“So, here’s the thing: liberation work is about imagination.” ~Shawna Murray-Browne

What a treat this episode is (IMHO), and what a gift Shawna Murray-Browne is! That exclamation point is not hyperbole, as you’ll soon hear. As founder and executive director of Kindred Community Healing, Shawna is a liberation-focused practitioner whose forward-thinking mental health care has the power to restore generations past, present, and future. I first came to know Shawna through her brilliant class Decolonizing Therapy for Black Folks, a program so influential that I took it a second time alongside my entire staff.

To understand what a liberation-focused practice looks like today, Shawna takes us back. From a young age, she questioned the routines embedded around her, her parents’ struggles with addiction, for example, and the church’s doctrine in which she grew up. Her unwillingness to settle for answers that ran counter to common sense or her community’s well-being sparked in Shawna a lifelong commitment to advancing grassroots sovereignty. When entrenched colonial systems of justice barred her from a career in law, Shawna channeled her desire for generational transformation into a postgraduate degree in social work.

OK, so that’s the primer on her past, but what you need to know about Shawna is that calendars or clocks cannot bind her concept of time. Nor can her expansive ideas about healing. Liberation is the work of reconnection, a reweaving of generational threads so that the holes left by trauma are finally, wholly addressed.

“I do think that connecting to our pre-colonial history helps us to understand some of our karmic sort of energy,” Shawna says, holding space for my inquiry about white expressions of pre-colonial wholeness as well. She ends our mind-bending, heart-opening discussion with this gem: “Our only way forward is together.”

Remember how I said that I’d taken Shawna’s course twice now? Yeah, well, this is one of those episodes that I’m going to return to again and again. The gift is so good. Listen in, you’ll see.

GUEST BIO & CONTACT INFO

Website

Instagram

Facebook Therapy That Liberates

Facebook

Shawna Murray-Browne, LCSW-C, is an award-winning community healer, national speaker, and Liberation-Focused, Mind-Body Medicine Practitioner. She is the Founder and Executive Director of Kindred Community Healing and the Principal Consultant at Kindred Wellness LLC. Trained as an integrative psychotherapist, Shawna has created life-changing, community-based sacred spaces, honoring culture, to equip Black women, youth, and change-makers with the tools to heal themselves.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

6 Crucial Steps To Decolonize Your Therapy Practice

Decolonizing Therapy for Black Folks

If you'd like to contribute to the work Sarah is doing, join the community on Patreon:

https://www.patreon.com/WoundedHealr

Leave a review in Apple Podcasts:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/conversations-with-a-wounded-healer/id1356225272

Conversations with a Wounded Healer is a proud member of @mhnrnetwork

Let’s be friends! You can find me in the following places…

Website:

www.headhearttherapy.com/podcast

Facebook: