Honoring our bodies, thinking about the way that we can move our bodies and reconnect to our bodies, honoring our breast, honoring our voice. That could look like singing together, chanting together, humming together. That can look like um, reconnecting to Mother Earth and reconnecting to herbs and medicine. There's something about the connection to the medicinal offerings of Mother Nature, mother Earth, and I feel like returning to those kind of indigenous practices and ancestral practices UM are the ways that we can heal. Also, the impact of weathering, like that whole theory that like being black in this country, weather's on our bodies right and makes us age quicker. It's not about like, oh, go pop up hill and that's the solution. It's about trying to get to the root cause of the illness and figuring out what are the what are Nature's and Mother Nature's gifts for us that we can return to to heal ourselves. Parents and caliberation has three buckets of work that we really operate in. One is our healing justice work, and that really looks at healing from a black diasporaic wisdom, right, like there's so many black killers, UM, there's so much black wisdom around our ability to identify trauma and heal from it. And so we've partnered with UM organizations that have Black Hill healing and wellness practitioners, whether they be ray key practitioners, therapists, coaches, UM really tapping into like sound medicine and sound healing, like how do we move trauma through our bodies through um movements. The other bucket of our work is really about shifting our parenting styles, so like un learning some harmful parenting practices and trying on liberated parenting practices, and so that comes through workshops. I have a book called Parenting for Liberation, a Guide for raising Black Children. That book is full with tools and ideas and practices from over twenty different Black parents who are practicing liberation in their homes UM. And also the learning also comes through the podcast. I interview a variety of parents experts who are raising Black children, and so in those conversations they share a lot of knowledge. And then our third bucket of work is around community. We really believe in that African proverb that it takes the village to raise a child. We believe that community care, community wellness, and community healing is really a huge part of building this tribe to raise liberated children. The way white supremacy is set up is that it wants you to think that you're it's just you, that there's just something inherently wrong with you, and it's working for everyone else, and no it's not just you. You're not it's not just your kid who's getting racially profiled at school. When you bring everybody together, you might find out like, oh, this is actually what ingrained into the school climate, right, That it's not just me. My child is not just the issue, or I'm not just inept right, um, And so I'll bringing folks together is also a way for folks to be able to make those connections. That it's not an individualized thing. This is a systemic thing. Um, It's not an individualized experience of trauma. This is rooted in our country's history, and the pandemic has only strengthened Trina's resolve and the dedication of the community. She started to acknowledge trauma and learn ways to grow from it together. COVID has really shown how freaking innovative our community is, Like the ability to create new resources or to find ways to maintain haying connection even when we're distancing. Like I've just been able to also see the innovation and creative spirit of black people to like make those connections still happen. You know, I've been to so many zoom birthday parties, baby showers, all the things like we're finding ways. You know, we had a whaling circle where we just had facilitators who helped us move through grief because so many people are losing people Like those are the ways UM. Some of its innovative and some of it is ancestral. I feel like this is a moment where we're returning to our ancestral ways of being. Like welling circles is something that UM has always happened, you know, in the continent, and us practicing and here in this moment, and so I just really am appreciating seeing us reclaiming our Black traditions prior to colonization and enslavement. When we come back the transformational properties of so we that's right after that. I grew up around selling. My mother sewed. My grandmother sewed. My great grandmother who I had never met because she passed away before I was born. Apparently she also did some sewing. I really am a fourth generation seist. Lisa wolf Fork is an Associate professor of English at the University of Virginia, my alma mater, where she specializes in African American literature and culture, and by vocation, I love to sew. Sewing is a self care practice. I see it as something that I do that I enjoy. It allows me to escape from some of the day to day stresses of everyday life. The transformative properties of sewing to transfer warm a flat medium of fabric into a quilt, into a garment that can be worn, into a handbag or purse or backpack that can be carried there. There's something about the spirit of making that I find incredibly empowering and reassuring. And for that reason, sowing is really important to me. It occupies a really important space in my life. It has given me solace, is giving me um uh, the delight of a creative edge. It has really been something that is meaningful to me. When I'm in my sowing happy space, that my soul is at ease. But once I was going to sowing events and I was going to sowing expos or sewing classes, it was all white people and I was the only black person, And so that started to warp my vision so much that it almost felt like my own memory was being expunged because I was so like I was looking around at my context and it was just white, white, white, white white. And I picked up the magazines and it was white, white, white, and the se white magazines and the quilting magazines all white. And so even though I know that sewing is part of my ancestral story, I couldn't see it reflected in the industry at all. But my experience is actually very common. Black women are often encouraged to recalibrate things to center ourselves. Instead, we are invited to participate in events where whiteness and white people are centered. But then they pretend like it's for everybody. It's you know, what scholars call the universalization of whiteness. Because I wanted to do the sewing, and I wanted to do in a group context, I went with the groups that were available, and the ones that were available were older white women. But then Charlottesville happened. On August eleven and twelfth, two thousand and