PODCAST · education
Let’s Have The Conversation
by Desireé B Stephens
Desireé B. Stephens, CPS-P, is an educator, counselor, and community builder who leverages her TikTok platform to advocate for anti-oppression, pro-liberation perspectives, and paths to holistic healing. As a public speaker and modern-day philosopher, Desireé invites us to reflect on the world’s complexities through a lens of intersectionality, dismantling constructs and binaries that hinder collective freedom. Her mission is to spark transformation—one conversation at a time. Join the movement to get free, together! https://desireebstephens.com#makeshifthappen #decolonizeeverything #desireebstephens #letshavetheconversation #DEI #publicspeaker #rethinkingwhieness desireebstephens.substack.com
Episodes
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A Moment for Black Love
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit desireebstephens.substack.com/subscribe
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What Broke Our Brains 🧠
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Live with Desireé B Stephens
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What broke our brains this week
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit desireebstephens.substack.com/subscribe
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What broke our brain this week: Feral Friday with Friends
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit desireebstephens.substack.com/subscribe
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Friday with Friends: Astrology of Liberation with Leah Tioxon
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit desireebstephens.substack.com You Were Never Separate Before we begin… Take a breath. Not to center yourself.Not to “get grounded.”Not to do it right. Just notice that your body is already breathing for you. That rhythm?That pulse?That...
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The Day of Oaths, The New Year, and the Return to Practice
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit desireebstephens.substack.com What I shared in the live wasn’t just about March 25th. It was about orientation. It was about telling the truth about where you actually are in your life… not where the calendar tells you you should be....
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Renewal into Becoming
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit desireebstephens.substack.com/subscribe
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The Unfolding of Relationships in Community Building
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit desireebstephens.substack.com The Unfolding. Not the outcome.Not the clarity.Not the resolution. But the space where relationships are still becoming. And if we’re honest, this is the space many of us struggle to stay inside of.…
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Friday with Friends: Orienting to Someone’s Good
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit desireebstephens.substack.com This morning during Friday with Friends, we sat with a phrase that has been unfolding throughout the conversations this week: Orienting toward someone’s good. Not the idealized version of love. Not the...
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The Unfolding of Love in Community Building
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit desireebstephens.substack.com During today’s conversation we explored something many people say they want, but few of us are actually taught how to practice. Community. Not the idealized version. The real version. The version that...
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The Responsibility Shift: Care, Power, and Liberation
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit desireebstephens.substack.com Some conversations are not meant to be summarized. They are meant to be sat with. The live gathering this week began simply. No guest scheduled. Just a moment to pause together, reflect, and let the…
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Learning How To Stay
Before you read further, pause. Notice your breath without changing it.Notice your jaw.Notice your shoulders.Notice your seat beneath you. If anything in this piece feels activating, you are welcome to stop.You are welcome to skip.You are welcome to return later. You are not behind.Your body is…
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On why #sayhername breaks solidarity
A Reflection on Naming, Erasure, and the Refusal to Disappear This conversation was never meant to be comfortable. If you listened and felt your chest tighten, your jaw clench, your impulse to defend rise— good. That is not punishment. That is information. As I said in the live: critique is not...
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Friday with friends: Motherhood , Capitalism, and the radical act of loving ourselves first
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit desireebstephens.substack.com There is a particular kind of disappearance that happens to mothers under capitalism.Not dramatic. Not sudden.Quiet. Incremental. Socially rewarded. In this Friday with Friends conversation, Deidre Keller...
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Community and all it entails
The Longest Night, and the Work of Staying Before you read further, I want to offer you choice. You are welcome to pause.You are welcome to skim.You are welcome to come back later… or not at all. Nothing here requires urgency.Nothing here demands resolution. If it’s available, take a moment to...
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Colonized bodies, Supremacy Culture, and the work of Reclamation
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit desireebstephens.substack.com Most of us were taught that faith lives in the mind.Belief. Doctrine. Theology. But long before Christianity told you what to think, it told you how to move.How to dress.How to sit.How to desire.How to...
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The world is ending… and that might be a gift 🎁
It’s All Shadow Work: Grief, Colonial Christianity, and the End of the World as We Were Taught to Know It Before Christianity became empire,before it became doctrine,before it became justification for conquest,it began as a story of liberation. Bethlehem was not a seat of power.It was a small...
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Friday with Friends: Intentional Relating, Decolonized Love, and the Courage to Choose Yourself
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit desireebstephens.substack.com Some conversations don’t follow an outline… they follow truth. This week’s Friday with Friends episode with Chaneé Jackson Kendall is one of those. No rigid questions. No forced structure. Just two people...
