We kick off this podcast season with a little solo pod. In this episode, I talk about where NEKKID is and where we are going. I hope this episode gives you a window into the NEKKID world we are building for you and gets you excited for the work ahead.
Martissa Williams: There are so many freedom movements all over the world who have dreamt of freedom, and so many of us right here and today are dreaming of what it could look like to do something different than what we're already doing. And so our mission, our dream, our work, our joy, what we're investing in is that dream is how do we transform the self?
How do we transform the self not for just the benefit of the self, but for the benefit of the whole. We do this self transformation as a love letter, as a gift, as our devotional practice to the whole, because we love each other. That's why we transform, and that's why Nekkid creates the type of work that we create.
Hey, loved ones. Welcome to Nekkid Conversations, a space for you and I to meditate, strategize and dream of the tools needed to transform into radical selves. I'm your host, Martissa Williams, free being, radical racial and liberation doula. My purpose is to support the collective on our journey to deeper joy, sweeter justice, and fulfilling presence.
So are you ready to step into your most liberated life yet? Let's get to it.
Hi friends. Over the past year, it has become abundantly clear that our world and our communities are in desperate need of some healing between the state sanction murders of dozens of black and brown folks to climate catastrophe, to the war on folks with uteruses and all manner of international nightmares.
The way we've always done things is killing us, and in the wake of all of this, many of us have felt hopeless and confused. We sign petitions and donate money and post on Instagram, but that honestly just doesn't feel like enough. For years, I have held the belief that transformed people, transformed the world.
The work of freedom and liberation must be done both from the political side and from the shifting of the individual's heart. And for many years I've been playing with methods of doing this for myself, working on how to unlearn the oppression that I grew up in, how to stop perpetuating that oppression in the world around me.
And out of that inquiry rate and experimentation came the toolbox. So the toolbox is an annual membership packed with the tools I've used to make anti-oppression a daily practice. With the 12 month membership, you get unlimited access to all of my Embodied Liberation Workshops, presence practices, group coaching, and more.
This is a huge, huge part of my life's work, and I am so excited to share with you. For more information or to become a member. Click the link in the show notes or go to letsgetnekkid.com/the toolbox.
Welcome to season three of the I could podcast dear ones . Um, it is so good to be back with you. It is so good to, um, You know, virtually sit next to you. I hope that you are in a place where you can rest, whether that's mentally or physically. I hope that you can find a space where you can rest and be still, and just take a moment to reflect on the beauty and the pain of this past year.
It's been almost a whole calendar year since we've seen each other in this capacity, and I'm super excited to share with you all the changes, all the amazing things that, uh, has been happening over at Nekkid. Um, and to introduce you, the new guests that will be coming on for this season of the podcast. So let's actually start there.
I'm super excited to have a new season of the podcast with amazing guests. Um, we'll be talking to, we'll be having 10 episodes, including this being our first one. Um, and the last episode is a special one that I will get into, um, a little bit, and we're gonna be talking to authors, to thought leaders.
We'll be talking to Ben Decker, who is a three times New York Times bestselling author, writing books that talk about meditation and world religions, and how we can approach the world through a multifaceted lens when it comes to our spirituality. We'll be talking to Toi Smith, who is a radical business strategist, but she talks about everything from like black motherhood and single motherhood to race, to capitalism, and she's just, the conversation that we had was just so juicy.
We're talking to Kim Crayton; which is an awesome, juicy conversation about blackness and whiteness and the ways that, um, We feel the most other when put up against a stark white background. And I'm quoting an author there that, I cannot think of their name, but I will, um, put their names in the show notes.
Uh, who else are we talking to? We're talking to Shannon Hayes, who is, uh, three times, um, author who wrote Radical Homemaker, Redefining Rich. Um, she is a farmer and a small business owner, and we talk about the ways that you know, our society. Well, we talk about how we can approach our society and we can approach the economy in a more life saving way. Rather than always having to default to a capitalist model, we can shift deeply into something that feels more life giving, more sustainable for the earth, more sustainable for each other.
And there are many, many more. I'll keep some of them surprises. Um, but I'm super, super excited to be bringing you another episode or another season of the Ne of Nekkid Conversations. I think we're building something really beautiful here and to like talk about, you know, what we are building.. Um, there's so much that has happened in Nekkid Land lately and I'm super excited to share with you.
The first really exciting thing is that Nekkid is no longer a one woman show. Super exciting. Nekkid now is, has a team with me, obviously as the leader, the vision holder for this, this, uh, organization. But we've brought on four amazing individuals to help support building out this dream of making liberation a daily practice.
It is so, you know, capitalism has us thinking that we have to do things alone. That the most honorable choice is for us to be in the wilderness so low, making it happen on our own and to me, I believe that that is deeply anti liberation. There is no liberation alone. You cannot reach the height of the mountaintops by yourself.
