CIIS Public Programs Podcast

TRANSCRIPT

[Cheerful theme music begins]

This is the CIIS Public Programs Podcast, featuring talks and conversations recorded live by California Institute of Integral Studies, a non-profit university located in San Francisco on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Land. 

African-centered scholars often point to mindfulness and meditation as important practices for those of African ancestry to tend to their inner landscapes and heal from the harm of systemic and internalized oppression. For Jenée Johnson, the Founder and Curator of The Right Within Experience, a mindfulness immersion program for people of African ancestry, mindfulness is a tool to cultivate a liberatory lifestyle of joy and well-being. These are the human rights and exalted emotions that are eroded in Black lives through consistent exposure to the trauma of racism. 

In this episode, Jenée is joined by filmmaker and activist Shakti Butler for a powerful conversation exploring mindfulness as a tool for Black Americans to reclaim joy, self-love, and well-being. 

This episode was recorded during an in-person and live streamed event at California Institute of Integral Studies on February 2nd, 2024. You can also watch it on the CIIS Public Programs YouTube channel. A transcript is available at ciispod.com. To find out more about CIIS and public programs like this one, visit our website ciis.edu and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms.

[Theme music concludes]

Jenée Johnson: Good evening 

Shakti Butler: And welcome. So it's nice to see you here and all the people that we can't see, but it's really nice to get to spend some time with you, Jenée. This is someone whom I love dearly. 

Jenée Johnson: Thank you. 

Shakti Butler: Yes. And I remember when we first met, we were at a place where people were planning, making plans for getting married and we stepped away and had lunch and we had so much in common, so much for both from New York, both from Harlem, both doing the work that we do in the world. And the biggest thing was the power of your love. Your love was so awesome in terms of how it is that you think through and present the work that you're doing that is to lift people up and invite them and to step into their full humanity and their greatness. So thank you for everything that you do. 

Jenée Johnson: Thank you, Shakti. I appreciate that. 

Shakti Butler: So I thought you might want to start by telling us a little bit about how you got involved with creating the Right Within experience. 

Jenée Johnson: Sure. Thank you. Well, I'm actually from Shaolin, the home of the Wu-Tang Clan. My father is a Harlemite and my grandfather lived in Harlem. So I took the number three train up to Harlem many, many days and took dance classes with Diane McIntyre, Sounds in Motion. Do you remember that? 

Shakti Butler: I love Diane McIntyre. We're in the same meditation group. 

Jenée Johnson: Really? 

Shakti Butler: Yeah. 

Jenée Johnson: There you go. So I think the essence of love came from my family, who are a combination of people that migrated from the South during the Great Migration. My grandmother came with her mother from Charleston, South Carolina, and she had that little Geechee accent. Yes, yes. And my mother's family immigrated from the Caribbean, from the island of St. Martin. And oh, yes, Shakti's family is from Barbados, but my paternal grandfather is from Barbados, so Beijing. So you've got New York, you've got Caribbean, you know what I mean? Okay, so what am I doing in California? I'm a little bit of a hot rod sometimes, because the cultural difference is, it's significant actually in our communication style, in how we engage. We have real winter. So that means if you really want to get somewhere, it's a commitment to buckle up and get there. But for the love, it's definitely started with my family and in the church. So when my dad, when I was about four, I have a distinct memory of my dad being in the choir. And we rushing to church and he had the big black robe, and my dad was very tall, and the robe was just flowing. And we get into the church, and I don't know where my family went, but I ran to the front, and I began kissing everybody up and down the pews. And I have a cousin who is now in her 90s. And when she was 88, she said to me, do you remember when you went up and down, kissing everybody in the church? I said, I do, but you remember? And she said, how could anyone forget? And I think that is my natural essence signature, my code from God the divine. And so I don't have to work at pouring it out or pouring it into what I am up to. So that's where it started. 

Shakti Butler: And we know that love is indestructible. We're not talking about romantic love, of course. But so tell us how this love, this running up and down and kissing the people, and it being something that's remembered, how does it inform your actual work? Tell us a little bit about your work and how you got it started and what your goals are. 

