Ep. 3 - How to bring our politics into a session: Coaching on Gaza (w/ Dara Silverman)

Transcript

Dara Silverman: And so in this moment around Gaza and the US's complicity in Israel's attacks on Palestinians, the U. S. attacking other countries in the Middle East, right?

Then I think there's the role for all of us as coaches, as political people of like, what's my complicity in this? Where are the places where I want to look away, where I get so caught up in my grief that I can't move beyond it?

Jeremy Blanchard: Welcome to the Wider Roots podcast. A show about how we can use the power of coaching and personal transformation to help create the world we most want to live in.

I'm your host, Jeremy Blanchard and today's episode is with Dara Silverman.

She was the founding director of showing up for racial justice, an organization that brings together white folks working for racial and economic justice. She's been studying and teaching somatics with the Strozzi Institute and generative somatics for over a decade. And she's currently running programs for white coaches, facilitators and organizers to integrate anti-racism into their work and into their whole lives.

This was a really important conversation and I'm so grateful that I got to talk to Dara. We spoke about the ongoing genocide in Gaza. We talked about how our clients are experiencing it, how we're experiencing it as coaches and practitioners. And what we can do to support our clients when there's moments of collective crisis like this.

I also asked Dara about her thoughts on when to have an agenda or not when you're working as a politicized coach, which is one of the biggest questions that I'm bringing into this podcast. How can we balance our personal politicized perspective with the general coaching principle of not having an agenda for our clients. And she also offered some tips on how to coach white folks specifically to notice when they might be perpetuating systems of domination or white supremacy.

So I'm excited for you to hear this conversation. And if you want more resources about this intersection of personal and systemic transformation, you can head over to WiderRoots.com to sign up for the newsletter. And if you're new to the podcast, make sure you subscribe in your podcast player to catch the latest episode.

All right. Let's dive in.

[00:02:28] Dara's Background

Jeremy Blanchard: ​Well, Hi Dara. Thanks so much for being here.

Dara Silverman: Hi, Jeremy. Thanks for having me.

Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah, I was excited to have you on the show, particularly because we've been adjacent in movement spaces for a long time. I've heard your name from many of my anti racist organizer friends, many of my climate organizer friends.

And yeah, you've been doing this work for so long, and you're one of the handful of people who I've encountered who's really strongly at this intersection of systemic transformation and personal transformation now, especially now that you're getting into coaching in the last five, seven years.

So just really glad you're here.

Dara Silverman: Yeah, I am a big fan of that intersection. So I'm happy to dive in.

Jeremy Blanchard: So I would love to start with your roots. Curious how you got your start in organizing. And then maybe we can move on to how you got your start in coaching as well, since that's a more recent addition, it seems.

Dara Silverman: It's such an interesting story you know, I grew up in Ithaca, New York. So in central New York, my parents were mixed class Jews who came from New York City.

And when I went to college, I discovered organizing and was like, Oh, we don't just have to help people with the immediate problem, they can make changes in their own lives. And I can be a part of supporting that, and I was like, that is so much better. I want to do that.

When I was organizing. I have this memory of I was living in Somerville in Massachusetts . I was working in Worcester and it's about an hour drive and I had this really big cell phone and I would get in the car, which was like one of those purple Volvos, like the boxy kind.

And I would start crying as soon as I got in the car, because every day I was working from 7 in the morning, I would wake up and do data entry. I would drive to Worcester, I would go door knocking, I would come home, I would do more data entry, and I would go to sleep, and I just, there was no space in my life.

And I would cry on my way to work, and I would say, I have to stop crying because I have to start making phone calls. I have to get to work.

And one time I had this dream that I was driving to work and I started to have a car crash. I like went over a cliff and as I was going over the cliff, I got on my phone and I called my co worker and said, I'm going to be late for work.

You have to cover my one on ones.

And It was such a visceral memory of what my life was like at that time that all I could think about was work and that I didn't really think of my body as a thing. And I was mostly organizing at the time in Puerto Rican and Dominican communities.

And at a certain point, some of the women who I worked with some of the members really called me out. And they were like, Hey. You talk over your members, and you don't let them say all the things that they have to say. And I got really mad, because that was like my only emotion at that point.

I was like, that's not true! I'm a good organizer! And then I really thought about it, and was like, wow, I have to do some work on this. But I didn't know where to do that because I was from such a political background. I hadn't really been in therapy at that point and I was like, well, what do I do to do this?

