The Revelation Project - Episodes Tagged with “Racism”

Episode 144: SUMMER SERIES: Amy McPhie Allebest - Breaking Down Patriarchy

Monica Rodgers | Revelation Media LLC — Wed, 14 Sep 2022 00:00:00 -0400

In 2016, Amy Mcphie Allebest published her piece "Dear Mormon Man,” which went viral during the #metoo movement, helping crack the foundation of deeply rooted inequalities within her church and worldwide.

The feminist awakening started long ago, yet part of the issue we face in making progress as daughters of the patriarchy is that our vast repository of herstory isn’t shared widely, taught, or easily accessible. Still, Amy McPhie Allebest is changing all that with her podcast Breaking Down Patriarchy, An Essential Texts Bookclub, which I believe is one of the most important podcasts of our time.

Amy has always been drawn to asking the deeper questions that revealed the oppressive social systems at play in her university studies. Her questions always led her to more questions that piqued her interest in how these systems impacted women over time.

Amy is no stranger to agitation and frustration about oppressive systems in her own life. When she found that she could not find a comprehensive women’s studies program, she decided to create one that would help her to illuminate her own struggle. So began an essential texts book club podcast where Amy invites her listeners and readers to tune in each week as she and one of her guests break down the patriarchy. Their conversations are about seminal feminist texts written over the ages that chronicle a deep, rich, and rewarding herstory highlighting the many remarkable ideas, observations, and work of female pioneers who are the foremothers of a most incredible movement to liberate, amplify, and celebrate the independent, sovereign and essential roles of women as co-equal partners in a world that has always sought to oppress and control them.

This podcast is a project for the whole human family, and I urge all of us to tune in and become active listeners to this body of work that Amy has worked so hard to make available.

It’s filled with incredible history, conversations, insights, and poignant and powerful revelations that offer alternative ways of imagining what might be possible if we were to succeed in joining hands with the men we love to build a more equitable system that benefits and liberates everyone from the oppressive and unjust systems that have dominated the world for the past 5,000 years.

It’s just as important for men to listen in and participate in breaking down patriarchy because ultimately, men are still in power, and patriarchy harms everyone.
It’s also deeply important because we love the men in our lives, and Patriarchy hurts the men we love as well as hurts women.
We don’t actually know the true nature of women because she has always been subjugated.
All human beings have both masculine and feminine energies, and all human beings benefit from cultivating both.
Men are taught to be good men by being defenders of women, and while there is a lot of beauty in that, it can also be very condescending and limiting for the women in their lives.

Listen in as we talk about her podcast responses from both women and men across the country, how Amy sees her role as she continues to steward this project, as well as what her vision for the future entails.

Episode 135: Sarah Durham Wilson - Maiden to Mother: The Archetypal Journey to the Mature Feminine

Monica Rodgers | Revelation Media LLC — Wed, 13 Jul 2022 00:00:00 -0400

This past year I completed my 8-month rites of passage teacher training with Sarah Durham Wilson. It’s by far one of the most provocative and potent trainings I’ve ever done. It helped me truly understand the core wounds of women conditioned by patriarchy and how to assist women in healing those wounds.

In this episode, I have the honor of introducing you to my teacher and her work and celebrating with her the publication of her first book with Sounds True: Maiden To Mother, Unlocking our Archetypical Journey into The Mature Feminine.

When the goddess culture was stolen and buried, so were women’s rites of passage into our wild, intuitive femininity and maturity.

With Maiden to Mother, Sarah Durham Wilson excavates these ancient rites, guiding us through a sacred and crucial initiation from the immature Maiden into the archetypal Mother. This powerful, safe, compassionate, full-bloom feminine life force exists within all of us.

Becoming the Mother is every woman’s birthright—regardless of whether or not she raises children. The Mother is who we needed as children, who we were meant to be in this life, and who the world needs us to be now.

Sarah teaches that while pre-patriarchal cultures honored women’s natural cycles, today’s society infantilizes women, idolizing youthful traits such as “pretty, pleasing, and polite” to keep us distracted and dependent. While a healthy version of the Maiden will always remain part of us, there comes a time when we must no longer let her wounds and immaturity guide our lives. We must step into our mature, feminine fullness.

