Not All Healing Is High Vibe: The Real Work of Sacred Leadership with Brigette Iarrusso

This conversation delves into the complexities of conscious business, emphasizing the need for deconstruction to create a more authentic and impactful approach. The speakers share their personal journeys, highlighting the intersections of privilege, spirituality, and capitalism. They discuss the importance of engaging with indigenous wisdom respectfully and the inherent extractive nature of capitalism. The dialogue also explores the necessity of inner work and community connection in navigating social justice issues and creating a new paradigm for business. In this conversation, Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser and Brigette Iarrusso explore the intersections of spirituality, wealth consciousness, and the importance of community. They discuss the challenges of navigating spiritual lineages, the role of money in spiritual work, and the need for marginalized identities to embrace their worth and potential for wealth. The conversation emphasizes the importance of aligning one's actions with their true desires and the impact of money on personal and collective well-being.

Takeaways

• Deconstruction is essential for reconstructing conscious business practices.
• Personal experiences shape our understanding of privilege and power in business.
• Conscious business often remains superficial and performative.
• True consciousness in business should lead to less harm and more impact.
• Healing from toxic capitalism requires inner work and self-awareness.
• Engaging with indigenous wisdom must be done with respect and honor.
• The capitalist system is inherently extractive and harmful to many.
• Awareness of privilege is crucial in navigating social justice issues.
• The journey of healing is complex and nonlinear.
• Community and connection are vital for true fulfillment. Makhosi identifies as a universal teacher rather than a lineage-specific wisdom keeper.
• The conversation highlights the discomfort of navigating capitalism and other societal 'isms'.
• Initiation in spiritual practices involves transformation and verification of one's growth.
• Sangomas work with ancestral spirits for community healing.
• The importance of wealth consciousness for marginalized identities is emphasized.
• Money should not be seen as inherently good or bad, but as a tool for exchange.
• Luxury should be redefined to reflect true value and craftsmanship.
• The conversation encourages a shift in how we perceive and use money.
• Basic human rights should be prioritized over personal preferences.
• Engaging with feelings around money can lead to personal growth and societal change.

Chapters

• 0:00 The Importance of Deconstruction in Conscious Business
• 7:00 Personal Journeys and Backgrounds in Conscious Business
• 11:05 Evolving Consciousness in Business Practices
• 22:08 The Intersection of Spirituality and Capitalism
• 34:51 Extraction vs. Honor in Indigenous Wisdom
• 47:49 Mitigating Harm in Business Practices
• 49:12 The Illusion of Conscious Capitalism
• 56:32 The Machine of Capitalism and Its Impact
• 1:02:17 Navigating the Complexity of Healing and Integration
• 1:10:08 The Role of Marginalized Voices in Healing
• 1:18:49 Understanding Ancestral Wisdom and Its Application
• 1:27:30 Wealth Consciousness and Its Challenges
• 1:35:52 The Spirituality of Wealth and Poverty
• 1:42:38 Navigating Guilt and Resources
• 1:49:18 Rethinking Luxury and Consumption
• 2:01:51 The Power of Money and Personal Identity

Transcript

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (00:01.525)
So I was speaking with Bridgette and my gosh, we were talking about the importance of deconstruction in conscious business and all of the ranty things that are kind of pissing us off in the spiritual meets business space. And everything that was coming up was so juicy. We wanted to invite you into this conversation, give you an opportunity to kind of be a fly on the wall. So let's...

first start with a little bit of introduction. We're going to be, this is not an interview, but more of a conversation about power and privilege and integrity in the conscious business space and the role of deconstructing so that we can reconstruct on a foundation that really is much more rooted in truth. And this is going to be an uncomfortable conversation.

Brigette Iarrusso (00:58.016)
yeah, juicy and uncomfortable.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (00:58.823)
a lot of discomfort. Yeah. Could you start with just sharing a little bit about your background and all of the intersections that are giving you a very unique lens on the conscious business paradigm?

Brigette Iarrusso (01:16.878)
Thank you so much for that invitation and thank you for this conversation, which is a continuation of a conversation I had with Makosy the other day that was gonna go on to three hours because we had quite a bit to talk about. In terms of my particular way that I approach being a business coach, and I put that in air quotes, is that I am here as a disruptor in an industry that is, for all intents and purposes,

got a lot of good things going for it and also has a really dark, shadowy underbelly within what is considered the online coaching industry, which I didn't start out in this space. came from a long lineage of being in the international development world, nonprofit sector, and I lived and worked in Guatemala and Peru among indigenous communities. And I really began to understand what social innovation or social entrepreneurship was.

from a grassroots way. And that's where I started to really unpack my own perceptions of being a white woman, Latina, mixed, Puerto Rican, person of privilege, going to the developing world to help these poor indigenous people, only to come to realize that I would go through that journey only to realize that I had received and learned more from those indigenous people than what I could have possibly thought I could have helped them with.

And they were highly resilient, innovative, deeply, deeply resourceful entrepreneurs that had created so much out of nothing. But at no point did I think I was going to be in the space of entrepreneurship. And so I went on a long detour after that. I wound up in the University of Berkeley, California, which is a very progressive liberal place in theory. And I wound up looking at the

coursework inside their entrepreneurial certificate programs through a lens of deconstructing and unlearning and removing all of what I consider to be the white supremacist toxic capitalist underpinnings of a lot of what's taught in business. So I spent eight years at Berkeley critiquing and auditing and really like ripping apart the courses. At that time, I remember we were even teaching

Brigette Iarrusso (03:37.878)
like marketing through this consumer behavior lens and NLP and all this stuff. And I remember reading it and thinking, this is highly manipulative and highly coercive. And this is really preying on aspects of human behavior that are like really rooted in scarcity, fear, right? Which is interesting because that long ago, I had no idea that fast forward eight years, I'd be where I am now, which is coaching and advising and working with

Conscious disruptive business leaders who are in predominantly the online space who really want to do things differently who are really at a place where the people I serve do care about profit they care about wealth and abundance and They care more or equally for collective wellness collective health collective wealth and they care about wealth distribution and access to wealth right so a lot of the people I serve

coming full circle from where I used to be, they also are working through or healing strands of like, saviorhood or toxic conditioning to be busy or to work harder or do more because the conditioning is that we are not worthy of success, wealth, abundance, right? And this is

tying into the work that Makozi does, which is a lot of how we heal and unpack that. So my work is kind of intersecting with Makozi's work in that I'm really helping people on the technical side of selling and establishing a business. And it seems like on the surface I'm a business coach. But if you go underneath it, I like to consider myself a disruptor and healer and someone who's really helping my clients unlearn the conditioning of toxic capitalism, which is

on a lot of levels and then at the intersection of that we're spiritual beings. We all have ancestral lineage to spiritual healers and ancestral guides and so often, especially those of us that live in white bodies of privilege, European bodies, we're so disconnected from our own lineage that out of scarcity we often find ourselves latching onto, or we can use a stronger term, appropriating

Brigette Iarrusso (06:00.876)
spiritual wisdom from other cultures to fill a void and or as a product or a service to help grow our businesses, right? So, you know, beyond the coaching, I also kind of speak to issues again at the intersection of the spirituality industry as it relates to coaching and mentorship and how people leverage and extract from other cultures spiritual wisdom to make more money without necessarily honoring

or doing the deeper work to really connect with the lineage of what they're using. So again, full circle to finish it up. All this ties into the central construct of how have we been conditioned, what have we been constructed to believe within the paradigm of this capitalist system that we are kind of raised to operate in. And I'll kick it back to Mikosi so we can go deeper into how do we deconstruct and how do we begin to unpack.

how we got here.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (07:00.435)
Yeah, you and I have so many similarities, even though we kind of come from different backgrounds. So I actually went to university first. And while I was in university, I came out with two degrees in marketing management and also business admin. And simultaneously, I was being kind of taken in this very interesting.

more psychological direction that kind of was rooted in my origins class, which was really all about, you know, the religious and spiritual perspectives from all over the world. And the same question kind of kept coming up. I was like, why is there so much problem and war and famine and all of this when it seems like

At least on the surface, we all kind of have a similar agreement about this higher power.

This spiritual aspect that all of us really were desiring. When I came out of school and I then ended up having a lot of success really fast in the network marketing, actually more direct sales, there's a little bit of a difference there. I had a ton of success in direct sales. Even though I really loved what I was doing, it just felt like,

it was not using my potential. Like I was just barely tapping into my potential because everything that I was doing was just centered on, you know, how much more money can I make? Am I going to hit this next goal? Am I going to, you know, win this next trip and the designer handbags and the, you know, first-class flights and mansion parties and all of those things are amazing. And I actually enjoyed what I was doing.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (08:58.965)
but it was missing something deeper, right? And it was the search for that something deeper that led me onto my spiritual journey. And I remember having a conversation early on in my initiation. I ultimately spent five years in initiation. This was probably month one. And my husband was like, why are you doing this? Like, what are you gonna get out of this?

Brigette Iarrusso (09:01.934)
Yep.

Brigette Iarrusso (09:24.038)
yeah.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (09:25.873)
I was like, number one, I have no idea where this is going and I'm not doing it to get anything. I'm doing this because I believe that it's going to make me like, I'm going to become my highest self or I'm going to become the potential that I know is living within me.

that is ultimately gonna ripple out into everything. So when I went into initiation, there was zero intent on, I'm gonna become a shaman, I'm gonna bring this to the world, I'm gonna save the world with my wisdom. Actually, even when it came out through divination, which is a form of reading about who I am and my destiny and really what I'm here for.

I kept thinking like, okay, cool. In 25 years after I've had my career, after I've done my thing, then I will follow this because it didn't in my mind make sense for me to be doing this now. And that entire initiation process was just an entire journey in learning to surrender. And I'm always like going into.

deeper and deeper levels of, okay, what is surrender now? What is surrender now? So I would love for us to talk a little bit around this new era of conscious business. And you've been in the space for a long time. I'm now like seven years in the conscious business space. How have you seen conscious business evolve? And where do you see that we're kind of stuck?

Brigette Iarrusso (10:43.096)
Yeah.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (11:05.193)
in the same cycles that we just like keep repeating and seeing again and again.

