She lived through a Horrific Past to Thrive to Help Others Internationally

How do we turn personal pain into purposeful action? My guest today, Queen Sheba Sisi, is a true testament to the power of unlearning silence, survival, and self-abandonment out loud. On this episode with this beautiful guest, she shares a deep personal story of growing up as a black woman in the United States and navigating inequality, and how that journey led her to advocate for women and children in Senegal. We explore her work with Queen Sheba Village and how she serves others. But we're gonna learn about the process of how healing and reclaiming dignity and purpose is also woven into what she does. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much, my dear sister Edna. It's a pleasure and a beautiful opportunity for me to be here with you. Oh, I am so glad you're here. So share with my audience who you are and what you're doing right now. Okay, humbly, my name is Queen Sheba Dubois Sisi. Queen Sheba is my birth name by my father, who was a bishop. And I am the youngest daughter of Daisy Renee Dubois. And my father, Sr. James Edward. And we're from Alabama, but we have roots in Louisiana. And those roots in Louisiana took me to my birth town in Alabama. And I'm a founder, an advocate for philanthropy on the social behalf of impoverished women and girls, youth orphans in Senegal, but not just Senegal, even here in the US of A, because before I can go to Senegal, my roots are right here in Senegal. That's it, yes, you do, yes, yes. Well, I want you to know that I am from Alabama. So I'm very excited to meet you. I hardly meet anybody from there. Are you kidding? Wow. I am from Alabama, Thomasville, Alabama, Clark County. Go, Bama, go. Okay. So that's where I am from originally. I would, you know, I came up here to live, my mother moved here, so I came with her. And when I was young, but I used to go back a lot. You know, my dad was alive. I don't go back so often now, but yeah, I'm from there. I love football. Football's happening now, so go, Bama, you know. The spirit always connects, doesn't it? It's amazing. Yes, yes, it's amazing. And it's so funny you talk about finding about your heritage. I did my heritage, and my grandfather on my father's side is from Sierra Leone. Okay. And my grandmother is from Haiti. Oh, wonderful. And they're actually in that, you know, the registry. I found their registry. And my dad was born here in America, but he was in my grandmother's belly when he came. That's a lot, okay, wonderful. Yes, yes, so it's crazy. That's amazing you say Haiti, because it's some ancestral from Haiti on through my mother's story through my aunt. And, but a lot of people from the islands were also trying to trace their ancestral back to the motherland as well. So, you know. Absolutely, absolutely. So I'm thrilled that you're doing some work there. One of my trips is going to be to Sierra Leone and, you know, and embrace that part of my life. So I'm really thrilled to have you on. And we wanna talk about, you know, operating in the place of survival and just your story on how, you know, you were unlearning that silence. Can you share a little bit about that with my audience? Sure, well, I've always been the more talkative, expressive of the children. I have two brothers as well, but of the children, I've always been, my mother would say, even my sisters would say, I've always been the most expressive. So basically when I seen or felt any, in type of injustice, racism, things that we all can relate to is being in our black, beautiful skin. Yes. I would speak up about it and not much, so much in the South, because I was still young, but as we moved on to the North, as we moved out of Alabama and came up to the North of Boston, Massachusetts, and, you know, the North, we understood and we could see things and what you call it, the segregation and the problems that was happening in Boston at the time. So I was, you know, I didn't experience much so-called racism, but I did see it, of course. A lot of times you don't experience something personally, you see it amongst your peers and other people and a little bit of, you know, things of yourself. So being that I'm very talkative and I would express injustices of inequality and type of things to my mom. And then of course she worked in, which is very common, our mothers, most of our mothers and grandmothers worked in white folks' homes to take care of us, to look good, to, you know, they sacrificed a lot. So with all of that and reading, and I love museums, I love documentaries, I loved, at the time- Oh my goodness, you sound like me. You sound like me. At the time, no, we didn't have no internet. We had, we had the library, we had National Geographic, we had WGET, W-E-G-E-T. Yes, yes, on Saturdays, on Saturdays, sit right there. Yes, so as we grew up, we learned more about, you know, like I said, injustice, racism, and that stuff still shapes us today. And it's, you know, because we still see it, it's still happening. So it's not like it happened last year and 10, 20 years ago, we still live it, you know? And how I cope is because I love to read and research, which took me to history, which took me to look at my mother, who I admire, my grandmother, who I admire, my great-grandmother, who I never met, which took me back across the transatlantic. But before we even got there, because of the research, the history, the reading, the writing, the documentaries, we, you know, we put these things together to find out who we are, why is this happening, who these other oppressors are. And we go into ourselves. And if you tap into your spirituality, and you can only do that for me, and I think you may agree, is when you, if you're close to your parents and your uncle, your auntie, your people in your family, and you look at their lives, and you kind of put things together as to, it's like a puzzle. Your life, the situation, where we live at, what we're going through, and the different tools that I just use to