Our Framework: What Our Movements Need to Win

NO ONE WAY WORKS, 

It will take all of us

shoving at the thing from all sides 

to bring it down

-Diane di Prima 

We live inside of a social context that is highly committed to the destruction of people and planet--of life. For those of us committed to liberation and to change, we are faced with a huge and monumental task. We know that change is necessary for our survival.

We find ourselves in a moment of enormous movement upsurge. Thousands of us are showing up to say no to genocide and say yes to life. Still, many of us wonder how much impact we are making. What will it take to actually realize a ceasefire and what will we dream into being on the other side? We find ourselves inside of a contradictory moment inside of organized struggle, at least in the so-called United States. Many of us are taking action, and still the conditions of our world remain largely the sa,e. That doesn't mean that our commitment to liberation has lessened. We can look to nature to understand that everything goes through cycles.

The question is: who will we be individually and collectively inside of these cycles to create the lasting change that our people deserve?

Inside of these times where the state has all but abandoned its people, the right wing is gaining power, we can feel the impacts of ecological devastation intimately, there are constant attacks on the bodily autonomy of queer and trans communities and birthing people, and the world continues to deny Black life, what is our task? 

What if our bodies held the answers? 

Our politics and our programs are important. They define our visions and the world we are trying to bring into being. However, our good ideas often give way under pressure. What's missing most inside this movement moment is the answer to the question how, not what.

This moment will be defined by how we are together. How we move towards our longings. How we feel for and know our belonging. How we find safety inside of ourselves and amongst each other. How we come to know our power and dignity individually and collectively. How we set boundaries and draw our lines with each other and with capital and the state. How we navigate conflict and harm inside of our communities. 

This moment calls us into complexity as we navigate the world to come and the change that is inevitable inside of it. 

We hold complexity as the ability and competency to be with more, to hold wider truths, to hold contradiction, to stay relational inside of bigness and messiness. 

Life is complex. Nothing in nature or the world is just one way. It is racial capital itself that often asks us to collapse ourselves back into rigidity and boxes.

When we are in relationship to complexity we are in relationship to life and to each other. We could produce a different world. Complexity is what allows us to enjoy the world that we are creating, and a world that is built on pleasure and not just survival.

Through our long tails inside of social justice movement, we see  that what our movements are missing right now is the capacity to hold vision and action at the same time and to hold the complexity that allows these ingredients to exist in their right mix. This is how we arrived at this series of courses that will grow your capacity to: 

• name your longings, know your limits, and take decisive action towards what you care about 

• move from a place of dignity and power rather than shame and internalized oppression 

• work with conflict in a generative way that builds a shared future rather than leaves you or anyone else behind 

We hold that these competencies require us to hold more and more complexity that allows for more and more of our aliveness and more and more of our power, alone and together. 

2024 Course Dates: Practice With Us In Person

This work is for you if: 

• You want to deepen in your somatic awareness, practice and learnings from the body up 

• You are interested in bringing your body/somatics into action in your work, organizing, and life

• You want a community of practice which will support you to keep exploring, letting your body reveal more depth, and unearthing your longings

• You are an organizer, activist, healer, educator, cultural worker and/or movement leader-- this is a place for you to deepen and build your commitment to politicized healing and healing as an organizing strategy and a vision to win power for our people

Somatics as Path

We hold somatics and especially politicized somatics as a path of practice. We hold these courses as part of a series called Holding Compexity in Times of Change because we believe in offering not just a one off workshop to address what most keeps us from embodying what we need to fight, heal, and transform towards more liberation and life, but instead a true theory and practice of embodied change.

So much of the way that racial capital shapes healing is into quick fixes, certifications, and disappearing history and lineage. We hold this path of practice as fundamentally different. 

To engage in a path of practice means commitment and commitment over time, and commitment with others. Our lineage of politicized somatics holds that it takes 300 repetitions of something before it is committed to muscle memory, and 3000 repetitions of something before it becomes our go to move under pressure. That means that we need many reps to embody what we care about. 

We invite you into this work as either an entry point or a continuation of your path inside of somatics and inside of justice and liberation work. This might mean that you take these courses many times. There is always something new to be healed and grown towards in each new repetition. 

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