Ep. 003 depth, power, and paradox with Giana Cerasia
In this episode I talk story with one of the most brilliant minds, hearts, humans I've ever met, Giana Cerasia. Her journey from teaching in the oldest high school in America, to reforming prison education, to building the first virtual school in the state of Connecticut at age 25 is only the first act in her story of troubling systems from within and asking: "What are the most strategic ways I can make sustained, systemic change?" Giana's story takes us from the peak of the corporate ladder all the way back to the depths of self -- an intersection of paradox, lineage, and the most powerful choice to return to yourself when you realize: "doing this costs too much". Buckle up. This conversation is a full sojourn into what it means to be a human and find the truest places of our power, creativity, and agency. Check out Giana's brilliant work here:
Transcript:
Welcome, Gianna. I am so excited to have you here on my podcast. I’m so excited for the conversation we’re about to get into. Welcome, welcome.
Thank you. I am thrilled, really. I’m super excited.
I have to tell people how we connected. I always like to give a little bit of the origin story when I bring guests on. Your story—I was reflecting on it—and I’m like, I’m going to tell it atrociously because it’s all gaps. I don’t know what happened here, but it’s so illustrative of the power of vibes and intuition.
We connected through Maya’s community, and I can literally see your face on the first call where I became aware of you. I feel like we didn’t even talk on that call. If there were words, I don’t know what you said. I just remember that feeling of walking into a room and thinking, That person. I think we’re going to be friends. It was instant connection.
That vibe. Instant friend.
It is. I don’t know, maybe I was sharing something, and I just remember you being locked in, nodding, and I thought, no, I think she feels me on a deep level. Then throughout the next few calls, I was like, oh no, I have to get inside this woman’s brain and heart. And then when I saw the page you built for your apprenticeship, I was like, this girl’s a teacher. I knew it. I freaking knew it. She’s down for the cause, she’s been teaching, she knows her shit—and we’re going to get into all of that on the pod.
We exchanged a few DMs and it was like, we don’t need a hi, hello, small talk. Let’s ramp up the friendship. Let’s just go straight in and build some shit together.
It’s so funny to hear you recount this, because that is exactly how I remember it—in reverse. It’s almost freaky, but of course it makes total sense. I do feel like it’s a testament to instinct, especially for women, particularly in spaces where there are other women and we find that one person across the proverbial table who’s nodding along, giving you that subliminal invisible, Go. Go deeper. I got you. I’m holding this space with you.
It’s been really beautiful. I feel like I know so much about you, and honestly, this is the first actual one-to-one conversation we’ve ever had.
Isn’t that amazing? If women ran the world, nothing that wasn’t supposed to be a meeting would be a meeting, and every meeting would be a gathering around the table. A kiki. Let me put some good food in your belly. You need a drink? You need a shoulder rub? What else do you need?
Yes. Months minimum maternity leave. Basic human rights. All your needs met. It’s not so hard. We actually have the ability and power to do so.
Well, I’m so excited to jump into some of those things that we connected on. I think you and I resonate as misfits or outliers in the online coaching and course space. So I’m going to start with a more loaded question, with big words, because what lit a light in me as soon as I saw anything you had written was: oh, there is a spine of pedagogy here. There are bones of critical pedagogy, an understanding of the role of teaching and of facilitating transformational shifts for humans, and I think that’s missing in a lot of coaching spaces.
I’d love to know your take on it—if you see pedagogy as missing, what your relationship with pedagogy is in general, or how you see your role and presence in this space.
What a question. It is loaded, and honestly my favorite question to answer, because this is the kind of question that lights me up and I want to have it more. Like you said, it’s not very prominent in the online coaching space. To be very frank, that was one of the reasons I was timid to enter this space. It took me almost nine months to build that apprenticeship, and honestly it had almost nothing to do with not knowing what to build or how to build it. It was more: how the hell do I bring it into a space that might not understand this level of rigor?
