ALTÆR: Iya Affo
===
[00:00:00]
Maurizio Benazzo: Good morning, good evening, wherever you are in the world. My name is Maurizio.
Zaya Benazzo: My name is Zaya. Welcome everyone.
Maurizio Benazzo: We are speaking to you to the ancestral and city territory of the Southern Pomo in Coast Miwok. People currently called Sebastopol, California. Yeah. And we are so excited to be with you.
Zaya Benazzo: so happy to have you and so happy for our guest today. Our dear friend Iya Affo, who has been a guide in our journey with the Eternal song. And she became a very important voice in the film. We are delighted. Time to expand. She has so much to offer. Yeah. [00:01:00] And film is always a powerful communication way, but also very limiting because of the time and the space.
Maurizio Benazzo: Iya Affo is aist an historical trauma consultant. She earned Western certification as a trauma specialist and she's a descendant of a long line of traditional healers from Benin in West Africa.
Iya advocate for the harmonization of traditional medicine and western medicine for true holistic healing. It's such a joy to have met you in person. And a joy every time we see you. Thank you Iya for existing in this planet. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Iya Affo: Thank you so much. Such a great introduction.
Thank you for having me. I wanna first acknowledge that I am on the land of the Akma Autum people tribe, the Hoku people here in outside of Phoenix, Arizona. I want to acknowledge Alafia to you who just [00:02:00] aff me, Ana. I want to acknowledge the ancestors of this land for being such great stewards of this land and allowing us to exist and to prosper and to serve.
I wanna acknowledge the struggle of the current day people and my hope for the future generations. I also want to acknowledge my own ancestors and welcome them to the space. I acknowledge your ancestors and welcome them. Space to allow us for healing. And thank them for allowing you to be here.
Before I go one step further, I really, and this is truly from the bottom of Zaya and Mauricio. I have never met, people, filmmakers, people that are operating in this space that are like you. You respect all of the traditions, respect our ways of being.
You have embraced it. You have embodied it, and [00:03:00] you present it with so much reverence and love and respect. It is so rare. When I first was introduced, I wasn't sure, I was like, how are they gonna present me? How are they gonna represent? I have come to truly trust in everything. I always will show up for you.
I always support you. I trust fully in the way that you tell our stories, that you embrace all of the people. You are a gift. We need you. We need the work that you are doing. Please continue doing that work. And I'm here with my lineage supporting you and holding you in every step. So I honor you. I thank you so much for the work.
Yeah, thank you.
Maurizio Benazzo: You have no idea how this word. Yeah. And through our bodies. You have no idea. Thank you, sister.
Zaya Benazzo: Yeah. Oh, you have been support and your [00:04:00] ancestors too. You've traveled with us all this years. Your spirit traveled with us. Thank you dear. Yeah, we'll be in the background and we'll let you do the introduction to your new body of work that you will present.
Iya Affo: Sounds good? Sounds good.
Zaya Benazzo: Thank you. So
Iya Affo: I I present my, our work from a place of, I started to see this drive and this need within our communities to participate in ancestral healing. Through the work we have done together with Sam, through my own work, through the work that Thomas Huble does, through, all of these great people holding work and in this space, what has continued to come.
From the community is a need for healing through the [00:05:00] ancestral lineage, right? Trying to understand how to heal ancestors, understanding that we have endured trauma on many different levels through the generations. And people asking, how do we heal our ancestors? How do we heal intergenerational trauma?
And I feel like the question. Has been empty all of this time. Nobody really has the answer, often. If we have access to traditional healers, if we have access to medicine people, if we have access to travel to different parts of the world, then maybe these questions get answered, right? Maybe some of this get gets answered, but even when we travel afar, and maybe we participate in ayahuasca, maybe we part in some [00:06:00] of the traditional voodoo ways of being or orisha, Yoruba Hawaiian traditional ways and of healing, even when we participate in those ways of healing, when we come back to our everyday life.
How do we continue the healing and moving forward, right? Sometimes we expect that we go, we receive ayahuasca, we receive some of these great blessings and healings from traditional medicine people around the world, and we think there's going to be a miracle. Or we think this has helped indigenous people for eons since time in memorial.
