Bella Figura, The Tradition of Living Beautifully

Sandra Chuma, of Zimbabwean ancestry, is an entrepreneur, speaker, coach, podcast host, and award-winning documentary filmmaker. She believes that our greatest responsibility is to share our stories so we can inspire and create possibility for others.

Raised in a tiny mud hut in Zimbabwe with no running water or electricity, Sandra has never been one to let circumstances define her. Through hard work, and support from her “village,” she became a management consultant, advising major global companies. She then went on to build two successful companies.

But despite all her professional success, she knew she wasn’t walking in her purpose. Sandra made the decision to go back to school in 2015 to get a master’s degree in Journalism, Storytelling & Documentary Filmmaking from Columbia University.

Sandra has made it her mission to help others create the best version of themselves. She is building brands focused on providing inspiration, tools and community.

Discussed in this episode:

The power of storytelling

Assimilation and knowing your roots

The complexity of leaving your country of origin

Holding onto the values you were raised with

Following your purpose, not just your passion

Taking the first steps in a new endeavor and allowing the path to unfold

Passing cultural awareness onto the next generation

Resources:

Sandra's website

NDINI

Sandra on Instagram

Bella Figura website

Dolores on Instagram

Stephanie Flor, of South American ancestry, is a NYC­ based celebrity makeup artist who works regularly with industry leaders ranging from musicians to television personalities. Her clients include Mariah Carey, Eve, Sting, Kathy Griffin, and politicians Mexican President Felipe Calderon, and the Israel President Shimon Peres, among others. She is most currently the Global Colour Pro artist for Clinique U.S and Hispanic market.

Flor has been featured on Glam Belleza Magazine “Weekend Section,” Latina magazine's “Young & Inspiring: Ones to Watch” list, “ Beauty Vanguard in April 2015”and landed herself on the Cosmo for Latinas blog spotlight for Around the World Beauty.

She is a go-to beauty expert for her tips in both beauty and travel for Teen Vogue, Allure.com, Glamour, InStyle, Essence.com, and Vogue.com.

Editorially, Flor has worked on photo shoots and video productions for Cosmopolitan, Glamour, L’Oreal, People, Martha Stewart, The New Yorker, Time, OWN­ Oprah, Victoria’s Secret, and Women's Wear.

Flor expertise in multicultural beauty has made her a go-to ambassador for leading cosmetic and hair care brands, such as Head and Shoulders, Makeup Forever, L’Oreal Paris, La Bella, Thicker Fuller Hair, and Maybelline.

Discussed in this episode:

Entrepreneurship

Beauty as a spiritual practice

Connecting to ancestors through beauty

Traveling the world

Connecting to ancestral culture through beauty practices

Beauty approaches from around the globe

Resources:

Around the World Beauty

Stephanie's Makeup Artist page

The Italian American Podcast

Bella Figura website

Dolores on Instagram

Shelly Marshall, of Japanese and Irish descent, is the founder of Beauty Shamans, which unites the wisdom of the past and the science of today to create healthy skincare products from the ocean and Earth. As a nurse, esthetician, and aromatherapist, her approach to skincare is clinical, clean and holistic.

Things discussed:

Connections between our work and our heritage

Helping our parents and ourselves reconnect to our roots

Taking care of our skin holistically

Ways to wean off chemical skincare products

Turning our nightmares into our greatest gifts

Feeding our bodies for optimal health and skin

Embracing our family stories

Connecting to our ancestors through our work and by being the keeper of family history

Resources:

Shelly’s website, Beauty Shamans

Shelly on Instagram

Bella Figura website

Dolores on Instagram

Jaquira Díaz was born in Puerto Rico. Her work has been published in Rolling Stone, the Guardian, Longreads, The Fader, and T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and included in The Best American Essays 2016. She is the recipient of the 2019 Whiting Award in Nonfiction for “Ordinary Girls,” two Pushcart Prizes, an Elizabeth George Foundation grant, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Kenyon Review, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She lives in Miami Beach with her partner, the writer Lars Horn.

Things Discussed:

Growing up in Puerto Rico

Coming out to a Catholic family

The tensions between the white and black sides of her family during childhood

The silence around sexual violence

Ethnic and racial identity - What am I?

Practicing Catholicism and being gay

Even the hardest family stories can give us strength

The publishing industry

Racism and learning to understand one another

Resources:

Jaquira’s new memoir, “Ordinary Girls”

Jaquira on Instagram

Jaquira’s website

Bella Figura website

Dolores on Instagram

Aimee Raupp, of Irish ancestry, is a renowned women’s health & wellness expert and the best- selling author of the books Chill Out & Get Healthy, Yes, You Can Get Pregnant, and Body Belief. A licensed acupuncturist and herbalist in private practice in New York, she is also the founder of the Aimee Raupp Beauty line of hand-crafted, organic skincare products.

She’s appeared on The View and has been featured in Glamour, Allure, Well + Good, GOOP, Shape, and Redbook and has received endorsements from Deepak Chopra, Dr. Christiane Northrup, Arianna Huffington, and Gabby Bernstein for her work in helping thousands of women to improve their vitality, celebrate their beauty, and reconnect to the presence of their optimal health. Aimee is also the Head of Chinese Medicine at The Well, an active columnist and is a frequent speaker at women’s health & wellness conferences across the nation.

Things discussed:

Cooking and eating as our ancestors did

Being drawn to practices from other cultures

How to improve fertility through health and wellness

Possible causes of the epidemic of infertility

The impact of the IVF industry on women’s perceptions of their fertility

Epigenetics as it pertains to fertility

As long as you’re still menstruating, fertility can be improved

The myth of fertility decline past 35 years old

Resources:

Aimee’s website

Aimee’s books

Aimee on Instagram

Bella Figura website

Dolores on Instagram

Chloe Garcia Ponce, of Mexican and Native American ancestry, is a Mexican Curandera healer, herbalist, and channel working through the power of prayer and candle work. Curanderismo is a holistic approach to wellness that has been used in the Americas, pre- and post-contact, for hundreds of years. In Mexico, it is also known as Mexican Traditional Medicine.

A Curandera may be referred to as a woman of knowledge, or, if trained in traditional Native ways and serving their native community, a medicine woman. Chloe’s multicultural upbringing shaped her life and Nomadic Songlines, her healing practice.

Things discussed:

Making the best out of times of fear and uncertainty

Returning to practices that connect us to our true selves

Youthful rebellion leading to a circling back and finding your roots

Supporting one another through hardship

Ways to release emotion

Death as a catalyst for growth

Accessing the voices of those who have passed

The importance of human touch

Women and christian sacred texts

Resources:

Chloe's website

Chloe on Instagram

Bella Figura website

Dolores on Instagram

My guest for Episode 6, Alicia Jo Rabins, of Jewish ancestry, is a writer, musician, performer, ritualist and Torah teacher. She is the author of poetry books Divinity School (winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize) and Fruit Geode (finalist for the Jewish Book Award) and has released three albums with Girls in Trouble, her songwriting project about Biblical women. She is currently at work on an independent film, "A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff." The recipient of a 2020 Oregon Literary Fellowship, Rabins lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and two children.

Things discussed:

Being drawn to ancestral religious practices.

Reconnecting to cultural traditions even after several generations of assimilation.

Re-examining the biases against organized religion.

How organized religion can root us.

Art as a means to explore religious experience.

Embracing the roots of our adopted country in addition to our ancestral one.

Emotional challenges of motherhood.

Struggles of the writing life.

Teaching children about their heritage.

Raising children with ancestral traditions.

Resources:

Alicia's website

A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff

Girls in Trouble

Alicia on Instagram

"Ancestral Language for Strength," Dolores' blog post

Bella Figura website

Dolores on Instagram

In Episode 5, I speak to Jill Willard, of Italian and Irish ancestry, author of “Intuitive Being" and celebrated intuitive and healer. Jill is trained in multiple healing, wellness and listening modalities. Her wisdom and expertise focuses mainly on the connection between the brain, our body and our choices.

Topics discussed

What intuition is.

What an intuitive is.

How her heritage connected her to her intuition and fifth-sense.

Her silent conversations with her grandparents.

How intuition and instinct are not new ideas, but ancient practices that were commonplace to our ancestors.

Catholic sacraments and their parallel to energy centers.

How her psychic abilities forced her to see the abuse priests perpetrated on children, and other troubling facts, before they were revealed.

Why intuition has faded in modern society.

What being out of touch with your intuition feels like.

Learning to rest and to get back into our bodies.

How motherhood opens up a new form of intuition.

The art of mediumship.

References

Joseph Campbell

Connect with Spirit, Find Your Center, and Choose an Intentional Life

Guest

Jill's websites:

www.jillwillard.com

https://intuitivebeingexperience.podia.com/ibe

https://www.thepresentprogram.com

Jill on Instagram

Bella Figura

Bella Figura website

Dolores on Instagram

Mallorie Vaudoise, of Southern Italian ancestry, is a NYC-based spiritualist of Italian descent. With Vanessa Irena, she hosts Good Bones, a podcast about living and dying well. She is the author of Honoring Your Ancestors: A Guide to Ancestral Veneration and Italian Folk Magic, a blog about devotional practices from Southern Italy and Sicily.

Drawn to witchcraft and folk magic from a young age, her path has required both careful study and wild abandon. Her writing is an act of devotion, an offering to the spiritual ecosystem in which she finds herself. She believes that music, food, wine, and kissing are vital tools of spiritual evolution.

Things discussed:

What ancestor veneration is and what it isn’t.

How different cultures venerate their ancestors.

Mallorie’s book, “Honoring Your Ancestors: A Guide to Ancestral Veneration.”

How we repeat patterns from not only our own past, but the pasts' of our ancestors.

Ancestor veneration can shine a light on these patterns to help release them.

How to discern if a pattern is ancestral trauma.

The body and home are our spiritual foundations and need to be tended to first and foremost.

How to feel messages from our dead.

Resources:

“Honoring Your Ancestors: A Guide to Ancestral Veneration”

Mallorie’s blog, Italian Folk Magic

Mallorie on Instagram

Bella Figura website

Episode 2 [Marine Selenee]

Dolores on Instagram

Christopher Castellani, of Southern Italian ancestry, recently published his fourth novel, Leading Men, for which he received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, was published by Viking in 2019. The novel explores the complex relationship between Frank Merlo, a Jersey-born Italian American, and Tennessee Williams. Castellani is also the author of the novels All This Talk of Love, The Saint of Lost Things, and A Kiss from Maddalena, a trilogy inspired by the lives of his Italian immigrant parents. His collection of essays on point of view in fiction, The Art of Perspective, was published by Graywolf Press in 2016. He is currently on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He lives in Boston, where he is artistic director of GrubStreet, the country's largest and leading independent writing center.

Things discussed:

The parts of our heritage we need to leave behind.

Internalizing our family stories.

Research shows that family stories give us strength and build the foundation of our lives.

Loosening the ties to our family stories in order to incorporate some of our own.

How our respective cultures can be comforting and also suffocating.

The beginning of our lives start with our ancestors’ stories.

Writing our family stories as a way to redeem the loss of assimilation.

Leaving behind the parts of our heritage that don't support us.

The same Elemental of our culture can heal as well as wound.

Tips on how to gather and write your family stories.

Resources:

Guest:

Christopher's website

Christopher's books

Christopher on Instagram

Grubstreet

Mentions:

Guggenheim Fellowship

Italian American Podcast Gay Talese Episode 1

Italian American Podcast Gay Talese Episode 2

"Where are the Italian American novelists?" - Gay Talese essay

Bella Figura:

Bella Figura website

Dolores on Instagram