My relationship with pedagogy is informed by a lot of different classrooms. At the foundational level, my pedagogy is constructivist in the sense that learning through experience is one of my core beliefs. My nana used to say she was “heart smart,” not “book smart.” But my nana is fucking smart. She is smart because she has a constructivist education. She learned everything through experience, through humans, through instinct, through moving and weighing possibilities and risks and change. So all of my teaching has always been informed by that constructivist essence of learning through experience.
The other thing I want to say is that so much of the coaching space—and formal education spaces too—center knowledge instead of the student. A true constructivist vibe is that every single student is a resource. They are literally an asset, a treasure trove of wisdom that gets to become an asset to everyone else in the class. Every experience you’ve had, every wondering, every question—it all belongs on the resource shelf. And when you do that, your aperture becomes almost endless for where teaching can start. It also honors humans. Knowledge is important, but who cares about that if we can’t honor humans?
And then, of course, critical pedagogy—making sure there is an intentional spine of learning through experience, while also questioning everything: power systems, conditioning, and the way we make meaning. Then there’s the dialogic piece: making sure there is a communal essence, that we are not learning individually. It’s an individual experience done in community. Witnessing, sharing, reflecting together—that meaning-making machine is something nobody gets alone. It’s the third thing that is created when you bring humans together to do the thing together.
Oh my gosh. I have full-body chills. I feel like I’m simultaneously looking in a mirror. And thank you, ancestors, so we exist. But I also feel like you just picked me up and dropped me right back into my early classroom spaces. I did my master’s in teacher training at Center X at UCLA, and it was all about critical pedagogy. So much of my career since then has been against-demand-machine, against-the-status-quo work.
You just dropped me back into those spaces where I was surrounded by people who talked about these pedagogies and believed that every learner walks into the room with prior knowledge and a well of resources. This is why we need each other, because it can be a long, hard, dry journey through the desert when we’re doing our work solo. You just brought me to an oasis.
Thank you for asking. Thank you for drawing this out, because I think the fact that we both feel like we’ve been picked up and put somewhere different is exactly why we need this conversation in the spaces we’re in.
I’d love to explore more of the journey that brought you from classrooms and all this methodology and pedagogy into the work you’re doing now. You speak like a true practitioner, like someone who didn’t just read the book—you lived it. I’d love to hear more about the classrooms that shaped this knowing for you.
Okay, strap in, because it’s a weird one. And what I’d offer the listeners is: this is definitely not a tale of finding the next job. I was always looking for the next best way to solve a problem and trying to find the lever that was either being used incorrectly or not being used at all.
I have to give honor where it’s due—my very first classroom was my nana’s kitchen table. Was there formal pedagogy? No. But I learned almost everything I know there, in the chaotic messiness of an informal education with sometimes five generations of women under one roof. Gorgeous and also riddled with chaos, knowledge systems, personalities.
My mom owned a preschool for a little while, so my first teaching job was helping with little ones. But, as you’ll hear on this journey, I am absolutely not at my best with the young kids. Love them, but that’s not my ministry.
Same. I feel like the ones meant to teach high school and older—it’s just not our ministry to teach the babies.
Exactly. So my first real teaching job was in a high school. I taught Spanish and history in the oldest high school in the country, in Hartford, Connecticut—positioned right next to one of Mark Twain’s houses—and it was one of the lowest-performing high schools in the state. If you know anything about Connecticut, it has one of the widest opportunity gaps in the U.S. between wealth and poverty.
I was 21 when I started teaching, and most of my students were between 16 and 18. We were close in age, and I had 150 kids a day.
Damn. Okay.
And as you know, in situations like that, it wasn’t just teaching history and Spanish. I was witnessing the intersection of workforce, transportation, housing justice, and policy running through these children’s lives. They didn’t arrive excited to learn history—they arrived navigating lives that often felt like those of 25- to 35-year-olds.
So of course I was pissed. I was a 21-year-old ripped to shreds, getting 150 students a day with very little control over the actual problems that needed solving before children were ready to learn—including basic nutrition.
While teaching, I also did a master’s in instructional design and policy. Actually, I collected a couple different master’s degrees because I couldn’t pay my student loans and needed to defer them. But after that, I went to work for the governor as a policy expert on education and anything related to children. From there, I took a job with the Department of Children and Families, which ran the juvenile prison in Connecticut, where I learned a whole bunch of things I wish I never knew, but I’m glad I learned.
