[Bonus] Marc Lamont Hill in conversation with Prentis about

Visit another powerful stop on the What It Takes to Heal book tour. Author and activist, Marc Lamont Hill, interviews Prentis about their book at the Library and Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington D.C. Together, they explore the threads of generational trauma, Prentis' practice of 'cry dates' and how allowing feeling helps us arrive in the present moment. They also discuss the role of Transformational Characters and how interrupting patterns in ourselves can alter the path of healing for the next generation.

This conversation was recorded in July 2024. 

• You can watch the full book tour on our Youtube Channel.
• Check out Prentis’ book: What It Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hey everybody, this is Prentice. Uh, one thing I wanted to share with you really quickly is that uh some of you may know, some of you may not know, but a couple years ago I had a book come out called What It Takes to Heal, which is a really awesome book that you should still get. And I went on a tour around the country for that book, um, which was wonderful. I got to meet so many people, it was really incredible. And I got to have, importantly, a lot of really great conversations with writers, organizers, artists all over the country about what's inside of that book. And if you weren't there, you just missed it. If you weren't in that city, you didn't get to see it. And now the ones that we recorded, we are gonna share right here so that you can experience also that book talk. Um, there's so many exciting people that we talked to, too many to really name right here, but we're really um, yeah, looking forward to to sharing this with you, sharing it more broadly, seeing what you think about it. I haven't revisited these in a while, so I'm excited to revisit them with you. Um, but as I'm taking a bit of a break, we're gonna share some of this footage and would love to yeah, hear what you all think and feel um once you hear it. And yeah, what it takes to heal if you haven't gotten it. What what the hell is going on? Please get it. All right, thanks, y'all. See you soon.

SPEAKER_00 1:33

My name is Mark Lamonthill. It is a pleasure to be here in DC with y'all uh for such an amazing, amazing event with such an amazing book and such an amazing author. I I run a bookstore and I know how hard it is to get 25% of a room filled on a Monday. So when I walked in, I didn't, I had my expectations managed when I pulled up. And when I looked in and saw a room filled with people like this, I I'm overwhelmed and excited for you, but I'm also it's also a reflection of how extraordinary you are as a figure in how extraordinary this book is and how the theme of this book is resonating with people. Um so, first of all, let me just say congratulations. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 2:23

Wow, thank you.

SPEAKER_00 2:26

Um you have written a different kind of book. Um in the aftermath of Trayvon Martin, the aftermath of George Floyd, and the aftermath of Brianna Taylor. Um we should add Mia Hall and so many other names who don't get named when we talk about state violence and death. We often leave our trans folk, we often leave our queer folk, we often leave our people who don't fit the narrative of respectability or or or or or eligibility. Um but in the aftermath of all of that, a lot of people wrote books on like the system and the state and defunding and all these things, which are important. Um but you went a different slightly different direction. You you got some of that in there too. But you focus on healing, you focus on the self, you focus on uh that part of the journey. Why?

SPEAKER_01 3:18

Hi, everybody. Nice to see everybody. Um I focused on that in part because that's been my role inside of Black Movement for the last decade has really been bringing healing. You know, I I when I started doing what we call healing justice work, I didn't exactly know what that meant. I was uh had been an organizer, I had been a therapist, and then I was getting called on by organizations, by folks and movement, movement leaders to do work. And I was like, what you know, it's like when you enter into a room and you're like looking around, you're like, what all this, what does this really mean? This this call, this ask. And um, you know, I learned a lot. One about this individual journey that you're talking about, what what healing really means and what are the kind of what's involved in that. But I think if you really look seriously at healing, you have to look seriously at trauma and look seriously at what causes trauma, which are both the individual moments that are really important. And there are also all these systemic and collective things that we experience together that create trauma. So to look seriously or be seriously concerned with the question of healing is also to look at social conditions, look at social context, but also look at our relationships and how we do them, how we inhabit them. That's also important. So it's it's all of it at the same time. What is healing? Oh, y'all ready for me to be stumped? Everybody's like, I think we just want some help. Um how I define it in the book is that it is a process, often lifelong, of essentially coming back to safety, belonging, and dignity on the other side of an overwhelming or what we call traumatic event. And I I define it that way for a couple reasons. One is that um I'm trying to articulate that it is not something that is actually really achievable in a sense. It's a way of being, a way of being with oneself and with our own aliveness and with other people. It's an orientation, as I often say, to life and living. Um, it's not something we can expect to like, oh, I healed that, and therefore I don't have to think about that or don't have to bother with that. That it's it's actually a way of orienting towards life that uh inspires us to engage in repair and reconnection, uh, transformation. That's what healing is to me. And uh safety, belonging, and dignity, I talk about those specifically in the book. To me, those are some of the capacities that really get uh broken down and apart through traumatic experiences, both individual and collective.

SPEAKER_00 6:10

In the book, you you talk about the importance of thinking about this not just at the individual level, but at the collective level. How hard is that in this particular juncture in history where so much is bound up in the self, whether it's our technology, our social media, our economic mode of production, you know, neoliberalism is always like the self, the self, the self. I get more money, I need more stuff, I need more stuff. For me, I how how challeng how does that sort of complicate this process of getting at the getting at a collective we as opposed to an individual I?

SPEAKER_01 6:43

I'm gonna answer that in two ways, because I think uh one part of it is the way we think about the I, which you just described, is also it's a particular orientation to the I. When I think about what is a self, a self is inherently relational to me. A self is inherently created through relationship, but we've narrowed that orientation in order to not be responsible for each other, um, to not tell the truth about how we came to be and who supported us to be here. So I think our our the way we even conceptualize self is usually very individual in a way that I think is untrue. Um and I think when you start to consider the self in a different way, uh it doesn't feel like such a jump to thinking about the collective experience. Um and you know, I think there's so much to say about kind of the collective healing and collective traumas. Um but I, you know, I was recent, I was just writing this morning about just how I see this moment. You still write it's a bad habit. I see, you need to heal. But I was writing this morning about the how do I say this? I was trying to, I haven't gotten language that really conveys what it is that I feel, but the force that is collective trauma, like I was like, it's almost like a natural disaster. You know, how powerful the experience is of collective trauma, what it opens up, what it opens up in the relational space and community and culture. I was just like, oh, this is like a human-made natural disaster that we create, and it reaches through history and across time and through bodies. It undoes so much. So I I think it's such a powerful force. And I see in this political moment, I can I can look around. If I look around at the world, I can see both the immense suffering, the immense pain, the immense just, I mean, it's incredible what we are witnessing. And you can see, oh wow, collective trauma, what it destroys, what it breaks apart. And you can also see what collective trauma, when offered uh power over as a remedy to pain, what kind of violence it can produce when it's unaddressed, when it's actually not dealt with, when it's actually not processed. So I think collective trauma is just it's an incredible force that we don't fully understand and deeply impacts all of our societies and our world.

SPEAKER_00 9:37

For sure, for sure. Um you take us from this place of I to we, but then you take us to this interesting place of saying there's a we and you even invoke kind of family therapy models to say, you know, if a family is going through something, there are people, I can't remember the words, was it transitional figures, transitional transformational characters?

SPEAKER_01 10:00

Transformational characters, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:02

Who they're like the ones that say we gotta do something different. We gotta do something different. Um, there's how many of us gotta do something different? Like in a family, you might get one. You know, and I'm thinking about this from a from a collective we, because so many of us either don't have the will to change, to use Bell Hooks's language, or we don't realize where we are, or life is hard. We overworked, underpaid, we got this going on, we got this point, or we're wrestling with the trauma, and so we don't have the capacity, even if we believe everything in here, to go out and do the thing that needs to be done or things that need to be done. How how many of us, what what slice of us have to become those those characters?

SPEAKER_01 10:42

I don't know, but uh let's try to have it be a lot. Um, because I want to say in in some ways, you know, this is something we've like grappled with our team. It's like what transformational character is a term that we use. We're like, you know, we we don't want to give people an extra burden, you know, like okay, now you gotta heal all the generations of trauma forever and ever. And that's not really the ask. Um, I I offer a story in the book of, and this is a kind of minor example, not minor, actually, it's pretty transformative in my own life, but um, when interacting with my daughter when she was little, and my own trauma, the way I wanted to pull away and guard myself and not really be available to her looking because of what I've experienced, what I experienced growing up. But learning through my own practice how to feel that impulse to move away, but to catch it and soften and open myself to her, and how that interrupted the transmission of trauma in my family, just being able to do a simple move like that. So, in part, I'm not I'm not saying we all have to do the most. And a lot of times when people are spending their time trying to fix everybody, it's because they're trying not to feel the pain and the grief of it all. So sometimes it's a it's enough to say there's some things I won't transmit, there's some things that won't move into the next generation or won't move relationally into the people that I interact with. Um, I think that's part of it. And then I think you know, doing the work of undoing what causes so much pain and trauma is ultimately healing and liberating, and feels like healing and liberation at times when when we do it well.

