Hasira "Soul" Ashemu Speaking Topics

• Reconnecting with Ancestral Practices for Health Equity and Wellness

  Most of us have lost connection to the tools, practices, and culture that our ancestors cultivated over thousands of years to support healthy mind, body, and spirit. Instead, we find ourselves bogged down by anxiety, fear, emotional detachment and numbing, and other negative emotions as a coping mechanism for the trauma we each have experienced individually and intergenerationally from assimilation into white, westernized culture. These issues then land in our tissues and create physical health issues that are then treated as one-off symptoms rather than recognizing these as symptoms of a larger issues of disconnection. Learn how you can reconnect to your ancestral practices for healing and manifesting your deepest desires.

  Core Concepts:

  • I Create My Life: We are always creating within our lives. The goal is to create from “the big I”, meaning the highest version of yourself. To be clear, you are so much more than your basic personality/likes/dislikes. There’s a powerful soul that is buried within the person, and this journey is about resurrecting and reestablishing that soul-self to lead your life instead of having trauma and negative past experiences with their accompanying destructive patterns lead your life.

  Morning Mastery:

  • It’s been said that success leaves a trail and if we want to master our lives, we must first master our year and to master our year we must first master our days and to master our day we must first master our morning. We can build positive habits grounded in ancestral knowledge and wisdom and proven by success sciences to build greater mindfulness, intentionality, and connection to our deepest desires. We build these habits each and every day, using the magic of the morning to create a ritual for starting the day in ways that reconnect us with our ancestral healing and wellness practices, including meditation, words of affirmation, mirror work, health and nutrition, and more.

  Pattern disrupt:

  • We all hold wounds that affect how we move through the world. Wounds are how a person gets hurt, namely by being shamed, criticized, embarrassed, abandoned, discriminated against, and so on. We also all develop shadows, which is the strategy a person chooses to adapt to that wound, to cope with it and protect from that negative thing ever happening again. Our shadows are subconscious, though we can use the mindfulness habits from morning mastery and reflective questioning to draw our patterns into the light and seek to disrupt them by embracing their opposites.

• Creating Connections: Authentic Relationships across Race and Class

  Because of the history surrounding race and class in America, we have been conditioned to avoid or ignore the difficult conversations about race that are ultimately essential to being able to move forward with solutions for diversity, equity, and inclusion. We must learn how to build deeper connections across race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and other identities as a first step to establishing the strategies and mechanisms for accountability and systemic transformation required for true DEI work to take hold.

  Core Concepts:

  Holding space:

  • More often that not, we are not truly able to hear, see, and feel other people and their experiences because we are so focused on our own experience, emotions, and feelings. Inside organizations, people often fear not knowing what to say or how to respond. To protect themselves from embarrassment, shame, guilt, etc., they create more distance between themselves and others, subconsciously cutting yourself off from witnessing anyone else’s experiences or emotions that may be different from your own.
  • By learning to hold space, we understand our own emotions and fears around connecting across race, and learn to regulate those so we can create safety and inclusion for all lived experiences to be spotlighted, shared, and embraced. This builds the relationships and knowledge needed to create true, long-lasting change.

  Multiple truths:

  • When people share their own truths or opinions that differ from our own, it can trigger a lot of subconscious patterns within us. Our instinct as humans is often to counter someone else’s truth with your own perspective. We become so focused on our own experience and the need to center it in conversations that we can lose the power of sharing multiple truths from all different perspectives and embracing diversity of thought.

  Releasing control and power:

  • As institutions and organizations, we need to be in fundamentally different relationships with communities of color and community-based organizations. We must step back to allow others to step forward, release the drive towards perfectionism, and embrace a more relational approach that is not afraid to lead from behind.

Doing More: Creating Transformational and Authentic DEI work

Many companies and organizations are seeking to be part of the solution for health equity and justice, transforming education systems, and bolstering economic justice, but the scale of the problems can feel overwhelming and we often don’t know where to begin. This presentation helps participants understand that transformation starts from the inside-out, and provides tangible ways that we each can reconnect with our ancestral practices for healing, growth, and societal wellbeing, as a first step in creating the systems of equity that we want for society.

Core Concepts: Inside-Out Strategy: systemic transformation starts with individuals within the system making changes in their own mindset, thoughts, and behaviors. When a critical mass of individuals within a system start making intentional changes within themselves, they collectively change the entire culture of an organization, sector, or society.

Conscious vs. unconscious thoughts: 80% of our thoughts and behaviors are subconscious, and 75% of our subconscious thoughts and behaviors are riddled with negative self-talk and negative views of the world. When we think about ourselves, groups of people, and/or our society as hopeless, useless, not good enough, etc., we continue to create that reality. Society as a Mirror: The things that bother us the most about other people, our organizations or society as a whole are actually mirrors to understand our own subconscious mindset, thoughts, and actions that we often shove down, ignore, or suppress within ourselves. By looking deeply within at those shadow thoughts and behaviors, we can make the subconscious, conscious, and tap into the inner knowing and wisdom that will give us a deeper understanding of how to transform our homes, communities, organizations, and society to be spaces for equity and healing.

Racism and Cultural Consciousness: Every single statistic across health, education, the economy and more show different outcomes for individuals when you disaggregate by race, ethnicity, gender, and class. We are living in a society that was founded on principles of social hierarchy and ascribing superiority to people based on the color of their skin. As part of the conditioning over the last 200 years to create and maintain this system, we see that even today the dominant culture inside of workplaces and institutions, drives us towards cultural norms and “solutions” to problems that are rooted in a “white” mindset, way of thinking, and behaviors. What this means is that norms of white people and white culture are held up as the right way to do things and those norms become the rules that people of color are forced to adapt to. We can address this by building our individual and collective practices around cultural consciousness: seeking to understand ourselves, our values, and our cultural norms and preferences and accepting, celebrating, and centering other cultures above our own to create more inclusion and equity.

Examples of Racism and Inequity in the sector/industry specific to the organization hosting the event (e.g., medical apartheid, school segregation, economic inequity, etc.) Becoming effective agents for change: So what can we each do as individuals to truly create the change we want to see in the world?

What we focus on grows: shift your attention from what you don’t want, to what you do actually deeply desire. Often times, we are more focused on what we don’t want, what we don’t like, what is not working, and how slow change is happening. When we put our thought and energy there exclusively, we just create more of those negative outcomes. Instead, we need to be mindful of our thought and behavior patterns that keep us in a pattern of creating more negativity and roadblocks and create pattern disrupts where we imagine what is possible, instead of what is impossible.

Relationships first: take stock of your own relationship with yourself: are you subconsciously undermining, disrespecting, and belittling yourself? Understand where those messages of “not good enough”, “never going to happen”, “nothing is going to change”, etc. come from and the purpose they have served so you can heal from them. Then, take stock of your relationships with others, and how you are using curiosity and nonjudgement to remove shame, blame, and guilt, so we can collectively operate at a higher, more effective level to achieve our objectives.

Leading with Yes: Systemic change requires us to question and reassess the status quo of how things have always been done. We can fall into the trap of saying “no” quickly to new ideas or ways of doing things because it’s not how we’ve always done it. By starting with yes, and asking ourselves what would need to happen to make this change work, we create more openness and possibility to imagine ways of doing things that invite greater equity, inclusion, and cultural consciousness."

Unstuck Yourself! Honing Your Power and Living Your Purpose

In this session, we will explore the essential elements necessary to create sustained breakthroughs in life. We will delve into the process of making significant life changes and identify the obstacles that hinder progress. Through introspective questioning, we will examine our relationships with ourselves, relationships with others, and our relationship with success, leadership, and mastery. Emphasizing the importance of alignment with purpose, we will uncover how operating out of alignment can lead to feeling stuck.

We will also explore the concept of net worth as the culmination of our network and learn how to leverage our connections to support personal and organizational growth. Furthermore, we will discuss the significance of making difficult decisions and avoiding the trap of following the crowd. Finally, we will delve into the concept of deep work and its transformative potential in unlocking personal power and living a purpose-driven life.

Core Concepts:

• Identify the key elements necessary for creating sustained breakthroughs in life.

• Examine personal relationships with purpose, success, leadership, and mastery, and assess alignment with these areas.

• Learn strategies for leveraging personal networks to support individual and organizational growth, and develop the ability to make difficult decisions and avoid conformity.