Scaling Deep Tatiana Fraser @ The Systems Sanctuary

Bayo Akomolafe is the grateful life-partner to ‘EJ’, father to Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden Abayomi, son of Olufunmilayo Ibidapo Akomolafe and Ignatius Abayomi Akomolafe, and descendant of Yoruba fields of archetypal becomings and mythopoeic landscapes. He is an author, celebrated speaker, teacher, and self-styled trans-public intellectual (a concept imagined together with and inspired by the shamanic priesthood of the Yoruba healer-trickster)- whose vocation goes beyond justice and speaking truth to power to opening up other spaces of power-with, and queering fond formulations and configurations of hope.

Bayo was born in 1983 into a Christian home, and to Yoruba parents in western Nigeria. Soon after he was born, his family emigrated to Bonn, Germany with his father on his first diplomatic assignment. This - Bayo’s first trip - would foreshadow a life of travel (both literally and figuratively) to come. Losing his diplomat father to a sudden heart complication in Kinshasa, Zaire, Bayo became a reclusive teenager, seeking to get to the “heart of the matter” as a response to his painful loss. After meeting with traditional healers as part of his quest to understand trauma, mental wellbeing and healing in new ways, his deep questions and concerns for decolonized landscapes congealed into a life devoted to exploring the nuances of a “magical” world “too promiscuous to fit neatly into our fondest notions of it.”

Nisha Sajnani, PhD., RDT-BCT is the Director of the Program in Drama Therapy and Theatre & Health Lab; founder of the Arts & Health @NYU and Chair of the NYU Creative Arts Therapies Consortium. In her capacity as founding co-director of the Jameel Arts & Health Lab, established in collaboration with the WHO, Dr. Sajnani leads a Lancet global series on the health benefits of the arts. An award winning author, educator, and advocate, her body of work explores the unique ways in which aesthetic experience can inspire equity, care, and collective human flourishing across the lifespan. 

Dr. Sajnani is also on faculty with NYU Abu Dhabi where she developed a trans-disciplinary course entitled Can Art Save Lives? which unites current evidence for the health benefits of the arts with practice and policy. She is a faculty advisor in the Rehabilitation Sciences Ph.D., Educational Theatre Ed.D and Ph.D. program and co-teaches Improvisation and Leadership in the Management Communication Program and the Executive Education program in NYU Stern. She is also on faculty with the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma where she lectures on the role of the arts with people who are forcibly displaced. 

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Learn more about ⁠The System Sanctuary⁠ where Tatiana Fraser and her team teach and train leaders on systems change. We work with individuals, teams and ecosystems to support learning and inform wise action.

⁠⁠Sign up for The Systems Sanctuary Newsletter⁠⁠

A Tonglen teaching and meditation led by the guest from our last episode, Charlotte Z. Rotterdam. Hear her full Scaling Deep interview here.

Follow her work @ SkyMind

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Charlotte Z. Rotterdam is a contemplative educator, Buddhist teacher, and meditation instructor. She is the Director of the Center for the Advancement of Contemplative Education at Naropa University and an Instructor in Naropa’s Core College, World Wisdom Department, and Graduate School of Psychology. She co-developed and teaches Naropa’s Mindful Compassion Training, a secular program to cultivate compassion in personal, professional and societal contexts. She is the Lead Teacher of the Mother Lineage (Magyu Lopön) at Tara Mandala Retreat Center. Charlotte received a Masters in Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School. The mother of two boys, she has published essays on the intersection of spiritual practice and daily life in Lion’s Roar, Buddhadharma, Mandala and Fearless Nest, an anthology.

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Learn more about ⁠The System Sanctuary⁠ where Tatiana Fraser and her team teach and train leaders on systems change. We work with individuals, teams and ecosystems to support learning and inform wise action.

⁠⁠Sign up for The Systems Sanctuary Newsletter⁠⁠

Charlotte Z. Rotterdam is a Buddhist teacher, meditation instructor and contemplative educator. She received the title of Magyu Lopön, lead teacher of the Mother Lineage at Tara Mandala Retreat Center, by Lama Tsultrim Allione in 2016. She is the Director of the Center for the Advancement of Contemplative Education at Naropa University and an Instructor in Naropa’s Core College, World Wisdom Department, and Graduate School of Psychology. She co-developed and teaches Naropa’s Mindful Compassion Training, a secular program to cultivate compassion in personal, professional and societal contexts. Charlotte received a Masters in Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School. The mother of two boys, she has published essays on the intersection of spiritual practice and daily life in Lion’s Roar, Buddhadharma, Mandala and Fearless Nest, an anthology. 

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Learn more about ⁠The System Sanctuary⁠ where Tatiana Fraser and her team teach and train leaders on systems change. We work with individuals, teams and ecosystems to support learning and inform wise action.

Sign up for The Systems Sanctuary Newsletter

Tanya Birl-Torres of SoHumanity has taken her 15 years of experience as a Broadway performer, choreographer and movement director and melded it with her love and passion for justice and change on the systemic level. With a deep and grounded sense of presence and urgency, Tanya uses the subtle yet potent power of drawing inwards to provoke curiosity, promote healing and empower oneself to create change beyond what we have been taught and into personal truth telling and embodied experience. Through reflection, moving metaphor and a process called Presencing (The Presencing Institute and Social Presenting Theater at MIT), participants are encouraged to become the change that they wish to see manifest.

More on Faye LaRoux/ The LaRoux Method: Tanya's friend and teacher who taught her the principals of Rafical Responsibility and the ancient Hawaiian reconciliation prayer Ho’Oponopono

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Learn more about The System Sanctuary where Tatiana Fraser and her team teach and train leaders on systems change. We work with individuals, teams and ecosystems to support learning and inform wise action.

⁠Sign up for The Systems Sanctuary Newsletter⁠

Welcome to Scaling Deep, a regular heartbeat and inspiration from wisdom traditions and teachers at the forefront of leading change.