Jun 26, 2023
Show Notes:
Virginia Ravenscroft has had a long and winding road since graduating from Harvard in 1992. Her journey has taken her through a diverse range of experiences, including graphic design, teaching, project management, and tech. However, despite her success in these fields, she felt that something was missing. She realized that she wanted to offer a more healing type of work. It's something that she had been learning about, practicing, and pursuing training for over time. Virginia's journey is emblematic of the changing nature of work in the 21st century, where people are no longer expected to have one job for life. Instead, they are encouraged to explore different paths and find work that aligns with their passions and values.
Founder of Two Companies
Virginia's two companies, Offering Abundance and Abolition in the Bones, are the culmination of her journey. Offering Abundance is a company that offers a diverse range of services, including coaching, software development, travel arrangements, especially to places that are off the beaten track, and healing practices. Virginia's goal with Offering Abundance is to provide a one-stop-shop for all of her clients' needs by providing a diverse range of services that can help people in many different ways.
Abolition in the Bones, on the other hand, is a company that focuses on anti-racism coaching. Virginia's journey and her two companies highlight the importance of finding work that aligns with one's values and passions.
Abolition in the Bones
The focus of Abolition in the Bones is anti-racism coaching and support for those who have experienced racism. The company provides a 15-20 session curriculum that is tailored to each individual's needs. Virginia works one-on-one with her clients to help them understand the impact of racism and how to be anti-racist.
Virginia explains that one of the ethical problems with white people in anti-racism coaching is that they don't really know about the impact of racism as a person of color. Virginia is aware of the issue of a white person doing racism coaching, and the blind spots she may encounter. To overcome this, she has an accountability circle of Black women who are the experts that help her shape the curriculum and review her practice.
Virginia's Healing Practice
Virginia's healing practice is one of the many services that she offers through Offering Abundance. She is trained in a modality called Indigenous Focusing Oriented Therapy (I-FOT). I-FOT is a body-based practice that attends to the wisdom within the body. It is a decolonizing practice that is rooted in Indigenous ways of healing. Virginia explains the origin of the practice and the difference between this practice and the traditional western approach to illness. Virginia's approach to healing is focused on helping people become their best selves and understand the wisdom within their bodies. She talks about who this practice serves and why they look for a healing practice outside of the traditional medical industry.
Virginia's journey and her two companies have important implications for the changing nature of work in the 21st century and that it is possible to have a diverse range of experiences and still find work that is fulfilling.
Working in a Healing Practice
Virginia discusses her experiences with healing and anti-racism and the exercises she uses to help clients uncover and address their problems and discover the root cause through paying close attention and focusing on the body’s reactions in various situations. She talks about how we perceive intelligence and her education practice. She talks about her work as an end-of-life doula. Her goal is to focus on queer and trans people as they approach the end of their life and how she can help them plan, communicate, and cope with this difficult period.
Working as an Anti-racism Practitioner
Virginia talks about her work in Abolition in the Bones and it helps people with internalized racism, unconscious bias, and problematic attitudes. She talks about the "why exercise," to recognise behavior. As an example, she talks about thinking about a time when they felt like they had to control a situation. Virginia believes that underneath this urge to control or dominate is fear and a desire for safety. She also highlights how this sense of being out of control can be triggered in situations with racial components. She explains how this is used to recognize the trigger and control the response, and how body-based exercises help people recognise unconscious impulsive behaviors. Virginia believes that understanding the interiority and full humanity of people of color is crucial for overcoming racism and promoting inclusivity.
Virginia is passionate about anti-racism and has been working on it since college. She attended an anti-racism workshop led by a black woman, and a presentation by Jacob Holt, a photographer from the Netherlands, who documented racial injustice and counteracted each one with a new photograph which challenged her to work on anti-racism work. She also mentions how she became aware of her own unconscious racial behavior.
Influential Courses and Professors
Virginia discusses her experiences with various courses and professors at Harvard, including Professor Edwin Cranston, who was her advisor throughout her sophomore, junior, and senior year. She was fortunate enough to come into Harvard already speaking Japanese fairly well, and she went into classical Japanese classes with him. She also mentions a course on the art and architecture of Suleiman the Magnificent with Gülru Necipoğlu, Simon Schama's class on art and history in the Baroque era, and Regina Johnson's class on Modern Japanese Women Writers.
Timestamps:
06:46 An introduction to indigenous focusing oriented therapy
14:42 Examples of the body mind connection in holistic healing
16:51 Assisting the healing journey
19:21 Virginia’s healing methods
22:15 Virginia’s work as an end-of-life doula
27:42 Explaining problematic meanings
30:30 Running abolition in the bones
34:23 Exercises to uncover racism
39:06 The story behind Virginia’s focus on racism
49:50 Preparing to live abroad
Links:
https://abolitioninthebones.com/
https://virginiaravenscroft.com/