67. Heal the World by Healing Yourself with Sarah White, Executive Director of South Dakota Education Equity Coalition

Want to heal the world? Start by healing yourself first.

For this Women of Color Rise episode, Analiza talks with Sarah White, Oglala Lakota and Executive Director of the South Dakota Education Equity Coalition (SDEEC) and 2019 Bush Fellow. 

Raised to value spirituality and education, Sarah saw how the system was failing her people with indigenous people falling further behind in the achievement gap. She decided to found SDEEC, a grassroots movement of community stakeholders committed to promoting diverse, equitable, and inclusive learning for future generations. 

After years of working, Sarah noticed that her response to coping with trauma was achievement to give her a sense of self-worth. She realized that if she wanted to heal her community and world, she needed to start by heal herself.

Sarah shares strategies to heal:

• Develop awareness of where we find your self-worth. For Sarah, she realized that she had been seeking worthiness through achievement. She believed that achieving would lead to wellness and being happy. This pattern of thinking set her up on a never ending cycle of looking outward instead of inward.

• Notice that when we focus on outward success, we are the furthest away from ourselves. When we are on the hamster wheel of striving for outward achievement, we lose sight of our own belief in ourselves, that we are enough as we are.

• We can come back to ourselves to heal. This includes self-care, even basic things like not skipping meals and drinking water.

• Let go of martyrdom. Sarah shares that women generally more often than men suffer and martyr ourselves, falsely believing that it’s going to contribute to some sort of prosperity. But that’s never going to be sustainable. The key is to nurture our spirits, focus on healing, and recognize that this is going to be synonymous with the healing that we need to see within our professional work as well.

Get full show notes and more information here: https://analizawolf.com/ep-67-heal-the-world-by-healing-yourself-with-sarah-white