Staci K. Haines: Somatics for trauma healing and transformative justice (ep396)
“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.
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About the guest:
Staci has been experimenting at the intersections of personal and social transformation for the last 30 years through the work of somatics, trauma healing, embodied leadership, and transformative justice. Staci is the author of The Politics of Trauma: Somatics, Healing and Social Justice (North Atlantic Books 2019) and Healing Sex: A Mind Body Approach to Healing Sexual Trauma (Cleis 1999, 2007), which has been translated into German, Japanese and Spanish.
Staci is a leader in the field of Somatics focusing on how it can bring transformative capacity to social and climate justice movements, and help to heal the impacts of trauma and oppression. She runs programs and teacher training, and partners with social change organizations. She is a senior teacher at Strozzi Institute and the co-founder, and prior executive director, of Generative Somatics, a multiracial social justice capacity-building organization. Staci also founded generationFIVE, a nonprofit whose mission is to end the sexual abuse of children within five generations, using transformative justice approaches.
Artistic credits:
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Oropendola
Episode-inspired artwork by Nano Février.
Dive deeper:
The Politics of Trauma, a book by Staci Haines
The Trauma of Caste, a book by Thenmozhi Soundararajan
Learn more about the work of Eduardo Galeano
Learn more about The Embodiment Institute
“Embodied Healing Approaches to Personal, Generational, and Socio-Political Trauma,” an interview with Staci hosted by Bioneers
Expand your lenses:
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Transcript:
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Staci Haines: I grew up in a family that was very connected to nature in the Colorado Rockies, in a very small town. I spent a lot of time in nature, and found a place of refuge, of what I'd now call a spiritual connection. I also grew up in a family where there was a lot of violence- violence is between the adults, violence within the community. I'm a survivor of child sexual abuse. And when I got to my own breaking point of, 'I got to figure something out, I got to heal or or it's going to get bad', I was fortunately in an environment in college where I was also getting politicized. And for me, they just fell together.
Even [when I tried] to get help, when I went to the college psych services, they're like, 'There's not that many people who experience incest, so if you want a group, you're going to have to organize a group yourself.' So even to get help, I had to be an activist about the issue and organize as a group, and only then would they run it. Because I was in an environment where I was learning much more about political history and movement, history and feminism and anti-racism and anti-colonialism, I knew this was a political issue, this is not just a personal and psychological issue.
There were some days when I felt like, 'I do not have the wherewithal or the courage to heal for myself today, but I can heal for the people who come after me because that's what people before me did.
They changed the world and I am benefiting, and I'm part of that lineage or that chain of commitment toward healing and liberation and social justice'. So, in some ways they were just so woven together for me from the beginning.
Kamea Chayne: That's really powerful. Thank you so much for sharing a bit of your story. This is the first time that we're talking about somatics on the show. So I would appreciate actually if we can start from the very basics and foundations here, as in what exactly is somatics, and what does it have to do with our broader socioecological, spiritual crises?
Staci Haines:
Somatics is a shift of paradigm and a shift of worldview, especially from the standard Western worldview about how we as human beings change.
And it really gets away from the whole mind-body split, or the Cartesian view of kind of like the mind should control everything. And along with that is a deep objectification of the body, objectification of nature, objectification of other. There's this beautiful, very short poem by Eduardo Galeano, who is a leftist journalist, theorist, Uruguayan. And it goes like this: "The church says the body is a sin. Science says the body is a machine. Advertising, [or sometimes capitalism] says the body is a business. The body says, I am a fiesta."
I love that piece because it gives us a baseline of what somatics means. Soma is a Greek root and it means 'the living organism in its wholeness'. It's the best word we have in English to really mean the psychobiology and our relationality, or the sensing self, the emotional self, the thinking self, the relational self, and how we take action- that's all one whole piece rather than this inheritance that many of us got about the body as a thing.
Somatics helps us understand ourselves in this wholeness, and it also helps us understand how we change.
You've probably noticed, or some of 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. Often, when we hit those places of reaction, or stress, or pressure, or even a new risk, even love can be a new risk, that these very old habits and the sex, the biology and the body-mind tend to run the show instead of how we want to be, or how we want to relate, or how we want to act. So somatics helps us understand that, and understand and how to work with it.
Kamea Chayne: To summarize a little bit, somatics really looks at human beings as much more integrated and holistic selves, which stands in opposition to dominant Western worldviews that name and separate, for example, the mind and body and spirit. I guess I'm curious how this might have been reflected in the broader systems, because I know you're keen on really connecting the dots between the personal and the systemic. So what do you think have been the impacts and limitations of this way of objectifying the body, and splitting and compartmentalizing how we conceptualize our whole selves?