SPEAKER_00 12:31

That's a beautiful answer. And by the way, the reason I'm just to be clear, I'm asking these questions because the book is so good and it's so rich, and as I'm reading, I'm like, I want to do this, but I don't feel fully equipped. So part of it is I'm there's like a free therapy session. So I got questions. You you and I started talking about this earlier. You do something that a lot of like academics and and and grassroots activists, leftist activists in particular, don't do. I I hear a lot of people when we talk about healing and transformation, they start with the structural. They say they say we're gonna, you know, we're gonna fix we're gonna destroy capitalism or we're gonna do this thing. And then that'll create new consciousness and that'll allow us to have the kind of ability to imagine the futures, which will then allow us to and so forth and so on. And I sort of expected the book to go there. I I thought the book would be structured in that way. It was refreshingly different. Um talk to me about the choice not to do that and why it was so important to you to tell us to vision and heal, etc., before we even get to this world stuff three, four, five chapters later.

SPEAKER_01 13:46

Yeah. That was a hard decision. It was hard to figure out how to do that because I do feel like the what we call individual healing and collective healing, it is a kind of interwoven thing. Um, but I did it that way in part because, yes, I also believe that conditions must change, and conditions changing changes us.

SPEAKER_05 14:07

Right.

SPEAKER_01 14:08

And um we are already shaped by those conditions. The way that we, our own interiors, the way that we feel about ourselves and feel about others is already shaped by those conditions right now. And so I've seen so often that people are taking that shaping into their organizing work, into their movement building work. But because they're focused on the external, because we gotta, you know, change conditions, we lose awareness of and a sense of how much those structures are already deeply embedded in us, and we recreate them even when we don't intend to. And so I was trying to convey both and, which is, you know, you gotta start somewhere. You know what I mean? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:52

So let's start with that vision. Because you say we need vision. And we do. Um what does that mean in a practical sense, especially given um I I I'll give you a concrete example. Um, I have a remarkable amount of conversations about Bill Cosby, way more than I'd ever want to. Um, part of it is because I have this tattoo of my father, who people seem to think is a tattoo.

SPEAKER_05 15:21

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 15:22

Who people keep thinking is Bill Cosby, which I didn't realize until this year. It's mostly white people. Like my dad doesn't look like Bill Cosby, but he looks how white people think Bill Cosby looks.

SPEAKER_01 15:32

Yeah, yeah. You see what I mean? Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:37

So I end up having a like a and so, but then I end up in these really uncomfortable conversations, these awkward conversations. And a lot of the conversation becomes about how um Bill Cosby was held accountable for things that like other people who did harm were not. The Harvey Weinsteins of the world. And I often become really frustrated by those conversations because it seems that our vision of what justice could look like and what a future could look like is not to have Weinstein held accountable, it's to have Bill Cosby be as unaccountable as rich white men. Right? And so our freedom dream, our radical imagination is scaled down by patriarchy, scaled down by misogynists, scaled down by rape culture, scaled down by all these things. And so when I think about how do I how do we get people, one, to engage in this nurturing of a vision, and how do we keep at arm's length all those things that have us uh just not having as ambitious a freedom dream as we could have?

SPEAKER_01 16:44

Yeah. Striking one of the records anticipating. Yeah, sorry, I apologize. No, no, it's fine. Um the first road I want to go down is that, you know, um I think the thing about vision that we often overlook is that it requires us to change. It requires us each to change. And sometimes you want a vision from like I think that's why we get stuck in those, like, I want a vision where I'm on top, or I want a vision where I can be, you know, whatever. Um, because we don't believe in our own ability to change and transform. Um, and so I think there's some part of vision that necessarily you must change to enter it, to enter that process. Um and I I think it's so necessary, you know, this work around vision, because you know, as long as I've been in movement, I'm there have been extremely visionary moments. And I I can also feel times where we've been reactive to what we're losing, which is important because we are losing. I hate to break it to everybody, we we out here losing a bit. Yeah. And there's a reason why we're reactive to those things, but I think if that's the only position we take, our movements will shrink and shrink and shrink in a way. Because there has to be, unfortunately, I think I talk about in the book, I think the right has done a job of articulating a kind of vision. It is not one that is compelling to me, but they are articulating a kind of vision. And I think, you know, on the left, we need more and more to be able to articulate a vision that is compelling to people, that feels like life, that is like not just that we're gonna patchwork this thing, but that something else really has to be possible. And I think that will generate a kind of energy and commitment that I think is really necessary for this moment. So I think vision is critical, but vision is also really hard when you have been hyper-vigilant, when you've lost so much. Um, it that necessarily, in a way, takes you out of vision. If you're always scanning for safety, it's hard to imagine what's beyond. And so that's why I think spaces for visioning, dreaming, imagining, cultivating that all along the way is so, so critical. And I I've been saying this often, is like, I want to keep being strange in this moment. I do. I think we have to be strange to this world. We have to be able to look around it and come up with odd ideas and do weird things and in our oddness reveal the absurdity of this current structure and way of being. But that's part, for me, that's like experimenting with the dreaming, experimenting with vision. I think it's so necessary for us to shake off kind of what's already been in ingrained in us.