This can also heal me. But the reality in that is we can go and receive these great healings and we can sit among some of the most powerful energy movers [00:07:00] healers in the world. But if we don't know how. To continue those practices and to have a way of life that supports that indigenous way of being.
Our healing will get lost, right? Our healing will dissipate. That energy will change and shift and go back to the same energy that we've been carrying all along. So really is about how do I honor the ancestors? How do I see my body as a sacred vessel for healing? How do I realign with the divinities? How do I realign with land?
How do I merge and integrate and balance the scene with the unseen in order to have sustainable healing? That not only affects me, but affects [00:08:00] my ancestors maybe seven generations back and my descendants perhaps seven to 14 generations moving forward. So that's really what this work is about. Alter I use this word that looks so different and is not really what we're used to seeing, but I use this word because I wanted to acknowledge the body as an altar coming back to the body as an altar so that we are altering A-L-T-E-R, altering our ways of being and our genetic expression and the lives of our descendants and our unseen actors that came before us.
So that's really what a, what this work is about. That's why the word looks [00:09:00] the way that it does. This is our call to reclaim what has been carried in silence, to honor the gifts of the body and the ancestors, and to restore wholeness in ourselves and in our lineage. So really we're gathered here today, and hopefully again in the future to explore the body as a shrine, right?
The bones as scrolls and pathways for ancestral healing.
I think one of the first things that we can do in this moment is to get into what I call coherence. I started to recognize this very sacred and important framework of getting ourselves, connecting with other humans [00:10:00] and then conducting or creating, taking action in what we wanna do. So let's take a moment to get into this coherence.
I know it's a strange word. It's a word that we don't often use or hear, but I want you to feel embody what coherence is. So I'm gonna ask you to do some breathing and I'm gonna give you some instruction. So let's take a moment to regulate ourselves.
And be fully in this space with one another.
Often we like to think about healing as a linear [00:11:00] process, but healing is communal, right? As human beings, we're wired for interconnectedness. We're wired to be tribal. So even those of us, like myself that think we like to be loners or think we feel better existing without all of the connections of community and family, really as human beings, we're wired for interconnectedness.
Let's take a moment to take. I'm gonna have you first take four as we inhale for four, we're gonna hold, and then we're gonna exhale for six. Okay? Let's begin. Inhale for four.[00:12:00]
Exhale for six.
Inhale for four.
Hold.
Exhale for six
last time. Inhale for four.
Hold. Exhale for six.
Now, I want you to take a moment and think about someone or something that you deeply love and [00:13:00] appreciate.
Now allow that warmth to feel your chest.
That is coherence. The feeling that you get after you're centered and in this moment. And then think of something that you have so much love or appreciation for. I can feel it again, just talking about it again, right? I start to feel. Under my sternum, right? It can almost bring you to tears. Allow that to wash over, fill up in your chest.
That's the feeling of coherence. That's ultimate alignment. [00:14:00] And when we're in coherence and then we make connection like we're doing today, it magnifies any and all things that we wanna do. Move
cohere, connect, conduct, get in alignment, have human connection, take action.
In terms of indigenous ways of knowing, right? One of the things that we look at when we think about healing and let me preface by saying when I say indigenous, right? Sometimes if we live in the United States, we think of indigenous only [00:15:00] as one particular population, right? We think of indigenous as Native American people.
But of course, when I use the term indigenous, I'm talking about across the world, people who are indigenous to a particular land, people who are typically collectivists in nature. If we think about indigenous ways of knowing our cosmologies. Within our com cosmologies, we understand life to be interested.
So our bodies, the ancestors, the land, the divinities, are all part of the same sacred web, right? Healing is never individual. It's relational, and it's ancestral. Many of our Western approaches [00:16:00] focus only on what we can, right? But an indigenous framework, the unseen, the ancestral presence, the spiritual memory and lineage energy is equally real, right?
And the invisible, the these are the invisible, far existence and healing requires honoring both the invisible and the visible. Our body is our shrine. Okay? Each bone joint fold in the body is sacred. It's a place where spirit resides. Our bodies are living alters. It houses memory and wisdom, ancestral knowledge.
It houses grief and it houses our gifts. So when we talk about ancestral healing, we can have guidance [00:17:00] right through our own bodies. So when people say to me, Iya how go through how do I heal the ancestors? Or how do I heal the historical trauma? We have to heal physically what's happening in the body, right?