And I started getting involved in Jewish community because I was like, well, maybe there's something there. Because the women had said to me, like, why are you organizing with us? Why aren't you organizing your own community? And I was like, I don't even know what that means to organize my own community.

And a friend of mine was like, Hey I went to this course with this group, the Strozzi Institute about somatics, I think you'd really like it. And I was in this corporate hotel room with a lot of people who were from major companies like Pfizer, and I was like, Whoa, that's really weird. I've never been around people like this, but they were all talking about what they cared about and about the body and.

At that point, I'd been in therapy, I think, for seven years and the weekend was so transformational for me that I went home and I quit therapy and was like, I just got more out of these last four days than I've gotten out of seven years of therapy. I want this.

And there was someone who was a master coach who was in the program. And I was like, I'm going to do the coaching program. I'm going to do all the things. And it was before. Strozzi Institute was certified by the International Coaching Federation, and she was like, go somewhere else, get the basics of coaching, come back to Strozzi, and learn somatics, because then you'll be layering it on top of knowing the basics of coaching. So I went through a program called Leadership That Works, Coaching for Transformation, which no longer exists in the US, they had a big breakdown around race and white supremacy.

I was in their first cohort that was majority people of color and it was a real range politically. and there was enough for me where I was like, oh, okay, I get it. Like I see what's happening here. I see how transformative this can be. And I immediately just started practice coaching with all my consulting clients.

Jeremy Blanchard: So cool. I love this story because it feels like surfacing these stories of how organizers find their way to like, Oh, we need to be doing the inner work, whether that's spiritual, whether that's healing, whether that's somatics, whether that's coaching or something else. actually, I think more and more and more over the last long period of time, but especially in our organizing circles, like over the last 10 years or so, I've seen more people get involved in, oh, it's not enough to just be pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing for external change. But there's this way of being that we're getting more curious about how do I bring a different way of being to the external transformation?

So I love hearing that in your story.

Dara Silverman: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you.

[00:08:22] Coaching clients around Gaza

Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah, let's start with, Gaza. I found an article you wrote in 2016 that was about what Jews can do for Black Lives Matter. And at that moment you were drawing the parallels between the Palestinian experience and the Black experience in the U.S. And now here we are. We're recording this early February. It's been three months of a siege on Gaza.

And I know from a coaching perspective, there's a lot of questions I'm bringing about how I'm showing up to this when this comes up in coaching conversations. A lot of my clients are bringing it up, Encountering their own personal grief and stress and despair. And then encountering a lot of interpersonal stuff of the way in which this issue is like fracturing a lot of relationships in different communities. So yeah, I'm curious, just broadly, how are you holding this? And then maybe more specifically, like, how are you holding this with clients when this comes up in coaching?

Dara Silverman: Yeah. Such an important question for this moment. As you said it's February 2nd. There are I think over 26, 000 Palestinians who have been murdered, there are over 1200 Israelis who have died, who were killed on October 7th. And I think even just the scale of that level of violence, like of the murders that have happened, of the injuries, of the miscarriages, like it's just hard for our systems to like, hold and visualize. And I think it's one of the pieces that I really feel for in myself is like the disassociation that can be so close to the surface of like. Oh, I can't see that level of pain. I don't want to see pictures of babies who have been killed or all the amputees or all of the things.

And then what's my responsibility as a Jew of knowing that Jewishness is being used and that the way that Israel was created was both as a way for European countries to have access in the Middle East, a way to, to divide and undermine democratic movements and governments in the Middle East.

And there's these two competing ideologies, like there are people who think through Zionism and through their political beliefs that Jews will only be safe if we have a country.

And then there's this other view that I really feel like I came up in, which comes out of the Labor Bund, the labor organizing of Eastern Europe, which is that Jews are safe when we're in solidarity with other communities. And the word for that in Yiddish is doikayt, or here ness.

So I think in terms of me, it's like a lot of practice is around those moments of disassociation or distancing from what's really happening right now and what's really important.

And then it's interesting with clients. I have a whole range of clients. I do publicly identify as an anti-Zionist. And I don't believe the state of Israel should exist. I also don't believe the US should exist. And I'm also a realist, so I don't think either of those countries are going anywhere, but that doesn't mean that politically I think that we should be supporting them, even as a citizen of the U.S.

