Tara Brach - Healing Racialized Trauma: A Conversation with Resmaa Menakem and Tara Brach (2020-10-21)

Episode Date: October 24, 2020

Healing Racialized Trauma: A Conversation with Resmaa Menakem and Tara Brach (2020-10-21) - The body is where our instincts reside and where we fight, flee, or freeze, and it endures the trauma inflicted by the ills that plague society. Resmaa Menakem speaks in a compelling way how this destruction will continue until Americans learn to heal the generational anguish of white body supremacy, and create a truly anti-racist culture. This conversation includes a powerful and provocative guided reflection.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Welcome, friends. I'm so glad to have you with us and I am thrilled to be able to introduce to you, Resma Menickam, who will be joining me for a conversation this evening, just to let you know the title, it's Healing of Racialized Trauma. And Resma has, served as the Director of Counseling Services for the Tubman Family Alliance, as behavioral health director for African American Family Services in Minneapolis, as domestic violence counselor for the Welder Foundation, as certified military and family life consultant for the U.S. Armed Forces, as trauma consultant for the Minneapolis Public Schools, and as cultural

somatics consultant for the Minneapolis Police Department. And I wanted to read that because so many rich ways of serving. And he currently teaches workshops on cultural somatics. And I think that term is incredible for audiences of African Americans, European Americans, and police officers. It's also a therapist in private practice. And the author of My Grandmother's Hands, Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. And I have to say, welcome.

So glad to have you with us, Rosma. Thank you, Tara. It's good. I'm really excited about this. I've watched a bunch of your stuff and been looking at things, and everybody, a number of my friends found out that I was coming on your show. They were like, oh, my God. So even in my show, you're a pretty big deal.

Oh, and that's what people were saying when I told them about you. That's so funny. Can I just say thank you first for my grandmother. mother's hands because I have read and reread and flagged so many pages. And I just want you to know, I feel like you delivered into this world a book right at the time we most needed it. So, so thank you. I appreciate that. I really do. That book came from a very personal and a very deep place and hopefully people felt feel it and experience it when they're reading it. And so I'm just glad it's touching people.

Well, the way you did the book made so clear that we weren't reading it if we weren't stopping and actually coming into our body with the exercises. Before I get to that, because the title is such a grabber. Yeah. Would you let us share a bit about it? Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely.

So if people read the story or read the book, there's this pretty salient story at the beginning of a book about the relationship that I had with my grandmother. Honestly, my grandmother was one of the funniest people that I, that even to this day that I knew, my grandmother would always be laughing. She'd always be playing jokes, all that different type of stuff. And so all of us, me and my two, brothers both had a very good relationship with her. And so one particular story in the book is about how she would, so some of the black people that's listening to this are going to culturally

pick up on what I'm getting ready to say right now. Other people may not. But so when I was growing up in my family, you know, black families, when I was coming up, all had two TVs. And we had one, that was the big one, it was ornade, it was probably color, right? And then you had one that sat on top of it. Well, the reason why the one set on top is that usually the one on the bottom never, the sound would go out. So we had the one at top that had the sound and the one on the bottom. So my grandmother was sitting there watching TV and listening through the other TV.

And so we were sitting there and what she would do was, would be to put her legs across my thighs or across our thighs. So if my brother was sitting there, she'd do that, right? And so she would sit there and put her hand on her thigh. And then we would be sitting there watching TV together, and she may do something stupid, right? She may pass gas or do something and start laughing or do something, right? But that's where we all sat, right?

And so when we would be sitting there, we'd be rubbing her hands because she would always complain of arthritis. And this interesting thing is that after she passed, I was talking to my mother about it. And my mother said, you know, she never really had arthritis, but she would always act like her hands hurt. And so I was rubbing her hands one day. I must have been about somewhere between seven and nine.

I'm not quite sure what the age is. And so I was rubbing her hands. And I was comparing her hands at the time to her hands and my hands. My hands are very thin and angular. My mother's hands, it's very thin and angular. But my grandmother's hands had these fingers where they were thick digits. She had very thick fingers and then thick, a thick thumb. And then in the inside of her hand, it was padded.

It looked like it was padded. And then on the back, it looked like it was padded. And so I was rubbing her hands. And she's watching TV. And I said, Grandma, I said, why your hands kind of have joking, right? Like why your hand so fat like that? And she without even looking at me, she goes, oh boy, that's from picking cotton. And I was sitting there.

