We’re back with the second half of our conversation with Najla. Najla shares her experience navigating her identity in the theater and entertainment industries. We talk about racism, white supremacy, and propaganda and a concept called PEP — Progressive Except Palestine. The past almost year has been one of shattered illusions, loss, and grief. Najla and I connect on the feeling of not knowing who to trust anymore but that of those we do trust, in Najla’s words: We trust so hard. I believe this ...
Sep 27, 2024•59 min
Najla is an author, actress, playwright, and activist. Her identity cannot be reduced to a checkbox: she is Arab, American, Palestinian, Lebanese, and Christian. She is the daughter of Edward Said, the late Palestinian professor, author, and activist. Today, September 25, 2024, is the 21st anniversary of Professor Said's death, and I am so humbled to share my conversation with Najla. May it be in remembrance of Najla’s father as well as a prayer for both Palestine and Lebanon. In this first part...
Sep 26, 2024•59 min
Janet is a Dance Embodiment and Moving Meditation Guide who explores healing, self-discovery, and re-wilding through the power of dance and somatic movement. Our conversation dives right into a discussion of the wellness world and the burnout that can result as we try to free ourselves from personal and systemic trauma and harm. As a non-binary person of color growing up under the weight of expectations from family, society, and self, Janet has fought to understand and be who they really are. We...
Sep 21, 2024•1 hr 3 min
Hannah is an unapologetically fat and queer Palestinian American. She is the author of Homeland: My Father Dreams of Palestine and she works at her Palestinian family-owned publisher, Interlink . When I was first learning about Palestine in October 2023, I turned to books, which is what I have always done when seeking answers, inspiration, or healing. I came across Homeland and immediately took a copy home to my children. It still brings me to sobbing tears to remember sitting in my daughter’s r...
Sep 11, 2024•1 hr 7 min
Cassandra is our favorite restie bestie! An autistic Viet-Chinese somatic healer, grief-tender, and community caregiver, Cassandra is a spirit-affirming breath of fresh air. Our conversation is a reset that I think many of us desperately need. Cassandra shares her stories of unrest — from a childhood on the margins to chasing dreams that did not bring the wholeness we all seek. In time, they came to experience their disillusionment and discontent as an invitation to liberation. We talk about the...
Aug 25, 2024•1 hr 21 min
Cera is a Diné (aka Navajo) woman, artist, and creator whose love of her Native identity inspires her labor of social justice and her solidarity with all oppressed people. She is a wealth of indigenous wisdom and a keeper of Native narratives. This conversation has stayed with me ever since we recorded it. There is so much I did not and do not know when it comes to the history and current events of our indigenous kin here on Turtle Island. I’ve known enough to not celebrate Thanksgiving, but not...
Aug 09, 2024•1 hr 34 min
Yejin is the cutest comrade you could ask for in the movement for collective liberation. Through her clarity, honesty, and TikTok dances, she makes anti-oppression work look simply irresistible. They are also an equity and justice coach, consultant, and practitioner in service of community care. This is such a joyful conversation, which is a testament to Yejin’s expert ability to guide connections and hold space. We laugh a lot, which I feel like I sometimes need to be given permission to do dur...
Aug 03, 2024•1 hr 15 min
Cami is an author, artist, and embodiment practitioner dedicated to creating networks of care and livable futures. Their book Tending Grief is an embodied guide to being with grief individually and in community through practical exercises, decolonized rituals, and Earth-based medicines for healing. Our conversation is a compass for how to move forward in radical honesty and hope as we find ourselves living in, as Cami says, these Babylonian times. We talk about the normalization of numbness and ...
Jul 26, 2024•1 hr 11 min
Judy is a certified hypnotherapist, mindfulness and meditation practitioner, somatic activated healer, and psych researcher. Our conversation touched upon so many experiences and thoughts, frequently through the lens of our shared Korean roots. I want to offer a trigger warning for this episode as we talk about mental illness including suicidal ideation and childhood abuse. Although we talk about these topics in the context of our survival and healing, I recognize that it may not be comfortable ...
Jul 25, 2024•1 hr 19 min
Joon is a hospital chaplain, author, but perhaps most importantly — a father. A fellow Korean American, we share and understand a lot of each other’s experiences growing up with immigrant parents, in the ever liminal third space between cultures and identities. We talk about the contradictions of our culture, with a history of aligning with the oppressed amidst the continued toxic elements of collectivism such as overbearing authority. I want to offer a trigger warning for this episode as we tal...