Staci Haines: To me it is one of the root causes of the disaster we're living in. We are living in climate injustice, we are living in climate collapse caused by humans, and we are living in a level of inequity that is just so profoundly unnecessary. All the inequity serves is greed, it doesn't serve life. And I think this controlling and objectifying the body, controlling and objectifying the planet as a place of resource for human beings instead of as a sacred home. Worst case scenario, we're going to drive ourselves and all large mammals off the planet with that. So I think this deep split and objectification and separation has been a core narrative belief system, a set of violences that keep inequity or power over systems perpetuating and intact.
One of the ways that somatics and social justice connect is, there's a phrase we have in semantics, which is, 'We become what we practice.' We're always practicing something and is what we're practicing aligned with what we most care about?
Part of the transformative work is aligning our purposeful practices with what we most deeply care about, and that helps to transform our embodiment or transform our soma.
That's one aspect of it. But when we back this up and understand social conditions, most of our default practices are inherited from our social conditions, and we begin to learn them and embody them at such a profoundly young age. So if what we're learning in dominant Western culture is animals don't have feelings, rocks and trees and plants in the air aren't alive, they are things. Or people different than us, we should separate from.
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.
So when we look at somatics and social justice, it's like somatics helps us heal and transform the impacts of oppression. But it can also help us transform how we've embodied mainstream power-over ways of being, or narratives that we might not even agree with. And then as social change agents, whether someone's an activist, organizer, a movement leader, it helps us develop ourselves kind of from the inside out so that we can be, and lead, and relate in a way that has more capacity, but also is more aligned with our values.
Kamea Chayne: This all resonates with me because I believe that transformations need to take place at every level, including all that we embody and how we can also embody the values and changes that we wish to see in the world. And with that split as well, I think many of our more dominant cultures place more value on rational thinking than on our emotional experiences. So we've talked before on the show about the sort of cultural gaslighting going on where we're supposed to suppress and ignore our feelings of burnout or exhaustion. And healing is about healing so that we can keep turning away to contribute to this endless economic growth that supposedly is more important than the growth of our collective sense of aliveness.
It feels like there's a lot of emotional suppression and contraction, and we are at a time of immense change and loss in many ways, whether the loss of our loved ones too soon to illnesses that could have been prevented, the unprecedented loss of biodiversity as we've known it, the loss of community and rooted relationships. And a lot of this requires us to slow down and take the time to process and grieve. And yet, I don't know that many of us have had the space and time and safety to grieve.
So I wonder if you've thought about the relationship between grief and the cultures that tend to suppress them, as well as, more broadly speaking, the impacts of containing grief on our abilities to heal from a lot of these traumas?
Staci Haines:
One of the things that somatics really understands is that we have this innate ability to adapt, and then we have these core needs that we're adapting to from the very beginning.
We talk about those needs as, we have an inherent need for safety, for belonging, for being a part of the social fabric, for belonging, and for dignity- or you can think of it as inherent worth. And then, of course, we have material needs for clean water and good food and education, all those pieces. But what's interesting about the soma is that it is adapting to try to take care of safety, belonging and dignity in all kinds of creative ways. We end up calling these condition tendencies. We develop these condition tendencies or kind of habitual ways of responding or reacting, especially under pressure. But part of those condition tendencies are also what we're trained into by our social conditions, and our community narratives and practices. When we look at something like oppression, violence, trauma, we also have these automatic survival strategies that try to help us live through these things.
Most people have heard about the fight or flight response, and we'll talk about it as fight, flight, freeze, appease and dissociate. And again, we don't have to learn any of those- they come with that evolutionary wisdom in our beings and our bodies. But what happens is that through these adaptations, through these survival strategies, we can develop these very deep habits that actually shrink our emotional capacity and habituate the ways that we relate, and have us act certain ways, many of which might not work anymore and not be able to take other actions. And that whole thing can't be changed just by will. It's an embodied set of conditioning and survival strategies that really require that we transform our way out of it.
So when I really look at expanding our emotional range, like, first of all, rational thinking is awesome, analysis is great, we need it. But it's only one form of knowing. As you know, I'm very interested in death and dying. And I really look at what the study is of what people say is important to them as they're dying. And people say their relationships- who loved me and who I got to love. And did I make any difference? Did I make a difference for the world or for my community or for my family? Those are the things people are coming back to, not 'how much money did I have?' And so this whole thing of having a wide emotional range, that we can feel delight and joy and even ecstasy, and that can actually be present with irritation, anger and rage, can process sadness and grief- we can let ourselves go. I feel afraid- but you let it be an emotion that we can process through together. I just see it as essential in our times.
If we're not feeling, we are going to get so clogged up, then what we do is we either act out on each other or we act in.