So then I think with clients, working with a range of clients, it's been a whole piece of like, people who are feeling it so deeply, who are deep in organizing and thinking about it and working through it every day who both are supporting Palestinians, and then people who have family in Israel, and are supporting people in Israel, or how people have been killed, or who are hostages.

And how to feel my own politics and like my own agenda and where the places are where it's useful for me to name that and where are the places where it isn't.

[00:12:13] Holding "not having an agenda" while being politicized

Jeremy Blanchard: I mean that's the big question, right? I feel like for me, the coach training that I got was completely apolitical. I think that's true for most coaches. There's only a handful of schools that have an explicit political and justice orientation in their coach training. And we're taught not to have an agenda for clients.

And I came up in a group of people who were like climate and racial justice organizers going through an apolitical coaching school. And we were all asking ourselves this question. Well, we're not supposed to have an agenda for clients this is what the International Coaching Federation, the ICF says, and this is what all the coaching schools say. And it's said as like a premise for what coaching is.

And yet the only reason I'm doing this is because I'm committed to movements for systemic transformation and change. Okay. Well what's what's my theory on how I engage this moment? Part of it, you're talking about is who my clients are which I think is maybe the clearest piece if I have clients who are already very politicized, maybe this will come up at some level, but we're already kind of on the same page but what happens when I have clients who have very different opinions and political views or are interested in and becoming more politicized, but don't understand, they don't have a lens up looking for white supremacy and capitalism, et cetera, right? I'm sure you've thought of this in your coaching. It's maybe not an answerable question, but like, how are you moving with that inquiry?

Dara Silverman: Yeah, I mean at this point I split my time between teaching somantics to politicized folks, doing individual coaching and working with client organizations, mostly around race and transformation and supporting leadership to build a racial justice analysis and put it into practice. So I get to be kind of choosy about my clients.

And I feel lucky about that. if I'm working with people who are less politicized, it's because I'm brought in to work with them around their political analysis.

Jeremy Blanchard: And it's explicit.

Dara Silverman: Yeah, exactly. So the one client I have who has family in Israel, has kids who are studying in Israel, we're in a very active conversation of what does it mean to be a white Jewish person working in a majority BIPOC organization, and for you to be in this position?

And like, where's the balance here? And I mean, since October 7th, it's all we've worked on and talked about. At the end of a session, when I say what's your mood or how did this go for you? What are you taking away from this? I remember one session, she said, I really thought you would have more judgment of me this session. And I was like, Oh, that's so interesting. Let's unpack that a little bit.

Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah.

Dara Silverman: And so in this moment around Gaza and the US's complicity in Israel's attacks on Palestinians, the U. S. attacking other countries in the Middle East, right?

Then I think there's like the role for all of us as coaches, as political people of like, what's my complicity in this? Where are the places where I want to look away, where I get so caught up in my grief that I can't move beyond it, where I maybe have a hard time following Palestinian leadership that doesn't take the line that I want them to take and what's the recentering that I need to do in this moment that we need to do in this moment to support our politics and like the vision of the world that we're longing for?

So I feel like for me, it's been a real humbling experience. As much as I dove into local organizing and holding online groups for Jews who are anti Zionist and our friends, and having all these people come who are like, I just started identifying as anti Zionist this week.

Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah, I mean, there's so many good themes in what you said there. One part I hear is an invitation for the coach or the leader who's doing this kind of support work to do some of their further internal work, right? Of okay, where am I complicit? If I'm in a privileged identity, especially white coaches, white consultants, et cetera. Where am I leaning back? Where am I moving away? And why? What's coming up for me that I'm moving away so that I can move forward, follow the leadership of the folks that are most impacted, in this case, Palestinians.

Yeah.

Dara Silverman: Yeah, I think there is that self management. There's the self work, then there's a self management in sessions.

I know I was doing generative somantics, which is another, somatic formation that a practitioner through they were having free sessions for folks after October 7th, and I signed up and I was holding a bunch of those and there were a bunch of therapists who were like, I'm getting really angry at my clients because they're not talking about Gaza anymore, and I was like, Oh, that's so interesting. Like, what does that mean when you're a politicized person and other people move past this political moment or aren't as in it as you are.

And I'm not facing that with the folks that I work with, people are still really in it.

And we know what happens, especially as we're going into an election year as other things come up, that there will be a waning of interest. There's never been this much attention on Palestine as there is right now.