SPEAKER_00 20:03

What are the kinds of places? I mean, your book is a great place to start. Sincerely, it is. What are some other spaces, places, sort of sources that we can lean on to help us get strange or stay strange, to nurture those oppositional identities?

SPEAKER_01 20:18

Yeah, I think all kinds of um politicized healing spaces to me, and and projects that are doing that. There's a lot of projects that are um incorporating transformative principles into their work that are giving space to play and dream and and do odd things. I mean, um, you know, the the Embodiment Institute, my organization, Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity, where I also teach, um, I feel in those spaces there are new things emerging. It feels generative in that way. Um, but I think more projects, more organizations have to either take some aspect of that on or also be in in partnership with groups and spaces where we're working with that, the not yet, the possible, the unknown.

SPEAKER_00 21:13

Yeah. One of the things that often happens when we begin to resist is that the resistance itself gets co-opted. Um our political enemies, um, the powerful, or whatever you want to frame it, they will take the language and give it back to us. I mean, watching right now, um, the language of defunding be used by the right um in very particular ways to take the kind of teeth out of it and also to kind of uh animate certain kinds of struggles. Um the language of healing, the language of self care, the the language of therapy, I've seen it being used in particular. in social media in ways that sometimes reinforce patriarchy and some ways reinforce neoliberal ideals, some ways reinforce it reinforce a kind of self-indulgence. And we pretend that it's self-care. And sometimes it feels like selfishness to me. Tell me if I'm wrong about that, but but more deeply sort of how in a in a world where everything again is so individualized, how do we kind of use these languages and frameworks? Or do you worry that they're going to get taken or that they've already been taken?

SPEAKER_01 22:35

Sometimes I worry a lot of times I don't worry about that. I worry about a lot of things about that. I think it's um in part because I might get a little woo-woo on you, Mark, for a second. Okay. Be prepared. There's something for me, you know, the book and all the practices and everything we do, there's something else at play for me that I feel in my center inside of myself, a commitment, a conviction, a whatever that the words the words never could describe the thing that I'm talking about. The words never could describe healing or center. The words will always fall short and the words will be taken and people will use them but the feeling of you know there's been poets and organizers and philosophers and everybody has pointed to this place of center, of uh internal sense of power, of commitment. That's the place I moved from. And if the language changes, language changes. I'll find another way to describe the undescribable the thing you can't name because I think that's the thing that we desperately need to survive honestly is connection with that place. When we don't have connection with that place in us and we don't have that we're not cultivating that in relationship we're easily reactive we can lose connection to the path where we're going we can lose connection with each other. We can get caught in caught caught caught uh but that's the thing I'm trying to convey with embodiment is that there is a felt sense something internal that can be cultivated a relationship with oneself that can kind of see through some of the more surface battles so I worry there's a part of me that worries like oh healing it's not going to mean anything yeah you just said that so much better than me yeah um but there's something that has meaning for me that I'll always find a way to communicate and I think other people will always find a way to communicate and we'll always find a way to get there and that is always the most important thing to me do used to book a cry date yeah can you break that down yeah I don't know how many of y'all grew up and your parents would be like don't cry I'm gonna give you something to cry about kind of thing and we're all like anybody got that same one did you get that one? Yeah. And so when I was little I would you know start to cry and then you hear that and it you know suck it back up put it down and even when it got to a point this is the thing about embodiment how our bodies learn I didn't need anybody to say that to me anymore before I could automatically stifle the cry. And so when I grew up I didn't know how to cry anymore. And by cry I mean like cry and like really cry and let the emotion move through my body I didn't know how because I had so internalized that voice. I didn't even hear anymore just there it was a part of me. And the story I told was that I didn't cry and uh yeah it came to this point where I realized that that's what I was doing and I wanted to figure out how to cry and so I would go book in Oakland you could get these hot tubs for $15 an hour private hot tub. Yeah I don't know how much it cost now that was everything and I took a sad playlist I mean sad you know I was like sad it's all real sad and I sat in the hot tub and tried to remember how to cry which was a whole embodied process of permission giving you know and I had to I would feel the contraction the stifling I had to keep relaxing keep opening keep opening you know catch and then eventually a whale came you know like a real whale and then I would go on these cry days periodically and now I can cry you know now I'd be crying but I I didn't I didn't know how to cry for a long time and when I would cry I would time travel you know I would think I was crying about something and then I'd be crying about some what is that who why are they there? But there was just so many cries I had stifled so I had to I say relearn how to cry I had to remember how to cry I had to allow crying and that was really a healing practice for me and it helped me you know I say the other thing about healing in part it helps you arrive in this moment because a lot of our bodies and our beings get caught in other times and so your chest or your brow or some part of you your stomach might be in a whole other time caught in another time holding on to that as though it's still happening and so healing for me is in part moving through those things so that you can actually mostly more of you can arrive here now.