Jenée Johnson: The Right Within experience. I call myself, I do teach mindfulness. I am an ordained minister. I have studied the scriptures extensively, biblical research, fellowship, and teaching. So I am a teacher. And there is a distinction between empire Christianity, yes, yes, the arm of colonialization, the arm of violence and terror against particularly Black people and other people of culture, and a Christ-centered faith that is based on Christ's light and based on a true vital spiritual relationship with God. There is a distinction. And so oftentimes in our culture, when you say, that's why I don't even call myself a Christian. I call myself a, I say that I have a Christ-centered faith. So I digress, because I do that a lot too. But this love came from my love of Black people. I love being Black. I embrace all of humanity. And human suffering is universal. But I was born in this frame and figure. And the culture and the vibrancy of those that raised me and the style and the personalities is just so rich. It's like deep, dark soil. So this love that pours out of me is for Black people. Now, when I was in fourth grade following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, a beautiful teacher who lived in my neighborhood started the Dr. Martin Luther King at the time we called it Afro-American history class. We moved on to African later. But I haven't had, you can't really see it, but this is me with Mrs. King, another student in her class. And the borough president of Shaolin, which is Staten Island for those of you who don't know. He came to visit our class. She started this after-school class to teach us Black history. And when I brought the little paper home with all the after-school offerings to my mom, and she was reading them off, and she got to Mrs. King's class, Afro-American history, I said, oh, I'm not taking that class. And she said, oh, yes, you are. And I was like, she says, because you don't know who you are. And I said, well, when we all going to tell me I was African? So that was never spoken, but when the opportunity, it was clearly believed, right? So when we went to Mrs. King's class, she opened up before us person after person of African ancestry who were accomplished, who had done things, who had gone to the edge of their potential. And not only did we read the history, and not only did we read about these people in books, but she brought live bodies into the classroom to talk to us about their ordinary general lives, where there was some measure of exception or excellence or accomplishment, so that we could see that the power of regular people, that everybody had a little something, something. And so she gave me a primary hook to then go out and hang more things on and build more hooks as I continued to grow. So my love of black people got solidified, got codified with a teacher who loved her people and came to a classroom. She's a public school teacher, but she didn't teach in her neighborhood public school. My school was her neighborhood public school, where she started the after school program. And it changed the lives of, I can't tell you, countless of young black people that came up in my era. Because I'm a baby boomer, I don't mind telling you. I'm 6.6 66. Yes. 

Shakti Butler: So I have, yeah. We were talking a little earlier tonight about the impact on you about the Montgomery bus situations and what you learned from that. Because I think the tentacles of that really influence your work deeply. So could you tell us a little bit about that? 

Jenée Johnson: Yes. Absolutely. Because it was the ordinary foot soldier in Montgomery, Alabama. So remembering that this is the stage where black people if you want to ride the bus, the bus pulls up. You get on at the front, you drop your dime in, then you get off. You walk to the back door, then you get on the back of the bus, and then you sit in the black section. Rain or shine, sleet or hail, it doesn't matter. And sometimes, before you could get back on the bus at the back, the bus driver would pull off. It was absolutely impossible. The bus driver would pull off, it was nasty. And who rode the bus? Working people, people going to work, doing the asundry things that we do, primarily women going to work in the homes of white families. And it was women who actually led that movement. Rosa Parks, this beautiful upstanding citizen, was the pinpoint. She was secretary of the NAACP. And when she said, I am not getting up, and they arrested her, people were like, up in, how can you, of all the people, how you going to arrest Rosa Parks? What is significant about the 365 odd days of not riding the bus? People walking, people performing. We have Uber, but they did their own. Taxis, situations, driving. At night, after a full day's work, people gathered in church. We don't want to go anywhere after we get home from work. That's another story I'll talk about later. Gathered in church together, and sang, and prayed, and were in community. And got a word from the pulpit to give them some encouragement to go out and continue the walking the next day. So the whole notion of taking a stand, and be thou not the oppressor and choose none of his ways, pulling out, deciding that our humanity is important, and doing it in community and not in isolation, and the work was not de-spiritualized. So all of those things, all of those things are of interest to me and have impacted how I view the world, and how I endeavor to do things.

Shakti Butler: And it's woven into your work. So tell us a little bit about the tagline that you use in your work, which is called, liberation is a lifestyle of love. How does this philosophy guide you, guide the program? And what does it mean on the individual, personal, and even collective level? 

