[JOE]:
Between writing notes, filing insurance claims, and scheduling clients, it can be hard to stay organized. That’s why I recommend TherapyNotes. Their easy-to-use platform lets you manage your practice securely and efficiently. Visit therapynotes.com to get two free months of therapy notes today. Just use the promo code JOE when you sign up for a free trial at www.therapynotes.com.

This is the Practice of the Practice podcast with Joe Sanok, session number 501.

Well, I’m Joe Sanok, your host here, live from Practice of the Practice world headquarters on the road. We are living out of a camper, a pull-behind Grand Design thirty-seven-foot bunkhouse. We at the time of this recording are in Fort Collins, Colorado. And we have already traversed through the Badlands, the Tetons, Yellowstone. We have been hanging out here for a while with our friends, Jeremy and Carrie. Jeremy has The Testing Psychologist podcast and Carrie has a new podcast, The Art of Groups and so I’ve been hanging out with them, our friends, Josh and Dana, and doing it while we’re trying to social distance as well. But it has been fun to be around friends.

You know, we also wrapped up Killin’It Camp a bit ago and we’re gonna be having a series kind of in early 2021 where we’re sharing some of those talks. But if you want access to all of those recordings, you can head on over to killinitcamp.com where you can get access to over thirty talks about pillars of practice, scaling a practice and multiple streams of income. Man, every single speaker brought their A-game, it was absolutely incredible. We also did an event recently called The Art of Dreaming Big, where we brought together… we had five people, social distanced, masks on and got together in person to talk about dreaming big and kind of walk through my process, and to see what happened in those two days was just incredible.

So something that I think I might, as we travel around the nation and live in this camper somewhat indefinitely, gonna probably do more of those types of events. Also, if you want to just follow our Instagram and just see where we’re at, we have our Instagram @LeaveToFind. That’s our family kind of name for our podcast and our Instagram, if you want to see camper life and what that’s like as well. So I hope you’re doing awesome today. We have an amazing talk. I can’t wait for you to meet Nathalie. And we’re gonna be talking about meditation and anti-racism work with Dr. Nathalie Edmond. So without any further ado, here she is.

________________________________________

[JOE]:
Today on the Practice of the Practice podcast, we have Dr. Nathalie Edmond. Nathalie Edmond is a licensed clinical psychologist and experienced yoga teacher. She has been in the therapy world for twenty years. She’s been a clinician and administrator in a variety of clinical settings. She started her own practice in 2015 and it grew to a group practice in 2019, called Mindful and Multicultural Counseling. Dr. Edmond specializes in the treatment of trauma from a mind-body-spirit approach. She infuses mindfulness into her personal and professional life. Social Justice is centered in her work. She has a variety of training on diversity and inclusion in developing an anti-racist identity. She enjoys bringing a mindful and compassionate approach to difficult conversations. She’s located in New Jersey with her spouse and two kids. Welcome to the Practice of the Practice podcast, Nathalie.

[NATHALIE]:
Thank you so much, Joe. I’m happy to be here with you.

[JOE]:
Yeah, this is really exciting. I think that this year has been such a heavy year. And to have someone that’s an expert like yourself, talking about mindfulness, yoga, anti-racism, psychology, you are the whole package. Oh my gosh, I’m so excited about this conversation. I would love to just hear more about your personal journey as to how you brought all of this together. Because for me, like, I didn’t even discover yoga till high school, I think college maybe, and didn’t really jump into that world other than for some exercise, but this is a big part of who you are, like, how did that form for you?