And so those of us who are really committed to Palestinian liberation, short term to a ceasefire and long term to Palestinian self determination. There's a question of how many people will stay? And I think for me, as someone who's white and Jewish what can I do to support and invite more and more people to, to stay in and to keep being engaged? And then a lot of that happens through relationship.

Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah. Amen. And another thing to go back to what you said a minute ago is, the client who was worried that you were going to judge them for their views. It's such a, that's part of the balance that I find really interesting here of we're coming in highly politicized, many coaches are inviting in clients who are already politicized and already in movement work at a high level. Doesn't mean they don't have work to do, but there's kind of a base, a foundation of alignment already present.

And we're also there to create a very high relationship, high trust, safe space, so that they feel like they can bring things to us.

It's different than therapy, but it has some of those traits of, we really want to create like high trust, so that we can challenge them in moments where they're open to being challenged and invited further. But if we're sitting there bringing our high, mighty kind of perspective on politics.

I mean, maybe one way we can, that's occurring to me to think about it is what's your theory of change inside a coaching session, right? Of like, do I think that shaming this person for not, you know, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh. Do I think that, reprimanding them for some political belief that they're holding? Do I think that's a good theory of how transformation happens? Definitely not.

Um, uh, versus creating a space where we can really join together on something. And maybe there are moments where we can see if there's curiosity to go further on an issue. Maybe this is something you don't know yet that you might be curious about. Let's at least create an opening that they might not even be aware of that is available for them.

Dara Silverman: Right. Right. I can think of other folks who I'm coaching who are doing a ton of Palestinian solidarity work. White Jews who were testifying before legislative committees and doing direct action, right? And doing a whole range of things and are really draining themselves. Cause they're going so hard in this moment.

And I think that piece of what it means to be on someone's team and what our theory of change of like how transformation happens. I'm so steeped in this particular lineage of somatic practice coming out of the Strozzi Institute and Generative Somatics and Black Leadership for Organizing and Dignity, Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity and the Embodiment Institute, that I think for me,** I think if people don't change by shame or blame or forcing them into things, I think they change because they have a vision of the world they want.**

And then they keep practicing and aligning themselves towards that vision and that being a coach, then it's like being some of the guardrails and helping them really rehome towards what is that vision? Yeah.

And then, for those of us who are white, what does it mean to also recognize that we grew up that under white supremacy, we have it as a part of our worldview, there are things that we can't see.

[00:21:03] Relaxed, Dignified and Accountable: Supporting white folks to show up for racial justice

Jeremy Blanchard: It also makes me curious about your work, with white coaches and white consultants. You're running this program now to help white coaches and consultants deepen their anti racist work. I'm curious, how did that start? And what's the intention

Dara Silverman: Yeah. It's called Embodying Freedom. And we're doing a cohort this year of 28 people. And really it started because in 2020, when COVID started, I started doing courses online teaching somantics to white racial justice organizers and coaches and activists, and really bringing in more anti racist theory.

Right? So like when we look at Amy Cooper, the white woman in New York City who had her dog off leash and a black birder came along and asked her to put her dog back on leash, having people watch their interaction through a somatic lens and say, Oh, what do I see in Amy Cooper? Not just that I'm like, Oh, that's bad and racist, but like, what can I identify with?

What are the parts where I'm like, Oh, I do that thing. As another white person, oh, she's getting louder when she's talking to the police. I do that when I want people to hear my authority. And I think there's that piece for white people, what does it mean to be accountable and dignified and also relaxed?

Because one of the things that I hear a lot from people of color is, white people can get so awkward when they start doing anti racist work. They get really tense, and they're trying to get everything right, and it can feel kind of robotic. It's like, oh, right, we want to be human with the people around us. We want to be in real relationships with people of color.

Like, how do we get to really practice, like what it means to be in a commitment to ending white supremacy in our lifetimes, in ourselves, in our communities, in the world and be in community while doing that?

And I think one of the challenges that I've really been in is that The somatic streams that I came up in really believe that it takes a long time to become embodied. And I think a lot of that structure is based on white people. And the fact that a lot of white people aren't very embodied. And so it takes us longer to get embodied. Like seven years is the language that's often used.

And I think when people are in anti racist work, when they're in community, we know this for a lot of Indigenous cultures, for Black and Latinx and Asian and Pacific Islander communities, that they're in embodiment practices all the time.

And so how do we, as white people, start to build our embodiment practices? And then start to use that in our work, when we're facilitating, when we're coaching folks can we invite people to feel our bodies and not just see the body as like a vessel carrying around our brains.

Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah, and you're leading this group and you have a lot of longings for the folks you're serving, coaches, organizers, etc. I'm curious, specifically for white coaches, is there like a wish that you have or an invitation ? Like what is your wish for white coaches to develop in themselves?

Dara Silverman: Yeah. I think part of us to be in community, right? Like that we are not alone in doing less. Because like you said, most of the coaching spaces are not politicized. It feels so special when we get to be with other coaches who are politicized and other white coaches who are politicized of like, Oh, I get to actually be in these questions about what are the contradictions that I'm feeling in this moment working with clients who don't share my politics?

What does it mean to be with a white person when they say something racist in a session? How do I blend with that? And then what's the higher calling that I bring them to and that as well.

I think there are so many pieces that we learn and like the coaching format about asking good questions and setting the agenda right and all the International Coaching Federation standards of what it means to be a coach.

And I think all of those can also be seen as being rooted in an overly structured or deterministic or white supremacist way of this is the right way to do it. And so I think there's this way of how do we really be present for what's happening for the white folks we're working with when there's an opening, right?

When it's a moment of the whirlwind, as they say, momentum of like, all of a sudden the ground is shifting and like, how do we be with and hold folks and move them towards that big vision of where they want to go and the big political vision that when we're working with politicized clients, we share.

Jeremy Blanchard: Mm. Mm. Yeah I love that invitation. I think that's a part of the intention I bring to this podcast, too, is how can this public one directional sharing of some people who are really leading the way at this intersection. How can that also eventually turn into where there are ways that we can make more connections? Because I feel like there, again, there are a handful of coaching schools out there that are politicized. There's a lot of politicized coaches who got trained in other schools who don't necessarily have easy in-road to community.

And even among the schools are politicized, it feels like there's a lot of silos of like, Oh, I know all the people who are in my school who care about social justice And so one is along similar lines that this. That we can create more community and what are the ways we can connect and have a shared experience. So I love that.

Dara Silverman: Awesome.

[00:26:30] The role of coaching in movement spaces

Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah, what I appreciate in what you're naming there is there's a lot of things in the coaching world that I think are we can validly like question and critique and have an assessment of and consider different ways of doing.

One of the questions I really wrestle with that's bringing me into this podcast project is where are the limitations of coaching, right? It's modality where we work one on one. We're often charging very high fees. And there's a lot questions I bring into like, I know I feel deeply called to it.

It was a source of great transformation for me. I've seen it over the last decade, be a source of great growth and transformation for my clients. And yet I guess the bigger question is, what role do you think coaching has to play within movement spaces and what are its limitations?

Dara Silverman: Yeah I remember when I was the director at JFRJ, I was in this like middle level leaders training program. And one of the trainers said my brother in law works for JP Morgan Chase or something like that. And he said, every day his boss comes to him and says, how can I be supporting your leadership?

And I was blown away by that question. I was like, to have a boss who's thinking about your leadership every day? I've never had that. And so it was just a little bit humbling, right? I've always worked in the nonprofit world. I've always been in this world where we're stretched so thin and we're so under resourced and we're so struggling.

And so for me, I think when I started to receive coaching and then when I started to offer coaching, it was like, Oh, I get to be invested in really deeply and someone's really excited. I'm like on my team.

I didn't really grow up with team sports. My parents didn't believe in that sort of thing. And so I never really had a coach like that. Like I had teachers, but I never really had someone who was like, my entire job is just to support you to get better in the ways that you want to get better.

And so when I think about coaching for people who are in social justice and movement work, it's really like, what does it mean to have someone on your team? And have someone who just is unequivocally like, yeah, I want you to be like the best that you can be. And like, you're committed to this worldview of how we can transform the world, I am with you, I'm at your back.

And just the ways in which people relax when they feel someone at their back.

I had a client who runs a big donor network in the U. S. of giving money to folks who are working on electoral politics, and he ran his first retreat last week, and he texted me afterwards, and he was like, I couldn't have done this without you.

And he totally could have, right? But he might not have believed that he could have. And so I think that's the thing in community organizing, we talk a lot about building people's skills, building people's political analysis, and building people's confidence. And a lot of times with white people, we have too much confidence.

We believe that we can do anything because we've been told that our whole lives and sometimes it's like pulling that confidence back a little bit and having there be some more humility and I think that's been a big learning for me is like I don't have all the answers and so it's a little bit of a contradiction with the story that I just told but I think there's also a piece of what does it mean to support movement leaders?

In that situation, it's a young Latino man who I was supporting. In other situations with white people who I'm coaching, it might be... Like, I remember coaching someone who was working for a statewide LGBT organization. And she was really having a hard time being taken seriously by her staff. And I remember some of the coaching was like, do less. What would it be like for this entire next week? For every time you want to tell someone what they could be doing better, to, write it down or text it to me. And she was like, I've never done that.

Jeremy Blanchard: Wow.

Dara Silverman: Right? Because there's so much in the way that whiteness teaches us of our ideas are important, let's get them out there.

And then when you're a supervisor, there isn't necessarily the discernment of when is the right time to bring up my five different critiques of how you hung that banner. Right? Or whatever it is. And just to be like, good job. Great job making this meeting happen. I'm so proud that there were 20 people here.

Right? Whatever it is. And just the longing that people have for support and appreciation.

So, I think for me, a big part of being a coach and being a coach who's focused on race and racial justice and supporting white people to take race on and make it our lens is sometimes when people are first starting to do race work, white people, they think it has to be super hard and that they're gonna feel bad all the time and that means it's working.

As opposed to oh, for us to actually be relaxed and dignified and accountable, we have to feel like we're not making mistakes all the time. Yeah, we make mistakes all the time, but if all we can do is feel the mistakes, then we're never going to relax into the knowledge or experience that we do have and have the capacity to try things or not try things and see what happens.

Does that make sense?

Jeremy Blanchard: It makes great sense. And what I love about it is it's a place where they're, part of my inquiry with this podcast is I know from experience that there are so many places where coaching and social justice brought together look different than just coaching or just social justice work. And there's like a deep longing to like. be in inquiry around those. And you're naming one of them right here, which is in if I make a little bit of an exaggeration of the coaching world at large It would often have someone coaching a white client if you had no political analysis coaching a white client to be like well You need to what do you want?

And what do you most want for you? And now you need to speak up more about what you want and sure, sometimes that is the move. Absolutely. And there's such a sweet and simple moment that doesn't even necessarily look politicized, if you were just listening to a recording of the conversation where you're like, what if you did less?

What if you didn't have to critique there? You're not bringing up race necessarily. I mean, you could. And I think there's value to naming white supremacy in a moment like that, or other forms of conditioning. And, you might not need to, but yet it's a moment of politicized coaching, very elegantly worked in, that works in counter to what most coaching culture would maybe have done in that moment.

I think that's a beautiful example.

Dara Silverman: Hmm. Thank you. Yeah. I think that's such an important point because I think sometimes we can feel like being a politicized coach means like you're bringing up analysis and theory and like systems of oppression all the time. And a lot of it is just the approach, you know?

[00:33:28] Dara's coaching growth area

Jeremy Blanchard: So good. I'm curious to hear what your coaching growth area is or what skills you're leaning into and recognizing at this point in your learning journey as like your next area of growth.

Dara Silverman: I recently did a two day with this great program that's based in Los Angeles, Coaching for Healing Justice and Liberation. And it was such a great refresher because they also come out of Leadership That Works Coaching for Transformation so they have a lot of similar frameworks to the way that I was trained but with a really politicized analysis.

And one of the pieces that I really got from the two day that I've been really practicing is my self management. I think one of the places I've really been feeling that is when people ask me how I'm doing. At the beginning of a coaching call and especially in these past couple of months with everything that's happening in Gaza and then also my 91 year old mother in law just moved to town and my partner and I are taking care of her.

Dara Silverman: And it's a huge thing in my life that there's this 91 year old that's in my life and navigating Medicaid and all these things. But I really can feel if I share too much about what's happening for me, that, that piece I was talking about earlier, that transference, that care, that clients or coaching partners will turn to like, Oh, my God, I have to take care of you, or like, I was thinking about you and worrying about you after our last session, and just feeling for that edge, both around the personal piece, and then there have been moments around the attacks on Palestinians where I've just been really upset.

And it's just been a real question of, like, how do I go into a session and what do I need to manage it in myself so that I can be present for this person?

So I feel like that's an edge that I've been working lately is really around self management.

Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah.

