The Joyous Justice Podcast
The Joyous Justice Podcast
Ep. 115: Slow, Deep, and Irreversible
We dig into a phrase (attributed to Ricardo Levins Morales) that we can and should apply to social justice movements and our lives more broadly: slow, deep, and irreversible.
Mainstream American/Western society often prioritizes speed and urgency. This conversation gets into why that’s often ineffective and can even be harmful. Anchoring in the “slow, deep, and irreversible” is immensely beneficial in our lives and in our movements toward decolonization and collective liberation.
We also want to hear from you: what does slow, deep, and irresistible in your work and in your living look like for you?
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Learn more about Aurora Levins Morales:
http://www.auroralevinsmorales.com/about-me.html
Learn more about Ricardo Levins Morales:
https://www.rlmartstudio.com/about/about-the-artist/
Discussion and reflection questions:
- What in this episode is new for you? What have you learned and how does it land?
- What is resonating? What is sticking with you and why?
- What feels hard? What is challenging or on the edge for you?
- What feelings and sensations are arising and where in your body do you feel them?
In a culture scape that offers and demands quick fixes. We have a countercultural idea. Let's look for slow, deep, and irreversible.
April Baskin:You're listening to the joyous justice podcast,
Unknown:a weekly show hosted by April Baskin with Tracie Guy Decker.
April Baskin:in a complex world in which systemic oppression conditions us to deny others and our own humanity. let's dedicate ourselves to the pursuit and embodiment of wholeness, love and thriving in the world and in our own lives. It's time to heal and flourish our way to a more joyous and just future is the second episode of the joyous justice podcast and the I believe 115th episode of April and Tracie recording a podcast
Tracie:together. Yeah, baby
April Baskin:hears for newness and momentum all at the same time. I love it keeping it fresh while going and building from strength to strength. Yes. Okay, so I have a thought that it might be worthwhile and juicy to share with folks, a subject that's really captivating me and holding my interest. And, and Tracy, you agreed. And so we are assuming, beloved listener, that hopefully, this will be a great episode for you since we're excited about it. So what I am eager to talk about today is a theme that keeps coming up again and again lately, that has been a North Star for me, for a couple years now, ever since I heard and learned this phrase that I learned from Aurora leptons mirallas in the context of my work with the Jewish liberation fund, and she cites her brother Ricardo, Levin's mirallas, as the source of this phrase, and I'm guessing it also sort of, you know, has its origins in indigenous and liberation movement spaces, but the person I noticed, society and source is Ricardo elevens mirallas. And the phrase of this North Star that I love so much is slow, deep, and irreversible. As in, we should strive for our social justice work for our work in the service and toward collective liberation toward a decolonized world in which we reconnect with our relationship more deeply with Mother Earth. And we care for ourselves and all living beings and our planet, that the work that we do in that direction, and service and in service of that should be I want to shift my embodied state,
Tracie:slow, deep, and irreversible. And I've wanted
April Baskin:to more deeply align with that principle in the context of our work.
Tracie:Enjoy us justice. And
April Baskin:as y'all may know, and as I both talked a lot about and also haven't fully shared about, so if you have questions about it, please feel free to let us know. There were different things that I needed to work through and process, internalize internalized oppression, fears, different things to really, really get clear, and have the degree of courage and clarity that I wanted to have in order to boldly and bravely lead
Tracie:the visionary and compelling
April Baskin:work that I saw for Joyce justice. And so while I was in the midst of playing smaller for me anyway, which is still not relatively in the bigger scheme of things playing that small, P led a lot of great programs for a number of years. But I also wanted to do bigger, bolder work across lines of difference. And so it was harder while I was straddling my mask self, who the world knew me to be who I wanted to be all these different bits to really commit to slow, deep and irreversible when I wasn't yet, when our work wasn't yet fully aligned with like, Yes, this is my life's work that obviously I want to evolve over time, but that I really want to anchor and root deep The end, I believe, is the best set of teachings and strategies to help our clients and aligned folks throughout the world, powerfully advanced justice and collective well being. Right. And so it's gonna take a breath with that sign. And so yeah, so here we are, we've, I am therefore, the organization I lead in the team I lead has gotten into and is getting into greater alignment and clarity. And we've been doing it for a number of months. Now, we did it by rolling out a partial variation of the work that I wanted us to be doing through our wonderful program grounded and growing. And I say only partial because it's the core content that I wanted to teach. But I was still teaching it to a beloved, but a specific group of people. And my broader vision is to still have affinity spaces and connection points within what we offer, but to be working and supporting people and working effectively across lines of difference. And we're gearing up to do that now, both building from strength to strength, still powerfully and lovingly supporting many in our Jewish community, hopefully even more, with each passing week, day and month. And also opening our doors to anyone who aligns with our mission to cultivate and lead an equitable, multiracial movement of folks who are working for spiritual transformation and systemic change. And so now that we're doing that, I am ready to dive more deeply into us embodying this principle of slow, deep and irreversible work. And see what helps us be clear in that basically, all of that to say is having a core focus of a core set of principles, a core process, that our business and our community is teaching and championing and advancing, which is our Shamal
Tracie:process.
