[00:00:00] Welcome to This Is How We Care, a podcast where we look at what it means to embody care, not as an individual practice, but a collective one, and to see what kind of world emerges from this place.

[00:00:12] Thank you for being here. I am your host, Emily Race.

[00:00:15] Emily Race-Newmark: Today we are joined by LibertyGonzalez,(they/them). 

[00:00:18] Emily Race-Newmark: Liberty is a liberatory, community psychologist, certified holistic life coach and mindful facilitator, a creative, a consultant, and a speaker. They are the founder of Awakening Creatives, LLC and a co-owner of Connect Community Center for Wellbeing.

[00:00:35] Liberty Gonzalez: I came from a Jewish mother and a German father who were both family therapists. They got a really bad divorce [ Laughter] when I was five. It was one of the few divorces that ends in an extended custody court battle that lasted over a decade

[00:00:54] Liberty Gonzalez: It's a very small fraction of situations that escalate to that level.

[00:00:58] Liberty Gonzalez: So my family experience began with a lot of contradiction and a lot of conflict. 

[00:01:04] Liberty Gonzalez: Being raised by a progressive secular Jew, she had us in a conservative synagogue community. Although I lived a comfortable material upbringing, my minority experience primed me to be sensitive to the differences and injustices of the world.

[00:01:24] Liberty Gonzalez: When I was in college, I began learning about the Israel Palestine conflict. Mind you, I never heard about the Palestinian occupation once before this in all of those years of being engaged in Jewish life. I thought that was interesting. I thought that Palestine was like a neighboring country or something. [Laughter]

[00:01:46] Liberty Gonzalez: And at the same time, as a Jew I was afforded a free trip to Israel, compliments of the Israeli government and the Taglit birthright program, so I took that opportunity to see, "What is going on here?" [Laughter] And to ask a few questions up close and personal.

[00:02:03] Liberty Gonzalez: That is a whole story for another day. 

[00:02:05] Liberty Gonzalez: After arriving back in the U. S., the Arab Spring erupted. I was close with two Libyan girls. So I got really intimately involved in their protests against Gaddafi, the dictator at the time. And that fall, the Occupy Movement swept across the United States. 

[00:02:21] Liberty Gonzalez: By then, I was all in.

[00:02:23] Liberty Gonzalez: I was deeply critical of the United States, crony capitalism and disaster capitalism. And I had really high ideals. I'm in my early 20s, some rose colored glasses. I had this vision of how the world would like change and be this livable place for all people, not just a small fraction of people who had access to wealth. 

[00:02:44] Liberty Gonzalez: I started and cooperated on the Occupy Portland Library. That was 100 percent donated library in one of the two city parks that was occupied in downtown Portland for five consecutive weeks. This experience was really like a launching off point for my last 13 years of activism. I sold most of my belongings. I left my partner and my home at the time and lived off of nearly no money. I gave myself completely over to this awakening journey and it was an incredibly liberating experience, but a number of years into the organizing, I completely burnt out.

[00:03:21] Liberty Gonzalez: I didn't lose my interest in activism, but I realized that I was on the verge of being completely depleted and it was not sustainable or good for my mental health. I moved into this really inspiring eco village, Tryon Life Community Farm in Southwest Portland. 

[00:03:38] Liberty Gonzalez:  I learned that the cultural transformation that I was looking for was going to require so much more than just taking action in opposition to oppressive systems. We're actually going to need to be the midwives together birthing a new culture into being. Or rather, co create a new era where ancient cultural ways, indigenous ways, and reclaimed Earth-based ways of life could flourish again alongside the new ways—somehow.

[00:04:09] Liberty Gonzalez: Ultimately, we are bound to this planet, unless you're trying to go to Mars. We lose sight of that of, "We are on this planet as a civilization." We become too disconnected. Too into our phones. Too obsessed with money or status or like fictitious worlds that we create. We lose connection to that which gives us life. And we're as good as dead at that point.

[00:04:37] Liberty Gonzalez: I'm still on this journey, in this midwifing process. Still on this quest to embody life ways that care deeply for the Earth around us and the Earth within us. That uplift natural wisdom of cyclical regeneration and care that is communal, not just individualistic.

