00:05:32.520that we don't just try to push through intellectually.
00:05:34.560So in that way, it's embodied resilience. It's using your body as a guide, as a compass, as a companion, and a source of strength to meet these challenges flexibly.
00:05:47.660so i'm gonna leave it there and i mean i can go further and in terms of you know how the
00:05:55.520resilience toolkit frames embodied resilience and what are the connectors between the person
00:06:00.900or the people and meaning people groups of people and their ecology but you tell me i feel like yeah
00:06:08.320why not please take us there so so often in the wellness world where it's about lowering
00:06:17.520your stress and always being calm. And you see it a lot in, I don't know if you want to use the
00:06:22.900word, it's pejorative, a new age sort of sense of spiritual, almost as a spiritual bypassing or
00:06:30.260toxic positivity about always be calm and always take the high road and always this. And what
00:06:35.780happens is, is that people are having legitimate responses, legitimate trauma responses, legitimate
00:06:42.240stress responses to conditions of adversity, be they interpersonal, be they collective,
00:06:46.780be they structural. And people are made to feel that there's something wrong in them for having
00:06:52.200these responses and that they should, you know, if they can just settle, they'll be more productive.
00:06:57.100And I think of how mindfulness has been co-opted in corporate America and other, you know, and as
00:07:02.480that has spread across the globe, this idea that you're going to do some mindfulness at your lunch
00:07:08.420hour when you should just be relaxing, you're going to do some mindfulness so you can be more
00:07:12.060productive. And nowhere does the organization look at how they're contributing to the lack of
00:07:17.580wellness in their workforce. And so in the Resilience Toolkit, our core objectives are to
00:07:24.960say, yes, we know that a big source of the suffering comes from history and structure
00:07:33.720and culture, and that people cannot be solely as individuals responsible for that. But we also know
00:07:40.120that systems don't change themselves in that sense, right?
00:08:10.120And so this is this paradox here, but it's the reality where I think most of us find ourselves. And so how do we become, the Resilience Toolkit helps us become more aware of what our actual responses are. When are we activated in stress? When are we settled?
00:08:28.980And then to ask ourselves a very important question is, is my reaction right now, is
00:08:46.600And most of the time we find that we're overreacting for a host of reasons.
00:08:52.300And it's not that our reaction is wrong per se, it's just stronger than is useful.
00:08:57.180And by learning and choosing from a sort of a menu of body-based tools, how can I downshift my stress response, right? So I'm not blowing off this extra energy in an over-response. And it allows me as I settle into a more adaptive stress response to the moment to access what's been locked inside of me, what's been hijacked because of the stress or trauma response, the excessive one.
00:09:26.180and I get access again to more creative and flexible visioning, and I'm more open to
00:09:32.860collaboration. I know how to rest. I know how to recover. And in that way, I am more poised for
00:09:42.380sustainable work for liberation. And there's a better chance when we're collaborating,
00:09:49.560when we've got more creative visions, we can really kind of work on the systems and open
00:09:54.320them up a little bit so then they're not pressing down on us so much and so it's back and forth
00:09:59.060recursive loop between us settling working to open up the systems and then the systems giving
00:10:07.180us more space so we can settle more so there i said a lot more that was such a beautiful opening
00:10:15.040And yeah, I'd like to focus on how cultivating embodied resilience helps us build capacity for discomfort. And this is so vital right now because I'm sure we're all seeing so many conversations collapse or remain stymied because people are freezing in their discomfort.
00:10:37.940Similarly, I've heard you speak about the function of numbness and how BIPOC also go numb to sort of stay afloat in spaces where white people are, for the first time, having to dismantle their privilege and in doing so are opening themselves to a flooding of pain, you know, previously hidden by oppressive systems.
00:10:58.960So how does embodied resilience mitigate our propensity to disconnect amidst difficult conversations?
