We recently connected with Xtina Geri Jogoleff and have shared our conversation below.

Xtina Geri, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about the things you feel your parents did right and how those things have impacted your career and life.

My parents effortlessly served our community, vigilantly advocated for equitable justice, and courageously leaned into betterment despite all that we endured and had against us. I come from a diverse family of activism, drug abuse, gangs, and violence. My parent’s values transformed our family and gave birth to new possibilities. Their love is truly unconditional, devoted, and supportive.

Who my parents were in my early years are not who my parents are today – and I journeyed with them through abuse, drugs, violence, and incarceration. When I was 5 years old, myself, my 3 siblings, and both my parents – 6 people – shared a single room in another person’s house. Every morning, my dad took me to school on the public bus, because his license had been revoked from DUI charges. I would go days without seeing my mom. In order to protect my view of my mother, my sister would create a story to shield the truth of my mom’s disappearance from drug (ab)use. Despite my parents’ struggles with addiction, they eventually became the rock for our (extended) family. They directed their energy into recovery and community activism.

Our home became the family/community safe haven. A place where anyone and everyone was welcome. Where people could sleep if they had nowhere to go. Where you could eat a meal without question. The home my uncles came to once released from prison. The home my cousins would come to live at when their moms were in jail. We spent our weekends visiting family “inside.” As an adult, I always struggled when someone would ask me how many siblings I have… Do I share my “blood” siblings? Do I share about everyone who I consider a sibling? Do I want to even open that can of worms that my cousins are more like my siblings because we grew up in the same home (when their parents were in prison/jail)? My parents’ love and open arms impacted my community work and everything I chose to write about when I began research as an undergraduate student.

I was the only one of my parents’ 4 children that went on to college. Both of my brothers did not traditionally finish high school (both becoming system involved – my younger brother was being tried as an adult when we was only 17) and my sister chose to graduate early with her GED to begin working to support her family. While my family did not know anything about college, they loved and supported me the best they could. They were extremely proud, yet unable to support in ways that I needed. I supported myself through community college, transferring to the university, and on to graduate school. I graduated magna cum laude and spoke at my university graduation with my parents wathcing the first in our entire family earn a university degree. My research remained on abolishing the systems that tore my family apart and only caused more harm: policing and mass incarceration.

While I was in my doctoral program, I facilitated weekly restorative healing circles at a reentry home in South LA for women who had recently been incarcerated. In addition to my community work, I was preparing my archival work with medical and legal records within California prisons. However, while I was in graduate school, my cousins who were like siblings began getting incarcerated. I found myself doing everything I could to advocate for them – collecting character letters, attending every hearing (driving hours to be present, only to find out sometimes their case wouldn’t even be heard in front of the judge), etc.

It was a generational systemic killing. From my grandparents’, my parents’, and now our generation.

Even myself… I earned multiple college degrees, been living out of my community, and received national fellowships. However, I ended up in abusive relationships. How could individuals so committed to “dismantling the system,” be perpetuating abusive logics? We had internalized policing so much that we policed and punished ourselves.

I was pregnant and I knew that a different way of being was needed. I at once want to abolish these systems, but I also want to ensure that my son thinks from a place of freedom. I began to ask to myself: What would be needed if prisons were abolished? The answer was freedom and restorative healing – a re-imagining of a whole new world.

I became adamant about dismantling the ways in which my thoughts incarcerated, colonized, and enslaved me, informing how I engaged in this world. In my inner healing work, I learned the power of using affirmations to reprogram the subconscious mind.

I authored 2 decks of affirmations. The first deck, Divine Power: 52 Affirmations Where Profanity and Divinity Collide, is used inside Avenal State Prison. Men who participate in the 12 Week Self-Control Program (offered by Prison From the Inside Out) learn self-control, begin affirming themselves and others, for participating in the program they shed time off of their sentence to return home sooner, and it has been proven that they do not reoffend. Once they graduate from the Self-Control Program, they select a family member to send a Divine Power Deck to. This keeps families connected. It also ensures that as the men are focused on their healing, their family is also anchored in their healing, in order to prevent generational incarceration and cultivate freedom (we plan to get programs in Women’s Prisons, I am only using the word men, because as of now our programs are inside 4 Men’s Prisons).

My parents are my biggest supporters. They pull affirmations from my decks every single day. They implement my healing tools and techniques, and our family has grown profoundly close because of my work.

My parents showed me that we are not what we have done or has been done to us. My parents showed me that we are not determined by anything outside of ourselves. My parents showed me that as we heal ourselves, we support others, and we address the root and the systems that perpetuate the problem. Everything about how my parents raised me informs how I show up in this world.

Xtina Geri, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Thank you so much for this question. Often times as I am immersed in the work that I do, I can forget that not everyone is in my bubble. My family – especially my brothers and cousins – are great at checking me and bringing me back to the collective.

I am an Inner Healing Coach, Author, and Activist commited to liberation in every sense of the word. When we understand that we are all inseparable, we begin to understand the vital importance to truly owning the self and our (individual) healing.

I conduct healing workshops in leadership, recovery, corporate, and community spaces. We all experience pain, but we do not all understand pathways to healing. In my core workshops, attendees are grounded in forgiveness, master mindfulness, learn the transformative power of affirmative thinking, and become anchored in (self-)love. Workshops can be booked in person or virtually. I have offered workshops in recovery and reentry homes, goverment offices, youth programs, nonprofit organizations, and university settings. Each workshop is tailored specific to the group I am facilitating.

I work with coaching clients one-on-one to dive to the root of their pain and patterning, ultimately to release it from their existence.

I write tools for self-healing that range from eBooks, journals, and decks of affirmations.

I have written self-healing curriculum on Forgiveness, Meditation, Self-Care, and Affirmative Thinking. The newest curriculum I am developing is a parenting program where parents can at once heal their own pains while establishing new healthy generational ways of being to pass on to their legacy.

That is the business side of things. As a person, which is inherently interconnected with my brand, I am very nuturing, involved, and active in my varying communities. I participate at my son’s school, coordinate events with other families, and love being an active hockey mom. I tend to my (extended) family the way my parents did. When anyone is in my home, I cook them a fresh meal and treat them as the queen or king that they are. I serve on 2 non-profit boards that work with incarcerated families. My Affirmation decks are partnered with Prison From The Inside Out.

My hope is to help people truly see that we are all interconnected and inseparable. When a deck is purchased, a deck is given to a family working with Prison From The Inside Out. Therefore, when you choose to prioritize your healing by affirming yourself with a deck, you at once are elevating every on your path and you are also (re)connecting a family torn apart by incarceration. That family is now prioritizing their elevation. When one of us is hurting, we all are. Therefore, when one of us is healing, we all are.

Empathy guides my essence and purpose. I can feel the pain of the collective, of pachamama, and all that is. And just as I can feel the pain, I can open to the healing and liberation. My ability to empathize and alchemize is by far what I am most proud of and why I am so committed to bringing healing to spaces where healing is not omnipresent – i.e. workspaces, prisons/jails, community orgs, etc. I am not interested in being another healer or spiritual teacher in traditional healing and spiritual spaces.

I much rather go to the pain and hold space for the healing. The people who work with me are courageous, brave, and fierce! They do the inner work and they become majestic in all spaces of their lives – work, family, home, personal, etc. I am truly honored to walk with my clients, workshop attendees, and customers.

Can you open up about how you managed the initial funding?

I started from negative – seriously. I had lost everything and chose not to let that prevent me from living in my purpose. I was a single mom, with an infant, was living in my parents garage, and didn’t even have a laptop or phone when I wrote my first eJournal and began helping women and men as my own practice/brand. I barrowed my mom’s laptop, wrote in the middle of the night while my son was sleeping, and held my first online healing space.

From there, I was able to build a clientele base. My one-on-one clientele base set the financial foundation for my business to grow in other ways (publications, workshops, curriculum, etc)

Most recently, I turned to fellowships and grants to fund my work. The driving force for that was choosing to go where I was needed – and asking myself, if I am meant to offer programs to incarcerated families, what would I need to make this happen. The answer was external funding.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

Put simply – do the effing work, be transparent, and walk the talk! My reputation is solid because I show up as me, do the work no matter what, and live as what I teach.

Do not worry about the best steps, or which order is best. What speaks more than anything is yourself and your work. Whatever industry you are in, master it, become it, and be it.

If each time you show up anywhere and you give it your all – then people will gravitate to you, others will recommend you, and your energy will out shine the rest.

I receive high ratings on google, with my clients, and organizations because I am healing in the flesh. Affirmative thinking is a way of life for me – in all spaces I traverse.

Contact Info:

• Website: XtinaGeri.net
• Instagram: instagram.com/Xtina.Geri
• Facebook: facebook.com/ChristinaGeri
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christina-xtina-geri-jogoleff-b15973bb/