Jenée Johnson: Yes. We are in pursuit of liberation from a dominant culture. From a dominant culture, understand the culture. It is a way of its policy, practice, behavior. It is a code. It is a system. System, it's almost like invisible. It's not like a thread that you could say, I see the red thread. I'm going to pull it. So when we say we're going to be liberated from that, it is not a one-time thing. It is a lifestyle. It is a way of living from how you get up, for how you eat, for how you manage your relationships, from how we get honest about our stuff, for how we pursue our healing, how we tend to our hearts, how we rest. It's a lifestyle of self-love. So the start here is you start with love. And you start with love of self and love of people. I start with love of myself and love of Black people. Not like I don't love other people, because I'm a human flourishing curator. But I love myself and my own. And then the circles grow wider, because what else does the sacred text say? Love your neighbor. What? As you love who? Yourself. Yourself. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, soul, mind, and strength. And the second commandment is like unto it, love thy neighbor as you love yourself. So actually, that's a little twist, right? Because it's you love yourself first. And that sets the standard for then how you love others. It's not, oh, I'm out there. No, it's I start in here, and then I move out. So liberation is something that you tend to. It's something that you steward and cultivate. And it also expands as our consciousness expands. Things are not perfect by any means. But the Charleston that my grandmother left, who refused to tell us any stories about it, because it had to have been brutal. She said, I'm not talking about it. I stand on her shoulders and the shoulders of her mom, who brought her to New York. So the circle of love continues. And it is not linear. It is not linear. And it's not just in this plane. That's why you have to spiritualize your work. You have to pull. You have to evoke the power of God and all the others. I happen to have a particular, I happen to have a particular lane of a sovereign God. But there are other entities and powers that are for us. You all better get some of that. 

Shakti Butler: Can you, I love that story because we are on different spiritual paths, but we're both on very deep spiritual paths. I've been a meditator for many, many, many, many, many years. And Jenée has been working in this area of mindfulness and sharing that with people. Can you give us a specific example of how embracing a lifestyle of love, dare I say divine love, has led to liberation for someone whom you've worked? 

Jenée Johnson: Wow. I think that I work with two young Black men who are trained under my leadership in the Department of Public Health to be mindfulness teachers. And what I do is what I have observed is I watch them continue to open, open, open, open. And I attended a mindfulness program that they led together. And I was in the back of the room. They were amazing. See, it's about growth. Someone plants, someone waters, and God continues to give increase. And this is what I'm seeing in these two young Black men. Opening, opening, occupying space, leading. And the way they opened and told their stories, amazing. But what they do and what I saw in them is they have embraced the dedication and the discipline of practice. This is not like, I'm going to just show up. No, you show up. The practice does not have to be complicated. Pick two, three things that you will do with consistency. Get up, have your water, your lemon water. Sit and meditate, pray, read something that's nourishing. Start your day with the positives of God's word or some other spiritual text. So you do that for 365 days and see what happens to how things start getting reordering. Then you begin to start setting your intentions. You start talking to yourself differently. And, honey, spirit starts getting activated on your behalf. Stuff just starts working, working, coming to you. Oh, I just thought of that. And here it is. See, because this thing called liberation, this thing called we are, what is Harriet Tubman said? I have the t-shirt. Get out requires not only that you steward your life and be serious about your life, but it requires an alignment with that which you cannot see. It requires spirit. And so part of my conversation is calling back that essence to how we operate and not making this a heady intellectual pursuit. It is not that. Those people that walked at the Montgomery bus boycott, our ordinary ancestors were extraordinary foot soldiers. And they evoked the power of the God that they believed in. You have to have faith. You have to believe. And the great thing about faith is it helps you to relax some of that neural energy. So you're not scrunching up and working so hard. Relaxes the neural energy because you have an expectation that something else that you cannot see, the parallel spiritual reality is for you. And doors just open. And if we're going to change this and elevate, we have to have that alignment.

Shakti Butler: I kind of have a bunch of questions I want to ask you at one time. So I know that a lot of your, because this is a scholar over here. She has studied and studied and researched and gathered a lot of information to do what you do. One of the things, and I've been to a class of hers and was quite impressed with everything that happened. And my daughter came and my niece came there and there. Well, they're almost 40 now. But it was amazing because we spent the whole day lifting each other up, talking about what does work. And so many people approach this liberation as just a scholarly pursuit. I can break down systems. I can tell you about structures. I know how this works. I know how that works. But you have done your history about history. And you mentioned the African lineage of mindfulness. And since this is a core piece of what you have developed, tell us a little bit about that.