[00:35:21] Dara's sources of nourishment

Jeremy Blanchard: One of the questions that I like to end episodes with is this name Wider Roots comes from many different metaphors. One of them is where we get our sources of nourishment. And so like to end episodes by asking, where are you getting your nourishment? Maybe it's books, music, someone you're following online.

Dara Silverman: I love that question. I'm reading this book Nervous by Jen Soriano. She was an organizer in the Bay for a long time. She lives up in Seattle now. She's a Filipina writer and activist and organizer. And it's really about the ways in which colonialism and post traumatic stress disorder and like our nervous systems are all wound up together and like the healing process and it's so beautiful and so heartfelt and I feel like I'm learning so much about myself, about her, about the Philippines, which I'm now also reading a history book about at the same time. So just really appreciating that.

I just watched the latest season of Fargo. It's pretty amazing because I love pop culture in many ways. And this one is a lot about domestic violence and domestic abuse. And there's one episode where the main character is recounting the abuse that she survived for many years through a puppet show. She makes a puppet of herself and it's really such an act of resilience of her telling the story to a group of women about what she survived.

And it's devastating and it's also really beautiful. And just to see mainstream culture taking on intimate partner violence in such a deep way is really impactful.

I feel like I should say one more, which is a podcast. There's a podcast called Handsome, which is three butch and trans comedians. And it's just very light, and I really appreciate it, and they have a political analysis that they work in.

Jeremy Blanchard: Cool. Yeah. I've heard this is Tig Notaro and,

Dara Silverman: Yeah, Mae Martin. Yeah, Fortune Feinster, exactly.

Jeremy Blanchard: Nice. Cool, thank you. Is there anything else that we didn't get to that you want to surface for folks listening?

Dara Silverman: No, I just really appreciate this conversation. I don't think about coaching as a form that much. So, I feel like your questions for me to think about some of the connections between coaching and social and racial justice and somatic work. So, I'm glad we got to have that conversation.

Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah, yeah, me too. So grateful.

[00:38:00] Closing

Jeremy Blanchard: Where can folks connect with you or find out more or connect with you to work with you?

Dara Silverman: You can find me on my website, DaraSilverman.com. I have all my new courses up there. You can find me on Instagram. I probably use that the most of the socials or LinkedIn.

I'm doing these in person courses, this year long program. I have a free practice group every Tuesday at 9 a. m. Pacific so that's 10 a. m. Mountain, 11 a. m. Central, noon, Eastern. It's for 45 minutes. Folks can just sign up on my website. It's the same link every week. It's for the whole year. It just feels like right now is really a time to like deepen and practice together and sustain ourselves for the long haul.

Jeremy Blanchard: I love that. And links to all that in the show notes so folks can find you.

Thank you for your commitment to this work. Thank you for sharing your wisdom and experience and inquiries with us and the folks listening. And yeah, excited for more.

Dara Silverman: I am as well. It's been great to get to talk to you, Jeremy. I look forward to more.

Jeremy Blanchard: Thank you so much for listening to this conversation. You can check out the show notes for links to the resources that Dara mentioned and other ways to connect with her.

Episode four comes out in two weeks with Noelle Janka. She's a politicized coach and the author of the book, Rebel Healing.

Noelle Janke: And she was like, the river is filled drop by drop. Do not underestimate the power of doing individual work.

Jeremy Blanchard: So make sure you subscribe in your podcast app of choice so that you can catch that episode and all the future ones.

And as I mentioned at the top of the episode, if you haven't subscribed to the newsletter yet, I really invite you to do so. My hope is that over the months ahead, the newsletter grows and leads to ways that you all can start connecting with one another. So I invite you to pause this episode, if it is safe for you to do so, and click the link in the show notes to sign up for the newsletter, or you can just go to WiderRoots.com.

If you have ideas for topics you'd like us to cover on the show, you can email me podcast@widerroots.com. And you can follow the podcast on Instagram at @WiderRootsPod.

Thanks to Wild Choir for the theme music for this show, you're currently listening to their song, Remember Me, which will play us out. See you next time.

I always add bloopers at the end of every, for like just a little five second blooper. So all of the dog interruptions will be a part. I'm sure there'll be some funny moment where like, hold on, dog, laugh. Oh,

Dara Silverman: you want to see what she looks like, she just came in the room.

Jeremy Blanchard: Sweetie pie. Oh, look at you. Oh.

Dara Silverman: What a good girl.