Episode 172: Indigenous Wisdom Conversations: Walking Both Worlds and the Now of Life with Juliana Guerrero

What did the word *woke* mean before the overculture got hold of it?

In this conversation, Julia Carmen sits down with her granddaughter, Juliana Guerrero — high school English teacher, writer, and curandera in her own right — for one of the talks they share a few times a year. They begin with that one small, loaded word, and the distance between its political version and the older one: the meaning that lived in us before anyone made it a slogan. Not awakening for the first time, but the remembrance of what we already are within ourselves, in the soul self of being.

From there the conversation turns to what it takes to stay awake when the whole world seems to be drifting back to sleep. Juliana, three years into teaching, talks about the "iPad generation" — children raised on a screen from day one, the decline in critical thinking, the kids whose mother told a stranger, "just text them, they'll respond." Together they name what that costs the soul self, and what it asks of the rest of us.

And they keep returning to the medicine: chichi soul time, the self-care that goes all the way back to the first nurturing we knew; kindness to yourself before anyone else; boundaries as clarity; and community, because we cannot do this alone. Walking both worlds at the same time — the now of life — is a job. It is also a remembrance.

This is the first of a two-part conversation. Next time, Julia and Juliana sit with heritage and what it truly means to be awake inside the female frequency of being.

"If you are wondering whether you're woke enough — you are already awake. The soul self knows."