finding internal integration in her cultural home with Anela Seliskar Barboza

About Anela Seliskar Barboza | She/They/ʻOia, coach, 

Anela is a Somatic, Transformation, and Leadership Coach and Mentor Coach. She is deeply committed to creating a safe and loving container for exploring questions of identity, culture, race, relationship to place/home, and resiliency as a means of personal transformation and healing. Anela’s perspective has been shaped by her experience as a diasporic kanaka maoli, born and raised away from her home, culture, and into assimilation. Impacted by cultural isolation, her personal transformation included Somatics as a means to healing the cord that connected family to land and to one another. In 2022, she returned her family back home and lives full-time on the Big Island of Hawaiʻi, in the sunbelt of Keaau, Puna. Learn more at https://www.anelabarboza.com/. 

In lieu of a specific non-profit, Anela invited us all to learn about the peoples who lived on our land before colonization and find out: Where are they now and how can we serve them now?

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All Up in It is a project by coach SB Rawz focused on telling stories of growth and change from the thick of learning. Learn more about SB, coaching with her, & her projects at https://rawzcoaching.com

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Key moments in the conversation include…

…how Anela describes herself as a human:

• Humaning in progress, constantly working to arrive in a basic outline while leaving room for growth
• Someone exploring how all the versions of self can coalesce into one form
• A multi-racial person of color with mixed ancestry and deeply rooted in her Hawaiian heritage, raised on the assimilated mainland

…what Anela is all up in:

• Two years into coming home to Hawaii and noticing who she is in this context that she’s craved for so long – including the logistics of moving and making home of a place and the intuitive/instinctive acts of connecting with place
• Navigating being invited into rooms exploring diversity while having to confront Model Minority biases and the desires of those in power for her to be somehow responsible for their emotions – to provide more in the form of soothing rather than growth-oriented challenging
• Growing a business that is inherently inseparable from Anela as a person while also experiencing the exhaustion of being in primarily white, cis-gender, heteronormative spaces
• Finding rest in community, with people who welcome her unmasked self
• Living at a time when the Hawaiian language is being revived and, along with it, the oral history of that part of her heritage

…her tools include:

• Learning, in academic settings but also farther afield, particularly experiential learning
• The longitudinal view of her heritage, into and before Hawaii 
• Being in a place where her brown skin is more “normal,” a place where her nervous system can settle more fully than when she was living on the American continent

…the non-profit she chose to highlight was:

Learn the land you’re on, who the indigenous people are who lived on the land before colonization, where they are now, and how you might serve them even in some small way. (I used this website years ago to discover that I live and work on Tutelo land.)