April Baskin:And, through that work, we also want to help our people, we want to help you also in the ways that you want to, if you want to start to think about and consider what is slow, deep and irreversible. In your work, and in your living look like for you a prompt that I would ask you to consider and engage with, you know, for a moment or two now or after the episode is, there's likely perhaps some areas of your life where you are have or are already engaging, in slow, deep and irreversible work, perhaps my guess is it might be in the context of a certain relationship, whether that's a family, or a friend, or movement relationship, where there's someone, whether it be a child, or a movement partner, with whom you share an identity, or you work across lines of difference, where you've really invested deeply, and you are not rushing around, it's not transactional, it's deep and meaningful. And you're investing in it in such a way that it can be enduring. Or perhaps it's in another area of your living. But I want to talk about I wanted to name that and, and just invite you to consider that and think about that, because something may immediately hurt my finger recently, I'd love to snap but I hurt my finger. But that might immediately come to mind. Where you might need a little bit of time to think because this is a big bold vision. And we live in an oppressive context in which this is not the case for many things. But I also want to point out, it already is likely a part of your living in some way we might not be as far off or detached from a counter oppressive, liberal, liberatory, slow, deep and irreversible approach. I'll stop there, there were other key points that I wanted to make. But I also spoke as per usual longer than I anticipated. So, Tracy, what do you want to
Tracie:toss into the mix here? I want I guess I want to name that what you're saying. Sounds amazing. And also, when I think about myself, say three years ago, it would have felt like really far off. And so I just want to name like if you're listening in and you're like, Yeah, that sounds nice. I don't I don't know how I can do that, then. That's okay. You are not resources for you for that. And and you can it's it I am glad April that you made the invitation for folks to think about where that's already happening, so that we can all be reminded that it's actually is closer than we think and And I'm I am intentionally, I'm trying to speak a little more slowly because I think part of what makes slow, deep and irreversible feel out of reach is our constant pressure to go go go to do it now to, you know, do as much as possible, as quickly as possible. That is the way we've been conditioned. And that urgency is contraindicated for slow, deep and irreversible. And so it's, it feels a little mutually exclusive from the way that we're living now. And that urgency is not natural, or at least not essential. It's not required, inherent.
April Baskin:When when I would say the Quranic urgency, yeah, I would, I would say that chronic or because urgency obviously at times in the human existence is very important. But shamanic urgency is not is anything but essential. And Tracy, do you mind if I quickly interject because I just had a huge epiphany while you were talking. We were talking about some of this friction and different things, I noticed, oh my god, that, that our Shamal process that slow, deep, and irreversible maps beautifully. Onto the shamanic journey, the the arc of the process that we take our clients through, right is slowed down, at least in the moment, right. And then we take people through different processes and tools that help them look and think deeply and integrate their truth, external insight more deeply, and then weave it into their agency and how they show up in the world into their identity like. Like metta, like, Oh, my God, oh, so much alignment. Sorry, back to you. So excited. Also, not sorry. But like, Thank you for your patience. That's a better, less internally aggressive way of saying that. Thank you, Tracy, back to you.
