[00:00:00] Yemi: Hello, amazing humans. I am currently recording this from Boston, Massachusetts. I've headed over to the United States to firstly present some of the early findings from my PhD research on the transformation of cultural trauma using a decolonizing lens. Surprise, surprise. But also to make deep connections, start a business, and Spread my wings.
[00:01:01] So if you're listening to this, considering I don't have that many people listening to the podcast just yet, but I want to acknowledge you. I want to say I see you. I know you're listening and I'm grateful because it becomes a bigger form of co creation, decolonizing and therefore healing our trauma.
[00:01:19] Thank you. So what I want to talk about today, I want to talk about the collective trauma and something I raised in a showcase I delivered in Sydney, Australia, a couple of weeks ago, which is titled sustaining humanity. Now, I'll also be hosting this showcase in LA in a couple of weeks and one of the things I shared in a program, a future program I'll be releasing to organizations, leaders, communities, institutions, the work, is the concept of window of tolerance, which is a term originally coined by Dr.
[00:01:55] Dan Siegel, and there've been a number of different alterations to it. And I know that it can have different meanings, but I'm talking about this in the context of how we respond when we have experienced adversity. What I love about the window of tolerance is that it gives me language and I guess a form of understanding that lets me know what is going on with me.
[00:02:23] Now, this is something I will obviously be sharing in some keynotes and workshops, but I want to share some of this with you now, and I want you to just observe and see how it lends. When we think of the collective trauma that we're all experiencing, whether it's what happened in Sydney, Bondi Junction Shopping Centre, or the war going on in Sudan, Congo, Palestine,
[00:02:51] the fear, In Israel. And these are just some of the things that I know of because of good old social media. What are the things I don't know of? And then I don't even start to talk about our individual traumas, you know, the ones that's happening in the family or the community. There is without a shadow of a doubt, collective trauma that is happening and passing through our veins, whether we decide to put our head in the sand or not.
[00:03:18] And I will put my hand up right now and tell you of recent I've been putting my head in the sand. I've started to realize I'm getting outside of my window of tolerance and the best way I can describe it for ease and to avoid this being some sort of research presentation is the notion that we all have a window.
[00:03:37] So just think of any sized window. And when we stay in that window, we are as balanced as we can be. So that is us operating our most optimum self. Now, when we go outside of that window, For some it could be anxiety, depression, many different things could be happening to you on a biological and neurological level.
[00:04:01] But just for the sake of not pathologizing ourselves, definitely not in this podcast, because firstly, it's not my skill, but I also want to provide alternative ways of digesting information so that we can be our healers is when we come outside of that window. is when we then start to really feel the pain and suffer.
[00:04:26] And so what I've done to protect myself over the past couple of weeks is constantly put myself back in. And sometimes that has looked like watching shit. on Netflix or scrolling on Instagram, although it becomes very obvious very quickly that that's not too healthy for me. So I have to come out of it and come back in my body.
[00:04:51] But what most of us are experiencing, probably most don't even realize they're out of their window of tolerance. You know, there are times I think, shit, Yemi, have you taken some sort of speed? I don't do drugs, by the way, although I did take a weight loss drug a good couple of decades ago, and apparently it did have speed in it.
[00:05:09] I digress. But there are moments that I can feel myself being out of character. Where my anxiety is just that little bit more. Like I start to overthink. Shit, are the kids okay? I haven't heard from my partner. He hasn't texted me. And I am not that character. I am not that person. And when I start to do things out of the norm, that do not fall within my calendar of my period, which is when I do change as well, I know I'm outside my window of tolerance.
[00:05:45] And then I pause and I think, what's going on? What's going on in my outside world? And then I think of all the stuff I'm ingesting and digesting. What we are all doing. But because we continue to let life life us, because most of us don't know any other way of being, we miss the signs. And then our good old body keeps the score and keeps adding it up.
[00:06:15] Just the language of knowing my window of tolerance allows me to play this game that says, Yemi, let's get back inside the window. Just tap into your resilience blueprint, or find ways to expand your resilience without breaking yourself. That either enlargens my window, Or gets me really good of coming back in when I'm on the edges.
[00:06:45] The collective trauma is no joke. And although we can protect ourselves and quote unquote hide, the question I pose to you and to me is, What would need to happen to us and our loved ones for us to do more about the sustainability of humanity? Now, if you don't follow my work, that might feel like a whole heap of words and a whole heap of nothing.
[00:07:23] But when I sit and think, oh my gosh, how am I meant to care about, you know, the violence against women and the amount of lives that are lost specifically in Australia? Yeah. How am I meant to care about how our First Nations women and communities are treated in Australia? How am I meant to care about the war in Sudan, Congo, the genocide in Palestine, the fear in the Jewish family and community in Israel?
[00:07:54] Valid fear. And I haven't even come closer to home. How am I meant to handle all of that? When I have been raised. To focus on the memo, the 2. 4 kids, the white picket fence, the education, the job, the marriage, the retirement, the pension, the death.
[00:08:25] Part of decolonizing trauma is just getting curious about the fact that things are changing. And the minute we open up our third eye, our sixth sense, whatever you want to call it, is to start saying, is there another way to be? And although I'm not fully there yet, I feel that that's a lot of what my research is doing and I hope to contribute to get us in a position where we are empowered enough to manage our window of tolerance so that we stay in our bodies and in our minds and in our hearts forever.
[00:09:07] I love you.