Episode #10

Laura Dawn: All right, welcome Charlotte and Dre. It’s so nice to have you guys on the show today. Thanks for taking the time, how you guys doing?

Charlotte: I’m good.

Dre: I’m a little tired. I had this weird thing I didn’t eat. So, I was falling asleep. In the middle of the day, what’s going on? I haven’t eaten. So, but I’m doing well. I’m happy to be here.

Laura Dawn: Thanks. Well, I’d love to invite you both to give a little background around, what is the mission of the Sabina project that you co-launch together? I’d love to focus on that. And then maybe we could dive into the backstory of how you guys aligned to co-create and co-launch this together?

Charlotte: So, this would be a project is a platform to return reverence to ancestral practice and psychedelic medicine, which we call Sacred Earth Medicine. And we do this through online education, legal ceremony, and preparation and integration work. And we’re focused on how we can look to ancestral practice as a form of harm reduction in what folks are calling this psychedelic Renaissance.

Laura Dawn: And how did this align? What’s the backstory here? How did you guys meet? And how long have you known each other?

Dre: The first time we met was at a brothel. I just make that up. No, I’m just joking. She called me on the telephone. I remember I was walking down the street. And it’s very interesting, Millennials calling in the phone and saying what I thought I heard was that they wanted to do ceremonies exclusively for the BIPOC community. And so, I let her gone for 15 minutes, and I was like, Okay, I got to school, this young. And I did my whole transcendence is about not excluding, it’s not appropriate in the spiritual world. We all Malaysians. And then what I appreciated was she didn’t like to argue with me. 

She just said, Okay, thank you for sharing. And there’s a conference, people of a color psychedelic conference in DC. I have two tickets; would you like to come? I said, okay, clearly, this is a Jedi warrior here, it knows how to quiet down the old person, right. And so, we went to this conference, and I was blown away by the clear need to have integration periods, with people of color for sure. And just the need to have more people of color, in a healing practice, like sharing these maximum leaves for me, because the consistent story from a lot of folks was harm that had been caused in these all-white spaces. After ceremony. So, we got together.

Charlotte: I had just started to look into this intersection of psychedelics and race that tinker with medicine had been in my life for many years. And I was starting to wonder, why these things sort of weren’t melding. And then I saw someone in my co-working space with combo marks and made some sly remark that they probably went to a white shaman. And I said no, it’s this black guy in Baltimore. And so, that’s how we had our first conversation. And that was not even two years ago.

Dre: No. And then it comes that the pandemic, it. And so, a lot of the things we were going to do a person having to go online to do. This is how the spirit that moves to all things works, right? It’s kind of like how the ceremony works. It’s not about what you want. In ceremony. It’s about what you need, right? So, our mission was to get the word out there. And then the spirit that moves to all things kind of just has been guiding us this whole time. But thankful.

Laura Dawn: Beautiful. And when you say, people of color expressed that there was the harm that they experienced in white spaces, can you give me an example of what that looks like? Just to bring more awareness for people listening?

Charlotte: So, there’s a really helpful term that sort of encapsulates a lot of where some of this harm can come from, which is the term spiritual bypassing, where folks will talk about how you just need to transcend and it doesn’t help to talk about negative things. And by talking about negative things like race, it just perpetuates them. And these are constructs that are made up and we need to surpass them and etcetera. And when you’re in a very emotionally, spiritually, and even physically vulnerable space, and folks are saying these types of things. It can be damaging, and it can cause harm because, after the ceremony, we have to come back into a world that has created systems and structures to keep us quiet and oppressed in some ways. And so that’s where this conversation around having these BIPOC spaces for integration became so important for being able to talk about these experiences and see that we weren’t alone in having them.

Dre: Just didn’t look like this way. Imagine a person going to a therapist, or a minister, or priest of some sort, and is very vulnerable, about whatever the trauma that they’re enduring. And let’s say that person is there because they’ve been assaulted by someone sexually. And then, at some point, the counselor therapist’s priest says, that’s not a thing. And you just get over that. So, not only you already have the trauma that you’re experiencing, right, and dealing with, but now you’re, it’s impacted, and more, and it’s intensified, like 1000-fold, because of this person who you have a tremendous amount of respect for to put yourself in a vulnerable position, and trust. And they have shown you that either two conclusions, one you made an error in judgment to put yourself in a position of safety with this person wasn’t safe, or you start to question your reality. Or maybe I should just get over the structural racism that I’m experiencing daily that’s constantly oppressing me. Right. So, it is extraordinarily harmful when you’re in these spaces, and they do the bypassing.

