What is GariTalks?

GariTalks is a platform dedicated to curating conversations and teaching tools for unpacking, processing, and healing individual and collective emotional trauma. We offer online and in-person community spaces. All spaces are created and guided by Gari.

Space Values

Norms and space values give us an expected idea of how to behave, and function to provide a source of common grounding when sharing space.

When you attend a GariTalks conversation, be ready to practice your ABCs:

Appreciate Discomfort

Learning happens in the space of newness, awkwardness, uncomfortableness. 

Be Raggedy

We leave perfection at the door. We show up just as we are.

Curiosity, Courage, Conflict - Engage!

Curiosity disrupts fear
Courage means from the heart
Conflict can be a space for learning

Founding Beliefs

Emotions are Messengers

What are my emotions trying to tell me?

Power is Cultivated

What choices are available to me?

Becoming Whole > Being Happy

Am I holding space for all of me? 

Contrast Creates Clarity

How can I learn from contradiction?

Driving Questions

Driving questions are the questions that keep you up at night.

They describe the force that compels you to keep going in life, the curiosity that exists within your hopes and desires.

GariTalks seeks answers to the questions:

What does it look like to create a world where trust is a common resource? How can we be better strangers to one another?

How can we draw power from our generational wounds to strengthen our gifts?

What is possible for us beyond healing?

About the Founder

Hiya! I’m Gari

I am fascinated by the 'unwanted' things in life.

The discomfort, the chaos, the conflict, the big feelings like rage and grief, the socially marginalized, the incarcerated...
the Shadows of humanity if you will.

There is something very powerful within the things we avoid.

I am a big feeler.

As a child, and through most of my young adult life,
I had many emotional experiences where I thought my deep feelings would, in all honesty, kill me. My parents didn't know how to help me develop this gift of sensitivity. They, like many adults in our lives, had been conditioned as children to distance themselves from big feelings.

The emotional response I felt the to world around me was overwhelming.

I was convinced something was wrong with me.

I decided to dedicate myself to uncovering the source of what exactly was wrong with me.

In 2010, I began to unpack my trauma. To acknowledge all the ways I had been wounded, abandoned, neglected, harmed.

I met with therapists, healers, and coaches. I read countless literature on positive psychology and personal development. I did the affirmations. I cried. I took cold showers. I crafted routines. I dragged myself through cycle after cycle of depression, existential crisis, and spiritual awakening. I was determined to fix my brokenness.

Over the past 16 years of digging deep, I've come to one simple realization:

Nothing is wrong with me...

I had just never been taught how to face my feelings.

Healing isn't just about the unearthing and the processing of painful memories. It is also about learning how to embody emotional safety within yourself to be able to feel your feelings, learn from your feelings, and then choose differently when confronted with similar situations.

So, it didn't matter how much I tried to 'improve' myself or make myself 'better'... If I couldn't learn how to hold space for and appreciate the full range of all my emotions, I would be perpetually stuck in a cycle of self-improvement.

​"No amount of self-improvement
can make up for any lack of self-acceptance"
- Robert Holden

What had been wrong with me this whole time is that I was taught that something that humans naturally do - feeling, especially feeling bad - was wrong!

This is when I discovered Shadow Work.

I learned how to recognize the disowned parts of my psyche - the parts I was (taught to be) disgusted by, fearful of, uncomfortable with. I learned how to get close to those those seemingly scary, dark parts. I learned how to hold them and integrate them into my being. I learned how to feel deeply, and most importantly, I learned that within my deep, big feelings are actually the keys to helping me unlock and achieve all of my greatest dreams. 

I have since made it my life's mission to feel fully and deeply everyday, to make decisions that honor my feelings and my sovereignty - and to teach those tools to others.

Let us learn to embrace the wholeness of who we are.
In order to become the gifts we were born into this world to be.

Contact us

Seeking perspective on a tough conflict with a friend, family member or colleague?

Feeling like your life is out of control?

Let’s get on a call, recenter your agency, and talk through the solutions available to you!