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Giving without self abandonment
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit desireebstephens.substack.com Every season asks something different of us.And winter, Season of Self — this sacred descent inward — asks us to tell the truth about what we’ve been carrying, what we’ve been giving, and what it has been...
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The Cycles we don’t see
Every December like clockwork, the same patterns crawl back to the surface. Not because they’re new — but because dominant culture keeps repeating them, choosing comfort over accountability, performance over transformation, and the “lesser evil” over liberation. Today’s piece is the companion...
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FRAMily, faith, and the inner arc of knowing
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit desireebstephens.substack.com We Are the Furlings: Alignment, Inner Knowing, and Liberation with Leah TThere are some friendships that don’t just witness your evolution — they midwife it. Today’s Friday with Friends on Let’s Have the...
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The Stories We Are Told
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit desireebstephens.substack.com Before we step into Bethlehem, I want you to sit with this: Most of what you’ve been told about this story wasn’t a lie.It was the truth, flattened. Just like the McDonald’s “hot coffee lady” (a story we…
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Not Consuming Our Way Through the Holidays
If time doesn’t feel real right now, you’re not malfunctioning. Between school breaks, end-of-year work parties, sales drowning your socials, and systems demanding cheer while your body is demanding truth, we’re all suspended in that weird week/month where the calendar looks like a suggestion…
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White Women Waking Up to Intersectional Truth
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit desireebstephens.substack.com Whiteness handed you a script on how to belong, lead, and stay comfortable — but somewhere between the lessons and the living, that script started to feel small, thin, and suffocating. It didn’t give you...
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Grief Is Love + Holidays Are Mirrors
The holidays pull the curtain back, every single time. The kind your body speaks before your mouth ever does. And today, you’re one day away from a national holiday that many of us now recognize as steeped in mythology built to obscure violence against Indigenous nations on this land. That…
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Debugging & Decoding Patriarchal Programming
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit desireebstephens.substack.com There are some conversations that don’t announce themselves as teachings — they unfold. They reveal. They stretch us past the surface and pull us into the marrow of what we know but rarely name.This…
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What You Learned to Call Belonging Was Actually Compliance
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit desireebstephens.substack.com Before I get into today’s lesson, I want to say thank you. Losing my main Facebook account — losing my stories, my community, losing the people who have been building this work with me in real-time — was a...
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Guilt is not accountability
There’s a myth that supremacy culture handed all of us; directly, indirectly, through family systems, school systems, religious systems, even workplace policies: “If you feel guilty, you’re being accountable.” But guilt is not accountability.Guilt is collapse.Guilt is emotional performance.Guilt…
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Friday with Friends Equity over Extraction
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit desireebstephens.substack.com Today’s Friday With Friends was a whole sermon on what it means to build a business that doesn’t betray your values. I sat down with Kay Coughlin , CEO of Facilitator On Fire, who has been behind the…
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Accountability Without Shame
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit desireebstephens.substack.com There’s a moment when awareness hits the body before it reaches the brain.That drop in your stomach, that heat in your chest, that quick rush to defend—that’s not guilt. That’s your nervous system trying…
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Your Nervous System is the first community you build
There is something happening in the collective nervous system right now — you can feel it. Institutions are collapsing.Benefits are threatened.People are stretched, grieving, terrified, exhausted, and trying to hold a thousand things at once. And in moments like these, our bodies revert to what...
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Friday with Friends The Somatics of Liberation
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit desireebstephens.substack.com There is a place in this work where theory can’t take us.A place beyond language, beyond analysis, beyond the perfect explanation of “what happened to us.” There is a knowing that lives in the tissues.In…
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Slowing down
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit desireebstephens.substack.com We are living in a moment where everything feels like it is on fire — globally, locally, relationally, and inside of our own homes. And for many of us, the instinct is to move faster in response. To do…
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When Food Becomes Control
Let me say this plainly before we go anywhere else: There is nothing accidental about hunger in America.Hunger is a policy decision.A design choice.A tool of control. And the people most impacted are the same people this country has tried to control since its inception:Black folks, Indigenous...
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Friday with Friends — Featuring LadySpeech Sankofa
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit desireebstephens.substack.com There are conversations you hear, and then there are conversations you remember in your bones.Today’s Friday with Friends was one of the latter — not a performance of healing, but a return to the…
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The Quiet After the Roar: Integration as Revolution
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit desireebstephens.substack.com The chants will get quiet.The hashtags will slow.The adrenaline that surged through the streets will soften… hopefully, into something else, quieter, heavier, truer. This is the part they don’t teach you...