That was the turning point where I realized the systems, as they were, were not going to solve the problems. I had to look outside them and get creative. So I started the first virtual school in the state of Connecticut, trying to pull kids out of the prison system and give them access to education around the state while allowing them to care for children, care for family, work, and still finish high school.
Let’s timeline this. How old are you now, starting the first virtual school in Connecticut?
Twenty-five.
I figured. Let the people know. So you’re a baby, and here you are solving systemic issues for your entire state, including interrupting the school-to-prison pipeline by inventing a virtual school—in what year?
And fun fact: the way we were able to set up this virtual school was by finding a non-gender-neutral statute from 1972 that failed to define a school as a brick-and-mortar entity. My 25-year-old wise-ass self was like, well, you didn’t say it couldn’t be virtual. Let’s go.
And it worked. Of course it worked, because it was putting students first. It was literally working backward from the experience of a young person who had been incarcerated and asking: what do they need to access opportunity? Cool. Let’s design that.
Talk me through that process, because this is monumental. You had to have other people involved, people co-signing and approving. What was that like?
This was the point in my life when I learned the importance of a co-conspirator—not just a mentor, not just a good boss. A co-conspirator. He was the person who brought me over from the governor’s office and basically said, “You want to do this with me? Then do it. Don’t act like you’re 15 years younger than me. Do this with me.” And I was like, okay.
Wow.
It was the first time I felt seen not for my age or my feistiness, but for my actual power. He was the first person inside the system who was like, do alchemy, let’s go. And he let me use my delusion. There were other people, but it really was him and me. It felt like we were moles, building inside a system that didn’t want us to do what we were doing—planting seeds, laying foundations, building quietly and sometimes in secret, co-opting other co-conspirators.
I remember a secret meeting with teachers from the prison where we basically asked, “Would you leave your jobs inside of there to do this out here?” And they were like, let’s go. So then we knew we had critical mass. Looking back, it felt like some kind of governmental special force unit takeover. It was beautiful.
I’m so happy you’re telling this story. It was such a special time period for me in my own career too. When you talk about being delusional, having co-conspirators, restructuring systems from within strategically—this was 2015. Social media wasn’t what it is now. We were still doing so much invisibly, not for recognition, but to make material change for our communities and students.
I want people listening in 2026 to take something from this. Are you in a position of power where you can turn around and grab somebody younger with fresh delusion and tons of energy? Can you leverage your positionality, privilege, years in the system, and co-sign with them? What has to be done when you’re starting a movement that has to be invisible or look like something else on the surface? You may not get credit, but you’re doing what has to be done to make sustainable change for the most people with the least backlash.
You just gave us a case study in movement building 101, and I think it’s been lost for the last decade.
Oh my God. This conversation has me 300 percent activated. This is exactly the conversation that’s missing—to underline that sometimes you have to move quietly, and sometimes that is the loudest thing we can be doing.
And I’m going to say this even if people don’t want to hear it: this whole “build in public, show everybody everything” thing—I love a lot of that. But when you’re building something where critical pedagogy is part of the spine, and part of the fidelity of critical pedagogy is building co-conspirators—a long-tail, unsexy process—you can’t always post it on Instagram. It’s delicate. And if it’s enough for you to post, I’m not sure. No judgment, but I don’t know.
I’m like, when can I buy a ticket and meet you wherever you are in the world, because we have so many late-night wine conversations to have that should not be recorded.
No, right? I don’t know if this should be recorded.
But I’m so glad it is, because what you’ve just brought up intersects with everything I’ve been thinking about this week. We’re recording this in the week where Dolores Huerta just spoke up with her testimony, and I’ve been reflecting on what it means to live in devotion to a movement—and more importantly, in devotion to the people for whom that movement exists. At what cost do we let movements be led by people who chase icon status, visibility, and platforming? History shows us again and again what happens when we let that role be led by men, or people who want to fill the entire space with themselves. At best, we’re disappointed; at worst, we’re harmed.