And even if you do, you'll find the medicine is not up there. Because the medicine is really in our collective freedom. It is in our ability to learn to live and to be in joy and to be cooperative with one another. And so I had to get very, very clear on my values and very, very clear about my capacity and recognize that for me, one of the most important things was to do this with people.
That we can go only so far by ourselves, we can maybe— What is that saying? That cliche, saying like, "You can go fast, but you won't go far." There's so much burnout in solo entrepreneur. There's so much getting caught up in my, my own head. At least for me, I've gotten caught up in my own head with solo entrepreneurship.
And so I was so grateful when I put out the call that I was looking for partnership. I was looking for collaboration around Nekkid that these just swaths of people came out to say, "Hey, I'm interested", and, and through that we created this amazing team. And so, You will get to meet these, these amazing individuals.
We're actually gonna have a nice little round table to close out the season at the end, so you'll be able to meet them, see where we're at, see where the vision is going, because we're really hunkering down in our mission. And if you are new here, um, the mission of Nekkid is to provide programming and resources to create a radically free world through self transformation.
We know that this new world that we're all birthing, that is more just, more joyful, more equitable. Requires policy change on the ground grassroots work. But one of the pieces that it is so critical that I think gets lost is the self transformation. We have to recognize in order. It's a Miriam Kaba quote that, "In order to transform the world, we ourselves must be transformed."
And so Nekkid's focus is creating resources and tools to support that transformation, to support the deep unlearning and excavating work of removing oppression out of our bones, out of our dna, out of our subconscious mind, and replacing that with liberatory free practices. Replace that with a frame of mind that is going to help us birth the new world.
And I feel so deeply passionate about this work because it is a continuation of the black liberation struggle that I am birthed from, that has been going on for centuries. I get to be, This work gets to be an extension of my ancestors' dreams, but I wanna be clear, it's not just black folks who have been dreaming of freedom.
Our native and indigenous brothers and sisters and and family, our, there are so many freedom movements all over the world who have dreamt of freedom. And so many of us right here and today are dreaming of what it could look like to do something different than what we're already doing. And so our mission, our dream, our work, our joy, what we're investing in is that dream is how do we transform the self?
How do we transform the self not for just the benefit of the self, but for the benefit of the whole. We do this self transformation as a love letter, as a gift, as our devotional practice to the whole, because we love each other. That's why we transform, and that's why Nekkid creates the type of work that we create. So one of the ways and our, one of our biggest ways that we are doing that work right now is through our work with the toolbox.
So if you haven't heard, the Toolbox is a 12 month membership that houses all of our workshops, all of our events, all of our guest teacher spots. You'll find that all in the, the 12 Month Toolbox membership and you'll find our like flagship cornerstone workshops, which is our Presence practice library.
Where, because it is my belief that no self transformation, no transformation at all is going to happen in the past or in the future. It's all going to happen right here, right now. So our ability to learn how to be present, to learn how to speak, be in the present moment is critical foundationally to this work of transformation.
So there's a library of presence practices, everything from breath work to meditation, to movement, to asana practices. Um, and then you move into the vision workshop, which is how do we begin to build radical vision? How do we stretch our imagination to begin to see, to begin to ideate something beyond what we're already seeing.
How do we begin to like say that yes, this is the way that it is, but I am seeing with my mind's eye a whole nother possibility because as Bell Hook says, "We cannot be what we can't see." I don't know if that's a direct quote, but it's something like that. We cannot be, we cannot bring into being what we cannot even see.
So the vision workshop is all about how do we create radical vision? How do we do that? How are other people, other movements doing that? And then there's exercises for us creating that vision and creating some, some practice around that. The toolbox is all about practice. That's why it's, it's a 12 month thing and I truly believe that 12 months is never, is just the like tiny first step towards liberation, right?
Like liberation is a practice. It is not something hot. Some pie in the sky, boom. It hits you like a ton of bricks. No, it is something that we have to practice at daily and so the toolbox really encourages . It encourages that. So the next workshop you'll see in our core workshops is the unlearn workshop, which is walking through different characteristics of oppression culture, and naming it.
Seeing how it functions in our world, seeing how it shows up in our behavior and how we relate to each other, and then giving us another characteristic, another frame of mind that we can practice in order to begin to unwire that oppression in our subconscious mind. There's also some libraries about how the brain works, what the neuroscience is behind this work, because it's all in the brain.
And then the last core workshop is the Embodiment workshop, which literally says, How do I align my life? How do I align my time, my money, my values? With collective liberation, it's evaluating how are we spending our time? How are we spending our money? Where is our values? Do we even know them? And then making sure that those are so deeply dialed in to , for a world that is liberatory.