And she must have heard the paws and she looked at me. And she goes, boy, you ever seen a cotton plant? And I said, no. And she's so, cotton plant got these birds. And that's the way she's talking to me. It's like this energy. It's like a lot of energy. And I'm just sitting there looking at her.

She goes, it's got these birds in it. She said, I started walking up and down in rows. when I was four years old. And you reach your hand in when you four, my dad was a sharecropper, when you reach your hand in, then birds cut your fingers up, right? And she said, when the birds cut your, she said, they go inside your fingers,

they go all around, and she said, as they're ripping your hands up, and she said, until your hands get them calluses, they're gonna bleed. And that's the way she was talking. And so that interaction with her, and so I'm looking at her. And then she broke.

She broke and then started watching TV again. And so I'm just sitting there with her hand in my hand. And I'm like, I don't know what to do with that. I did not remember that story again until I started writing my grandmother's hands. After I had gone through my own trauma in Afghanistan, after I had done seeing things that I shouldn't see and experienced things and that story came together

with all of the other stuff. And so that's how the name, the name. That's how I came up with the title of the book because it represented both the historical, the intergenerational, persistent institutional, and the personal traumas all together like a yarn ball. And so it's both representative of my relationship with her and representative of black people's relationship to this nation. So, boy, I'm feeling that in my body. I mean, just as you describe picking that cotton. So it's all. all about trauma, Razma. I mean, you're, you're circling around the trauma in the culture in your body and

all of our bodies. And your way of going at it in this book, you are impacting our culture by introducing language that's fresh and it's powerful. So can you talk a bit? Because of course, the first word that jumps out there is white body supremacy. Yeah, yeah. So, so, so, So everything that I'm talking about really comes under the rubric of what I call somatic abolitionism. And what that means is that we have to be about the work of abolishing white body supremacy in the body. Many times, many of the kind of strategies and approaches we've chosen to work with are really heady type of things, cognitive types of ways. Let's just talk. Let's just do this. let's just do that.

And we don't account for the bodies, both protective mechanisms, mechanisms around survival. And so to me, this is really about how do we usher in a living, embodied, somatic, anti-racist culture, right? It is not enough, it is not enough to just think about it. We have to, people have to actually slow down enough so they can begin to discern what's actually percolating, was actually coming up, which actually has been so decontextualized that now it looks like culture or it looks like

personality or it looks like family traits. And so the term white body supremacy fits within the rubric of somatic abolitionism, living embodied anti-racist practice and culture. And so the reason why I say white body supremacy as opposed to white supremacy is that there is one organizing rule that whenever I'm starting to begin to talk about this that that that helps to organize me and more me and that rule is the white body is the supreme standard by which all body's humanity shall be measured both philosophically and strong And so in a society where the white body is the standard of humanity and everything else is a devious from that standard structurally, it is an advantage to be born in a white body in a structure like that, in a system like that, and a philosophy like that. So when people say white supremacy, many times it comes off and it lands in people's cognition.

White supremacy, immediately people start thinking of strategy. Immediately people start thinking of, okay, what can we do? The reason why I use the term white body supremacy is that I want to land this in the context of structure and philosophy. and put it back where it belongs and that is in the body. The term and the idea of white people is a new idea. And that idea has teeth. It is visceral. It blows brains out.

It creates inequities. It is not. So yes, it is a social construct, but it is a social construct with teeth. It is backed by a military. It is backed by economic system. It is backed by a scientific system. system. It is backed by a health care system. And so the idea that White, of saying it and putting in the

context of the body is so people can't automatically genuflect to the brain or genuflect to cognition. They have to hold what happens in the body as another domain of information as opposed to saying, well, we just need to think about this differently. It is not just about thinking about this differently. It is holding, and especially for white people, it is really important that they begin to hold the idea that race, the idea of race is predicated on them being human and me being primate, right? And me, you being the standard of human and me being monkey. That's woven through every institution. Many white people don't want to contend with the charge of that. So they develop and collectively white people develop ways of dodging that reality. And so when I talk about

white body supremacy, it's designed to hold the charge, hold the speed, hold the direction, hold the texture of that so you can't dive up out of it. So here you are right now and you're talking about it. And I'm I'm saying, okay, as a white-bodied person, how do I get in touch with the reality somatically? Yeah. What are the ways that you ask white bodies or black bodies to pay attention so that we start getting that it's in our body? This isn't just a concept.