seventeen, hundreds of white supremacists and nationalists swarmed the college town of Charlottesville to rally over plans to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee. I was there, and I can tell you personally, the weekend was a violent, terrifying one, and as an advocate from Charlottesville, Lisa was in the thick of the counter protests and someone ran in and said, they the white supremacists are outside with fire. Stay where you are, and we had to like sneak out of the side of the building because we didn't know if they were going to come over there. Like we didn't know what was going to happen. And that was basically the recipe for the weekend was like not knowing what was gonna happen, not knowing what was happening. When a white nationalist drove his car into a crowd of counter protesters, Lisa was nearby. I happened to get separated from my group, which is bad protocol, and that's when we hear this bang, this this loud bang, and then I look up and there's a shoe. Somebody's shoe is just in the air, and I'm like, is someone throwing shoes? What is that? And it was a person who had been hit by the car and his body had flipped over and the fourth was so strong that one of his shoes flew off his body into the air, and from there it was chaos. And so what I realized is that that experience left me wounded. It left me hurt by racist trauma of a terror attack. And then on top of that, the then president said there were good people on both sides, very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group, excuse me me, And so that felt to me like someone had just poured cold water over my head. It was just dripping that it was. It was so shocking I had I did not expect to be it was. It was just terrible. It was just a bad bad The whole of it was bad. Lisa turned to Sewing her happy place, but within her own sewing group, she was once again confronted by racism. I went to a retreat in September of that year, which I should not have done. It was a mistake in retrospecting to a quick retreat in September of but I thought leaving Charlottesville would be good. Get out of town, um go and sew and just relax. But while I was there, people knew I was there, and so they asked how I was, and I would respond, oh, yeah, it was hard, and you know, we woke up screaming for weeks. Is just really difficult. And it turned out that me talking about my experience like not. I didn't go there and start preaching. I just went there to make some quick blocks, and they're a rule had been made in my absence that Charlottesville was not to be discussed. That was the rule, and um, and so I was like, well, I don't know what to do and should I just leave? Should I just go home? If that's not that's the case, And so I decided to stay. I stayed, and again I never brought anything up. I was just responding to questions that were asked of me. And then I went home and a few days later I checked the mailbox and when I opened the mailbox, my check for the next year's event is in an envelope, no note, no nothing. So me, still being me, I call around and I'm like, oh, was the next event canceled? I'm just I'm just unsure. I got my check back, and this woman who I considered a friend, who had known for many years, said, oh, I don't know, the event's not been canceled. The only thing I can think of is that you broke the rule about talking about Charlottesville, and that's why you can't put And this is my favorite part. She said, I would never say that she's prejudiced. I would never think that this person was prejudiced, and that just doesn't seem like it's me. I was heartbroken and embarrassed. I was so embarrassed that I first I was heartbroken and it just felt like cruelty on top of the trauma that I had already faced. And then I was embarrassed, and I just felt like, who did these people think I was all this time? And it helped me understand that I had gone from pet like being their only black friend or whatever, from pet to threat. Lisa started Black Women's Stitch in July of two eighteen. For me, Black Women's Stitch is both a recovery effort, and by recovery I mean my own like trauma healing, but also recovering an ancestral story and thinking about sewing as an ancestral craft and being willing to say this is what's important to me, and I want to do it in a way that serves my soul. Black life is already living in what Christina Sharp calls in the wake of slavery. That means all of these little ripples and reverberations from the nineteenth century, the implications of slavery are still with us. I'm not trying to say that black life is a traumatic life as a whole. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that there are certain things that Black folks live and survive and experience as a matter of course, that white people do not deal with. And so in addition to dealing with these things that we do, we can create a place of of comfort, of love, of support. And Black folks have always done this. That's what the Black churches, that's what you know, Like we have these things. We create artist collectives, we create uh yoga groups, we create you know, teachings and liberation workshops. We do these things to care for ourselves because we deserve care so and that kind of loving support. And if this was going to be part of a recovery project, it had to be something that wasn't just that it was motivated by personal trauma, but it couldn't be limited only to that. It is past time that sewing companies and pattern companies and threat companies see black consumers as someone in the background. And so for me to center black women, girls and fems and sewing was to create the community of care that I needed. And that's what Black Women's Stitches. Black Women's Stitch began on Instagram, where Lisa was able to connect online with other like minded black women. A court group emerged, as well as events and even a podcast called Stitch Please, And in March two thousand nineteen, Lisa organized the first Retreat, a week of communal living, sewing, and sharing. About a dozen women from as far as Texas and California came together at a home in the outer Banks of North Carolina. Lisa called it Beach Week, and it changed their lives. It is really hard to explain or summarize the nirvana of the first Beach Week experience of twenty nineteen, because I wasn't the only person that felt so moved by what we were able to do by just getting together. This is another kind of revolutionary act. In March, Black Women Stitch managed to hold their second annual Beach Week before COVID shut the world down. Like everyone else, the group went virtual. But as we were watching the cataclysms of COVID, we were also, because we are black women, watching the racist destruction of black people. So, you