So that's the core of the toolbox, and it's so juicy. It's simple. It's very simple, but the whole intention is to make anti-oppression a daily practice. Liberation has to be something we do every single day. I created the toolbox in a way that is almost like you go to the gym for your body. You do some studying for your mind.
You may even go to church every week for your spirit, but what are you doing for your deep embodied justice transformation? What are you doing to help transform the world and create the world to be in alignment with your values? And the toolbox is here to help and support you in doing that. If you've been here for a while or been in my orbit for a while, you'll remember Books and Yoga, which is a study group that focuses on bipoc uh, authors and authors who are helping shift our liberation praxis.
We've been, a friend of mine, Hannah Bats and I started Books in Yoga back in 2018 and in this iteration it is coming up under Nekkid and we'll be doing meetups twice a month. Virtually every third Saturday, and then every third Sunday we'll be meeting in person. If you're in LA at Sovern all the details for registration is in the show notes.
Moving forward is that every book will be one of three of a series, so right now we're, our series, we're calling it Radical Love as a Weapon. And so our next three books will all be about love and how love can be used as a political force, and I'm really excited. If you're interested in our book list, you can find that at letsgetnekkid.com/books-yoga.
And then just a couple other Nekkid Land updates before I let you go. We are currently looking for affiliates, so if you feel passionate about liberation work, if you are interested in the toolbox and want to share that work with your audience, sign up to be an affiliate. You can email us at, hey@letsgetnekkid.com.
And just put in the subject line "affiliate" and we'll get you all the information you need to know. But we are offering our affiliates in exchange for talking about the toolbox and talking about our work with Nekkid, we're offering commission on every sale and access to the toolbox. And then last but not least, if you are interested in staying in our orbit beyond just the podcast below, there's a link to get onto our newsletter so that you can get our weekly newsletter and then get emails about the podcast as well.
Learn when new seasons are coming out. Learn every time a new podcast is released, and it's just a good way to stay in our orbit. Learn what we're learning, cuz in our newsletter. It's a roundup style newsletter where we share what we're learning, what we're practicing, what we're dreaming about and then what's happening in Nekkid Land. So if you're interested in staying appraised on what's going on in our world, please, please, please become a subscriber to our newsletter.
One of the things that I'm really focusing on these days is we're obviously gonna be doing a lot of content and work on social media platforms, but I also think that one of the radical ways that we can do business and do our art with each other is to take back some of our power and our agency from this book Instagram, TikTok, and come back to saying, "Hey, I invite you into my community over here that's not attached to the rules and the dogma and the dare, I'd say the social media platform." So one thing I'm really looking to do is grow our community on the newsletter.
So if you are interested, if that calls to you, we'd love to have you as a subscriber . Okay. That I think is all for all my updates for Nekkid I would love if you would be interested to close us off in a prayer. I am not a religious person, so when I use prayer language, I know that it holds a lot of what could be religious trauma.
Please understand my use in that language is, I use it to say, let's, I'm, I am offering a word of encouragement, a word of alignment, a word of intention, um, a moment for us to be in each other's energetic space. And so if you don't mind, I'd love to bless, set the intention for this season of the podcast and for our time for the next 10 weeks together.
So if you can, unless you're in the car, please do not close your eyes. But if you can close your eyes, place a hand on your belly and one on your heart, and just take a full, deep inhale,
open your mouth and let it go.
We'll do that one more time. Full, deep. Inhale.
Open your mouth, let it go.
And I wanna start with deep gratitude. I feel so overwhelmed. Such overwhelm with gratitude. For this incredible work, for the call that we've all been called to, to create a world that is rooted in connection, that is rooted in joy, that is rooted in justice. Knowing that justice is love out pictured. I am so grateful for the call that I get to stand side by side with you. In this work, I get to stand side by side with you in creating something that is for all of us. I feel so deeply grateful for our ancestors who set the stage for good and for bad for us to do this work and to be here now. I'm grateful to my ancestors for their lineage. For their freedom work, for their vision of something deeper and something better for their lives, for their children, and for the world.
I'm grateful that I get to be an extension of that, and I'm so grateful for you. I'm grateful that you heard the call, that you're standing strong, that you know that you are so deeply human and human is perfect.
Thank you. Thank you, thank you. I bless each and every one of our guests. May their homes may their lives be filled with ease and with peace and with grace, and that when the storms come, they know that they're strong, that they're capable, and that they're able to weather. And that we each know that falling down is not a moral failure.
That slowing down is just as important as speeding up
and may we see each other with right eyes, with compassion, with love in our hearts and with truth on our tongues. Thank you, Thank you, thank you.
I'm so excited to be moving through this season with you.
Much love. I'll see you next week.
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