[00:04:59] Emily Race-Newmark: Liberty and I met a number of years ago at a Mindful Facilitation seminar that's led by Lee Mun Wah, with the focus on facilitating spaces for diverse communities on cross cultural needs and concerns. 

[00:05:12] Emily Race-Newmark: Not a light topic. An experience like this one is really intimate, personal, emotional, and enlightening, to say the least.

[00:05:19] Emily Race-Newmark: It connects us as participants, not just in the experience itself, but through this shared understanding of the similar values and commitments in the world that we hold. 

[00:05:28] Emily Race-Newmark: As such, even though Liberty and I haven't actually been geographically in the same location since this time, we have managed to stay in touch through seasons of our lives, checking in on each other, to see how we're each evolving our work in the world and cheering one another on.

[00:05:41] Emily Race-Newmark: I have admired Liberty's work with Awakening Creatives, which provides support to visionary community leaders, DEI and cultural workers, artists and healers to embody their values and live their liberation out loud. 

[00:05:53] Emily Race-Newmark: What reconnected us this time was our parallel immersion into the world of New Parenthood. similarities in our experiences, sure, and there's also differences based on the identities that we hold, our partnerships, where we live, so on and so forth, which you'll hear more about in a moment, as this is part of what informs Liberty's work with the Connect Community Center for Wellbeing, which they started with their partner, and will share more about here.

[00:06:15] Emily Race-Newmark: This episode was originally recorded on December 11th, 2023. 

[00:06:20] Emily Race-Newmark: I want to touch on Connect Community Center for Wellbeing. Can you share more about that center and the intention of how it came to be? 

[00:06:27] Liberty Gonzalez: I got into contracting with different organizations to advise their equity, diversity and inclusion journeys from a decolonial and liberatory perspective. And my partner is a super talented massage therapist. We wanted to join forces. 

[00:06:43] Liberty Gonzalez: Massage therapy and DEI consulting might seem like really different lines of work, but the more we talked and we got to the root of what is afflicting our culture, we see that from a holistic perspective, or a perspective that sees the whole person, it includes their culture. It includes the systems that the person is a part of. From that perspective, we can see the realms of body work and body healing intimately interconnected with mind healing and culture healing. 

[00:07:17] Liberty Gonzalez: In a Western capitalist paradigm, where specializations are even a thing—where specializations are separate— have your eye doctor, your foot doctor, your internal medicine doctor, your mind doctor...[Laughter]

[00:07:31] Liberty Gonzalez: In a holistic healing paradigm, and in many indigenous healing paradigms and cultures throughout history... the mind, the body, the spirit, and even the whole community or the land where that community resides is not separate from the individual and you cannot piece them apart, like we do in the Western paradigm.

[00:07:54] Liberty Gonzalez: My partner and I, we believe this, but we're also trying to bridge worlds. It's not as easy for some people who have been raised and conditioned in the Western paradigm to just be like, "Oh, yeah, I'm going to go over to that other paradigm." 

[00:08:07] Liberty Gonzalez: That sort of binary thinking, even, isn't necessarily helpful. 

[00:08:10] Liberty Gonzalez: How do we be a bridge from what is true about this system that we're in now and this other culture that we're trying to midwife? For us looks like making holistic healing more accessible to people who often don't fit into medical systems, medical definitions, or yoga studio culture.

[00:08:31] Emily Race-Newmark: Mhmm. 

[00:08:32] Liberty Gonzalez: So often people at the margins, or even just people who don't feel safe or feel like they belong there for any reason. 

[00:08:39] Liberty Gonzalez: As a queer person and somebody who is part of this queer and trans community, we knew that we needed something different. And in the Midwest, there just is not a lot of that going on. 

[00:08:51] Liberty Gonzalez: Connect Community Center for Wellbeing is like a grassroots business attempt to create a common space where people can engage around these conversations and engage in care that is communal, not just individual—although we do offer individual services. 

[00:09:06] Liberty Gonzalez: One of the reasons why it's so important to engage in communal care like this, the Surgeon General of the United States recently put out a report claiming disconnection and isolation is one of the greatest health crises of our time. That was affirming to me when I read it. Obviously that's pretty devastating to affirm that, "Oh yeah, I really do feel this isolated, now there's research to back it up that this has been elevated to the level of health crisis." 