Tracie:I had a job interview about four years ago now maybe, and I ended up withdrawing my application, because it just wasn't the right time for me to be shaking things up. But in the job interview, I was it was for a fairly high level, but like, marketing communications type thing with a with a nonprofit organizing group. And the question to me as the interview II was like, how do you deal with crises as they come up? You know? And my answer was, you know, whatever you expect, I gave the right answer, right. But then I said, and actually, it is my experience that when we are prepared, because we've done planning, and you know, done sort of that work to be prepared, then these kinds of crises are much less frequent, and also easier to handle. When they do come up. And my interviewers sort of were like, Oh, you don't understand. Like, they thought that I was being naive, that I just didn't understand how volatile and how, you know, unexpected these things can be and I understand, right, but with the kinds of preparation that you know, even four years ago, I was moving in the direction of what we do now. With that kind of preparation and emotional agility and self self understanding and situational understanding. Like it's not the crises don't happen, of course, they happen. But each one isn't a an existential, like, panic attack. Instead, it's like, okay, this is happening. What are the tools that I need to address this thing that's happening instead of like, oh, sky is falling, which is sort of how my interviewers were dealing with the crisis, like the sky was falling several times a week for them, and they were actually kind of enjoying the like, ride, I think, I don't think they would say it that way. But this is my Yeah, was it there was this it was it was serving a role for them that they like were, you know, surviving and like putting
April Baskin:out their sense of purpose and yeah, and significant
Tracie:and accomplishments. Yes. And so anyway, I like I'm just thinking about the different the different ways that that we have been taught to approach conflict and crisis and challenges And the ways we've been rewarded in the past and also just recognizing that that is not the only way. I guess that's what I'm thinking and the fact that your epiphany just now that what that, you know, this aspiration that you've been holding, and also what we did that just to me speaks to the the capital T truth in Yeah, we've mapped out that what we've articulated actually maps so neatly to an aligned leaders articulation of what it is that we're aspiring toward. And I am trying, I don't want to, I did feel a sense of judgment for those interviewers. moment I did. And I'm trying actually to get past that judgment and recognize like, it was serving a very significant role for those people, the way that they were handling things. And it wasn't, because they were making bad choices. Exactly. It was more that they couldn't see past the patterns that they had already set up.
April Baskin:Right. And the model that they've set up for their reality, right, and like likely was likely wasn't wasn't serving them in different ways, right. And the word that's coming up for me right now that I want to use to help bring us home, in this moment, is enduring, enduring, that I have been cultivating. And our team has refined a set of tools that offer and during resilience and enduring clarity, that cuts across a range of issues. Because what I see playing out, whether it's around racial justice, or other liberation efforts, or other adaptive challenges, people are handling or life circumstances or crises, that for a lot of folks, much of the time, they see all these things as piecemeal, and fragmented and different in different barriers in different places. But as someone with a multi dimensional identity, who's had a multi class, multi, multi, many, multi many experiences live in different regions, different cultures, I've been very curious about what are tools? And what are challenges? And what are common themes that cut across racial lines that cut across different categories and separations. And where actually, are these separations that some of us are aware of, for instance, around race, but other things people aren't aware of are actually conceptual and superficial, right? And what are tools? What is a set of tools and insights and reframes and frameworks that are adaptive, that can work for people with different identities and different moments, but these anchor insights are consistently true, right. And to me, it's a combination to me, what Shamala involves, is a set of principles, or pragmatic or spiritual laws, or principles or laws that cut across a range of different issues. And then a suite of different practices and tools that are circumstantial for specific moments, right. And I think in a lot of business, and even in coaching, and I wanted to talk about this more, in our social media presence, this is a great way to kind of kick it off. I'm not the first to talk about this. I have a colleague at my former job at asin, who used to talk about this a bit and I want to talk about it even more in deep in it this concept of a difference between Principles and Practice, and that people conflate them regularly. And people often think in racial justice spaces. What's confusing for a lot of people is that people have mistaken practices for a principle and practices are circumstantial, and and even beyond that I'm interested in we're interested in what are the issues below that? Because I find increasingly, yes, knowledge is a part of this. Right? It's Yes, there are certain books you need to read and things you need to know about racial justice or social justice or activism. But at the end of the day, it's all of it combined. It's about what is your personal ecosystem? What is your story of self? What is your understanding or ability to understand or inability to understand and analyze what's happening in the environment so you can better know how to navigate it more skillfully and effectively, and figure out where to place your focus because there's a lot happening. And so what are ways that you can cultivate and refine your focus that sets you up to be accountable to the causes you care about also yourself and move forward effectively, right. And that is where we are investing where we have opted to invest our slow, deep and ears reversible work is how to help people have endurance and thrive while doing it. While advancing joyous justice, how do we care for ourselves effectively? How do we make sense out of nonsense, because many things in our world seem like nonsense, and they seem random. But I find increasingly actually, most things aren't. And if we widen the frame around whatever we're looking at, through some simple skills, we can begin to better understand what's happening, and better care for and protect ourselves and those we care about. And people across lines of difference, right, that we can start to move into greater abundance and clarity. And it starts by facilitating that in our own leadership, and personal living experience. It's no wonder to me that people are grappling with scarcity mindset thinking around different forms of oppression, because they haven't addressed this in their own living and the different parts of their life in their mourning and how they talk and deal with situations in their family, how they, as you were alluding to, as you were alluding to, as you were speaking to earlier, oh, I can't remember what it was an episode in our prep, but earlier in our conversation, so you were talking about the ways in which we speak to ourselves, right, that a number of these things, these principles that we teach, cut across all these different things, and they are profound concepts, we break them down so that they're easily implementable, and build over time, and gives you a fighting chance, but even a fighting chance, a likely chance of not only getting some competence in me that is competency in these skills within with these insights, but start to build momentum, so that you're slow, deep and irreversible work isn't just one step at a time, one step in front of another. That's how we all start, everyone, every seedling starts with just one watering and one little root growing out. But in time, it starts to be leveraged. Because as you start to integrate more of these principles, they complement one another, and build on each other and allow for leverage and impact over time where it's not step by step, but it's like multiple steps at a time. And now Yeah, it's like a Snowball.
