The Embodiment Coaching Podcast 560. The Way Is Awkward Not Forward - With Bayo Akomolafe
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Dec 22, 2023 
Bayo Akomolafe, self-styled writer, speaker, and activist, discusses 'story as a lie', being an intellectual, African embodiment, colonization, eloquence, polarization, cancel culture, post-activism, breakdown of culture, hyper individuality, gender, and more.
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Place Relationships Before Resume
- Bayo situates himself by foregrounding relationships—partner, children, parents—rather than individual achievements like a PhD.
- He sees telling his life through relational webs as resistance to hyper-individual hero narratives.
How Babalawos Rewrote His Intellectual Life
- Bayo describes being transformed after sitting with Yoruba healers called babalawos who recontextualized his Western education.
- He credits their stories and practices for breaking his prior frameworks and launching his public intellectual path.
Narrative Compresses Complex Lives
- Stories always leave things out; the world exceeds narrative and reduces lived complexity into tidy plots.
- Bayo warns that packaging life as a hero's journey erases relational networks and the multiple persons we become over time.