Podcast Host: Tammi Mac
Guest: Dr. Joi K. Madison
Tammi Mac – The 3 time NAACP award winning, Tammi Mac was hand-picked by the legendary Stevie Wonder to host the number one afternoon radio show, “The Tammi Mac Show” from 3-7pm daily on his Los Angeles owned 102.3 KJLH. Tammi Mac is voted best radio personality in Los Angeles by the Los Angeles Times. Her one woman show, Bag Lady has garnered best writer, best producer and best one person show and the spin-off webseries Bag Lady is award winning too. Her radio career has extended to television with her talk show, The Business of Being Black with Tammi Mac on the digital network Fox Soul, daily.
Joi K. Madison, Psy.D. – Dr. Joi Madison is a former competitive swimmer who combined her affinity for all things sports and physical activity with her commitment to serving the whole person – mind, body and spirit. Joi intends to create unique, relevant and, most importantly, effective methods for all of us to train, heal and evolve in ways that move us closer to creating the grandest version of the greatest vision we have for our lives.
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Full Episode Transcript
Tammi Mac:
Hello and welcome to our podcast. It’s the podcast that lets you know, you are not alone. Your guide to mental wellness. I’m your host, Tammi Mac. This podcast is a production of The Chicago School, which has been training and educating multi culturally competent mental healthcare professionals for over 50 years. Yes, our program is committed to educating our community about mental health and wellness, and normalizing conversations about our mental health. Our program will explore mental health and wellness issues that impact us, as well as explore ways that we can improve our wellness. Now, every week, I will be joined by mental and behavioral health experts, who will share their experience and expertise to help us on our journey to good health and satisfying lives. Today we want to focus on ways to stay mentally and emotionally healthy, our wellness.
Joining us is marriage and family therapist, Dr. Joi Madison. an adjunct professor at The Chicago School, and also a former competitive swimmer and fitness expert. Dr. Madison is an international speaker, coach, facilitator who specializes in trauma informed emotional intelligence, to enhance relational health and improve our overall quality of life. And let’s face it, we all want our life to be improved. So let’s do this.
Her coaching, consulting and curriculum design styles take an evidence-based approach while also centering cultural humility and social relevance. Now you know I got to find out what that’s all about. Dr. Joy invites us to connect more deeply with ourselves, more authentically with ourselves, and more readily with the resources that invite you to live your most fulfilled life. Please welcome, Dr. Joy. Hey, Dr. Joy.
Dr. Joi Madison:
How are you?
Tammi Mac:
Now I got to get to the good part. I got to get to the good part. You got to me using all these big words and half of us, only half of us, don’t know what they mean. Cultural humility and social relevance, please talk about that.
Dr. Joi Madison:
Yeah, so wellness does not happen in a vacuum. We all live in communities. We live amongst people, we have families, we have work, school, all these places where we interact with other people. And so part of our wellness, our understanding of wellness, our experience of wellness has to happen in the context of the communities in which we live. So cultural relevance is about what are my cultural values? What are the things that matter to me that are related to where I come from and the experiences that I have? And then social relevance is like what’s going on in the world around me at the moment? And am I really assessing my wellness with those things in mind?
Tammi Mac:
What is something that will be culturally valuable to someone? What’s an example of that?
Dr. Joi Madison:
Thinking about the Black community, for instance, when we think about wellness, oftentimes there’s a big conversation about self-care right now. And a lot of that is geared towards sort of the individual, how you care for yourself. Which that makes sense, yes, but a lot of the times, the way that we’re told to care for ourselves or the pictures that we’re seeing of what self-care looks like, doesn’t include things that are a part of our values. We tend to be a more collectivist culture. We tend to be more communal. We like to be together. We like to go to a good cookout, these kinds of things. And so when we think about going to a quiet spa day such and such, which yes, that works sometimes, but that’s not always the thing that’s our jam.
Tammi Mac:
Oh my goodness. Ding ding ding. Ding ding ding. Because you’re right. I get massage gift certificates all the time, and I would rather go to a barbecue.
Dr. Joy Madison:
Listen, we want to be with our people. And I’m not saying that those things don’t have their place, but again, going back to this conversation or this question about cultural relevance, it’s like, what’s the thing that matters to me? Self-care is not just caring for myself. It’s me defining what that is for me.
Tammi Mac:
Yeah, yeah. So me doing the cha cha slide at the barbecue-
Dr. Joy Madison:
Listen.
Tammi Mac:
…is an example of self-care.
Dr. Joy Madison:
Absolutely.
Tammi Mac:
Who would’ve thunk it?
Dr. Joy Madison:
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Tammi Mac:
Because it makes you feel good. It makes you feel a part of something greater than yourself. Yeah, it’s community. Yeah, I get it. Cultural humility. We learned already in the first 30 seconds, Dr. Joy is teaching up in here. So you seem to be actively exploring the mind body connection.
Dr. Joy Madison:
Absolutely.
Tammi Mac:
So with your background as an athlete, please tell me how you got started on your journey to wellness.
Dr. Joy Madison:
So that’s been a lifelong thing. It’s a family value. So we have cultural values and there’s family values. My mom was always into a very active since I’m a child, but thinking about the mind body connection specifically, I always think it’s hilarious when we’re like, health and then mental health as if they’re separate. My brain is in my body and it’s all part of the same thing. So it’s really about thinking for me, that holistic approach, that mind body connection is about understanding how our thoughts, our emotions, our sensations show up in our bodies.
And then making sure that as we approach the things or practices around wellness, that we’re addressing all of those things and understanding the interconnectivity in those areas. So that we are treating our whole selves, not like the fragmented versions of us that I think the world is trying to tell us we’re supposed to be.
Tammi Mac:
Exactly. And you as an athlete, your body obviously has to be in shape, but then you have to have the mindset-
Dr. Joi Madison:
Sure.
Tammi Mac:
…that says, “I want to work out. I want to win. I want it.” So I get that too.
Dr. Joi Madison:
Sure.
Tammi Mac:
I get how it’s connected too. I remember in grad school, they made a point of telling us that our body is one thing. It is not a whole bunch of different parts. It is a whole. And how you move and how you feel physically affects how you perform. And your mental… It’s connected to the character that you create. It’s connected to your own personal individual feelings, but it has everything to do with you physically too.
Dr. Joi Madison:
Absolutely.
Tammi Mac:
So I’m feeling that too. Y’all learning yet? Okay. So wellness sounds like it’s part of the mind body connection that we talked about before, so explain the connection.
Dr. Joi Madison:
Between mind and body?
Tammi Mac:
Yeah.
Dr. Joi Madison:
So, the way that I approach it, thinking about, for instance, the word itself, disease. It is dis-ease. When we have unaddressed emotional trauma, when we have negative thought cycles, that influences how we feel and we don’t deal with it, it shows up in our bodies. And we have language for it. We say things like a knot in my stomach or a lump in my throat, or a pain in the neck. Or even we talk about being heartbroken. So we have language that expresses this idea that our bodies hold the stories of our emotional selves. We understand that we have language for it, but I don’t think that we are consciously making the connection in terms of how we address that relationship between the mind and body.
So it’s really about understanding when I think and feel this way, when we’re not feeling well and we’re like, “Oh, oh.” And you start to feel helpless. All of those things, it’s because my body’s not feeling well, and then that’s influencing how I think about myself and then how I behave. And then, so all those things are influenced.
Tammi Mac:
I don’t mean to cut you off, but you gave me a thought here, and I want to know this. So which comes first, the chicken or the egg? Does the body react to the mind, or does the mind react to the body? What becomes diseased first?
Dr. Joi Madison:
I think it can go either way. The idea here is that it’s sort of this exchange, this relationship, which like me and you, we’re having, you’re talking then I’m talking. And we’re both just right, so it’s a relationship where they’re both influencing each other.
Tammi Mac:
It’s a connection.
Dr. Joi Madison:
Yes. Yes.
Tammi Mac:
Got it. It’s a connection. So one can never work without the other.
Dr. Joi Madison:
Absolutely. They’re not separate.
Tammi Mac:
And one will always influence the other.
Dr. Joi Madison:
Exactly.
Tammi Mac:
Whichever way it goes.
Dr. Joy Madison:
Exactly. Exactly.
Tammi Mac:
So I can make my body physically sick if I think about it.
Dr. Joi Madison:
You can.
Tammi Mac:
And if I’m physically sick, I can make myself well, if I think about it.