[NATHALIE]:
It was interesting. So, I too was not really into yoga for many, many years, most of my life, and then I had my first child in 2007, and shortly after that, I became the director of a women’s trauma program. And I was the director of that program for seven years and it was really an amazing experience. But what I found pretty early on in probably my first three months of being the director of that program was that there was a lot of burnout happening on the team. And so I brought an old mentor who was now a yoga teacher and she did Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction with us and that started my entry into meditation. And then somebody, my sibling actually told me I should try yoga. So I started doing yoga and I found that that was a moving meditation. And it was amazing treating trauma and incorporating elements of yoga into that treatment to have more of an embodied experience, that it just took healing to another level. And I thought, there’s something here. So I just decided I was going to get more training in sensory-motor psychotherapy and EMDR, and other mindfulness-based therapy approaches like DBT. And then it kind of grew from there. And the clinical world seemed to need that mind-body-spirit approach. And then when I started doing much more anti-racism work, that embodied approach of not being in your head, and being in your body, and noticing how hard it can be, to have these conversations and how much we’ve just learned on a body level, and how much trauma we hold on a body level. It felt like there was no other way to really do this kind of work.

[JOE]:
Oh, yeah. And I want to dig into that work. But so for you, when you first started doing meditation in yoga, I know for me, when I started, it was like a battle. A second, I’m like, I’m gonna sit down and meditate. All of a sudden, the to-do list comes flooding in and, like, how is this coming now? What was your experience on kind of that? Maybe it wasn’t a struggle for you? Maybe it was super easy. But what was that struggle or that experience like? And then, when did you start to feel like, I’m someone who meditates versus someone that’s meditating?

[NATHALIE]:
It actually took a couple of years because at first I just dabbled at it, and then I think it was maybe about eight or nine years ago, I was like, I was going through a major life transition. And I was like, I just feel like I need to do this every day. And when I started to do it every day, for twenty minutes, I really started to feel the difference. Like, I could observe myself more and I had much more compassion and much more ease and much more grace. I still had a busy mind. And you know, I would craft my emails and write my to-do list, but I became friends with it. And I think there’s something about when you do meditation more regularly – whatever meditation is, because I could see meditation as knitting, or taking a run or taking a walk in nature, I personally like to sit and meditate in silence or with or chanting – and once you start to do it regularly, you really start to see like, it’s not so much effort, and you don’t… so much of what happens when I think we allow ourselves to be still with ourselves, is our patterns show up. So it makes sense that if you’re still and you tend to be really busy, that all the stuff you tend to be running away from, or the things that are pressing on your mind, they would show up. And so to become friends with that, and to be curious about like, oh, why do I keep thinking about this person whenever I slow down? Or why do I always have all these worried thoughts? It’s, like, that’s already there. I think of meditation as just shining a flashlight on what’s already there, and then what are you going to do with it once it shows up? Are you going to fight it? Or are you gonna try to become friends with it?

[JOE]:
Oh, man. So then when you start doing the anti-racism work, and you kind of said earlier, this kind of meditation and kind of somatic version of it coming together felt like there’s no other way really to do this work. Take us through what that looks like, and how it felt to participants. So just like kind of sketch it out for us so that we can kind of understand how you’ve merged these two seemingly different worlds, but also, it sounds like they’ve come together in a really beautiful way.

[NATHALIE]:
Yeah. So I think what… so I was an administrator for many years. And what I noticed in that space, so I identify as a black, cis woman, she-her pronouns, and for many years, I was navigating predominantly white spaces. And I think that’s when my anti-racism really started was that I noticed that I never really brought my full self into the setting. On some body level, it wasn’t safe to bring my full self. But there was a way that I knew I had to adapt myself to fit into those settings and to be successful, which I was. And so I would supervise new psychologists and especially if they were a person of color, they would often talk about this stuff. And then when I left that system and started to do my own private practice stuff, and I started to do more workshops, and I started to see that it was so hard for people to talk about this stuff, that people of color were holding a lot of pain, and that white people were holding a lot of pain. And I think oftentimes when we talk about racism, there’s a lot of defensiveness, and shame, and guilt, and how do we start to just acknowledge that that’s part of the process, that’s the stage? And how do we learn the skills to stay in our body, and to stay with our emotions so that we can bring our full selves?