Hearing your story alongside all of this has me even more emboldened to say the future has to be matriarchal movements. It has to be your nana’s table. It has to be people willing to do the work in unsexy ways because they are knee-deep in the mud planting seeds that will grow seven years from now.
No notes. And I get that this is paradoxical. I talk a lot about paradox, and I know we might get to this, but every leader, every person with a program, a platform, or honestly even an Instagram account, should inspect the dance between visibility and secrecy. There’s no clean answer. It’s not always that if I want to adhere to critical pedagogy, I have to do things in secret. It’s about staying present with the paradox and discerning, moment by moment, whether to share or hold back—and treating that discernment as a critical act of leadership.
Let’s dive into that, because paradox is so present in the curriculum you’re building. Walk us through what you mean by paradox, the power and potential in it, and what gets lost when we don’t develop the capacity to hold it.
What an easy question.
Paradox, in the simplest way, is being present with your multitudes. Most of the time, those multitudes feel like one is on one end of the earth and the other is floating somewhere in the cosmos, and you think, these two things cannot exist in the same solar system. The work of paradox—and where it becomes power—is saying, yes, they absolutely exist in the same solar system, and the whole system would fall out of balance if they didn’t.
Range and paradox go hand in hand. The degree to which you can look at something difficult and hold more than one truth at a time is the degree to which your range expands. Take politics, for example. The people withdrawing from being clued into politics and the state of the world are often the same people who struggle to experience joy in their own hearts. Those things are connected.
This isn’t about fixing yourself to expand your capacity. It’s about how we care for each other more intentionally by creating more moments of evidence that more than one thing can be true at once.
That’s it. And it’s delicate. Just like everything else we’ve talked about. One of the paradoxes leaders face right now is: do I talk about politics or not? I don’t know everything, so maybe I should stay silent. But if I stay silent, people won’t know where I stand. That matters. I hear this all the time.
The work here is being graceful with yourself and with others. If paradox is us trying to hold billions of truths at once, we’re going to be wobbly. And that’s okay. Constructivism 101—you learn by going out, falling down, getting dinged up, coming back to safety, and then going out again. We have to do that with ourselves and each other.
What gets lost when we can’t hold paradox is that we live half-truths. We close ourselves off to one side of reality and end up living only part of our lives. Our hearts become half alive. Our ancestors are pissed. We build an entire life missing half of ourselves.
And honestly, my whole journey—from the classroom to prisons to corporate to now—is the story of a human being living a half-truth. Even while I was “doing the shit right,” out there in systems, I was still living only half of myself. There were parts of me—my needs, my artistry, my creativity—that had to be shut down in order to survive and succeed there.
We’re going to come back and fill in more of your story, because I think it will illuminate how you metabolized this lesson. But I want to pause and point out how much depth there is here. You mentioned one stumbling block for leaders: the misconception that if I’m going to take a stand for anything, I must be clear on everything. That brought me back to one of the most useful concepts from critical pedagogy for me: unfinishedness. We are lifelong learners. We walk around with working theories. We are constantly reading the world, and what we read shapes our meaning-making.
That has been such a service to me in my own practice, because when we take on systems and big problems with hearts this large, we have a very real tendency to burn out—to give everything because the problem is bigger than us.
I’m so curious, as we return to your story and the move from prison to corporate to now online coaching, how these paths shaped the curriculum you now teach.
After the prison work and building the virtual school, I started looking for more co-conspirators and looking for ways not just to work within systems, but to build alternatives. I had to get comfortable with messiness and misunderstanding. Most leaders never believed my initial ideas. That work became lonely, and isolation is a teacher.
I became a lobbyist for educational equity—not for oil—and that taught me women are not always listened to in the most critical lever-holding spaces. When I wanted to be heard, I literally brought a man from a local business to say what I would have said, and they listened. Cute.
But I didn’t lose my shit over that. I wasn’t going to single-handedly change the misogyny of politics, so I had to ask: what hill am I willing to die on? That lesson led me to IBM, where I helped scale a model of education that allowed high school students to take community college while still in high school. It was a public-private partnership between schools and industry.