00:11:05.280so when we can lean into our body for some wisdom you know our i find that the body can't lie to us
00:11:13.220like we can lie to ourselves in our thoughts the body may have responses that are like maybe you're
00:11:20.940having an old trauma response to what's happening right in this moment and so you think in some way
00:11:25.680your body is lying to you but it's not it's telling the truth it's just doesn't have the
00:11:29.220time right it's talking about something in the past so in that way it's this idea that the body
00:11:34.800has this wisdom and it's kind of tells us like, if we can cue into, Hey, I'm in this conversation
00:11:42.600right now and it's a hard conversation. And I noticed my mouth went dry. I noticed I'm holding
00:11:48.540my breath. I noticed I I'm having a hard time hearing what's being said. My mind is jumping
00:11:54.000ahead to what I want to say. If I can become aware of those as stress responses that are starting to
00:11:59.840crest over my threshold for staying present. If I can become aware of that, and I have some kind
00:12:07.720of tool to help myself recognize, wait a second, is it really that dangerous right now? And most
00:12:14.060of the time, it's not that dangerous. And I can, again, downshift my response a little bit.
00:12:20.560It allows me to stay open and my hearing shifts. Right? And it's really, these are biological
00:12:27.100changes, the more stressed we are, are hearing tunes away from the range of the human voice
00:12:32.500and more to low sort of danger sounds in the environment. We literally don't hear each other.
00:12:38.700And so in order to be in a conversation of any kind, let alone a difficult conversation,
00:12:43.880the capacity to listen is so crucial. And so being able to listen to my body's own signs
00:12:49.900that I'm exceeding my threshold and settle myself lets me stay in connection, lets me stay
00:12:55.460open and have that spaciousness around the ideas, around people's feelings and my own feelings and
00:13:04.000ability to sit with that discomfort. And on the flip side, as you spoke about,
00:13:10.000is recognizing when things might not be safe, right? It might not be safe as a BIPOC person1.00
00:13:15.640to be in a room, in a group, in a collective with white folks awakening to privilege and
00:13:25.120struggling with white guilt and white shame, that might not actually be all that safe of a space0.53
00:13:31.600for a BIPOC person. And for us to recognize like, you know what, this is not all right for me. And0.86
00:13:39.580that I did go numb and that maybe I've exceeded my threshold. Cause it's not always that when
00:13:46.000something you've exceeded your threshold, that we are the people that need to settle. Sometimes we
00:13:51.600need to remove ourselves from the situation and say the situation just like isn't okay but if we're
00:13:56.720not for me at this moment with my my capacity or the degree of safety and my awareness of what my
00:14:04.000system what my body is telling me helps inform my decisions and there's a you know there's a time
00:14:09.980in when we're doing racism repair where affinity groups make a lot of sense until people are there
00:14:19.660have a better set of skills to enter into hard conversations and stay in hard conversations
00:14:26.180in ways with a certain skillfulness and that embodiment skill. Because we see a lot of
00:14:31.940anti-racism initiatives founder because they're highly cognitive, especially if we're talking
00:14:37.840about corporate spaces where we're like, here's your equity checklist. And so we're doing it by
00:14:44.260force of compliance, or where we end up in a space where people are so hypervigilant and afraid to say
00:14:51.860anything, to hurt anybody's feelings, that it shuts down capacity for connection. And so there's this
00:15:00.120basic set of skills about trust and safety, which are really body-based skills. We can't make trust
00:15:07.760and safety in our heads. It just doesn't work. I think about this very interesting study that
00:15:14.300was done in Sierra Leone after civil war, where they used some sort of restorative practices.
00:15:23.640And it was a very interesting study because it was, they randomized 200 villages where half
00:15:29.220received or went through restorative processes and the other half did not. And they followed
00:15:34.880them for three years. And like you would expect, oh, you went through restorative processes
00:15:41.040and you find, you know, on measures of people's social engagement and what they say as how much
00:15:50.100they trust their neighbors and their community were higher in the groups that had gone through
00:15:54.940restorative processes. But when it came to psychological measures, they were worse
00:16:00.660than those who had not. And I, you know, the authors of the paper spoke to that restorative
00:16:08.980processes are not the same as trauma healing. And I would go one step further is that we know
00:16:14.720trauma is a process that is not just cognitive and it's not just emotional. It's also biological.
