Hey there! I’m honored to announce a free event that I’ll be co-hosting on 27 July about decolonizing our emotions. I’ll be in partnership with Aya Hijazi, Founder of The Human Room and Director of Belady - An Island for Humanity. Registration link is below; we look forward to seeing you!
You were told that there’s no room for your emotions. You were told to focus on the data, not on your feelings. And if you were ever hurt by someone else's decisions, you were told: center what matters, not yourself.
The message was clear: emotions are distractions at work and in life – you must work hard to dominate them. Yet in the background, you saw a different message: You must celebrate birthdays and promotions while staying silent about personal loss. You must cheer in public for the soldiers of Ukraine, but never get “political” and cry for the children of Gaza. You can express love for your partner in public; just bury your despair about the hardships at home.
You saw emotions... but only the ones that were convenient for the system you were placed in. So you severed yourself to survive. You embraced the convenient feelings and buried the rest, to live for the system and not for yourself. To put yourself back together, you have to face what you ignored.
In this free 1-hour event, you'll explore the meaningfulness of all emotions -- even the inconvenient ones. Through guided prompts and group reflection, you'll start seeing the feelings you’ve kept hidden. You'll leave the event with a glimpse of a richer and more aligned life that honors your emotions.
Severed: Reclaiming the Emotions This World Trained You to Silence
July 27, 2026
11:30 to 12:30 USA Eastern Time / 15:30 to 16:30 UTC – Click HERE to convert to your local time zone
Free to attend
Click HERE to register
This event is for: those of you who’ve been taught that your true emotions are not okay to have.
What we will do in the event: Through small writing exercises and short verbal reflection, we’ll explore your views on your own emotions.
What you’ll leave with: A prompt that you can reflect on after the event, to begin befriending your true emotions at your own pace.
Facilitated by:
Aya Hijazi, Founder of The Human Room and Director of Belady - An Island for Humanity
Aya has lived at the paradoxes of power and ethics. Sleeping next to a common thief in prison and shaking hands at the Oval Office. Sharing meals with children living on the streets and teaching Harvard midcareer students. Through her work, her education, and her life, she has stood at the extreme ends of these lines, and that is what lets her reach what stays hidden, and help bring it into understanding.
Aya was "the Egyptian charity worker and prisoner of conscience freed by Trump." But behind that headline is a woman who spent twenty years inside power, emotion, and human systems. She founded a grassroots organization for children living on the streets, survived three years in prison as a prisoner of conscience, and received a Democracy Award for resisting authoritarianism. She walked out with her method intact, and learned the truth her release proved: the deepest change begins from the inside.
Today Aya works on the interior conditions, the values, emotions, and identity, where real change takes place. She holds a Harvard MPA and degrees in law and international conflict analysis and resolution.She has been published in international outlets including the Washington Post and Just Security, and has been a keynote speaker at various events, including the White House Correspondents' Dinner.
Chris Musei-Sequeira, Founder and Principal of CJSC, LLC
Chris built a career exploring some of the biggest challenges of our time: the challenges of global climate change and sustainability. As an MIT-trained aeronautical engineer and policy analyst, he helped create computer tools now used for aviation environmental modeling worldwide. Chris also participated in some of the first United Nations discussions to create a global carbon dioxide standard for aircraft.
Questions of math and physics were never a problem for Chris. But charts and equations couldn't address the questions that matter: Who gets to decide the future? Whose voices matter, whose are ignored, and why? His career in environmental policy taught him painful truths about how the world's most vulnerable are excluded from decision-making. Through business coaching and marketing, Chris now supports practitioners who are dismantling oppressive systems and building the inevitable post-capitalist, post-colonial world.
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My position
My name is Chris Musei-Sequeira, and I use he/him pronouns. My mother was born in Trinidad and Tobago as a descendant of enslaved Africans brought to the Caribbean during the time of European colonization. She came to the United States of America (USA) at the age of 10. My father is Goan and was born in India, in Mumbai, and raised Catholic and English-speaking. He came to the USA for his graduate studies, where he met my mother.
My sister and I were born in the USA and lived a middle-class life in the suburbs of multiple American cities. I studied aeronautical engineering and technology policy in university, then worked at the Federal Aviation Administration and as an aviation consultant. I've lived in cities up and down the USA East Coast since the age of 18, until very recently. Now I live in Eastern Europe with my wife and our cat.
I thank Heather Luna and Lavinia Muth for showing me the importance of publicly expressing our positions. Because of our positions, all of us are very familiar with some aspects of the world while having no idea of other aspects. Positionality expresses how our individual positions affect our relationships with other people and with the world as a whole.