say, TV, libraries, reading, writing, talking to your mother, your grandmother, looking at their issues, their pain, and their impoverished ways, not ways, but life. Patterns, yeah, the patterns that they have, yeah. The patterns, you know, and it shapes their behaviors, it shapes the way they act. Not that they were ungodly, unruly, they were very beautiful women, historical women, and feminine women. Exactly. And you put all these things together, and you say, wow, you know, and how can I make a difference? What can I do? You know, you don't know what to do, really. You're just kind of like drowning in sorrow. But as we got older, you know, you go to school, I educated myself, I got married, I had my children, which was a challenge. And it just led me to do more research and to really want to take action and go deep. And the only way I could go deep in my research is to know exactly who I am in consciousness, meditation, and really travel. Travel opened up a huge, it opens up a- You know that truth right there. Yeah, it opens up a universe, you know, if you get the chance to travel, and you don't even have to travel outside abroad, you can travel right in this US of A and learn a lot and come in contact with different great, wonderful people, like-minded like yourself, who are kind of searching and looking and reading and writing, you know, and the universe, the omnipotent God, you might call him, if he, Christian, Jesus, Hey, Salam, you might want to call Allah, you might want to call Buddha, whoever, however, the omnipotent source, you put things together and say, you know what? Okay, let me master this. And the only way you can master anything, you try to master yourself, your feelings, heal yourself, and through this pain and trauma. And the biggest problem is, how can we heal ourself when we don't know that there's nothing, we don't believe there's nothing wrong with us in the first place. So I think we do, sis, I think we do. I think we do, because we feel it. We just don't acknowledge it. We just don't acknowledge it, and we override it, you know, we override it. We feel it. And once we feel it, and once we come to terms and authentically take off any kind of mask, we want to acknowledge it. Once we acknowledge it, that's when we really, at this point, you know, we say to ourselves, we want to get into some type of action to, you know, internally, and then you want to go externally, you know, and get into some type of action to complete the start, completing the journey. You know, it's a lifetime of a journey. And that took me to doing something about the injustices or the racism issues that I didn't, you know, approve of. And my work is a source of healing, and I wrote my first book, which is a traveling guide. It was called Return to Glory. I started writing it, I was writing articles. What was happening was people was asking me about Senegal. They were asking me, well, oh, you went there? What happened, and how'd you do that? And how about the Glory Island thing? And, you know, people would ask me about my travels as I came back and forth, you know? And because of that, one thing led to another, and I said, let me write, let me put together a little book. Let me do a book. And, you know, the articles were good, but, you know, I said, let me write a book. And I did, and it was published by Mind Publishing House, Mind Publishing, and it just, I just went from there and kept continuing to, you know, do my work overseas and talk with people. And I can only give back to myself and to others when I started the nonprofit work in Senegal, West Africa. Yeah. So you gave us a real, you know, robust referral to you, and I thank you so much for that. And part of what you're saying, and I really want to break down some of the pieces that you did share, you were saying something about recognizing when we're operating in that survival, those old patterns that we have from, that we live, you know, see in our lineage coming through. So rather than living like that, how did you start to start to navigate? Because, you know, I could see for myself, I tell my mother all the time, I'm glad I was born when I wasn't born, when I was born, because this big mouth of mine, I don't know, I think it would have got me in a whole lot of trouble. And she always says, I'm the kid that challenged everything. And like you, I challenged everything. I went the next level, but that was God. You know, that was, that was your purpose. You know, that was, you were, you know, and I loved how you said that you start to work on the inside as well as the out, the purpose from the inside and the outside, right? A lot of us don't do that, but a lot of us don't do that. We know there's something wrong, right? And, oh, we're going to go fix this one. We're not going to fix ourselves. That's survival mode, right? That is, the problem too, in that, a lot of us don't know how. We don't know how. We know, we feel it, like you said, we know it, but it's like, I know someone did an injustice to this person or murdered somebody, but you can't prove it. So you don't know how and where to start the research to try to track it down. So, and like, I think we all are shown differently in different ways, maybe. And all of us are shown in the same type of path. And, but what helped me was reflection, observation, praying, we've always been a prayerful people. That's just, spiritually, actually, financially, I mean, psychologically, it's just, we are, I mean, look at what we've been through. I mean, come on, I mean, we were created this way. That's the bottom line, you know? And so that took me the time spent on myself, trying to master myself, looking at my life between the time I could remember myself at five and six. I couldn't, I don't remember anything before five and six, but from five and six on, I remember a lot of things. And I said, I want to master myself. I want to master my thoughts and who I am, who my creator is. And, you know, I was just all into it, the Bible, the, and I started reading the Koran, but it took time for all of these different things down the road. The interest in, and looking at your mother, who was a good, powerful, a father too, but your mother and your grandmother, the people that are, who helped shape you, who taught you and showed you the way to go, and who is still showing us the way to go. The living and in the past, the people who have transitioned back to God. These things are, you know, like I said, putting the puzzles and the pieces together, they helped us in our journey. You know, they help us still to this day. Right. So how does your work, the work that you do, and I know it's deeply rooted in your own story, how can people use their personal trauma to fuel their advocacy and service without bleeding all over them? If I could say, you know what I mean? Like, you know, how can we do that effectively? That's what I'm saying. Yes. You said something so, so important, which is a lot of things that you've said, but this one stuck out, and you said the word meaningful purpose. Meaningful purpose. Yeah. And that's where I was searching and scratching and digging. Okay. And I knew to help me with any type of trauma that I felt and faced, which is injustice and injustices and racism and impoverished things that our parents went through in the deep South. I knew I had to, for me, it was my healing came through serving other people. And it just wasn't, it just doesn't have to be, of course, people of color, it's just serving humanity, you know? Yeah. And it's serving humanity is a healing process and a healing tool and beauty for me, and to give back. And because I said, maybe whatever I'm feeling, would I like this 200 trillion years ago? Oh, that's good. That's good, that's good. I don't want to, no. I said, because we know and we believe we are immortal. We are the image of the likeness of God. And we have no beginning and no ending. I said- Oh, that's a very good question. Oh, I like that. I said, I want to go there to myself, you know? And that was just like in multiverses of dimensions. And I said, I love people. I love talking to people. I enjoy women, I enjoy people, period. And I said, I want to give back to society and to people whom, whatever I felt was suffering like me or even worse. Yeah. I wanted to learn- How do we identify those things? Because I think that's self-sabotage, what we do to ourselves and we prevent ourself, like you said, for going to those levels. How do we prevent that? Or how do we identify the ways that we do that? The subtle ways. Because it's not always the overt ways, you know, like we always use it, you know, I don't like that or something, but it's something really subtle that kind of like, you know, interferes with us, making sure that we're in alignment to receive. How do we see that? How do we identify that? The almighty God will send you either some type, well, for me, you know, we all get it differently. Right, right. Sometimes a sign. You know what you mean. Sometimes a sign. It could be a person, people, places. It could be like, I don't want to use the word, but I will. I mean, deja vu. It could be something from way back or from the ether coming or something. Some type of, I don't know how to explain it because I'm not good at explaining everything that I went through and feel. And sometimes some things, some powers are locked in you and you can't express it in your verbal voice, but you can express it in your actions and your physical, tangible actions. And you'll be shown, trust that. You will be shown the how. Sometimes the how is not explained and can't be explained sometimes. And, you know, even if I didn't explain it, it might not happen to you that way or you might not can relate to it that way. It depends on whom you're speaking with and what her experiences have been up until now, her involvement, her transition, her transcensions and type of things like this. So I think you will be shown, you know, so trust that, just trust that you will be shown. Okay, good. What's the most uncomfortable truth you had to face about yourself on your journey to self-mastery? Being too judgmental, overthinking. You know, trying to figure it out is another, could be another situation that we have to let go of and stuff. And just trust the process. Because the answer, a lot of times, you'll be shown and then you'll be shown why you didn't get the answers at the time and why it just didn't happen if you're being patient. Because the word patient is a very powerful word, a suburb, a suburb, I can't pronounce it well. It means the patient. And it's one of the last attributes of God that we use. And Ms. Edna, my dear sister, you will be shown. You practice patience, practice forgiveness of yourself and practice patience. And that's your true, it helps you with your authentic self because you can't wear a mask in this journey. There's no mask that you can wear. You have to put it out there. You know, come out, be authentic, and that's how you help heal yourself and that helps heal other people as well. Absolutely. You talk about self-forgiveness and that's one of the acts that we normally forget when we've forgiven everybody else. We forget about, you know, for us. And I know I talk about it a lot, but I wanna hear from your perspective. What does it truly look like to forgive ourselves for past mistakes? For me, I can say, endive yourself, indulge in prayer, indulge in reflection, indulge in self-observation, indulge in meditation, you know, and indulge in something we call zikr. Zikr means remembrance. You know, you're trying to, you know, once you seek forgiveness and once you seek to forgive others and once you're patient, it's all these different tools that we use to help us get there and help us reflect and help us understand ourselves, read, and it's like I said, it's a combination of things. It's not no one way of something. It's a combination of things that we put together to really, you know, have mercy on ourselves and ask the omnipotent source of God to have