Somatics & ideology: notes for a book, plus some tables
Notebooks: March 20th, 2018
PATHWAYS TO TRANSFORMATION (notes for a book)
Intro: Somatics & Ideology
Chapter 1: Healing Masculinity | Pathways to Gender Liberation | Sex-Positivity
Chapter 2: Healing Whiteness | Pathways to Ancestry | Culture-Positivity
Chapter 3: Healing Class | Pathways to Redistribution/Repair/Interdependence | Money-Positivity
Chapter 4: Healing Ableism | Pathways to Rest/Ease/Agency | Body-Positivity
Chapter 5: Healing Place | Pathways Home
Closing: Healing Time | Pathways to Liberation [Legacy]
*
Not the legacy I am leaving/making,
but the legacy I seek to join/claim.
Keep – step in it.
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Take each breath knowing
this too one day will cease
/ transform.
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To heal time
is to come fully
[into the] present.
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To heal one’s relationship to time
one must heal one’s relationship to place
and vice versa.
*
This book takes as its fundamental assumption that no one of us can be free until all of us are.
When I say “fundamental assumption”, I mean: proceeding from my body.
I mean a fundamental observation.
I know from my body that I cannot be free [from suffering] until all of us are free.
*
This book also takes as an assumption – an observation – that much of social movement rhetoric and culture does not funnel us toward nervous system/cellular transformation/transformation at the level of embodiment and action, but rather gets stuck at the levels of heart and head.
That is to say, it ignores our gut.
Instead it tells us how we should think and feel.
*
Still, I notice things bubbling and surfacing.
Stories of what has gotten us to move and transform.
Models of new shapes, embodiments. Or very old ones.
These observations owe a debt to the work of generative somatics, Resmaa Menakem, adrienne maree brown, and many other movement/somatic practitioners. My task here with you all is to apply some of these lessons – to take note and to poke at the places in which I embody an oppressor shape, and to keep records of what causes that to shift, in the hope that in these observations exist a kind of [user’s] manual toward transformation.
SOMATICS & IDEOLOGY (tables)
oppression = trauma systematized over generations
Table 1: Physiological (adaptive) responses to the pain of the vulnerable: emotional contagion1
Table 2: Physiological (adaptive) responses to the will/violence of the powerful
Table 3: Bystander Interventions (Spectrum of Allies)
I’m not a psychologist, and there’s a lot here that is more than a bit loose/playful. It’s important not to pathologize attachment styles in general – i.e. there is nothing “wrong” with having a disorganized, or avoidant, or anxious attachment style; nor are those totalizing categories that anyone’s personality or life choices (or politics) can or should be reduced to –but I’m leaving as is because I do still think there is something interesting here. How might our tactics change if we understood political alignment as rooted in individuals’ physiological, nervous-system-level shapings , rather than as a set of logical policy-based choices? How can we better understand our own tendencies, pitfalls?