DeepSummary
In this podcast episode, Stacy K. Haynes, a leader in the field of somatics, discusses the importance of understanding and addressing the deeper sources of trauma, including their political, social, and economic roots, in order to bridge individual healing with social transformation. She explains that somatics is a shift in paradigm and worldview that moves away from the Cartesian mind-body split and objectification of the body and nature, and instead recognizes the interconnectedness of the psychobiology, emotions, and relationships within the living organism.
Haynes emphasizes the need to understand how social conditions and inherited narratives shape our embodied practices and trauma responses, and how these practices can either align with or contradict our values. She suggests that integrating healing practices and transformative development into social change work can help cultivate resilience, process stress, and respond from a place of vision rather than reactivity.
Haynes also explores the relationship between trauma, privilege, and power dynamics, and the potential for transformative justice and accountability approaches that prioritize healing and restoration rather than punishment. She encourages a holistic approach that recognizes the inherent humanity in those who have caused harm and creates space for them to transform and reintegrate into the community.
Key Episodes Takeaways
- Somatics is a holistic paradigm shift that recognizes the interconnectedness of the psychobiology, emotions, and relationships within the living organism.
- Understanding the political, social, and economic roots of trauma is crucial for bridging individual healing with social transformation.
- Integrating somatics and healing practices into social change work can help cultivate resilience, process stress, and respond from a place of vision rather than reactivity.
- Transformative justice approaches that prioritize healing, accountability, and creating space for those who have caused harm to transform are essential for long-term change.
- Aligning our embodied practices with our values and intentions is a key aspect of personal and social transformation.
- Social conditions and inherited narratives shape our embodied practices and trauma responses, even if they contradict our values.
- Cultivating somatic awareness and purposeful practices can help us respond from a place of resilience and responsiveness, rather than reactivity.
- It is important to recognize and build upon existing resilience practices within communities when organizing for social change.
Top Episodes Quotes
- “Somatics helps us understand ourselves in this wholeness, and it also helps us understand how we change. You've probably noticed, and maybe your listeners have noticed, that just having a new insight does not translate into new ways of being, new ways of action or new ways of responding instead of reacting that often when we hit those places of reaction or stress or pressure or even like a new risk, even love can be a new risk, that these very old habits in the psychobiology and the body mind tend to run the show instead of maybe how we want to be or how we want to relate or how we want to act.“ by Stacy K. Haynes
- “And when I think about, like, a campaign or an organizing strategy, like, it also be great in understanding somatics, trauma, and resilience to go, okay, what's the already, what are the already resilience practices of these communities that we're organizing? How do we practice that on purpose, integrate those things on purpose into our organizing strategies or into our campaign or into our narrative?“ by Stacy K. Haynes
- “We become what we practice. We're always practicing something, and is what we're practicing aligned with what we most care about? Right. So part of the transformative work is aligning our. Our purposeful practices with what we most deeply care about. And that helps to transform our embodiment or transform our soma.“ by Stacy K. Haynes
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Episode Information
Green Dreamer: Seeding change towards collective healing, sustainability, regeneration
Kamea Chayne
4/20/23
“If we’re soaking in all these default practices that are power-over practices that are reflected to us through the media, through our families and communities, through how the economy works, it means we’re embodying things that we might not even agree with that might not at all align with our values, but we’re embodying them anyway.”
Staci K. Haines is a somatics innovator and the author of The Politics of Trauma. In her decades of working and teaching in the field of somatics, Staci has grown fascinated with the “how” rather than the “why.” She invokes questions such as how we are shaped, how we cultivate resilience, how we practice, and how we transform.
Observing somatics as a holistic paradigm shift, Staci offers insight into the body as a form of place—a place where the personal meets the collective. With this in mind, she invites us to explore how working with embodied somatic practices in safe and accessible ways can shape the ways in which we want to respond to, act on, and heal cycles of trauma. By leaning on the phrase “we become what we practice,” Staci poses somatics as a relational space where social justice, collective aliveness, and personal healing align in untangling the knots of exploitative power. Ultimately, she expresses the urgent need for collective resourcefulness as guided by somatic awareness.
(The musical offering featured in this episode is Trust The Sun by Oropendola. The episode-inspired artwork is by Nano Février.)
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