Even in tech, I was always still in education. Always. I’ve never had a job that wasn’t still centered around students, because I was always looking for problems and figuring out who held the lever. I’m still in tech now while building my business, working on expanding access to AI and pushing on ethics in AI.
But ultimately, through all of that, I came all the way around to this realization: I think where I’m best positioned to work is actually at the level of the individual. I spent my entire career in systems, pushing and burning out. Then I unraveled myself from burnout and came back with a fresh perspective. And I realized it wasn’t only burnout leading me here. My instinct was telling me: you are meant to work with the smallest unit of systems change, which is the individual. We are systems.
Full-body chills. The way you say that with such clarity. Your whole story turns the “climb the corporate ladder” journey upside down and says: here is my ministry, at the level of the individual—and this is still systems work. I have to say it for you: you’re still doing something revolutionary. What were the moments that revealed this truth to you?
The most successful moments in my career were the weeks where I looked back and realized I had spent more time secretly coaching women in corporate—as a colleague, as a leader—than doing anything else. Corporate is hard. The misogyny is high, the greed is high, the power is high. It is a vicious place to exist, especially for an empathic, intuitive, highly capable woman.
And my best weeks were the ones where I was basically creating rebels—counseling and coaching women on how to do all the things I’ve been talking about: do the slow work, let it be unsexy, don’t die on every hill, pick the thing, follow your instinct, and when you get there, don’t just bring one woman to the table—kick some men out and let them take your seat.
I don’t know your nana, but when you started talking about gathering women in corporate, I felt like I saw your nana right here on my screen. It’s your nana’s table.
It is. My nana is still alive—85. And I’ve watched her revolutionize her own life in the last five years and come into her power in ways that are extraordinary. The woman has always been powerful, but now she owns it. She’s making her own political choices, going head-to-head with my grandfather. It’s beautiful. And I think her arc has paralleled my own in realizing where my agency is best suited.
You asked in our pre-conversations about Sicilian folk practices, and one thing that is true of Sicilian and broader Southern Italian folk practices is that we are raw, unfiltered, and slightly chaotic people. When you sit at our table, there’s no way to hide anything. Somebody’s eyes will drag it out of you before the question even comes. Some people avoid that kind of space, and honestly, internalized white supremacy will do that to you real quick.
I think one thing people get wrong about Sicilian folk practice—and maybe folk practice more broadly—is that anyone who has internalized white supremacy cannot tolerate the heat at an Italian woman’s table. I’m telling you that right now. They just can’t, because things will come to the surface. People have said to me, “You are like a magnet for my pain,” or “Why can’t I lie to you?” Those things are super inherent to how I was raised.
These traditions are unspoken. They’re in the way conversation happens, the way you look at someone, the way words are never allowed to just pass through the room without some kind of intervention to metabolize truth. Now, yes, in folk culture a lot gets swept under the table too. But when it comes to grief, pain, suffering, joy, and purpose—those things are out on the table to be dealt with in community, because when they’re left in isolation, they’ll kill you. That’s the belief. They will destroy you from the inside and start harming others too.
So this metaphor of a kitchen table—as I’ve practiced it in corporate and now as an online coach—has become this practice of coming into my own and not being afraid of my power. Folk practice, enacted in 2026 in this body, is a scary thing for a lot of people trying not to be seen. But what I’ve also watched happen is that even with resistance, once the space is created and reaches a tipping point, people fall. They let it all come onto the table so it can be dealt with, metabolized. It’s food. Food for power.
And particularly with women, entrepreneurs in burnout and corporate women in burnout are actually very similar archetypes in the suffering they’re holding. That’s where folk practice is true medicine. I can call it a seven-month apprenticeship, and yes, there is a pedagogical spine—but in the end, it’s me and every one of my grandmothers showing women that it is safe to show up for themselves, in community, and to let community alchemize how they’ll show up in the future.