00:16:19.860And in fact, it's probably biological first before it becomes emotional, before it becomes
00:16:24.980cognitive just thinking about how we know the body works and that if you don't address the body
00:16:31.460someone comes to you and they're having an emotional outpouring and you you know in a
00:16:37.300restorative process and you you know there's amends that are made and you cognitively say
00:16:42.660i forgive this person but you still have that lump in your throat you still feel that clutch in your
00:16:47.480chest that pit in your stomach if those aren't addressed those are what come back and those are
00:16:54.260what grow as we revisit them over and over. And they, you know, rise up into our emotional state
00:17:01.240and into our thoughts and begin to hijack our behavior much to our consternation. We're like,
00:17:06.760I forgave them. Why am I still? And so I think about that when we're doing racial healing
00:17:12.900processes, that if we ignore the body, we ignore it at our peril because our efforts will be
00:17:20.860short-lived. The body will remember. I was recently reading a piece titled
00:17:29.300How We Fight Without Hating by Valerie Brown in Tricycle Magazine. And Valerie writes,
00:17:36.320quote, our hearts are broken open by grief, fear, and anger. How do we fight injustice and not hate
00:17:43.460those who perpetuate it? How do we fight injustice and support ourselves? How do we deepen our
00:17:49.780resolve for a more just and equitable world within that unjust and inequitable world? How do we face
00:17:57.420the fear of failure within ourselves and in our society? End quote. And yeah, I think so many are
00:18:06.840trying their hardest to not be overwhelmed with frustration and anger every day. And I wonder if
00:18:13.680maybe you could respond to this in terms of how embodied resilience can also relieve feelings of
00:18:19.740hatred when they come up as we try to communicate change? I mean, I think a lot of it is there's,
00:18:26.880I mean, this is a capacity question, right? The capacity to sit with hard and big things
00:18:34.440without shrinking, collapsing, going rigid. Like typically how we respond is how we respond. And
00:18:43.280it tends to, we tend to each have our own patterns. Some of us, when we hit our threshold,
00:18:47.560we disconnect. Some of us shut down. Some of us act out. Some of us get rigid and controlling,
00:18:57.720you know, and maybe we have a few patterns, right? But we have our style, our little insignia.
00:19:05.400And so when we reach our threshold, regardless of the stimulus, we tend to go into that response.
00:19:11.500and so it's about how do we grow our window of tolerance our ability to sit with hard things
00:19:18.440without going into our pattern um and i think what i find is this idea that i presented earlier
00:19:30.100that so many of us are in an over response most of the time and that we're constantly exceeding
00:19:37.440And part of that is, you know, late stage capitalism that asks us to constantly be in production and constantly to be in consumption and, and to push, push, push.
00:19:47.340There's no, if there's rest, it's certainly not recovery.
00:19:52.580And so, so many of us, when we truly stop our window of tolerance, that where we can stay connected to ourselves in a calm and, and, you know, spacious way is actually quite small.
00:20:05.700Because when you're constantly pushing, you decrease your resilience, you decrease your reserves. It's like, you know, you overspend your bank account, be it energy, be it money, you know, you end up, your reserves are depleted and you're more reactive and you have a harder time tolerating, tolerating things.
00:20:25.760And most of us know this intuitively, yet still, this is how we conduct our lives. This is how the culture asks us to conduct our lives. And so the ability for moment to moment to track what is the most adaptive response allows you to not exceed your threshold when it's not necessary.
00:20:49.760necessary because when it is necessary that then you can dig in and go into your your reserves but
00:20:55.040if you're doing it every day all the time and i think a big lesson for me and where i learned this
00:20:59.860is i have mcfs or myalgic encephalomyelitis chronic fatigue syndrome and you know i was
00:21:07.480quite sick for some period of time on and off but the last several years were very very rough and
00:21:13.960one of the strategies for managing, well, one of the hallmark symptoms of the disease
00:21:18.460is activity intolerance. Basically, the theory is, is that our mitochondria are not producing
00:21:25.280energy appropriately for a number of reasons, almost like a kind of hibernation, if you want
00:21:30.920to think cellular hibernation. And so anywhere I, where I would expend energy, like I would have a
00:21:39.500payback afterwards. It was like, it's called post-exertional malaise. It's more than malaise.
00:21:45.160It's all the symptoms flare. And so I learned pacing, which is don't spend all your energy
00:21:51.000in one place. I had to really be very, very careful and measured and say, okay, I'm doing
00:21:56.780this activity. Am I spending more energy than I have? Making sure to dial it back and really
00:22:03.820learn what is rest and what is restoration and i think that has heavily influenced how i think
00:22:12.520about the world and i see that when i'm able to listen to my body's rhythms and when my body is
00:22:20.540asking for rest and i can give it when i don't push when it's when you have to you push right
00:22:26.820for many years i was single mom and working and going to school and and you have to push you push
00:22:32.820but many times we're pushing when we don't need to and so when we can dial that back that grows
00:22:39.700this reserve that embodied resilience that gives us the capacity in hard conversations
00:22:45.800in movement work to be more spacious to have more grace to have more compassion
00:22:52.540where we may feel anger but it doesn't calcify into hatred
00:26:22.740And so it's a very privileged place to think that you can fight.