Brigette Iarrusso (11:10.882)
Yeah, it's such a good question. And I remember coming into this with a colleague when I was on the board of Conscious Capitalism in the Bay Area. Just the construct of consciousness and being business people that label themselves as being more conscious then is kind of an oxymoron and still rooted in ego, right? Which is this idea of like, we are more conscious. And then the bigger question is, does that greater consciousness actually result in us being

less harmful, creating more impact in constructive ways. Like what are the actual outcomes of being more conscious as business leaders and what does that even mean? So for me, I come from, you know, years of this movement being really superficial and really performative, particularly in the spaces that I was in. Like many spaces, they were predominantly white and privileged and a lot of like really well-intentioned, well-meaning people.

who loved to vision and talk about all these ideas for what it would look like to create a better world. And I think some of the bigger challenges in the early phases of that movement, like many movements that are taken over or created by people of privilege when the goal is to serve people who may have fewer resources or who are more marginalized is that

the people of privilege with this vision should not necessarily be in the driver's seat of a movement that is designed to serve people who have different identities, right? So a lot of this had to do with looking at the unraveling of this kind of white savior construct of like, who's saving whom, who's there to help or lift up. And is that really the paradigm that we need to work within, right? So then I saw that there was some

awakening or realization around this. then of course, things came to a completely obscene public head around the murder of George Floyd, which God rest his soul, he's just one of many, many black men that have died and that have been leveraged in public spaces for performative allyship and speaking to black lives and being aligned with communities of color and being aligned with communities or who are historically marginalized. And all this sounds great.

Brigette Iarrusso (13:30.072)
But then we have to get at what does that actually mean? And I will say for myself as a leader, I can absolutely acknowledge where I myself participated in these movements in ways that were performative because the more uncomfortable, truthful work is that a lot of what has to happen, and I think you wrote about this recently, is we have to do the inner work to heal in order to actually have the outer work in the system

have any type of positive constructive impact. Otherwise, we're just replicating the very things that we're complaining about or speaking about, pontificating on, but we're not healing those same systems within ourselves. So we're not actually going to be able to change the system, right? So for me, that looks like looking at things like hierarchy, power, and privilege, and really deconstructing, am I the person that should be leading, speaking on this?

being the person in the room taking up space around this issue, or should someone else who represents or is a leader in the communities that I'm saying I wanna uplift and support, should someone else be in that room? Should someone else be taking the lead around these issues? And I think there was just a lot of healing and pain and a lot of trauma bonding and trauma transference happening throughout this period between COVID, George Floyd's murder, the aftermath.

And then a kind of settling down from where a lot of people were involved in these issues publicly, speaking to the issues, excited to talk about the issues, but then very much going back to business as usual and not doing the really icky, uncomfortable work of looking at where within myself do I hold these systems and these ways of being in the world that are rooted in white supremacy or saviorhood or some levels of

subconscious programming that very few people are consciously aware that they think they're superior to other humans. This is not a thing that we walk around with a daily awareness of, which is why when those subconscious ways of being programmed show up in our relationships and we get called out on it or told about these behaviors, it's deeply shameful because we're thinking I'm a good person, I have good intentions, I want to do good in the world and

Brigette Iarrusso (15:56.248)
This can all sound very deconstructed, so I actually want to give you an example from something I went through last week, and it's a really uncomfortable conversation, because it involves another white person of privilege who I think is a great human and who's also an ally to communities of color. And their approach with me over the years has been to, in the comments of posts online, kind of make digs that I've harmed black indigenous people, that I'm manipulative, that I'm,

I go after, I use people of color for XYZ, like a lot of stuff, they have never come to me personally in a private message or called me in and said, hey, I have an issue with you. And the reason why is I don't know if they really have an issue with me. My experience of this person is that they want to appear better than, safer than me.

a better ally. And so, so often among people of privilege, it really is about this positioning of themselves and wanting to be seen a certain way because it feels better, right? We want to be seen as good, likable, kind, conscious people. And we can have that aspect of ourselves, but also we have a shadow side. And as humans, we all have a side of ourselves.

that is still healing and we can actually be causing harm to other humans and we can be in that duality of being good well-intentioned humans and making mistakes. And so my historical tendency with someone like this would be to like argue and debate and get into a whole positionality of, you know, why I'm not bad and there and there and I noticed that dynamic and then I thought to myself like, what is the point here? If in fact I have caused harm,

to some people who are black or indigenous or who hold marginalized identities, then what is the goal of this interaction? For me, the goal would be to have a dialogue, to understand where the harm was caused, and then to look at how do we prevent further harm? What needs to shift or change? But there's no interest in that part of the conversation. A lot of it is this call out culture, which one of my mentors, Trudy LeBron, I want to give her credit. She talks a lot about

Brigette Iarrusso (18:16.314)
the harm of call out culture. Like yes, we can call people out till the cows come home and we can speak on all the problems and all the issues and all the ways that people are being problematic. But again, what's the actual impact and outcome of that? And what's even the goal? It's to make ourselves feel better than those people who are bad. We ourselves may be engaging in things that are harmful. And so the uncomfortable conversation is like, yes, maybe I have caused harm.

or have caused a negative impact. And then if so, who is gonna support me to see what's really going on here and how can I be both open to that and surround myself with colleagues and mentors who are also doing the deeper work to move away from pointing fingers to looking inward and really looking at like how are we shifting and evolving as leaders to rise to this new way of wanting to do business, right? If we want to be more equitable.

and we want to be a person that can redistribute resources to communities that are historically less resourced, then we have to look at our own healing around scarcity or hoarding or what comes up for us around money before we can externalize that and talk about it from the perspective of like a mission or a vision or a goal, right? So for me, it's this whole journey of going from like all the superficial performative declarations of what we want.

to now moving into the space of like, what actually has to happen underneath this? And I think for many people, there is an awakening happening that the work, for example, of healing from racism or historic imbalances in resource distribution, it starts with us as people of privilege doing our inner work first to look at like, how are we still participating in that system that we speak against?

are we still benefiting from that system that we speak against? And if we are, how can we take away the stigma or the shame or the judgment from that and say, okay, now that I'm really more self-aware and I understand how this system works and I understand that perhaps I do inherently benefit more from that system than others do, then I can get out of shame into creativity and into, what would I like to see on the other side of that reality? Like that's what is.

Brigette Iarrusso (20:40.994)
And I'm not here to argue that because I have reached a place of high level of awareness that, and this is to be really clear because I think a lot of people get confused in these conversations that there is this hierarchy of like people of privilege have it easier because they're superior than. I absolutely believe that all people are born equal with the same exact potential from God creator. Everyone is a perfect being and perfect entity with

unlimited possibility. But then we're born into a system that does not reflect that back to us. And that starts to change our construct and our worldview. So it doesn't mean that black, indigenous people of color are humans that are marginalized in that they themselves are marginalized beings, that they are in a system that creates marginalization and they have to operate in that system. And then that again connects with

humans like Mccosey who does work to help people understand that they can reclaim that inherent value and worthiness in that system, right? But again, the whole conversation of like, where we come from and where are we heading? I think we're heading into an era where people have to understand that the buck stops with them. They have to do the inner work and they have to do the spiritual work, which I'm hoping is the next part of the conversation in a way that is actually about

unearthing and healing the shadow side of us as human beings and getting comfortable with all the icky feelings and not creating a hierarchy of like high vibe happy feelings wanting to always be love and light which sounds kind of good but can be deeply harmful when as humans especially when we have an awareness to this from other spiritual lineages

We are not designed to be happy and love and light all the time. And if we are trying to be in that vibration at all times, it is because we are either suppressing or bypassing the darker, more shadowy emotions like rage, fear, anger, which in an oppressive system are completely normal and unnecessary, especially for the people most

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (22:59.463)
and necessary.

Brigette Iarrusso (23:03.384)
harmed in that system, which I'm going to leave it on this really uncomfortable note. A lot of people are like, she's an angry black woman, or even me as white as I am. she's really intense because I'm Puerto Rican, right? And I have a lineage that has actually lived through colonization. And I didn't. I still have my privilege. But my lineage experienced a great deal of harm and oppression from the other side of my lineage, which are Spaniards and Portuguese and Latins and Italians.

And so of course I have intense feelings about these things. And what I find interesting, and again, it's not to place a hierarchy or a judgment, but I find that when I'm around healed black indigenous women of color, like Mekosi, my energy is not too much. It's comfortable. It's normal. It's welcomed. It's like received and reciprocated and engaged with. When I'm around people of any

ethnicity who are less healed or less aware of certain types of conditioning, my way of being is too much, which is tying into this awareness of again how we're conditioned with white supremacy to think that certain ways of being and acting and behaving, ways of spirituality are more acceptable or desirable. And why?

Why is something that is more intense, gritty, dark, aggressive, passionate? Why is that bad or dangerous or unprofessional or wrong? And why are ways of being that are light and pleasant and polite, good and professional, when ultimately those things can be cloaking or hiding some really harmful things underneath, right? So all of this is to say like,

I see an awakening to these things. In fact, I've seen this beautiful trend. And every time I see these posts, my heart just cracks of spiritual white women coming clean and saying, I am emerging from a cult and I'm awakening to the fact that I have been mired in a very whitewashed, unhealthy world of spirituality and I'm no longer comfortable with what I've been participating in.

Brigette Iarrusso (25:29.25)
I'm healing from it and I am not even sure what the next step is, but I know that what I was doing and what I was involved in was not spirituality. And I've seen more and more women of privilege speaking to this and it just, it's gonna be a journey, right? But like I see light, I see the light shining and I see people building their capacity to look at and acknowledge.

what the light is being shown on. Even if it's not comfortable, it's not love and light, it doesn't always feel good. And that's again, full circle, we'll kick it back to you. Not all healing work is about laying on a lounger with a white goddess gown and having someone fan you and banging the shamanic gong and they're just doing the incense from the tree that's about to become completely decimated. There's almost none of these trees left in the forest

the smoke and it's my appropriated shamanic rattle and I'm wearing the garb of another culture. like, I get it, everyone's on a spiritual journey. The human condition is that we want to heal. We want to evolve to that, as you said earlier, that highest version of ourselves. And there's some difficult truths and things that we have to contend with to find a path forward of healing.

and awakening is into conscious leadership that acknowledges how we may still be holding and perpetuating harm. Right? And that's been my journey. I've come from that die hard, like, you know, anti-racism and decolonization and like go hard and it's all about speaking truth to bullshit and calling out all the issues and that it's in and of itself is deeply harmful and depleting even to my own.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (27:07.551)
Yeah.

Brigette Iarrusso (27:24.662)
self as a human, right, coming into that awareness and then hitting a space of like grief of like holy mother, what was that? And in that grief kind of feeling like inertia of like do I even want to do the thing? Like what does this even look like? Into this deeper realization of like I was coming at this from the wrong angle, right? And now being in that other work.

It's quite different and the conversations I'm having with people now from this other place are really different than they were three, four years ago.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (28:02.483)
Yeah, it's so funny because we can really hijack any amazing beautiful thing. We can unknowingly hijack spirituality, business, consciousness, like any of these topics when we aren't aware of how these systems, how these constructs are.

emanating from us in all in literally every move that we make. I was so glad that you brought up the, you know, the experience with George Floyd, because before that moment, I've been talking about this stuff for a very long time. And then whenever George Floyd passed was brutally unalived.

all of a sudden there was this interest in like, my gosh, it's like a mirror just like came up to all of us. And we were like, what is it that we are supporting? Like, holy crap. And, you know, some of us were like, y'all, this has been going on. Where have you been? Okay. Some of us have been living with like these various levels of violence. I had a VIP day on Monday and shared with my client. I was like, yeah, I've been in the midst of...