know, a mod arbor in February, Brianna Taylor in March, George Floyd in the midsummer. So we're getting reminders again that even in the midst of a pandemic, The pandemic of American racism is still steadily beating forward. And these are things that we don't have to explain to each other, you know, these are things that you know that we can, that we can talk about, that we can listen, that we can we can hear each other through, that we can you know, think about and make space for because it's also part of our story. But I also wanted people. I also wanted black women to feel less alone, to feel like when they were the only person at this particular sewing expo or in this class or at this event, that that is not the totality of our experience, and that we can create something where we are the beginning and the end of the circle. And it's too often in a white supremacist society where blackness, if it is talked about at all, it's kind of seen as something to overcome or something to ignore, or something that's a trauma based identity. It's one of the great blessings of this experience is that we know the truth about us, and we are able to share that truth and be in that truth with each other without supervision, without oversight, without feeling like we need to accommodate someone else's opinions or expectations. In working through trauma, I was able to create something that can provide solace and support for Black women who might face similar traumas. Um I can create an environment, or encourage the creation of environments where Black women will be cared for and protected, where we are not marginalized, where we are not tolerated, but where we are the point. Thank you again to all my guests today, Lisa wolf Fork a Black Women's Stitch, Trina Green Brown of Parenting for Liberation, and Dr James Gordon of the Center for Mind Body Medicine. You can find more about all of them and their organizations in the description of this podcast. Next Question with Katie Kurik is a production of My Heart Media and Katie Kurrik Media. The executive producers Army, Katie Curic, and Courtney Litz. The supervising producer is Lauren Hansen. Associate producers Derek Clements, Adriana Fassio, and Emily Pinto. The show is edited and mixed by Derrick Clements. For more information about today's episode, or to sign up for my morning newsletter wake Up Call, go to Katie currek dot com. You can also find me at Katie curic on Instagram and all my social media channels. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Each of us, if we live long enough, is going to experience trauma. Trauma is a Greek word that means injury to the body, mind or spirit. Parents, grandparents die, we may have major disappointments at work, we may get divorced, partners may die. So that's traumatic. I think we have to recover that understanding that trauma is a part of life. Collective trauma is what we're all experiencing right now. So you know, a mod arbor. In February, Brianna Taylor, in March, George Floyd in the Midsummer. We're getting reminders again that even in the midst of a pandemic, the pandemic of American racism is still steadily beating forward. It's not an individualized thing. This is a systemic thing. It's not an individualized experience of trauma. This is rooted in our countries. His three. Hi everyone, I'm Katie Kuric, and this is next question. It has been a brutal year, not only for the loss, heartache and isolation this pandemic has brought, but also because of everything else. It is the nightmare that America, I'm an especially African Americans country are living and experiencing over and over. She dialoged it in the comfort of her own home and over again. A mob, supporting and encouraged by President Trump, storm the US capital. We will never give up. We will never concede. It doesn't happen. You don't concede. Whether who would have ever believed we would see anything like this now to a disturbing rise and attacks on Asian Americans from California to New York. Six of his eight alleged victims were Asian women, viciously attacked in broad day lights. Tensions are already high in the city where the trial of former police officer Derek Showing. Even as the trial was going on, protests are raging once again in Minneapolis over the killing of another unarmed black man. Don't right, remembers the jury. I understand you have a verdict. It's a trauma. We the jury in the above entitled manner as to count one unintentional second degree murder while committing a felony, buying the defendant guilty, a brave young woman, a smartphone camera, a crowd that was traumatized, as to count two third degree murder, perpetrating and eminently dangerous act, find the defendant guilty. We saw how traumatic and exhausting just watching the trial was for so many people. Count three second degree manslaughter culpable negligence creating an unreasonable risk buying the defendant guilty of that verdict agree too. On top of the fear so many people of color live with every day when they go to sleep at night and pray for the safety of themselves and their loved ones. It's been painful, and even though we're starting to inch out of the shadow cast by this pandemic, depending on what you've experienced or witnessed this past year, the light that greets you may not be much comfort. So for now, in today's podcast, we want to acknowledge the trauma, the individual traumas, and the uniquely shared trauma of this past year, and how we can begin to heal. I think healing looks like honoring black culture and tradition, honoring our bodies. We have to see this as a public health emergency. When you're so used to being told that you are in the margins, and that you're supposed to be grateful for that slot in the margins, it's it's really liberating to learn that that is false and that you are capable of creating and living your own truth. Today, we'll hear from three healing practitioners, a psychiatrist, a parenting advocate, and a sewing group leader, each of them devoted to transforming trauma in their own way, and with their help will understand what share trauma means, how it's experienced, and how we can move forward. We'll start with the psychiatrist. Well, you know, psychiatry is all about trauma. Dr James Gordon is the founder and executive director of the nonprofit Center for Mind Body Medicine in Washington, d C. The origins of modern psychiatry with Freud and Broyer and Jane at the end of the nineteenth century, and what they understood is the power of psychological trauma, particularly early in life, to affect us later in life and to produce all the anguish and the symptoms of psychiatrist Saul. Dr Gordon is known for dealing specifically with popular latianwide psychological trauma