mercy on us and to, you know, embrace, embrace all the problems, embrace it. You know, it's a journey. It's our journey. You know, all our journey is unique. And just trust the process. You have to trust, you have to trust. And I think that's the biggest, the hardest thing for us is to trust the process because I was coaching one of my clients one time and I said, just trust the process, right? And they were like, I'm so tired of hearing this word process. What is it? And I said, well, it's trust your journey. Really, it really is just trust your journey. Trust that you're walking the way you're supposed to go. And it's so very scary because you're traveling in an unknown. It's very scary. And I feel that way sometimes, but like you said, you have to trust it. And so when I get off, you know, and I start worrying, then I go, nope, no, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to trust the journey. This is bringing me to a journey. This is bringing me to meditate more. This is bringing me to pray more. This is bringing me to align more, to master myself. You know, it's helping you to do that, right? So how do you like- Easier said than done. You're right. Yes, right. Easier said than done. But it is good to do because what you said, all those things help us to stay grounded. And that prayer and that meditation, you know, that reading, that research, you know, indulge in something other than worry. Because we love that. You know, we love that as humans. We love that. We love worry. So, you know, we often talk about that seeking validation, you know, whether we got it in our, as a child or not from the outside world. How do we start to internally turn that from outside? And that's one of the stories that had to really get right with myself. I found as I was digging around, I myself found that I needed external validation. I had to turn it inward. Can you talk about how to do that? Turn the outside validation inward and work on that? For me, I was given a gift and that gift came from my father. When I was born, my father said to my mom, this is the queen of Sheba. He said, this is the queen of Sheba. That taught me so much about the biblical queen of Sheba, the prophets, alayhi salam, and his father, David, alayhi salam. Peace be upon these beautiful people. And from there, he taught me, he gave me so much inspiration in the name. And then I had to read the stories, the biblical stories to him every Sunday, every Sunday. And people would say, do you know who that person, the queen of Sheba is in the Bible? I said, oh yeah, I know for a fact. That was a motivation or an inspiration for me to motivate and inspire and master and learn who I am of consciousness, so to speak, not externally. I might have been so-and-so. No, it took me inward. So that kind of sealed the deal to help me in this journey of to not seek the validation, because some of us seek validation from our parents and we have that trauma. We seek love, we seek, we came from a loving family. Our family had problems and issues like every most common family do. But the inspiration, the proud things that my father did for me in that name, it kind of sealed the deal for a lot of different things to help me with my self-esteem and how I felt about myself, because we have to, it's important to feel good about Sister Edna. It's important for Sister Edna to feel good for her, what she's doing. When you had sent me that, you asked about the podcast and the name. I said, oh, that's her. I said, that's her. I didn't know much about you, of course, because I'm not learning you, but looking and experiencing, that is her, that's her. So that's just like a ping, ping. Yeah, not even knowing that you had an Alabama roots, I didn't know any of that. But I did hear you speaking on certain talks and everything. And then when you did that, that kind of sealed the deal for me. And I said, oh, that's her. Absolutely, you got that right. Oh my goodness, yeah. I really thank you for what you're saying and what you gave. Can you just give the audience again, how they can reach you, what you would like from them for the support of what you're doing? And just the last word on what can uplift and inspire them. You can always reach me on social media and just put in my name. It could be in Google Research. It could be on Facebook or LinkedIn, preferably LinkedIn. And the work that we do is right up under my name and profile and everything. And the emails are there, the phone numbers are there. And you can reach out and support the work if you love humanitarian activities. We really appreciate it. We are volunteering operation and we have fun with it, but it is a very lot of hard work. It's no doubt, it's a challenge. And it was given to me by my late husband, spiritual scholar, a brilliant Imam Hassan Sisi, a Medina by Colac. I like to mention that because the story can be told without mentioning his name. He no longer may God have mercy on his soul and increase his paradise for the humanitarian work that he did on the planet earth. And what I like to say to the audience is be your authentic self. But in order to do that, we have to go within, we have to shift, we have to research, we have to read and we have to get in a place that is still and we can find the answers as possible. It's a lot of work, but we have to do the work. Yes. Well, Queen Sheba, thank you for your raw honesty and for showing us what it truly means to really heal out loud. Your story is powerful and we can remember it, that our pain can be our greatest gift to the world. To learn more about Queen Sheba's mission and how to support her work, visit her organization at givebutter.com at Help Women Girls. If this episode has spoke to you, share it with somebody who needs to hear this message. And don't forget to like and subscribe and leave a comment and we'll make sure that Queen Sheba gets the comment and gets back to you. And remember when you unlearn the silence, you give yourself and others permission to heal. Bye for now. Thank you.