Yeah. So the first place I do, the first thing that I do is particularly when I'm talking to white bodies is I want them to understand that we are not all the same structure. We are like when people, when people, when people, genia fleck to the idea that we all bleed the same blood, we all do this, we all do that. What they're doing is that they're trying to play with the

difference between intrinsic and innate worth and structural worth. Right. And so one of the first things that I have when I'm working with all white, because I don't, I usually, many times when I'm doing my trainings, I don't do these trainings with white bodies and bodies of culture in the room together. Because there's too many, there's too much charge and too many things that have not been contained in order to do that. So many things begin to get, bodies of culture end up getting wounded in those processes. And many times white folks end up getting enlightened. Right?

And so it's not the same work. So one of the first things that I do is really try and get white bodies to slow down with other white bodies first. Not with other white black bodies, not looking for a black guru, as Sister Kyoto Williams would say. Not looking for those types of things, right? looking, being in the room and starting to begin to condition and temper your bodies to be able to withhold and withstand culture building around race specifically. And so that may sound very simple, right? It may sound very simple just to get people in the room together. But when you, when you add that we're getting in the room to begin to create a culture that can actually hold

the charge of white supremacy and white body supremacy, that makes people begin to kind of do all of the dodges. And then so then what I begin to do is begin to work with those dodges in real time or have, not me, but have white folks begin to work with those dodges as a way to build a collective understanding around race. Many white people and white bodies have not had to contend with race.

Black bodies and bodies of culture have been raced, right? Which means the concept of race has been put upon us. So that's one of the first things that I would say is slowing it down. And getting people to understand that race, the idea of race really is a, so the term, the term race was a term that was used to, delineate speciesness. This is the piece that people forget. So we say, well, we're talking about the black race. We're talking about the right race. And we're talking about this race, that race, that race. And actuality, we're not talking that. That's not what we're saying. What we're actually saying

is that when the concept of race was first introduced in the 15, 16th centuries, they were actually talking about species. They said a species of bird or a species of cat or a species of dogs. Or a dog, right? A species of cow or bull, right? Those were species questions. And so the term race really does mean species. And so when we're talking about race, we're talking about speciesness. And so the question in America and this idea of speciesness got transported all over the world, the question, but it started here in America, the question is, is resma? a monkey. That question has always been answered in this question in this country, and that is, yes, he is not quite human. That has been interwoven through every institution, whether it be

religious, whether it be spiritual, whatever. Those ideas live decontextualized. And so one of the first things that I do is try and get people to slow down and lean into these pieces so they can begin to excavate and uncover how it lives inside of their bodies. So I just want to say when you just put it the way you did with species and different between human and primate. Right. And that that is what's, that's the perceptual sensitivity that's actually, that's how it's assumed in our bodies. That's exactly right. That's, that's, that's, very, very powerful. And through the book, you keep asking us to pay attention in certain ways so that we can begin to wake up to that. And I'm aware right now, you've got a real mixed group

of listeners right here, which I think is great, you know, and we're not, we're not all in the same room interacting. So I think it's viable. Absolutely. Yeah. But one of the things that really struck me, Resma, was, you know, it's really easy for me anyway, to. to see that black bodies feel traumatized by the presence of whites that through the centuries and currently white bodies are countless times more violent to black bodies than the reverse in terms of killing, lynching, raping. So what makes white bodies put black bodies into the dangerous category? I mean, I get how we detect our lizard brain detects difference.

Right. What else? Well, so for me, So for me, this is a very old question, right? And much of this question gets answered by white bodies rubbing up against white bodies and then watch what emerges from that, right? But I will say this, I will say that in the formation of this country, remember, America did not become America until 1776.

It did not become incorporated until 1776. The pieces that I'm talking about really started to begin their formation way before America became America, when America were colonies, right? These ideas around who was human and who was not and what got, and how those ideas got reinforced is very old. So when white people tell me, I'm not racist, I'm like, how in hell did you get around that? Like what, what peoplehood do you come from that, to, that you were able to just declare, right,

that that's the case? this is about what was sold into the seeds of how this happens. And one of the things that I believe white people really have a very difficult time confronting is the idea that most white people, most descendant white people that are on this call right now, came from other white people who were fleeing something. And I just want that to sit for a second. Most of the people that are on this call who were white bodies came from white people descended from white people who were fleeing something.

The energy of fleeing, that energy of fleeing never got dealt with. It never got processed. It never got acknowledged. It never got repaired. So what happened was that fleeing energy got decontextualized over time. And then when the opportunity came about for white people or for Italians, for Portuguese, for people for people from Spain, from people from Belgium, when the time came for them to actually maybe confront it, they readily decided that they were not going to confront it and accept it. and accept the rubric of whiteness, right? So that energy actually got encapsulated

inside of the idea of whiteness, right? This is why whenever you bring up something about as a collective to white people around race, you sense this energy, right? That never gets articulated, right? It made look, people call it anger or rage or whatever it is, but you sense a pregnancy, right? That's because that stuff never got mediated.

And so a lot of the work in terms of white body supremacy is white people beginning to get together with each other and beginning to go through a process. And I want to be clear, I'm not talking about processing it as yoga or processing it as religion or processing it as spirituality or processing it. And I'm saying working with it, so culture, so a living embodied anti-racist culture can begin to percolate within the collective white community.

The most dangerous place for a black person is in the mind of the white collective. Right? The white collective cannot conceive of a free black person. It is not within the rubric of what we're dealing with. That's going to take cultivation from white folks. Right? There's, you can't hire enough black gurus to come into, to come into white, to the white community and, and try and teach you this. This is something that's going to have to be earned through tempering and conditioning and reps and invited reps and life reps. That's the, that's how it's

going to come about. So, you know, I just want to check my understanding here that when you, because you do, I think there's some brilliant exercises that have me, pay attention when I'm with a black body person and watch what goes on inside me and watch the fear that comes up. And I always ascribe that fear not to, oh, it's from a past, unfathous trauma of me running away from anti-Semitic people, let's say, are the Northern Europeans that were torture each other. But I usually think of it like what's coming up in me is I feel like I did something. I was part of a collective that did something horrific to other people and those people are if it was me I'd be

enraged and murderously angry and that and that's the fear that that the other is going to be that the black-bodied person is just unforgiving and angry and yeah yeah that's that's that's different than what I'm saying yeah yeah yeah so so so can I take take you through something right quick and it might be helpful. So this is just for, I just, this is just for the white people that are on the call, the white bodies that are on the call. I don't like doing these types of things,

these kind of large forms and then filleting bodies of culture open. And so what I say bodies of culture, I'm saying black indigenous bodies of culture. I don't say people of color or bodies of color because what bodies of culture for me is about reclaiming that which was stripped from us. And one of the first things that was stripped from us

is the idea of culture. Culture is a human expression, right? And so the reason why I say bodies of culture as opposed to people of color is that I want us to reclaim and be about the business of reclaiming those things that have been stripped. So when I'm talking about bodies of culture, I don't usually do these types of things

with bodies of culture. So I want to walk you guys through this process. So bodies of culture just to kind of take a breath and just watch the process. Don't engage. So imagine, imagine that you're seven years old and you're in a house, and you're with your mom, and you're with your brothers and sisters, and you're with your father or other.

important caregivers, right? Or you're with your, your mother and mother or father, father, whoever it is, you're in a safe environment, right? And you're playing. And as a matter fact, I'm going to have all the white folks. I'm going to have you close your eyes because I think, I don't want you to watch me. I want you to watch. Just kind of pay attention to the images and stuff. So as you're moving and you're moving around now, house, you notice that there is a sense of safety. Even if it's not totally safe, there isn't in this moment, in this time that you're playing with your dump truck or playing with your brothers and sisters, you're noticing that

there's a sense of safety. All of a sudden, the door swings open. And you notice it's another caregiver. And let's say in this situation, this stuff is your father. Your father walks in and everybody's happy to see him. And you run up to him. He picks you up, kisses you all that different type of stuff. And he looks at you.

And he says, let's go. We're going to a park. And you say, oh, man, yeah, we're going to a park. So you get in the car and everybody's happy. And you're driving along. You're driving along. And as you pull up to your favorite park, you notice that there are a lot of cars. cars in this park. You notice that there are a lot of people in this park. And all of a sudden,

as you're looking out the window, you see your best friend. And you're like, oh, my God, there's my best friend and they're with their parents. And you get out the car. And everybody is happy. And you're jumping, you're moving around. And it's like 5,000 people in this park, 10,000 people in this park. It's like, It's the best day of your life. And as you're playing and you're running, you notice a smell. I'm quite sure what the smell is. You're really unsure what the smell is. It's familiar but not really familiar.