Jul 19, 2024•1 hr 4 min
Rev. Mo is an interfaith minister, meditation teacher, and trained clairvoyant. Mo also intentionally goes by another name, Hilal, the story of which he shares in the episode. Mo is Palestinian Bahraini, and we talk about his experience navigating his layered identity, from his grandparents having been displaced in 1948 to continually being in a constant state of immigration and exile. This is a spiritually uplifting conversation, with Mo encouraging us all to trust our inherent intuitive abilit...
Jul 19, 2024•1 hr 19 min
Voices on the Side with Leah Kim is a podcast centering marginalized identities as an antidote to oppression and supremacy. We invite a variety of guests to be in conversation together, from revolutionary thinkers, writers, and artists to folks and friends sharing stories rooted in their personal history. We share our hope in imagining a freer and safer future for all — an existence that is rooted less in individuality and more in community. Our themes include collective liberation, decolonizati...
Jul 09, 2024•5 min
Tiffany is an artist whose work is centered on liberation. Through her painting, writing, and music, she leads with so much love for humanity. She reminds us that hope is a discipline, no different to the discipline and practice that goes into any creative process. We talk about what it means to truly be in community, and how challenging this can be while we are beholden to existing in oppressive systems. Tiffany challenges the model minority myth (and even made a T-shirt !) and how this separat...
Jul 03, 2024•1 hr 21 min
Paris is a mother, yoga teacher, and doctor. Born in Russia of Iranian descent, Paris has Muslim and Jewish family while she herself is a practicing Hindu. Perhaps this is why she embodies tolerance through different identities and ideologies. Amidst a resounding silence throughout the yoga and wellness world, Paris has been a steady and unapologetic voice for humanity. In our conversation, we talk about the rupture that is happening when people who consider themselves spiritual turn away from t...
Jun 29, 2024•1 hr 13 min
Joon Ae is a Korean adoptee, mother, and writer. Estranged from her adoptive family, community means everything to her. She cultivates intersectional and justice-centered spaces such as Constellation and Voices and recently held an auction for the Abu Dayer family to escape genocide. If you enjoy and learn anything from this episode, please consider donating — even $1 helps. Joon Ae and I talk about the need to de-normalize adoption and the beauty of a chosen family, and she refers to Kit Myers’...
Jun 26, 2024•1 hr 5 min
Yuval is an Israeli, anti-zionist Jew, an artist, a writer, a dancer but most importantly — a human. He hosts the Emergent Wisdom podcast , which explores current events and the challenges of being human through the lens of ecology and mysticism. He is dedicated to the liberation of love, land, and Eros — which we talk about in this episode. Hearing Yuval speak is at once grounding and uplifting. As we acknowledge the horrors of colonialism and genocide, Yuval invites us to stay connected to our...
Jun 20, 2024•1 hr 16 min
Liz is the president of AAP(I belong), a nonprofit organization that aims to raise greater awareness on Asian American Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander discrimination and cultural challenges. Liz created AAP(I belong) after her mother was attacked — for being Asian. We talk about the way that the Asian American identity is structured to be successful and how we are gaslit to think that we are only subjected to so-called micro aggressions, all the while being constantly reminded that we are f...
Jun 05, 2024•1 hr 9 min
I am very excited to welcome Michelle back on the podcast. In this conversation, we talk about making room for multiple feelings, self-erasure, and pressure testing our values. Since her last visit, Michelle went back to our shared motherland of Korea. I loved hearing about how it felt like it was her first time returning home. We also address the institution-wide repression when it comes to liberating Palestine, the weaponization of feminism, and the need to abandon binary thinking. Michelle le...
May 24, 2024•1 hr 16 min
Amanda is a Jewish, queer, anti-zionist writer and poet. Her words have been clarifying, educational, and ultimately — liberating. Witnessing the genocide in Gaza, where the population is over 1 million children, I personally have unearthed a courage that I haven’t ever felt as a woman of color in this country. It’s felt scary at times, especially as people I had considered friends yelled at me and called me antisemitic. I am so grateful for voices like Amanda’s that remind me that it is right t...
May 23, 2024•1 hr 8 min
Mo is a Palestinian artist, author, digital creator, and father. He has been tireless in educating all of us on what is and has been happening in Palestine for 76+ years. Mo shares with us how it was to visit Palestine for the first time last September, from standing outside his grandfather’s ancestral home to the guilt he felt that he was able to set foot on his homeland when most of his extended family cannot. He talks about being Palestinian in the diaspora, and how much has changed from once...