[00:09:34] Liberty Gonzalez: Whenever there is a health crisis, there is something going on in the social justice realms. Generally, it's marginalized communities who bear the brunt of those impacts. 

[00:09:47] Liberty Gonzalez: As a queer person who was pregnant and went through a whole experience of trying to get care around my pregnancy. I had a really intimate encounter with how difficult it is to get affirming care. 

[00:10:00] Liberty Gonzalez: Even a health professional who will recognize gender identity and use pronouns consistently is incredibly difficult, which in a vulnerable experience like pregnancy is even more important than some other instances.

[00:10:15] Liberty Gonzalez: I got really passionate about uplifting those experiences and giving voice to them.

[00:10:21] Emily Race-Newmark: Can you summarize your version of what you think the problem or the challenge of our time is?

[00:10:26] Liberty Gonzalez: Under capitalism, and when I say capitalism really what I'm referring to is the existential dread of humans to cling on to the known. And to containerize, compartmentalize and put boundaries around things. 

[00:10:45] Liberty Gonzalez: Capitalism in its founding and its roots was literally putting up fences and then walls to contain livestock and to contain wealth so that it could be reproduced and measured and grown, exponentially, in theory. 

[00:11:00] Liberty Gonzalez: Under capitalism, we become worried about the upcoming Q1, and how Q1 is going to play into the rest of the fiscal year. And it's this paradigm that requires this infinite growth, yet depends on an illusion of scarcity and compartmentalization. 

[00:11:22] Liberty Gonzalez: You have only 365 days to create your salary and there's a panic underneath there of like, "Is it ever going to be enough? Am I going to make enough?" 

[00:11:30] Liberty Gonzalez: In an Earth-based or a cosmos-based paradigm, there are no compartments of time.

[00:11:36] Emily Race-Newmark: Yes. 

[00:11:37] Liberty Gonzalez: There is only motion and there's life. So a human baby, for example, it doesn't actually take nine months to gestate a baby. It takes anywhere between maybe four months, if that child is viable and decides to come out, [Laughter] and 10 months or even more. You don't usually go more than that, but there's this wide range to grow and be born. —every person in their own time. 

[00:12:03] Liberty Gonzalez: Seasons are predictable, but the solstice doesn't come and all the sudden switch flips and winter is on, "Switch on the winter light." 

[00:12:12] Liberty Gonzalez: No. We follow the clock and we pay our quarterly taxes, because of this sort of existential panic. Hundreds of years of propaganda around the need for capitalism and its merits, and, "This is the way that we must operate." Life is much more fluid than that. And much more fluid than the capitalist system really allows to exist.

[00:12:35] Liberty Gonzalez: In Earth-based life ways you see people cooperating, and when someone's not able to do the field work because of an injury they do the handwork or they do spiritual work. Capitalism is so much more rigid and unforgiving it's really dehumanizing. It disconnects us from that natural impetus to care— for the collective. It gets us really stuck in this scarcity that we're just this individual. And if you get an injury and you lose your job, you had better know how to advocate for your unemployment or be damned. And you'll get your eviction notice if you can't figure it out. 

[00:13:11] Emily Race-Newmark: I'm hearing the thread of disconnection and everything you're sharing, and I'm also hearing the origin of where perhaps that disconnection was really exasperated.

[00:13:20] Emily Race-Newmark: It's like "this is the only way to survive" when like the compartmentalization of everything and individualization of everything was amplified. 

[00:13:28] Liberty Gonzalez: Yes. 

[00:13:29] Emily Race-Newmark: If you like what you're hearing so far, there's more great content from Liberty over at our Patreon. 

[00:13:34] Emily Race-Newmark: Every contribution, no matter the size, is a massive help to fund the production of this podcast, and as a thank you, you will receive extra bonus content, such as: 

[00:13:43] Emily Race-Newmark: Liberty's experience with the Occupy Movement in Portland and how they got the name Liberty; the love story that precipitated the Connect Community Center for Well Being; and Liberty's fascinating dissertation experience focused on liberatory care for, by, and among gender non conforming caregivers.

[00:13:59] Emily Race-Newmark: Truly, thank you so much for being a part of this community, for sharing and supporting conversations like this one. 

[00:14:05] Emily Race-Newmark: Let's get back to Liberty as they share more about their vision for the world.

[00:14:09] Liberty Gonzalez: In order to define liberation, you have to get in touch with what it means for you personally and each of us does.  Liberation is one of those concepts, like justice, that can mean a lot of different things to different people. Liberation would not even be a necessary concept without oppression. It's only in the dehumanizing, the diminishing, or the negating of someone's life—human or non human—that liberation is even an idea. Or something that people would want to seek.

[00:14:46] I personally believe that all beings want to be free; we have this existential imperative to live. Just as we have an imperative to die, eventually we're all going to die. That's part of life, but most creatures will fight, they will flee, or they will freeze.

[00:15:04] Liberty Gonzalez: In the case of humans, we do this fawning thing. All in order to avoid death, right? 

[00:15:09] Liberty Gonzalez: What we're seeing right now in Palestine, and around the globe, is people fighting on behalf of life. They call it a fight for liberation, but really it's a fight just to live.

[00:15:22] Liberty Gonzalez: And under occupation or various oppressions, to have our movement or our culture or our freedom to live inhibited is a diminishment of that life. Therefore liberation has become the goal of a lot of oppressed people. To be free from that which diminishes our life.

[00:15:40] Liberty Gonzalez: What really makes you feel alive? What are all the things that are required, not just to breathe and have your heart continue beating, but really to feel alive?

[00:15:49] Liberty Gonzalez: In these movements for liberation, whether they're micro or macro, we see this deep abiding love—or care. Bell Hooks talks about the absolute necessity of love in movements for liberation because it is in this love that we find great acts of care. 

[00:16:09] Liberty Gonzalez: Whether it be communally shared meals or singing around a fire together, care can look like so many different things that the so called "self-care" industry really overlooks. Because the industry, and therefore all of the recommendations that come from the industry, depend on us acting as independent individuals who need what that industry has to offer.

[00:16:37] Emily Race-Newmark: Oh, I'm angry. I know this, but I'm angry. Go ahead, keep going. [Laughter]

[00:16:43] Liberty Gonzalez: Speaking truth. I know it hurts. Because be it massages or bath salts or yoga classes, those aren't going to heal what is really deeply afflicting most people. 

[00:16:54] Liberty Gonzalez: What most people really need at the deepest level,it's not that they're suffering from sore muscles and misalignment... I mean, yes, that might be a symptom, but we're suffering from disconnection.

[00:17:06] Liberty Gonzalez: We're suffering from disconnection from each other, from community, and from the Earth. Or you could interpret that as disconnection from our bodies, from our life force. We're suffering the systems that keep us dependent on things like cars, computers, plastics, fossil fuels, oppressive governments who are massively extracting resources—primarily from the Southern Hemisphere, mind you.

[00:17:32] Liberty Gonzalez: We're dependent on this culture of lateral oppression. I propose that we don't actually need self care. Yes, of course we need to care for ourselves. We eat and drink and breathe and all that, but we also need a global care. We need care that liberates us from oppressive global norms, from oppressive systems, governments, practices, policies. We need to imagine ways to engage in community care and movements for liberation—I would say those are the same thing, in ways that don't kill us or burn us out so that we can maintain them.

[00:18:12] Liberty Gonzalez: Even having this conversation I believe is a profound act of liberatory care because we are attending to that which has otherwise been deeply repressed, not given space, not centered in the mainstream conversations about care.

[00:18:31] Liberty Gonzalez: You're giving us an opportunity, right now, for something to be born here. 

[00:18:35] Emily Race-Newmark: Specifically, what does liberatory care look like for gender non conforming parents or caregivers? Cause that to me feels like a really important nexus. And it's interesting that, that is in a context of oppression.

[00:18:46] Emily Race-Newmark: You've emphasized that a few times. What's possible beyond oppression, even being in the background?

[00:18:51] Liberty Gonzalez: It's a great question. What it brings up for me is, we are acting in response to oppression. But liberatory care is an invitation to imagine beyond that, to dream into what liberation looks like, feels like, sounds like, smells like, tastes like.

[00:19:10] Liberty Gonzalez: In the queer community, there's lots of different ways that we care for each other.

[00:19:15] Liberty Gonzalez: There's really a lot of different types of relationships and relationships to family. For many folks, family of origin ties have been strained or estranged, or there's a lot of complexity and pain in them. 

[00:19:26] Liberty Gonzalez: As queer people often look to kinship ties to create our communities of care. Every city that I go more or less, I find a queer exchange group or a group where people will make recommendations for queer safe healthcare providers, and hairstylists, and sell their couches, and all manner of things that you might take for granted that queer people really need in order to feel safe to navigate through the world. With relational structures like polyamory, which could include maybe open relationships or relationship anarchy, there's all sorts of different relational fuckery concepts Laughter that are out there. 

[00:20:05] Emily Race-Newmark: Totally. Yes. 

[00:20:08] Liberty Gonzalez: There's generally more of an openness to consider more fluid relational constellations. Within that, a lot more creativity around care—what care can look like. Even just the reflection on what care do I want? What care do I need? What is that which makes me feel most alive? Or even just a little bit more alive? Start there. 

[00:20:31] Liberty Gonzalez: Liberatory care is an invitation for us to really define and get clear about what is it that I need in my life as a queer person, as a queer caregiver, as somebody who is legally responsible for another little person's life? 

[00:20:46] Liberty Gonzalez: That type of liberatory care is going to be unique to that group and each group to their own struggle. 

[00:20:52] Emily Race-Newmark: I believe, regardless of whether someone identifies within the queer community or not, I feel like we all have so much to learn from queer ways of living. Because I feel like you said, even just in the expansion of relationality, again, there's that parallel to the compartmentalization of like, "This is a relationship, it's very in this box and very isolating." 

[00:21:11] Emily Race-Newmark: Versus an expansive way, which to me, I almost just see a future where we all really tap into that universal desire to be in relationship and in intimacy with, in many forms, in many ways, the wide range of people. I don't know if that speaks to anything for you, but I just really wanted to emphasize that. 

[00:21:28] Liberty Gonzalez: Oh, it so does. It so does. 

[00:21:31] Liberty Gonzalez: I talked about hundreds of years of propaganda and part of that is monogamy. The Christian prescription for being happy is being in a marriage. 

[00:21:42] Liberty Gonzalez: And that isn't necessarily true, although I am married, for strategic political reasons. [Laughter]

[00:21:49] Liberty Gonzalez: There's so much more complexity to humans outside of that. And I believe there is a long history of relational trauma that has come from forcing people into these boxes of relationships—an incredible amount of intimate partner violence. 

[00:22:07] Liberty Gonzalez: I believe it's going to take these conversations to remind people that there is more possibility outside of that. And it will require processing some of that trauma so that we can get to a place... you know, we're not all just going to flip a switch and then one day we're all sexually liberated or relationally liberated, it's a process. I do think the queer community is at the edge of leadership around that conversation.

[00:22:30] Emily Race-Newmark: A final question on vision here is your vision for how we might relate to families differently. 

[00:22:36] Emily Race-Newmark: In a similar way, there's something very confining about the traditional structure of what a family should be, versus what I'm really hearing in your vision there's something more expansive to explore and in the role of different caregivers. So can you speak to that?

[00:22:49] Liberty Gonzalez: Yeah. I would say if we went back, and I'm not saying we can really go back to the way things were in the ancient ways, but if we look at Indigenous communities, for example, there is a lot of intergenerational interaction. Even in some cases, intrafamilial interaction where everybody is taking on a role of care.

[00:23:12] Liberty Gonzalez: The child that's being raised in a society where aunties and uncles and siblings and gender non conforming people are all engaging in acts of care; it isn't just the parents who are responsible to meet all of the needs of the child and all of the needs of their partner themselves. That care becomes a co creative process.

[00:23:35] Liberty Gonzalez: And I would love to see every community exploring what that could look like for them and breaking down the barriers that keep us in our little ticky tacky boxes. [Laughter] 

[00:23:46] Liberty Gonzalez: There isn't a prescription for that it's going to look really different for each person and the situation that they're in, and the locality that they're in, their access to resources, and even their access to conversations like this. 

