Podcasts

 

Phoenix Tales With Yuliana Kim-Grant

Rahshaana Green joins Yuliana as the pair discuss her mother and her life-altering battle with late onset Schizophrenia. A Dartmouth graduate turned nonprofit executive and forest yoga lineage guardian, Rahshaana details the moment she decided to institutionalize her mother, how that choice impacted her own psyche, and the stigma surrounding mental health in the black community.

The Practice You Podcast With Elena Brower

On the teachings and vitality in discomfort, and the smallest moments of recognition and awareness that can quietly change us all.

On cultivating belonging through confronting discomfort. Being a bridge to incrementally change the world.

A conversation surrounding the individual and group work of developing compassionate and diversely represented spaces.

Rahshaana is a multi-disciplinary wellness consultant focused on helping people heal and manage the stressful effects of change – in all its forms. Her work includes mental, embodied and organizational practices that teach resilience and provides tools/resources to evolve, heal and grow. She draws on her life experience navigating challenge and change, as well as her personal study in meditation, mindfulness, compassion and embodied practices.

 
 

Wonderstruck With Elizabeth Rovere

Through her private yoga and coaching practices, and in her role teaching Compassion-Based Resilience Training at Nalanda Institute in New York City, Rahshaana Green helps students manage stress and heal reactivity by developing greater clarity, self-knowledge, and grace. But, as Rahshaana tells Wonderstruck’s Elizabeth Rovere, her own path to becoming a practitioner meant overcoming pain and trauma. “When you literally have to have an injury make you stop and pause,” Rahshaana says, “there’s a few things that aren’t working.” Reflecting on her own life— from the complexities of her childhood in Houston’s inner city to embracing her mother as a source of empowerment to the surprising evolution of her career—Rahshaana shares how she ultimately learned the value of vulnerability and stillness, and how she carries forth an intimate, ongoing relationship with wonder that was once beyond her imagination.

Out of The Clouds Podcast with Anne Muhlethaler

Rahshaana tells Anne about being a curious kid, a high performer and voracious reader who used books as windows into other worlds. She talks about how she learned the power of agency from her mother, who taught her and her siblings, with a ‘scared-straight’ approach, how to make choices to take life into the direction they intended. The oldest of four, Rahshaana admits that her choices were also a potential blueprint for her siblings, and how a desire to influence them positively led her to pursue an early career in science.

After receiving her BA in Biophysical Chemistry from Dartmouth College and an MBA from The University of Texas at Austin, Rahshaana talks about how she combined her passion for science and business skills, which led her to pursue a fifteen-year career in Marketing and Business Development for medical device and life science companies.

Rahshaana then explains how an accident directed her towards yoga — Forrest Yoga specifically. Able to heal herself through this practice, she tells Anne how she made the choice to certify as a teacher and with the support of an amazing manager was able to do so in parallel to her career. She continued to pursue a personal study in meditation, mindfulness and compassion practices to deepen her own growth and to empower others to cultivate well-being and resilience.

Reaching the present, Anne asks Rahshaana to talk through her journey that led her to the Nalanda Institute in Contemplative Science (which is, incidentally, how the two became acquainted). Rahshaana talks in depth about the programs she teaches in Compassion-Based Resilience Training (CBRT). And who needs to explore CBRT? Probably everyone, according to her, because, as we can probably all attest, ‘human-ing’ is hard.

To conclude, the pair discusses how the power of compassion and mindfulness combined can help people access emotions, including difficult emotions, and become resilient to feelings like discomfort. And they talk about the importance of intimacy — a word that can describe the connection we can hope to have with the body — as a form of ultimate intelligence.

 
 

Mindful Inclusivity: Rahshaana Green on Bridging Equity and Emodied Practices

Rahshaana Green is the Director of Equity and Contemplative Psychotherapy at the Nalanda Institute. After receiving her BA in Biophysical Chemistry from Dartmouth College and an MBA from University of Texas-Austin, Rahshaana combined her passion for science and business skills to spend 15+ years in Marketing and Business Development for medical device and life science companies.

One day, a car accident helped her find her way to a yoga mat as a means of recovery and it opened her eyes to the power of embodied practices as a tool for self-discovery, self-care and self-healing. Rahshaana got trained in Forrest yoga to help bring these tools to others. She then pursued personal study in meditation, mindfulness, and compassion practices to deepen her own growth and to empower others to cultivate well-being and resilience. When she’s not teaching or coaching, Rahshaana is a global explorer, continuously seeking new methods of movement to enrich her life and the lives of those she teaches.

In this conversation, we really drilled down into what makes diversity initiatives successful versus unsuccessful, potent versus ineffective. We discussed how and why code switching functions, what are some of the key traits of a truly inclusive leader, what she believes is the future of diversity and equity work, and how she’s able to stay positive, focused and radiantly alive while pursuing what can be a challenging career path.