Tracie:Snowball like the snowball starts out little teeny, but then it gathers right
April Baskin:or another metaphor, right? Like instead of like a domino knocking down a domino, a domino knocks down or like a paperclip knocks down something that knocks down a domino that like went off like a third, bigger, bigger. Exactly, that's it gets bigger and then really, really quickly, right, right. And then it's even bigger than that is what we are going all in around our slow, deep and irreversible strategy is a suite of tools that can get narrowed down to the simplest to just to one thing that you can focus on to get big results, and can fan out to offer you a robust suite of tools to the point where you start to feel unstoppable in your leadership, and joyous and joyous because not only because you're making progress, but because when you're not making progress and when things go wrong, you know, with increasing and eventually absolute certainty, that you have a suite of tools that you can rely upon, and turn to solo and also in partnership and in community, to bolster yourself to heal, to take the time you need to rest to recover and to come back with glute greater clarity with greater conviction and move forward, unquestionably, from strength to strength, regardless of what circumstances come across your path. Yeah. So hopefully, this sounds interesting to you. And if it does, or if you're at all curious, you're like, how in the heck while like that was like a tall order? Well,
Tracie:you know what,
April Baskin:as a person who experienced a tremendous amount of adversity in my life, this is my life's work. I have dedicated 20 years to refining and cultivating and identifying this framework and the last three on investing in reading hundreds of books and taking hundreds of courses and cutting out the unnecessary stuff and noticing across all of these different themes, what is consistent and then also just noticing, what was I retaining within my own practice that across different cultural dynamics, different levels of intensity? What were the tools and resources that again and again stood up against stood the test of time, could hold up In different cultural and contextual situations. Yeah, I lost my train of thought and Tracy is not here to help keep me on track. I think she took a bio break.
Tracie:Here she is. So,
April Baskin:all of this to say, we're really excited about the days, weeks, months and years ahead, because we've landed on something that we believe in that's worth shouting from the rooftop rooftops that's worth sharing with folks for free in deep intensive coaching containers. In group learning settings, we're excited to share these different insights and many different ways. And our first step in diving more deeply into this after having piloted this over the past few months is to offer a live workshop for you in early December. And so we hope that you will sign up you can find more information if you visit joyous justice.com There's a link right on the homepage that you can click and fill out a simple form with your name and email. Even the dogs did you hear that dog? The dog is like yo, even the animal kingdom is like, homie, home person homeboy home girl, listen to what April and Tracy are telling you. Like what do you have to lose? This is a free workshop and we are sharing some of these key insights
Tracie:to help you cultivate and
April Baskin:enduring joyously just thriving lifestyle and leadership practice.
Tracie:Hey, have you signed up yet? We're offering a free four day workshop the roadmap to resilience kicking off December 5, visit joyous justice.com and sign up. See you there.
Unknown:Thanks for tuning in. To learn more about joyous justice LLC, our team and how you can get involved with our community. Check out the info in our show notes, or find us at joyous justice.com
April Baskin:If you enjoyed this episode, show us some love. Subscribe wherever you're listening. Tell your people share what you're learning and how your leadership is evolving. Stay humble, but not too humble. And keep going because the future is ours to co-create