The Revelation Project - Episodes Tagged with “Covid”

Episode 159: Akilah Richards - DESCHOOLING Reclaiming agency over your time, body, thoughts, & actions

Monica Rodgers | Revelation Media LLC — Fri, 17 Feb 2023 00:00:00 -0500

Join us for an episode of self-inquiry, unlearning, and reparenting. My guest Akilah Richards is back to dive more deeply into deschooling and what it’s all about and how we can recognize it as liberation work that fuels learning, life design, and relationships.

This episode was emotional for me because compulsory schooling harmed me in a variety of ways and I saw those same harms happen to my own children through the public school system. I’ve come to see that this system is harmful to just about anyone who experiences it because it’s very nature is to standardize, grade us, and get us to conform to ways of being which are dehumanizing.

De-schooling is also a massive part of the process of unbecoming- a subject I’m endlessly passionate about because it honors our humanity, and invites us into the messy and magnificent truth of being human.

It’s about reckoning with the systems that have dehumanized us, and unlearning the behavior that causes us to dehumanize others. It’s about breaking the cycle of intergenerational trauma that conditions us to give another power and agency over our minds, bodies, thoughts and actions, and reclaiming our sovereignty so that we can make informed choices and participate through consent with the world around us vs. being forced to comply with tyranny.

While this episode is about de-schooling, it’s also about reframing our role in parenting and so much more.

I hope you love listening as much as I loved recording this interview.

Highlights:

How can we reframe our role as parents without the habits of control and power over our children?
Most of our lived experience in standardized education has been normalized, and yet it’s the cause of grave harm at many levels.
How can we experience awkwardness and disruption as gifts to deepen relationships and foster trust?
Why resistance is the roadmap and why we should trust it.
Why “mad question asking” is a necessary part of the deschooling process.
Why self-directed education offers our children more freedom to be who they are.
Why schoolish ideas persist in our culture and how we can change the status quo through the unschooling movement.
Why “learning loss” is schoolish and not a thing to be concerned about.
Why we need more than rules, tools, and “bad adult” guilt trips
How to interrupt and disrupt the impact of colonization so that we can learn to trust ourselves and our children.
Why silence is such a great teacher and why we must practice sitting within the pauses as part of our deschooling journey.

Links:

Episode 143: SUMMER SERIES: Akilah S. Richards - Raising Free People

Monica Rodgers | Revelation Media LLC — Wed, 07 Sep 2022 00:00:00 -0400

I loved my conversation with Akilah S. Richards and walked away with a much deeper understanding of the value of unschooling in America. Conventional schooling is deeply rooted in colonization, industrial progress, and control over our personal autonomy.

Akilah is passionate about mindful partnerships and parenting. Since 2016 she has hosted Fare of the Free Child, a lifestyle and parenting podcast about the connection between liberation, learning, and parenting, particularly among Black, Non-Black Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities. Parents, educators, unschoolers, and entrepreneurs tune in weekly to connect about unschooling, deschooling, conscious parenting, and self-directedness. Discussions center around emotional wellness, learning and children, parenting, self-care, and self-love. The voice and work of this Jamaican-born, digital nomad have been featured on NPR, Forbes, NBC TV, Good Morning America’s blog, and in several literary and in-person spaces throughout the U.S., Jamaica, and South Africa. The TEDx Speaker, digital content writer, and facilitator’s highly-anticipated book Raising Free People: Unschooling as Liberation and Healing Work (PM Press), will be released in the Fall of 2020.

“We can’t keep using tools of oppression and raise free people.” -Akilah Richards

Unschooling is a life design choice but it’s also deeply linked to liberation and the idea of raising free people.
Akilah’s children, Marley and Sage, had a consistent level of pushback when attending conventional school and at one point, Akilah and her partner Chris started to listen to what their children were saying.
While the girls were accelerating academically, they were shrinking emotionally.
They had stopped asking questions, which is a very “schoolish” thing.
Akilah and Chris wanted their children to have agency and autonomy and the journey has revealed a tremendous tie into the work of liberation.
Unschooling started as an experiment based on what Akilah and Chris knew was not working.
This began a process of “mad question asking.”
The way of the world is schooling - is our job as parents to acclimate our children to that?
The idea of unschooling is to help your child create a trustful relationship to learning.
The American Dream seems deeply entrenched in this idea of conventional education as the only way.
Unschooling started as an experiment based on what Akilah and Chris knew was not working.
When they left conventional education they discovered that there were many rewards - many freedoms with travel and finances that they had not previously recognized or been able to take advantage of.
A lot of what we see as educational issues are really issues of human relationships.
Unschooling creates an environment to question and unlearn.
Questions are the path.
Mad question asking brings us inward into the feminine - how do you want to feel?
In our school system, children are rewarded when they comply.
Parents worry about socialization, but socialization happens everywhere but school.
All people are indoctrinated into the “system,” but when you walk around in a Black body there is another level of suppression of your personhood which is why creating safe environments for BIPOC children to learn and develop confident autonomy is so important.
Unschooling isn’t just for rich people.
The pandemic is offering us opportunities and parents are noticing a positive shift in their children.
Covid is an opportunity to create a new normal in many ways including our relationship to education.
Liberation comes with responsibility and accountability.
It is time to decolonize our ideas of learning