00:26:26.880And sometimes, and it's a very, very privileged place to think that you can run.
00:26:30.740I mean, I think about, there's an example I use often when I teach of, it was a situation here in the US, actually in Southern California, where a group of young black women had rented an Airbnb, and they were checking out of the Airbnb and putting their luggage in their trunk of their car.
00:26:53.940and a white neighbor saw them didn't recognize them as owners of the home and waved at them
00:27:00.180and the women didn't recognize the woman they don't know her they didn't wave back
00:27:04.920so the neighbor called the police and the police in typical u.s fashion sent a helicopter and
00:27:11.120multiple cars and what ensued was a tense situation and it was diffused and nobody was
00:27:19.400arrested and, you know, it was cleared up. But what I find instructive here is that these Black1.00
00:27:26.280women, when you see you're surrounded by police cars, you're terrified. And you would want to run,1.00
00:27:33.860but if you ran, what would happen? It's not a privilege to run. They don't have that privilege
00:27:38.620there. They don't have the, if they were to fight and sort of mouth off to the officers, we know
00:27:44.220that they could likely not survive the interaction again no privilege to fight and so what happens is
00:27:51.820they appease and appeasement takes a number of different forms and in this particular instance
00:27:56.760the form it took was they laughed and joked with the officers they laughed and joked with the
00:28:02.940officers and so what happens is they leave the the officers leave the experience and say look0.83
00:28:12.380they were happy you know everything's fine we did fine the women leave the this incident and say
00:28:20.880we were terrified we were afraid for our lives look at the disconnect between those two experiences
00:28:27.400because part of what makes appeasement work is it has to be a little bit invisible
00:28:31.760right and so um the police force actually did a press conference afterwards and said the women
00:28:39.980we'll show you the videos. The women were happy and they were laughing. And this goes to show
00:28:44.940that there's a masking that happens. And it's not just that we're socially conditioned to do it,
00:28:51.680because you can say that, because we see bears do it. We see non-human primates appease. We see
00:28:59.600dogs appease. So we know that there's some biological underpinning when there's social
00:29:06.360hierarchy. And I would, I'm venturing to think is that most of us when we're on the bottom end
00:29:12.460of a social hierarchy, spend the greater part of our existence in appeasement. And that actually
00:29:19.680is the most common form of our responses that we live in. And in my speaking to audiences,
00:29:27.200you know, in the U.S., in Africa, in Europe, this has resonated with all different kinds of
00:29:35.620audiences where they say, yes, this is what I am experiencing. And to hear it named so clearly,
00:29:42.120people are quite relieved. And to understand that there's a lot of shame when we have appeased,
00:29:49.080we may leave a situation and say, why didn't I speak up? Why didn't I do anything? When in fact,
00:29:53.740our body has locked us into a freeze on top of the roiling fight flight that's kept inside.
00:30:01.560Oh, you know, the freeze is holding us to keep us safe. So it's almost a combination of those two. And when people can hear, oh, that's why I didn't respond. And there's a, it moves from a shame to a self-compassion. I was keeping myself safe.
00:30:17.820and the other important piece to tie into this is that we can have appeasement responses and
00:30:26.960we can settle our responses when we realize they're stronger than they need to be they're
00:30:32.000not useful or adaptive i don't need to be appeasing in this situation but appeasement
00:30:37.440cannot be solved by the individual alone because it's part it's it's it's a byproduct or a feature
00:30:45.580actually. It's not a byproduct. It is a feature of social hierarchy of inequity.