Laura Dawn: So, for people listening, you know, I just, I think it’s just such an amazing conversation to be having and bringing more awareness for facilitators, holding space for a wide diverse range of people. What advice you have for people and leaders stepping into the psychedelic space when it comes to holding space for mixed raced circles?

Charlotte: I see a lot of folks talking about trauma-informed practice. And there’s a lot of focus on trauma-informed practice, predominantly as it pertains to, like sexually-based trauma. And I think that we have to remember that racial trauma is a very real thing. And so, the same space that you would hold for someone, and lean on those trauma-informed practices are some of the same approaches that can be used when working with people from the BIPOC community.

Dre: With one very important difference. When a person is coming to us for most traumas that they’re coming to us. These are not current experiences. This is something that’s happened in the past, your dad said he didn’t love you when you were six, right? But you’re still reliving that trauma, those words over and over again, right? When it comes to structural racism and oppression, this is my daily experience, no matter how positive I am in the world. The reality is, if I get pulled by a police officer, my life could end. The reality is that when I go to get a job, that it’s not enough for me to be the most qualified person that I simply because of the color of my skin, I may not get that job or maybe not be allowed to live in that community or maybe called name. 

We know now white supremacy is clearly on the rise in this country know that. It just imagines the experience of a person of color that knowing that a significant portion of the police department and when I mean significant, even if one police officer is always by supremacy, so this person was pulling me over and has a gun and authority to take my life, control my body could be someone who hates me, simply because of the color of my skin. Just think about that realistic trauma. And then in our world, every decision I make, I have to consider how that decision reflects on my entire culture. It’s a huge responsibility too. 

I would say that as a practitioner myself, no matter who I’m sitting across, a big part of what I am doing is clearing my mirror, cleaning myself, so that I am not projecting my own story onto the human being that is expressing their needs, right, those unmet needs that they’re needing to get. So, even if I don’t understand it, but that’s okay because there’s a lot of trauma that I’m not going to put myself into just to understand it, but we all know, for example, sexual trauma that we certainly don’t diminish the victim. We don’t blame the victim, there certainly was a time 50 years ago, where you said, Well, what was that person wearing? Right? We know better to do that now. Right? Well, we should.  

Charlotte: In an ideal world. I would do the same thing.  actual trauma

Dre: Step forward to be a human presence, and then be quiet. And listen and be nurturing with all, this doesn’t seem to be that complicated. For some reason, when it comes to people of color, it seems to be this extra level of we need to explain ourselves, a thousand time break it down to people.

Charlotte: I think it is important and necessary that we have a conversation about how you can better serve people of color black folks in these spaces. At the same time, it shouldn’t take additional training for you to not re-traumatizing a person when they’re talking about their experience and their trauma. But as Dre was saying, there is this question of, but is it that bad? Right?

Dre: We had a black president? 

Charlotte: So, it’s not acute trauma, it’s chronic, right. And until we fix the structures, and the systems that replicate the trauma, the least we can do is, liberate ourselves from it.

Dre: I think another part of that it also is for folks who are not of color is, to be honest about their biased. They may not be aware of their bias, but they have a bias, right? Because if they didn’t have a bias, you wouldn’t have to explain the reason why we have to, when people of color are constantly having to explain to people non-color, about the trauma that we were experiencing in America, is because there’s a clear bias.  And so that’s what we have to play, right? Which is unusual. There’s no other example of the victim needing to explain themselves about the trauma, we don’t ask people to do that. It’s tough for people to color.

Charlotte: That’s true. We have two questions that we like to ask non-BIPOC, folks. One is, why is racism bad for you? If you sit down, try to answer it, it’s challenging, and two what are you specifically willing to sacrifice in the fight of dismantling white supremacy? A lot of people will be Oh, my God, I’m ready to sacrifice anything. I’ll sacrifice everything. No, is it your job title? Is it a board member seat? Is it a grant that you want to get? Because you want to be the one doing the work instead of grassroots organizations that already exist within the community? What is it specifically that you will sacrifice? 