Thank you for sharing all of this. I’m so activated. My mind went a few different places, but there’s always resonance when you hear someone from another collectivist culture talk. You call it folk practice; I hear it as collectivist culture. And you touched on white supremacy in a way I deeply resonate with.
I often say white supremacy fractured and disconnected lineage for white people as much as—if not more than—it did for people of the global majority and colonized peoples. And now we’re in a moment where white supremacy is collapsing on itself. The work isn’t only dismantling it, but filling the gaps it leaves behind.
The word that comes to me is hollowness. That hollowness gets fed by capitalism, because people keep trying to fill those gaps with consumption. But your story of the Sicilian table is a story of fullness—full of food, people, knowledge, protocol. You said: these are the rules. Some things get swept under the rug, but other things do not, because that would mean literal death—body, soul, or collective.
That’s exactly what has been missing. And sitting across the screen from you, I feel the huge responsibility on our shoulders, because you and I still have those grandparents with us. Not everybody does. Not everybody has unbroken chains of knowledge and parasympathetic wisdom in their lineage. Some still have to sit down and fill in those hollow parts.
What a beautiful way to put it. And I think there’s a lot of compassion needed there. I have good friends who get mad when I talk like this because I do tend to have compassion for almost everyone. Maybe not the very small group at the top these days—but I think a lot about the town I grew up in. People who internalized white supremacy as first-generation immigrants, who lived in poverty, who didn’t have running water, who vote against their own interests, who aligned themselves with identities as a survival strategy. I understand that differently than some of the cleaner narratives we tell about it, because I watched humans do that to themselves to survive.
Then generations move forward, and they still can’t fill in the gap because they lost the identity so long ago. It’s hard. But I think this brings us back to critical pedagogy. When you have intention, tools, and rigor—not hierarchy-rigor, but rigor in the sense that recreating anything close to parasympathetic safety is going to take hard, unsexy work—then we can begin.
That is equal parts exciting and terrifying.
Well, the second half of that sentence is: it’s going to be really hard work, but we got you.
Exactly. It’s our ministry, our responsibility, those of us who are still in the hard work but have made it through enough to metabolize it, to turn around and say: just as we were held by those before us, we’re going to hold you. The hard work will only be as hard as what is yours to carry, in the portion you’ve been appointed.
Yes. And if you’ve never been held before, that creates resistance. What you need can feel like the opposite of what’s safe, because your identity has been shaped around safety, not wholeness. So a lot of this work asks you to deconstruct the version of yourself that is safe in a capitalistic, anti-collectivist world. And we’re like, no, it’s going to be fine, just unravel that and do this other thing. And it’s like—what do you actually mean?
What do you mean you’re going to hold me? That doesn’t sound safe.
And I’m also speaking for former versions of myself. I had the benefit of growing up at my nana’s kitchen table, held by five generations of women, and still I was like, no, no, no. I need to sell out in all these ways. I need to become more hollow. I need to care less. I need to anchor myself into things that, especially in tech, are constantly broaching the paradox between impact and greed.
I’m not speaking from judgment. I’m speaking from the confounding experience of being willing to deconstruct an identity that was on track to make me extremely safe, extremely wealthy, and a perfect contributor to a capitalistic system—and still saying, no, hold on, there has to be another way.
I’m with you. And I think what you’ve lived through is rare. When you talk about reaching this tipping point—if I keep pushing these buttons and levers, I get security, wealth, status, all the things denied to the women in my family—that is powerful. For your grandmother to look at you and say, “I’m scared for you. Don’t do this,” is deeply confronting, because to her, safety means: do whatever you need to do to stay safe and have a different future than the one I had.
Exactly. She called me in the airport two days ago after I told her about our moving plans. She is still so scared. Her version of safety is: do what you need to do to secure a better life. Hold onto it.
And I think what happened for me was that I reached a point where I hated who I was becoming. Even though I had these beautiful stories of impact, even though I was changing things inside big tech, changing minds, opening doors for students around the world—I hated who I had to become to do it. I hated the trade-offs. I hated what it was doing to my relationships.