Through personal stories, rituals, teachings, and practices, Sarah helps women heal the Mother Wound and dismantle our internalized patriarchy with its false, constricting standards for the feminine so that we may live with authenticity and feast on the richness of life. “Midlife is not, as our culture proposes, where a woman’s power ends,” writes Wilson, “but where it really begins.”

In this episode, Sarah and I talk about:

Sarah’s diagnosis and her more recent understanding of how being undiagnosed has impacted her in her work.
Sarah losing her Mother to Cancer when she was still a teen and how her Mother’s life and death shaped her work and healing.
Activism as a potent medicine for what the world needs now, how she’s helping to dismantle racism through her work, and being a faithful ally to black, brown, and indigenous women, and the connection to the colonization and capitalistic trance of patriarchy.
White feminism and white fragility and how they are related to “The Wounded Maiden” archetype.
Why Climate Justice and Racial Justice are Married.
Inner misogyny, its impact, and how it becomes internalized in both men and women.
Making the rites of passage journey to the mature and why this is the work for all of us at this time.

Links:

Episode 132: Dr. Terrlyn Curry Avery - Dismantling Racism from the Inside Out

Monica Rodgers | Revelation Media LLC — Wed, 22 Jun 2022 00:00:00 -0400

In this episode, I had the pleasure of welcoming back Dr. Terrlyn Curry Avery to talk about anti-racism.

In our first discussion, we explored her work in helping heal religious trauma, which is also intersectional to racism and a by-product of patriarchy.

Today we dove into her book Dismantling Racism from the Inside Out, and how these times invite us to reckon with our internal bias and require us to untangle the lies of us and them, black or white, and other corrupt programs of patriarchy.

Some of the topics we discussed included:

When did Terrlyn first encounter racism?
Understand micro-aggression and its impact.
What are implicit and unconscious biases, and how do they show up in our lives?
The murder of George Floyd became a catalyst for a new explosion of awakening to racism worldwide.
Racism is not a “trend.”
How can we activate this work in our lives and grow our capacity to dismantle racism?
Looking at our own internal “stuff” is hard and necessary
What is Sacred Intelligence, and how can we access it?

Rev. Dr. (TLC) is the creator of Pastology, the cutting-edge field that focuses on the synergy between pastoring and psychology. She holds a Ph.D. from Hofstra University and a Masters of Divinity from Yale University. She calls herself a pastologist (licensed psychologist and ordained minister) and is a transformational leader, coach, speaker, author and retreat leader. Rev. Dr. TLC has a unique approach to healing, transformation, and manifestation. She places emphasis on the journey toward sacred intelligence: the ability to tap into one’s internal source in order to move toward intelligent choices. Those choices are intended to honor the Sacred and help the individual manifest their greatness, while simultaneously embracing the humanity of those around them.

Rev. Dr. TLC works with highly influential and committed leaders who need spiritual, life, or career coaching as they transform the world by creating a legacy of service, prosperity, and greatness. She also provides coaching support for leaders to help them understand how their sphere of influence can help to change the status quo and to dismantle structures that have intentionally and unintentionally created racial disparities. Her coaching provides an opportunity for leaders to: create the right context for conversations on race and leadership development with their employees; discover how racism and unconscious bias influence their hiring practices, affect their clients and have a direct impact on the company’s financial goals; and understand how racism impacts employees, their work performance, and their feelings of safety in the work environment. Rev. Dr. TLC has a long history of working with institutions, organizations, and communities to bridge the racial divide and to promote racial equity.

Rev. Dr. TLC is the host of Dismantle Racism with the Rev. Dr. TLC which airs on talkradio.nyc.

She is the author of Dismantling Racism: Healing Separation From the Inside Out and Sacred Intelligence: The Essence of Sacred, Selfish & Shared Relationships. Rev. Dr. TLC is the pastor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Presbyterian Church in Springfield, MA.

