In the last six weeks I’ve been in five different cities to co-facilitate a retreat, travel, and deepen my somatic education. In between trips, I’ve been at home having surgery, analyzing survey data, researching and writing reports, coaching clients, and generally doing a lot of consulting work.
It’s been a long six weeks that has felt full, wonderful and challenging. A cold I had six weeks ago left me with a cough that still won’t quit, and I’m feeling run down and tired overall. Last week I was supposed to board a flight to Toronto and because of pain and exhaustion, I ended up staying home.
All of this is to say, there hasn’t been a newsletter in a while and I’ve missed you. Here are some highlights from the last few weeks.
On Somatics
I’ve been taking somatics courses online over the past year, and have been dreaming about attending an in-person somatics course that’s held near San Francisco for months now. At the beginning of June, I finally went.
My deepest take away from the course is that my primary site of transformation is me, and the more I work on my own conditioning and patterns, the better I can help others and support social change as a family member, an equity practitioner and a community member. The course also taught me that rather than punitive forms of discipline/unkind self talk, transformation happens through having a compelling vision of who you want to be and the life you want to move closer towards.
In the course we learned that embodiment is about being able to make different choices under the same pressures as before. It takes 300 repetitions to create bodily memory, and 3000 repetitions for something to become automatic.
In other words, you cannot think your way to transformation. I like to talk and write through my thoughts, but change requires practice. It requires thousands of repetitions to be able to choose something new when you’re under pressure. And so instead of spending our course days taking notes and learning somatic theories, we spent the majority of our time in practice, doing practices intended to help us move closer to the kind of change we want to embody internally and externally in the world. We practiced centering, making requests of one another, giving and declining consent, moving under pressure when we feel frazzled, extending our power and fighting for our declarations of change. From morning to evening, we practiced. It was wonderful and agonizing. Being in practice gave me so much useful information about how I react, my comfort zone, the internal dialogue I have with myself when trying something new. And now that the course is done, the practice continues.
In her book “The Politics of Trauma”, scholar Staci Haines describes somatic transformation as predicated on somatic awareness, somatic opening and somatic practices. Somatic awareness is our deeper awareness of our “soma” which is a Greek word that means “the living organism in its wholeness” and refers to human beings as “integrated mind, body, spirit and social, relational beings”. Somatic methodologies posit that change happens through our tissues, our somas, rather than through other verbal/cognitive methods such as changing one’s framing, language, and/or thinking differently.
Last week I heard an episode of one of my favourite podcasts “If Books Could Kill” which examines popular airport books. In each episode they point out useful aspects of the book under analysis and debunk what isn’t true, and the latest episode is on the bestselling book “Atomic Habits.” One of their critiques of the book is that it argues that to keep a habit going, one must identify with that habit, (ex: instead of saying I should run, say, I am a runner) and to identify with the habit, one should do the habit. What the book doesn’t do however, the hosts point out, is clearly lay out how to overcome the initial catalyzation energy required to start doing a habit. It doesn’t tell you how to “double dutch” into the loop of activity you want to enter.
Instead of thinking our way to new ways of being, somatic transformation happens through awareness, practices and openings. Awareness often increases through practices such as meditation, centering, and other activities that increase a person’s ability to tune into themselves. For me, a question I had before, through and after the course was how to tune into my body and increase my somatic awareness when I live in a body in chronic pain. How do I tune in when it is less painful to separate yourself from your body?
I didn’t have a chronic illness when I first started my somatic learning, and so to get oriented in this course, I found myself thinking a lot about one of my first somatic teachers Nkem Ndefo and how she would emphasize the importance of choice, tuning into one’s body to the depth and degree that feels manageable to you, and changing approaches when something is not working to resource you. And so through this course I tried to find the balance between challenge and overwhelm, stepping out when my body pain was too active for me to participate in beneficial ways. I’m interested to continue to learn more about the connections between somatics and disability justice in the months and years to come.
One of the primary methods of somatic opening is body work, and during the course I had the opportunity to do bodywork with a practitioner at the school. It was a profound experience that for me, brought home the idea that change happens at the level of the body even if the verbal parts of us cannot fully understand or articulate that change or experience.
Representation
One of the most powerful elements of the course was our teaching team. We had five teachers across 20 students and there was a lot of diversity on the teaching team. For the first time ever, I had the opportunity to participate in a course without being harmed or triggered in some way, and it was an unusual and moving experience to be able to relax into the role of being a learner. For the first time ever, I had the opportunity to be taught by someone with whom I shared a spiritual and religious background, and that experience helped me see how my somatic education is deeply connected to Islamic epistemic lineages and practices I hold dear. This is something I want to continue to learn more about.
Connecting faith to other spheres of my life has always mattered to me.
On Creating a Faith Friendly Work Place
On May 30th, I hosted an incredible workshop called “Creating a Faith-Friendly Work Place”. I’ve hosted talks about faith inclusion at universities, done trainings for manager training programs, helped create guidelines for workplaces and interfaith spaces, written about Islamophobia, but this was the first time I’ve spoken to a group of people across different organizations, cities and sectors. It was a wonderful experience, and a deeply enriching conversation.
If you wanted to attend but couldn’t - stay tuned to this space! I’ll be doing more workshops/webinars in the Fall.
Below, details about our upcoming bookclub on “You Could Make This Place Beautiful” and things I’ve loved watching and reading recently.
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