Broadcasting from the Hip Hop Weekly Studios. I'd like to welcome you to another episode of Civic Spher. I am your host, Ramsay's job. Big shout out to my man c Ward, who is out in the Philippines this week if I'm not mistaken, as you know, he is a globetrotter. But have no fear. We have a special guest in the building, couple of special guests actually, and we are going to spend some time talking to the one, the only ea AFO about how trauma can pass from generation
to generation. I want to give you a proper introduction when we actually get to that point, but it's okay to say hi.
Yes, Hi, thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to see here.
And you know, funnily enough, I learned about you and this amazing lecture or lecture series that you give from a dear friend of mine and a dear friend of the show, fellow activist. Her name is Leanna Taylor, So thank you for being here as well. We'd love to kind of get an idea of what it was like to be in the audience listening, just so that we know kind of how to see the information that is in store for us today. That is something that you definitely need to stick around for, as well as the
rest of the show. Our way Black History fact I believe lends itself to what we're talking about today. I don't want to spoil it, but suffice it to say, a barrel lap is something that we're going to peel back the layers of. In addition to that, we have an incredible Boba today for you to stick around for as well, So a lot in store for you today,
plenty to stick around for. And of course, true to form, well I guess really not true to form because normally we're talking about like police violence and all that sort of stuff, and lately we've been talking about the war in Palestine and Gaza, which is a sad situation. But true to form, we are going to be doing our best to empower you our allies with some information that you can take into your communities and hopefully make some
lasting changes. But first and foremost, like we always do it, this time, let's start the show off with some ebony excellence. So today's Ebony Excellence is sponsored my major Threads for Innovative Fashionable Sports, where checkmajorthreads dot com and I'm going to be sharing an amazing story. Lately, We've been inundated with lots of stories from young black kids that paint a picture that I don't believe fully represents the entirety of black youth in the United States. So this one
I thought was a great example. This comes from moss Point, Mississippi, and I'll read a sixteen year old boy is being hailed as a hero after helping rescue four people from a car that drove off a boat launch into the Mississippi River. And the incident happened around two thirty am when the car, which had three teenage girls inside, drove into the Pascagoula River in Moss Point, floated about twenty feet away from shore and started sinking, the Moss Point
Police Department said in a statement. Quote the driver of that vehicle said she was following her GPS and did not realize she was going into the water, police said. Carry On Evans, age sixteen, said he immediately ran over, took off his shoes and shirt, and went in the water when he saw the car sinking and heard the three occupants shouting for help. Quote, I was like, I can't let these folks die. They need to get out
of the water. Evans is a past Cugoula High school student, and he said this to Biloxi, Mississippi ABC affiliate WLOX, where this article comes from. He goes on to say, so I just started getting them. I wasn't even thinking about anything else. One of Evans's friends also jumped in to help with the girls out through the top of their vehicle. According to WLOX quote, I was trying to I was behind them, trying to keep them above water and swim with them at the same time, Evans told
the station. Along with Moss Point police officer Gary Mercer, who responded to the scene, Evans helped bring the three teens to shore. And this is a really cool story. I really want you to check it out again. This is Ebny Excellence and you can find this on our social media at Civic Cipher on Instagram for this one. Okay, now, yeah, AFO.
Thank you so much. We're going to have a good time. Let's get it going.
So before we get to all the good stuff, give us a little bit of background about the work that you do and the changes that you're trying to bring about in this country and in our conversations with ourselves and with each other.
I you know, I started being on a lot of Native American reservations, working with tribes around trauma and historical trauma.
Historical trauma.
Yes. And then the craziest thing happened. What I had been talking about this stuff for years, but nobody really wanted to hear me, right, nobody cared anywhere that I could talk. I'd be there and you know, for free,
for whatever. And then George Floyd was murdered. And the murder of George Floyd during COVID was what really further law launched a lot of the work that I'm doing, and I think the most important aspect of it is understanding that certainly black Indigenous people of color have a level of generational trauma that impacts the physiology and the neurobiology and therefore drives how we think, how we feel, how we emote, how we relate, how we behave, And
it's important to know these things because it changes how we raise our children, it changes how we behave, and so this has been really the important part of the message. I've also been working with police departments on training their officers about what happens when you move into your fight or flight response. How do you know when you're in your fight or flight response so that your reaction to
what's happening in front of you changes. How do you communicate, relate, and talk to people in a way that creates safety? And in creating that safety, you can control their behavior. So if you really want to control the situation between you and a potential suspect or somebody that you're interacting with, create safety and you can have a safer outcome in the end. So that type of work.
Got it. Got it? So when you say generational trauma for the initiated, let's break down what that means.
So we can say generational trauma, intergenerational trauma, historical trauma, collective trauma. All of them are interchangeable. They mean the same thing. You're referring to the same phenomenon from a different perspective. But it's the idea that trauma can be passed from one generation to the next on the epigenome of the DNA, meaning that the genetic information doesn't change, but how that information is expressed can be altered due to trauma as well as we have cultural shifts and
changes based on trauma. From previous generations.
Okay, now, I know that you have a number of certifications and qualifications and so, but let's make sure that we list a handful of them. You don't need to list them all, but a handful of them, just so that the people know that they're talking to an expert on the subject.
Okay, So I'm a historical trauma expert. I am a certified trauma specialist. I am certified in doctor Bruce Perry's Neurosequential Model of Health, who is another one of our trauma experts. I'm certified in doctor Gobor Matte's work that he does around trauma and addiction.
I knew this was going to be a lot good.
I am a professor at the Arizona Trauma Institute Trauma International. I'm the founder of the Rising and Resilience Phoenix Rising and Resilience blog on the Paces connection platform.
On and on and on. Yes, indeed, Okay, trauma.
Just suffice it to say that trauma is my life, like trauma is my passion.
You know, this is just my thing. It's who I am. I live this, you know. It's it's interesting because I've been invited to go to New York sometime.
I couldn't tell you the date, but I'll be having a conversation with Charlemagne and we're going to be talking about mental health for black men and destigmatizing it and so forth. So it's it's interesting in the past few years this has become especially with respect to trauma, this has become something that more and more people have been talking about. So your pedigree in your and your studies is kind of it's kind of like the right place and the right time with the right person and right
you know what I mean. So I'm really excited to have the conversation. Now I want to shift gears here just for a bit. Okay, So, Leanna, you are the person that brought really this conversation and this amazing individual to our attention. And the reason that this happened is because you were able to experience a I believe it
was a lecture. I'm not, she knows, okay, So for for our listeners and just so that we know, give us an idea of what it was like to witness and learn and kind of understand everything that you know, she was talking about. And I want to make sure that this is stated. We do this from time to time on the show. Leanna is white. She is a
white woman. Iyah is a black woman, and you guys know me so anyway, So go ahead, you know, because this is important the shows about ally ship and so as a white woman to learn and receive instruction and more information from a black woman who's an expert on trauma, I'm sure you learned a lot. And I don't want to. I don't want to answer the question for you, but you know, that's kind of what I was hoping to get me, so.
All right, yeah, yeah, So I run a nonprofit and you know, in nonprofit our work, when we're dealing with our disempowered communities, it is a lot of individuals who
have suffered tremendous trauma, sure and generational trauma. So the subject, I think is something really near and dear to my heart because our clients really are the living, breathing embodiment of what you were talking about and how we connected was at a conference where it was a lot of nonprofit individuals, frontline service workers, people that work with UH low income again, disempowered, underserved, you know whatever uh language we want to wrap around these, you know, our communities,
A lot of them are also black and round people themselves, and I think having this information to contextualize the experiences of our clients is so critically important. I've been to a lot of conferences a lot and listen to a lot of keynote speakers and was really blown away, not just by the quality of the content, but the way that it was delivered with such joy and really just positivity. It felt really empowering, I think for a lot of
the people in the room. So I was excited to bring the two of you together and you know, hopefully get this information out to a broader a broader community.
It's really important. Thank you so much. Thank you for all those kind words. And I love the fact that you use the term disempowered. You know, it's just an important way I think to describe our communities. So thank you for that.
Okay, so let's let's let's rewind a little bit. Let's go back to your origin story, because I remember, prior to today's conversation learning that you know, you had dealt with depression going all the way back to age seven or eight, correct, and you know you had gone through therapy. There was there was a moment where you were kind of confronting suicidal thoughts. And my understanding, and I want your version to serve, but my understanding is that you
were able to connect this. This is how you were able to make a connection with yourself and really the generational trauma that you ended up studying and becoming so proficient with.
Yeah, totally accurate. I could. I can recall being seven and eight years old and being sad and depressed and I was that kid at school that it's the seventies, so it's going to sound crazy, but my second grade teacher, I would spend the night at her house for the weekend and I, you know, have all this fun and that was part of what helped me during that time. But I could never understand why I had so much pain. I did I have adverse childhood experiences. You know, it's
a big thing right now. We know that there's the ACES study and I had a very low A score, so out of ten, I have, you know, like a one A score. So it wasn't about adversity in childhood. I come from a very solid, upper middle class family. My mother has two PhDs and three master's degrees. We have access to education, to income entrepreneurialism going back four generations in my family and still one. I struggled so
much with mental health. But what was even more profound was that the males in my family master level people, people that were entrepreneurs, that owned property, could never really be contributing members to society, never reached their full potential. And so when I looked at that, I couldn't understand why, you know, what is that really about? And why am I suffering so much? And so I went on this quest to I just wanted to be able to live
like I just wanted to be normal. I just wanted to wake up every day and not not want to go outside and not want to do some of those things. By the time I was in high school, I was missing like thirty days of school a year, and it was around depression and anxiety and those types of things. And so I kept searching. So I did talk therapy, I did group therapy, I did New Age things, I
did self help things. I did acupuncture, any of the things I had nutritionists that my mother would take me to, any of the things that are your quote normal things to do when you're struggling with mental health and behavioral health outside of medication. I did all of those things, and I could not get myself to a place where I could be a functioning person on a regular basis,
with joy and really engaging in life. At some point I started to read about and this is many years ago in fact, but I started to read about doctor Rachel Yehuda out of New York her work in the Jewish community, and she had done some studies in a Jewish community and found that second and third generation Holocaust survivors had an alteration of the genetic expression, and so
that rang a bell for me. Then she went on to say that Jews that live in Israel do far better in terms of mental health and addiction and all of those things than any of their brethren around the world. So Jews in any other communities, right, the ones that
lived in Israel were far better. And she was making the connection that when you connect people back to their ancestral land, when you connect them into their communities where they can live within their culture, have their you know, ceremonies and rituals and not feel oppressed, it impacted mental health and behavioral health. And that's where I took off running.
