Ashley Sumner
In our latest New Narratives episode, humhum founder Alexandra Ballensweig shared space with writer, super-connector, serial entrepreneur, and lifelong seeker Ashley Sumner to explore the importance of internal alignment when it comes to cultivating nourishing relationships.
Together, Ashley and Alexandra also explore:
Building our own stories about what we want in relationship
Paying attention to signals from our bodies and the environment
The difference between attachment and nourishing connection
Establishing and upholding boundaries in relationship
Tasha Blank
The relational journey is one of perpetual growth and transformation, as humhum founder Alexandra Ballensweig and guest Tasha Blank explore in the latest New Narratives episode. Together, Tasha and Alexandra also explore:
The importance of teachers to guide us without judgment
Learning about our "darketypes" to illuminate opportunities for personal growth
How turning toward our pain can often lead to healing and expansion
Creating containers that support meaningful relational work
Tasha Blank is a celebrated international DJ, somatic practitioner, teacher and founder The Get Down, The Drop, BODY LVNGUAGE and global leadership academy Powerhouse DJ School (PhDJ).
Elizabeth Carroll
In this episode, Elizabeth Carroll, a 24-year-old management consultant who moved to NYC after college shares her experiences navigating the chaotic NYC dating scene, highlighting social pressures to date multiple people simultaneously. She discussed the importance of taking time for self-healing and self-understanding after a breakup, emphasizing emotional maturity, communication, and personal growth. Elizabeth also expressed her goal of enjoying her own company, rekindling friendships and finding joy in personal hobbies. She shares about lessons learned from past relationships and how she has come to value authenticity, vulnerability, and humility in a partner.
Anjali Mahadevia
In this episode, Anjali shares her current perspective on relationships, focusing on personal joy and presence over seeking external validation from relationships. She discussed how she sees that every relationship has shaped her and taught her, and the lessons learned from heartbreak emphasizing resilience and the value of platonic relationships. We explored the idea of de-centering romantic partnership as the primary strategy to meet needs for connection, relational fulfillment, and support. Anjali emphasized the importance of faith and trusting in her path, finding safety within herself, and integrating spiritual practices influenced by her upbringing to feel peaceful on the journey.
Nkechi Njaka
In this episode, our conversation with Nkechi explores dating as a practice that supports waking up. Nkechi questions to what end staying with relational difficulty such that it stretches us serves.
This conversation touches working with wounding around worthiness and value, and how practicing with tenderness can be an opening for healing and empowerment.
She talks about claiming the desire to be chosen as an intentional orientation, rather than letting it run as a conditioned pattern. We can choose ourselves.
We touch on attachment security, and nervous system capacity-building, as well as buddhist non-attachment as a practice. We explore the difference between equanimity and the near miss of not caring as a part of practicing with non-attachment discerningly. We discuss feeling as a superpower, and the blessings that come when we have capacity to keep the heart open. Listen for more!
Nkechi Njaka (she/her) is a practice-based creative researcher, a neuroscientist, choreography artist, and mindfulness meditation guide. She is the founder of The Compass, NDN lifestyle studio, co-founder of the sleep app DreamWell, the co-host of Dating White and the other 1/2 of RESONANCE. Her work intersects wellness, science, art and social practice.
Ella Israel
In this episode, Ella vulnerably shares about her evolution from anxious attachment to embracing peace and authenticity in her polyamorous relationship. She shares how she's discovered her "relationship politics" by keeping an open mind, researching, self-exploring, and living into her relationship values. Ella shares about race, sexuality, and the challenges faced as a black queer femme woman in dating environments influenced by societal biases. She sees dating as a spiritual practice, and a revolutionary act; with the opportunity to foster mutual growth and to leave the people she meets feeling inspired, uplifted, and cared for.
Mallory Combemale + Ariel Figueroa
In this episode, Alexandra sits down with Ariel and Mallory to talk about the ways they're writing their own scripts about their relationship both as business partners and life partners, about conflict resolution, commitment and more. Ariel and Mallory joined Katya Stepanov on the founding team of Inheritance Project. Inheritance Project trains leaders, resolves conflicts and builds inclusive, resilient communities by unpacking and transforming our individual and collective inheritance.
Ariel and Mallory had never met before Katya brought them together as co-founders and they began building Inheritance Project together. In Feb 2021, they made the leap from co-founders to life partners and have since been navigating the joys and challenges of an intense partnership where there is nowhere to hide. The complex dynamics of working and living together has served as an accelerator to their relationship, as well as their individual personal growth. The unique nature of their relationship has invited them to create more intentionality in the way they structure their relationship, relate and handle conflicts.
Caley Alyssa
In this episode, Alexandra sits down with CEO• Founder of The Caley Alyssa App & Academy of Yogic Sleep to chat all things partnership, and relational edges. Caley shares about her practice with finding awe and gratitude in the mundane as a pathway to opening the heart and finding more connection in her partnership. She talks about how parenting has helped her clarify the kinds of relationships she wants to invest in, and being more discerning about that. Caley is calling in service-oriented community, and aligned opportunities to which she can step up and be of service in ways that are not transactional, commercial, or oriented around profit.
Jason Luk
In this episode, Jason shares their experience with building chosen family connections and breaking down barriers inherited from societal norms about what forms of intimacy are reserved for certain relationships vs. others. They emphasize the significance of vulnerability, self-responsibility, and flexibility in cultivating meaningful relationships beyond romantic partnership and the family of origin.
Jason is a Certified Mindfulness Facilitator through UCLA and a Wellness Coach through Catalyst Coaching Institute. Jason founded the Mindfulness program at Yahoo and serves as its Global Lead. Jason is also a coach, catalyst, and collaborator for high-performing individuals who seek to overcome plateaus in certain areas of their life. Whether it be healthy eating, exercise, sleep or stress management, Jason helps clients grow into their full potential to lead fulfilling lives.
Dr. Marie Thouin
In this episode, humhum founder Alexandra Ballensweig interviews Dr. Marie Thouin about her own heart's journey. Marie explores what love means to her and how she can get in the way of it. She shares how her countercultural upbringing has influenced her views on love and how she is now challenging inherited beliefs to open herself up to aligned experiences and an authentic expression of her heart.
Marie is the founder of Love InSight a mindful dating & relationship coaching practice where she supports people of all backgrounds and relationship styles in developing vibrant, intentional, and empowered love lives. Marie completed her PhD in the East-West Psychology department at California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco where she conducted seminal research on the topic of compersion (or positive empathy) in consensually non-monogamous relationships. Her work on compersion and mindful dating was featured in numerous podcasts and publications, including the Savage Lovecast and ELLE magazine. She believes in the power of intentional love to create a better world.
Jenny Chen
In this episode, Jenny shares intimately about their own experience with sexual liberation, letting go of modern paradigm milestones that may not feel like their own, and what it means to engage in a co-creative relationship. Jenny shares about their aliveness around dynamics where intimacy expresses an exploration of emergence, rather than a preconceived idea about how something should look, and what should happen.
Jenny Chen is a Sacred Values coach, plant medicine guide, heart-centered space holder, podcast host, and eternal student of the great mystery of life. As a coach, Jenny empowers the world’s rebels, rule-breakers, and misfits to define, embody, and live from their Sacred Values.
Efe Kabba
In this episode, Efe shares how dating has been an integral part of her self-love journey by recognizing triggers or wounds that arise during the process and using them as opportunities for growth and healing. She discusses her recent exploration of polyamory, and the challenges and opportunities that have arisen in practicing relationship in this way. Finally, Efe talks to the intersection between relational practice, creative practice, and spiritual practice, and how she is working with her sexual energy to fuel her creative work.
Efe Kabba, a storyteller, Filmmaker, and writer based in Brooklyn, shares vulnerably about her personal journey with dating. She shares how both experiencing dating with humhum, and going on to become a facilitator at humhum had shifted her approach to one where she practices presence and intentionality allowing her to enjoy the process rather than focusing on the outcome.
Cori Shearer
In this blog, we sit down with Cori Shearer, humhum’s Head of Product, sat down for a deep conversation about dating with intention and moving through dating with new eyes.
Cori shares how to center your own experience for empowerment, and prioritize reflection for clarity and self-honesty. Focus on yourself, rather than on how the other person is seeing you. How did you feel in their presence? Did you enjoy the connection? Would you like to connect again?
And how turning to your community for insight and accountability in dating, rather than keeping those worlds separate can help us stay accountable to what we say we want, and catch us in our patterning when our actions and intentions don’t align.
Dating with discernment and intention can mean going on fewer dates, and that’s okay.
Helen Vonderheide
In this episode, we explore together Helen’s personal journey, practices and resources she’s actively working with to embody her essence and wholeness. We discovered together that it comes down to the truth of interconnectedness, and the web of relationships. We belong to loving systems.
Helen Vonderheide is a community educator whose teachings invite the embodiment and expression of interconnectedness, relationality, and reciprocity through the lens of the Akashic Records, Decoloniality, and Empirical Evidence.