00:30:54.460I think many of us would willingly admit that in the past year, we found ourselves in a permanent
00:31:01.360state of stress. And I also think about this in terms of the Anthropocene and that many of us
00:31:08.160will live through a period that is characterized by a certain degree of uncertainty because of
00:31:14.360Earth's own distress. So we really need holistic perspectives on stress and anxiety that acknowledge
00:31:21.300the impacts of living in a stress-inducing ecology long-term. Can you speak to the importance of
00:31:28.600ensuring we don't get stuck in cycles of stress and trauma in relation to the ways in which stress
00:31:35.120hijacks our capacity to imagine and create? I was teaching in London last year,
00:31:43.280and there was a little contingent of folks who work around building awareness around
00:31:53.040climate collapse, climate crisis. And what they were finding is, is that people just shut down.
00:31:59.620It's so overwhelming that they literally just shut down. They can't even engage in the conversation.
00:32:06.680And so the question is, is like, how can we engage people if they can't even hear us? And
00:32:12.680it comes back to this ability to sit with you know to grow your capacity to to sit with hard
00:32:18.820things which is to recognize when you're pushing when you don't need to so you can your nervous
00:32:25.600system gets a chance to rest and restore and rebuild some of that flexibility that it needs
00:32:30.760to expand around these really hard things and have spaciousness i almost like sometimes i have this
00:32:39.880image had this image over the years of like when you have a big feeling and it's bigger than you
00:32:47.780and it just spills out all over you right like it's just like it's just bigger than your body
00:32:53.840it fills the room and there's no it's like really hard to be spacious to vision to do all of
00:33:01.040anything right when you're just contending in this thing and that about the impulse to how do
00:33:08.980we grow ourselves so that we are bigger than the feeling itself. And we recognize that the
00:33:15.520feeling is a part of us, but that there are other feelings and that there are other experiences and
00:33:20.100other thoughts and other sensations. And in that way, we can start to move with instead of be
00:33:26.360overwhelmed by. And so it comes back to really the same process. And people have different impulses
00:33:32.900about why they may want to learn this set of skills. They may want to learn it because we're
00:33:38.900this is 2020 and 2020 is all of the things. They may want to learn it specifically. I want to do
00:33:45.260racial healing work. I want to, I'm having a hard time sitting and then collapsing into white shame
00:33:50.660and I can't stay in conversations around racism. They may want to say like, when I start doing work
00:33:59.100around climate issues, I just become so overwhelmed and then I can't sleep. And then,
00:34:03.740you know and so then what good are we to anybody um and so people have a tendency to either put up
00:34:10.160walls to you know do their thing um tune it out have to leave they burn out in movements
00:34:17.420have to disengage it's a good part of my work you know being a single mom and having kids
00:34:25.980and not being able to travel and was really good because I stayed put while I did the work
00:34:33.780and I worked with groups over long periods of time and I worked with groups that didn't have
00:34:39.660the ability to pick up and go places when I'm working with done a lot of work with gang
00:34:46.080intervention so these are people who are formerly in gangs themselves and live in the same communities
00:34:54.140that they grew up in these are people who can't go on retreat you can't go on retreat so i needed
00:35:02.200to say like how do we develop methods for people when they're in it that they can use while they're
00:35:07.680in it and never did i think i would live through a pandemic i don't think any of us did but it's
00:35:13.120the same thing this is like it's something that's all consuming it's all the time the climate issues
00:35:18.300are all consuming all the time the race issues all consuming all the time and so while the idea
00:35:25.160of getting away from it to do restoration is important we also need ways to restore while
00:35:32.040we're still in it because not always can we get away not always can we get away
00:35:40.940well i'm you know wondering about the psoas muscle and i know that it plays a vital role
00:35:50.140in stress response becoming activated when we enter a period of fight flight or freeze which
00:35:56.140has happened to me quite a few times and um and i think about the trauma that is held in that part
00:36:02.280of the body and it really emphasizes something that we should all know which is that working
00:36:08.180with the body is so vital we can't treat it individually but that's exactly what is done
00:36:14.280under western systems that are hyper obsessed with the siloing of intellect body and spirit
00:36:20.280and so i wonder if you can just remind us what happens when we don't address the body
00:36:26.120and even how beginning to think about moving our bodies in different ways is vital to relieving
00:36:32.160suffering? The idea that, you know, I was in this conversation earlier this week with somebody who
00:36:41.760said, well, I know other people do emotions, but I'm an action person. Like I don't do emotions,
00:36:47.760she said. And the thing is emotions or even the biology underlying the emotions
00:36:56.800sometimes doesn't care what we think. Often it doesn't care what we think.