I lived also in a Jewish community, so a lot of my friends growing up were Jewish, and so when I looked at them and I thought, wow, you know, we have the same socioeconomic background. Our parents have similar jobs, similar levels of education. We're having the same educational background. We live in and you know, the same community. But why do their family members look different than mine? Why is their trajectory so different? They have the Jewish Holocaust,
I have the trans Atlantic slave trade. What is the difference? Why is there so much difference there? And so that really sparked my interest in It was not formal education or formal training in that area, but there were pockets of people doing studies. Doctor Marie Yellowhorse Braveheart Jordan, she's another expert in this work. She was doing this work in the Native American community and then she started to have studies and that's really how it all came about.
Okay, so I would guess that you might be one of the people who advocates for black people in the United States to take a trip to Africa at some point in their life.
That's what healed me.
Really.
I don't think you and I got to have this conversa. I know there's a lot of things that we didn't get to talk about. Yet that's what healed me. So I got to I am really a nomad real quick yeses.
Please, my teacher in the fullest sense of the word, and a dear friend of the show doctor Camilla Westernberg. She's a big advocate for that as well. And so this won't be the first time that I've heard this, but I'm glad I'm hearing it from someone who's so qualified to have this conversation.
Now continue, Well, I was a young adult age I was having suicidal ideation. I didn't think I would be able to make it. I thought like, if I don't figure something else out, I don't know that I can continue living. Right, Like, either maybe I'm going to take my life or maybe I'm going to be overcome with illness and allow myself to die. But I can't move
in this way. I had this opportunity to travel. My mother had traced our ancestry back to being in Republic, which was once known as the Homemade in West Africa, and we started traveling back and forth, were going to we were opening a museum in the French Quarter, and I knew immediately that this was life changing for me, and I thought, Okay, this is my last chance, there's
something here for me, Stay open and be ready. While we were there, I had the opportunity to start going through initiation processes, so initiation into our traditional religion, cleansing ritual, and one of the most important things was my naming ritual. You know because as African people and many black indigenous people of color communities, we when a child is born, we asked the ancestors, we ask the deities, you know, who is this person, what is their destiny? And we
get named based on our destiny. So the first big thing that happened was my name is Ea, but Ea is more of like a title that I earned, and that means Holy Mother. The name that I was originally giving and ritual was what kennel and that means mother or owner of the universe. That was my north star. That's who you are. So when you get lost, remember
who you are. Get on your path. When you're encountering adversity, remember that as a mother, we have compassion, we have mercy, we have to have strength, we have grace, and that's how you have to manage other human beings that are hurtful for you. That's how you have to carry yourself in the world because this is who you are. So that got me at least with something that was guiding me.
And then I continued to have ritual and ceremony to cleanse some of the things that I had gone through, to work through some of the neurological issues that I was having. Remember, our indigenous communities the same as what's in Buddhism, the same that's what's in Native American communities, and surely what's in Africa. Our people have been doing these rituals and ceremonies for thousands of years. It's not
just for fun. What we really find out is a lot of these ceremonies and rituals they're neurologically regulating, right. They impact your neurobiology, they impact your physiology. We know that yoga right now, we've done enough research around yoga that we know that yoga impacts our neurobiology, our physiology, our mental health. So do all of these other traditions. Sure so as I was able to connect to who I am be on the ancestral land and know how do I live as an African? You know, I live
in the United States of America. I'm born and raised here, but my DNA and my imprint is as a tribal African woman.
Is this Where are we bordering on the meaning of epigenetics when you say in print DNA Okay, because that sounds like kind of a that's a smart people word, and we are we are just aspiring smart people on this show. We would not profess to be smart. So one of the things I want to say, and I do want to get into epigenics after we take a break, but I do want to say something that as often as we can, Q and I both will say it.
And you know, with respect to your name, we say that black women are as close to God as we can be on planet Earth. We say it on the show all the time. Longtime listeners of the show know that, and a part of that is true for us as individuals, of course, because our moms, our grandmothers or whatever. But obviously the first woman being a black woman, again, the lineage is all there. So again I think that that's as close as we can be to God on planet Earth.
So I love your name and I love the story of it all. We're going to come back in just a second with more on epigenetics.