GABES TORRES on Journeying Together /326
Cyanotypes by Anna Atkins (1843)
Gabes Torres offers her thoughtful wisdom in this conversation that weaves through healing, interconnection, and embodiment. Focusing on holistic healing and mental health support, Gabes lucidly describes the ways our individual health and well-being are dependent upon our connections and the structures of the societies in which we reside. This insight brings Gabes and Ayana into a beautiful conversation about interdependence and the abundance that our communities can foster when we move beyond a scarcity mindset based on individualism and profit.
Gabes paints a picture of health in which mind and body are not severed, and where embodied actions like eating in community, and making art can be sources of deep healing. With this understanding of community, no one is disposable, and we all must hold each other in accountability. Together Ayana and Gabes dream of what we may be free towards (not just free from) as we divest from extractive mindsets. Reverberating on a call to expand love in deeply rooted directions, this conversation offers nourishment for body and soul.
“We are wired for connection, yet we live in a society that aims and strategizes towards severing us from another through the capitalist project.”
Photo of Gabes Torres by Laurel Yae of Nour Images
Gabes Torres was born and raised in the countryside of the Philippines. She is a psychotherapist, organizer, and artist with her work focusing on the interplay of mental health, the arts, spirituality, and justice-oriented practice. She has an MA in Theology & Culture, and Counseling Psychology; both graduate degrees were accomplished in Seattle, the city where she organized with abolitionist and anti-imperialist groups at a local, grassroots level. In her clinical practice, Gabes pays attention to healing from racial and migration trauma, while decolonizing the therapeutic space from White Western modalities. Gabes writes for Yes! Magazine, an independent publisher of solutions journalism with stories that uncover environmental, economic, and social justice intersections. She is also a poet and singer-songwriter. She independently produced 3 albums of original music, and her first one was launched when she was 17. She has toured in Southeast Asia, Chicago, San Francisco, and Seattle.
♫ The music featured in this episode is “My Ocean" by Amaara, "I'm Small" by Blue Doll, and "Raven" by Annie Sumi.
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Episode References
Recommendations
Uses of the Erotic by Audre Lorde
Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon
Conversation with Dr. Leny Strobel and advaya (Kinship Online Course): Decolonisation as Re-membering, Kapwa Psychology, and Wells of Liminality (Transcript in the video notes)
My Grandmother's Hands by Resmaa Menakem
Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)
The 400 Blows (1959)
Gabes' learning guides
Abolition and Mental Health Learning Guide
Anti-Colonial Therapeutic Approaches to Racialized and Migration Trauma
Take Action
The aforementioned learning guides provide action steps and reflective prompts.
Join grassroots organizations and mutual aid networks at a local level.
Learn about pod-mapping and create a pod for accountability networking.
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For The Wild Podcast is an anthology of the Anthropocene; focused on land-based protection, co-liberation and intersectional storytelling rooted in a paradigm shift away from human supremacy, endless growth and consumerism.