Jenée Johnson: Yes. Mindfulness, we love our Asian brothers and sisters. But yo, yo, yo, it didn't start there. It started in Africa. It started in Africa. Look in the pyramids and you will see the drawings of the yoga poses. But you'll see the drawings of the yoga poses. So Black people were the first people on the face of the Earth. And we migrated out of Africa and populated East and West Asia and brought with us these embodied practices, not written down on a piece of paper, they're embodied practices that got shared and then codified Hinduism, Buddhism. Buddha didn't actually even start Buddhism, right? Christ didn't start Christianity. That got crafted later. But Africans left Africa with embodied practices. It is our way of being to occupy quiet presence. When I lived in the South, I lived in Arkansas for a year. Child, look. And on Sunday, we would take these walks and people would be walking. We would walk, but we would pass people sitting on their porches just rocking. What is that? Sitting quiet, sitting. Just enjoying the sun, sitting quietly. My family from the Caribbean, I would go to the sea with my Aunt Marie. And she said, come, let's take a sea bath. We'd just go in the sea. Not to swim around, just to go and let the water. What is that? Mindfulness. Where you sit, where you engage with your presence, where you're quiet, to listen to your own heart. It gives you a gentle pause. And so now we have other practices where we can connect to the breath. And in mindfulness, so how I really went deep into mindfulness, let me tell you all. I was parenting a teenager. And I had been drinking all the Kool-Aid about being a Black mother and the dangers in the Black world, the dangers in the world for Black boy. I'd be like, Khalid, where are you? I'm like screaming at his cell phone. He's like, Mom, I'm on the bus. Well, where's the bus? Like, what was I going to? I said, you know what, girlfriend? This is ridiculous. You are not fostering anything good in him. And your cortisol levels, your heart, it's driving you crazy. You have got to change. And that sent me deeper into the quiet sitting practice, which I also was inspired by Dr. Frank Staggers, Jr. in Oakland, California, who brought meditation in the 70s to his clinic in West Oakland and got a grant from the National NIS? National Institute. Right, National Institute of Health. When they told him at first they're not going to give him the grant because Black people don't meditate, we started it. He pursued it. And in listening to him, I got the idea, got inspired actually to bring mindfulness to the women in the Black Infant Health Program that I directed, pregnant and parenting women. And now it's actually written in the statewide curriculum. So mindfulness. When I studied to get my mindfulness certification, I learned about a neuroscience principle called neuroplasticity. What you think, what you do, what you pay attention to with consistency does what? It grows, and it resets and retrain your neural pathways. I was like, that is the key to our liberation right there. If we could think, do, and pay attention to, if we can come out of the white gaze and set our attention on what we want to grow and how we want to change, we can change. Those practices, morning practices that I talked to you about, that's a little kernel of a star here. Think, do, pay attention to. Because what does racism do in its reductionist ways? It robs our what? Our attention. And that's what, Khalid, where are you? My whole, and it's not that atrocities and terror are not happening. But part of what happens in many of our communities is what I call the parade of Black pain. And if you're parading Black pain and if you're constantly, constantly consuming that, think, do, pay attention to, then what do we continue to co-create? Pain. So it's not that it's Pollyanna and everything's going to be. However, what did I also tell you? If you align with spirit, the lift, the lift, the lift. So that's how I moved deeper into mindfulness. My own need to parent better, to be in better relationship with my son, and also what I learned about neuroplasticity. So in my work, I cultivated this program called the Right Within Experience. Thank you, Lauren Hill, because how you going to win what? When you ain't right within. When I heard that line, I was like, go on, Lauren. I'm going to build a program around that. How are you going to win when you ain't right within if your own inner landscape is filled with weeds and trauma? So I said, let us turn our attention to one, reclaiming our humanity, because what does racism do? It is a dehumanizing process. The way that white culture and people have rationalized treating us the way they have treated us is because they have said that we are not human. So the dehumanization process, so the first thing in the Right Within Experience is to rewrite the narrative of our humanity. So that's why I don't start with 400 years. I go back further on the timeline. Rewrite the story. Our stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves are very important. So humanity, the next thing in the Right Within Experience is joy. Joy should be every day, and it shouldn't just be making a cameo appearance at the birthday party. It should be every day, because joy is a spiritual quality. In the sacred text, it says joy is a fruit of the spirit. And the next thing is well-being, being well. And those are the practices and the ways that we care and take care of ourselves. And one of the number one practices, thank you, Tricia Hersey, the nap Bishop. Right, y'all know her? Rest is resistance, a manifesto. We were brought here to work. One of the first things you need to do is rest. And she will say, lay your ass down. Give yourself permission to rest, to de-unhook from the capitalist production mechanism. Now I know we got to work. Now I know, for real, I know that. But there's some, for many of us, we do not exercise the full range of our possibility, because we've been hijacked. And that hijacked is real. Remember, a hijack of attention is real. 50 young men at Google, I'm assuming, could be other places. What was the moral compass? And Tristan Harris, if you look up his work, he's unveiled that. We're hijacked. I read somewhere that during the pandemic, the majority of people who were killed in car accidents were Black people. And I was like, what? Why? On the phone? In the car? No, the hijack is real. And many of those people take their phones and put them on the other side of the house. I'm working on it. So that when they wake up in the morning, that's not the first thing. Get you a daggone alarm clock. You don't need that phone to wake you. So we have to unhook from the matrix of distraction and reclaim our attention, which is the last field to be colonized. Because all the land, we already know. We have the land acknowledgment. We already know. What is left to colonize is your thinking, your mind, your attention, which your attention is your life. So the Right Within Experience is a mindfulness program, mind-body practices for people of African ancestry to come out and away from the white gaze and to give ourselves time to rewire, to think about what is the path forward. So that's the Right Within Experience. It's a day-long online or in-person opportunity. So that, out of my mindfulness work, became my love letter to our people. How do I contribute to this conversation of liberation? Even though I work in a system, the system is brutal. It's brutal, and it's nasty to this day. There are little oases of excellence, islands of possibility, but as a system itself. But to have the fortitude and the inner resilience to do that work every day, you've got to do the start here work that I've been talking about. And then we do what they did in Montgomery. We build community. We cannot do this alone. I teach a beautiful practice I bring to mind through a Rwandan prescription for depression. So when in the genocide, after the genocide, Western psychologists went to Rwanda, they wanted to be of help and assistance to heal. And they would practice cognitive behavioral therapy. And they were bringing people into the little dingy rooms to talk. And people said, this is not how we heal. To have to talk and rehash and go over the trauma drain of all the things that happened to us. How do we heal? We heal by sun, drum, dance, dance, drum, dance, community. Get you some sun, get you some movement, get you some music that has some beat, and be in community. See, the principles, the recipes are not complex. But it is challenging in a system that is so loud. We have to break off. Girl, I went off a little bit.