Links:

Episode 94: Amy McPhie Allebest - Breaking Down Patriarchy

Monica Rodgers | Revelation Media LLC — Wed, 29 Sep 2021 00:15:00 -0400

This podcast is a project for the whole human family, and I urge all of us to tune in and become active listeners to this body of work that Amy has worked so hard to make available.

It’s just as important for men to listen in and participate in breaking down patriarchy because ultimately, men are still in power, and patriarchy harms everyone.
It’s also deeply important because we love the men in our lives, and Patriarchy hurts the men we love as well as hurts women.
We don’t actually know the true nature of women because she has always been subjugated.
All human beings have both masculine and feminine energies, and all human beings benefit from cultivating both.
Men are taught to be good men by being defenders of women, and while there is a lot of beauty in that, it can also be very condescending and limiting for the women in their lives.

Links:

Episode 63: Ken Mossman - Big Boys Cry

Monica Rodgers | Revelation Media LLC — Wed, 24 Feb 2021 00:00:00 -0500

I met Ken almost a decade ago and felt an instant kinship with him.
In addition to being a masterful coach, I admire his capacity as a human being to hold complexity and emotion, as well as his great dedication to working with Men toward greater emotional fluency.

After the events at the Capitol on January 6th, I reached out to Ken seeking comfort and a deeper understanding of what I was witnessing. I felt helpless, triggered, and overwhelmed by the series of events that had unfolded that day and how we got there.

Throughout this episode, I was mightily triggered. I’m grateful for Ken’s steady and compassionate response as we explored the underpinnings of what happened that day and what we can do to start to be part of the change we want to see in the world for the men in our country and our sons.

Ken Mossman has specialized in working with men for almost two decades. With an international clientele from a wide variety of industries from finance, academia, and technology – to entrepreneurship and the arts, Ken’s focus is on helping men expand their emotional literacy, fluency, and flexibility so they can lead with presence and empathy.
Ken is a Senior Faculty Member with CTI, the Co-Active Training Institute. In addition to his coaching and training work, he writes regularly, hosts the “Mojo for the Modern Man” podcast, and designs and leads intensive, deep programs for men.

Show Notes:

On January 6th, 2021, Ken's sister contacted him about the siege at the Capitol and the unfolding violence. Ken's reaction to what he saw on the news felt like a “gut punch" and included tension in his neck and jaw along with a sense of “there’s no surprise here” while simultaneously feeling the shock of what was happening.
The roots of the events have a larger cultural context that we seem to be in denial about.
"We are a nation of good and decent people” seems to be the refrain heard over and over again. Still, the truth is that our nation was built on wobbly legs of genocide, slavery, colonization, and brutality.
Many of the images we saw that day are emblematic of toxic white male privilege and gross characterizations of “The Man Box” in cosplay.
A population fed on a steady diet of misinformation and a toxic model of white male privilege and feelings of anger and invisibility created the Capitol events that day.
One of the Trump administration hallmarks was this idea of “the enemy,” and his language and energy were often about "us or them.”
Rage is a culmination of unexpressed anger, hopelessness, and invisibility.
Many men in our country lack the relational and communication skills needed to break out of the “man box.”
When it comes to raising our children, we need to be mindful of our internal dialog and catch ourselves as parents when we find ourselves triggered by our own unresolved “stuff.”
We need to ask ourselves if we are modeling healthy behavior for our children regarding the full range of human emotion. We need to recognize that the language we have to raise boys falls short and creates an environment for rage.

Links:

Episode 58: Liz McCartney - The Human Mess & Accountability

Monica Rodgers | Revelation Media LLC — Wed, 20 Jan 2021 00:00:00 -0500

Liz McCartney offers healing wisdom and knowledge to humanity through her gift as a spiritual channel. She is a master teacher of Reiki and combines meditation and pranic healing in her work with her clients. Her focus is on creating a synergistic connection to help her clients embrace the human experience through the divine being. Imagine a synergistic relationship to healing through the divine being within you - this is the work of Liz McCartney.