Dre: Or some of that family wealth that you inherited? Right, because of the oppression that your forefathers enjoy? Right, you know, that as well.

Laura Dawn: Right. Well, I also wonder about the sentiment around white guilt right now, and I know there’s a lot of people who feel some resentment for being treated like, I’m a white supremacist, because I’m white. And that’s interesting. It’s like generalizations that get made when people are showing up. I genuinely care about people. I’m not a white supremacist. It’s so interesting. And I’m so curious, your general sentiment about the state of the conversation right now and where we go from here.

Charlotte: So, I think there are a few things one white guilt and shame. Just like shame and self-judgment don’t serve any of us in our journeys, white guilt and shame don’t really and white fragility does not serve the collective liberation movement. Right. So, like, there is a need to move past that. I think also This idea of understanding just what Dre is saying like we all hold internalized biases. And when we talk about white supremacy, we’re talking about the general idea that anything that is non-white is outside of the norm, and holds less value. And so, we all have internalized systems of oppression. 

And that’s why it’s such a great self-replicating system. Because the shame, the judgment, the hatred that we hold for ourselves, all stems from being colonized, being oppressed and this is for white folks as well. This is not like a BIPOC only, sort of deal. And then the other thing that I would encourage is for white folks to sit in that discomfort of being generalized, because just like Dre just said, when we do or say something, we have to calculate how that’s going to be somehow representative of the entire black community, even though we are two individual people. 

And so white folks they are very concerned when people are saying this happens a lot in different groups, people would say men are trash than men want to say not all men right now. True, not all men, but that’s not the point of the sentiment, and in the same way like white folks need to fix this. This is racism is a white problem, that is true. And it’s not a call out of you had slaves, we understand that’s not true. But it’s how do you benefit from the privileges established by those systems of oppression.

Dre: Everything from redlining, where they had specific neighborhoods that people of color could move into, which was the older neighborhoods where the prices for homes that were sometimes 20 30 years older, were more expensive, but the only black people would live in and then the newer homes in the suburbs, with the newer construction, which cheaper and white folks could purchase those homes. So, there’s a huge wealth gap there, right? Another thing to think of is reparations, this is something that I always encourage people to review this idea of reparations. And I want to just also support what you said is that if you are privileged, you have to get over your discomfort in these conversations. 

The fact that you are acting being uncomfortable, and complaining about it is a distraction to do so if you don’t like being marginalized or being generalized welcome to our world. We live in every day, right? So, it’s okay, you still get to go back to your privileges, you don’t lose any of those privileges from that. But after this conversation that we had that’s been so edifying for you, we still have to live in all reality. So, but I think we’ll talk one way that we can move the needle on this conversation is with money. And reparations have to be a serious conversation. And for 400 years, black folks have black bodies, their bodies were used to enrich this nation at one point, the American slave was more valuable than cotton, it was the most valuable commodity in the world, in fact, and this is why when people say, my family wasn’t part of it. 

But people also realize is that many of the abolitionists all over the world as, for example, when England abolished slavery, that made folks in England feel good, but it also made the American slave more valuable. So, as it as it became less tolerable throughout the world, and there is lots of documented evidence to show that abolitionist, even though they were saying slavery was bad, they were benefitting significantly for investing in the American slave trade. So, anybody who has any lineage connected to tobacco, cotton, firearms, alcohol, that family, wealth is complicit in slavery, right? Textiles, we could go on and on. Sugar, rubber, just on and on, and we got to pay that restitution for sure.

Laura Dawn: Well, I appreciate what you said Charlotte about and I agree. I fundamentally believe that we can’t grow collectively or heal through shame and through shaming each other and through fighting against each other. And it poses such interesting questions about where we go from here. And when we see so much division and polarization right now, and this is such a big inquiry that I think a lot of people are in right now, how do we move past this division? And how do we hold space for more kind conversations, and it’s something I appreciate about you both. I feel that from both of you, even in the short conversation we had last week, Charlotte, you’re like holding space with a lot of kindness and a lot of openness to where the conversation wants to go. And I appreciate that about what you guys are doing.

Charlotte: Thank you. we try to communicate with gentleness and respect. And these are challenging topics. But we are grateful for the folks who are willing to come to the table and have open vulnerable conversations about it. And are willing to sit in that discomfort.

Dre: I think it’s important too, I’m grateful for these types of conversations. Because if we don’t have these conversations, first of all, the only way people of color are going to change their experience in this country is two ways, is going to be by bloodshed. Or it’s going to be by cooperation. So, if they’re not part of this conversation, then what other choice do people of color, we’re certainly not going to do another 500 years of this type of experience. 

And I’ve told my daughter, who’s 11, that by the time I take my last breath, I fully expect that she, as a woman, before she goes to college, I don’t want to be living in a world where she may get sexually assaulted. When she’s going to college by some dude, I just don’t want to live in that world. I don’t want to live in a world where a person of color might be treated differently just because of the color of a person because what they choose to love is treated differently because of that. These things have to change now, right? Because there’s just too much trauma. 

Every generation, every person that has to endure this for another day, it’s the trauma, it’s a price, the price just keeps going up and up for people. And you can see that because we’ve been kind of passive, all of us in addressing this. Now, you see that white supremacy is on the rise like nobody’s business. It’s baked in our institutions now. In our institutions, we have people in high places of government, who believes we have senators right now, who believe these ideologies and perpetuate them, it’s no longer the person who is downtrodden, and poor, that you could say, well, that’s who uneducated. These are very educated people who are expressing these viewpoints and it’s on the rise. 

Laura Dawn: And I just think holding space with the kindness and compassion I saw that was part of your mission. And I saw that on your website. And I think a lot of people are afraid to say the wrong thing. And you’re pointing this out, it’s white discomfort. And I think it’s also legitimate, that people are, wow, I’m going to move away from this conversation, because I’m afraid to be publicly taken down and shamed for not being aware of like the current word that we can’t use now, or the canceled culture, and I’m like, Oh, my God, well, if I step out and say, I want to hold space for this conversation, but if I say the wrong thing, I’m either like white supremacy or white fragility, and I fit into two boxes right now, and there’s not a lot of room for anything else. And so, it’s like, Okay, how do we, you know, move past this and the canceled culture? I don’t know. 

Dre: It is interesting.

Charlotte: And I think, it’s hard because then this conversation can start to get into like the spiritual bypassing realm of over compassion for people, people who continue to make choices that harm other people, people that continue to ignore calls for being held accountable, and all those sorts of things. But if people are willing to come to the table and have a conversation, and then you see them take the action, they need to change their behaviors, their habits, their language, whatever it is, then you don’t keep canceling that person. I remember years ago; I had a conversation with my mom about a company that had been in the West Bank and then they were boycotted against they pulled their factories from the West Bank. 

And years later, I don’t know I bought something from this company and she’s, I can’t believe this, you have to boycott this company. If you keep boycotting a company that takes the action that you were boycotting them for, then your boycott holds no weight. So, if you keep calling people to the table and calling people out for accountability purposes, but then those people change, and you continue to cancel them, then canceled culture holds no weight, there is no method of holding people accountable. Because it’s fine if you’re going to cancel, you cancel me. So, it’s ultimately not super productive.

Dre: I’m not a big fan. I’m a little bit older. So, I kind of cancel culture. I’m not sure where it comes from. But it seems to be coming from a place of insecurity and two minutes of judgment for themselves, which is why they reject all of us, right? Because we do a lot of that pointing fingers. But really, there’s a lot of internal work that all of us need to be doing and it’s always surprising me within this amount of world, we have a lot of that we have just as much of that in the Shamanic world, healing community as we do and, in my opinion, the examples of gentleness and respect. 

My favorite book is a book by Don Miguel Ruiz called The Four Agreements. First, be impeccable with your word, be thoughtful, because it was can you be your power your poison? But this is not a lot of that. And I don’t know where that comes from. And what I see, what’s even worse, is that we part of the reason why canceled culture is effective is that we buy into it, that we react to it by instead of ignoring it, like a petulant child, he just kind of this is interesting. 

