Fresh from a zoom meeting with the Working Families Party and Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, I’m feeling heartened, fired up and grateful. What would America look like if all our communities had what they needed? Where would resources be prioritized if the Breathe Act proposed by the Movement for Black Lives’ Electoral Justice Project guided our policies? Who would we need to become, and what would we need to embody?
That final question is important because justice and injustice are lodged deep inside our bodies, thinking and habits, so engaging that mind-body connection is crucial to realizing the future that we want. A number of techniques have been developed to help us do this, including ‘Somatics,’ which I’ve been learning about, working in and teaching for the last 25 years.
Somatics is a mind/body methodology that supports deep personal change, trauma healing, and embodying new practices for individuals and groups. The aim is to align our skills and capacities, ways of being and relating, and actions with our values and visions, even under pressure. For Somatics this is the test: how do we think, act and relate from what we most care about, including in the most challenging of circumstances, rather than reacting from what is familiar and accepted?