May 17, 2024•1 hr 2 min
Jemarc is a trauma recovery coach and wellness consultant supporting Queer, BIPOC, and neurodivergent beings. They are a speaker and lead workshops including the upcoming master class — Reclaiming Your Compassion — on May 18. (Details pinned on their profile.) In our conversation, Jemarc shares their personal story of identity, trauma, and healing. They emphasize the absolutely powerful force of unhealed trauma as our greatest existential threat. They explain the differences between short term r...
May 15, 2024•1 hr 8 min
We are back with one of our most beloved guests, Sasha. Sasha is an ancestral healing practitioner and death doula who has been a truly incredible voice of collective liberation and dismantling supremacy culture and thinking. Since her last visit to the podcast, Sasha has launched Phoenix Rising — a community for healers of the resistance. This conversation is fuel for the soul. We talk about what it means to embody liberation, the incredible mobilization of the student encampments, and the way ...
May 10, 2024•1 hr 1 min
Tejal is an Indian American yoga teacher, writer, podcaster, and community organizer. She advocates for yoga through a social justice lens through her online studio , the abcdyogi global community, and the Yoga is Dead podcast . We talk about our respective journeys to becoming yoga teachers and the issues we see in the yoga and wellness world. From spiritual bypassing to centering physical movement to the co-opting of words like namaste, what is presented as yoga here in the west is an extracte...
May 08, 2024•1 hr 14 min
Judy is a Boundary Coach, speaker, and author of The Boundary Revolution. With two decades of clinical experience as a Licensed Mental Health Counselor, Judy expertly journeys with individuals and groups towards boundary healing and collective liberation. In our conversation, we share our personal stories around growing up in an immigrant family, parenting our children, and being committed to breaking cycles of trauma. Judy is so real in talking about how hard life can be, but that in choosing a...
May 03, 2024•1 hr 23 min
Sole is a social justice educator, writer, speaker, and the founder of Nectar, which provides political education and healing justice to support communities and movements. She is currently an Activist-in-Residence at the UCLA Asian American Studies Center. Starting with her own immigration story, Sole teaches us about the rules of whiteness, the fact that white supremacy is not about the actual color of your skin, and the way all oppressive systems are connected. We talk about the journey we are...
May 01, 2024•1 hr 16 min
Hasanain is a father, social justice educator, and longtime activist and organizer. I personally have been learning so much from him about the way oppressive systems are impacting all of us regardless of our privileges, where we live, or how we identify. In this conversation, we talk about whiteness as a construct, the role of propaganda, and why representation is not enough. Hasanain’s ability to show us how all the dots connect is liberatory in an of itself. Hasanain reminds us that we must mo...
Apr 27, 2024•1 hr 13 min
Susanna is a yoga educator, yoga unity activist, founder of the Ignite Institute and co-founder of the Yoke Yoga Social App . She is the author of Embrace Yoga’s Roots , and offers a free chapter of her book linked here . As an Indian teacher in the West, Susanna is known for her work in decolonizing and embracing the roots of yoga. She reminds us — with much compassion and often levity — that yoga is much more than fancy asana and expensive yoga wear. Amidst a resounding silence throughout the ...
Apr 24, 2024•55 min
Nadia is a Palestinian from the American south. She is a chef and filmmaker and has been an incredibly beautiful and important voice in the name of community healing. I loved hearing about the pride she has always had in her Palestinian heritage and cuisine and her yearly visits back home which served as a sort of detox from Americanism. With both of us being yogis, we talk about the difference between “pop” yoga and spirituality versus a soulful practice. Nadia also encourages having difficult ...
Apr 20, 2024•1 hr 10 min
Rohan is a queer/non-binary Black Asian writer, dancer, trumpeter and community organizer in New York City. They founded the Blasian March , a Black-Asian-Blasian grassroots solidarity organization, which has been featured on major networks including CNN, NBC Chicago, USA Today, and WNYC. We talk about racial assumptions and identity — I especially loved learning about their gender identity being Firebird. As a longtime organizer, Rohan shares their thoughts on how we have been conditioned to vi...
Apr 17, 2024•1 hr 20 min
Zach is a Jewish historian of Palestine who received his Ph.D in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University. He grew up in a very Jewish and Zionist environment — he was in Jewish youth groups, went to Jewish summer camp, and studied abroad in Jerusalem. Jews are 0.2% of the global population and anti-Zionist Jews an even smaller percentage, so Zach’s perspective and expertise are both unique and urgently needed during this time. Zach provides ample historical context on Palestine and Israel...
Apr 12, 2024•49 min