“The resistance is the roadmap, not a route to something else.”

Episode 140: SUMMER SERIES: Ian Mackenzie - Mythic Masculine

Monica Rodgers | Revelation Media LLC — Wed, 17 Aug 2022 00:00:00 -0400

We've been taught to believe that myths are untrue, yet this indicates how atrophied our cultural mythic imagination is. As a result, myth has been relegated to consumer entertainment or dismissed as irrelevant to us vs. a potent way to more deeply understand ourselves in reciprocal relationships with others and the world.

Ours is a fact-based, linear, logical, and control-based culture that doesn't allow much room to follow the deep longing to know ourselves, and yet the longing persists and will continue to persist until we answer its call. Perhaps this time in our human evolution represents a heightened collective calling - can we answer it?

In this episode, Ian and I talk about where we are as a culture and Ian's hope for awakening men worldwide.

Ian became fascinated by the mythic masculine archetype when he initially learned more about the feminine through his film work.
Ian was estranged from his grandfather growing up, but he went with his uncle to clean out his grandfather's home and came across a stack of books after his death. On top was "Iron John" by Robert Bly, which piqued his curiosity.
When young men are not correctly initiated into adulthood and society, they become men at the mercy of their ego and are suspended as "boy-men" in our culture.
The Dominator Culture is a term coined by Riane Eisler, who wrote The Chalice and The Blade. Eisler positions the dominator model in contrast to the partnership model, a more egalitarian structure of society founded on mutual respect among its inhabitants. In dominator culture, men rule over women, whereas partnership culture values men and women equally.
An awakened archetypical mother is a mighty force in the world.
Women tend to enact violence against themselves and Men against others.
The narratives we often create are that the world is out to get us, that we need to conquer nature or anything threatening.
The medical establishment creates a narrative around "war" - such as terms like "frontline workers" or "losing the battle to cancer," and there is a consequence to thinking about nature in this way.
Our colonized view of the world keeps us from reciprocally engaging with life.
The solutions mind is a colonized mind.

Ian MacKenzie is a new paradigm artist who lives on the Salish Sea with his partner and young son. For over ten years, he's been tracking the global emergence of new cultures. From the desert of Burning Man to the heart of Occupy Wall St, he has sought and amplified the voices of visionaries, artists, and activists working toward planetary system change. He hosts The Mythic Masculine podcast and is the founder of A Gathering of Stories.

Episode 92: Ian MacKenzie - Mythic Masculine

Monica Rodgers | Revelation Media LLC — Wed, 15 Sep 2021 00:15:00 -0400

We’ve been taught to believe that myths are untrue, and yet, this indicates how atrophied our cultural mythic imagination is. As a result, myth has been relegated to consumer entertainment or dismissed as something irrelevant to us vs. as a potent way to more deeply understand ourselves in reciprocal relationships with others and the world.

Ours is a fact-based, linear, logical, and control-based culture that doesn’t allow much room to follow the deep longing to know ourselves, and yet the longing persists and will continue to persist until we answer its call. Perhaps this time in our human evolution represents a heightened collective calling - can we answer it?

In this episode, Ian and I talk about where we are as a culture and Ian's hope for awakening men worldwide.

Ian became fascinated by the mythic masculine archetype when he initially learned more about the feminine through his film work.
Ian was estranged from his grandfather growing up, but he went with his uncle to clean out his grandfather's home and came across a stack of books after his death. On top was "Iron John” by Robert Bly, which piqued his curiosity.
When young men are not properly initiated into adulthood and society, they become men at the mercy of their ego and are suspended as "boy-men” in our culture.
The Dominator Culture is a term coined by Riane Eisler, who wrote The Chalice and The Blade. Eisler positions the dominator model in contrast to the partnership model, a more egalitarian structure of society founded on mutual respect among its inhabitants. In dominator culture, men rule over women, whereas partnership culture values men and women equally.
An awakened archetypical mother is a very powerful force in the world.
Women tend to enact violence against themselves and Men against others.
The narratives we often create are that the world is out to get us or that we need to conquer nature or anything that threatens us.
The medical establishment creates a narrative around “war” - such as terms like "front line workers” or “losing the battle to cancer,” and there is a consequence to thinking about nature in this way.
Our colonized view of the world keeps us from reciprocally engaging with life.
The solutions mind is a colonized mind.