Shakti Butler: No, actually, actually Jenée has been talking about some of the principles. But I'm going to give them names before we move on. There's the African lineage of mindfulness, which you name. There's being a victim to the vortex, which you have been talking about. And you also talked about daily soul nourishment, what we need to do to nourish ourselves, to heal ourselves. Because it's not just thought that's going to get us there. It's the practice of other things. So I thought you might want to give the audiences an example of a daily practice that we could do right now.

Jenée Johnson: This is from the heart math technology. Heart math is heart intelligence. And it gives us greater access to the heart's wisdom. The sacred text tells us that the heart is where all the issues of life come from. And the heart actually has an electromagnetic current that goes out three feet from the body. So when I saw this beautiful sister in the bathroom, we didn't just connect on that heart energy was in interaction. I was like, oh, I love her. So our hearts were like in a conversation even before. And Black people, we are masters at this. And we have had to be, because you have to, you walk into rooms and you have to assess safety quickly. So this is heart focused breathing. And let me tell you what it does before I lead you through it. Heart focused breathing saves energy. It turns down the volume on depleting emotions. Because where we lose energy is in the emotional reactivity. Right? You ever have an argument and you walk away, but yet your heart rhythms are still dysregulated? Heart focused breathing helps bring a sense of calm. It helps bring a sense of balance. And it helps bring a sense of coherence. This breathing practice you can do washing your hands, walking down the hall, before you start your work in the morning at your computer. You can do it while you're in a conversation. You are going to breathe, focusing your attention on the heart or chest area. I often put my hand here to just help me, but you don't have to. You will make your breath equal lengths. So in other words, you can breathe, inhale five, exhale five. Different from other forms of mindful practice where we may breathe in and have the exhale be longer. In heart math, the inhale and exhale are equitable. They are equal. This is a beautiful heart math, heart intelligence. Intelligence means clear sight. So, oh, I didn't bring my snow globe. And you shake the snow globe up. But if you hold it still, the snow settles. And then you can see clearly. And so heart intelligence is heart. It's giving us clear sight. And this so that we can see clearly and have access to the prefrontal cortex so that we can expand and take, make good use of our intelligence and our imagination because we're here to imagine a future, imagine a present that perhaps isn't so accurate. Perhaps isn't so access to our dreams, access to our strengths, access to yourself. I believe the dose is 10 minutes three times a day. So set a timer and just do it. Easy.  See, the practices are not, stay on your head, take your left shoe off. You know? Ha, ha, ha. Clothes are not, you know, it's not all that. It's breath and body and stillness, pause, the sacred pause. And that gives us access to a deeper depth of ourselves and access to things that want to be known. It cannot be known when it's so loud. Access to healing because healing needs safety to show up. So very simple practice. Thank you for inviting me to do that.