Brigette Iarrusso (29:14.574)
Right, right.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (29:28.455)
at least five shootings in my life, right? It's like part of the experience of some of us. Like we just are immersed on the back end or the harmful end of some of these systems. But let me even rephrase that because one of the things that I think is also important is that we keep coming back to that all of us can be harmed.

by upholding these systems, right? So as a white presenting person, you can experience the harm as a result of upholding supremacy. And also as a black presenting mixed woman, I also have experiences of experiencing the harm.

of upholding supremacy in ways that I didn't even know that I was doing, sometimes against myself. Like there's numerous ways I'm coming across all the time of various ways that I am unknowingly supporting it. And it's holding. It's limiting to me. But anyway, back to George Floyd, around that time, everyone was so like, my gosh, if we have to do something, we have to stop this from happening. And everyone was very activated at that time.

to participate. And I had so much resistance to now all of a sudden people wanting to talk to me about, you know, the consciousness underneath all of these issues that we were seeing pop up in the world and really were five years later and it's still, we're still unpacking it.

But I was so resistant because I, number one, knew that so much of this was going to ultimately be performative because we want to be seen with good intentions. We want to seek to be seen as, you know, change making and doing good things in the world. And I'm an ally and all of these things. But intentions really don't matter. It really is. What is the impact?

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (31:44.745)
that we're creating? What is the reality that we're creating? And I also saw the flip side of this like group of people who, and I want to also take the sting off of this. Anytime you become awakened to something you were not awakened to before, the automatic reaction is to go extreme.

Brigette Iarrusso (32:02.35)
you

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (32:09.429)
There's a sense of guilt around not having seen it sooner. There was a sense of shame around participating and supporting entities and laws and all of these things that were creating a certain type of harm and not having been aware to it. And so a lot of people swung to the other side of, okay, now I need to call people out for not using their power and privilege in the way that I

wish that I could. And all of that was really just an invitation to look inside of yourself to examine, well, how am I using my power? How am I use? All of us have power. All of us have privilege in various ways. And how are we utilizing that? So that entire experience for humanity was actually an opportunity to explore.

Where are these harmful constructs showing up in my life? And one of the things that has completely changed my reality is instead of approaching anything from the idea that I am good, I started approaching life from understanding I am in a human body. I'm in a human body. That means that inherently,

Brigette Iarrusso (33:24.846)
Yeah.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (33:36.447)
there are blind spots that I'm not seeing. It means that there are ways that I'm causing harm that I'm not seeing. And so instead of approaching things from like, how do I be a good person? Approaching from a lens of actually, I am not a good person. And just accepting that I'm not a good person so that I can be open to the ways in which I might not be seeing.

that I'm harming others, right? Because there's something about the intention. Like we all have good intentions. Everybody has good intentions. Even the most evil, like people doing the most evil things, generate and manifest in their minds good reason for doing these really awful, horrible things. I shared with someone like at some point,

Brigette Iarrusso (34:16.366)
Brigette Iarrusso (34:21.805)
Yes.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (34:31.785)
There was a time when slave owners in the US, really across the world, but if you read certain books and certain diaries and journals of people who owned in their minds other people,

they would tell you that, I care for these people. I love them. Even though you don't see them as human, even though you see them as property, right? They still found ways. well, they can't take care of themselves. So I'm making sure that they have a place to stay and all of these things. And that's where that disconnect comes in understanding that there's like your intent.

And then there's the actual impact and being able to tell the difference, being able to differentiate between like, is the actual thing that's happening versus my intent? And that leads me to this next place that I would really love to go, which is around the mindset of extraction because...

Extraction is kind of a cornerstone or a pillar of the colonizer mindset. And any and all of us can carry this. I recognized it in myself when I was in initiation and coming to various tribes and interacting in the bush in Africa that

automatically I would be looking to, well, how can this make money? How can this be expanded? There's just so much that you could do with it. So with people who are entering sacred systems, interacting with spiritual lineages that might not be their own, number one, what are the conditions that differentiate between

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (36:45.021)
honoring versus harm? And also, what does it look like when we build businesses that are rooted in an exchange versus extraction versus I'm doing this to just profit off of it versus an actual genuine exchange? And also, I'm going to ask I'm going to ask an uncomfortable thing like

How do you feel about?

white people.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (37:22.261)
profiting off of indigenous or ancient spiritual systems that aren't necessarily connected to their own. I've got my own thoughts on this, but I want to hear your views.

Brigette Iarrusso (37:27.883)
Uh-huh.

Brigette Iarrusso (37:34.018)
Yeah. this is the million dollar question here, literally. And it's so complex. And the way I would have answered it a few years ago would have been so fast and hard and immediate and so filled with aggression because I've come from a lineage of feeling a lot of anger at the awakening to how much has been extracted from certain indigenous, native and like Aboriginal communities. So for me, there's

these worlds of like, we are here in this new world and everybody is on a journey and wants to heal. And there's this historical construct of the communities that gave rise to the spiritual wisdom that many people are tapping into to heal. And for me, a lot of what indigenous wisdom is rooted in is right relationship and balance.

whether it's called yin yang, kabawil, every indigenous culture has a construct of being in right relationship and balance. For me, we have to look at historically how far out of balance we are first to then get into the conversation of what do we actually do in this new construct. Because where we are and how we got here is through the decimation and extraction of cultural wisdom, resources, wealth, teachings, land, and human labor

from black indigenous communities of color around the world. And I think the first place we have to start from is acknowledging and remembering and giving honor to truth. Before we get into the feelings about that and the guilt and the, I didn't do it. We have to first just say, this is what has happened and there has been a real impact and those impacts reverberate and continue.

And so right now we're in this way of living in the world where everybody wants to heal. And these indigenous ancestral African lineages, Indonesian lineages, lineages from all parts of Eastern Asia, right? India, Pakistan, lineages from Latin America have these beautiful practices and wisdom that can support us in our healing journey.

Brigette Iarrusso (40:01.312)
And so one thing is to learn and receive and participate in practices that come from communities that have been historically decimated. And when we partake of those practices and these resources and these medicines, and we buy them from these local lineage keepers,

In my perspective of money and right relationship, we are giving back in a direct way. We'll get to indirect. That's a direction that I feel restores. There's another pathway, which is I'm a white-bodied woman. My mother was born in Puerto Rico. I'm not going to put on some type of Taino garb and go back to Puerto Rico and even sit with Puerto Rican lineage keepers and learn a thing.

and then come online and say, I'm a Taino Shaman and I'm going to heal you in these ways. I would really grapple with that because I was not raised in that lineage. I did not participate in that lineage keeping culture. I did not experience the shadow side of being born into and raised in a culture that was decimated by colonization. So I personally, as a mixed white Puerto Rican woman,

wouldn't feel comfortable positioning myself as an expert, even in my own indigenous cultures lineage, just because of the distance I have from being immersed in that culture. What I would consider is being a bridge or someone that could leverage my privilege, my business, my connections, and even my offerings to then bring people to lineage keepers of my culture or other cultures, for example, right?

And then there's that spectrum of like leveraging privilege to bring attention to or encourage other people to invest in lineage keepers, resources, services, products from communities that are original lineage keepers. Or my business can directly give back into organizations that are supporting those communities in ways that are effective and proven, not like random nonprofit things that are not working like Mekosi's organization that she works with, they give small loans.

Brigette Iarrusso (42:26.188)
It's been proven time and again that the way that they give loans, they get repaid, people get ahead, it works. It's a thing, right? And money can go that way through our businesses. Then there's this other part where it's like, if we are profiting from utilizing indigenous wisdom, if I am a white presenting woman and I am a yoga instructor and a yoga teacher and a yoga trainer, and I am not

and a lineage holder from the tradition of any of the cultures that gave rise to yoga. Should I be the voice, the expert, the face of yoga teacher training if I'm not of that lineage? And if I am, am I in right relationship with what has already been extracted and taken from that culture? If I am profiting from that lineage,

and I am not directly giving back to it. I don't think for me, from an energetic transfer of money as energy resource misalignment perspective, I personally don't feel an embodied awareness of this is good and true and a good way, which the language of indigenous, a good way doesn't mean bad good. It just means a balanced way. My mentor taught me this, Marita. I don't think white people

profiting highly off of Indigenous wisdom in and of itself is a good way. I think there are ways to mitigate and bring greater balance to being a person of privilege that is leveraging and extracting from Indigenous wisdom for profit. And people will argue that I'm a lineage, I adore the lineage, I sat with the lineage holder,

I honored the lineage holder. I have done the work. I get to be a Sangoma. I am a white Scottish woman and I am an African Sangoma, even though I wasn't born or raised in Africa. I don't have any ancestral ties to Africa. I am Scottish and I am a Sangoma. I paid the Sangoma that trained me. That's how it works. And I have a right to embody this lineage and teach this lineage and

Brigette Iarrusso (44:54.328)
be the keeper of this lineage. And I had a three-day-long dialogue with this person, and I could not, at the core of my intuition of what it means to decolonize and be in right relationship with bringing balance back to what has been imbalanced for so long, I cannot find a way to engage with it, right? I'm moving to Bali. I've been in Puerto Rico. I don't

think that white people opening yoga studios in Bali is doing anything to benefit Balinese people. Even when they are giving a percentage of their profits to the community, the larger impact from a socioeconomic perspective of white people appropriating, extracting, and monetizing lineage healing from lineages that are historically marginalized

has not shown in any way to improve or lift up in any significant measurable way these communities. Like it's for me, and I've done it. This was my business model. Like I am not preach, I am preaching from inside the choir. I am in the choir, I've done it. It makes us feel better. We reconcile that.

my business as a white woman gives back to this thing and I'm leveraging this thing. it's like, most of a lot of the forms of business and capitalism that we encounter are inherently extractive. Meaning there is somebody at some level benefiting disproportionately where someone at another level is being extracted from more or leveraged more, some resource, some person. And those things can change with creative business modeling. But historically the capitalist model, whether it's

overt and we see it really clearly or it's more subtle and more covert, there is typically some forms of extraction happening for other people to be profiting. And this is a really tricky, hard thing to sit with. It's not about feeling guilty and bad and shamed. It's about looking at how the system was built. How does it operate? And then in that imperfect oppressive system, can we bring greater balance? Can we

Brigette Iarrusso (47:19.2)
mitigate or lessen the harmful impact. But bluntly speaking, white European people that look just like me moving to Tulum and Bali and Costa Rica has driven the price of housing through the roof, making it impossible for local people to buy, own and rent homes inside of their own countries. Airbnbs have bought up and colonized all of the most beautiful islands around the world.