SPEAKER_00 27:51

This journey you're talking about this process you talk about embodiment healing has to be embodied you said for years we have tried to outsmart our bodies override them and ignore them that feeling that feeling that my clients have had of late in uneasiness a discordant tone I feel in myself too is an indicator that our best intentions and even our best politics have not created in us the kind of change we long for and need. I hadn't thought about the inadequacy of our college of our politics being linked to our bodies again and I'm forgive me for all these chicken or egg questions but as we're in the midst of these political struggles how do we get to the I'm still trying to figure out what to do with my body to get there politically or vice versa. And I I was struggling to you gave me this brilliant analysis of how what to do and I wanted I I wanted you to help us think through like what what the next step is.

SPEAKER_01 28:58

Yeah. Um I'm just gonna go back because I want to make sure we're all I mean I imagine if you're here you've thought about embodiment yeah y'all like yeah yeah I do that um but I think that part about the politics it's like we can have an idea where we think we're showing up and then our bodies and our behaviors and our postures communicate something totally different to the people we're in community with because we've embodied something else. And it's not just a stop doing that or do this instead but the body is actually a a living process that has a logic it's like we don't do this because it's unsafe or we do this because our identity is attached to this is how I have to be and so it's not just a a thinking game it's actually something that has to be felt it has to drop into the tissue. So I think um that piece is really important and how do we begin I mean I'll say two things about that I think you know we begin through practice because you're always practicing something right now you're practicing something you practice how the way you listen you practice how open you are you practice how closed you are you practice how you're always practicing something and there's a reason why you're practicing and you may not understand it. So you have to practice and there are quote unquote embodiment practices that you can do that are important and there are places to go to do that. But I also think this this thing for me is that culture is embodiment practice to me. It's the way that we train ourselves or you know we're like this is the way we embody who we are and these are the rituals that we do in order to reinforce that embodiment and way of relating to each other. And our cultures and I will speak as a black person from the South I think our cultures are both like you know it's like this is how we got here. You know what you're saying like how I got over is through our singing it's through our food it's through our hugs it's through our faith it's through all these elements of culture that get us there and our cultures can be infiltrated and co-opted and used for others' gain in a way that it mimics the kind of embodiment aspect of culture. It's like our culture has been infused in embodiment there's a reason you dance for the seasons you dance when someone's born you eat something in particular when this happens culture must be connected to the intention and the purpose and the the it creates connection in a community for a reason and it can be co-opted to serve someone else's gain we can we can adapt things into our culture that don't actually serve us. And to me part of the work is also looking deeply at what we practice collectively and being willing to go okay well we got to create we got to do something we got to remake something we have to bring something back we have to make something up I think this is a weird time because I feel like a lot of people don't want to make up this is what I mean about being weird and strange. We got to make some shit up and one of my mentors um native Hawaiian uh she's a facilitator she's a she's an activist one of the things she told me is like you know when the um renaissance the native Hawaiian Renaissance came about she was like just coming into consciousness around her identity and she was like she asked her mentor how do I create culture my ancestors created culture I don't know how to do that now and her mentor said to her aren't you looking at the same water do you have the same arms legs whatever you know she was specific about the kind of body parts she's like don't you have everything they had to create and I think that's part of the mandate in this moment is like we need new rituals for this time we need new ceremonies for this time and my partner will always say it's gonna feel maybe a little weird in the beginning you're gonna feel a little awkward like ooh do we do this is this but eventually you find the rhythm and the magic of it and I think it's so so necessary for us right now.

SPEAKER_00 33:28

You said we and us a lot yeah who am I talking about you well especially because you tell us to expand our we.

