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Dwelling in Place: Journey Toward Decolonization


It's a great honor to share a series of talk radio interviews featuring Dr. Leny Mendoza Strobel, Professor and Chair of American Multicultural Studies at Sonoma State University and Dr. Bayo Akomolafe, a clinical-psychologist, lecturer and author from Covenant University in Nigeria.

Ka Leny Strobel
I met Dr. Strobel, a fellow Filipina, through her leadership of the Center for Babaylan Studies (CfBS), an international focuses on Filipino Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Practices (IKSP) with specific focus on Babaylan discourse and Sikolohiyang Pilipino (Filipino psychology). The mission of CFBS is to connect with resources and to facilitate the relevance, cultivation and promotion of Filipino indigenous wisdom in an age of globalization.

CfBS organizes events that bring together Filipinos in the diaspora. Through symposia and conferences hosted in cities across the U.S. and Canada. I've had the privilege of meeting writers, artists, scholars, and community leaders who are actively interrogating their cultural "programming" to identify and heal the scars of colonization on the Filipino psyche.

An excerpt from the CfBS vision states:
"We live in a planet of diminishing resources. We live in a time when so many peoples on the planet are becoming disillusioned and disheartened by the narratives of empire, manic global capitalism, neoliberalism, and 'progress and development,' as these fall short in their promise to alleviate suffering, poverty, injustice for a majority of people on the planet. Many are questioning these modern paradigms, because it is becoming apparent that the affluent lifestyles these paradigms have created for a fraction of people on the planet are not sustainable and do not sustain happiness."  
"We are fortunate to still have with us shamans who have access to “The World We Used to Live In” (Vine DeLoria) when All was considered Sacred – the sacred world that includes spirits, and belief in the sacred non-hierarchical interdependent relationship of all species – before it all became disenchanted and desacralized by the rise of the scientific worldview. We still have remnants of old sacred chants and oral traditions, dances, rituals, weaving, drumming and other practices that can re-connect our body, mind, and soul and experience this sacred wholeness."
Dr. Bayo Akomolafe
Dr. Bayo Akomolafe's writings and publications have taken him to multiple conferences and counter-cultural events around the world. He is author and editor of ‘We will tell our own story!’ with Professors Molefi Kete Asante and Augustine Nwoye, and ‘These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to my Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home’ (in press; North Atlantic Books, 2017).

He is globally recognized for his poetic, unconventional, counterintuitive, and indigenous take on global crisis, civic action and social change, and was recently enlisted as the recipient of the Global Excellence Award (Civil Society) 2014 by FutureShapers. He is the Initiating/Coordinating Curator for The Emergence Network (A Post-Activist Project) and host of the online writing course, "We will dance with Mountains: Writing as a Tool for Emergence."

In the "Revolutionary Wellness" talk radio interviews embedded below, Ka Leny (as the CfBS community fondly calls her) and Bayo (as he humbly insists to be called) discuss the deep scrutiny required in questioning the incessant motion and noise of our modern lives, and cultivating the practice of stillness toward truly understanding "How to Dwell in a Place," learning how to see and feel in a whole new way.

Part I: Learning How to Dwell in a Place: A Practice in Decolonization with Dr. Leny Strobel and Dr. Bayo Akomolafe



Part II: Learning How to Dwell in a Place: A Practice in Decolonization with Dr. Leny Strobel and Dr. Bayo Akomolafe

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