Ian MacKenzie is a new paradigm artist who lives on the Salish Sea with his partner and young son. For over ten years, he’s been tracking the global emergence of new culture. From the desert of Burning Man to the heart of Occupy Wall St, he has sought and amplified the voices of visionaries, artists, and activists who have been working toward planetary system change. He is the host of The Mythic Masculine podcast and the founder of A Gathering of Stories.

Episode 60: Sandra Payne - Nurse Rx

Monica Rodgers | Revelation Media LLC — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 00:00:00 -0500

Join us for this revealing conversation as Sandra Payne and I discuss our healthcare workers' well-being, especially our nurses.

Sandra Payne is a Registered Nurse and the owner of Sandra Payne Holistic Wellness Coaching. She is also the founder of the Nurse Rx Coaching Program. To overcome her own struggle with burnout, depression, and anxiety, Sandra used a truly holistic healing approach that she refers to as her “Journey through the Canyon of Hope." She felt a passionate fire to guide other women on their own canyon journeys through coaching and healing, so she created the Nurse RX Program in which nurses learn and practice a host of skills and exercises to manage their own mental and emotional exhaustion through the combination of individual coaching and a powerful sisterhood of connection & support.

Show Notes:

Before COVID, Sandra recognized that our essential workers, especially our nurses, are part of an unsustainable system that almost guarantees their burnout.
Sandra has endured the struggle of anxiety and depression that’s so common with nurses.
The root causes of her anxiety and depression stem from undue pressure on herself to continue being of service when she was already at max capacity.
Burnout and the overwhelming demands of women are leading us down a path to mental and emotional overwhelm.
Sandra takes nurses through different stages of awareness and healing through what she calls “The Canyon of Hope.”
Burnout is incredibly common for our essential workers and nurses. Ironically, a large percentage of nurses end up in a state of illness or chronic fatigue due to the way the medical and health care system operates.
Sandra catalogs the risk of not addressing the signs and symptoms of burnout.
What's the risk to us if we don't address our signs and symptoms early?
Sandra encourages women to find a support system or coaching circle of women to receive support and help.

Links:

Episode 34: Akilah S. Richards - Raising Free People

Monica Rodgers | Revelation Media LLC — Wed, 29 Jul 2020 00:15:00 -0400

“We can’t keep using tools of oppression and raise free people.” -Akilah Richards

Unschooling is a life design choice but it’s also deeply linked to liberation and the idea of raising free people.
Akilah’s children, Marley and Sage, had a consistent level of pushback when attending conventional school and at one point, Akilah and her partner Chris started to listen to what their children were saying.
While the girls were accelerating academically, they were shrinking emotionally.
They had stopped asking questions, which is a very “schoolish” thing.
Akilah and Chris wanted their children to have agency and autonomy and the journey has revealed a tremendous tie into the work of liberation.
Unschooling started as an experiment based on what Akilah and Chris knew was not working.
This began a process of “mad question asking.”
The way of the world is schooling - is our job as parents to acclimate our children to that?
The idea of unschooling is to help your child create a trustful relationship to learning.
The American Dream seems deeply entrenched in this idea of conventional education as the only way.
Unschooling started as an experiment based on what Akilah and Chris knew was not working.
When they left conventional education they discovered that there were many rewards - many freedoms with travel and finances that they had not previously recognized or been able to take advantage of.
A lot of what we see as educational issues are really issues of human relationships.
Unschooling creates an environment to question and unlearn.
Questions are the path.
Mad question asking brings us inward into the feminine - how do you want to feel?
In our school system, children are rewarded when they comply.
Parents worry about socialization, but socialization happens everywhere but school.
All people are indoctrinated into the “system,” but when you walk around in a Black body there is another level of suppression of your personhood which is why creating safe environments for BIPOC children to learn and develop confident autonomy is so important.
Unschooling isn’t just for rich people.
The pandemic is offering us opportunities and parents are noticing a positive shift in their children.
Covid is an opportunity to create a new normal in many ways including our relationship to education.
Liberation comes with responsibility and accountability.
It is time to decolonize our ideas of learning

“The resistance is the roadmap, not a route to something else.”

Links: