This course represents an offer inside of a larger lineage of politicized somatic practice and is meant to support activists, organizers, healers, educators, and cultural workers in our work for liberation. 

We live inside of conditions where change often feels impossible, still the call for a world where life gets to flourish mobilizes many us towards action. We want the action we take to mean something, we want it to matter, we want it to support the material conditions of our lives to change in fundamental ways. 

There is so much that we are up against that gets in the way of visions becoming reality, but through the body we get to uncover the power and the possibility that has always been there. 

We know that our longings can't wait for the right conditions or the right moment, but politicized somatics gives us a path to living our longings on an individual and collective level in the here and now. 

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. 

We live in a world that shapes us into all too familiar relationships to conflict. The polarization, the isolation, the power over, and the dehumanization so many of us experience don't make it easy to know how to be inside of conflict. So many of us shy away from conflict completely, never naming our needs and building resentment inside of us. Others of us go on the attack, looking for what's wrong in others to find safety. These are smart moves, but they have a cost. 

We see these dynamics play out inside of our movements time and time again. How many of us have been part of a moment of huge movement upsurge, to then experience repression from the state or from the right, and then to experience the inevitability of turning on each other, of political beefs, of intimate partner violence inside our formations and organizations? 

The cost is our relationships, our connections, our dignity, and often times our safety. The cost to our movements is the impact we can make together to build the power necessary to shift the conditions of our lives. 

We understand conflict as change entering a system. It is a natural part of life and being alive. We could also say that conflict is an expression of life moving towards life. We can and must work with conflict to move towards revolutionary change in our lifetimes. We hold that not having the skills to deal with conflict in generative or transformative ways, is one of the biggest obstacles our movements face. 

Somatics offers us a path to embodying new and missing competencies when it comes to conflict. Through the body, we can learn the skills necessary to transform conflict, ourselves and our conditions. Generative conflict is conflict that leaves us more connected, learning, and positively changed on the other side. It is conflict that can deepen trust rather than rupture relationship (Staci K. Haines). 

This course will support you, individually and inside of the groups and formations you are a part of, to effectively engage and transform interpersonal and organizational breakdown, and to move towards repair in a way that generates more dignity and trust. 

We promise that you will leave this course with a clearer sense of your own commitments, a sense of how to support yourself and those you care about to take choiceful action, and a clearer sense of how to feel for and build towards liberation inside your own body and with others. 

• Four days of in-person sessions, 10-6 PM Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and 10-4 on Saturday

• On-site small groups, partner work, individual work

• One to one and small group coaching

• Somatic bodywork to deepen your experience of healing directly through the tissues

• Practice in the Jo Kata, a martial arts practice from the Japanese lineage of Aikido

• Free time to swim, rejuvenate, be in beautiful nature and practice embodied resilience 

• Pre-work and curated reading list

• Embodied daily and weekly practices to take home