[00:23:58] Liberty Gonzalez: I would say for anybody who is looking for that kind of expansion to start imagining for themselves what it is that they want and need, and start talking to the people that you trust about that. Keep dreaming and imagining. 

[00:24:13] Emily Race-Newmark: Yeah. And again, I see that parallel. You were mentioning monogamy and what comes up for me there is listen, if someone chooses that out of a full choice of what feels most alive for them, that's beautiful. And I think there's something to even critique within the construct of monogamy, of putting all the eggs in the one basket of, "You have to provide all the care and all the love for me." 

[00:24:31] Emily Race-Newmark: In the same way that we're expecting parents—as you're saying here—to provide all the care, all the love for these children in that particular relationship. 

[00:24:39] Emily Race-Newmark: Let's focus now on what folks might leave with, an action that someone could take in this moment. 

[00:24:44] Liberty Gonzalez: Really observe the life in your body. 

[00:24:49] Liberty Gonzalez: Feel the sensations that come up for you. 

[00:24:52] Liberty Gonzalez: Let go of some of the labels. 

[00:24:53] Liberty Gonzalez: I sometimes don't find the labels of monogamy or polyamory very helpful because they put these images in our mind of different containers that might have been prescribed by somewhere.

[00:25:04] Liberty Gonzalez: When we tap into what we really want and where our bodies will let us explore, I think liberation lives there. Just as much as in exploring all these different ideas and concepts and potential strategies. Observing your thoughts and your feelings without judgment, allowing life to arise and including the desires that come up for you. Things that you might have repressed, or you can't acknowledge in yourself even privately because you're in a X, Y, or Z relationship. 

[00:25:36] Liberty Gonzalez: Letting life emerge as it is can transform our whole experience of that expansion. It's a really good place to start is being honest with yourself about what do you want to experience in this lifetime? What do you need to get there? And who can you start to talk to outside of yourself about that who might feel safe to admit the dirty secrets or the fantasies and get some movement happening? 

[00:26:02] Emily Race-Newmark: Yes, I feel the liberation within self [Laughter] through with this. 

[00:26:07] Emily Race-Newmark: So much gratitude for everything that you're allowing to flow through you and the ways that you're leading in your life and for our relationship in this conversation. Thank you so much, Liberty. 

[00:26:16] Liberty Gonzalez: Thank you. What we're doing here, staying in contact and continuing to check in with each other over time and track each other's growth over a long arc of relationship, that continuity is so powerful and is one of those practices that people could take with them. 

[00:26:35] Liberty Gonzalez: Stay connected to people. Don't treat people like expendable resources.

[00:26:43] Emily Race-Newmark: Thank you so much. I'd add from my perspective that it's a practice and for me, it's always about noticing the fear of reaching back out, like, "will they think it's been too long?" I found it to be so nourishing. So I really appreciate you emphasizing that.

[00:26:56] Liberty Gonzalez: Yeah. And my answer is, you'll never know until you try.

[00:27:00] Emily Race-Newmark: Totally.

[00:27:00] Emily Race-Newmark: Thank you for listening. If you are inspired by this conversation and want to explore working with Liberty, they offer a variety of free online events and in person at Connect Community Center for Well Being, along with one on one and group coaching spaces that are curated to meet the needs that are emerging.

[00:27:17] Emily Race-Newmark: You can actually book a free Connection Call with Liberty to explore the best way to engage with this transformative work. Email liberty@awakeningcreatives.com, which is also linked on our website, to schedule a free call.

[00:27:29] Emily Race-Newmark: If you mention "How We Care", you will become eligible to receive a special discount on your service, package, or event of choice. 

[00:27:35] Emily Race-Newmark: Don't forget there's more great content from this interview over at patreon.com/thisishowwecare. 

[00:27:41] Emily Race-Newmark: Thank you again for all the ways that you support this podcast. Whether it's through Patreon contributions, listening and leaving reviews, sharing episodes with the people in your life, or subscribing to our newsletter and Instagram to be a part of the conversation. 

[00:27:56] Emily Race-Newmark: This episode was produced by me, Emily Race, co produced by Kimberly Anne, with audio by Andrew Salamone and music by Eric Weisberg.