I mean, that’s really what I think of like full anti-racism work, is that we allow all individuals to bring their full selves into the arena, into the workspace, into the school district, and also that we acknowledge that the system was built on white supremacy, and even noticing, like, bodily reactions just from that phrase ‘white supremacy, but that we’re all conditioned into a system that values some lives over other lives. And we could talk about that related to race, we could talk about that related to heterosexuality, we could talk about that in terms of the way our brains work, about males being valued over females, we could go on and on about that. And so anti-racism work is looking at all the different identities, and who tends to be privileged and who tends to be marginalized, and how can we deepen relationships, not only in therapy, but in all our relationships?

[JOE]:
And when you do this work, is it kind of, here’s some steps that we walk through typically, some phases, what are those? What’s the kind of pattern or story or journey of the anti-racism work when you’re working with, say, a group of people?

[NATHALIE]:
Yeah, so I do different kinds of training. So when I do it with the other communities, it’s often more of a didactic experience, with meditation, and it’s just the introduction to how do people want to start to explore this in their life. Then when I do it with just people who just want to dive deeper into this topic, we do a lot of processing. Just what are some of our stories? When did we first notice the experience of being white or being black or being Latinx. And then when I do it for group practices, often it’s a three-part series, and we do a little bit of the history of racism in the United States, and how racism, we tend to think of it as overt, right, the things that tend to be unacceptable, but the way that I talk about racism is that to be not racist is not the same as being anti-racist. And that most people are not racist but it takes a lot of work to be anti-racist.

Anti-racism is just the effort that one puts in to understand one’s own family ancestry, and our privilege or lack of privilege, the messages we’ve internalized in terms of anti-blackness culture, and how that ties to the ways in which people are treated on a systemic level. And it helps us to start to, I think, as therapists, to conceptualize clients, not just as an individual, but that individual in the context of a much larger society, and how that can cause racial trauma, and grief, and rage, and how do we support people who are navigating COVID and the awakening and understanding of the Black Lives Matter movement. And that goes back four hundred years. And there’s a lot of heaviness, but yeah, there’s a lot of hope, if we engage in these conversations together.

[JOE]:
Yeah. I love that idea of just kind of observing what’s happening in the body as a starting point. Because there’s so many reactions that sometimes we don’t even think about, or know, or we aren’t even conscious of. And it’s interesting when you said white supremacy, in my own body, just feeling a stiffening, and didn’t even realize it till you said, in your own body, like, when we say that word. It’s like, oh, wow, like what’s going on there? Why did it make my body twitch like that? And then being able to, in a safe setting, start to unpack some of that and have it be facilitated. So when people start to kind of open these things up, like, what often happens in regards to either where you would take the group next or are there follow-up conversations? What does that look like after that kind of first, those first phases of kind of unlocking what’s going on?

[NATHALIE]:
Yeah, so then we start to talk about noticing when’s the first time you felt different, you had the experience of feeling different. And most people can identify an experience. And we talk about what social identity was that related to. And people start to uncover the pain that goes from that and I think that helps with empathy, and vulnerability. And the way that I talk about white supremacy, I talk about it as a culture, a value that is about perfectionism, that’s about binary thinking, that’s about urgency and productivity. There’s a lot of shaming, there’s a lot of power hoarding, a lot of objectivity.

And so when people start to resonate with that, and in a culture that has difficulty with rest, or that has a lot of FOMO, or that has a lot of, I always have to be achieving more, we start to see that impacts all of us. It’s not just for black indigenous or people of color. And then people start to explore, like, I’m seeing things that I didn’t used to see. And then it’s, so how do we invite people into conversations, which is another skill set to develop is okay. So now you have this understanding and you want to do something different. You want to be an ally or an accomplice, you want to start to make changes in your practice or in your business. And then the next stage is then, okay, then how do we start to do this in a way that’s authentic for you? How do we understand your community and your community’s history of segregation? Or ways in which it was set up for certain people to have more privilege than others? And then, if you’re a parent, how do you start to have these conversations with your kids, no matter how old they are, and how you navigate school districts, and different communities that are important to you. So it really is a deep dive over a period of time to really unpack all of that stuff, and then decide what to do next in a really mindful, grounded way.

[JOE]:
Yeah, you know, it’s interesting. So I have two daughters. One’s almost six – by the time this goes live, she’ll be six – and the other’s nine. We’ve been reading through, we just finished Rebel Girls 2, it’s the Rebel Girls bedtime stories.

[NATHALIE]:
Yeah. Love it.

[JOE]:
And it’s the stories of women who have done different things. And just, it’s been really incredible, the just little conversations that… they’re not little, they’re huge conversations, like who are the Nazis? You know what I mean, just like really big questions. And, you know, asking about privilege, and asking about, like, why couldn’t that woman do that? Or, why wasn’t a black person allowed to do that? And I feel like those conversations, it’s not, you know, like, past generations, at least in my experience, if it was a sex conversation or race conversation, it was, we’re gonna sit down, we’re gonna have a conversation. It’s a one-time thing. This is how we stand as a family. But it feels like you’re just opening that up as I never want them to feel like they can’t ask questions, or that they aren’t going to get an honest answer. Even… my five-year-old asked yesterday, like, do you believe in unicorns? It’s like, well, I said to her, I believe in the story of unicorns. And she bought that, but even just to say, I want to be truthful, but also, you know, I want that childhood wonder to stay too.

[NATHALIE]:
I love that.

[JOE]:
In saying all that – thanks – are there things that whether it’s, you know, white parents or black parents, that around race you’ve found with kids to be, like, other tools that I can add to my own toolbox, or that you would recommend people add to their toolbox, that are just either perspectives or ways to talk about things or ways to do that deeper education with your kids?

[NATHALIE]:
Yeah, I think a couple of things. One is what I loved about what you were saying is that this idea of challenging colorblindness, which is the time period I grew up in, which was color blindness, which is a form of racism, color blindness, because we’re not acknowledging that people are treated differently based on the skin that they inhabit. And so to start to show at a young age that there are differences, right, which doesn’t mean one is better or worse than the other, just different. And so to build this, like, celebration of life in all of its forms and shapes, so to be able to read the Rebel Girls, and to talk about those stories, to be able to read books that show a representation of a variety of people. Oftentimes, when we’re talking about diversity, the question is diverse from what? And so that means that there’s a standard that’s kind of the one we expect. And so if your daughters, your children, are seeing various representations of people doing various activities, then their body is getting acclimated to that. And then as they grow up to be adults, then they have a much broader perspective and it’s easier for them to talk about race.

I also think about the kinds of TV shows that are watched, and movies – do they have a wide representation? Are they stereotypical? And can we have conversations about that? I also think about, like, exposure to different places and towns. And if you happen to live in a town that has a variety of racial and ethnic identities, that’s great. If not, how do you expose that so that people can have those experiences throughout their life? I think the other thing is, if you’re friends with a diverse group of people, then your kids see that’s something that you value because I think sometimes what’s problematic is the lack of representation. I worked at a college counseling center for many years, and there were some students who’d never met a person of color until they went to college. And so to never have had that personal relationship, then all you know about that person is maybe what you read in a book, or what you saw in a movie, which may or may not be, like, really representative of the wide range of presentations that a person can experience.

So those are just a few of the things. And there’s some great websites like Embrace Race, and Conscious Kid. So the Embrace Race has a lot of webinars about anti-racist parenting, and ways to have these conversations. I think what happens sometimes is that kids notice a difference at age three maybe, and that if parents are uncomfortable with having those conversations, they kind of give the message subtly, or not so subtly, that we shouldn’t be talking about that stuff, versus just acknowledging what the kid is picking up on and inviting them into a conversation before the kids get to the point where they censor a lot, and they’re going to get their information from their peers or the internet.

[JOE]:
Oh, I love that. You know, I mean, I think about when… – it was after my freshman year of college – I went to Europe for six weeks, and just traveled over there, and just that initial travel, of seeing the world differently. And then, you know, going to a variety of other countries like Haiti or Honduras or Nepal, in that early kind of adulthood years, so framed out for me just how different cultures were and how beautiful they were, and how there’s, you know, things people do in other countries that I would never do. And just to be able to say, this is part of kind of like the world experience, and then to say, well, now how do I take my kids onto a similar journey, but for them to kind of form their own way of thinking about the world? I love that you had travel and kind of friendships with people that are different than you as part of that learning. Because I mean, kids and adults are so experiential in how we absorb things, that it’s one thing to listen to a podcast or, you know, go through a webinar, but to really go back to your body, like you said at the beginning, is so important.

[NATHALIE]:
Yeah, absolutely. And just the idea that our body is so smart, and it picks up things far faster than our brains do. So a lot of the bias that people are talking about, it’s the body that’s picking up on it based on conditioning, and the body automatically picks up on things that are different or considered not familiar, because that’s our threat response. So the more that our body is exposed to different people, different environments, the more the body can not have that biased reaction.

[JOE]:
Yeah. Now, when you think about people that have privilege in any sort, whether that’s male, or white, or wherever there’s a privilege, that say, I want to help, I want to be a part of this, I want to move towards anti-racism, I’m acknowledging my own limitations and blind spots, or trying to, like, what would you hope that people with privilege would do, would think, what kind of situations they put themselves in, like, what do you think would help them kind of move and allow kind of the black community to lead but also to, like, join? I mean, that’s a big lump of a question but, like, what would you hope that people with privilege would do?

[NATHALIE]:
I would want them to slow down and feel their feelings. That if they’re just awakening to their privilege, to just sit in that for a bit, to notice the waves of emotions, and then to really educate themselves. Like, what’s the history of the United States? Not the history that you learned in school, but the history that we weren’t taught in school.

[JOE]:
The untold history.

[NATHALIE]:
Yeah, like, to really focus on that. And I’ve made a decent amount of videos on my YouTube channel just about primers for white supremacy and the untold story of racism. And to really read about it, and have an understanding of what does it mean, the phrase ‘redlining’? How does systemic racism show up throughout history, throughout different phases, even after slavery was abolished? There’s some great documentaries out there, and books. And so to really understand the systemic nature of it, and then to invite people into the conversation, other white people, like, we’re talking about race, white people inviting other white people, into a compassionate, curious conversation about it.

And then, from there to really figure out how to partner with the group that they want to support. So if that’s white people wanting to support black people, to really use their privilege to be able to center those voices. Not to change the voices, not to edit it, not to take over or rescue because I think it could be problematic to become a savior. That oftentimes the marginalized group is more than capable, it’s just that they don’t tend to have access or opportunities or they’re not taken seriously. And so what are the ways in which you’re willing to take a risk, or to put yourself out there to center those voices, and to also be able to fit in this comfort? Because there might be a lot of emotion, right? There might be a lot of rage, a lot of grief over all the times before where you’ve created a microaggression, or you didn’t get it, or you minimize? And how can you hold space for that? Because I think if you can hold space for that, then other people don’t feel shamed. And I think what’s problematic oftentimes, is that once people have an awakening of their privilege, they tend to shame other people who aren’t there yet. And people don’t tend to change from shame. And so how do we always see people’s full humanity, even if we don’t agree? And even if we’re filled with a lot of anger and rage, how do we still see that person’s full humanity?