Dr. Joy Madison:
You can. Because what it tends to do, is it’s not just the thinking. The thinking leads to behaviors. So if I think a certain thing and I focus on a particular thing, and that’s all I see in terms of my options and choices, then it’s going to lead to me continuing to create the same outcome. But if I start to think differently, I see a new choice-
Tammi Mac:
Girl, you got me praise dancing. Because everybody… No. There are people who are like, your mind can’t change whatever you have.
Dr. Joi Madison:
Sure.
Tammi Mac:
But you just made it very clear when you said it’s not that your mind changes it. It’s that your mind changes the way you react and it changes your behavior.
Dr. Joi Madison:
It changes what you perceive. It changes the opportunities that you see for change.
Tammi Mac:
So if I’m thinking, let’s just get in my business.
Dr. Joi Madison:
Okay. Get into it.
Tammi Mac:
If I’m thinking I’m skinny. It’s not that thinking I’m skinny will make me skinny. It’s the things that I think about when it comes to being skinny, that will lead me in that direction.
Dr. Joi Madison:
So what I believe about who I am will inform what I choose. And so if I believe I’m healthy, then I’m going to choose healthy foods, healthy activities. And eventually the body will reflect that because I am making choices behaviorally that reflect what I believe internally about who I am.
Tammi Mac:
Yeah. Y’all get that. It’s not the mind that changes the actual thing. It’s the mind that changes the behavior-
Dr. Joi Madison:
Sure.
Tammi Mac:
…of how you get the thing. Girl, you’re taking me to church today, I’m sorry. Okay, we’ve talked a little bit about self-care, but let’s dig a little bit deeper into it.
Dr. Joi Madison:
Sure.
Tammi Mac:
What is self-care and why is it important?
Dr. Joi Madison:
Yeah. So, self-care is exactly that. It is caring for yourself. And the question of why it’s important, and I’ll contextualize this specifically for this conversation around Black people and wellness. It’s important because it’s also a part of not just our wellness practice, but also our liberation practice.
Tammi Mac:
Oh, oh. I don’t know what you’re saying. Our liberation.
Dr. Joi Madison:
It is. It’s a part of our liberation process.
Tammi Mac:
How so?
Dr. Joi Madison:
Recognizing that historically, Black bodies have been used for labor, and then we internalize that that is our only worth. We don’t know, for many people, wellness is just the absence of illness. If I ain’t sick, I’m good. As long as I can get up and go and do the thing, I’m good. And that’s the thing. Our worth is often tied to our capacity to be productive. What can I do? And so selfcare is about taking a moment to do some inventory around, not about what can I do for others? What do I need to be well, how can I care for me? If that’s going to do the wobble at the barbecue, then that’s what that is. So it’s about liberating ourselves from the idea that we’re only worth, what we can do for work.
Tammi Mac:
This is… I’m trying to put it into layman’s term. I went to a panel and a white man was talking about his independent film. And he was saying how he went to these different investors and he asked for $5 million. The Black people in the room were like, “What? You ask for $5 million?” So that’s a part of that liberation that you’re talking about. We would never ask for $5 million because of our history, because of the way that we’ve been brought up, to not believe that we’re even worth that much. That’s crazy.
Dr. Joi Madison:
The audacity. The audacity.
Tammi Mac:
That’s what I was thinking when I heard. I said, “You went to somebody else for $5 million?
Dr. Joi Madison:
That was your starting point? You got to work your way up.
Tammi Mac:
That’s where you started? Okay, hold on.
Dr. Joi Madison:
Taking notes, exactly.
Tammi Mac:
I only asked for $20.
Dr. Joi Madison:
Exactly. And was shaking when I went to ask.
Tammi Mac:
Okay, just make it 19,99 and we’ll call it even. So does wellness look differently in the Black community than it might look in other communities?
Dr. Joi Madison:
I think, yeah. And I think for the reason that we were just speaking about that, it is very much attached to our liberation. And so a lot of times when we think about wellness, particularly around self-care, the conversation that’s happening now is that it makes it like a luxury. You have to go to the spa.
Tammi Mac:
Yes, it does.
Dr. Joi Madison:
And go on the vacation. And you go to the things.
Tammi Mac:
You have to spend all this money, yes.
Dr. Joy Madison:
And so for us, for many of us, that’s not accessible. And so it may look different, not just because of the accessibility piece, but also, again, going back to the values piece. One practice that I’m really working on just personally is the difference between being tired and being drained. I’m tired. I need to rest. I’m drained. I need to recharge. And what I do to recharge. Maybe connecting with people. Maybe for me, going out to surf, spending time in nature, right. Going to do a thing that feels vigorous or I’m having to output a lot.
Tammi Mac:
Or that calms me down.
Dr. Joi Madison:
But that’s the way I recharge because that’s the thing that fills my battery is being with my people.
Tammi Mac:
What do you do to recharge? What do you do when you’re drained? I’m-
Dr. Joy Madison:
Personal?
Tammi Mac:
Yes, personally.
Dr. Joi Madison:
Anything creative-
Tammi Mac:
Because you’re an athlete, you’re a swimmer. I want to know what you do. Because I want to do what you do.
Dr. Joi Madison:
I surf. I surf. So I love to surf.
Tammi Mac:
You’re saying surf like surfboard.
Dr. Joy Madison:
Yeah, surfboard.
Tammi Mac:
Okay, so you would’ve asked for that $5 million too? I mean, because I don’t know [inaudible 00:13:59]-
Dr. Joi Madison:
So today, Joy would’ve asked for the $5 million. I don’t know, a couple years ago I probably would’ve been, I don’t know. But today Joy is, let me get that five. But I surf, I create. I like to just create for the sake of creating, not for a particular reason or a person or to sell it or to do anything, but just to get it out. I have an idea and I want to see what it looks like outside of my head. So I might color, I might write, I might dance. Anything creative in that manner. I also like to just laugh a little bit. Just laugh.
Tammi Mac:
I love laughing.
Dr. Joi Madison:
Yeah. My name is Joi. How can I not? Come on.
Tammi Mac:
How can you not be joyful?
Dr. Joi Madison:
Exactly.
Tammi Mac:
How could you not?
Dr. Joi Madison:
Exactly.
Tammi Mac:
So what are some things that I can do to improve my family’s or my own wellness? Because should a person be concerned with their family’s wellness as well?
Dr. Joi Madison:
Absolutely. And when you say concerned with, I think that, again, going back to our more sort of tribal communal tendency, usually our family’s wellness is a part of our wellness. I’m good, you good, we good. We all we got sometimes. So there’s that. But the question of what can I do is always interesting to me. Because it goes back to what I was saying earlier, which is sometimes for us, the question is what can we not do? What can I say no to? How can I slow down and do less right? As a way to tend to my wellness? Because we tend to be busy all the time doing all the things.
Tammi Mac:
So as a busy person myself, yes. Let me ask you this. Can being busy be a part of wellness?
Dr. Joi Madison:
That’s interesting. It could. Now how much time we get? It could. It could. What I would invite people to do is create a practice where you are regularly checking in with yourself. And for me, my understanding of wellness, is alignment. When you feel emotionally, spiritually, mentally, physically, relationally, even environmentally aligned. And whatever is helping in supporting that process, that then to me, could be a wellness practice.
Tammi Mac:
How do we know-
Dr. Joy Madison:
If it’s not, then…
Tammi Mac:
How do we know whether we’re aligned or not?
Dr. Joy Madison:
Oh, we feel it. You know how you feel when something is just off and you can’t really know what it is or you can’t… But you know and this is part of wellness. Wellness is reconnecting to our intuitive selves. It’s remembering, we talk a lot about who we’re becoming. I like to think about it as remembering who we’ve always been. And peeling back all of the fears and expectations and everybody else, what we should have done, or peeling back some of that and being still and connecting to the truth of what we know, what we feel intuitively. And then making it a priority to make that the thing that’s our new default, not the default setting of always on the go. Can I change my default setting to what it feels like to feel grounded, to feel safe in my body, to feel like I have agency in my environment? When I can feel that, that to me is a sign of wellness.
Tammi Mac:
I love it. On that note, you are not alone. How about that? Thank you, Dr. Joy.
Dr. Joi Madison:
Thank you.
Tammi Mac:
I could have done a whole nother 30 with you, sis.
Dr. Joi Madison:
Thank you so much.
Tammi Mac:
My goodness. But then you’d had the invoice me.
Dr. Joi Madison:
That’s all right.
Tammi Mac:
I’ll be in here…
Dr. Joi Madison:
It’ll be 5 million.
Tammi Mac:
I love it. You are not alone. It’s your guide to mental wellness. I am your host, Tammi Mac. Goodbye, everybody.
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