The Greater Us Podcast

This is part 2 of my conversation with Dr. Haley Sparks, the founder of Ease and Enjoyment Coaching. If you haven’t listened to part 1, it’s the one just before this. I’ve experienced Haley’s work in quite powerful ways, and think it is important medicine for the world at this time. I invited her to speak to me on here – not just because I love speaking with her– but also because of the overlap wi...

I’m excited to introduce you today to Dr. Haley Sparks, with whom I’ve had the privilege of working in a number of settings. Haley is a psychologist who has done powerful work, including starting a practice called Ease and Enjoyment Coaching , based on a set of methodologies that she developed and whose power I’ve seen firsthand. This is another two-part conversation. In this first episode I speak...

This is the second part of my conversation with psychologist and sleep medicine specialist Dr. Elaine Boland , who also happens to be an old friend of mine. In the previous episode, we talked about strategies for getting rest during periods of heightened stress. In this one we talk more about the relationship between sleep and anxiety. Note again that the content of this episode is for information...

I'm excited to welcome psychologist and board-certified sleep specialist Dr. Elaine Boland , who has worked as an academic researcher at the University of Pennsylvania as well as as a researcher and clinician at the VA. Elaine is a longtime friend and someone whose insights I've always appreciated. I recently asked her what she might offer to people who are experiencing elevated levels of anxiety...

A question that I've been thinking a lot about lately is who, or what, gets my power. In this episode I talk about how that question is relevant to equity work, and also more broadly in the period of turmoil and uncertainty that we’re in now, at the end of 2024. The question is, to what extent do you need other people to change before you are okay? Do you need them to be different before you can b...

Trigger warnings were the subject of a big debate a few years ago. And as the debate happened, people seemed to fall into one of two camps. At one extreme, people were overly cautious with them giving trigger warnings about almost anything they were bringing up-- to do with oppression, with discrimination, as well as things you might expect. At the other, there was a view that this is real life, p...

In any group setting, moments of tension can arise when someone says something offensive. These "hot moments" often involve issues of power and oppression. As a leader or participant in these spaces, how should you respond when this happens? Should you intervene right away? What if the offensive comment doesn’t directly affect you but may hurt others in the group? The answer, as is often the case...

This episode is inspired by one of the most popular posts on our blog, which is titled “The Problem with Assume Best Intentions.” The more that I engage in this work the more I think of it as being about supporting people in showing up the way that they want to-- in the world, with one another, and as groups and organizations. How do we live into our best intentions for who we want to be? There is...

This is the fifth and final part of our short series about trauma-informed self care. And today I am going to talk about context and community-- first their relationship to trauma, and then how cultivating connection, reconnection, and community is a vital strategy for staying in the work. In the last episode I talked about how the precursor to developing post-traumatic symptoms is frequently the...

This is the fourth part of our short series about trauma-informed self care. In the last few of episodes we talked about cultivating a reset space, and about monitoring our intake. I talked to you about the metaphors that I think with, including treating engaging with vicariously traumatizing material like it is a low-dose poison or radioactive. This episode is about what we do-- how we act back o...

This is the third part of a short series about trauma-informed self care. In the last episode, I talked about cultivating a reset space. I think about this as my baseline. Not only is it a helpful practice in and of itself, it is helpful in terms of having a sense of when I've veered too far from okay. A key thing for me has been about what kind of material i am taking in about the world -- I call...

This is the second part of a short series about trauma-informed self care. In this part I'm going to talk about cultivating and protecting an inner space, a reset space that to ideally begin the day in, before the energies of the world come in, and also return to. Entering and spending some time in this space first thing in the morning can make the difference between reacting and responding to the...

This is the introductory episode of short series about trauma-informed self care, about the strategies i've come to as someone who has been engaging in various kinds of fraught and difficult work for years. In the next few episodes, i'll talk about the four areas or domains in which i think about these self-care strategies, so please stay tuned for those! This is a public episode. If you would lik...

Hello. You're listening The Greater Us, a podcast where we think about anti-oppression work and deep culture change through a trauma-informed lens. I'm Leena Akhtar. There is, of course, some wordplay in the name "The Greater Us." in one sense, it is about expanding our definition of "us." in another, it's about showing up as the most expansive version of ourselves-- as who we want to be in the wo...