00:37:02.160it's just going to have the reaction that it has because when we come to talking about stress and
00:37:09.820trauma it's about survival trauma in particular and so your body has those primitive responses
00:37:18.140that come first sometimes i'll use an example of like you know most cultures have games that
00:37:25.320involve balls and if you're sitting on the sidelines watching whatever game that is that
00:37:29.960has a ball and something comes hurtling towards you, if you pause to give it a lot of thought
00:37:37.220about what is this thing coming hurling towards me, it hits you before you can move. If you pause
00:37:43.680to have a feeling, oh, it's kind of scary that thing is hurtling towards me, it also will hit
00:37:47.720you. What actually happens is your body moves once it recognizes it's in danger. And then you
00:37:53.380say afterwards, oh, that was so scary. Did you see what just happened? That's how it works.
00:37:59.960and when we can remember that you can understand that the stressors and the traumas that we're
00:38:07.480experiencing our bodies are going through that so if we don't pay attention to the body piece
00:38:11.980thinking back to the example i gave from the study in sierra leone the body will come back
00:38:17.820and hijack us so make friends with it or not it's still going to do what it's going to do
00:38:22.700um so i prefer to make friends with it and work alongside and to the the comment about the siloing
00:38:30.800that happens i find it's not i mean it's hard to to break that that pattern or move away from it
00:38:38.780because there's a move about either the psoas or i hear it also about the vagus nerve
00:38:43.880right and where people talk about the psoas in relationship to its role in in the trauma response
00:38:53.940because it's the muscle that contracts and helps you know us fold our top and bottom part of our
00:39:01.060bodies above the waist below the waist where we crunch into a ball to protect ourselves if you
00:39:06.660hear a loud sound you kind of jerk and close in right that's some psoas action there um
00:39:13.100um so it's certainly part of it but it's one player in the whole thing in the in the symphony
00:39:20.840and people talk about the vagus nerve and there's you know different branches of the vagus nerve
00:39:25.700often when people are talking about the the branch they're talking about is the part that
00:39:29.600is involved in settling the stress response and then people then talk about the vagus which again
00:39:35.180is one player in a symphony as if it is the only thing and so there's a reductionist
00:39:42.480impulses because we're talking about complex systems and they're hard to talk about with
00:39:48.080nuance so we use some things as proxy but sometimes when we're using it as a proxy we
00:39:54.340forget and we confuse it with the whole thing and so i would just like to i'm one to always expand
00:39:59.460that lens to recognize that this is a symphony that involves your immune system
00:40:06.900your central nervous system your peripheral nervous system your gut
00:40:12.560are predominantly hormone systems these are the systems that are involved in stress
00:40:19.580and in trauma and they're all talking to each other all the time like one of the big things
00:40:27.480again through my illness that i was able to discover is that a big part of my reactivity
00:40:31.980It comes from my immune system and that the immune system will drive my stress response.
00:40:38.960And so if I'm having a low level allergic reaction to something, I will be more stress
00:40:55.300Just like it ignores the ecological reasons for stress, we also ignore biological reasons
00:41:00.920reasons for stress. So just expanding the lens to look at all of those is useful and practical.
00:41:07.500Like if you're a highly allergic person, you're also usually probably a highly stressed and more
00:41:11.360likely to be anxious person as well. They tend to go hand in hand, but it's often all shoved off
00:41:17.780onto psychology. So I don't know, I might've lost the thread of your original question,
00:41:23.420but I appreciate the impulse, the direction it took me. Tell me, did I answer?
