Return to Presence with Dr. Shawna

Season 1: Episode 5 Summary Ms. Frances Mary Albrier was born in 1898 in Tuskegee, Alabama, carrying the legacy of a grandmother who survived enslavement and helped found the Tuskegee Institute. Inside this episode, Ms. Albrier shares — through a rare oral history clip — one of the most enduring lessons her grandmother passed down: next to every poison is an antidote. She speaks candidly about bit...

Season 1: Episode 4 Summary Mother Waddles—a Detroit-based community activist—shares about navigating poverty and people , and how fashion and self-presentation weren't vanity—they were what kept her going. Getting dressed with intention helped her feel better when she was struggling. She recounts the oppressive welfare systems that sought to strip her dignity, her shifting relationship to money ,...

Season 1: Episode 3 Summary Queen Mother Audley Moore was a radical Black visionary whose ideas about reparations and Black liberation were dismissed as extreme. She was lonely, misunderstood, isolated —she never fit in anywhere. Not because she was difficult, but because she was decades ahead of her time. But here's what made her different: she made herself irreplaceable. Without traditional cred...

Season 1: Episode 2 Summary Pleasant Harrison was told by her doctor that she wouldn't survive her cancer diagnosis. With no meaningful care offered, she turned to what her grandfather had taught her— herbal medicine, ancestral healing practices, prayer, and the land itself . She survived by trusting what her ancestors had already placed in her hands. In this episode, we explore what Pleasant's st...

Season 1: Episode 1 Anna Arnold Hedgeman and Bertha Cooley fought for racial justice inside the YWCA decades before "DEI" existed—and paid a steep price. In this opening episode of Return to Presence, we examine Black women's burnout, workplace racism, and the health crisis created by being "the only one" in the room. We explore how racialized workplaces fracture Black women's health, the weatheri...