It smells like barbecue, but it's not really barbecue. But you just keep going. And you every once in a while, you look over and you see your father or you look over and you see your mother, you look over, you see your caregiver. And they're smiling and they're having a good time. And then your father comes to kitchen, takes you by the hand, and you look up at him and he looks down at you and you smile and you know, this is my dad and this is the person that loves me and this is the person I love.

And you start to begin to walk and he's taking you someplace. As you, as you walk, you notice he's a person. having to squeeze through a crowd. And people move and people move to the side. And it's the baker. And you notice Mr. Kravitz, who is the butcher. And you notice Mrs. Johnson who does the flower arrangements for the church. And you notice all of these people in there. And the other thing that you notice is that it's getting hot. You notice heat on your skin. And the smell. and the crackling of now you're sure there's something burning. And now you get further and further,

and the smell gets more and more intense. And the crowd opens up, and when you're standing there, and your dad has his beautiful, loving grip around in the small of your back now, and he wants to show you something. And when you open your eyes, there's three black men there who have just been lynched.

Notice your body. Notice the urge to run. Notice the urge to scream. And notice that this is sanctioned. What happens to that little body? When they see horror and smell horror, but it is sanctioned. It is sanctioned. It is sanctioned.

It is sanctioned. What happens to the voice, to the throat, when that little body sees everybody in their life sanctioning horror and brutality? How many of those little bodies became police, morticians, college professors, sheriffs, clerks,

cab drivers, Supreme Court justices, street sweepers, janitors, bakers, butchers, how many of those little bodies lived on and had children and that was never resolved.

That brutality was never dealt with. What gets passed down as standard? If the white body is the supreme standard by which all bodies to humanity shall be measured, what gets passed down as personality? Trauma in a person decontextualized can look like personality. Trauma in a family, Decontextualized can look like family traits. Trauma decontextualized and the people can look like culture.

Now open your eyes. Look around the room. Orient. Look behind you. Look up. Look down. Look around. Find the exits in the windows. You are not there. You are here. You are not there. You are here. Look over both. shoulders and engage your neck and your hips, your SOAS and your neck. Find the windows and find the exits. Your body needs to know it can leave. So did that answer your question? Well, I'm grateful. I'm still, my own body is metabolizing in its own way. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yep. Now, we came out of that, right? Now imagine when I talk about my people, we had the experience of never being able to run or fight for 400 years.

What gets passed down? What weather's in the body, in the brain architecture, in the heart, in the cardiovascular system, in the reproductive system, what gets weathered and then is passed off as lifestyle choices? So this is why I talk about white body supremacy as opposed to just white supremacy. Good breath, good breath. Part of what I'm aware of is how hard it is for so many people to even begin to feel their body when they're not being asked to feel challenging things.

So it feels like part of the work is for us just to keep learning how to live awake inside a body. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Not only learn to live what it's like to be awake, but notice when you're not, right? You know what I mean? Notice when you're not. And begin to do that, not just with your body individually, but do it with other bodies. Begin to do these practices. That's why I don't call them exercises in the bar, call them practices, because you've got to get and reps in, right? You actually have to actually practice with both yourself in order for white folks to develop a living embodied anti-racist culture. And they're going to have to practice and get reps in specifically around race, right? In order for us to usher in a somatic abolitionist

culture, you're going to have to spend some, this is why I say for white folks, it's going to take at least nine generations of collective work before they even are able to touch this. You do talk real specifically about kind of the steps. You give steps for how to metabolize. And I think given who's listening, I think you'd find, I think it would be really helpful for us to get a sense of what you encourage people to do. I've been saying it all along. What the first step is get together with other white bodies. Slow down. go through what I call the VIMBAs, right? The V-I-M-B-A-S,

understanding, because those are domains by which information can begin to present themselves, right? Vibes and vibrations, images and thoughts, meaning-making, behavior and urges, what wanted to complete and could not, what wanted to move and could not, what stuck and is actually not yours,

but a pass-through, right? Affect and feelings and sensator sensations. And starting to begin to do that with each other and track it in yourself and in each other. So you don't just, because you'll start to learn patterning in the process of that. You'll start to learn patterning when you pause, when you actually pause.

