What is embodied antiracism?
In my experience, many white bodied people spend a tremendous amount of time thinking about, reflecting on and honing our ideas about what’s right. The more we learn about what’s broken in the world, the more motivated we feel to be part of healing and change. Often though, when we encounter an opportunity to act on those intentions, to move against the grain and to disrupt embedded systems of harm, we find ourselves frozen or hesitant instead. What if I do it wrong or make things worse? What if things get really awkward? Am I the best person for this? Am I ready or equipped? Often our bodies hold one set of ideas about how we want to show up in the world, and another set of deeply ingrained patterns and fears that limit how fully or effectively we actually do.
This disconnect between our values and our bodies is not a personal problem, it’s an impact of collective traumas! And it has a long history, with devastating consequences for communities of color. While disconnection from our body can be wise and protective for surviving experiences that it hasn’t had the capacity to feel fully, unprocessed experiences and emotions from individual and collective traumas leave us living and bracing as though we are in the past. As we attend with support to these stuck protective patterns and bring connection to the parts of us that are hiding, we can experience greater connection with the flow of life around us and capacity to show up how we mean to, becoming more and more awake and responsive to the present moment. The journey to becoming more embodied and connected to all parts of ourselves gives us access to the internal resource and resiliency that we need to live out our values with boldness. I am in no way an expert around embodied antiracism - but I am deeply invested in the journey and eager to share, learn and build with others.
Lineage of this work…
My approach to this work of building embodied antiracism culture and community, cannot be separated from the mentors and teachers who I have learned with and from. It was Resmaa Menakem’s books and teaching that first began to connect the dots for me between the trauma held in our bodies and the persistent patterns of harm, immobilization and fragility in the white collective. And it is Resmaa who articulated that culture and community are what we need. During those years, Rachel Martin was living out Resmaa’s teaching through communities of practice with fellow white folks here in Minneapolis, where we were learning to track our embodied patterns and develop collective language and practices that could help to heal and shift them. Rachel’s work provided space in which I could practice and stretch and begin to catch a vision for what this kind of collective healing could look like.
In the last several years, local somatic practitioner and elder Susan Raffo has been a treasured teacher and mentor, modeling loving accountability and reaching towards ancestors, shaping my vision for the future, and for the kind of elder I hope to be. Since beginning my studies in Somatic Experiencing, SE faculty Joshua Sylvae has been a primary teacher around that modality, and local SE practitioner and therapist Tracy Williams has been an essential mentor around integrating my SE learnings into the context of working with racialized trauma patterns.
It’s also important to note that although my experience of somatic practice and embodied trauma healing have largely come through practitioners of more recent articulations of somatics like Somatic Experiencing, there’s nothing new or novel about these modalities which all have their roots in indigenous practice and cultural ways of healing from across the world. Just as our bodies know how to heal, communities throughout time have developed ways of supporting bodies to release and metabolize stuck energy. I am committed to continuing to learn about the much older roots and lineage of the somatic practices that have become so important to me.
Offerings
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Intro offerings support awareness of the deeper embodied roots of our collective patterns, emphasizing the importance of relationships and practices that can help us be with the charge of race and contend with the ways history shows up in our bodies. These range in depth from a day-long retreat to a series of sessions with your group.
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This experience introduces participants to the autonomic nervous system, our threat response system, and the impacts of trauma on the body. We introduce and experience resourcing somatic practices and their ability to help us experience greater agency under stress and connect with the present moment.
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These cohorts of justice leaders or faith leaders spend 9 sessions building a foundation for loving accountability, developing shared language and practice for tracking embodied white patterns, and beginning to move from reflexivity and reactivity to greater intention. We hope to grow greater capacity for disrupting racist harm in and around us, and resilience for taking risks towards racial justice.
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Building embodied antiracist culture and community is the work of many generations! In the short-term, cultivating lasting, accountable relationships and practicing regularly in community is the only way I know to do the work.
If you are part of a group committed to racial justice and hoping to bring somatic practice into somewhat heady work and learning, I would love to support your group in building the foundation for that. It is my hope that in the coming years our community will have many communities of practice, practicing new ways of relating and moving through the world that can make the future more just and thriving than the present.