One phrase that stood out to me from your apprenticeship page is cost too much. That’s a phrase I use a lot. We reach a point of sudden awareness where everything we’ve been going along with costs too fucking much. And this is where I talk about the ancestral technology of desire. When you hate something enough and want something badly enough, it gives you the power to change your whole life.
That’s right. And the paradox of it all is that while I was ascending and climbing the ladder with all of my ancestors in my ear saying go, go, go, build the wealth, do the thing we never could, stick it to the man—I was also becoming a person that they themselves didn’t want me to become. My grandmother asking, “Why are you working so much? Come sit down. Why do you have another headache?”
It’s paradoxical because discernment comes in. Desire tells you when it’s time to go. Someone asked me recently if I wish I had left sooner, and honestly, no. I needed to hit my critical point of hatred in order to alchemize this. That’s when conviction arrived. That became the fuel. The cost is too high. New threshold. New protocol.
And I think it’s important to say: every step you took was the right step. It’s not that you were on the wrong path. You already have the blueprint for this kind of work. You got as far as you could within the context you were in, just like when you left a space where solutions weren’t possible and built a virtual school. Now I see you doing that again. You got as far as you could in corporate, and now you’re exiting and building another kind of virtual school.
So let’s talk about that curriculum. You came into the coaching space already knowing what you held and what you had to offer students. It took eight or nine months to make the space for it to emerge in integrity and coherence. Tell us about this apprenticeship. Why an apprenticeship, and what does it mean?
Why an apprenticeship? Because apprenticeship is one of the oldest forms of learning, and it honors a craft. In this case, the craft is aliveness, wholeness, knowing yourself. Apprenticeship honors the craft through proximity to practitioners, through duration, through practice, and through planned discomfort along the way. Any good apprenticeship includes mistakes. You want some mini fires, because that’s how people learn.
I was in the same program as you, watching everyone invent their offers, and I was like, I don’t know if this space is for me because everyone seemed to be offering a neat outcome: do this, in this long, and you’ll get this. And I was like, no. I don’t even know what that would be, because every student is different and I want it to stay that way.
So I gave birth to a seven-month apprenticeship called Depth, Paradox, and Power. Its core tenets are really a reverse-engineering of what I’ve learned through my own life, from working with thousands of students and dozens of women who were burnt out—usually struggling against systems of power and against their own depth.
What the apprenticeship does is recreate a lot of that friction internally, through curriculum and experience, but with interaction and support. You’re apprenticing your own paradox and your own depth in order to resurrect your power. It’s probably the most fun thing I’ve ever created, and I’ve created a lot of shit in my life. Honestly, if one person showed up to this, I’d have a blast. That’s how I know it’s good.
That right there is another case study. I hope everybody pauses there. If one person shows up, it will have done what it was here to do. That’s devotion. And I say this with love, holding people’s hands while I say it: so many people are operating on metrics that will burn them out and pull them away from real creation. To chase numbers, clout, platform—it costs too much.
It does. And I’ll say this very vulnerably and transparently: I wanted so badly to create a shorter program because it launches on my last day in my corporate job. That means I lose the safety of a monthly salary and move fully into online coaching. I tried, in so many iterations, to make it more sellable, more palatable, more marketable, more understood.
But eventually I had to say to myself: all that discernment, all the things you teach—you need to put them into practice. Build the program. Build it and trust. Because if I had done anything else, I would have recreated outside the system the same human I was inside it. I had to ask myself if I wanted that. Obviously the answer was no. So I built a seven-month program, and we’re going to see how it goes.
I’m annoying myself because I keep saying “case study,” but truly—this is what integrity and coherence look like. If you want to change the world, you have to build things that don’t exist. That’s not safe. So you feel the risk, and then you have to resource yourself and root into deeper truths. I could hear your grandmothers behind you while you were saying that.
And for what it’s worth, from my corner of the world: this is exactly the kind of classroom people are not only hungry for, but longing for. My own Sovereign Storyteller students keep asking for more time. People are hungry for deep reconstructive space, for pedagogy, for proximity to the teacher. Apprenticeship really is that practice of standing behind the master and absorbing not just what they say, but how they move, how they breathe, how they turn. That takes shared space over time.