SPEAKER_01 33:38

Yeah part of the book in the book it's like expanding our we from allyship to just reimagining community who is we to begin with and and then what does a bigger we look like we for me are it's like is it concentric circles you know I feel like there's a a a black we where I'm situated and have been um I think there's also we's that I feel related to I think uh marginalized and I think all all oppressed people but I also feel like there's a we that is beyond that and in a way you know I talk about transformational characters in the book and you know in our work we talk about this to me we is everybody who's trying is my we everybody who's willing to try let's go I think it has to be it's that time it's that time we can have multiple we's in different we're it's also time that our we's include everybody who's willing to change are there any conditions or what are the conditions maybe on making those forge and those connections conditions I think there's practices I think there's like I don't know if there's conditions for me but I think there's there has to be um a willingness and a practice of accountability of I mean I talk about embodiment because when you are practicing embodiment embedded in that is a practice of self-reflection and a growing self-awareness. I can't work with I mean we can't work with each other if if you are unpracticed at looking in what can we do? So if you have a practice that you do something that you revisit that helps you look in and become both less and more a mystery to yourself you know some of what's active in there and you can be somewhat responsible for it. I think that's part of it and that to me is the root of accountability and I think you know there are other principles I would say reciprocity being able to feel for um what kind of you know because I in part I want to say about expanding our we it's not just I've said this many times not just us holding hands and it's gonna all be great some some things have to move around.

SPEAKER_00 36:13

That's what I that's where I was going with the conditions.

SPEAKER_01 36:15

Oh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah some things got to move around um and I think if in part if we are in our quote unquote healing in the way that I'm talking about if we are in our own process some of that will become clearer and clearer. Oh I can't actually be in alignment and hoarding it doesn't make sense it's not gonna generate the future that we're talking about. I can't be in alignment and also there is suffering of whole peoples that I have some impact there's something I can do about that that's not gonna work. I think it's going to compel us expanding our we requires us to change and by that I mean changing both internally but also changing the way that we relate to the world what we have how we share and all of that it requires all that with all of that things are still going to fall apart things are still going to work out still experience trauma or pain bad fortune mistreatment. What do we do when things fall apart one know that I think sometimes we don't know that and I've facilitated a lot of conflict in movement spaces and I think part of it is that when we connect with each other we somehow expect that everything's gonna be great and we don't realize that we will inevitably break each other's hearts or hurt each other or miss each other and that is a part of um relationship it's a part of relationship. It is not even an aberration it's not like an abnormality it is a a part of relationship to miss I used to when I um first became a therapist my supervisor I don't know if this is good advice or not but I'm gonna tell you what he told me my supervisor said just sometimes don't listen as hard I know that don't sound right but let me explain it. He would say just just pull back your energy a little bit sometimes because you have to leave some room for rupture is what he would tell me. I'm writing that down release room for rupture you have to leave some room for rupture because you also have to leave room for repair because part of what transforms people also in therapy is to have the opportunity to say hey where are you? You didn't remember that or I'm not sure this is working. You know I have a lot of people like I don't know if it's working with my therapist what do I do I think I'm just not gonna go again tell them I ghost right right he'd be texting me I'm like it was being like 11 months three weeks and I still didn't respond I'm just going to look for new I'm serious I believe you because there are these moments of of which you expect quite that much laughter. No but things happen and then you're like sometimes there's shame yeah or sometimes you just don't know how to articulate then there's the power dynamic yeah you know and that's just in therapy I don't make it about me but that's just in therapy but then these things also happen in movements and episode isn't that so much good content to work through isn't that something you need to understand about yourself with the next therapist let me tell you about this dude right yeah but you know what I'm thinking yeah no you're right you're absolutely right don't be like me but that's important for us to know because that is a rupture even though we're denying it we're like it's still a rupture that happened and it's that it reveals our ways of dealing with ruptures and conflicts when it happens we might be like oh I'm gonna ignore that and run away or I'm about to fight this therapist today we're gonna argue today or I'm gonna give them a rough time or whatever it is but it's it's all of those I remember um uh Ruthie Gilmore said in one of her books all edges are interfaces and that just excited me so much I was so obsessed with that when I read that all edges are interfaces and I was like right there is no edge where I can't come to understand myself more and that won't serve my reconnection to others and reconnection to life there that's what the edges are for.

SPEAKER_00 40:41

Sorry Mark that's heavy calling as my therapist and I text oh dang hey Mark you up courage.

SPEAKER_01 41:06

What role does courage play in all this I mean I I put a quote by my Angela at the top of that chapter that basically is the whole chapter if you read that quote um but courage makes the practice of everything possible because you need courage to do it and courage is this really um remarkable actually ability that we can cultivate to come up to our edge and say okay I'm gonna try to do something differently so there's courage on the individual level I I say in the book there's courage that people to me it's remarkable when people come sit down with with me or people you know I do body work and people come lay on the table and I'm like I don't know what is about to happen but I'm willing to face the unknown which is what courage allows us to do. We enter the unknown and we do some of the work of reshaping reshaping it reshaping ourselves. So courage is necessary for any of our healing work and it's necessary for our movements because again it moves us from the reactive space into being willing to enter the unknown being willing to offer a shaping into the future that to me is courage and it is so so necessary. And it you know we talk about like everything it's like what we do has to transform us. Courage does that you become the person you think you are when you're courageous. You become the person you say you are when you're courageous and you have to live with that pool of fear the pool into hiding protecting and you have to hold it and shape shape shape the world y'all y'all y'all wrote in some questions as well and I have them here and I'm gonna read a few of them how might you approach embodiment practices with clients that don't feel safe or comfortable figuring out what will make them safe and comfortable and maybe that's something again it's an imagination thing I think as a practitioner being creative is the best gift. Who knows what's gonna happen I've I've done embodiment work in the weirdest places under the weirdest circumstances. I've done it over the phone with people in jail I've done it in the moving car while I'm driving I've you know what I'm saying? And even in my like practice space in my room, it's whatever. It's whatever. Because we're so trained into the way we're supposed to be with each other. Again, you work with me, it's the weirdest space. What do you need? You need me to be over here, you need me to be over here. What do you need? Because that helps people check in with themselves to be like, oh, this actually feels better than that. This feels worse than that. And that's the beginning of being able to feel and notice your own sensation. So I think dropping the destination of what a practice should be and figuring out the practice is always returning people to their body. So if it looks like who knows what, that's the practice. I mean, we have embodiment practices because they're helpful, but it's it's entirely a practice of creativity.

SPEAKER_00 44:57

That's a good question. What would you say to those struggling in movement spaces where discomfort is conflated with harm? Didn't I tell you?

SPEAKER_01 45:13

I got some snaps on that. Snaps and um I've been a lot of those spaces, by the way. Um where to begin. There's so much that sits underneath that question for me. Um because I know exactly the phenomenon we're talking about.

SPEAKER_00 45:48

By the way, feel free to unpack it. Take your time.

SPEAKER_01 45:49

Okay, I'm like, I understand that phenomenon, and it's I've had irritation and frustration, and like, what, what? Um and again, I think there's there's multiple things at play. I think one is this orientation to self and how people who how do I say it? How people are kind of seated within themselves and what they expect from relationships or what are their unmet needs that are surfacing. I was talking to somebody else earlier this week is that and saying that you know, when we don't have a practice of looking in, sometimes we are in an argument with our mother, but we're actually talking to our coworker. You know what I mean? Yeah, we're talking to somebody from the past, and that impedes our ability to be present to this relationship, the up the options available, the capacities in this relationship. Um, and sometimes, you know, I've been in spaces where people are like, well, I have been harmed in this way, and therefore that is what is gonna happen here, or that is what's possible here. But I I think that there has to be, I think, in our organizations, an expectation of being able to, you don't have to do it in the organization, but you need to be doing something that's gonna bring you into some kind of self-awareness. I don't think the organizations have to be responsible for that, but you gotta be doing something because that's just maturation. That's just growing up, is being able to do that work. And I think we need to do that. I think the other thing is like, what is what's the relational field that exists in the organization? What is possible there, what is not possible there. Um, you know, in our organization, I feel like we both have a lot of boundaries and we have a lot of care for people. You know, we're this is not we don't do co-therapy there, we're not going in everybody's business, and we have expectations about people doing their own work, and we have built-in feedback, we have clarity on how we expect, and I'm not saying it's perfect, but how we expect people to show up. So I think there's some level setting that has to happen that organizations aren't necessarily, and this is my assessment, doing about expectations, about conflict, about feedback. People would be scared to give feedback and unskillful at it. And people can get feedback even as whatever the role is in the organization, but also be trying to prove something or take care of some uh sense of their own worthiness and how they give it, and they're unaware that they're doing that. So there's a there's a lot of complexity to that, but I think I would there has to be some level setting and understanding and some encouragement to support uh around people doing their work so that self-reflection is not just an optional thing, but it's a necessary thing. You gotta grow. We all growing. I gotta grow, I gotta get feedback. I get a lot of feedback, and it's important. It's really important, it changes me.

SPEAKER_00 49:08

I've been sitting with the Audrey Lorde quote. The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house for a long time now. What master's tools do you challenge in your work?

SPEAKER_01 49:37

Communally.

SPEAKER_00 49:38

Oh, communally, okay.

SPEAKER_01 49:41

What master's tools? Psychotherapy?

SPEAKER_00 49:45

Wow, okay. Got right to it. Okay, break that down.

