Within the Consciousness Raising stream are pods working to increase self-reflection and decrease isolation and self-doubt.
In trying to become “objective,” Western culture made “objects” of things and people when it distanced itself from them, thereby losing “touch” with them. This dichotomy is the root of all violence.
—GLORIA ANZALDÚA
One way that we can work to dismantle white supremacy and other systems of oppression is to practice experiencing the world in and through our body. For most of us, our connection with our body has been severed—by colonization, capitalism, cis-hetero-patriarchy, ableism, white dominant culture, or the experience of trauma. Prentis Hemphill tells us that the explicit practice of somatics emerged from the break between mind and body that started with the European Enlightenment.
That break keeps us from fully experiencing our emotions and robs us of the wisdom that is inherent in our bodies. Somatic practices seek to repair this break.
Somatic practices often start with noticing
Somatic Awareness
Our ability to feel and work with sensation, emotions, and aliveness in the felt senses.
Somatic Reflexivity
Exploring our own senses and signals from the body; noticing the habits of the mind, including beliefs and judgments; and noticing the choice in how we cognitively decide to act and how that choice influences one’s interactions.
Somatic Wisdom
The practice of listening in somatic awareness and applying somatic reflexivity to our everyday life, engaging our full body in receiving, processing, and cognitively communicating information.