Hello my loves. Welcome back to the Balanced Bond podcast. So on fire, I am so happy that you are here. I missed you last week. We did not have a recording go up last week out of solidarity and respect for your love.

And I'm excited to be a part of the change. I want to just also pay my deepest respects and love to everyone who is fighting this season.

And I'm excited to be a part of the change. I want to just also pay my deepest respects and love to everyone who is fighting this fight and putting themselves out there and sharing their voice.

I'm vulnerable for the lives lost and I have a lot more to say, but I'm going to save it for a future episode.

Once it feels more appropriate to speak on the subject because right now I'm learning, I'm committed to learning to making a lot of changes to educating myself to bringing more diverse voices on the podcast.

And making the balance blonde a space for everyone that feels accessible and open and where we can have these deeper vulnerable conversations about race and equality and justice and have conversations with people from all walks of life.

So I will be sharing a lot more about that soon. I actually recorded a brief little solo episode about this that I decided to save for a later date when it just feels like a better time because right now I just want to focus on amplifying diverse voices within this community and also get my thoughts together before I do a whole bunch of reflection.

And as you know, I am a reflector through and through with human design, which if you don't know about human design, check out the previous episodes with Jenna Zoe.

And yeah, right now I fully recognize that me talking about what I'm learning about anti racism is not going to be super helpful to anyone because there are educators for that.

We have some of them coming on the podcast soon and I'm excited to share more. So I just wanted to begin this episode by saying I love you all.

I see you. I stand with you. I stand with our listeners that are from all walks of life, all races. I stand with the Black Lives Matter movement.

And I am striving to do better and learn every single day and continue to be a voice that brings love and positivity and high vibrations and in a very accessible way.

And I want to be the first to recognize that this podcast and the balance blonde life has not always highlighted super accessible ways of life and veganism and spirituality and all the things.

So I'm learning there's so much more to come. I'm really excited to highlight today's guest. Jasmine Leva, who I discovered last week in the flurry of amazing accounts being shared and documentaries being shared and all sorts of things.

And a friend of mine, a fellow vegan food blogger shared Jasmine's documentary on her stories her documentary is called the invisible vegan, which can be found on Amazon Prime and in multiple other places, which Jasmine shared about in the episode today, which you guys will hear.

And the invisible vegan is a 90 minute documentary that explores the problem of unhealthy dietary patterns in the African American community talking basically about veganism in the African American community talking about health and wellness possibilities enabled with the plant based life and lifestyle choices.

So immediately after hearing about it, I watched the documentary. Obviously it spoke to me right away because as a voice in the vegan community and someone who's been a champion of the plant based diet for a long time, I wanted to learn more and when I watched the documentary, I realized there was so much to learn so many mind glowing moments shared by Jasmine talking about just how all of the prevalent

documentaries in the plant based community are largely made by white men or white women. There's a lot of white men making plant based documentaries and all plant based documentaries are amazing and illuminating and wonderful for the plant based cause and Jasmine wanted to come at it from a different angle and important angle to talk about the plant based life within black community.

And it's a lot of people experience that a lot of people experience especially in the African American community. So her documentary opened my eyes. I immediately reached out to her. She was super kind and she was like, yeah, totally come on your podcast this week. So this one was a really fast turnaround and we met on on zoom for the first time and she I felt immediately like,

I had known her for a long time. She was just so kind and has such a loving spirit and shared about her documentary with us and about the plant based life and things that she learned we talked in the beginning about things going on in the world right now and she shared some really beautiful experiences and painful experiences and I just want to honor her for sharing them and for all of us.

So talking to me during this very delicate time and making herself available. So I'm excited to highlight her and in her voice today and amplify her voice and her documentary. So if you feel inclined and inspired to check out her Patreon account, which you can find at the invisible vegan.com. You can see different ways that you can support her and support future projects of hers that she's working on.

She's working on a documentary about eating disorders among people of color because she also brought to my attention that most documentaries about eating disorders are about skinny white girls and that's just not the representation that's needed or accurate because this is a problem for everybody.

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