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No Kings, Just Kinship: From March to Momentum
🌬️ Opening Reflection: A Declaration, Not a Destination The No Kings March was never meant to be the arrival point, it was a beginning.It was a collective exhale that said: no more crowns, no more thrones, no more hierarchy in the name of liberation. But as I shared in our live gathering, we…
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Friday with Friends: Fascism with Amy Bright
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit desireebstephens.substack.com The Fatigue of Freedom and the Fascism We Keep Ignoring Black folks have been marching for centuries, from plantations to protests to policies that never quite deliver. So when people ask why we’re not...
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Returning to the Bones
Today, as we honor Indigenous Peoples’ Day, I want to invite you to return to the bones, to the memory, the grief, and the relationships that tether us back to humanity. We live in a world that rewards forgetfulness. It rewards production over presence, and busyness over belonging. But October —...
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Friday with friends: Men’s Work
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit desireebstephens.substack.com When Ukumbwa Sauti and I sat down for this conversation, it wasn’t simply to talk about men.It was to talk about memory. About what patriarchy made us forget: tenderness, belonging, accountability, and the...
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The Feigned Victimhood of White Wives: From the Klan to Erika Kirk
This live began as part of my September thread on the Gilded Age, but it needed to be turned into something deeper. I wanted to trace the line from suffragettes to the Women of the KKK, all the way to Erica Kirk, and show how white womanhood has always played both sides of patriarchal power....
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Friday with Friends
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit desireebstephens.substack.com I went live this Friday expecting a guest, but they got called into work, so it turned into me, coffee, and community. What started as a “down day” conversation shifted into something sacred: elder care,...
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Tending Grief
"We are living in the throes of a dying empire, and like any death, it fights to hold on. Grief is not just about loss; it's about transformation, reckoning, and the space in between. Today, we hold space for the grief of healing, the truth of violence (internal and external), and the call to...
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Friday with Friends Kate Coffman
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit desireebstephens.substack.com This conversation with Kate Coffman of Rooted Beginnings is all about what it really looks like to divest from oppressive systems and co-create something new. We talk about the fear, the cost, and the...
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Live with Desireé B Stephens
This live began with me naming my struggle: how to stay true to my September editorial plan (The Gilded Age: Then & Now) while also honoring the urgency of what’s happening in real time with Charlie Kirk’s murder and the internal violence of whiteness. I reminded us that flexibility is part of...
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Why White Comfort Is Not Liberation
What happens when comfort is treated as the highest value? From Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Movement to today’s “civility politics,” white comfort has consistently been placed above justice. History shows us the pattern: when progress threatens to disrupt the status quo, calls for “unity”...
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Friday with Friends: Celtic Ginge
This week on Friday with Friends, I was joined by Celtic Ginge, a creator who proudly calls themself “a thorn in the side of those that seek to oppress.” Across Substack, Instagram, Bluesky, YouTube, and more, Ginge blends humor, history, and sharp political analysis to dismantle lies and systems...
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Are you Brave or are you Comfortable?
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit desireebstephens.substack.com What does it take to disrupt systems that have been designed to recycle themselves for centuries? In every era; from the Gilded Age of robber barons and racial terror, to our age of billionaires and...
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Let’s BBQ
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit desireebstephens.substack.com/subscribe
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Desireé B. Stephens, CPS-P, is an educator, counselor, and community builder who leverages her TikTok platform to advocate for anti-oppression, pro-liberation perspectives, and paths to holistic healing. As a public speaker and modern-day philosopher, Desireé invites us to reflect on the world’s complexities through a lens of intersectionality, dismantling constructs and binaries that hinder collective freedom. Her mission is to spark transformation—one conversation at a time. Join the movement to get free, together! https://desireebstephens.com#makeshifthappen #decolonizeeverything #desireebstephens #letshavetheconversation #DEI #publicspeaker #rethinkingwhieness
desireebstephens.substack.com
HOSTED BY
Desireé B Stephens
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Let’s Have The Conversation have?
Let’s Have The Conversation currently has 190 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Let’s Have The Conversation about?
Desireé B. Stephens, CPS-P, is an educator, counselor, and community builder who leverages her TikTok platform to advocate for anti-oppression, pro-liberation perspectives, and paths to holistic healing. As a public speaker and modern-day philosopher, Desireé invites us to reflect on the world’s...
How often does Let’s Have The Conversation release new episodes?
Let’s Have The Conversation publishes regularly with 190 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
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You can listen to Let’s Have The Conversation on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Let’s Have The Conversation?
Let’s Have The Conversation is created and hosted by Desireé B Stephens.
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