Shakti Butler: Yes, that's great.

Jenée Johnson: Love sharing heart math, heart focused breathing, heart intelligence, clear sightedness. And the gift is in you.

Shakti Butler: Yeah, thank you. That's beautiful. I want to share one of my favorite quotes that's about this. And it goes like this. “The heart is the hub of all sacred places. So go there and roam.”

Jenée Johnson: That's gorgeous.

Shakti Butler: No, it's the teachings are available. This wisdom is available. Thank you so much. For sharing this because it's very important that we heal. And we can't love the world and create liberation and freedom if we don't know what it feels like on the inside.

Jenée Johnson: Yes, absolutely. And these simple practices, so if you're in a hard place, school, work, relationship, parenting, these are the practices that give you just a little more space so that you can see your way through, a little more space so that you can find that intention and that dream and nurture it. I'm going to do this class. I can't wait to do this class. Six decades of treasured wisdom because I want my younger sisters to know a little bit about this path because y'all don't have to really say, yeah, I want to pass on. Because that's also part of it. So in us, sitting here, is us who are here in the present, our generation, but the generation that raised us and the generation that raised them and the generation that's in front of us. The same for you. So to embrace all of that and to be into why joy becomes so important because it's fuel, joy and pleasure. Pleasure is not a reward as the beautiful Rashida Khan Miller-Bay says. Y'all got to look her up. She's gorgeous. Pleasure is not a reward. It is what you need to move through your day to day. So the beautiful Dr. Naeem Akbar, he is like structure your life, set it up. Go home. You don't have to tackle everything at once, but take a look. What is the area that is most disruptive and most draining? Acknowledge that. Or maybe you don't want to start there. Go for a low hanging fruit. What is an area that I can align quickly and gain some momentum so that you can go to the more difficult places? But the whole notion is be serious about your life. Be thoughtful. Be kind and compassionate. Part of liberation is a lifestyle of love. Part of what is inside of that love is loving kindness, metta, and compassion. The compassion of saying things are hard right now. I wish for them to be better. Things are hard right now. This too will pass. Maya Angelou said, “every storm runs out of rain.” I love that. And the beauty of connecting with those who are older than you, who did some of the work and got their stuff together, not the other ones, is they can help you with perspective that you can say, OK. So my mom's 92, and I heard the beautiful Charles Blow speak recently, and he talked about his mom being in her 80s. And he's like, mom, all this stuff going on, aren't you? And she's like, honey, you know how much of this I've seen already? So I'm not going to get in a tizzy. Same thing with my mom. She's 92. So what does she want to do? She wants to talk on the phone with her friends. She wants to keep her social network alive. These are the things, your social network, your forgiveness work, your mindfulness work, your kindness. Did you know that kindness activates the same pleasure centers in the brain as food and sex? Hello, somebody. Right? The forgiveness part of the dropping of grudges, I had to work on that this year with my family because some of that is not nice, and it hurts. And I had to, OK, how do I rearrange it? And put it on my gut. This is my impossible list. It feels impossible. I keep bringing it. So right within experience, it's an experience. It is not a head trick. It's not academic. Shakti lovingly called me a scholar. She's a scholar, Dr. Shakti Butler. But I'm a practitioner. I lean into the work of great scholars, and I take the golden nuggets, and I bring it forward and make it accessible to people. That's the work of the practitioner. My work is based on scholarship, science, and spirit. And science and spirit are like that. So 

Shakti Butler: I'm a practitioner too. Yes. And you're still a scholar.