00:41:28.880yeah i mean the questions are just diving boards so i think so yeah and
00:41:37.180oh yeah it's it's good for me to personally think about too just i've been working through
00:41:46.200stress and as i know so many folks are and um it's nice to just sit with you in
00:41:54.380the thought process of it all and yeah and i'm thinking about as wellness and self-care have
00:42:02.680been industrialized in the west i've heard this narrative of healing as a permanent state
00:42:09.060that we're always healing which to some extent i understand but i think you make an important
00:42:15.600intervention by pointing out that healing is intended to allow us to live our lives
00:42:21.600We aren't actually meant to heal forever. And I think about how this idea of infinite healing
00:42:28.580might mean that we're in a state of diminished power as well, which limits our ability to aid
00:42:34.860in co-liberation. So can you share why you think it's so important to complete the healing cycle
00:42:40.620and how this completion also relates to safety and how becoming healed allows us to feel safe
00:42:48.000and become safe? I don't know if I would go so far as say completion. I think sometimes the
00:42:53.760impulse around healing, I mean, the impulse around healing, there's a lot of suffering,
00:42:57.600right? And so the impulse is like, I want to relieve this suffering myself and of others,
00:43:02.360right? And very noble and important work. What happens is I think we can get stuck in
00:43:12.860never good enough so almost it's like a capitalistic impulse of never good enough
00:43:18.100around healing where we get stuck in using it as a way of controlling our environment
00:43:25.920well if I can just tinker and improve tinker and improve tinker and improve
00:43:29.840it's a way to deal with uncertainty and I think for myself at there was times in with my own
00:43:41.240illness, about looking at the idea of always healing is actually quite ableist. Is there an
00:43:48.260acceptance that I have limitations? Can I accept my limitations? How do I balance the tension
00:43:56.580between could I improve or is this, can I accept where I am? It's a very hard question that I've
00:44:04.700navigated in various places along in between and pulling between those tensions where no this is
00:44:12.660this I'm accepting that I have this illness and then maybe I'd like to try one more therapy
00:44:18.340and how do we walk back and forth between those I think there's cycles of healing rather than
00:44:26.800I'm done kind of so there may be cycles or seasons might be a better where there's periods
00:44:32.960where we are more intent, intentional in our healing efforts.
00:44:40.260And then also remembering to stop and celebrate what is working.
00:44:44.500Like not always, the idea that there's always something to be healed
00:44:47.740comes from a stress activation cycle like itself.
00:44:52.820I'm stress activated, so I'm going to see what's negative here.
00:44:55.820I'm going to see what's problematic instead of seeing also what is working
00:45:00.100and what is right and what is good and what is pleasurable.
00:45:02.960So there's that as well. You know, when they say like when your feet hurt, all you can think about is your feet. And when your feet don't hurt, you just walk. You just walk. And that feels very liberating to me, that some of us, our feet might hurt a little all the time, and that might be part of our experience and will never change.
00:45:26.260Can we make that okay too? So there's a lot of threads in here about ableism, about control, the unknown, about acceptance, about the impulse to relieve suffering and heal.
00:45:48.980and I think avoiding absolutes can I heal a little bit and I feel a little safer
00:45:57.580I think about my own journey having lived through sexual abuse at a very young age
00:46:05.840and so young that I could never remember really what safety was it wasn't a concept for me and
00:46:12.380like, I guess this is what safety is. And only through healing later, years later, into my 30s,
00:46:20.780into my 40s, did I say, oh, is this the safety people were talking about? Oh, is this the safety?
00:46:26.480And like, and then maybe, you know, a year later, two years later, I go through, you know, another,
00:46:32.360you know, there's, again, seasons of healing and like, oh, wait, this, this is what they're talking
00:46:36.900about. And I would say really at four, I'm 50 now at 48, I had a drop into another level of safety
00:46:47.240that I had never experienced in my life before. And I said, wow, this one's delicious. Could there
00:46:53.020be more possibly? Do I need to insatiably hunt for it? Can I accept this as good enough? These
00:48:01.460In a conversation you had with Alex Howard titled
00:48:11.920Building Capacity for Healing Racial Trauma
00:48:15.520you talked about how western culture does not have good repair models
00:48:20.440we have domination and submission models
00:48:23.980And this reminded me of something I read from Glenn Elbrecht, where he writes, quote, this form of political economy has been called corruptalism. Even better, perhaps would be corumpalism from the Latin corumpere to destroy.