Liz and I decided to riff on what is currently happening in our country and why it seems so much easier to blame, shame, numb, and deflect, and why it is so important that we start working on the unresolved and unhealed wounds within.

We hope that this episode will normalize the human mess with some intersecting conversations that may reveal more awareness and even normalize the healing process.

In this episode, we define "the mess” as something we either try to hide or won’t hold ourselves accountable for because we don’t want to look at our own shadows or unhealed wounds.
We have a choice to make; we can choose to be willfully ignorant of the root causes of our disruption, of our disparity, and our needs to heal, but in doing so, we not only do great harm within ourselves, we're actually harming the collective energy and creating a bigger mess.
Part of the journey of enlightenment and consciousness, however, requires us to overcome this struggle.
Nobody really wants to talk about hard things. We tend to disassociate from difficult situations and to avoid challenging topics that make us feel vulnerable.
We don’t often think of our ignorance as being willful, but as Liz mentions in this episode, it’s a choice to continue to choose suffering.
Many of us are hiding a mess in our lives behind a prettier picture we show the world.
Addiction, family dysfunction, and trauma are part of a perpetuated generational cycle if we don’t actively choose to break that cycle.
If you have grown up this way, you may not have a healthy model for behaving differently, but we have access to healthy models these days if we seek them.
Often we create enemies outside ourselves when the real war is the one we are having on the inside. Our refusal to look at ourselves as the original source of our own suffering is what contributes to many of the isms.
When we talk about creating more unity in the world, we first have to look at our own unity within ourselves. If we are fractured inside, we must be accountable for healing ourselves.
Qanon is perhaps an example of a movement of people who are hiding their own white supremacy, racism, sexism, unresolved rage, and fear, and are refusing personal accountability for the way things are in their own lives. Instead, they blame outside forces or direct their attention on fantastic distractions so that they don’t have to look at their own stuff.
We are all in an ongoing state of healing, but we will not get anywhere unless we take inventory of our own personal mess and ask for help and support where we need it.

Links:

Episode 55: Truth Speaks - Decolonizing The Mind

Monica Rodgers | Revelation Media LLC — Wed, 23 Dec 2020 00:00:00 -0500

Truth Speaks is a Black, Non-Binary, Trans-Queer Woman with Southern roots. She relocated to the state of Maine in 2011 to be an Evangelist. Truth is a Black Lives Matter Activist, Feminist, Writer, Femme, and Artist. She also has a long history in the medical field in nursing, then shifted her focus in 2015 to her work in Antiracism. She uses her art to draw attention to issues surrounding white supremacy, police brutality, and anti-Black racism, focusing on Black women. Truth is always looking for opportunities to empower women and share her lived experiences and truth with the world.

In this episode, we talk about Decolonizing the Mind and what it means to empower womxn by raising the awareness of unfamiliar intersections and conversations that other women like Truth encounter daily.

Truth chose her name because she has been seeking her truth with all of her heart and has become aligned with that truth, especially since coming out.
Truth feels liberated by giving herself permission to be who she is and to seek her truth, and speak her truth, no matter what.
No one can write your narrative for you, and your personal truth does not have to align with anyone else’s.
We are given these hidden scripts that dictate how we “should” live, love, and be, and these scripts can be incredibly harmful if you do not fit in a cultural box.
Truth agrees with James Baldwin’s writings - that we can disagree with one another, but it’s not ok to harm one another for being different or for having a truth that’s not a cultural “norm."
Truth was born into a male-gendered body, but this was not the essence of her spirit. Truth knew at a very early age who she was but felt that she could not be true to this due to her upbringing and what the church dictated.
Truth's mother knew she was having a girl, and yet, she birthed a boy.
It’s only in the past few years that Truth has felt like she can fully express who she is, and it’s made a tremendous difference in her health and her joy.
Black Mamas Matter focuses on the disproportionate rates that black women die in pregnancy and childbirth and how black women are treated based on stereotypes that subject them to unnecessary trauma and pain.
Truth is passionate about art, modeling, music, and self-expression based on activism around issues such as police brutality, disparities in health care, and the treatment of queer black and brown people.
We are seeing a lot of activity in progressive areas, but Truth understands that this is not yet the case in many places.
Truth wants to bring change to how Black and Brown Women are treated. She wants to create more spaces and have access to the same opportunities without being discriminated against. She also wants to help educate through her art, voice, and activism.
Pose, Drag, and J-Sette are art forms that are growing and being celebrated.
Silence is violence. Truth works to bring her voice to the many ways racism is covert and hidden and how it needs to be revealed.

