Épisodes

  • Navigating Identity through Spirituality
    Jun 4 2024
    In this episode of Conscious Conversations with my sister Clara, we delved into the resilience required to live as a Black woman, committed to discovering her true identity and living her truth. This journey, often solitary, demands courage and a steadfast commitment to one's values. Yet, it is through this journey that we uncover the abundance and richness that the Divine offers. Visit our website · Follow on Instagram · YouTube Channel · Patreon
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    1 h et 10 min
  • Imagining a New Earth
    May 28 2024
    In this conversation, Austen Smith and I explore ways to regain our creative energy and use our imagination to project our way into the reality we desire for ourselves and all Black communities. By reclaiming our ancestral wisdom, resilience, and veneration for the Earth, we can harness this creative force. The radical imagination entails stepping outside the confines of the now and into the expansiveness of what could be. It has been described as the ability to dream of possible futures and bring these possibilities back to the present to drive social transformation. Visit our website · Follow on Instagram · YouTube Channel · Patreon
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    1 h et 5 min
  • Recovery, Healing & Restoration in Black Communities
    May 22 2024
    Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) have faced disproportionate levels of violence from state institutions, the persistent legacies of slavery and segregation, and economic injustice and displacement. For centuries, the cognitive, spiritual, emotional, and physical resources of BIPOC communities have been disproportionately depleted due to structural anti-Black racism and White supremacy.

    In this conversation, Rev. Diane Ford-Dessables and I reflect on hopes for collective recovery and restoration for Black communities. I continue to ask: what do freedom and liberation mean to you? What are you willing to do to ensure your sovereignty and that of future generations? What does revolution in the 21st century look like? Visit our website · Follow on Instagram · YouTube Channel · Patreon
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    59 min
  • Settler Coloniality, Decolonising Space, Imagining New Futures
    May 14 2024
    Settler colonialism in urban and rural landscapes in Africa has not only meant dispossession of land; it is also an ongoing system of power-use that has sought to homogenise, sterilise and decontextualise space and place. This linear way of thinking perpetuates the repression and genocide of peoples, and the exploitation of cultures, land and resources. It continues to alienate non-White people from their genealogical relations with nature and the non-visible world. While many African countries have enjoyed independence for decades, the quest for development, urbanisation, modernisation and globalisation has sustained and reproduced spatial inequality and exclusion for the majority of poor non-Whites. Decolonisation as a project has been undertaken in various ways by different actors, yet a modernist approach in urban and rural architectural design persists. It is rooted in the dominant culture, in the decontextualisation of people, space and time, undermining issues related to eco-diversity, transitional justice, restoration and diversity. This situation deeply reinforces hopelessness, fearfulness, a sense of scarcity and displacement, and an inability to imagine future cities where everyone belongs.

    In this conversation, we’ll reflect on our past and our hopes for a decolonised future, imagining future urban and rural places and spaces that are resilient, anticipatory, inclusive, autonomous and technologically disruptive. Visit our website · Follow on Instagram · YouTube Channel · Patreon
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    1 h et 26 min
  • The Path of Fearlessness, Healing and Liberation
    Apr 29 2024
    Societies across the globe are built on a dominant culture – an oppressive, violent, hurtful, exploitative and destructive fear-based culture that thrives on inequalities in terms of gender, race, class and income. Dominance as a cultural construct has for centuries had a strong presence in institutions, influencing the socio-political agenda and landscape of societies. Fear as a concept, especially in relation to its opposite – love, is one of the most important and under-researched concepts of our time. Love is said to be a pattern that is life giving, regenerative, healthy and emancipatory, and fear is said to be a pattern of death, degeneration, dis-ease and enslavement. Fear-based conditioning is created when a person is hurt and does not heal that hurt, causing a disassociation from love. It’s a cause of great trauma. Fear is a dominant symptom in non-self-regulating, hurting and violent societies that have been subject to oppression and domination. In turn, like a virus, this fear infects the ideologies, myths, beliefs, values and socio-cultural context of societies. Fear and love are directly related, and so are fearlessness and liberation. Visit our website · Follow on Instagram · YouTube Channel · Patreon
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    1 h et 38 min
  • Afro/ Black Indigeneity & Sovereignty
    Apr 16 2024
    In seeking to have a deep understanding of indigenous-Black identities, human and non-human, one cannot help but think about the ramifications and the intersections of anti-Black racism, slavery, gender inequality, colonialism, erasure, of history, fractured identities, sovereignty, land dispossession and violence. These issues are entangled with the spiritual, social, political and economic embodiments and structures of the lives of Black people on the African continent and in the African diaspora, and are connected to one’s sense of place and displacement, appropriation and recovery, othering and belonging.