Don't do anything, just pause. Stuff starts to quake when you pause. Stuff starts to vibrate and move back and forth when you pause. But if you have been so kind of disconnected from your humanity, disconnected, and you get benefits from staying disconnected, right? When that happens, you have to actually continue to get the reps in so you can begin to develop discernment around it. Most of us don't have any discernment around it.

So the first piece is really slowing it down, pausing and not looking at this as an opportunity to get together and go through a book club or get together and only do yoga poses. You can do those pieces, but that's a separate piece from the somatic abolitionist work, right? The somatic abolitionist's work is that specifically do somatic elicitations in order around race, right? somatic elicitations around race so I can begin to deal with the fire and begin to deal with the texture, begin to deal with the direction, begin to deal with the charge, begin to deal with the weight specifically around that and how that rubric gets set up and got set up in my body decontextualized. And when there's a, when it gets overwhelming, you go back settling again. Yeah, back off, back out, back out, right? What I tell people is that,

many times when I'm working with people, what they want to do is like take a fire hose and turn it on full speed and be like, why can't I drink anything? Because you're sitting there with the fire hose turned up to nine and is blasting you in the face, right? You're getting wet, but nothing's being satiated. Nothing's happening, right? And so what I tell people is that this is a very slow matriculated piece. You're not trying to get it all at one time. You begin to notice the patterning inside of the small movements, inside of the small moments, inside of the smallness.

You begin to learn the patternings. And what you want to do is just to kind of, like I had a guy tell me one time, Resma, I read your book in two days. I said, you didn't get a damn thing out of it then. I said, I don't know why you would do that to yourself. That's not the point. The point is that begin to deal with the uncomfortableness of it so things can emerge

that need to emerge. You know, we are energy having a human experience, right? If you're not slowing that piece down, you'll never understand what your experience is. You will never become the person that you were supposed to be, right? And so for me, it really is about slowing it down long enough so I can be curious about what's showing up as opposed to what happens a lot of times when people start to vibrate back and forth, they do something to stop it. They boot us the hell out of it, right?

They Christian the hell out of it. They yoga the hell out of it because they can't tolerate it specifically around race. So what you're saying right now, and it totally resonates, that it's really about learning to lean in, to be able to tolerate so you can lean in and with curiosity, because it's more important to wake up and be free than it is to live with our armors of armoring and trauma. Exactly. And one of the things that is, I mean, there's a lot that we need each other to reinforce, but one of the key things you talk about through the book is really that we each have got to

get the knack of how to settle and calm our nervous system enough so we can be curious. curious. Exactly right. And I want to name a P, one place you talked about really is your own very deep realization, which was that you were accessing a settledness that was always and already there. Oh, yeah. Everything that I'm talking about is already here. Yeah. Right. White supremacy and white body supremacy warped and constricts it. So a lot of the work is really about moving into that thwarting and constricting so the expanse of who you will really are can actually be bloomed so it can actually come forward, right? Not tending to those constrictions, not tending to those to those bottlenecks, right? Thwart your, your, your, your emergence, right? And so this is one of the reasons why I

talk about the idea of going slow with this. Because in the, in the slow, in the slow, you begin to get some, not insight, inside is the wrong one. You begin to glean something. Right. And specifically as it relates to race, this is why I talk about, you know, the cultural somatic skills, right? The full cultural somatic skills. And that is grounding, orienting, self and communal, grounding, self and communal orienting self and communal touch and self and communal movement.

Right? And what begins to happen when you do it yourself, right? You begin to create a ground so you can actually move to the next piece, right?

And so there's a word that that is escaping me right now. Let me go through this process and the word will probably pop up, right? So the four parts of the cultural somatic skills, the self and communal grounding first, right? What begins to happen as you begin to do the self and communal grounding, as you begin to do the self-grounding, right?

It sets the stage for you to begin to maybe think about or begin to lean into doing it with another body, right? But what happens is, is that if you're doing it around, specifically around race, what begins to happen is that other things start to emerge, right? And so the grounding that you begin to develop actually comes up out of the emergence between you and another body, right? By witnessing that body, by allowing that body to witness you, right? You begin to stuff begin, your vulnerabilities begin to show themselves, right? One of the pieces around when I'm walking people through these process, one of the things

that happens and one of the things I'm really pretty esticul, pretty much a stickler about is that this is not about your narrative. This is not about telling me your story. The most, the hardest thing that I've noticed for people to do is to be quite. why yet when they're going through the process without giving people cues, right? Just allow somebody to witness you specifically around a particular practice in the book. And without talking, without going through the narrative, something you began to, there is another piece that gets added to it when you allow somebody to watch you and witness you as you're

working with some of the racial pieces, right? And so each one of those skills allows you to temper and to be tempered and conditioned. It allows you to over time develop a thick skin. It allows you over time to develop a more fortified mindset. It allows you over time to hold those two pieces together with a malleable heart. What happens most often, though, people go through this process and they develop a thick skin. They develop a fortified mindset, but they also have a hardened heart. They don't have a malleable, flexible, or light heart.

It is much harder in this process to develop in time a malleable, flexible, light heart. That is a much harder toe in this process than it is to develop a hardened heart in the process of going through this, right? And texturally, those two things are different. And so that's why I talk to people about using the cultural somatic skills as a way to guide you around and having another body that can begin to lean into and pick up on the vibrations of what's happening and the alignment of what's happening, right? they're able to look at you and see things that you absolutely cannot see. The way I'm hearing this and I'm checking with you is, I think of trauma as ultimately it separates us. It severs belonging and that when you have people do the grounding, they're kind of reconnecting with their own ground. And when we witness each other, we're reconnecting with an energetic field that is bigger than our separate.

itself. So each step of what you described feels like you're, you're helping people reconnect to a larger belonging that makes it safe enough to tolerate the pain. Yes. And at the beginning of it, they cannot tolerate, especially as it relates to race. So this is the key. People, people will move into, some people will hear what I'm saying and move very quickly into a performative stance. Right? They were performed the acts of what they think that I'm trying to do, that I'm saying, right? Like they will get into a, they will do this and they will stare the hell out of each other. I'm watching you. You are letting me witness you. I'm going to witness the shit out of you. Right. Right. And that's totally missing what I'm saying. Right. What I'm saying is pay attention to the vulnerabilities that show up with this.

Pay attention to the pieces that are not so that you don't have a whole lot of efficacy with, right? Pay attention, right? You know what I'm saying? That that's where, that the things that you don't do well is what is where all of the learning is. Yeah, what you most don't want to feel. What you most don't, not just feel, what you most don't want to experience. feeling is just one domain of that experiential kind of idea, right? And so there will be a whole lot.

And that's what I was saying when we were talking earlier. There are a lot of people that are doing that have read my book and are doing workshops and doing this and on my book and stuff like that. But they haven't done this, right? So people end up thinking that they are having a certain experience as it relates to race. but the depth of it is shallow. I'm really going to be digesting more about what you say about developing certain types of resilience but still having a hard heart because I think that's a really,

I think you have to go right to the very core of the vulnerability to actually free the heart. Yeah. Which often has to do with underneath the fear facing the grief, facing what's been lost. Yeah, yeah. And the grief many times, the grief is not individual grief. It's collective most of the time, right? The weight of it, right? The temper and conditioning I talk about, you have to do that in order to be able to contend with the weight of that, right? And that's why I say go slow, because you can't take it all on as a fire hose. You have to take a little bit and then back out. I can't tell you the number of people that I work with. And I say, they say, well, this is really overwhelming.

I say, stop. Just stop. Yeah. If it's stop. And when I say that to people, they look at me like I've grown another head. They just, they're like, what do you mean? Stop. Shit, stop.

It's too much. If it's to stop, you're not, you have reached a level where your body is saying, this is too much. So respect that. Back out. And then when you're ready, come back. And your body's asking for something different. Your body's asking to find its ways to settle to get the synthetic nervous system

calm. That's right. The body's wanting to be more safe. That's right. And you're overriding it. And many of us come from families and cultures in some ways that have, that because of survival, have had to override. any sense of vulnerability, right?

And so part of it is kind of leaning into that and being curious about that again. So those pieces can come forward without all of the charge. There is a metabolism that can begin to take place. And when it comes to race, the white collective has not even begun to think about that, right, as it relates to race. And so this is one of the reasons why I said

it's going to take at least nine generations before this becomes, you know, everybody's talking about, well, I'm an ally and that's it. Those kind of declarative pieces really mean nothing. How would I know that by what, by your peoplehood, by who you're collecting and who you're developing peoplehood with? Not strategy, not performative stuff, not,

not million moms march, not none of that. I'm talking about how would I know that based on what it that you're doing in terms of building a living embodied anti-racist culture, not strategy. Say more, if you will, because I think we're all leaning in here, and I'm aware we don't have too much time. What does it look like for me, white woman, white-bodied woman, to be building an anti-racist culture? Like, what are some real, what do you see? You see, this is one of those questions that I think comes that is an emergent question rather than the question that Resma can answer. I don't know what that looks like for you.

