#21 A Hunger for Wholeness: Iya Affo
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Maurizio Benazzo: My name is Maurizio.
Zaya Benazzo: My name is Zaya. And we live, currently we are based, we live on the unceded land of Southern Pomo and coastal Miwok land in.
So called California. Welcome, and we're delighted for, to have, for our guest today. We feel that the topic of historical trauma is very pertinent for all of us today. Very important. Let's introduce our guest. Yes. Iya Affo Iya a culturalist and a historical trauma specIyalist. She is certified in multiple trauma modalities, so she's a trauma specIyalist and she's also a dependent of a long line of traditional healers from West Africa.
She's also a chief in a village of Oida. I don't know if I pronounced that correct. Correct me, Iya. Wida. Wida. Thank you.
Maurizio Benazzo: You're welcome.
Zaya Benazzo: And she's also a high priestess in the Yoruba tradition.
Maurizio Benazzo: And Iya has visited more than 30 countries around the world. Like in West Africa, she lived among medicine men and women to learn the ways of the shaman and to understand the truth about the transatlantic slave trade.
In China. She lived in the Shalin temple in IndIya. She lived in NRA while learning the inco and ideology, and then serving the Neva nation in the LL River IndIyan community. E found the home among the egalitarIyan indigenous people of North America. So our knowledge is cross cultural in ways that are, is completely mind blowing and heart opening.
So it's such a joy to have you with us.
Zaya Benazzo: So welcome Iya and thank you so much for being with us today.
Iya Affo: So thank you so much for having me. And I'm so excited to be here.
Zaya Benazzo: Likewise. Yeah. Maybe we can begin by if you could share, how did you start on this journey? Learning about historical trauma, what set you off to, to travel around the world to learn about cultures and to start learning about historical trauma? What was your personal journey? Yeah,
Iya Affo: I think as long as I can remember going back in my childhood, I struggled with tremendous depression.
Yeah. And I just went through a lot of things emotionally. I grew up in a very Jewish community, and so I would see all my Jewish friends, and visit their families, and I would see their families interact in a way that was very different than my family. As we, as we started getting older, I would think Why is it so different for me and the black people in our community versus, my Jewish friends and in their community?
Why is it so different? We have similar socioeconomic backgrounds, our parents do similar jobs we have the same education, but the trajectory is so different for us. Why is that? And then as time started going and we got to ages where my friends would be in Hebrew school, I would literally be outside of the temple with my face on the glass, looking inside trying to know what are they doing in there.
And sometimes the rabbis would invite me to come inside and allow me, to participate or, to at least listen, and I started to wonder well. What language did my people speak and what are our stories? And why is there such a, an emphasis on remembering the Holocaust?
And everybody knows that, even my friends can talk to me about the Holocaust and they know facts about it and they control the narrative about it. What about the slave trade? And where did my people come from? And where's our Hebrew school? Why don't I have something like this?
And so it really got me thinking. And I remember it being so intense that I thought, Did something happen to our DNA? Is there something wrong? With our DNA that we have so much suffering and so much struggle to overcome what has happened in the past and and that, that's really for me where it started.
So that piqued my interest at a very young age. I was, you know, always a traveler. So one I traveled a lot as a young person with my family. But once I got to age 17 and 18 where I could travel on my own. I just started traveling to just understand other cultures and understand how other people deal with trauma.
And that, that's really what got me going. Yeah, that's what happened.
Zaya Benazzo: And we can maybe talk about that later. Probably, I would assume that's where you found the seeds for healing on your journey. That exploration led you to your goal. Your own healing journey.
Iya Affo: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Zaya Benazzo: Yeah maybe you can share and teach us like what you have learned about historical trauma and how does it manifest in different communities and why some communities are more impacted than others or why there is more resources or resilience available. And I don't know if that's a question, if that's the case, maybe you will correct me there.
Maybe resilience is everywhere, but I'm putting too many questions. So maybe you can just speak about what you have learned, how trauma has manifested in different communities. And I, you speak so eloquently about faces of trauma. Sure.
Iya Affo: Sounds good. The thing about trauma is Certainly some communities are more resilient than others, right?
We're all resilient because we're all here, right? So we're not, I'm not going to challenge anybody's resilience, right? We're still here. We have still survived, but there are. Communities that have a more full expression of resilience than others. And I think what starts to happen is, when we look at trauma, are we looking at trauma that happens in communities where people still have the tools that they need to be resilient?
What I realized One of the big differences between my friends that were Jewish and my black friends and family growing up, I looked at my Jewish friends, and I was envious of the fact that they still had language, when I would go to my friend's houses, we would speak Yiddish, I still, no little Yiddish words now, but, In the home, Yiddish was spoken, so there was still some language that was there.
When we got up to rites of passage age, I went to bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs, and I would hear about brisk ceremonies for circumcision for younger siblings and cousins and things like that. All of these, a lot of these cultural traditions and religious Traditions and ceremony were still intact.
I was blown away when I found out that it is your birthright. to touch Israeli soil at some point in your life when you are Jewish. And there are all of these organizations that will help you if you don't have the money to travel on your own. There are organizations that will help you so that you have the opportunity to travel.
to make that pilgrimage home. So all of these things, that people could still be connected to their ancestral land, that you could still be connected to religion. If I went to synagogue with, my friends and I could participate and hear things going on and be a part of religious ceremonies and there would be satyrs and.
All kinds of specIyal events that I was able to be a part of big Yom Kippur things and, all of these Rosh Hashanah and, we would have all these ceremonies and traditions. Having that connection to who you are ancestrally helps to mitigate some of the damage of trauma, right?
If we think about it, if within the ChristIyan tradition, if, Somebody passes away in your family, and you are heavily relIyant upon your church community. You're waiting for Sunday to come, so that you can go to church, so that you can hear the words, so that you can sing the songs, so that you can have fellowship.
with others in your community, or you have Bible study on Wednesday, you need to get to Bible study because that's going to help you process some of the things that you're going through. So in communities and cultures where these things are still intact, there's the ability to have a more full expression of resilience.
I want to be careful in how I say that because Every ethnic group has had adversity, right? At some point in history, we all have had adversity at some point in history. So I don't want to take that away from anybody. And I don't say, the Holocaust is a horror, one of the worst crimes ever committed against humanity.
Horrible and people suffered and there is still suffering and there's still the impact on the people. We can never, invalidate that for anybody. To have those pieces still intact, it helps you to have the resilience. So when I look at like African American people, and, or really Africans throughout the dIyaspora, and I think about last names.
I I'm a name changer. So for a long time, growing up, I would change my name. Okay, I'm going to be called this now. Okay, I'm going to be called that now. Okay, I want to be called this. I never was connected and anchored, really, to a name. And then as more, the more I developed in this work, I go, well, hello, what percentage of Africans in the dIyaspora are connected to slave master last names?
Okay, I cannot find the statistic yet, but it has to be, what? 90%, 95% maybe are Jones and WillIyams and Smith and Brown and Murray and Johnson. All of those names, right? Those are not our names. Those names belong to the people that owned our ancestors. So if every time you speak your name, you are imprinting again the fact that you, your ancestors were owned by somebody else, what does that do to you spiritually, vibrationally, right?
If we want to really take it to the foundation, to the core, but what does that do for you also psychologically? How do you have that full expression of resilience when you don't have even connection to your name? In many First Nation cultures, when you introduce yourself, you start by saying who your people are and where they come from.
And in doing that, you allow the person that you're introducing yourself to have an understanding of who you are. Who your people are, where you come from. That's really how they know you, by your ancestors, by the land that you originated from. If we as African people, and even some First Nation people who have lost their way, right?
If we don't even know where we come from, right? We don't know. Where our ancestral land is. We don't have connection to the names that came before us. How do we have that North Star to help us find our way, right? And to find our way in the world or find our way back to ourselves. One of the most powerful things that happened to me was being able to trace my people back to Benin Republic West Africa to, which was once Dahomey and to marry my husband who is West, is Beninese and exposed me to the opportunity to have ritual and ceremony.
And the first thing they did was say, You have to have a name. You don't have a name. And so my first ritual and ceremony was to determine who am I? So the first thing they said was, okay, we're going to go and talk to the ancestors. We're going to talk to the deities and find out who this woman is.
And the first name that was given to me was Wekeno. And that means mother or owner of the universe. And then the second name that was given, which is more in our tradition is more of a title, which is Iya, which is Holy Mother. So in finding Holy Mother of the Universe, my life started to make sense.
Because I came into this world being a mother and a nurturer and taking care of everyone around me, right? So I can go back to age 2 4 and see that nurturer, that mother. So when I was bestowed those names and that title, I said, ah, I have value. I know who I am. This has always been with me, even before I realized it was a part of me.
So when I make my decisions in life, you remember what your path is, your destiny is, that you're a mother, you're a holy mother. You're the mother of the universe. You must have patience because you must start to see all of these people as your children. So even the people that are hurting you and that are aggressing you, that have molested you, these are your children.
And you must interact with them as you would a child, and that in and of itself is healing, right? If you can see the person that aggresses you and molests you as a person, they're not quite there yet. They, they have to have, you have to give grace, you have to give mercy. This is part of your role.
And this is even teaching you to be in your role. Because if you are the mother, you have grace. And you have mercy even in the face of adversity. So this is the importance of having those tools that we use for resilience. I have to touch and I, I take the direction that spirit leads me.
And so I'm going to assume that spirit is leading me here because we have people that have gone through abuse. And are coping with abuse that are on the call right now. So I have to say that even in the face of abuse, and even in the face of severe hurt, we have to remember that we live in the physical world for evolution.
And we live in the physical world so that we can keep growing, evolving, raising our consciousness. When we start to heal pain and we start to heal trauma, we have to remember those pieces and remember that we only grow when we face adversity. We don't grow when we're resting. If life is easy and we're kicked back, it's a rest period.
We're not really growing. When we are facing adversity is when we are having our growth. Thank you. And it's painful. It's painful. And I have to acknowledge that pain and that hurt. But it's part of what our journey is in this lifetime. And it changes who we are as people. If I have not gone through the adversity that I've gone through, I cannot be the person that I am today.
And the thing I am most proud of in myself. is my ability to love human beings. That's what I'm most proud of. When you face me, when you come before me, I instinctively search for the best part of you. I look for it. It might be a seed. And that's okay, because when I find that seed, I know then how to empower you and hold you so that you can have your growth.
That's what I'm most proud of. If I had not gone through some of the horrors that I've gone through, I don't have the ability to be that human being. And that's what I'm most proud of.
Thank you. That's part of the adversity and that's part of being able to have our full expression of resilience. This physical world is not meant for us to be easy, the physical world is meant for us to do work.
Zaya Benazzo: So what I'm hearing is two aspects of the beginning of the healing process that you're mentioning. One is turning towards our pain. Because sometimes the pain is so big that we just want to run away or numb it just because we can't handle it. But we cannot avoid turning towards the pain.
And the other aspect I'm hearing Is looking for the lineage for the root for the cycles that might be still moving through us and expressing the cycles that our ancestors started, and they're still living in our lives. So start looking and studying and learning about lineage and. Yeah,
Maurizio Benazzo: see the patterns that they are repeating.
Zaya Benazzo: That's right. Might be consciously or unconsciously repeating.
Iya Affo: That's right. That's right. Because we all have faced adversity. We all have traditional ways that we have managed adversity. And when we can tap back into some of that, it will help us to manage our current day adversity. Some of the reason that many communities.
Struggle to have a full expression of resilience is because they have been stripped of their tools to manage adversity. I talk often about this story, and if you've heard me talk before, you might have heard me say it. But a few years, ugh, we have to do everything COVID, pre COVID, post COVID, right? So pre COVID I was at a conference in Flagstaff, Arizona, and at lunch, they brought in these dancers from the White Mountain Apache tribe.
So they were singing and dancing and it was powerful. And I remember thinking like, Oh, there's more to this than entertainment. This is certainly not entertainment. This is, a traditional something that they used to do. So I asked the dancers and I said, What was this? What is this dance?
And what is this the singing? It's really impacting me and he said to me that when the Apache used to go to war, they will go out to war and we see things in war and experience things in war right that potentIyally can be traumatizing for us when they return from war, they would perform that dance.
And that song in 2022, we'll say that was their debriefing, right? We have ways that we debrief our soldiers when they come back from war. That was the Apache way of debriefing. So that's how they got their neurological regulation. Because if we go to war we have to be in fight or flight, we have to be in stress response, because we have to be in surviving, right?
In survival mode. We move into, we must survive. That's how we fight war. When we come home, we are still in that level of stress response. If we take that level of stress response back to our family, back to the community, we're going to be destructive in the community. So we have to have a process where we neurologically regulate first, Then clean up, it's also on a spiritual level, cleaning up our, our spirit and making sure that our essence is clean and ready to return back to our people.
And then we return, and we return regulated and cleansed so we don't bring all of that back to our community. That was a tool for neurological regulation. That was a tool for mitigating the damage of trauma. But when we have colonization and we have historical trauma, we're stripped of those tools,
Maurizio Benazzo: right?
Iya Affo: If we're stripped of our traditional tools to manage these things, we have to find artificIyal ways to have neurological regulation or destructive ways to have neurological regulation. So then we have addiction, right? We have all levels of addiction, right? We have sex, we have alcohol, drugs Amazon, the internet, all of those addictions so that we can have neurological regulation.
That's what happens when we are stripped of our culture.
Zaya Benazzo: And for the brain, there is no difference, how we regulate,
Iya Affo: right? That's right.
Zaya Benazzo: Whether
Iya Affo: yeah. That's right.
Zaya Benazzo: I you also talk about epigenetics, and I know something that set you on your quest was like, also, How does that live in our DNA?
Maybe you can share something about what you've learned from epigenetics, how that trauma historical trauma is passed on from one generation to the next. And we don't even know yet how many generations, or maybe we do.
Iya Affo: First, I'm going to preface it by saying that We know that trauma passes from one generation to the next through the science of epigenetics.
We've learned that. We also know that positive experiences. And healing also go from one generation to the next,
Maurizio Benazzo: which
Iya Affo: is why I love the science of epigenetics, because this, for me, gave the opportunity to affect the future generations. If I know, if I now know that how I interact with my granddaughter and how I groom my children to be parents, can impact potentIyally 14 generations after me, I now have new motivation to change some of my behaviors and work with my neurological regulation and work with some of those things.
So benevolence and positive childhood experiences also go one generation to the next. Okay. But if we talk about historical trauma and how this impacts us, and this for me is absolutely mind blowing. This information has been out, almost 30 years. So this is not new. Dr. Rachel Yehuda has been talking about this for, almost 30 years.
Dr. Yellow Horse Braveheart Jordan, Dr. Marie Yellow Horse Braveheart Jordan. She's been talking about this since the 90s as well. So this is not new. Okay, let's do storytelling. If I have an ancestor from nine generations ago that's on the continent of Africa during the slave trade, right? So that's about nine generations back for me where my ancestor would be during the slave trade.
Now there's my ancestor doing day to day work. And has heard that somebody potentIyally is going to steal me and take me to the new world. Because that information was traveling back, right? I don't know if that's going to be a foreigner, if that's going to be a settler or European, or an African from another tribe.
I don't know, but what I know is, there's the potentIyal for me to be stolen. So as I move and do my day to day work. I must become hyper vigilant, right? I better be hyper vigilant because this could be happening at any point in time. The DNA does not change. The genetic information does not change. The expression of that genetic information is what changes.
Suddenly, I'm hypervigilant. I'm looking around. Okay, is there something? Is there anyone? Okay. My hearing is going to change, potentIyally, right? If I hear a stick break in the forest, Is that an animal? Is that a human? I'm going to learn to differentIyate animal breaking the stick from human breaking the stick.
Because my body, I'm in survival mode. So I'm now moved into the survival part of my brain. And I am going to, my body is innately going to adapt to the hostile environment in which I live. If I'm walking along, my smell might change. I can smell, oh, there was an animal that was just here. There was a human that was just here.
There was somebody from my tribe just here. There was a foreign person just here. That's how keen my sense of smell can get because I'm in this hostile environment and I need that for survival. All of those switches will really make it simple. But all of those switches that just got turned on in order to survive.
somebody stealing me, have the potentIyal to stay switched on for up to 14 generations, according to the Cherry Blossom Study. You can look that up. Cherry Blossom Study will talk about it and they'll say 14 generations. So for potentIyally 14 generations, I can be hypervigilant, more hypervigilant. I can have, Hearing that can differentIyate things.
We don't always like to talk about the sixth sense, right? The feeling and the spiritual thing, but that is going to increase too, right? I can come somewhere and I can send my body consent that somebody else is going to be. That somebody else is in that area, so all of that can go generation after generation.
So now, if we think about my son. And he walks into a classroom and he's had trauma from his ancestor all those generations ago. And then they've had the trauma of what happened once we got to the new world. And then the trauma that has accumulated over time, all the way up to all the young, all the African American people being shot when he walks into the classroom and he presents in school.
Maybe he's hypervigilant. Maybe he has a hard time focusing. This is something that could have impacted him from all of those generations ago, and then become cumulative over time. As each next generation comes with their new trauma and so forth and so on. That's epigenetics. So the reason we're still talking about the slave trade today, is because we are still impacted by the slave trade today.
So what I'm absolutely saying is, if you're part of the BIPOC community, and this is why we often focus a lot on the BIPOC, Black Indigenous People of Color community, when we're talking about historical trauma, it's not that we don't care about the other communities, or it's not that they don't matter.
Of course they absolutely matter. Everybody matters, right? But if we're talking about the Black Indigenous People of Color community, And we have this historical trauma that came from all these generations ago, layered with new trauma from each generation. And then in the world today, where we're still experiencing some oppression and violence and discrimination, we're going to have a lot of stress hormones in our system all the time.
Because each layer that we talk about is going to add just a little bit more. So if we're walking around if we're walking around with a lot of stress hormone in our system, our window of tolerance is much smaller. So if we looked at a scale of 1 to 10, right, 10 being you're about to explode, it's And as a Black woman, I wake up at a four, right?
If I wake up at a four, just from the historical trauma, just from the stuff that I deal with day to day, maybe, stuff I have to deal with at work, the code switching I have to do as a Black woman, on and on, and I wake up at a four, and then I start to have the regular stressors that happen in day to day life.
I might be explode, I might explode sooner because my window of tolerance is smaller due to the historical trauma and the layering of the trauma. I saw a question pop up that I want to clear up right now. And I know you'll ask, have people ask questions later, but I want to clear this now. The historical trauma is not necessarily a factor in ADD ADHD, but the trauma specIyalists of today, the trauma big names like Dr.
Bruce Perry or Nadine Burke Harris, will say that often ADD, ADHD is misdIyagnosed. It will be called, you will be dIyagnosed with ADD, ADHD, sometimes the oppositional defIyance disorder, autism, a lot of these, dIyagnoses, when in fact the issue is trauma. So I'm not saying that trauma contributes to those dIyagnoses.
I'm saying according to our trauma rates, Those dIyagnoses are not always accurate. I'm not a psychologist or a psychIyatrist, so I don't speak from that perspective. I speak from the work of our, you're welcome, I speak, from the work of our trauma experts.
Zaya Benazzo: And prescribing medicine, medication, would never address the root cause of the issue that No.
Iya Affo: And that's so dangerous, and I'm glad you say it, because when I worked as on the, as a community, based clinicIyan in First Nation, you see a tremendous amount of dIyagnoses. 90 something percent of my caseload would be ADHD or ADD dIyagnoses. And often the caregivers would keep saying, The medication doesn't work.
They keep prescribing more and more medication. I would go to the doctor to the psychIyatrist with my client as an advocate and say, these medications are not working. And there would be more medication or time release medication then coupled with the medication. Sleep aids for kids, that are eight, nine and 10 years old taking sleeping pills to go to bed because they're so hyped up on this ADD, ADHD medication.
It doesn't work because we're talking about communities that almost 100 percent of the communities have experienced historical trauma and are continuing to experience trauma today. A lot of those symptoms are, have to do with trauma.
Zaya Benazzo: And not to mention that historically, these children of indigenous communities, they have a completely different way of learning.
The ancestors didn't learn by sitting on a chair in a classroom for six hours. It's completely unnatural. It's completely not connected to their DNA. Yeah. That's against their instincts, their nature. So we're forcing again, imposing Western mindset to other cultures and that's re traumatizing again.
That's right. And I'm just wondering if you can reflect because I could see that something similar can be happening and I'm asking for maybe finding a balance by bringing Western therapy to Indigenous communities, to BIPOC communities, which again, I'm sure it's helpful in some way, but also it goes against the lineages or the cultures of healing, if you can say something about that.
You're
Iya Affo: going to make me stand on my chair like this gets me invigorated, absolutely. Um, I'm going to step very carefully. In
communities where people have been traumatized, the best way for us to heal moving forward is to become self healing communities. We must be healing ourselves. And when we bring Western culture and Western ideology into our healing spaces, it is often more damaging. Let me give you an example. We went through COVID and I'm allowed to give this example.
I'm not betraying my son. I talk about this often, so I'll just put that there. During COVID, one of my sons really struggled because my husband has not been home and my other sons were are adults and they were, isolating due to COVID, so forth and so on. My younger son was really struggling when he went back to school.
He continued to struggle emotionally and the psychology, the socIyal worker at school wanted to have these conversations and help him. And she was very kind and loving and really wanted to help him. His he's, a Yorba Voodoo person. So we don't talk about a lot of negative things that happen.
Because our belief system says that you're then empowering and calling those negative things. So sometimes that sounds weird for people, but think about the secret, right? Everybody has embraced the idea of the secret and the laws of attraction and all that kind of stuff, right? So similar stuff, right? So it can be on the wavelength of what you can understand.
So if we are constantly talking about something negative and reliving something negative that has happened, that's against his cultural beliefs. So he's never going to have those conversations with you, although he needs some help. If we
Maurizio Benazzo: I keep discussing
Iya Affo: a rape that has happened to me, right? And I've discussed it, and I've talked about it, and I've dealt with it. And then I come back to therapy again, and to talk about it again, and then I come back and again, and I talk about it again, and then I get more detailed, and then I tell you all the different things, and then I do all this stuff.
Every time I go to therapy, I'm dysregulating my brain again. I'm becoming dysregulated again. When I become dysregulated again, I'm practicing being in my brain stem, which is the most primitive part of the brain, and the part of the brain that we use for survival. So if I keep going over this again and again, and I continually practice the neural pathway of being dysregulated.
I'm continuing to teach myself to be dysregulated and I'm continuing to empower the neural pathway for dysregulation. So there's, that's twofold, right? So that's a twofold thing. It goes against my cultural beliefs and my cultural ways of being. And it's potentIyally also disturbing to me. My neurobiology.
So we have a lot of psychologists and psychIyatrists that work out in indigenous communities, in First Nation communities, that will say that, our Western ways of managing trauma and mental health are not necessarily healthy for First Nation people and are potentIyally re traumatizing First Nation people.
So I say that carefully. I'm not a psychologist. I'm not a psychIyatrist. I don't claim to be. But if we look at things from our Indigenous perspective and then look at things from a neurological perspective, That's what we find. So what I ended up doing with my son, because I always want to give you a solution, right?
I don't always want to say what's bad, what's terrible. Here's the solution. What I did with my son was I took him to a trauma person that practices motivational interviewing. That's what I did with my son. And so when my son talks about behaviors, perhaps, that he wants to change, and he and this person who is a psychologist then says, but how did you survive that?
How did you get to this point? What did you do to get here? Then my son says oh, I do martIyal arts and so I do my Kung Fu. And I also like to go run. So I go on the trail, near my house and I run. And then I do this and I do this. When he's leaving that session, he feels like, Oh, I'm empowered.
I have tools. Oh, I'm not that bad. I used to be, at a 10, but today I feel more at a five or, and I've made progress because I have these tools that I utilize that helped me to do that. And so he walks away from that session, neurologically regulated. And the more we can be neurologically regulated, the more we have the ability to change the neural pathway that.
Cause us to have behaviors that perhaps we don't want to have.
Zaya Benazzo: Yeah. I love that, that she amplified the tools he was already using. They're not even tools. I hate the word tools because then you have to fix things with the tools. Exactly. Exactly. We were filming recently in Palestine and in the West Bank, and we came after releasing the The Wisdom of Trauma movie, which had a huge, it was very well received.
Around the world. And suddenly I found myself that everything I knew about trauma collapsed. And I just felt wow, even the concept of trauma is such a Western, again, invention. It's something that's not too fully deconstructed, but I found it. Yeah, it just fell apart, like it didn't, it was not applicable to even use the word trauma there.
So I'm just wondering for you maybe if you have experienced that in your journey of finding your roots and finding your tradition, like how is there such an understanding of trauma or how is that addressed and And taught or healed, like what is the approach that your tradition takes towards healing?
Iya Affo: It's such a I'm glad you asked that question. It's such a beautiful way from in my perspective for looking at the things that are happening in our physical world and in our day to day life. From our perspective. We all have a unique energetic configuration, right? And my energetic configuration makes me who I am and yours makes you who you are.
And so when we experience things in life, it might change our energetic configuration. And so we are constantly doing things. to restore the energetic configuration. If we look at it from a neurological perspective, we can see it in the same way, right?
We have a level of neurological regulation, and then we go through certain things in life that may cause us to be dysregulated. And so we do things in order to re regulate ourselves. So we do ritual. We do cleansing ceremony. We're constantly using the nature in order to restore our neurological regulation or our spiritual vibration, right?
Every leaf, every flower has a different essence, has a different vibration. So we use certain leaves in order to heal certain conditions. We use drumming, and drumming is another form of healing. Again, we're talking vibrations, and we're talking neurological regulation. Because if we think about 2022, we know that drumming and anything with rhythm is going to help us neurologically.
Our ancestors already knew those things. So drumming is another way that we utilize healing. We use water a lot for cleansing and for healing and for neutralizing. The beads I wear, they're beads that we use that are for export and that are, just for fun. And then there are beads that have gone through certain ritual and certain ceremony that caught that, that have been a certain vibration.
They're made of certain things that come from the earth and cause them to have a certain vibration. So depending on different things in my life or what I'm going through or how I feel, I wear different beads. I wear different colors. I do different things to work with my neurological regulation and work with my spiritual being.
If we take it outside of spirituality and we look at it in a more practical sense, Here's another way that we have been able to manage trauma or that we learned to manage trauma. When I moved and lived in IndIya for a period of time, I lived in a very minimal lifestyle, right? I lived in an ashram, in a Hindu ashram.
We slept on the floor. We had clean water sometimes we didn't. I had to hand wash all of the clothes, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What concerned me most in this environment was the thought of hand washing clothes because I had my young son, and one of his school uniforms was white, and there was a lot of red clay, and I thought my goodness, this is the worst thing that ever happened to me is trying to hand wash this white uniform being worn by a seven year old.
What I learned to do was, and this is how we clean the clothes, is you go, to a river area, there's a big rock, and you take the clothes, and you bang the rocks, the clothes on the rocks, I see somebody nodding, yes, ladies, okay, and so you do that, and then there's the, there's some scrubbing that you do, you have a scrubber, and then you're trying to scrub away the debris that's on the clothing.
I learned, first of all, I learned to love that period of time because it became a moving meditation for me. If we remove it from spiritual because everybody doesn't embrace the spiritual part, take it away from the spiritual part. The rhythm of hitting the clothing against that rock and the sound and the rhythm of the scrubber scrubbing the fabric is neurologically regulating.
So when we live in a world that focuses on Capitalism, growth, and expansion, we have removed a lot of the ways that we had traditionally to constantly be regulating ourselves throughout the day. I don't have the opportunity in the United States. I'm not banging the clothes on the rock. I'm putting the clothes into the machine and I'm going on about my day and I'm multitasking with 59, 000 other things.
And I'm staying constantly neurologically dysregulated. The neurological dysregulation is what we can call trauma, right? That's the issue. It's what happens to us as a result of having neurological dysregulation. If I'm neurologically dysregulated, I'm going to be aggressive, I'm going to be hostile, I'm going to be in the most primitive part of my brain, I'm therefore going to have primitive behaviors I'm going to struggle to have to be self reflective, I'm going to struggle to inhibit.
Maladaptive behaviors. All of that has to do with neurological dysregulation, so we can call trauma this neurological dysregulation. When we lived differently, and we valued relationships, and we still had a relationship with the earth, and we still had relationship with one another, We have ways of neurologically regulating because the most impactful way for us to feel safe and regulated and for our brain to feel regulated is through positive human interaction.
That's at the top of the list. We must have relationship to heal this trauma and the way we're healing this trauma is by activating the pleasure center of our brain. We have good relationship. We then, therefore, activate the pleasure centers of the brain. When the pleasure center of the brain gets activated, it releases the feel good hormones, right?
We get dopamine and serotonin and epine and endorphins and, all of the things in our system, oxytocin, that make us feel good and safe and healthy. And satIyated and regulated. The whole way that we are living in society supports neurological dysregulation, i. e. trauma. Because the very things we need in order to not experience that and in order to mitigate trauma.
The adversity and lessen the blow of adversity is removed because we don't value those things anymore. We live in communities where we barely know our neighbors. We don't really interact with our neighbors. We don't have time to interact with friends. We don't have time to be out in nature.
We definitely don't bang clothes on the rock and to clean them and scrub them with our hands.
Zaya Benazzo: Yeah. Wow.
Maurizio Benazzo: Yeah.
Zaya Benazzo: Thank you. This is so informative. And I just feel everything you're talking in my body. It's you're speaking not to my intellect, but you really, it's going deeper. It's so intuitive also what you're sharing.
It's knowledge that perhaps we all have, but we have forgotten it, that's
Iya Affo: the key. We forgot. Yeah.
Maurizio Benazzo: Yeah. Yeah, that's the to me the refreshing part of talking to you since we first met you that is so not you don't use big words. You don't use the big word that make the things complicated.
It's like I feel your heart and your words are connected. And I feel that what you say. Makes sense. The simplicity, of doing a simple action to reconnect ourself that the community. It's beautiful. It's a pleasure. I just
Zaya Benazzo: Thank you so much Iya. I for this enlivening and so informative conversation that I feel like we will be continuing. I don't know yet how it's going. This is just yeah,
Yeah. And deep gratitude to you. so much.
Iya Affo: Thank you. It was wonderful. I look forward to seeing you both soon and everybody. Thank you so much.
Maurizio Benazzo: Thank you. Thank you, everybody. Thank you, everyone.
Iya Affo: Take good care.
