Session 5: Somatic abolitionism
With Carlin Quinn: white cis female lineage from turtle island.
First we land in the planet before being able to unlearn
Cultural somatic toys
To stay with ourselves and with each other while lots of ways are coming. Not go so much into our minds that we leave everything else.
- Rocking: to center in the pelvis. Keep grounding.
- Orienting in the actual physical space we are in. Looking at the walls, the windows, the exits, look behind us. It is possible to leave. Focus on colors, textures.
- Humming: the vagus nerve loves that. Whatever comes to your body.
- Self-touch.
Life experience
Embodiment, create space in my body to stay, when energy is charged.
Shame, fragility, defence comes up, and that’s the moment we want to flee our bodies. It’s not even a choice. To stay safe we go into our heads, leave connection, leave the more than human world.
Remember to pause, reconnect to the commitment to stay, whatever ancestral trauma is coming up. Stay well.
Trauma puts us through a lot and builds resiliency. The spiritual realm can be a great place to rest when one is not ok with being human.
When she started plant work, the social justice and equity work intensified.
While studying physicotherapy, 95% where white, serving in the bay area a majority of peoples of culture. The framework was cis white male from Europe or United States.
Every time race was brought, the whole room would explode. Everybody would freak out, even the most experienced liberal psychotherapist. Bodies freeze, relations break down, until somebody changes the topic.
At 30 she realized it meant something to be white. So many people had 0 understanding of what it meant to be white and of their positionality that backed her positionality.
When there’s a topic with a collective agreement that we will stay silent, what happens is that the agitator is cast out.
Her body could not sustain the charge and the social commitment to white solidarity. By body did not have the space to hold the tension.
She started working with Robin Diangelo who called it white fragility, describing white supremacy in a way that was undeniable. It exists, it is everywhere, I’m complicit with it or I’m actively changing it. Started working with the defences of the bodies that listened.
There was a racial reckoning from east and west US from white liberals trying to learn.
She created an organization to make events for white bodies and redirect money to black and indigenous communities. Education for Racial Equity. Following mentorship from Orland Bishop, so the money doesn’t go back to white people.
On covid met Resmaa Menakem. Redistributed $1 million, not through strategy but through praying and dieta. We are at the tipping point of a global movement towards this topic that had been avoided.
The amount of energy required was far more than what her white body had capacity for. She was an activist working so strong and so hard with little access to the body. The spiritual community was not working on activism, resting on a lot of privilege.
Social location
The body and roles are different based on the dominant system on your location. Her work is based on white colonial Turtle Island, Europe and Australia.
Some categories of social location:
- race
- gender indentity
- class
- age
- ability
- education status
- immigration status
- language fluency
- sexuality
Go through them and identify your social location.
Global dominant systems
- capitalism
- patriarchy
- white supremacy
- christian hegemony
- cis hetero normative
They fuel each other, they all react when one is threatened.
Dominant systems determine policy, incentive structures, legal rights, and access to social power within a society.
Compliance will give you access, safety, rights.
White body supremacy
At 4 years, children realize it’s better to be white.
White supremacy is the dominant system of subjugation.
White body supremacy is where the white body is deemed the supreme standard for “human” by which all other bodies shall be measured. Every hue away from whiteness is less human.
This has been encoded in all of our bodies. This is the work of somatic abolitionism.
Apathy and numbness
As somatic escape routes for white bodies. Habitual, quick and unconscious responses to avoid racialist stress.
My mind was onboard on anti-rascism but viscerally, somatically, wasn’t.
White fragility
As a collective, white people have a low threshold for honest reflection which challenges their self-esteem and identification with being “good” people.
The result is often white fragility, disregulation, emotional hijacking, escapism and separation.
Being unaware of having been socialized in a racist environment doesn’t make you “bad”. It invites you to curiosity and to build embodied anti racist cultures.
Fields of whiteness
Energetic force fields which preserve white space. Unconsciously created through enactment of white body space. Unconsciously created through enactment of white body supremacy, behaviors, agreements and relations.
Ways to evaluate worth that don’t leave room for anything else.
Pause, bring the VIMBASI, see your own images and the ones you bring from past trauma, interrupt preserving that vibration and desire to disconnect.