The Gumpcast

EP19. Humanizing Others With Music w/ Mina Girgis 🇪🇬🇺🇸

How do we challenge our stereotypes about other cultures and humanize others beyond what we assume?
My guest today, Mina Girgis, believes that learning about music and listening to other people’s music is the path forward. What happens when we bring curiosity to the music we listen to?
Mina is a musical anthropologist and current Director of Education, Campus and Community Engagement at UC Berkley CalPerformances. Mina is also the founder of The Nile Project, where he used the power of human connection via shared musical culture to tackle one of Africa’s most challenging sustainability conflicts: The River Nile.Whether yo are into classical music, to gypsy music, or electronic and hiphop, we’ll cover how any music tells a story that can help us understand life and humans on a more fundamental level.
Sample performance from the Nile project:
 
Notes:
Romani People/ Gypsies
The Nile Project: http://nileproject.org/music/musicians/
Illuminations - Human and Machine https://calperformances.org/learn/illuminations/illuminations-2022-23/
Othering and Belonging Institute
https://belonging.berkeley.edu/
 
 

Ep18. Standing your ground without losing your loved ones

 There are many voices that tell us to express our truth, but almost none that tell us to do so with grace and respect to our loved ones and their truth.
Our anonymous guest spent 14 years building his own sense of safety before coming out as a homosexual man in a society that was directly opposed to it.
It is remarkable how he created space for his mother, a member of that society, to live her own story.
Our guest today bravely shares his journey of conscious self-acceptance, while waving a tapestry of love to hold his family despite their conflicting views on homosexuality.
“I wanted us to go through it together. I did not want to become someone they did not recognize”
Today’s Gumpcast story will leave you with:
-A new perspective for what it looks like to speak your truth, while holding space for others.
-A model for how knowledge can help build a sense of self that is shielded from society.
-A deep probe into how the gay identity is engineered for a Western society. How the Arab homosexual identity is inspired by it but does not relate to it.
-A big question in the end about the history of man and our relationship to nature.
9 min Bonus Soundbite next week!
There is a segment of the conversation that took us on a riff where my guest shared a lot of the history of homosexuality and the “scientific”-ization of it with Freud and Eugenics.
He masterfully pieces together the bits of history as he discovered them in his quest to understand how society reacted to homosexuality, from political will power, and the utility of the Gay identity.
We decided to cut it from the episode but will make it available as a stand alone 9 min segment this week.
Stay tuned for a follow up soundbite at findgumption.com 
References:
Desiring Arabs Paperback – Illustrated, September 15, 2008
by Joseph A. Massad (Author)
Orientalism Paperback – October 12, 1979
by Edward W. Said (Author)
Desperate housewives scene: Bee’s son comes out
Juste une question d'amour,TV Movie 2000 1h 28m
Contracorriente (VOST) 2009 ‧ Romance/Drama ‧ 1h 50m

EP17. Mending The Heart with Somatics w/ Staci Haines 🇺🇸

What do you want? What do you value? What do you long for? What is yearning to heal? What do you want to be possible for your community or for the world?
What if your body already knows all the answers to these questions?
 
Staci Haines, Somatics teacher and practitioner and Author of The Politics of Trauma breaks this down for us in an another authentic and vulnerable Gumpcast conversation.
In this episode:
Her story of holding space for her mother’s passing away, and how everything she learned in the field of Somatics prepared her for for that moment.
What is the Soma? How is it different from the body?
How we identify what we are longing for and become a commitment to it?
Practical Live session: I offer myself as a guinea pig for all of you, Stacie offers offers me a live session to heal my aching heart, and give you a taste of what working with Somatics looks like.
Enjoy,
Omar
 
 
 
“Resilience is the ability to somatically, holistically renew ourselves during and after oppressive, threatening, or traumatic experiences. We are able to shift ourselves, physiologically and psychologically from traumatic hyperalert states to calmed cohesive states. It is the ability to regain a sense of hope and imagine a positive future.“ - Staci K. Haines
Show notes:
The Politics of Trauma
Strozzi Institute Somatic Programs: Declaring a New Future
The Tibetan book of living and dying
Healing Sex: A Mind-Body Approach to Healing Sexual Trauma
 
 

EP16 How do we deal with heartbreak? w/ Sherin Wafaai 🇪🇬 🇫🇮

How does one take care of heartbreak? What messages do we get from society when going through a heartbreak? And how does it actually impact us compared to breaking an arm or a leg?
In this most vulnerable episode, I discuss all of the above with my Sherin Wafaai, my ex-partner. Together we tell our two-sided story and then dive into what her vision for a place that can tend to heartbreak is. If you stick to the end, you'll also get to hear one of my poems read by her called "Heart Break Hotel" 
Let me know your thoughts in the comments on youtube or on the blog below
Join the conversation at http://findgumption.com

EP 15. Race and Identity: How do we face our demons? w/ Hatim El Tayeb 🇸🇩🇪🇬🇿🇦

Join the conversation at findgumption.com
What happens when we excavate our race/identities and the demons that they carry?
Hatim El Tayeb, CEO and Ex-Dean of the African Leadership Academy, tackles his identities as a Sudanese who grew up in Oman and Egypt, studied in Boston and now living in South Africa.
We’ll cover our journey in uncovering out identities, and reflect back on our relationship in high school and how far we have come on these topics.
We quickly realize that opening up some of these old conversations is a major opportunity to own up to our ignorance, and celebrate what we have learned about ourselves since.
Show notes and links
Identities in Sudan: The History Behind Sudan’s Identity Crisis
How reading fiction can make you a better person.

EP14. The Penis Dialogues. How does the myth of ED shape our minds? w/Mostafa Fayek and Khaled Sallam

We’ve all been there. Everyman, no matter big or small, healthy or sick, young or old - has realized, one way or another, that his penis can defy his brain’s directions.
What happens when we listen to our dicks not working versus try to “fix” them, as we do with everything else?
Two of my longest standing friends from high school and I, take turns to share three stories from our early twenties, where we first experienced the dreaded penis-not-working syndrome for different reasons.
This is followed by a raw roundtable Q&A that produced an honest conversation.
I guarantee you. You will not hear anything of the sort anywhere else.
Join the conversation at findgumption.com
Leave a comment or email me us at thegumpcast@gmail.com or if you just reply to this email if you are already subscribed.
We want to hear your stories. Send them. 
Show notes and links
Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance [Philosophy Novel]
Stress-Induced Erectile Dysfunction: Personal and professional stress, such as relationship trouble, is the main reason for ED in middle-aged men. [Healthline Article]
Porn-induced Erectile Dysfunction: It is hard to prove outright that pornography causes ED, but these testimonies replicate findings from the clinical literature: that if men can kick their porn habit, they start to recover their ability to become aroused by real-life intimacy. [The Guardian]
Full list of drugs known to cause Erectile Dysfunction [WebMD] 
Practicing and Measuring Self Compassion
 

EP13. Gender - How Do We Balance the Masculine and Feminine? w/ Sumaya Holdijk 🇳🇱🇸🇾

Why does talking about gender feel complicated these days? Is there an imbalance between our Masculine and Feminine? Sumaya Holdijk, massage therapist, birthing doula and self-described space holder, shares her stories about sexual harassment in Egypt, and the practices she has learned over the years to come more into her power.
Join the conversation at findgumption.com
Show notes and links:
Chi Nei Tsung (Abdominal Massage)
Family Constellations Bert Hellinger
Victim hero villain triangle
Anima and Animus Carl Jung
The Multi Orgasmic Man Mantak Chia

Ep12. Nationalism - Can it be a force of peace? w/ Omar Dajani 🇺🇸🇵🇸

Subscribe at findgumption.com
How much do you understand your national background? What is your relationship with your local environment? And what kind of ideologies move you without realizing?
We’re back! We start Season 2 with a deep and delicious discussion around our relationship to nations.
My guest Omar Dajani, is an American Palestinian law professor, and this is his story about how a college debate opened him up to explore his Middle Eastern origins, and took him on a journey to become part of the Negotiations Support Unit of the Palestine Liberation Organization in the late ninteis.
In this episode we tackle:
The experience of being a dual national, and how nations are intertwined with our imagination.
The complexities of nationalism and the many ways it shapes our world.
We ask: Is nationalism always bad? If not, can it actually propel us forward?
The Palestinian occupation, and the grim reality of how far we’ve come from the end of the nineties. Is there any hope? What does it look like?
White nationalism in America, and how a lonely world is driving people to look for more structure. Are we at risk of a fascism?
The power of the local, and why talking to those who trigger us is critical to humanity.
About Omar Dajani:
Omar lives in San Francisco and is a Professor of Law at the University of the Pacific - McGeorge School of Law. He grew up in Texas, and lived for a long time in Palestine where has been part of the Negotiations Support Unit
Things we mentioned (and further reading!)
What makes you Antifragile?
An Ode to Heartbreak: A book of poems and meditations, on losing relationships, nations and friendships.
The Palestinian First Intifadah
Imagined Communities: Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism by Benedict Anderson
What Makes a Nation? By Ernest Renan
Born a Crime, by Trevor Noah
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
A Land for All: The Two States, One Homeland initiative
The Lonely Century: How to Restore Human Connection in a World That's Pulling Apart by Noreena Hertz
If you liked this, stay tuned for the upcoming weeks, we will release some more short soundbites from this episode!
On behalf of the Gumpcast team,
Thanks for listening!
Omar Shaker

Ep11.Feel Your Feelings (and don‘t be a victim) w/ Atta Pilram 🇮🇷🇺🇸

Are emotions a distraction from the rational? Or is it really our superpower as humans?
On our season finale, we are joined by our friend and honorary grandfather (and Omar’s honorary grandson), Atta Pilram. Atta shares with us his own journey on learning about his emotions, through family, business, and especially in his art. Omar and Pilram take a deep dive into creativity and the importance of emotional intelligence in our ever-transforming world.
This episode covers:
How it felt growing up in Iran, and the many ups and downs of Atta’s life.
How feeling into your emotions can be a healing experience.
Creativity and its pursuit.
The limiting nature of making yourself a victim.
These are all covered through Atta's plethora of stories and imagery, as he reflects on his whole life from a 5 year old kid to a 68 year old grandpa.
Sit back, relax, and reflect. What is your relationship to this world of emotions?

Ep10. Finding Dad in Me w/ Dr. George Kist 🇪🇬 🇺🇸

Would you bring on one of your parents to be a guest on your podcast? Well, we did just that! Paul invites his dad, Dr. George Kist, to join him on a very special episode where they discuss their relationship.
In this episode they cover:
Immigration, and the risk of leaving it all behind
Assimilation and identity in the diaspora of ones’ homeland
The relationship between fathers and sons
And the experiences that helped mend their relationship
Have you ever thought you are more like your parents than you want to admit? Join us as our host discovers this very thing in conversation with the man that raised him. And pour yourself a glass of Trader Joe’s Secco, while you’re at it.