Many white bodied people spend a tremendous amount of time thinking about, reflecting on and honing our ideas about what’s right. The more we learn about what’s broken in the world, the more motivated we feel to be part of healing and change. Often though, when we encounter an opportunity to act on those intentions, to move against the grain and to disrupt embedded systems of harm, we find ourselves frozen or hesitant instead. What if I do it wrong or make things worse? What if things get really awkward? Am I the best person for this? Am I ready or equipped? Often our bodies hold one set of ideas about how we want to show up in the world, and another set of deeply ingrained patterns and fears that limit how fully or effectively we actually do.

This disconnect between our values and our bodies is not a personal problem, it’s an impact of collective traumas. And it has a long history with devastating, ongoing consequences for communities of color.  As we attend with support to these stuck protective patterns and bring connection to the parts of us that are hiding, we can experience greater connection with the flow of life around us and capacity to show up how we mean to, becoming more awake and responsive to what this moment is asking of us. The journey to becoming more embodied and connected to all parts of ourselves gives us access to the internal capacity and resiliency that we need to live out our values with boldness. That's what this embodied antiracism learning is all about!

These nine-session cohort experiences are an opportunity for white members of our community to come together to become more familiar with the white patterning that we embody + it's racist impacts, grow our capacity to be with the grief and shame of our people’s history and present, and develop relationships and practices that can help us move through stuck patterns and shift towards greater alignment with our deeply held values. As we become more resilient in the face of discomfort, feedback and uncertainty, we become more willing to use our power to disrupt racist harm in and around us - making our community that much safer for everyone.

This experience will include relationship building, somatic/body-based practices, and some study. The framework is informed by Somatic Experiencing, somatic abolitionism and a long list of teachers including Resmaa Menakem, Susan Raffo, Rachel Martin, and Tracy Williams.

It can be easy to focus on cross-racial relationships as the site of racist harm, which makes sense. But often what determines how resiliently white folks are able to show up in multiracial community, is our capacity (or lack thereof!) to both hold each other accountable with compassion, and help each other move through the discomfort and shame of whiteness. Together we will practice building those kinds of relationships and culture that can resource us for the daily work of undoing white body supremacy in and around us.  

Surely, some of this work can be done in multi-racial spaces. However, for white bodies to build up our often-underdeveloped resilience without expecting colleagues of color to make us feel okay or always be our teachers, it is valuable to have devoted space to do this work among white bodies. Our work together will focus on the particular role that white bodies must play in undoing white supremacy.