[JOE]:
Yeah. Oh, I wish that I had heard that when I was in my early twenties. I remember when I first kind of really encountered that term ‘white privilege’. And it was one of those moments where it was like, what do you mean, you’re telling me I didn’t do this on my own? Like, my whole value set, as you know, white middle-class America was, you know, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, work hard, get into college, and it took a while of grieving to be okay with, yes, I had this privilege, and I have a duty to kind of push back against that and to change things and to own that and realize, just, you know, having two upper-middle-class parents that put me through Catholic school, like, that set me up differently than a lot of the world. And to realize how much that grief at that time, and then to move past that and think differently. And so I love that you push us to first kind of know ourselves, to know our own story, to know our body, to feel those feelings because if I hadn’t taken the time to kind of sit with that, I think, like, it was a very reactionary phase. But then out of that came, woah, what is that actually about? And so thank you for walking us through that process because I think that, especially when you’re working with people that are first identifying this privilege, it could be clients, could be other people, when that comes out to just know how to kind of allow them to feel that, it’s just such a great tool that you gave us.

[NATHALIE]:
Thank you. Yeah, and I love this work. I think it really changes people when they dive deeper into this, and really enriches their life.

[JOE]:
Yeah, yeah. Well, Natalie, if every private practitioner in the world were listening right now, what would you want them to know?

[NATHALIE]:
I would want them to know that wherever they are right now, it’s okay. And that there’s resources and trainings available for them to dive deeper, if they want to take on an anti-racist lens. And that taking an anti-racist lens means being gender-inclusive, it means not centering kind of the white, cis, able-bodied, male, Christian person, and that means that we build healthier communities. And I think that that attitude of abundance, you know, is immeasurable.

[JOE]:
Oh, that’s so awesome. If people want to connect with you, if they want to connect with your work or work with you, what’s the best way for them to connect with you?

[NATHALIE]:
The best way is to check out my website, drnatedmond.com and that will show some of the anti-racism resource pages that I have, as well as videos I’ve created to help people, and then I have a bunch of lists of different ways that people can dive into trainings, either individually or in groups.

[JOE]:
Awesome. We will put all of that on not only the show notes, but we also have our Black Lives Matter resources round up so if you want to go over to practiceofthepractice.com, just search ‘BLM resources roundup’ and you’ll see we’re just bringing all of our resources we find and putting it in one spot, as well as in today’s show notes. Thank you so much for being on the Practice of the Practice podcast today.

[NATHALIE]:
Thank you so much. It’s lovely chatting with you, Joe.

________________________________________

[JOE]:
You know, over and over this type of work, the work of anti-racism, the work of pushing back against kind of what’s happening in our society, the most effective work usually comes from people that are really grounded in who they are. I’ve been listening through the book Caste – Jen Morley had recommended it. She’s a therapist in North Boulder. It’s amazing, you know, thinking about the caste system and just things that I’ve learned like that Nazis came over and they looked at the Jim Crow South to figure out how to create a caste system in Nazi Germany. Things that are just, you don’t read about in the textbooks and are so important for us to know, not just as therapists but as human beings. And what an amazing kickoff here. We’re going to be doing, actually LaToya Smith in just a couple episodes, starting with episode 506 – LaToya, she was part of our Black Leaders Matter series, as a part of that she also helped put together Can You Hear Us, which is a storytelling event about kind of the black experience in America from therapists point of view, that happened in early July and she ended up joining our Practice of the Practice team as a consultant, doing kind of two different branches of work, one around anti-racism and social justice work, specifically for private practices. But then, also, she’s doing storytelling work, helping people learn how to be good storytellers. And so she is going to be doing a podcast takeover in just a little bit here. And when I let people do a podcast takeover, I let them have full reign. They get to interview who they want, they get to go down whatever rabbit holes they want. And I’m so excited to hear kind of what she puts together through that. So thank you so much for listening today.

Also, thank you, TherapyNotes. Please make sure to use promo code JOE when you sign up for TherapyNotes; they are amazing. And if you’re a part of Next Level Practice and you’re signing up for TherapyNotes for the first time, you can get six months for free. When you sign up, just forward that confirmation email to me and we will send that to the marketing department. They don’t have a promo code because it’s just too darn valuable. So thank you so much for letting me into your ears and into your brain. Have an amazing day.

Special thanks to the band Silence is Sexy for your intro music; we really like it. This podcast is designed to provide accurate, authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical or other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.