So from where I’m sitting, you have built exactly the classroom people need. Your students are on their way to you, and I can’t wait to see what emerges and how the world changes because you are in it being yourself.
My God. Thank you. Really. Thank you. I know this is our first actual conversation, which is unbelievable, but you have unknowingly offered me something like a model—a step-ahead elder. Watching you move, watching you create Sovereign Storyteller and Ancestral Wealth, sharing your process… you were one of the first people I saw in this space and thought, wow, okay. She’s a little like me. She’s a little weird. She’s rigor-driven in all the right ways.
It unlocked so much in me. When I questioned myself, you were one of the people who came to mind. It’s hard in this space not to sell out sometimes, especially on my first go. But you have given me belief and hope and craft—evidence that we can hold onto the things we believe in and not only survive in this space, but help evolve it. Pedagogy matters. It accelerates things. It helps.
I’m taking that and putting it right here as very necessary affirmation. I talk a lot about the power of story and of visibility, and this is exactly how I reframe visibility. The tagline of Sovereign Storyteller is decolonizing voice and visibility. I think visibility gets tied to greed and platform and icons who will eventually crumble. But I see visibility as being necessary evidence for those seeking proof that someone like them can exist and do this.
We all must show up in that way—sovereignly, choosing which parts of our knowing and story and crystallization we generously make visible because someone on the path needs to see a blueprint.
That actually hits. So deeply. I’m just so grateful to our ancestors for crossing our paths. I’m grateful to sit in your presence and for all that you are sharing and creating. And we have so much more coming, Gianna. As we wrap this episode, please tell us how people can find you, and let’s talk about our upcoming collaborations in each other’s spaces.
Okay. You can find me at Gianna Cerasia on Instagram. I’m sharing a lot of my story there these days. I also have a podcast called Kitchen Table Sauce and a Substack called Atoms and Meat Suits. I play around a lot. I exist in a lot of different formats and spaces.
And our collaboration coming up: Joey is one of our guest teachers in the Guild of Practitioners coming into the apprenticeship to represent different seemingly disparate topics. I call this initiatory friction because I kind of like to see my students suffer a little bit—while held and with love—and do weird things that make them ask, “Why am I learning this today?” and then immediately realize why.
So Joey, you’ll be coming in to lead a beautiful session that helps students inspect systems, power, and conditioning, and how storytelling and connection to lineage and instinct and roots are a source of power—not only in understanding those things, but doing something about them.
I’m so excited. And thank you for opening up your space to me.
No, thank you—because then I get to come into Sovereign Storyteller and concoct something too. Who knows what it’ll be. But I’m really taken aback, and grateful for who you are, how generously you share yourself, and the spaces you create. It’s such a landing place for my heart and spirit, honestly.
This has been such a critical moment for me in my own journey—finding a space and collecting evidence that I can exist and do this, stay true to my integrity, stay true to what I believe in as a teaching practice. I’m so excited. And I know this isn’t the end. We’re going to find many ways to collaborate.
That’s the beauty of relationship. What an expansive beginning. Truly the beginning.
Gianna, let people know: there are going to be listeners hearing this and thinking, okay, that apprenticeship is my next learning space. You are enrolling now, correct?
Yes. The waitlist is open, and the application will launch in a couple of weeks. If you get on the waitlist, the application will go there first. I’m not capping seats yet. We’ll see. Maybe I’ll have to. But for now, the best thing is to get on the waitlist. We start at the end of May, and we go for seven months. I’ll probably drop you off somewhere in the middle of Scorpio season.
We’re on a very similar timeline. I’m starting Sovereign Storyteller at the end of May too, so we’ll be running parallel programs. Amazing.
If you’re hearing this episode, it’s probably already open enrollment for Gianna’s apprenticeship, Depth, Paradox, and Power. I’ll have everything linked below.
Gianna, thank you so much. My heart is filled. I’m buzzing with energy.
Likewise. Thank you for giving me so much life today. Thank you for existing the way you do. Really, thank you.
Start learning with the free email course 6 Lessons Sovereign Storytellers Live By.