SPEAKER_01 49:49

Um I had a a really good professor in in grad school that said, you know, um, if you just take this practice of psychotherapy as it is, it can be an acclimatizing tool. It's like finding the outliers and the people that are disruptive to how things are. Even what we were taught to measure as well-being um was kind of like individual distress. There were no relational metrics or ecosystem metrics. It just felt like um, yeah, I think that, and I also had a great professor that was like the DSM is essentially trauma and its adaptations, is what you could call it. And I think that's really true. Yeah, yeah. When I looked at it more and more, I was like, right, right, right. Um, and I think having an understanding of that changes the way that you work with people, it changes the way that you um, yeah, just just think about the work and think about what people mean to the collective. Um, I think psychotherapy doesn't know generally, it doesn't know how to do that. I think there are a lot of people that have pushed that for a long time. But I think in general it doesn't know how to look at the collective and it doesn't know how to look at power.

SPEAKER_00 51:10

Yeah, oh that's good. What do you what do you want people to walk away from when they read this book?

SPEAKER_01 51:20

I want people to feel both stirred and accompanied, you know, both both like uncomfortable, but like but like I'm I'm also there with you. I I had an option to kind of write it as a clinician, you know, as like a therapist, and with that safe distance of like, you people, y'all be doing A B C and D. Um, but I chose to put my story in there um for the reason of breaking down that wall of that kind of authority. A therapist is a human being who has been through things also, um, but also to be like, ain't nobody special over here. You know what I mean? Everybody here has the capacity to deeply transform and change, I think. I don't know for sure, but that's like the hypothesis I'm working with. Um and I just I I wanted people to feel both like challenged, a little bit uncomfortable. Speaking of discomfort, I want your discomfort, I want you to feel uncomfortable, but gently, kind of. Um and I want you to feel like I I've been there and I'm also currently there. Um, so you're not by yourself. If no one else is around you, at least you're not by yourself.

SPEAKER_00 52:44

How can we approximate comfort as we embrace revolution? In other words, how can we make the process of change more irresistible by making it more desirable, peaceful, fulfilling, and sensual?

SPEAKER_01 53:00

Oh, and sensual. That was you? Okay, okay. Somebody else like, no, that was my sensual. I put that on.

SPEAKER_00 53:12

They put on a whole other side of the card too. Like they added it.

SPEAKER_01 53:14

Oh, and added it later as an editing. Love it. Um, isn't it interesting how I think about this all the time. I think so much of what our current system offers us is just not sensual at all. It's not sensual or it's a turn off. It's a turn all the way off. Um and I think that's really sad because we're living under those conditions, but it also excites me about the possibility of real transformation. I'm like, that's why I think about embodiment too. When I do that work, I'm like, oh, this is what it could feel like to be alive. Huh?

SPEAKER_05 53:57

Right.

SPEAKER_01 53:58

It could be this textured, it could be this sensual, it could be this much deep. I could relate to time this way. I could have relationships that feel this way, I could have intimacy this way. That's not what I was trained to know. And I think we know what we've practiced, but I think there is something on the other side that is much richer, wilder, deeper. And to me, it's not just an idea. I'm like, I can feel it in my body. I can feel it when I'm with people who are practicing. I can feel it. I have an expansiveness to me. And I love that. And so I think the question of how do we do that, and I think about this with um our ecosystem, our world, our living world. We just don't relate to it, but it doesn't mean it's not magnificent. It doesn't mean it's not alive. It doesn't mean it doesn't impact us, and we can't. This system approximates life in a way, but it does, it has to, in a way, exclude it. The magic of it, the wonder of it, the part that can't be commodified and packaged and sold wholesale. It always is gonna keep the soul out. And so I think our movements have to remember yes, we need, we need vision, we need strategy, we need tactics, we need all these things, and we need our work to be imbued with whatever you want to call it, but that feeling of connection to something much bigger, unknown, wilder, sensual. Thank you for that word. Um that's just the truth. I don't even think we have to make it up. I think we have to feel it and do our work from there.

SPEAKER_00 55:57

Wow, and do our work from there. Y'all, this book, if you haven't read this book, it is amazing. Please read it. Please go buy a copy. In fact, buy three copies. Because we all know somebody that needs this text, even if they don't know they need it, they absolutely do. Um, I'm so grateful to spend time with you. Thank you. And I'm so grateful for you writing this book. Uh, it means so much. It really takes us on a healing journey. And we look forward to more from you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Everybody, give it up.

SPEAKER_01 56:25

Becoming the People is produced by Devin Delania, sound engineered and edited by Michael Main. Our theme song was created by Miyata. And if you're enjoying these conversations, please subscribe, rate, and especially, especially leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever it is that you listen to podcasts. And if you haven't already, please join us over at the Patreon Printestemple. We are having a great time over there, building community, learning together. Come join us. And as always, thank you for listening to Becoming the People.