I know I know what it will look. I know that if you begin to do this work, this small work with other bodies, what I do know is that something will emerge. And again, I wasn't asking specifically me, but just so we, when you're, it's your person. I think I think that it has to, that that is an emergent. The way that we answered is that that that is an emergent question. And that, that, that it, that emergentness. That's not a word, but let me say it anyway. That emergentness will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will, will answer those questions as you grind up against another white body, specifically around race for the next year, for the next two years, for the next three years.

there will be something that will emerge for you and those other two bodies or other three bodies that you're working with. Something will emerge specifically around. And let me caution about this. And we actually say many times, like I said earlier, people will get together and begin to start to do this work. And it will slowly but surely devolve into a support group. And then whiteness will be centered in that support group or will slow or will devolve into a, yoga practice or devolve into a book club, right? And what will happen is that you will begin to lose the charge of it because the white bodies.

So white comfort, white comfort always trumps black pain. White comfort always trumps black liberation or indigenous land sovereignty. It always does, right? And once you take that off of the table and make it so that white folks are comfortable, you're losing the heating element. You're losing the cooking, right? You're losing the ability to actually come out on the other end, something different, more succulent, more rich, more flexible, then you are if you just, if it devolves into just something we do to be calm with each other and cook with each other and, you know, do all of those different types of things. And so, so that's, I think the answer to

that question is that it's emergent. It's emergent. And I hear the, I mean, you're basically saying watch out because we have real strong conditioning to turn away. from where the is. Yes, absolutely. So you're basically saying don't get comfortable. Stay where the charge is and stay somatic. Stay, keep coming back. Keep coming back.

Keep coming back. Keep coming back. Keep coming back to those vimals. Keep coming. Keep writing. Don't go into the narrative. Don't go into the looking for the, well, logically speaking and objectively speaking. Yeah.

That shit ain't going to get it. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. It's too, it's too, it's too, it's got too much historical cement with it. You land up in even though you talk generations, there's still, you basically are saying trauma is not destiny. Mm-hmm. And do this. So maybe kind of as a winding up just to say a little more about that because I know from both individuals that are working trauma and just,

just people who are activists more broadly, that especially in recent days, there can be a lot of despair. Yeah. It is not destined. As a matter of fact, as a matter of fact, it is not even essential, right? It's not that trauma is not essence. essence exists before trauma. Energy exists before trauma. My human, my, I am energy having a human expression, a human experience, right? And so that thing is always, their resources always present. And many times we have to work to cultivate a visceral sense of it. Right? This is why I don't talk about it like, you know, God or this, that, and the other. Talk about it as energy. And I don't mean woo-woo energy. If you're into crystals, that's you. That's fine. We're not battling that. I'm talking about, I know, even if you take the Einstein idea of energy, energy cannot be created nor destroyed, but it can't be thwarted. It can't be manipulated. It can't be moved around. If you take that idea that we are energy and we can and it can't, and we can't. And we can't. not and it cannot be created nor destroyed it is, that's where I start, right? And I don't need to have it in some palatable way. I am connected, right? White body supremacy thwarts, limits, chokes,

tries to choke that connection. And it is our job as somatic abolitionists to make sure that that does not continue, that we lift white body supremacy off of the necks of people, so people can actually lean into the expression that they were put here to be. That's powerful and good. That's powerful and good. Resma, thank you. Oh, thank you, Tara. I appreciate it.

Wow. And for those listening, I want to say again, you're giving yourself a gift to get this book and even more of a gift to live, live the practices. Can I say one quick thing? In addition to the book, there is also a free e-course at my website, right? So a free companion e-course. So it goes along with the book. So if people want to go to resma.com and then at the bottom of when they get on that landing page, say take a course, click that, and then you can just take the free e-course. And it helps.

People have told me that both the video, both the e-course, the free e-course, and reading the book helps to contextualize things for people. We will post it along with this conversation so people have access. to your website. Again, many blessings. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate you. Talk to you soon.

Thank you all for being with us. All right. Bye-bye. Bye. For more talks and meditations, and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.