people of privilege are profiting from these investments and what they are giving back in the form of donations or foundations or paying it forward is just symbolic and it feels good. But there is a real system of extraction happening globally and I spent a lot of time looking at it and I'm moving to Bali and I'm going to be participating in that system.

and how, what are three things that I'm gonna do, right? I'm a coach. Three things I can do to mitigate or lessen my extraction in the system there. I'm gonna try to rent or buy directly from a Balinese family or realtor, not a foreign realtor, with the hope that more of those resources will go to Balinese community members through that family. I'm gonna do everything in my power to shop.

and eat with local Balinese businesses and warungs. And I am going to be there as an ally to talk to and educate in constructive ways and to bring awareness to other people visiting or living on the island, the importance of paying and buying and spending with Balinese businesses. Because just like in Puerto Rico, Bali has the same scenario. Foreigners like me

We go there, we set up our yoga studio, we set up our sailing classes, we set up our surfboarding classes, we open our conscious coaching centers and retreat centers, and Balinese businesses make less and less money. And yes, we spend that money back into the economy, but if we are spending that money with other expat or foreign-owned businesses predominantly, which is what people do, we are perpetuating a nouveau form of

Brigette Iarrusso (49:41.326)
colonization, is really just the same model. It just feels better. It makes us feel good. It has a veneer. And like, I really feel like I almost want to apologize for bringing this truth because it's so ugly and it's so painful to contend with it. And like, I try to work around it and I try to create scenarios of like, I'm going to make millions of dollars and I'm going to give it

in these ways or I'm going to spend it in these ways. And I probably should have been an economist and not a business coach because I look at the economy and I look at how that money gets distributed and where it gets spent and who it's going to make it to and where it's going to trickle down. And it doesn't shake out. The wage gap, the quality of life gap in comparison to the amount of wealth and resources that there are in the system.

is really imbalanced and becoming more so every single year. Prices are inflating, locals are making less, expats are making more and spending more and living better lives in places that they've moved because their own economies are extractive. Like the US is a mess. It's hitting a recession. People are going to

move and leave and are already leaving in droves to Mexico, to Bali, to Costa Rica, to Taiwan, to Vietnam, seeking a more cost effective way of living. And we are going to live a good life. Our money is going to go further. And if we en masse started making different buying decisions, could we shift this? Could we turn the ship? It's tough.

We would have to en masse really completely shut down and stop spending a single penny with all of the multinational corporations that make their profits from poisoning people with food, overcharging people for drugs and pharmaceuticals, and profiting off of steel and oil and other resources that are designed to be profitable through weapons of mass destruction and war that maim and kill human beings.

Brigette Iarrusso (52:05.854)
All of the money in this system is concentrated in these industries. They're billion dollar industries and we spend our money in direct and indirect ways with these industries and we invest in assets that are tied to these industries directly and indirectly. And we're all invested in things that are causing harm. I am. I can't fully divest of those things. I have to live, right, in this system. I buy properties.

which I find that I make myself feel better, that they're less extractive. I rent to people of privilege. I live in a community that's a community of privilege. So I'm not living in a marginalized community or a community of, you know, indigenous people here in Catalunya. It's a European culture. But again, these are all ways that I manipulate or move things for me that makes me feel better. But when I look at the hard economics of the system, that's where I hit grief because

And this is the last thing I'm going to say about this. I am a very white conditioned thinker for the most part, linear, logical. I love to analyze. And I have over the past few years on my healing journey, learned to listen and feel and to allow for wisdom and truth to come to me through a different means. And when I allowed that to happen, it was so terrifying.

because what my ancestors showed me broke my spirit. I allowed myself to go into awakened dream state and my ancestors showed me the machine.

When I say the machine, I mean the system, the capitalist machine that exists globally. And what I saw in the machine is what Makosi is talking about. My body, I feel so much in my body when I talk about this. This is where I speak. And now I feel truth in my body. Before that was that logical part of my brain. It was cold, it was calculated, but now I'm feeling it. My feet are hot. The blood in my body, I feel it heat. I feel it in my hands. My ancestors showed me the machine.

Brigette Iarrusso (54:21.324)
and they showed me all the parts of the machine. There's inner working of the machine, the cogs. Then there are outer parts, the cogs are bigger. And then there's the outer perimeter of the machine that also has cogs.

What I saw in the machine is all three levels of the machine were killing us. The planets, the people, the humans were getting torn and shredded and bloodied in the machine. In the center of the machine were people who hold the most marginalized identities from communities that are historically marginalized, black, indigenous, people of color, trans people, people with disabilities, people who are holding marginalized identities. were

in the center of the machine and they were working the machine the hardest. They were doing the most work in the machine. They were the most harmed by it. And then there were people on the never level of the machine, people like me, who have a relative level of privilege, but I'm not outside the machine. And I'm also getting harmed in the machine. Slightly less, not quite as harmed. I'm not working quite as hard in the machine, but I am still working the machine and I'm part of its mechanics and I'm working it and I'm getting hurt by it.

And then what I thought I would see is that the people outside operating the machine would be okay, and they wouldn't be harmed, and they would be operating the machine safely, and they'd be running the machine. But what broke me when my ancestors showed me the machine is all the people were getting harmed. Even the people on the outside of the machine were getting hit and hurt and bloodied by the machine, but not at the same level, but they were also getting hurt. And so everyone in the machine is being harmed.

And I don't know that I have the answers for how to completely stop and dismantle the machine while it's in progress and while people on the outside who think they're benefiting are living a good life, are still being harmed but in more subtle ways and are still running it and don't realize that they're part of why the machine works. I know that the people in the center are at a crisis.

Brigette Iarrusso (56:32.17)
every single day around the world. And I don't know if sending money to them, I sent money to a family in Gaza.

I don't think they're any better off in this machine. I can make a million dollars tomorrow or five million or 10 million and send it to families in Gaza. And money is not going to fix what's happening in Gaza.

And so the truth of what I have come to realize that has been deeply painful for me as an entrepreneur is that there is no safe, truly conscious form of capitalism. There really isn't. And I have done all of the emotional, philosophical, spiritual gymnastics that you can imagine that I have consorted myself into.

to find a way to narrate a better version of this system.

Brigette Iarrusso (57:36.91)
can't anymore. It is a very broken, extractive, oppressive, painful system. And we exist at the intersection of the choice to still honor our human journey and live a good life and take care of ourselves and not become sick or in lack because then we will simply draw upon other people in the community that will then need to care for us and we're not actually going to help anyone by getting sick, burnt out.

depressed and not resourced in this system, while also reconciling that in becoming healed, rested, wealthy in the system, we are going to live a good life. And then we have to decide what part of ourselves as spiritual beings rooted in the deepest truth and collective wisdom of Ubuntu that if one is not well, we are all not well.

Then what? How do we navigate? What is our soul's footprint on this planet? Like, what can we contribute to? What can we engage with in ways that can help move the needle of healing, help redistribute resources, and allow us to still live a good life and live a joyful life, because that is also our birthright, right? So it's this complexity of like, no, we were not put here.

to cry all day watching the news, to fixate on all of the people of color that are dying, that are harmed around the world. And yet, are we also designed to disconnect from that, to not feel pain for that? Because I don't think that that's human, and I don't think it's normal to do that. But I think that at the core of capitalism and the system,

is teaching us to become disconnected from that sense of interconnectedness, to disconnect from the feeling of pain for other people's suffering, to become so fixated on hyper individualism that we are conditioned with a story to believe that we're okay, it's all just about our own individual rights and freedoms and living a good life and being joyful, and we don't have to worry about any of the rest. And for many of us,

Brigette Iarrusso (59:57.302)
I can simply choose if I want, well, I can't anymore. It's done for me. Many of us can still choose to not think about or watch or know what is going on in the world. And then this is the last part I'm going to say, because this was really tricky when I heard this the other day from a white-bodied person of privilege. it triggered me. I got so upset at first. And then I started to really wonder and think about it, which was like,

Are we, were we ever designed as humans to see and know as much as we do about other humans all the way around on the other side of the world? Right? Before the internet, before television, before media, before airplanes, we lived in our own communities and we were only concerned with our own tribe and our own community and those that were bordering or those that we interacted with.

And beyond that, we did not know what was happening all the way on the other side of the world. Now, mind you, we didn't live in the type of modern society we live in. And so, again, going back to is this good? Is this a good way? Is what we've done progress? Are we more evolved? Are we more modern? Are we more advanced? How is all of what we have and know serving us? All of the modern ways of living, all of the resources we have?

Is it really making us a better, more whole, more healed society? Or is it also, again, just slowly harming us and eating us, right? And that's where coming full circle, the first pain in decolonization work is just the awakening and the feeling and the remembering and the knowing.

And there's a, for me it's been five years, it's a long journey. It's not like a overnight, I drank cacao, I went to a shamanic healing and now I feel groovy. For me it has been like a deep, deep soul bone grief of awareness of like, I feel and know these truths and they can't, they're not going anywhere and I had to just contend with that grief. And now on the other side of the grief, it's like, now what is the next level of healing and integration and moving beyond the

Brigette Iarrusso (01:02:17.262)
grief into what now. But I have to be really honest, I'm 50 years old. I don't have a lot of the what now clear. All I have clear is that my body and my soul remember and it knows what it wants. And it's painful because what I want feels very counter to what I have and what I think I need. Like I have a 300 square meter home in Spain.

I have two cars parked outside. I have a house in California on a property with two homes that is worth a lot of money now. And we have a property in Florida.

And I don't know what I want to do with any of it. I know that I can extract, make money, live a good life. I know that I don't need all this. I know that the size and the amount of homes and the amount of resources that I own extract a lot of energy and resources, gas, electric, water, humans that have to care for it.

found myself in this journey of the classic model of capitalist success with my conscious values, with my desire to do things in a different way. And I arrived at a certain place and I'm realizing that for me, for who I'm becoming, it's not actually what my soul desires. And I don't know how I'm gonna feel when I...

rent this house out and leave and downsize and move somewhere else and don't bring all of my stuff and don't bring my 50 pairs of boots and don't bring all my purses and don't bring all my lipsticks and all the things that I'm looking at going, what am gonna bring, what am I gonna leave? All the things that I've tied importance to or relevance to, I know underneath that I can have things that bring me joy, I can enjoy nice things, but what I deeply crave is something that I remember and it's community.