    While indigeneity in Africa and the Americas may be contested in different ways, the historical patterns of settler colonialism, cultural assimilation, identification of ancestral homelands and intensifying globalisation add to the complexity of one’s indigenous status.

    In this third episode of season 3 of the Conscious Conversations podcast with me, Mmabatho Montse, we speak to Greg McNeil about African Indigeneity and Sovereignty. We share our experiences and reflections about what being Black in Africa and America has meant, what we don’t know about our history and how we can capacitate ourselves to deal with the deception of colonisation and its handlers. Greg McNeil, a Ph.D. candidate at Southwestern College, Santa Fe, New Mexico, is a business owner (Coaches Korner & Empowerment Center of New Mexico, LLC), regenerative leader, healer, visionary, transdisciplinary scholar, Life Coach, Co-Podcast Creator – Art of Self Change, Performance Fitness Coach, Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor (with diagnostic privileges), United States Air Force veteran, hunter, and adventurer. Visit our website · Follow on Instagram · YouTube Channel · Patreon
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    1 h et 20 min
  • The Great Invitation and the Gift
    Apr 9 2024
    The world has been carved up by the great powers which have spiritually and economically dominated people, pushing them to strive for national dignity and nationhood. Ancestral wisdom and customs and traditional economics have been disrupted, and human energy and skills have been harnessed for the advantage of the conquerors and the disadvantage of the natural world. There are still people in the world today who regard anti-Black racism and White supremacy as race problems, a simple clash between Black and White. The world's wealthy few and their governments have promoted this narrative across the world, obscuring the real issues in the human crisis. This has greatly reduced the likelihood of the real problem being understood.

    These times we find ourselves in are no different to the times of the Bible, when men were downtrodden, with many consumed by despair – a time of moral collapse and social unrest. It’s a time when attempts are being made, in every facet of our lives, to debase God in man, and to set a limit on human beings, particularly those in bodies of colour, striving to serve their Creator to the best of their ability. It’s a time in which we perhaps should look more closely at the beauty and the sweetness of the Great Invitation and the Gift that lies within that invitation.

    In this conversation, I hope we can revive, restore and strengthen hope, faith and trust in the hearts and minds of our listeners. Visit our website · Follow on Instagram · YouTube Channel · Patreon
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    1 h
  • Unlearning, Learning, New Pathways
    Apr 2 2024
    Our vision for Season 3 is centred around people of colour in Africa and the Diaspora. People of colour continue to suffer from the effects of structural racism and White supremacy. This structural discrimination and the subsequent stigmatisation have inflicted multiple traumas on people of colour that have developed into degenerative, fear-based ways of existing, causing a disconnection between relatives, community, the land and ancestral wisdom.

    In this season’s Conscious Conversations, we hope to give listeners tools to increase their self-awareness, shift the beliefs they hold about themselves, shift their values to reflect a philosophy of Ubuntu, and find out how to use their resources to recover, transform and restore themselves, their families and their communities in a regenerative way that will nourish their whole being and strengthen their connection with our Source.

    This conversation is hosted by Thebe Montse. Thebe is a communication, media and marketing consultant with a depth of experience across public relations, brand communications, marketing, and advertising. Thebe’s worked with clients across the public and private sectors to deliver results for their businesses, brands, and communities. Thebe leads his own consultancy Endurance Africa and holds a BCom PPE degree from the University of Cape Town. Visit our website · Follow on Instagram · YouTube Channel · Patreon
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    50 min