Welcome to Untangle, the podcast from Muse, the brain sensing headband that helps you meditate and five-star app meditation studio.

I'm Patricia Carpus, your host along with my co-host this week, Muse co-founder Ariel Garten.

Before we get started, a reminder to check out our free meditations on Muse or meditation studio.

And if you and your family want to

learn to meditate while you're at home or just deepen your practice, use the discount code

muse stress less for your muse headband at choosemuse.com. We're thinking of all of you and wishing you

the very best. Now on to today's episode with Ariel.

My guest for today is the amazing Reverend Angel Kyoto Williams. She absolutely defies

words or traditional categorization, but if I had to use labels that we're familiar with,

I tell you that she's a black mixed-race Zen Buddhist priest.

She's also the second only black woman to be ordained as a teacher in the Zen tradition.

Reverend Angel really bridges the worlds of personal transformation and social justice with really poignant insights.

So I'm very honored to have Reverend Angel here with us today.

Hello and welcome. Thank you so much. Really happy to be here. Oh, I am overjoyed to be able to dive into conversation with you today. So to start, I'd love it if you could share a little bit about yourself with the audience. I do it, but I don't want to limit you by words and labels that come from me. I want to hear from you. So that's it. If we had to go with those

words, I am black and mixed race, mixed heritage. So what I think of that as being black by

definition and identity and how I face the world and of mixed heritage is the truth of my

blood and DNA. I am by training a Zen priest and a teacher called a Sensei in the Japanese Zen

tradition. Practicing a good number of years. I'm an author also. I am a quintessential New Yorker that happens

to currently have my feet on Chechenio Land, aka Oakland, California. I'm a person that's really

deeply committed to liberation on behalf of all people's, of the, all of it like full, full on liberation.

And I'm also really keen to be attentive to the fact that people are on different places along

the spectrum of everything, race and gender and sexuality and also meditation and liberation.

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