Brigette Iarrusso (01:04:21.706)
It's sharing and connecting and growing and building together. It's not surviving, it's thriving. It's existing, it's celebrating, it's ritualizing, it's being in ceremony. It's a different level of meaning that I think my biggest fear is can I decolonize and release enough to even get close to getting back to that? Or am I gonna be

like one of my favorite artists, Robert Meadabal, is an amazing indigenous artist. Am I gonna be that woman trapped between two worlds for the rest of my life? And he sings about the way of the indigenous person that is mixed, that the old world calls and we remember, and the new world crushes and pulls. And those of us that are on this journey are in between these two worlds. And there has to be something that brings from the old world

And there has to be a reinvention, a recreation, a reimagining of some other version for this newer world because we cannot go back. And my good friend Sochil, she just did a beautiful training around all of the indigenous wisdom lineage keepers that have foreseen these times. The Hopi, the Maya, the Koban, all over Indonesia, they saw the time.

when the people of the numbers and the computers and the technology and the advancements had to join and learn and work with the people of the old ways to move forward. And so the only thing that I can find in this journey of seeking truth is that the path forward is going to be messy, it is going to be nonlinear, and it is gonna require us to get comfortable

with such a level of incongruence and duality and yes and, and so much grayness in between the wanting to be good and right and wrong and bad and extremes that we have been trapped in and locked in for so long, it's gonna require us to get so comfortable with some type of messy middle that requires so much

Brigette Iarrusso (01:06:43.54)
healing and releasing of ego, of the need to be right and good and know the only way. And it's, I mean, think that's, those are the only things I, and I used to think I knew so much for so long. And the older I get, I'm like, I know so little and that's okay. It's not a denigration of myself. I desire to know more, but also there's a part of me

that is an inner knowing of like, maybe I don't need to know more, I just need to be more and integrate more and it's not something that I'm going to know or figure out, right? It's something that I'm going to have to feel and heal and move through with perhaps over time, getting comfortable with even knowing less or understanding less, right? I know that's a mouthful, but it has been.

a journey for me being in this industry. And the last thing I want to say is like, and I say this with no performance, with no desire to like superficialize any of this. I know that my black indigenous ancestors sent me women like Mokosi, like Trudy, like Sochille, like all these women, Maisha Hill, deeply rooted.

wisdom keepers that I know my ancestors literally sent to me through this industry, through this hot mess land field of craziness that I've been through, all the superficial stuff, all the craziness. There has been something so deep and so important to my path in the online coaching space because of the women that I've met and the wisdom that they've brought me and the awareness that they have brought me.

There is nothing else I can compare it to in terms of like, again, the gratitude and the awareness of like, these women in my circle come from my original wisdom and they're here to help remind me and help show me the way. And that's the last thing I'm gonna say to those of you who are listening or watching that are white body people of privilege. This is not a performative bandaid.

Brigette Iarrusso (01:09:08.598)
or a recipe or a formula that I'm prescribing you. I am telling you from the deepest parts of myself as a white woman, the deepest truth that I know is that when we as white people hire and spend money with black, indigenous, women of color in particular, but men that come from original lineages, we are directly contributing to healing in a completely different way through the energetics of the work itself that we need to do.

which is to be in right relationship and to be in a position where we are actually being led by and learning from black indigenous people of color, not as peers, but as our mentor and seeing them as such. And not in the creepy high ticket superficial whatever way when we pay a lot of money to black indigenous women of color who are lineage keepers and receive an energy exchange from that, there is something very different.

in the calibration of what is happening in that relationship when we are really intentional about who we choose to heal with, who we choose to invest in. And if there's one thing that I could say is a way forward, just in this microcosm of our industry, if there's one thing that we can be pulled to, hire, seek out, listen to, and learn from healed or on the healing journey, black, indigenous women of color.

who can hold us with compassion and grace and have themselves done enough work to unpack to lead us and help us heal. It is a very different journey. I have done all the ways and this particular way is a really good.

a really good way to do one thing that can, in my opinion, bring greater balance and right relationship to things that have been equitable for a really long time. And it's one thing. It's one. There's so many other things we can do. And if you're going to sell or use Indigenous wisdom in your business, please.

Brigette Iarrusso (01:11:22.242)
work with a social impact entrepreneurial coach, work with someone that understands how to create a social impact business model, please reveal your teachers. Keep getting certified or working with original lineage teachers. Advertise who they are on your website. Bring business to them. Give back to those original lineage communities. Acknowledge that you're not an original lineage keeper. Reconsider certain terminology. If you don't come from an original lineage that uses the terminology, consider alternative

consider saying, I'm a healer that engages with shamanistic-like shadow work, but I am not of a shamanistic lineage. Or consider saying, I have learned from these lineages, and I have interpreted, I am teaching these things as a person of privilege, and the ways that my company or my brand seek to bring balance or give back are in these ways. And again, I'm not saying that this is a perfect solution. It's still very much an imperfect solution. But I do think that these ways of approaching

doing business will help us in reducing the extraction that is inherently happening in the system. And again, it's not to blame or shame myself or anyone else that participates in the system, but it's just to get really curious and really lean into this conversation and really think about what we're offering and what we're asking to just to consider. And then what feels right, what feels like a path forward.

knowing that the path is imperfect.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (01:12:55.111)
imperfect is such an understatement. I love that you are sharing the not only the logical linear analytical

experiences of how do we start to shift on an on an energetic exchange level when once you've become aware of the cogs in the wheel like this big machine that we all exist in that really is just a machine of consciousness right it really is just these structures that we have set up that are reflective of

certain ways of being that ultimately harm all of us, right? And also that there is, there's the emotional aspect and the truth that none of us have the answers to fix this thing. Like full transparency, is going to be, it is going to have to be this unknown, unknowable

divine inspiration over time. You know, I think about this work in terms of generations. That this is gonna be something like we didn't get here in 20, 50, 100 years. This is like an unfolding of about 2000 years that started with the intentional separation.

or disconnection of human beings from spirit. It's all really, like that's the foundation. That's the thing that when we turn back to the connection with spirit, that is the only thing that is going to actually be able to solve this. We can't solve this with our mind.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (01:15:04.583)
It's impossible. None of us are going to be able to do that. And I think it's important that I share here that, you when I asked the question around, you know, as white people extracting, I also include myself in that. Because whiteness is an ideology. It's a way of thinking about the world.

And I know that because of my own upbringing in small town southern West Virginia, that I also have this way of being, this way of seeing the world, the way of operating in the world. And so as much as I spent so many years in initiation and returning to Indigenous wisdom, I also hold space for the fact that I am not

even though I am initiated in the lineage, I am not teaching the lineage. I am not a wisdom keeper of the lineage, but that I'm bringing, I see myself more as a universal teacher or a universal healer in attempting to,

support seekers and leaders and entrepreneurs in navigating this very uncomfortable bridge. Some of us are here to be in that really uncomfortable bridging of this way of being that we're all operating in. We can see doesn't

And you can insert all the isms in there, Like capitalism, patriarchy, racism, insert all the isms that are really born out of this like disconnection from spirit, disconnection from one another, disconnection from earth. And we are just in the manifestation of that. so I also in my part of some of the things that I have grappled with and continue.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (01:17:20.733)
to navigate is the fact of having initiated in a specific lineage, right? And then operating and profiting from that work and how to go about it in ways like from the very beginning in initiation, we are actually doing work.

while we are in initiation to practice, to verify. gotta be verified. We don't just like, initiation is not you just learning some information. It's like the information has to transform you and you have to be able to, we have various testings and things like that to verify that we are evolving on a certain level and being different. And so before I completed initiation,

coming back to the US and figuring out along the way, know, how am I going to navigate this space and I'm not getting it perfect. But even just the very foundation of like having the brand, the Royal Shaman, using the word shaman and everywhere I go, I try my best to make sure that I'm saying, hey, by the way, I'm only utilizing the word shaman. I'm not technically a shaman that I initiated.

Brigette Iarrusso (01:18:47.214)
Mmm.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (01:18:49.691)
and I'm technically a sangoma, many of them would probably say, call me a sinusi at this point.

Brigette Iarrusso (01:18:55.278)
What's the difference between a fangoma and a sunusi?

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (01:18:58.515)
Yeah, so a Sangoma is someone who is initiated in ancestral healing. So the spirits that you carry are ancestral and all of the work tends to be more community oriented.

So you're working with the ancestors of another person and you are using essentially the spirit of your own ancestors in order to facilitate healing. I have that as a foundation. And then I also come with other spirits that we would call, they would say that they are like foreign spirits or universal spirits, higher level spirits.

Brigette Iarrusso (01:19:37.848)
not your own ancestral spirits. Not your own ancestral spirits. These are beyond your family lineage.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (01:19:42.741)
Some of them, yeah, so they were never human, right? So we have those who were human. That would be, you know, from my mother's lineage, my father's lineage, also specific ancestors with specific roles. Also, there can be adjacent ancestral spirits. So let's say that they are spirits who...

Brigette Iarrusso (01:19:47.031)
Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (01:20:07.909)
owed some kind of debt to my ancestors now in order to resolve that karma, support me in writing some of their wrongs in their lifetime. So essentially when they come back next time around, they've worked through some of that karma by supporting me.

in my work. And then there are other kinds of spirits that are, you know, water spirits, praying spirits.

divinities, gods and goddesses type of thing. And those are the ones who are like my primary purpose is connected with them. But you always have to go with ancestors first. Like you always have to have that foundation of I am connected to my ancestors and they're the ones who are providing that foundation that then this other work can build on, right? And so.

Brigette Iarrusso (01:20:49.795)
Mmm.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (01:21:13.299)
the universal aspect of my work, which has to do more with visioning, being able to see collectively where we are out of harmony and what it is that we need to do to come into greater levels of harmony. And even with all of that, I still navigate.

these challenges. And I think from a spiritual level, I think it is important that we understand, maybe this will give you some peace about all of this. Because again, none of us have the answers to any of this. It's just where we've come to in our understanding. But from a spiritual perspective, there are individuals who part of their work in this lifetime,

is to either support or uplift or bring awareness to specific wisdom, specific lineages, and that is part of their calling. Many of them are not called to necessarily be the ones doing that.

That is actually the more common thing is like to bring awareness to these things not necessarily to be the one bringing it out and Also, I have to say there are some who actually are going to be called to bring forward XYZ in this life

Brigette Iarrusso (01:22:46.734)
Yeah.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (01:22:51.739)
Yeah, yeah. And it's a very tricky thing because we've got to be mindful to not discount everything, right? Not discount, well, this is a, you know, this is a person in a white body who is just taking this lineage. But there are some who, like I know of one Sangoma, he spent, I think, I don't know, 10 years in initiation.

had to abandon everything and live with his mentor. I think the biggest challenge, at least that I've experienced as someone who is an advisor, a guide, a teacher, is navigating some of the unconscious implicit bias

that shows up. I've had some really nasty experiences with

Brigette Iarrusso (01:23:57.454)
Thank

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (01:24:02.899)
the belief that you cannot be taught by or learn from people from these marginalized identities, right? Like, and I'm black presenting and a woman, and so there's like double layers of that. And it's funny because there's like this perception that always like the old white man is gonna know more than me.

And so when I bring up certain things, my husband was like, these people don't respect you. There's zero respect happening. And I started having the realization like, actually, respect is a medicine that I actually, that's a tool that I have to use in this life. I have to cement respect in order for me to be able to do my work, in order for it to be.

in order for it to be received. Like I had a period of time with my own ancestors where I was like, why do I need to make this money? Why is that part of this? And part of the, there were two levels. First, they shared with me that in order for you to do the work that you're gonna need to do, you need to essentially have demonstrated that you can make money because that's what some people respect.

Brigette Iarrusso (01:25:11.597)
Yeah.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (01:25:27.517)
in order to get into certain spaces. And I'm like, okay, I can see that. And also simultaneously on the flip side, part of me making money and being well-resourced and well-taken care of operates as a mirror of what's possible for all of these other lineages who want their descendants to receive the abundance that they are here to have in this lifetime.

they've got to do their own deconstruction around their value as a marginalized person or as a woman or as someone who's trans or disabled and what your value is as a person. In order to receive resources, we have lots of people, especially in who consider themselves spiritual, who are like, I'm spiritual, so I don't receive money.

Brigette Iarrusso (01:26:03.584)
Yeah. Yeah.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (01:26:26.621)
and they do everything in their power to avoid receiving money. But their work in this lifetime requires for them to have money. Just their like base living is going to require them to have money. Not everything comes from that. It is a part of the journey. And so I love having these conversations because

Brigette Iarrusso (01:26:41.454)
All right. Yep.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (01:26:57.037)
Money, I'm glad we're getting to this part because I really wanted us to touch on wealth consciousness and what the role is around money. I think that it's so interesting now that I'm on the other side of initiation and I've been on this journey for, I don't know, 12, 13 years at this point and been doing this work for seven years.

and

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (01:27:30.655)
There was part of me at one point who was really stuck on the idea of like, if people just understood what really mattered, like you were referencing it as the thing that you actually desire, right? The thing that you really desire is like this connection and community and that like walking in alignment. And really at the core, it's about energetic, spiritual freedom, liberation, right?

in a soul level way. I was like, if people could just get that early and just walk in that alignment early, that's my greatest hope is like, before you've made the money, what if you were making the money from soul alignment? Like while you were making the money, you

were creating from this place. And I fought for that, even though it didn't work well from a business lens. From a business perspective, you always want to be selling to what people are seeking solutions for or wanting, because there's a certain level of priority. People might want what you have to offer, but if it isn't a top priority for them,

Brigette Iarrusso (01:28:41.933)
Mm-hmm.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (01:28:53.555)
typically they're not gonna move on it, right? So part of my work has been finding out what, where are the people who value what I offer the most, right? And then finding ways, this is one of the ways, us having this conversation, this is one of the ways that I like disseminate, break down this

the importance of having that soul alignment to people who maybe it isn't their top priority yet. But then they start to, it's kind of like a, like I planted a little bomb in their mind. That so that they can actually grow the things with the soul. But most of us don't come to that understanding of the importance of.

soul connection and soul alignment until after we have had some level of success. You know, the houses, the trips, the designer bags, like that was my case. And it's different for everyone. For me, it was not, I didn't have to make millions of dollars in order to do that. For some people, it might take millions of dollars before they come to that.

to that awareness, but I see that more and more people are really prioritizing.

soul alignment. But I'm curious, because we, I think both of us can agree, we want to see more conscious people with money. We want to see more marginalized people with money. We want to see more women with money. What do you, what are some of the biggest wounds that you see around wealth consciousness, especially around

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (01:30:57.041)
like especially among white folks and maybe even people who were born into financial privilege.

Brigette Iarrusso (01:31:09.794)
Yeah, I mean, it's a tricky one because I think there's a whole spectrum of consciousness around money nowadays, especially like, and sometimes there are narratives that I don't know that I fully agree with. So I think one of the narratives around wealth consciousness that I hear people playing with or deconstructing is the idea that if I have more, other people will have less. And that being a non-truth, that if the more that I have, other people will not

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (01:31:21.94)
Mm.

Brigette Iarrusso (01:31:39.288)
have less because I have more. And then there are other people who work in the space of economic liberation, economies of liberation, who will actually argue that and say when people of privilege hold and amass more wealth, it is actually impacting and causing other people to have less. But that's where it gets tricky. I don't think that anyone at our level of wealth accumulation is having that level of impact.

really is at the level of like billionaires hoarding resources at that level. And the way that they amass that level of wealth through extractive industries and systems that harm people at that level, those people having and holding that level of wealth in fact does influence.

other communities having less access. Like in fact, their money may come directly from harming specific communities, damaging their water systems, destroying their ability to thrive economically. Like literally, there's a direct correlation. But we're not at that pinnacle of the pyramid. We're not those billionaires running those extractive businesses, right? We're somewhere else in the system where we can grow and build a more conscious business.

where we make the money in ways that are less harmful and extractive by healing or helping other humans. And then we can spend that money in different ways to move those money in system in different ways. And there is absolute data-driven proof that when black, indigenous, people of color, people who hold marginalized identities, queer people, disabled people make more money, they spend that money differently.

they invest that money differently. And so yes, in fact, the money does move differently in the system, right? So then going back to like, we don't want to have only the gloom and doom. On the other side of it, what would happen if more people who hold marginalized identities and more women made more money in ways that are less harmful because we're creative and innovative? And what if we spent and moved that money through the system in different ways?

Brigette Iarrusso (01:33:48.386)
what type of a critical mass could we arrive at and how could we begin to move those resources into different places through our buying power, right? But it gets tricky because again, a lot of the narratives of whiteness and guilt come from feeling bad when we have more. And that's also not helpful, right? Because again, going back to the point of like, I work with women of all ethnicities, I work with conscious white women,

women who have mixed identities. work with black indigenous women of color. I work with queer people. I work with trans people. I don't work with Trump supporters. I don't care what their identities are. Ever.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (01:34:27.401)
That's the hard line.

Brigette Iarrusso (01:34:28.866)
There's a very hard line and it's not about politics, it's about human decency and what I think is leadership and not leadership. don't support and I don't want to help people make money that support narcissism as a leadership quality. But as far as like ethnicity, I work with women of all types of identities. And a lot of what I help the people that I work with around is this engaging with

and discerning the difference between our inherent self-worth and value, which is limitless and exponential, as humans, regardless of what we have or do or how much money we have, the problem with the system is we've conditioned, we've been conditioned to believe that our worth or our value is still somehow hooked into how much money we have. And by inverse relationship, there are some people who will pedestal themselves

and feel that they are better humans for having less, not for having more, which is equally problematic to people who think they are superior or better for having more. Both sides of this construct are problematic, right? Like the whole Mother Teresa, I don't have anything, I'm an acerbic, I'm living in poverty. I don't mean to offend the monks and the nuns and the clerics who don't have anything, but then they have to rely on the community to...

pay for their food and so somebody's got to have something. So then they're still receiving, so they're not actually closer to God because they have less, which I think when we get back down to it, to Mikosi's point, the lie started with the story that the people who are poorer and work the hardest are closer to God and are God's chosen people. When you really unpack that Judeo-Christian narrative, that Western religious

construct and even Islamic and even a lot of religions, the idea that the less you have, the closer you are to God and the more chosen you are to God. And you connect that with a system that is moving towards what is a capitalist system. You start to see like that is a very convenient construct to get people to buy into that me having less makes me holier than and better than and closer to God.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (01:36:41.043)
Mm-hmm.

Brigette Iarrusso (01:36:50.508)
Right, so there's this complex duality of like, no, having more money doesn't make you a better human, but neither does not having any money. And again, we exist in this imperfect system. And even opting out of the system and living off grid and not participating in the system comes at a cost. And often only those of us with extreme privilege and access to resource can construct a life that allows us

to deconstruct and live outside of the system, right? So it's really complex. And I will say that's changing. There are communities of color and women of color. My friend, Daniela Shea is building a community in Guatemala for women of color that wanna live off the land and unhook from the system. Like there are, there is a growing movement of women of color. Historically, it was a more predominantly white movement, but there is a movement, you know, but even living off the system, off the grid requires resources to create.

an alternative system. So if we want to build a different or more alternative system in this existing system with the understanding that we can't decimate and boom and combust the existing system to just create something fresh from nothing, unless we're going to do what happened to the dinosaurs and then we're not going to be part of it, right? We have to find a way to leverage our resources in this system.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (01:38:09.781)
You

Brigette Iarrusso (01:38:16.256)
and make different choices with those resources. And then we get to have to make the difficult choice and decision of like, can we still create impact, do good things in the world and live a good life in alignment and have resources and feel good with having resources and not feel guilty about having resources when other people don't because that guilt or the shame attached to the having a lot of resources.

is the part that doesn't actually help or change anything, right? It's just a simple, like I remember when the genocide in Palestine started, every time I would look at my daughter come home from school and go into her room in this big house in Spain and she would sit down for dinner, I'd have to excuse myself because I would go and cry because I would say, my God, like, look where we live, look, my daughter is safe, look at the food she's eating, look at her room, look at her life, she's so safe here, she's living in a bubble.

my God, there are children going through X, Y, Z right now. I don't want to porn you, but like really horrific things happening to children beyond just not having their basic needs met. And like, I have all of this and it got stuck in that place of just feeling the grief and the pain and the guilt. It's an, so this is part of unpacking white supremacy and part of healing ourselves as allies. is normal.

to feel guilt when other people are suffering and you are not. It is normal. Then the question is, do we say stuck in that emotion, does that serve us? Or where else can we move with that into a place of like, and so then what? I'm allowed to have that emotion, whether it's accurate or real is irrelevant. It is a normal emotion to have. And then it becomes a matter of like, what do I do from this place? How do I wanna engage with this? And for me,

I had to get off social media during that time. That was part of the work for me around some of these issues was like, I felt like it was an energy suck. It was very performative. I felt like I am not the voice of bringing awareness around what's going on in Palestine. There's like a gazillion amazing Palestinian creators on Instagram. They do not need me to boost their algorithm. I don't have as much reach as them. Like that's not my work in the world. I, at that time, decided that I was gonna niche down my activism, like my...

Brigette Iarrusso (01:40:42.606)
My mentor, Maisha, taught me, because I didn't want to feel guilty about having a lot of resources. And I said, what can I actually do? Is there anything that I can do to move the needle? And like I said, even raising money to send to this family in Gaza at the end didn't create the level of impact that we had hoped. It was a band aid. It helped them for a period of time. But ultimately, what I started to do that felt even better was work with European white expat families.

to bring education and awareness around what was going on in Gaza and how that was tied to white supremacy and how I helped was to find a way to break that down for children in a way that was accessible and to help children think about how to be allies to other children just here in Spain. Just to think about their relationships with children from Morocco or other parts of Northern Africa who are dark skinned or children of other ethnicities who might be targeted or bullied. Like just getting down to that.

really niche down local level of like what can I actually do in this limited sphere of influence here with my time, energy, money, and resources that feels like I'm doing something that's contributing towards something that feels so far away that I feel so powerless around, right? How can I on a local level do something? So I think, you know, a lot of it is again with these money, the things that are tied to wealth and money, it's like, how do we feel about it? How do we become

normalizing and comfortable with having mixed feelings about it. And then how do we want to actually engage with and leverage and use resources when we do achieve them in a way that feels aligned for us? And so, you know, going back to my like story of like, I want to make more money to spend more money for the short term, for where I am on this human journey, for where the planet is and for where the system is. I do think that

me spending more money in different ways is going to be a small way that I can redistribute wealth, right? And it's again, this is not like a massive level systemic solution. I do still think it is like a small level, one cog solution. And then on a bigger scale, think the bigger questions have to do with things that are really difficult. Like what is our conditioning to be tied to consumption? And

Brigette Iarrusso (01:43:07.872)
amassing things as a sign of both status and wealth, but also just as a form of an unhealthy satiation, like we crave and desire something, we have a need, we've become conditioned to believe that having more things will satiate the need, but ultimately the science shows there's actually a really fascinating film out there called Happiness. And they did

surveys and focus groups and interviews of people from the poorest communities in India to some of the wealthiest places in the world to gauge their level of happiness. And what the movie and the science behind the movie discovered is that people who are living in abject poverty who don't have their basic needs met are not happy. So let's not create that romanticization that like really poor people are super happy. They're exhausted and they're living in survival mode and that doesn't make them happy. They can find joy but they're

they're exhausted and they're not happy. People who are obscenely wealthy are often not happy. We only have to look at the behaviors of billionaires, their statistics for their marriages, their mental health, their physical health, all the things to see that there are people with a massive amounts of wealth who are deeply unhappy. But the film found that there is an interesting middle zone of people

who have their basic needs met, but who haven't amassed a certain level of wealth that they're always seeking more wealth that are actually, they did find a median of true happiness. And the vast majority of those people that were most happy were living in communities where they had a lot of connection and collaboration amongst elders. They lived near bodies of water. They had really healthy air, healthy food, healthy diets. It was related to the zones, the blue zones in the world where people live longer and are living healthier.

And they identified in one country some of the most unhappy and unhealthy mentally people and the happiest. And that is Japan, which is really fascinating in the film. People in Japan with a lot of focus on wealth and success that lived in the cities had the highest rate of suicide and depression, especially among middle-aged Japanese men, especially losing money in the stock market or losing a job, losing their face, losing face.

Brigette Iarrusso (01:45:30.048)
around material success, the number one determining factor for depression and suicide among middle-aged Japanese men. Same country, just take a flight to the island of Okinawa, happiest, oldest, emotionally, spiritually well people are on the island. Distance from the community, the distance from city life, and they discovered that the people

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (01:45:51.337)
Mmm.

Brigette Iarrusso (01:45:56.96)
specifically of Okinawa, the ones that lived into their 90s and hundreds, they worked outside. They did farming by hand. They prepared their foods in communal ways. They squatted and sat on the ground and not on chairs. They didn't have desk jobs. And they belonged to community spaces where they would gather and sing and talk and spend time together every single day. And that's just one example of they were some of the happiest people.

Again, they're not impoverished, it's not a poor island, they have resources, but they're not like at the higher levels of wealth, but they have the highest level of longevity and health and wellness and perceived happiness. So I think it's really interesting to think about where's the balance and where are we striving and depleting ourselves in the pursuit of more

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (01:46:47.337)
Yeah.

Brigette Iarrusso (01:46:54.464)
If that's really truly, is it really what we want? And then if we have more, will we truly be satisfied? And it's not to say I'm expressing a desire to go in this opposite direction of not having anything, right? And choosing to live a life of like abject need of like not having our necessities met because we forego any material wealth in a system that requires it, right? To have enough resources to live well. Where is the happy medium?

and I don't yet know. I know that for me, I personally have swung a little into the higher level of having a lot and realizing not only is this having a lot not bringing me happiness, but it's actually causing more stress and complicating my life. These are privileged people problems, but having a million dollars in a specific stock market and watching that lose half its value in a day

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (01:47:42.324)
Hmm.

Brigette Iarrusso (01:47:54.016)
almost put my partner in an early grave. Now that is a very privileged people problem to have. It sounds absurd given what other people are grappling with, but like that was our entire like retirement savings, you know, invested in a way that we can't even actually take it out fully legally without, you know, it's a lot of complexity. Like having a lot of money doesn't protect us from a lot of things out of our control in the world.

whether that be economically, right, as well as health. Like having a lot of money doesn't prevent you from getting cancer from poisoned water systems and poisoned plastics food. You can just get better treatment if you get sick, but you're not gonna prevent cancer because pretty soon all the fish in the ocean is gonna have microplastic in it. Unless you can find another planet that you own,

and grow your food and your animals and your fish there and bring them back to this planet, we're all gonna be affected by the same things, right? So at the end of the day, we can have a lot of money and a lot of resources. That's not the problem. It's how we steward and what we move those energetic resources into that can be healing or harming. And so as a species, if we keep buying plastic and

buying from extractive brands and calling something luxury when it's made by sweatshop labor in a country that pays people a dollar a day, honey, that purse is not a luxury. You can't have luxury built on oppression. For me, a luxury item is something built by hand through manual labor. It's exquisite, it's one of a kind, and it's well, well paid for, and it's well, well energetically exchanged for.

A lot of what we think are luxury products and services are literally, this is not an insult, scientifically they are actual literal trash. Like the energetic biological makeup of many items that we desire and label as luxury are literal trash and poison to us and the planet. But again, we've been conditioned to associate value and status with certain items.

Brigette Iarrusso (01:50:16.598)
I'm not against luxury, but I'm going to say this again. If the luxury things you're buying are attached to extraction, environmental degradation, and the harm of humans, that ain't luxury, That's not, right? I mean, yes, we can have luxury. We can spend a lot of money. I'll give examples, you know. Go and yes, hire and pay people to give you massages and treatments and pay.

the individuals find people who are like experts who are doing the work themselves, not through big corporations that are extractive, pay them well, tip them well, know, spend a lot of money in places that give back or, or, or, you know, are paying their workers well. Like look into conscious companies and conscious brands. Again, there are no perfect companies or perfect brands. There are just companies and brands that are less extractive or less hierarchical or more local. And the more we can spend locally,

organically on items, products, and services that are grown, built, and produced in ways that are less harmful than our money does less harm in the system. But that's more about not the energy or the fear of the having the money. It's more of how we spend it. So for me, when I think of the money construct, the money is never the problem. The energy of the money comes from how we make it and how we spend it.

on either side of the money. The money itself is neutral. But how we make our money and how we spend it is not in any way neutral. There is an imprint, an impact in how we do those things. And all we can do is have a less harmful impact or a more regenerative or redistributive impact. And there is no perfect solution in the imperfect.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (01:52:09.245)
Yeah, I think the thing that I think a lot of people struggle with when it comes to money is seeing the money as a positive or negative thing. the money is actually just a physical or digital representation of an exchange, right? An exchange that's either coming in, I'm receiving this money, this is how I made the money, right?

Brigette Iarrusso (01:52:22.178)
money itself, right?

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (01:52:39.301)
or going out and that all of the all of the karma or all of the manifested effects are on how

we are making and spending the money. And I love that you bring up luxury because I am a luxury queen. I love it. But I love real luxury. like, I think I have actually a book behind me somewhere about luxury and it dives into the, the.

history of luxury, the sacredness of luxury, where it really, you know, where that idea of luxury comes from. And at the core of luxury is a concept of

Extraordinary-ness, right? There's the mundane, there's the everyday, regular experience of things, the common, right? And then what is luxury is something that is out of the ordinary, right?

Brigette Iarrusso (01:53:35.662)
Mm.

Brigette Iarrusso (01:53:42.958)
And that can be an experience and a way of receiving something that doesn't necessarily have to be like a tangible.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (01:53:49.455)
No, and it can even be, you know, the way that products or services are introduced is almost always through the luxury channel because you have what is mainstream and what is norm for people to have. And then you have this special thing, right? Or this, this one of a kind thing, this craftsman made thing, or something that is, that is pioneering or something that is new into

Brigette Iarrusso (01:54:17.326)
Correct, Yep.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (01:54:19.319)
the space and it has to be luxury because only a few people get it, right? Like if you think about when a refrigerator was created, right? That was not the normal experience. And just through manufacturing, you have to have early investors or early buyers who are spending more for the thing. And then as it becomes more common, the cost can go down because you have more people purchasing it.

And also the problem that we have with our ideas of what's luxury is that we have had big, conglomerate companies who are really, really good at marketing. Oh, try to overcome this idea of what luxury is and like, Oh, how can we make something appear luxury, but make a shit ton of it? Right. Right. No, not at all.

Brigette Iarrusso (01:54:59.49)
Yep. Co-opt. Yep.

Totally.

Brigette Iarrusso (01:55:11.0)
huge profit margin and the item is by no means luxury but they position it as such.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (01:55:16.051)
Yeah, and I was looking at, I love looking into fashion and all of that. I was looking at some of the designers at Fashion Week. And it's interesting how much diversity exists in business model in fashion, but the old houses are relatively small. Maybe they make a few million.

But then some of the big ones that we consider to be like the staple luxury, right? Like Louis Vuitton, for example. We see those as being luxury when actually they are mass produced and everything that you're buying is the branding, right? The branding of the thing. Branding is necessary, but.

Brigette Iarrusso (01:55:49.09)
Yeah. Yeah.

Brigette Iarrusso (01:56:05.474)
Yeah.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (01:56:09.589)
I was also thinking about it, like I live in what would be considered or what they market as a luxury apartment. However, my husband and I are the first people to live in this building, in this apartment. And the number of things in this place that have just fallen apart. Our refrigerator is broken right now with.

Brigette Iarrusso (01:56:31.022)
that you're like, really? A nice luxury job on the...

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (01:56:37.203)
like the interior lining, like the dishwasher, the handle broke in the first year. And so what we are seeing and experiencing right now is, you know, a lot of people are turned off by the concept of luxury because it's come to mean something that it's not, right?

Brigette Iarrusso (01:56:56.716)
Yep, yep, yep.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (01:56:58.547)
The thing that I also kind of, this also circles back to the idea of extraction and also why I am very adamant that people who are having these uncomfortable conversations, this, and moving through the discomfort of the guilt and the grief and the shame or having money or all of that, why those are the people who should have more and we want to allow for you to have more because of how you will

circulate that money in a different way, even if it doesn't fix everything tomorrow, because it won't. But the problem too, is that when we spend our money to go and partake in certain experiences, and then we don't pull the thread through, like a very common thing is for people in our space to go on an ayahuasca retreat, right? And spend money to go into the jungle,

Brigette Iarrusso (01:57:32.174)
Totally, yep.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (01:57:58.099)
the Amazon jungle, have this life-changing experience, right? And then come right back home and not continue holding that experience and the lives of the people there. And then come back here and then use their money and their, and our privilege and all of these.

norms for us in ways to reduce the harm that is happening to these people that we just interacted with. Like this is one of my biggest gripes is why is it that we are going into these places like Mexico, like Peru, Costa Rica, all of these amazing

experiences that we are getting to engage with the people, right? But then we come home and we forget about, that's low vibe to talk about. Yeah.

Brigette Iarrusso (01:59:00.206)
Well done.

Brigette Iarrusso (01:59:04.664)
or I already did that. I've done it and it's not all that or whatever the case may be.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (01:59:10.013)
Right, like we come home and then we are continuing to support laws that allow for, I don't know, pharmaceutical companies to keep just pillaging ancient recipes of medicine, extract the part that they think is the good part, the active component, so that they can patent it and then sell it, right? Or we support...

Brigette Iarrusso (01:59:26.232)
Yep. Yep.

Brigette Iarrusso (01:59:34.581)
Yep.

huh.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (01:59:39.369)
you know, the destruction of the Amazon jungle when just last week we were, you know, sitting with the medicine man. So those are the things that I'm like, what if we allowed for our money to not just go into support, you know, paying for, you know, the beautiful art, artisan made piece. Like when I went to Egypt, I bought the most amazing pieces in the Nubian village. I avoided.

all of the like, Chinese trash, no offense to the Chinese, okay? It's just that the pieces were not being made by anyone there. They were just being bought in bulk, that like polyester garbage being sold at the pyramids, right? And instead spent my money in the Nubian village with the grandmothers who were like making the crochet things and not stopping there, right?

Brigette Iarrusso (02:00:32.046)
Mm-hmm.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (02:00:36.041)
being mindful when we get home of, you know, what am I spending my money on? What am I supporting with my politics? What laws am I, like what is the actual ripple effect? And I think sometimes, you know, we think of what is the thing, at least in the US, because we are so hyper individualistic, we think of, well, what is the thing that

is going to affect me and my family. Like we vote or we make decisions solely for what matters to me. And I think sometimes we get out of order with priority. Like to me, the highest priority is basic human rights.

Brigette Iarrusso (02:01:19.022)
Yep. Yeah.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (02:01:26.237)
Like are people allowed to survive? Are they allowed to live? Are they allowed to have clean water? Are they allowed to have a roof over their head? Like these are the basic things that we should prioritize, right? And then after those, okay, are those check marks? How we struck those? Then we can start.

considering the things that are around our preferences, right? Like would I prefer for all of our food to not have certain chemicals in it? Yeah, actually I don't like eating microplastics, everything that I eat. However, what is the order of priority? Like I want people to eat first before concerning myself.

Brigette Iarrusso (02:02:09.582)
Right. Yeah.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (02:02:20.817)
with microplastics, right? Especially with money and privilege. Because one thing I noticed, like I grew up in small town West Virginia, we did not have access to fresh organic, you know, stuff in our grocery stores. But one thing that I've seen shift drastically since I was a kid, anytime I go back home, I go in the grocery stores and the organic section grows.

Brigette Iarrusso (02:02:21.484)
Absolutely. Yeah.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (02:02:48.071)
Every couple years, they're expanding either like another half aisle or another aisle to the point where now there's like a freezer full and multiple aisles of organic available food. And part of that is because when we spend our money on something, we are demonstrating demand for that item. And so by the way that we spend our money, we are creating a new reality of more organic foods available, right?

Brigette Iarrusso (02:03:06.99)
Absolutely. Yep.

Brigette Iarrusso (02:03:15.934)
And we need more people to be able to do that to move the needle because without a larger demand, it's still going to be a novelty, small niche item, and it's not going to get the traction it needs to even bring the prices down. So we actually need more people with more money to bring the prices down on certain types of luxury, organic, high quality foods, which will actually become more accessible if more people can afford them. So I have someone coming soon to pick me up to go hiking.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (02:03:39.869)
It's a tricky thing.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (02:03:44.459)
fabulous. Well, listen, we've been going and we didn't get to everything. I skipped over some, but I knew I was like, we could go on and on and on about this. So I do want to wrap this up because we are going, going, going. And I want to hear from you just if people listening could walk away with just one thing, because we've talked about a lot that could feel really overwhelming. What is the one thing that you hope that someone can take away from this and actually

Brigette Iarrusso (02:03:45.27)
Hahaha!

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (02:04:13.597)
take action on, actually implement that would allow for momentum to build off of this conversation.

Brigette Iarrusso (02:04:23.694)
Yeah, I mean, think the first thing would just be to take a moment to notice the feelings that came up throughout the conversation and how you reacted or felt in response to certain parts of the conversation. And to just get really comfortable with normalizing the feelings that come up around things and not to attach so much to those feelings. And then to move from a place of like, what is your actual desire in the world? And what is the vision that you have for impact? And what is it that you'd like to see in the world?

And then how can you move imperfectly, consistently, and confidently in the direction of what you desire without questioning it? Like how do you actually connect with what you're being called to, even if it feels scary? And that is gonna look like really different things. Like for some of you listening, that might be feeling called to actually make more money and release some type of narrative.

around having less, being worthier, or the harder you work, or the less money you have, you're still having that conditioning that you're somehow better, versus a desire to actually have and hold more resources so that you have more freedom and choice in how you spend and move that money in the system. How can you begin to move in that direction, right? Detaching your sense of value or worth from the money and becoming more of a vessel or a vehicle that money can flow through.

and getting comfortable with asking for and receiving money so that you can then also move and spend that money in ways that are aligned for you, right? So, you know, as a sales coach that works at the intersection of selling and decolonization, unpacking our conditioning in this structure, you know, how can you really embody your inherent deep wealth and value that you already have and then decide how do you want to move from that place, right?

and again, detach the judgment from it. And if it feels scary, that's okay too. Or if you want to go in the other direction and you feel like you actually want less, you wanna do less, have less, engage less in the system, and it feels edgy or contradictory to what the tides are telling us we should want, how can you actually like tune in and listen and honor what you're being called to?

Brigette Iarrusso (02:06:45.622)
and trust it for this process, for this leg of your journey, and also trust that you're not gonna always be linear and you're gonna ebb and flow, right? So it's like embracing what you desire, listening to what you need or want now, trusting it, and then also allowing for yourself to move, shift, deviate, and even change your mind is, I think, a big part of the journey.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (02:07:09.781)
That's so good. I think for me, the biggest, like the very first step in order for all of these things to be possible is to be able to differentiate between what is you and your true self and any of these constructs. And that the places where we find ourselves in that discomfort, in that grief, shame, guilt, et cetera, is giving us clues as to where we are actually.

deeply rooted in a construct and it's giving us clues as to who we are actually here to be and who we're not here to be. That the feelings are not bad or good, that they are just indicators, that there's something different and none of these constructs are you.

Right? But you get to choose once you become aware of what constructs you are upholding, then you have the ability, then you have the power to say, actually, this construct, upholding it in this way is actually not serving to me and the impact that it has, I'm not okay with. Or,

recognizing, you know what, based off of the experience that I'm in right now and the time and the location and all of these things that this is something that I am going to continue with until maybe I find a new way of being that works better. But it's, think what keeps us from having these conversations and actually creating change is

being so attached to every single one of these constructs as our identity. That this means I am limited, or this means I shouldn't make money, or this means I'm too much. And I think that that's really the common thread that we, yeah, when we really unpack.

Brigette Iarrusso (02:09:14.286)
Yeah.

Brigette Iarrusso (02:09:18.616)
Yeah, but I'm too much. That's such a big one.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (02:09:24.361)
You know, I had fear around being the angry black woman to the point where I wouldn't express any anger because I didn't want to be perceived in that way. And that was limiting to me. Actually, me pressing anger is fantastic. You know, I present in a hyper feminine way, very intentionally and consciously because it actually is an act of rebellion against the idea that.

Brigette Iarrusso (02:09:30.168)
Yeah.

Brigette Iarrusso (02:09:37.667)
Yeah.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (02:09:50.697)
Black women are not feminine and cannot be X, Y, Z. And it is my true expression. So we've got to be mindful of, know, where are we feeding into certain narratives and certain experiences? And then how is that actually manifesting in the businesses we build, our client relationships, our family lives, how we're impacting the community and on and on, we could go forever.

But I love this conversation so much and I really do appreciate you doing this massively deep, deep dive that could be an entire freaking course. And I am so glad that you took me up on the challenge of talking about some of these very uncomfortable conversations that ultimately are gonna be.

Brigette Iarrusso (02:10:24.76)
Thanks.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (02:10:45.563)
serving to both you and I for just having them and also anyone who listens to it. So thank you so much.

Brigette Iarrusso (02:10:49.112)
So healing.

Yes. Yeah, thank you. I just feel like every time we talk, it is really healing for me. I've always felt that with you and I, with our connection. And I feel like I receive so much in just having the space with you to talk through these things and just the way you exist energetically around these topics for me is deeply healing because these conversations can bring up so much. And even when we don't have

we have such a hard time engaging with it in ways that don't actually cause us more harm, even if the conversation is about harm. And just for whatever reason, every time I have these conversations with you, I feel that we've gone deep, but I don't feel a sense of like heaviness or harm from having gone deep and had the conversation. And I think it's, this is an example of the moving forward into what we are moving into. It's like,

we have to reach a place where we can have these conversations and we can be safe and regulated and comfortable even when the conversation is not a comfortable topic.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (02:11:55.647)
Yeah, yeah. So where can people find you if they want to learn more about you, tune into what you've got going on and how you're disrupting the business space?

Brigette Iarrusso (02:12:06.728)
I am on Facebook again after having my old account hacked. just under my regular legal name, Brigetta Iaruso, I am on Facebook. I'm also on Instagram under disruptive business coaching and I'm on LinkedIn with my name and TikTok. So I'm actually in most of the places. But yeah, I would say I live a lot on Facebook in terms of just like these conversations and a little bit more so on Instagram now.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (02:12:32.405)
Awesome, awesome. Well, I'm gonna let you get to your hike, your connection, your community time. And I'm gonna get some.

Brigette Iarrusso (02:12:40.066)
Yes, I'm going out into a labyrinth actually near my home that's like really special energetically and it's a really great place where I go when there's stuff coming up.

Makhosi Hefisah Nejeser (02:12:48.277)
Perfect timing. I love that. All right. Well, thank you all for tuning in and I'll see you next time.

Brigette Iarrusso (02:12:54.188)
Alright, thank you, Mikosi. Have a beautiful rest of your day. Bye.