What's happening with our neurobiology and with our physiology, but we're also healing. The unseen, healing our relationship to our ancestral energies, healing our relationship to earth and to land healing our relationship to divinities, right? Things other than the ancestors, other spirits that we are in connection with and in relationship with.
Making sure we're harmonizing with those energies and that's the true healing, that's sustainable healing that not only impacts us in this lifetime, but impacts our ancestors and impacts our descendants. [00:18:00] This work is a little bit interesting for me because the way the ancestral bone mapping came to me and came to be a part of me, I was well aware of true.
That used bones in divination practices and that used bones for various reasons. I was also very well aware of how important it is in my African tradition, in our Demian way of being, that we honor the human body after it passes and that we honor the bones. And that sometimes you have people that dig up graves and steal bones because of the power and the energy that is inside the bones.
Often. How this type of work comes to me [00:19:00] and perhaps to other people in healing lineages. So I'm thinking, I was thinking one night about how important ancestral healing is, right? And the fact that I had been able to take advantage of connection to medicine people and connection in other parts of the world.
And that's part of how my healing was able to exist. But what happens for people in a day-to-day life that don't have access to these areas, or what happens with people who do have access, go and receive one of the healing modalities of indigenous people all over the world and come back and rejoin society the way they were existing before.
And I thought, there's no way that healing is sustainable if we continue to have the same mindset that we have. If we only honor the scene and be [00:20:00] measured or felt, or seen in the physical world, how can we ever sustain any level of healing? How do we become aligned again with the unseen energies?
How do we come back and hold the energy that we were able to manifest in our bodies, or that we were able to embody through some of these ancestral practices and traditional ways of being? How would that be possible? So anyway, off to sleep, I go and I wake up at probably about two, three o'clock in the morning one night, and I couldn't go back to sleep.
And I heard this term, bone mapping. And I thought, oh, wait, bone mapping. Huh? Bone mapping. Bone mapping. What's bone mapping? Why am I here? Why? Why is this term coming to me? Why am I, why are we talking about this? And so I kept preying on it. I kept meditating about it and I said, oh, of course the bones are scrolls, right?
The [00:21:00] bones hold. All of this ancestral knowledge, ancestral wisdom. It holds our gifts. Oh, this is almost the foundation of epigenetics, right? And trauma being passed generation to the next, or healing and benevolence being passed from one generation to the next. What endures longer than the bones. And so this is where I began this.
Into the idea around bone mapping and why that's a sacred practice in many indigenous cultures. I wanted to bring forward Hawaiian culture because this is another piece that's very strong in many Hawaiian cultures, the importance of bones. I also, of course, wanted to honor my own the Holian traditions and voodoo traditions because we are another group that honors the memory that's carried in bones.
[00:22:00] So both our own memory and our ancestral memory are carried within the bones. They're scrolls, their archives of grief, of gifts, of resilience and wisdom. Epigenetics shows us that trauma and resilience can be passed. Through generations. But indigenous peoples have long known this because bones, remember, some bones carry ancestral grief or interpreted stories.
Others carry gifts and resilience. But our task is to read the scrolls and discern what to release and what to continue to carry forward as a basic mapping, I wanna say as something that we can hold onto. We think about the skull [00:23:00] as having vision and wisdom, right? That would make sense, wouldn't it?
Vision and wisdom can go along with the skull. If we think about the ribs, we can think about grief and breath. And protection. If we think about the spine, think about it as the ancestral backbone, the pelvis, the womb and thresholds between the present and the past, or other thresholds. If we think about, we can think about roots and belonging.
I want I, I call this out to you because sometimes we need a hint as we start to experience and embody what we might need individually. Okay? I want you to take a [00:24:00] moment now, bring yourself back into that space of coherence where we were not too long ago.
And we can ask ourselves
if we bring one bone into awareness, one of the bones I just mentioned, or any bone that really calls to you,
what story might this bone be holding for me or for my lineage, right? What story might this bone be holding for me or for my lineage?[00:25:00]
Let's pause.
Notice any sensations. Images or words that come to you.
The bone mapping can be very fascinating because in reality we hear from ancestors in so many different ways, right? Some of us can get visions, some of us hear voices. Some of us see words. Some of us see numbers that might relate to ancestors. Some of us might just have a [00:26:00] knowing of something that we wanna do, but sometimes we need a little guidance.
And so bone mapping. Can allow us to have the guidance that we need to know where the healing needs to occur, or to know where the gifts are waiting for us. So we're just this as a guide to help us understand what needs to be healed, what ancestor might need. I need to focus on, might I need to focus on what do I choose to continue to bring forward in my lineage?
What do I need to release?
That's the space that we're in. Let the [00:27:00] bones guide us in this moment.
I wanna move on to a practical example when we're talking about bone mapping and what that can actually look like, right? If we think about it as a pattern of reading scrolls, it allows us to see the patterns of ancestral memory, to acknowledge them and to reclaim gifts. One of the most profound ways that our bones carry lineage memory is through birth, [00:28:00] fertility, and thresholds.
So I'm gonna tell you a personal story, how this connects. My mother wanted to have two children. She had my sister had to have a cesarean section to deliver my sister, and then desperately wanted a second child. She struggled to conceive me, had to go through many procedures, right? And you may not recognize, but so this is way back at, the late sixties, early seventies. She's going through procedures in order to be able to conceive. She's finally able to conceive me and then she has a second C-section to deliver me when it was time for me to give birth to my children. [00:29:00] My first child was a male child.
I come from a high heavily feminine family, and my first child was male. I was very afraid of bringing a black male into the world. So my son is 33 this year. Even 33 years ago, the thought of a black male coming into existence was overwhelming for me. I swore it was a girl all the way until the end when I, they had to do an ultrasound and I saw the testicles on the screen, and that was finally when I realized, oh my goodness, it really is a boy.
What am I gonna do? I was in bed for two weeks crying, literally. I know this probably sounds like over the top or dramatic, but this really was the fear that I had. I can remember my body. Contracting. I can remember everything in me clenching. [00:30:00] We get to join the birth. I had a fantastic I wanted to do a home birth.
But there was something that said, maybe not safe. Maybe go to the hospital. I don't know if this is a good time for you to try a home birth, but I was very determined to squat and have my baby as my ancestors had done. So I had a fantastic doctor. I was in Berkeley, California. So you know, people are a little bit more, open and progressive.
I'm in Berkeley, great doctor, private hospital. He's respecting me, respecting my wishes. I said, listen, I don't want a c-section, I don't want forceps. I don't want any of that. I'm gonna naturally have my baby. I will squat and have the baby. It doesn't matter how long the layer, I'm going to be there and do this.
He respects that I go into labor. I'm laboring. And I'm laboring. Laboring. And I'm laboring. We are 48 hours in. The baby is not coming out. I [00:31:00] have only dilated one to two centimeters, right? We need to get to 10, right? In order to have a baby. I'm one to 2 48 hours later. Finally, the doctor decides it's time.
I'm so sorry, but you're gonna need to have a C-section. It's putting too much stress on the baby. We're gonna have to take this baby through C-section, so I have the C-section. The baby's fine. Everything's wonderful. Life goes on. I get pregnant with my second baby. Okay? That was a fluke. The first baby.
That was a fluke. He was a larger baby. I was also shocked that I was having a boy on and on. I'm going to give birth naturally to this baby. I go into labor, I'm laboring. I do all the things. I'm determined to squat. 36 hours later, there's no baby that comes out. The doctor says, I'm so sorry. You're gonna have to have a [00:32:00] C-section again.
I have the C-section again. Third, baby. Third. I'm significantly older by now. I'm into my, I'm in a geriatric pregnancy, as they call it. They're very concerned about me. I'm gonna squat. I'm gonna have my baby. I'm gonna do the things. I go into labor. I labor. No more. You need to have a C-section, three C-sections.
Now, I had three sons, three C-sections. My granddaughter, my first granddaughter. Obviously not. All of my genetic information my physical, genetic information. However, some of my spiritual genera gen genetic information, her mom goes into labor. She has a beautiful [00:33:00] labor. I'm there.
We're doing all the things. We have candles. We're singing, we're dancing. My son is tremendous. Never lets her go. He's holding her. He is doing all of the things. We're laboring, and we get to the end. She's 10 centimeters dilated. Her cervix starts to re swell. The baby can't come out. We have to wait longer.
Finally, the baby starts to come out. Her shoulder gets stuck. We go through this very difficult deliverable, though she was able to be delivered. This is a thread. Ancestral knowledge and memory. If we go even further, we can look at, although it was not a daughter of mine giving birth, [00:34:00] we look at how the spiritual genetics imprints every generation, right?
The, my mother had difficulty conceiving me. She later have two C-sections. I had three. My granddaughter was born to a different mother without our physical DNA, yet she still carried the lineage energy. She had the spiritual DNA ancestral memory beyond genetics was present. Think about this. Black women in America face higher rates of infant mortality, maternal mortality, and birth complications.
These patterns are connected to a history of trauma, the slave trade, sexual violence for while pregnant, and the systemic stripping away of children and families. That history is embedded in the body, in the womb, in the bones. So through ancestral mapping, [00:35:00] we can read these ancestral scrolls in our bodies, noticing patterns, gifts, thresholds that may carry forward or be transformed.
In this particular scenario, we are looking how the womb, how the pelvis, the bones, and the pelvis have carried this ancestral memory, this ancestral in. We look at it in huge numbers. If we look at what happens to black women during labor and delivery the first year of life for black children around the United States, here's an interesting statistic that helps us to understand some of these ancestral patterns.
If we take a black woman who was born and raised in the United [00:36:00] States and we compare her maybe she's a black woman who has college education, middle class, born and raised in the United States. We compare her to a white woman, born and raised in the United States. Same college education, same socioeconomic background.
The black woman's baby is two to four times more likely to die in the first year of life than the white woman's baby. Doesn't matter what level of education. Doesn't matter what socioeconomic background, even high socioeconomic background, right? Black woman raised the United States high socioeconomic background.
White woman born, raised in the United States, black woman's baby two to four times, depending on where she's in the country, two to four times more likely to die within the first year of life. Yes, some of that has to do [00:37:00] with health and access to healthcare, but not all of it. Right now, if we take a woman, let's say, a Nigerian woman that was not born and raised in the United States, that does not come from the same lineage of babies being stripped away.
Not having access to not having to labor and work in the cotton fields right. While being in labor and while delivering a baby. Somebody that doesn't have that same lineage. And we compare the likelihood of the baby dying in the first year of life for her and a white woman with her same educational and socioeconomic background.
If we compare the two, we're gonna find the same likelihood of death within that [00:38:00] first year of life. It doesn't change. The lineage is different. The spiritual DNA is different. Spiritual DNA is not carried in the same way for the woman that didn't experience the transatlantic slave trade and subsequent colonization here and subsequent buying and selling and human trafficking that happened, and sexual exploitation that happened to black women here.
This is that ancestral pattern and memory being carried in the bones in the womb. So this is what we're talking about when we start talking about bone mapping and how to break or transform some of those wounds that are happening, but also how we access some of the gifts that are happening as well, [00:39:00] right?
If we think of. The jaw, maybe voice or expression is something that you struggle with. If we think of the feet, maybe we think of our capacity to be rooted and grounded. And maybe those are some of the things that we have to consider if we think about those bones. So what we start to do is we then understand where some of the blockages may be, where some of the healing may need to take place, and then we take action, right?
So once we see the stories that our bones carry, what do we do next? One way is to create an altar, a sacred space that honors ancestors and continue healing. We're gonna have a course on altering or on alter, and this bone mapping work, a course will start in about two weeks, where we're gonna go into more detail in some of these things.
But [00:40:00] one place to start is by creating an altar, making offerings of water and food and flowers, objects where we're having daily ritual tending to the altar prayer song. Every gesture can be sacred, right? Using the body as an altar to address some of these things. So this is some of the way that we can change and alter some of the spiritual genetics that are happening.
Some are some of that pain, some of the suffering that's happening within the bones that have happened to our ancestors. Here are some of the ways we can start focusing on those ancestors and focusing on some of that grief that we need to address. In the next piece, I wanna move into our roles of healing as women and as [00:41:00] men looks like, as with gender fluidity and all of those things.
But let's take a moment right now while we collectively honor the ancestors. And call forth the wisdom that we need in order to move forward in our own healing and in our lineage healing. This is an integral space. In our time together today, we wanna call forward that wisdom because we wanna walk away from the space today with our healing emotion.
So let's take a moment, take a breath, let's come into this space fully and wholly,
and what wisdom do we [00:42:00] need to call forward from which ancestors so that we can move forward in healing. Let's take a moment here.[00:43:00]
Okay. From our traditional indigenous perspective, [00:44:00] women and men have very different roles in healing. We are not talking about gender representation, but what we are talking about are energy, responsibility, ancestral flow, not labels. We honor everybody's lived experience, including non-binary and gender fluid identities, but the focus is on how energy moves in your bones, your and your lineage.
Men and women are recognized as carrying complementary energies within the lineage. Women are seen as portals of creation and carriers of ancestral men as ancestral memory, but men we see as anchors and stabilizers [00:45:00] and protectors. If we think about the energy of women and in western terms, we to take one and amplify it more than the other.
But what we know in indigenous culture is that balance and harmony are where healing begins. So ev, so women and men have equal and important balancing roles in. Healing of the family and healing of the lineage. So if we think about women, we think about women as portals of creation and healing, right?
Not just in creation of human life, but in creation of many things, in creation of business, in creation of all types of community efforts, right? Not just in terms of birthing human life, but we think about the bones and the energy in the [00:46:00] pelvis, the sacrum, the spine, the womb, the shoulders. Our role as guardians of life thresholds and ancestral memory we're very integral in most indigenous cultures where women are very integral to the healing process.
Ways to embody. We think about bone awareness. We think about ritual sharing wisdom, nurturing the sage and embody practices. We can think of hands on our pelvis and sacrum. Inhale our lineage energy and exhaling grief. If we think about men and their role, we think of anchors and guardians, stabilizers, protectors, and carriers of the ancestral backbone.
Thinking about ways to, [00:47:00] it's important for grounding presence, supporting others, and having conscious reflection, embodied practices. We can think about hands on the spine, the shoulders inhaling resilience and exhaling ancestral burdens. So sometimes, so the reason I bring up the roles in terms of male in female is because sometimes we don't quite understand what our role is or how we go about embodying some of the things that's gonna be helpful for healing the lineage in our indigenous ways of being.
We all have different roles. There's not a role that's more important than the other role, but it's important to have both energies coming [00:48:00] together in harmony in order to have healing. Traditionally, right in our in, in our indigenous ways of being people that were binary or gender fluid. That's always been since time in memorial.
People who were binary and gender fluid were people that were considered very sacred and very close to God because they carry such a great balance of both energies. And that too is what our supreme being carries is this great balance of both male energy and male. So people that were non-binary or fluid in their representation, they were always really revered and utilized to bring together both male and female within the community.
So this is also a very honored role. So even if [00:49:00] your energy or identity doesn't fit in the traditional male female framework, you still access these teachings because you may feel drawn to both energies, which is normal and beautiful and sacred, and you can experience them uniquely. You focus on listening to the bones and your lineage and integrating these energies that support healing and balance.
So this is important for every, everybody, no matter how you identify here, it's important to, to think about the merging and the balance of all, of both types of energy. I think we're getting close to where we might wanna have some questions. I think the last thing before we move into questions, we can start to talk about, have some of the healing centered practices.
Again, we're gonna go into these things a lot [00:50:00] more in depth in our course. But we can focus on some of the ways that you practice some of this embodiment is bone breath, right? Focusing on the spine or the ribs or the pelvis. Inhale. Energy flowing into these exhale, releasing ancestral patterns.
And maybe we're gonna do this several times and maybe several times throughout the day because this is the way we're gonna start to release some of the grief that we are embodying. We acknowledge the threshold, right? Having awareness on a bone with ancestral or a personal challenge, right? If we have a particular bone that is is really challenging for us, or something connected, something from the ancestors that are connected to a particular bone, we can ask silently, what ancestral story or gift is waiting for [00:51:00] me here?
What's there for me? What's waiting for me? What do I choose to release and what do I choose to carry forward? Think about ancestral alignment. Stand with your feet on the ground, right? Barefoot. Feel the connection to the earth. Visualize ancestors supporting and guiding you. And then you might add gentle swaying or stamping to great the energy.
This really is is really the essence of alter. How do we realign with our ancestral energy? How do we realign with the other divinities that exist? How do we integrate and harmonize with land and integrate all of those practices? Of the seen [00:52:00] and the unseen so that we're able to heal both and have holistic healing, able to sustain healing from other practices that we've been able to participate in.
How to heal what our ancestors has suffered and helps to recreate new for the descendants that come after us if we want to change our neurobiology and our future. Which is something that I've spent so many years talking about, right? Trauma impacts the neurobiology. Trauma impacts our physiology. This is essentially what trauma is, right?
When we experience something that causes us to exceed our capacity to cope and causes changes, therefore changes in our body chemistry or our brain chemistry, this is trauma. [00:53:00] So we're wanting to change what's happening in the physical body, and we absolutely have to focus on changes, how we think, how we feel, how we emote, how we EE relate, how we behave.
All of those things have to change, but those changes are sustainable. Only when we come into alignment with the spiritual. The ancestral aspects, the land earth aspects that also must stay in harmony and stay in alignment. This is how we can have that overall holistic, sustainable healing that's gonna last generations to come.
And let's not forget the piece of science that we can study even more through the cherry blossom study that teaches us that trauma or [00:54:00] healing, right? Not just trauma, but healing and benevolence can be carried on the DNA for potentially 14 generations. So when we get into alignment, when we are able to harmonize.
The seen and the unseen. We have the potential not only to change us the potential, not only to impact our ancestors, but our descendants for potentially for nation moving forward. So it's powerful work. And I invite you to come back and do some work with us in two weeks on September 27th when we un roll out the full ancestor healing course, the full alter course, which will happen over a course of eight weeks.
Zaya Benazzo: Thank you. So welcome. Wow. So many [00:55:00] questions, so many reflections, memory were coming through as I was listening to you, and what a powerful way, Paulo, through the bones to connect to our ancestors.
Iya Affo: Yes.
Zaya Benazzo: I remembered my grandmother was in a wheelchair, so she had a her back was cut. My mom or her life had back pain and that was passed down. So it's oh my God. Yes. That's a way to look also at an intergenerational, she actually called it a curse even wound or yeah. So thank you for that pointer.
Very powerful. Yes. Oh, that, yes,
Iya Affo: that is, and that, that's a powerful manifestation. That's. That's exactly what we're talking about. So what happens now if after that first generation of being paralyzed and having being in the wheelchair, what happens if we had been able to work through some of that healing and to get [00:56:00] some of that pain and grief out of the body?
What then happens, with the next generation? Exactly. Yeah, that was, yeah. Yes. I'm glad that came up. Yeah, I'm glad that came up. Yeah.
Zaya Benazzo: Yeah. And I also remember a lot of the indigenous elders would speak about the bones of the earth. They would say The mountains are the bones of Mother Earth, and when we dig and do mining and we destroyed the bones.
I was just thinking how that is also another way to see. Our ancestral wounding because of Mother Earth of the places where we live has been, she has been wounded as well. Yes. That connection, I was wondering, you were trained in Western science and psychotherapeutic approaches yourself, what you had to unlearn in order to begin to listen to your elders, to the ancestral ways.
And [00:57:00] what do you see is needed for Western psychotherapeutic approaches to shift? So the approaches more ancestral and historical and intergenerational.
Iya Affo: That's that's such a brilliant question and my reality is this, I spent, I. If you recall, and we have talked about this together before and in, in other programs we've done together, but one of the ways that I got into this work is because of my own psychological, right?
I spent all the way through young adulthood in extreme, depression and anxiety and pain. And I utilized the Western system for so long. I tried very hard. My mother was, a doctor and so she encouraged when I started to experience depression and pain very early on she was taking me to [00:58:00] therapist and this therapy and this group therapy and therapies and therapies, and nothing was touching it, there was just nothing touching it.
And even I then did, you know the yogas and. And I love yoga. I'm still a big, practitioner of yoga and all of these things, but that still wasn't the pieces that were able to heal me. So I went through the training myself because I wanted to understand what people are taught and what to do with it.
But I quickly realized that, talk therapy is gonna be wonderful to maybe make sense of what has happened to you or make sense of your world, or even to debrief some of it. But what we know and what had to be unlearned is how do I allow somebody to make sense of what has happened to them in a way that does not continue to retraumatize them?[00:59:00]
If we think about it for every time we sit down and we have this conversation. I revisit those traumas. If I don't revisit them in a way that my brain can stay regulated, I visit them and retraumatize myself and reregulate my brain in every conversation. And I think of that as some people that, they go to therapy and then they say, I go to therapy and then I have to go get a glass of wine after, right?
I go to therapy and then I go to the bar because I need wine after. That makes sense because maybe you went to the therapy and you dysregulated your brain and we know that alcohol is something that's gonna activate the pleasure center of the brain and help you to regulate. That's why one of the reasons we have alcoholism and we have, some of the drug addiction issues.
So how do we do some of these practices without dysregulating the brain? How do we allow people to talk about and make sense of things without continuing to [01:00:00] dysregulate the brain? Number one. And number two, what, which of the traditional healing modalities. Are we particularly aligned with if I sit and I am in ritual and ceremony, and I know you all have experienced ritual and ceremony because you've been so many places when you are in ritual and ceremony.
This is changing your being this, changes your genetic expression and your being relearning the importance and the significance of not what science necessarily is telling us in terms of psychology and how to take care of people. But remembering that for since time in Memorial, the ancestors knew how to heal, right?
This is not our first time having adversity. We've had adversity since time in Memorial, and our ancestors had tools for healing. So how do we honor that first, right? Like, how do we put that first? [01:01:00] And then continue. The brilliance now is that science is catching up with our indigenous knowledge. More and more we're recognizing that science that, our indigenous ancestors, they knew they had it, and now science is going, oh yeah, that is true. Oh yeah. Mindfulness is important to regulate the nervous system. Oh yes. Yoga does, do this to the nervous system. So yeah, those are, some of the things that, that I had to really learn and learn what to prioritize and really to respect what the ancestors knew.
Zaya Benazzo: Yeah. Oh, beautiful. We heard one story. Indigenous elder saying how western therapists went to help their community heal. And what they did, they separated the people, put them in the rooms and asked them to talk about the most painful things. And he said, wait a second. You didn't bring songs, you didn't bring them, didn't bring stories.
Food, who your ancestors are. How can you think you can help us heal? So why something hard? [01:02:00] They're like, no, doesn't work. No, you gotta go.
Iya Affo: Yes. And sadly, we still think that, the epitome is how do we have. Psychologists and therapists in all of these indigenous communities that are going through protracted crises.
And it's no. How do we bring back our traditional ways of being? How do we decolonize so that so that we can be healing while we have protracted crisis and conflict? We can still be healing in those moments. We're experiencing crisis and trauma. We can still be healing in those moments if we pull back in our ancestral ways of being and doing.
Yeah.
Zaya Benazzo: We carry those questions like where do we begin? European and ancestry, like we are disconnected. There is a lot of ancestors I don't wanna know or connect to.
So this is a big body of work that I think we are all Yeah. Collectively caring. [01:03:00] Yes. We are not gonna solve in one conversation here. So another one way to continue is by joining Iya for, I think it's four sessions, the course. Four or five? Eight. Eight. Eight weeks. Eight. Eight weeks.
Iya Affo: Eight weeks, yeah.
Zaya Benazzo: For eight weeks to work with this this work and practice basically. Yeah. And so next year at SAND, we'll be offering an Iya will be part of that as well. Nine month course where we work on all these levels.
Maurizio Benazzo: Yeah. Not only on this, but on all the different levels. Yeah.
Zaya Benazzo: Thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. This has been so rich and has stirred so much. I feel all of us. This is it.
Iya Affo: I thank you so much. You are, you are my family, I love you. Love you so dearly. All of the sand team. I love you guys so much.
I appreciate you. Thank you so much for having me.
Zaya Benazzo: Deep gratitude. And thank you everyone for tuning. Sorry we couldn't answer all the [01:04:00] questions.
Please hold them in your heart and we'll work with this together for a while. Yeah,
Iya Affo: we will. Blessing. Love you so much. Love you. I'll see you soon. [01:05:00]