Laura Dawn: I think this is a good segue into Sacred Earth Medicines. And just bringing it back the only way that we can align with collective liberation is by going within ourselves. And doing that work and plant medicines are a gateway into that inner dimension. And so, I’m curious. First, I think I’d love to invite you to just define Afro psychedelia. I saw it on your website, and just for people listening, how you’re using that term?

Charlotte: So, that is the title of a series that we’re putting out to celebrate black features month, which is what a lot of folks are calling black history month this year, which I’m super into. And so that will be a library of videos of interviews with black folks who are working with Sacred Earth Medicine across the Diaspora to accelerate their healing journeys and our collective liberation. So, there are folks who are therapists, mycologists, educators, cultivators, healers, guides, all of those types of folks are included in the conversation. And the inspiration behind that was that we frequently find that we are invited to speak specifically about race and racial trauma, which we, of course, want to further that conversation. 

But black folks and BIPOC folks in this space, we all hold our expertise, as well, and our expertise on our healing journeys and what our communities need. And so, we wanted to create a space and a platform to have that conversation where folks could share about their journeys and experiences with the medicine, and then what they’re contributing to this space. So, that folks have more resources. And more examples, like [inaudible 28:58] said, more examples are folks who are out here, positively impacting our community.

Laura Dawn: Wonderful. And this is separate from the psychedelic anti-racism course. Okay, do you want to tell us a little bit about that?

Charlotte: So, psychedelic anti-racism course. The first part ran last year in October, November, and it was a four-part series. It was a wonderful opening of that conversation, again, trying to house all of this conversation in one place so that we continue to share it as a resource for people so that we can eventually begin to move past this conversation. When the time is right, but we talked about sitting in your discomfort, recognizing personal bias and personal privilege, and then had a really interesting conversation around reconnecting with sexual race, because a lot of the time when we see folks talking about connecting with our ancestors, it’s from a very BIPOC specific perspective, which I think is because the veneration of ancestors is just culturally more prevalent in BIPOC spaces. But white folks also have pre-colonial pre-Christian, Shamanic traditions to lean on and tap into, and ancestors to venerate. And we see this as a way of sort of helping to avoid the more predatory or colonial style cultural appropriation that can happen within this space. If you have a connection with your ancestors, your traditions that you can begin to practice. It makes it less necessary to take from others or romanticize others as well. 

Dre: Hunter-gatherers all over the world. We’ve practiced animism of some sort. And there’s a lot of similarities between the Vikings and the Lakota prey. Or the Shipibo of the Dogon. Right. So, there’s a lot of similarities in terms of what these pre colonized cultures, communicated, I think, what are your thoughts I have about why there seems to be less connected to like Celtic or Druid or Wiccan traditions by people who identify themselves closely as white is because the way colonization work, they started in that area, and they say keep on fire and killed, traditions, right? assimilated those people, into this monochromatic perspective. 

And then they moved and spread that poison. Well, so by the time they got to Africa or South America, white folks like, Celtic’s they had been, under the yoke of Abrahamic traditions and colonization for a significant amount of time. So, I think that might have something to do with why it tends to be less connection. And the other thing is, there is a benefit. That’s the other thing. You ever watch Star Trek. Do you remember the board? 

Charlotte: I just watched that episode. 

Dre: It’s futile, right? And there is a benefit, right? If you can, enjoy the privilege of Borgism, or colonization, to just letting go of my Italian, or my Irish, or my Germanic roots and saying that I am white. Especially in America, which is something we should get into at some point. I don’t know in this conversation. 

Charlotte: I was just thinking about this, the myth of whiteness, the creation of blackness in America. That’s a massive tangent. 

Dre: Wasn’t even a thing people are I’m white. No, well, actually I’m not, German and probably French or something else. White is not a thing neither is black. 

Laura Dawn: Can we get into it? For someone who’s saying that? And you’re thinking of it this way? And what’s the benefit of thinking of it that way? 

Dre: So, essentially, 1608 was when this idea this concept. And what was happening is most of us who were in this country, except for native peoples who were wiped and killed and slaughtered, but most of us wh