Jenée Johnson: Thank you.

Shakti Butler: It's OK. I would love if you would share with us a personal story that has ramifications of rippling outward. For example, you have the inner change. You have the outer change. You have the collective change. You have the structural change. So I'm not asking you to cover all of that. But from your own example, the practices that you have rippled outward. So tell us about this. You mentioned that you had a rough time with your family this year. What have you done to actually heal that for yourself, to heal that for them, and have that spread outward to their kids and their whatever? What was your process?

Jenée Johnson: Tears. I cried a lot. I set boundaries. And when I say that, I don't mean a barricade or a barrier. I mean boundaries are this wave of love to set protection for myself. And to decide that that thing that you do that hurts me, I am no longer available for that. And so that means that my communication will change. I'm no longer like, oh, let me try. I'm not doing that. I took myself out of a text thread. That's lovely. But if you want to communicate with me, just do it one on one. And I also, thank God I still do have my mom, I told my mom. And I said, your child did that. And he told me not to tell you. And she said, uh-uh. She said, I'm talking to him. So sometimes you need to enlist support. The support may go out on your behalf, or they may just be a listening force, a listener, or a kind advisor. You don't have to sit in it alone. But I told. I told everything. And she handled it. And she thought about it. She says, I am going to have a conversation. And we're New Yorkers, so we talk loud. And she said, it's not going to be loud. She said, I'm going to think about it, and I'm going to have a quiet conversation. And I'm gonna set it straight. So I got some support. So that's what I did. And the other thing I just want to tell you, which we don't have time to go into deeply, is I am married. And marriage is a spiritual practice, my loves. It is a spiritual practice. And there's nothing wrong with you desiring companionship. So first be a companion to yourself. And that I learned in my marriage. To not be out, but to come in and be better with myself. When we talked earlier about what the sacred text said, loving God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and thy neighbor as thyself, I worked on the thyself inside of the marriage. And you know what? I am more vibrant, and more sexy, and more juicy because of it, which is what he was attracted to in the first place. But stay in yourself. Learn. I had a wonderful godmother. I called her Diva. And she said, learn to be happy with your own company. So I'm going to challenge you, or offer you, or not challenge, invite you to take yourself out on an occasion. Take yourself out. Dress nice, whatever it means. Go for an exquisite cup of soup, a wonderful walk in a park, beautiful promenade through the botanical gardens, or to a museum. Or take yourself on a plane and go to a new city or town, and visit the little historical areas. And bump up against the edges of the discomfort of being alone. And learn to, with your heart focused breathing, to bring that calm to yourself. And then be like my mom. Come home and call all your girlfriends and stuff, and tell them what you did. Build community. 

Shakti Butler: Thank you.

Jenée Johnson: You're welcome.

Shakti Butler: And so I want to thank everybody for bringing your full self if you did that. And if you didn't, that's OK, too. But that you are here and that you are open or more open to taking good care of yourself in a way that really heals you. Thank you so much.

Jenée Johnson: Thank you, Shakti. What a joy. And I love you.

Shakti Butler: I love you, too.

Jenée Johnson: I love you. And I love you. Such a healing medicine. And up and down that church kissing everybody. Peace and love.

Shakti Butler: Peace and love. Or as my friend says “Peace out and peace in.”

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Thank you for listening to the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. We recognize that our university’s building in San Francisco occupies traditional, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands. If you are interested in learning more about native lands, languages, and territories, the website native-land.ca is a helpful resource for you to learn about and acknowledge the Indigenous land where you live.

Podcast production is supervised by Kirstin Van Cleef at CIIS. Audio production is supervised by Lyle Barrere at Desired Effect. The CIIS Public Programs team includes Izzy Angus, Kyle DeMedio, Alex Elliott, Emlyn Guiney, Patty Pforte, Nikki Roda, and Pele Shalev. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe wherever you find podcasts, visit our website ciis.edu, and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms.

CIIS Public Programs commits to use our in-person and online platforms to uplift the stories and teachings of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color; those in the LGBTQIA+ community; and all those whose lives emerge from the intersections of multiple identities. 

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