I loved this conversation with Truth. I will continue to follow and celebrate her beauty, grace, and fierce love for humanity and her incredible stand for making change happen in the world. Thank you for all you do as a cycle breaker, artist, and activist.

Links:

Episode 33: Jenna Arnold: Raising Our Hands

Monica Rodgers | Revelation Media LLC — Wed, 22 Jul 2020 00:15:00 -0400

Jenna Arnold was first mentioned to me by a dear friend over ten years ago. She called me one night soon after meeting Jenna in New York City. “This woman is a force of nature and you HAVE to meet her!" I recall her saying.

Fast forward, and while I have been following her on social media for several years, I recently noticed that she was publishing an important book about race. I asked for a copy, devoured it, and felt deeply excited about its content. I loved it because Jenna doesn’t try to simplify or dumb down what’s happening in the world and why. In it, she calls out middle-class white women to recognize where we unconsciously keep the systems of oppression in place and why. She further argues that if we were to awaken to our power and our willingness to be with difficult truths, we could quite literally change the future for all human beings. Jenna asserts that white women benefit from the very systems that oppress us, and we use our voting power to keep these systems in place because we won’t face where we have been complicit in the oppression of ourselves and others, and where our inaction has determined the current trajectory of this country. This is such an important book, and a powerful conversation- please listen in- I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Jenna Arnold is the author of Raising Our Hands, an educator, social entrepreneur, activist, and mother who lives in New York City with her husband and two children. Jenna was one of the National Organizers of the Women’s March in 2017 and Oprah named her as one of her “100 Awakened Leaders who are using their voice and talent to elevate humanity." For her work as the co-founder of ORGANIZE—an organization focused on ending the waitlist for organ transplants in the US, Jenna was named one of Inc Magazine's "20 Most Disruptive Innovators" and the New York Times called it one of "the biggest ideas in social change." Jenna created the hit TV show on MTV, 'Exiled!' which took spoiled American teenagers to live with indigenous cultures around the world, and while at the United Nations, Jenna created multi-platform programming for MTV and Showtime with A-list celebrities like Jay-Z and Angelina Jolie. Jenna sits on the board of the Sesame Workshop Leadership Council and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Her first book, Raising Our Hands, is about how white women can stop avoiding hard conversations, start accepting responsibility, and find their place on the new frontlines (published June 2020).