00:48:42.640carumpelism is the ability to corrupt and destroy the integrity of a social system
00:48:49.480and its biophysical foundation by perverting all forms of development end quote yeah so it's clear
00:48:59.040we have to break this model of domination and destruction and so i wonder if you could speak
00:49:06.580a bit to where you source inspiration for models of repair and symbiosis and how we can bring
00:49:13.900ecological thinking into healing and change work as well i'm a i'm an empiricist but also
00:49:24.340like inveterately curious one of my questions always is like how many tabs are open on your
00:49:31.600browser because I've gotten way too many. I'm curious on all kinds of things. And so it's not
00:49:40.300always clear to me during, because I, again, I'm in, I'm in there and tinkering and trying
00:49:47.140with different people about where I'm like, Oh, that worked. And I'm not like sure. Was it an
00:49:53.300intuitive hit? I am trained as a nurse midwife. And for some years I did home birth and that was
00:50:00.420a big teacher birth is a fantastic teacher um things are heightened in many ways at those
00:50:08.100i love i'm a lover of liminal spaces um and because there's just so much openness and
00:50:14.740possibility and in all senses both you know sometimes that's good sometimes it's not so
00:50:20.900good sometimes it's scary it can be all the things and i would love being in the room
00:50:26.100um with a birthing person their support people some baby trying to come earth side
00:50:36.540myself an assistant and the really doing home birth like our parameters were safety
00:50:44.420and the birthing folks wishes and how we would try just try different things
00:50:52.180and as long as everyone was doing okay we could try and we discovered some really you know i mean
00:50:58.220there's a lot of wisdom to tap into um from our my training and uh my teachers and there's also
00:51:06.520the inspiration in the moment of what can be discovered only in that space at that time
00:51:13.440and how that can be carried over to whether it was you know a different position or a
00:51:20.720a particular tool or an approach that came that was born out of out of that crucible of because
00:51:28.420birth can be that definitely a crucible there not always and so I think I take that spirit that's
00:51:34.380sort of my spirit of working around what what this looks like I still think of myself as a
00:51:42.240midwife even though I don't attend births anymore physical births right now my big concern has been
00:51:49.520with adequate preparation preparation for transformation which i think is really overlooked
00:51:54.860and so my inspiration around because if we don't prepare well we people don't have the capacity
00:52:03.280to stay in conversations for any length of time they don't have capacity for staying connected
00:52:09.220and collective visioning things collapse become rigid people attack one another breaks down
00:52:15.340so right now the my inspiration is really my life as a gardener preparing soil planting seeds
00:52:27.360nourishing the soil nourishing plants observing what the plant's telling me by how it's growing
00:52:35.200so right now that that's really in fact i'm building a out a big embodied anti-racism
00:52:41.820project for a very large public health care system in the united states at a scale that
00:52:50.040boggles my mind sometimes when i think about the hundreds of thousands of patients people they see
00:52:56.180every year and the tens of thousands of staff in all different departments doing all different
00:53:01.020things and how we're using the gardening metaphor here and to lean into that to slow people down
00:53:08.460when they're like we're preparing soil right now slow down we're gonna have a really anemic harvest
00:53:16.300if we don't slow down and really really feed the soil we're gonna plant a few rounds of cover crops
00:53:23.620here and mulch them in so and i'm open to all different other kinds of models as well
00:53:33.260again inveterate curious inveterately curious i like your diving boards thank you
00:53:41.520oh well and kim this has been such a beautiful deep dive off the board with you and thank you
00:53:53.720so much for your time and as we come to a close i just like to offer the space for any words or
00:53:59.840resources you'd like to direct listeners to hmm no i i feel pretty complete i feel like we touched
00:54:10.600on a lot of things and hopefully opened up some areas for folks to ponder and reflect on and
00:54:19.020maybe some things were tied up in a bow but i hope not too much because that's not good either
00:54:24.900that there's that you're like follow those curiosities and maybe i'm going to add one
00:54:32.600more thing that this has been on my mind lately i see in a fair amount of people who do liberation
00:54:39.680work for with a great interest in in spaciousness and freedom rightly so it becomes though that
00:54:51.140anything that is tight and small is bad and things that are big and spacious are good.
00:54:58.500A dialectic is set up and it becomes rigid and it becomes as problematic as that rigid dialectic
00:55:09.100of small and bad and open, big, good becomes a problem in and of itself because you lose your
00:55:17.740ability to be responsive there are moments that call for a directiveness there are moments that
00:55:25.580call us to hold space in a very open and loose way i was speaking to a student or maybe it was
00:55:34.180yesterday i don't know the days blur together a bit but and i had said it's like you're so
00:55:40.620beautiful and the way you hold space in that open gentle way but if somebody was cut and bleeding
00:55:46.320in front of you and they're bleeding out is that a time to just hold space they need you to be
00:55:52.800directive and so for those of us who are doing movement work and really prizing these open
00:55:59.740spacious how do we find places to how do we find okayness in us to be able to be as comfortable