from the effects of war, school shootings, or natural disasters, and he's using his new book, Transforming Trauma, The Path to Hope and Healing to pass on his decade's worth of knowledge to give people a step by step guide book to coming into balance and then using your imagination and reaching out to other people. Now. I met Dr Gordon, or Jim as I know him, in after Haiti's devastating earthquake. I was traveling down to Port of Prince frequently to report on the aftermath and recovery, and Jim was there with his center to work with Hades children, many of whom had been orphaned and their homes destroyed. Jim says that earthquake is a good example of a massive event that brings about not only individual trauma, but trauma that the community has to grapple with together. That's collective trauma. And we could see as we talked with those kids whom we were meeting at the hospital, each of those kids also had an individual problem physical injury, loss of a family member, but the whole society was effective and that's what we're seeing here. First and foremost I want to say before we dive into this pandemic which has resulted in so much collective trauma. Jim is, I'm so sorry about your brother who died at the beginning of the pandemic. Do you mind sharing what happened with us now what happened? I may start crying so because I'm missing so much. What what is might owner brother younger by thirteen years, and he had some kind of respiratory problem sinus infection. Is living in Dallas, Texas. He was doing okay, and the doctor said he was doing okay. He just declined. Nobody pushed him to go see a doctor. Everybody was staying home at that point, and so he just died. He died alone at home, and it was tragic for for me and for my other brother and for a lot of people who loved him. And we never were positive it was COVID, but but it certainly looked like it was COVID nineteen. Were never able to get a test. And I think that in addition to it being almost certainly COVID nineteen, the fact that nobody checked up on it was a product of the pandemic as well, so that nobody would go Nobody went over to to see how he was doing, even when he didn't respond that he was very responsive person. And then, of course after he died, we weren't really able to gather together two mourn so my other brother took care of the business that had to be taken care of. What's important, aside from the personal loss and maybe helpful to other people, is that I gave Eve myself time to mourn. So every day for months after he died, I cried, and I set aside time since I got up every morning and I could feel the weight in my chest, and I allowed myself to take some time to cry and sometimes yell and scream you know, why did this have to happen? Why? You know? And I miss him so much, and I gave myself time to mourn. So even though I couldn't do it in person with other people, I was able to go through that experience. And that's crucial, I think. And this is one of the things that people are deprived of during this pandemic, is that talk to Morton. This is just one of a myriad of ways I think, Jim, that the pandemic has affected us individually and collectively. Some people have lost their loved ones. Some people have lost their jobs. Some people, quite frankly, have lost both. Some have lost the experience of working outside the home and feel restricted in their environments. Some people have the loss of their children. Getting a kind of more traditional conventional education, UM it seems there have been such varying degrees of loss, and yet collectively it's had a huge impact on all of us. Can you can you talk about that? Well? I think there is a sense of uncertainty among all of us, and the ones who manifest it, particularly that I've observed are young people who are coming out of college or going into college, But there is a feeling of what's going to happen, what's the world going to be like? Is there a place for me? Plus they're being deprived of what we have in our society, that the rights of passage, that we ordinarily have, the rights of graduation, of problems of being together away from home, them away from family at college or university, or or in fact at work. So there is a sense of being thrown off. And I think those young people have an eighteen year old son and I can see and feel it in him very much, and they are kind of the canaries in this coal mine of collective trauma right now. The the other group that's experiencing it are the most obvious, perhaps our healthcare providers, frontline healthcare providers. So not only are they being traumatized by the threats the physical threats to their health and well being. They're also overwhelmed by what they have to deal with, by that the quantity of death, and by their inability to do very much about it. That's what I hear again and again from them. We you know, we we feel so, you know, we were trained to help people, and there's so little we can do in this circumstan. And also anybody who is a member of a minority, anybody who is operating on a marginal uh you know income, they're all traumatized because you know, there's been a whole lot of hostility against people who are black or brown Native people and they're dying at much higher right, So it brings rates, I'm sorry, So it brings up that previous trauma as well. So it's it's seeping through the whole society. And when those of us who are more fortunate perhaps and are able to do work from home, we're feeling it too, because it's like the the lion is just outside the gates. There's there's an anxiety about going out and when can I do and what can I do? So I would say there's a general uncertainty, and of course the political situation has compounded that uncertainty, what's going to happen and what is it going to look like in the future, and people just understandably, we simply don't know what happens with communal trauma when everyone is affected, how does it impact the community, because it seems to me there are all kinds of of psychological issues that are bubbling very close to the surface, if not exploding through. Well. I think the first thing is to understand that trauma affects us on a biological level, and the two basic responses that we have two loss of someone, to threats from outside, to worries about the economy, to lack of control. By the way, lack of control is, it's a threat and it's a and we react. We humans react to these sort of psychological, social, as well as physical threats as if it were a threat to our life, and we go into fight or flight response, just as if a lion were actually chasing us. It may be, you know, we're scared about what's going to happen with our work, or we're worried about COVID nineteen, and we become Our heart races, our blood pressure goes up, our muscles get tense. The part of our brain responsible for fear and anger fires off more parts of our brain responsible for thoughtful decision making and self awareness, and compassion shuts down. It's harder to connect with other people. And then if you play that out in the social realm, if you're more anxious and irritable, you're gonna deal with people in a more anxious and irritable way. It's going to be harder to connect with them. Plus, you're in a state, if you're in a fight or flight state where your biology is saying, you know, your life is at stake, it's not so easy to connect with other people. So the individual response to trauma, that individual fighter light response also manifests in social and collective ways. Well, if that part of your brain that helps you understand and have compassion isn't working so well, it tends to contribute to the polarization that we see in our society, the fear of the other. And I think, I think, you know, people have ways of looking at the world that they've held long before this pandemic. But I think with the trauma of the pandemic and of uh, you know, very visible, palpable political division that's exacerbating the situation that's that's throwing that, that's lighting the fire. The gasoline was there, but this is the match that's made people so both so fearful and so angry, and made it even more difficult to connect with and have compassion for the other. So I think the trauma has precipitated a lot of the difficulties that we see socially and lyrically, and certainly for people of color, it's made them far more fearful. It's also made them more likely to be targets of, you know, whether it's a white supremacists or of anxious police. We work a lot with police at the center from Mind body Medicine. They're very much on edge there on the front lines, and that doesn't improve their judgment, doesn't improve their capacity to deal with really challenging situations with the calm and understanding that that's needed. What about generational trauma? You know, we hear about you know, trauma being passed down and I'm curious, is there a physiological aspect to this or is it, uh, you know, just shared collective memory. What have you learned about that? It's it's both. So, for example, if you are a black person in the United States, you're dealing if what's been passed down through the family, but what people who are telling you about what happened to ancestor slavery and what happened during reconstruction and what happened more recently during Jim Crow era, and then you're experiencing it in your life now because there is still systemic racism in our society. So that's and then every incident exacerbates that pain and that trauma. In addition, there is this biological passing down of trauma, and the way it seems to go is that when we are traumatized, often there are changes in structures in our chromosomes that in turn affect the genes. So this is not like what we learned about in eighth grade science, where X rays you create physical damage to the genes. These are changes in molecules that are on the chromosomes, in the chromosomes, and they're called epigenetic changes. EPI means above and Greek, and these changes in these molecules, one of them is the methyl molecule one carbon three hydrogen atoms. When those changes occur, it affects the way the genes act in the body. So let's say we've experienced a major trauma, that may those epigenetic changes affect genes that help us to deal with stress. So if I've been traumatized before, I may have more difficulty dealing with stress because of these changes in my chromosomes. Now that's in this lifetime. When women are pregnant and have been traumatized, those changes are transmitted to the child in utero, and those children have these epigenetic changes not always but often. And also, and this is positively biblical, the changes can be transmitted through three generations. We have seen this. This research that was done in New York, very striking research by Rachel Yehuda Non Sinai Medical School on the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. And even these children and grandchildren, many of them at the same epigenetic changes in their chromosomes which made them more vulnerable to stress. And what was so striking about the research is that you could see the same changes even in children and grandchildren who grew up apart from the Holocaust. So it wasn't social interpersonal influence. This is a biological change that happens. How can you begin to heal from trauma? How can you be in a better balance, and what are the tools that everyone can can take advantage of. The first understanding is that trauma does affect us, and then it's going to come sooner or later to all of us. Doesn't mean you're crazy, doesn't mean you're abnormal. That you need to pay attention to the way the trauma has affected you, whether it's present trauma or past trauma. The second piece that's really important is to understand that it is possible to change, to move through and beyond the trauma. And that's one of the reasons that I tell stories in the book of people who have done that, who have gone from being horribly traumatized, whether it's by wars or by terrible physical and sexual abuse when they were children, who have grown up to be remarkable adults, or who have as adults changed profoundly, and then giving people very practical tools I teach people. And you're breathing slowly and deeply right now. I know because I know what you're gonna say, and I but I want to do it and I need to do it. We are talking about meditation or mindfulness exercises. What I teach is so simple, it's so easy. Just breathe slowly and deeply, in through the nose and out through the mouth, with your belly soft and relaxed. That is the antidote to the fight or flight response. That's what begins to bring our brains fully back online. We decrease activity in that o magdala in the center of fear and anger. We increase activity in our frontal cortex in the areas of thoughtful decision making and self awareness and compassion, and simply relaxing with our breath makes it easier to connect with each other. So that's one technique. Second one that's really important is movement, moving the body excers. I know you know this. The the enormous value of moving our bodies and decreasing our level of stress and in proving our mood. Exercise is is good a treatment for anxiety and depression as anything we have available on the plat. And then we teach them expressive meditations because one of the things that terrible things that happens with trauma is in addition to going into fight or flight, which continues sometimes if the trauma is overwhelming and inescapable, as it has been for many people during this period of pandemic is they just shut down. They freeze because there's nothing to do. So at that point we shut down physically and I'm sort of punching over a little here. We shut down emotionally. We gnumb ourselves to the pain. And expressive meditations shaking and dancing, fast, deep breathing, laugh and jumping up and down, shouting, crying, those helped to break up the freeze response, so we come back into balance. And the more balance, the more we're in a state of Balt's, the easier it is to use all the self care techniques, The easier it is to use guided mental imagery to help us solve problems and I think through issues that are confounding. The easier it is you to express ourselves in words or drawings, or the more we can get out of doing something simple like watching a TV show or reading a book or reading a newspaper. We're relaxed, We're getting more out of it, We're moving back into a more balanced vote normal life. Coming up the share trauma of parenting through racism that's right after this. There's a telling similarity in the deaths of George Floyd last May and Dante write this past April It's a detail that may not have gone unnoticed by parents, particularly those raising black children, that in the final moments of their lives, Dante Wright called his mom and George Floyd yelled out for his Raising black children in the United States can be really scary. Trina Green Brown is an activist and mother of two in Los Angeles. My son reminded me a lot of Trey von Martin in Tamir Rice, and so when those cases came to the forefront and we began proclaiming black lives matter, I began parenting from a place of fear. So the experiences of Tamir Rice planning a park and being gunned down in less than a minute by law officer impacted the way that I was parenting my little black boy, that he could no longer go out to a park without me being present. The impact of Trey Von Martin being murdered while wearing a hoodie made me take all hoodies out of my house. And so I really lies after a while that I was beginning to parent from a place of fear, fear that my child could be the next Mirror Rights or the next trade By Martin. But my fear was not only my fear was pushing me to be the police in my own house, like there was no police, but I started to police. I was allowing white supremacy to show up in my parenting because I was so afraid, and I didn't want that to happen. And so it was in those moments when I would look into my son's eyes and see him be afraid, are nervous because my fear was being projected onto him. I knew I didn't want that for him. I knew I wanted him to feel pride. I wanted him to feel powerful. I wanted him to feel a sense of agency. I didn't want him to be afraid and feel less than. And so I knew I needed to shift the way that I was orienting myself in my parenting. In two thousand sixteen, Trina founded Parenting for Liberation, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to help encourage resilient and joyful Black families. Parenting for Liberation is a nonprofit organization that really supports black parents and raising liberated children, and we do that through healing Justice as our framework that really looks at the impacts of intergenerational trauma, ongoing trauma, systemic trauma and violence that are experienced by folks who are black in the United States. What that looked like was me connecting with other black parents and learning from them about how did they practice liberation in their parenting UM reading books and learning about post traumatic slave syndrome and how that actually impacts the way that we parent our children. And I wanted to make a commitment to parents for liberation and like in my home operationalized liberation and also through my parenting, raised a liberated child and that resists all of the negative and harmful narratives about what it means to be black in this country. So literally, our existence and raising our child in this way is a form of liberation. The organization uses a whole range of resources like books, of podcasts, and workshops to connect with and celebrate black parents. I think healing looks like honoring Black culture and traditions, Honoring our bodies, thinking about the way that we can move our bodies and reconnect to our bodies, honoring our breast, honoring our voice. That could look like singing together, chanting together, humming together. That can look like um, reconnecting to Mother Earth and reconnecting to herbs and medicine. There's something about the connection to the medicinal offerings of Mother Nature, mother Earth, and I feel like returning to those kind of indigenous practices and ancestral practices UM are the ways that we can heal. Also, the impact of weathering, like that whole theory that like being black in this country, weather's on our bodies right and makes us age quicker. It's not about like, oh, go pop up hill and that's the solution. It's about trying to get to the root cause of the illness and figuring out what are the what are Nature's and Mother Nature's gifts for us that we can return to to heal ourselves. Parents and caliberation has three buckets of work that we really operate in. One is our healing justice work, and that really looks at healing from a black diasporaic wisdom, right, like there's so many black killers, UM, there's so much black wisdom around our ability to identify trauma and heal from it. And so we've partnered with UM organizations that have Black Hill healing and wellness practitioners, whether they be ray key practitioners, therapists, coaches, UM really tapping into like sound medicine and sound healing, like how do we move trauma through our bodies through um movements. The other bucket of our work is really about shifting our parenting styles, so like un learning some harmful parenting practices and trying on liberated parenting practices, and so that comes through workshops. I have a book called Parenting for Liberation, a Guide for raising Black Children. That book is full with tools and ideas and practices from over twenty different Black parents who are practicing liberation in their homes UM. And also the learning also comes through the podcast. I interview a variety of parents experts who are raising Black children, and so in those conversations they share a lot of knowledge. And then our third bucket of work is around community. We really believe in that African proverb that it takes the village to raise a child. We believe that community care, community wellness, and community healing is really a huge part of building this tribe to raise liberated children. The way white supremacy is set up is that it wants you to think that you're it's just you, that there's just something inherently wrong with you, and it's working for everyone else, and no it's not just you. You're not it's not just your kid who's getting racially profiled at school. When you bring everybody together, you might find out like, oh, this is actually what ingrained into the school climate, right, That it's not just me. My child is not just the issue, or I'm not just inept right, um, And so I'll bringing folks together is also a way for folks to be able to make those connections. That it's not an individualized thing. This is a systemic thing. Um, It's not an individualized experience of trauma. This is rooted in our country's history, and the pandemic has only strengthened Trina's resolve and the dedication of the community. She started to acknowledge trauma and learn ways to grow from it together. COVID has really shown how freaking innovative our community is, Like the ability to create new resources or to find ways to maintain haying connection even when we're distancing. Like I've just been able to also see the innovation and creative spirit of black people to like make those connections still happen. You know, I've been to so many zoom birthday parties, baby showers, all the things like we're finding ways. You know, we had a whaling circle where we just had facilitators who helped us move through grief because so many people are losing people Like those are the ways UM. Some of its innovative and some of it is ancestral. I feel like this is a moment where we're returning to our ancestral ways of being. Like welling circles is something that UM has always happened, you know, in the continent, and us practicing and here in this moment, and so I just really am appreciating seeing us reclaiming our Black traditions prior to colonization and enslavement. When we come back the transformational properties of so we that's right after that. I grew up around selling. My mother sewed. My grandmother sewed. My great grandmother who I had never met because she passed away before I was born. Apparently she also did some sewing. I really am a fourth generation seist. Lisa wolf Fork is an Associate professor of English at the University of Virginia, my alma mater, where she specializes in African American literature and culture, and by vocation, I love to sew. Sewing is a self care practice. I see it as something that I do that I enjoy. It allows me to escape from some of the day to day stresses of everyday life. The transformative properties of sewing to transfer warm a flat medium of fabric into a quilt, into a garment that can be worn, into a handbag or purse or backpack that can be carried there. There's something about the spirit of making that I find incredibly empowering and reassuring. And for that reason, sowing is really important to me. It occupies a really important space in my life. It has given me solace, is giving me um uh, the delight of a creative edge. It has really been something that is meaningful to me. When I'm in my sowing happy space, that my soul is at ease. But once I was going to sowing events and I was going to sowing expos or sewing classes, it was all white people and I was the only black person, And so that started to warp my vision so much that it almost felt like my own memory was being expunged because I was so like I was looking around at my context and it was just white, white, white, white white. And I picked up the magazines and it was white, white, white, and the se white magazines and the quilting magazines all white. And so even though I know that sewing is part of my ancestral story, I couldn't see it reflected in the industry at all. But my experience is actually very common. Black women are often encouraged to recalibrate things to center ourselves. Instead, we are invited to participate in events where whiteness and white people are centered. But then they pretend like it's for everybody. It's you know, what scholars call the universalization of whiteness. Because I wanted to do the sewing, and I wanted to do in a group context, I went with the groups that were available, and the ones that were available were older white women. But then Charlottesville happened. On August eleven and twelfth, two thousand and seventeen, hundreds of white supremacists and nationalists swarmed the college town of Charlottesville to rally over plans to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee. I was there, and I can tell you personally, the weekend was a violent, terrifying one, and as an advocate from Charlottesville, Lisa was in the thick of the counter protests and someone ran in and said, they the white supremacists are outside with fire. Stay where you are, and we had to like sneak out of the side of the building because we didn't know if they were going to come over there. Like we didn't know what was going to happen. And that was basically the recipe for the weekend was like not knowing what was gonna happen, not knowing what was happening. When a white nationalist drove his car into a crowd of counter protesters, Lisa was nearby. I happened to get separated from my group, which is bad protocol, and that's when we hear this bang, this this loud bang, and then I look up and there's a shoe. Somebody's shoe is just in the air, and I'm like, is someone throwing shoes? What is that? And it was a person who had been hit by the car and his body had flipped over and the fourth was so strong that one of his shoes flew off his body into the air, and from there it was chaos. And so what I realized is that that experience left me wounded. It left me hurt by racist trauma of a terror attack. And then on top of that, the then president said there were good people on both sides, very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group, excuse me me, And so that felt to me like someone had just poured cold water over my head. It was just dripping that it was. It was so shocking I had I did not expect to be it was. It was just terrible. It was just a bad bad The whole of it was bad. Lisa turned to Sewing her happy place, but within her own sewing group, she was once again confronted by racism. I went to a retreat in September of that year, which I should not have done. It was a mistake in retrospecting to a quick retreat in September of but I thought leaving Charlottesville would be good. Get out of town, um go and sew and just relax. But while I was there, people knew I was there, and so they asked how I was, and I would respond, oh, yeah, it was hard, and you know, we woke up screaming for weeks. Is just really difficult. And it turned out that me talking about my experience like not. I didn't go there and start preaching. I just went there to make some quick blocks, and they're a rule had been made in my absence that