Jenna Arnold's grandmother was one of 90 who contracted COVID-19 in her nursing home and is only one of two who survived.
Mindset is so powerful and important when it comes to what we are facing in the world at the moment.
All oars in the water - we all need to put our oars in, and row in the same direction.
The title of Raising Our Hands was so difficult to get to, and yet, so obvious. It symbolizes the way Jenna wants white women to remember that we all need to raise our hands and be counted when it comes to being antiracist and volunteering ourselves for hard conversations, truths, and paradoxes. "I’m guilty, but I’m also willing to learn." That the constant contradictions of who we are, the raising our hand emoji is a great way for us to relate to all the ways in which we need to make ourselves available to be with the truth of what is, in all of it’s complexity.
We need to learn how to allow paradoxes to stand together and hold “the sacred AND."
There is a genocide in this country that we do not talk about.
Abraham Lincoln is the victor and therefore he got to tell the story however he wanted. We have to be careful throughout history of who gets to tell the story.
When marginalized people are systematically abused, ignored, enslaved, and destroyed, they don’t get to tell a story anyone is willing to hear because it’s not a story of “victory,” yet these are the voices that need to be centered when it comes to telling history.
Middle class and above American white women need to sit down and be quiet AND stand up and roar.
Middle class white American women have to say, "I’m willing to show up and be messy and imperfect."
We spend more money on our prisons than our schools.
The data related to the demographics of white women was not adding up to the psychology of American white women in the voting booths.
Jenna formed listening circles of women around the country and for four years she asked them questions to have conversations that would give her insight into this paradox that had white women voting for someone that wasn’t aligned with their values.
Our systems are broken, not our humanity.
There are 480 sources in the book Raising Our Hands - the information Jenna included is well researched.
There are billions of dollars lost in wages to the gender pay gap.
There are exactly zero pronouns referencing “her” or “she” in the Constitution.
What we have to be willing to be with is the ALL of this big mess. We have to be willing to see what’s not working and see how we have been complicit in allowing it to happen.
We have to be willing to see that we have been the direct beneficiary of things that have been built off the backs of others.
We have a desperation of qualifying ourselves instead of realizing that no matter what we have biases, and we have to move out of the binary and back into “the grace of grey."
Perfectionism is the achilles heel of the country and white women are responsible for holding it up AND, we might not have known how bad the disease of perfectionism is, but it’s getting in the way of us making change happen.
“There is blood on the hands of voters who voted Trump into office.”
The founding fathers hated each other, they did not get along and they purposefully excluded women because they were too powerful.
This isn’t going to be easy but we all need to put our oars in the water and row in the same direction. We need to be willing to be with hard truths and use our voices and our voting power to change the status quo that’s currently killing all of us.

Links:

Raising Our Hands | Jenna Arnold
Book: Raising Our Hands: How White Women Can Stop Avoiding Hard Conversations, Start Accepting Responsibility, and Find Our Place on the New Frontlines:
ORGANIZE
Inc. 35 Under 35: Organize on Ending the Organ Shortage in the U.S.
Simon Sinek
Book: Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, Bryan Stevenson — “Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”
Facebook: Jenna Arnold
Twitter: Jenna Arnold (@JennaArnold)
Instagram • Jenna Arnold (@itsjenna)

Episode 27: Dr. Terrlyn Curry Avery - Revealing and Healing Religious Wounds

Monica Rodgers | Revelation Media LLC — Tue, 09 Jun 2020 21:00:00 -0400

What do systemic racism and religious wounding have in common? Both are very damaging to our souls if we don’t reveal and heal them.

Listen in as Terrlyn and I talk about the importance of taking the time to investigate our own traditions and beliefs. We discuss how all must examine and reveal where unconscious bias and disempowering interpretations might be getting in the way of tapping into the true spirit of our divine nature as well as how we can all relate to one another as members of a larger spiritual community where everyone gets to belong.

Dr. Terrlyn L. Curry Avery is a pastologist, spiritual leader, author, and TEDx speaker. She is the creator of pastology, the dynamic approach to transformation that focuses on the synergy between spirituality and the human psyche. She helps transformational leaders stay grounded in their faith, values, and purpose by providing both spiritual and psychological support as they manifest their own greatness and help others to do the same. Dr. Curry Avery helps leaders recognize and understand how ingrained disruptive and damaging messages from various religions may impact their finances, decision-making, careers, and personal self-image. She holds a Ph.D. from Hofstra University and a MDiv. from Yale University. She is the author of Sacred Intelligence: The Essence of Sacred, Selfish and Shared Relationships and was the previous host of her own Public Access Show.

Enjoy this rich discussion of the patriarchy, giving up your power, religious trauma, understanding how race and religion can separate us if we are not mindful and aware, and what might be possible if we were to give ourselves permission to reimagine and broaden our perspective on the sacred.

Show Notes:

We need to be able to look at religion and the divine through a number of different perspectives and stay open and stay curious, and give each other the freedom to have our own experience.
Language can segregate unless we put the stories of the Bible into context.
If we were to look at each other as spiritual beings we would not be in such division.
Many of us have hidden religious wounds that can keep us feeling unworthy, undeserving, and in shame.

Links: