How to Reclaim Your Flow at Work and in Life with Zee Clarke Aww Shift

In today’s episode, our guest is Zee Clarke. She is a Harvard MBA who went from leading teams at Fortune 500 companies and startups in Silicon Valley to teaching mindfulness and breathwork to people of color. Trained in India, Zee leverages her toolkit of yoga, meditation, breathwork, sound healing, and Reiki to ensure that all people of color have the tools to thrive despite any challenges that race, gender, or sexuality might present.
[2:55] Why should I listen to you? 
If you’re a black person, you should listen to me because I can share with you tools that can help you deal with racism and racial profiling and also help your mental health. But if you’re an ally or aspiring ally, you should listen to me for education about the reality of the experiences of people who look like me in this country. 
[4:56] When did this torch become something you wanted to carry? 
So I grew up in Washington, DC, also known as the "murder capital" of America. I grew up in a low-income, predominantly black neighborhood, and I went to a fancy private school in the suburbs of Washington, DC, where I was the only black person in a school filled with rich white people. So the first time that I experienced this feeling of, "Do I belong here?" I'm not good enough. What is happening, why is nobody speaking to me, and why are people treating me differently? That was the first day of school when I was eight years old. I share this with you to say that this feeling continued throughout my education. I went to Harvard Business School. I worked in financial services early in my career, and then after business school, I went to the Bay Area, where I worked in Silicon Valley in tech. And so during that entire time of my corporate career, I would be the only woman in the room, sometimes in tech. My mental health was in the gutter. I wasn't eating, and my doctors were like, "Something's got to change your stress levels; they're causing your current state of being," so I quit and I went to India. I joke that I did the black girl version of Eat, Pray, Love because I was meditating. I'm doing yoga, and I've never felt so good in my entire life. I did not know that this was possible. And so I felt very passionately that I needed to share these tools with others, particularly black people and people of color because we have higher rates of high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, and all sorts of other things that now medical research is showing are a direct result of racism and microaggressions.
[8:00] How would you define microaggression? 
A microaggression is a comment or action that unconsciously or unintentionally expresses a prejudiced attitude towards a member of a marginalized group. It can also be when people question your competence, when you don’t feel seen or heard, or when they mistake you for somebody that looks nothing like you. There is a long list, but in short, we are being treated differently because of what we look like. 
[9:45] Where do you think this came from? 
I think it's a lack of empathy. A lot of people who commit microaggressions might have good intentions, and that is why the definition means "unconsciously" or "unintentionally." They might have good intentions, but the impact is usually negative. Some of these things come from parents, too. When you hear your parents speak negatively about a certain group of people, you think they are right, but the truth is they also learned it from their parents. 
[11:56] What do you think should be the first thing we think about when these things happen to us and when we choose to respond to them? 
Well, my book is called Black People Breathe because breathing is very critical to regulating our nervous system. When these things happen, we get triggered, and that is when our systematic nervous system kicks in, and when that happens, your heart rate tends to go up. You might start sweating, you might clench up, your shoulders might come up, and all of that kind of ju