Charlottesville was not to be discussed. That was the rule, and um, and so I was like, well, I don't know what to do and should I just leave? Should I just go home? If that's not that's the case, And so I decided to stay. I stayed, and again I never brought anything up. I was just responding to questions that were asked of me. And then I went home and a few days later I checked the mailbox and when I opened the mailbox, my check for the next year's event is in an envelope, no note, no nothing. So me, still being me, I call around and I'm like, oh, was the next event canceled? I'm just I'm just unsure. I got my check back, and this woman who I considered a friend, who had known for many years, said, oh, I don't know, the event's not been canceled. The only thing I can think of is that you broke the rule about talking about Charlottesville, and that's why you can't put And this is my favorite part. She said, I would never say that she's prejudiced. I would never think that this person was prejudiced, and that just doesn't seem like it's me. I was heartbroken and embarrassed. I was so embarrassed that I first I was heartbroken and it just felt like cruelty on top of the trauma that I had already faced. And then I was embarrassed, and I just felt like, who did these people think I was all this time? And it helped me understand that I had gone from pet like being their only black friend or whatever, from pet to threat. Lisa started Black Women's Stitch in July of two eighteen. For me, Black Women's Stitch is both a recovery effort, and by recovery I mean my own like trauma healing, but also recovering an ancestral story and thinking about sewing as an ancestral craft and being willing to say this is what's important to me, and I want to do it in a way that serves my soul. Black life is already living in what Christina Sharp calls in the wake of slavery. That means all of these little ripples and reverberations from the nineteenth century, the implications of slavery are still with us. I'm not trying to say that black life is a traumatic life as a whole. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that there are certain things that Black folks live and survive and experience as a matter of course, that white people do not deal with. And so in addition to dealing with these things that we do, we can create a place of of comfort, of love, of support. And Black folks have always done this. That's what the Black churches, that's what you know, Like we have these things. We create artist collectives, we create uh yoga groups, we create you know, teachings and liberation workshops. We do these things to care for ourselves because we deserve care so and that kind of loving support. And if this was going to be part of a recovery project, it had to be something that wasn't just that it was motivated by personal trauma, but it couldn't be limited only to that. It is past time that sewing companies and pattern companies and threat companies see black consumers as someone in the background. And so for me to center black women, girls and fems and sewing was to create the community of care that I needed. And that's what Black Women's Stitches. Black Women's Stitch began on Instagram, where Lisa was able to connect online with other like minded black women. A court group emerged, as well as events and even a podcast called Stitch Please, And in March two thousand nineteen, Lisa organized the first Retreat, a week of communal living, sewing, and sharing. About a dozen women from as far as Texas and California came together at a home in the outer Banks of North Carolina. Lisa called it Beach Week, and it changed their lives. It is really hard to explain or summarize the nirvana of the first Beach Week experience of twenty nineteen, because I wasn't the only person that felt so moved by what we were able to do by just getting together. This is another kind of revolutionary act. In March, Black Women Stitch managed to hold their second annual Beach Week before COVID shut the world down. Like everyone else, the group went virtual. But as we were watching the cataclysms of COVID, we were also, because we are black women, watching the racist destruction of black people. So, you know, a mod arbor in February, Brianna Taylor in March, George Floyd in the midsummer. So we're getting reminders again that even in the midst of a pandemic, The pandemic of American racism is still steadily beating forward. And these are things that we don't have to explain to each other, you know, these are things that you know that we can, that we can talk about, that we can listen, that we can we can hear each other through, that we can you know, think about and make space for because it's also part of our story. But I also wanted people. I also wanted black women to feel less alone, to feel like when they were the only person at this particular sewing expo or in this class or at this event, that that is not the totality of our experience, and that we can create something where we are the beginning and the end of the circle. And it's too often in a white supremacist society where blackness, if it is talked about at all, it's kind of seen as something to overcome or something to ignore, or something that's a trauma based identity. It's one of the great blessings of this experience is that we know the truth about us, and we are able to share that truth and be in that truth with each other without supervision, without oversight, without feeling like we need to accommodate someone else's opinions or expectations. In working through trauma, I was able to create something that can provide solace and support for Black women who might face similar traumas. Um I can create an environment, or encourage the creation of environments where Black women will be cared for and protected, where we are not marginalized, where we are not tolerated, but where we are the point. Thank you again to all my guests today, Lisa wolf Fork a Black Women's Stitch, Trina Green Brown of Parenting for Liberation, and Dr James Gordon of the Center for Mind Body Medicine. You can find more about all of them and their organizations in the description of this podcast. Next Question with Katie Kurik is a production of My Heart Media and Katie Kurrik Media. The executive producers Army, Katie Curic, and Courtney Litz. The supervising producer is Lauren Hansen. Associate producers Derek Clements, Adriana Fassio, and Emily Pinto. The show is edited and mixed by Derrick Clements. For more information about today's episode, or to sign up for my morning newsletter wake Up Call, go to Katie currek dot com. You can also find me at Katie curic on Instagram and all my social media channels. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.