There's just no way. That's what we do. It's predictable, unless we can keep mending and moving and healing and feeling and letting emotions move, and letting those historical survival strategies and habits not be the only place from which we live or make decisions.
Kamea Chayne: So it's really important to feel and also listen to our emotions and how they might be guiding us. I recently shared a conversation with Vijay Prashad, in which we talked about building societies that are able to scale these small gestures of humanity and care, like checking out our neighbors, lending a hand to elders in our communities, bringing foods and medicines to friends or people who are sick. These acts of kindness that I think most everyone can agree on as being positive and inspiring.
Though the question we couldn't really answer, and perhaps there are no straight answers either. But the question I raised was, why is it that most people can get behind these small gestures of kindness, but conditions of scarcity or fear can lead some people to open up and revive collective care and organizing in the bigger picture, whereas it might lead other people to put up walls and discriminate and exclude? I get the sense that you maybe you could speak to this in more trauma-informed language and perspective. So I'd be keen on hearing how you might expand upon this and just how trauma might put our inherent needs against one another and influence our broader orientations of politics and what is possible.
Staci Haines: I can't underscore how deep these impulses are in us for survival and for safety, belonging and dignity. There's a couple of feral cats that live outside my house, I put food out for them. But it's so interesting to watch this one female like when she gets scared, it is amazing to just watch her crouch, her hair hackel, her eyes get wide. And I'm like, right, that's happening deeply inside of all of us.
Given that we're living in an existential threat around climate and that we do not have social norms and an economy that bring us together, that are based on interdependence, on the well-being and equality of all people, we are in collective distress.
So when I think about the people that really go from distress and move to collective care and organizing for change, and then the other folks that kind of hunker down, I do not have the answer, but I'll throw out some of my thoughts.
I think for some of the folks that hunker down, it's really confusing when trauma and privilege interact. Privilege teaches us that I'm safe because I have power-over. Like if we look at whiteness and white supremacy, I'm white, right? White U.S.-born. The training is that power over is what gives me safety, and that gets lodged as an idea because it's a lie inherently, but really deep in the nervous system. So therefore, if somehow I'm not in control or don't have some level of power over, I'm endangered. It's very deep what we're trying to unpack internally as well as systemically,
Really, to me, what's true is we are safest inside of interdependence. We are most resourced inside of our collectivity.
Often they'll talk about this epidemic of loneliness, which to me is a result of profound individualism, a culture based on individualism—of course we're going to be lonely. But this epidemic of loneliness, what I see in people over and over again is a longing for community, is a longing for 'we,' but a social training that is often traumatized into us, that says 'I'm only going to be safe with a few people or I'm only going to be safe alone.’ I think about it sometimes like addiction. I'm a harm reductionist at heart. But let's say alcohol use. Someone is starting to hurt themselves or hurt the people around them. There's still an impulse in their bodies that wants to drink alcohol even though it's hurting them. And that's sometimes how I think about these survival strategies that are mixed with a domination-based inculturation, is the impulses for safety, for belonging, but sometimes it gets turned awry by the social conditioning that says the only way you can access that is by power over, or by more isolation and separation. And it's the wrong solution for the need.
Kamea Chayne: So at least some of the barriers could be our social conditioning and the cultural stories we've been exposed to, and the norms and values we've been taught and have to unravel and unlearn, for a lot of people.
Something that you've shared before is that "Traumatic experiences are never outside of social conditions. Even the most intimate traumas are so influenced by the social conditions, norms and economics set up in which we live."
First of all, I'm curious about this idea that even individualized traumas are collective experiences, perhaps born out of our underlying power-over structures. I think it's easier to understand how conditions of poverty or economic hardships can lead people to react in certain ways that may cause trauma for other people involved, like the saying that hurt people hurt people. But I think it can be more difficult for people to see and empathize with the same dynamic in, say, rich and powerful men who exploit their workers or abuse their partners.
So I think I would ask whether it's farfetched to say that the people causing the most harm in our society perhaps also have deep traumas and wounds of disassociation from real community, from rooted connections to place and from grounded orientations towards values of interdependence. With that, I wonder whether there are ways to shift culture through more loving and empathetic approaches—approaches which see those who've caused the most destruction as those who actually are the most lost, and those who actually need guidance and healing rather than punishment. This isn't at all a judgment of the ways that various communities are fighting against and attempting to quash their own perpetrators of harm, but more so just a bigger picture question on our possibilities of interrupting cycles of trauma.
Staci Haines: Understanding a person in somatics, what we call their shaping, what's influenced them, what they embody, and the behavior coming out of that. So understanding their trauma, understanding their shaping does not mean that we don't want to address their behavior and stop harmful behavior. I've been connected to and involved in transformative justice for a very long time now. When I first started looking at non-state based, non-punishment based responses to violence and harm, it was through the lens of child sexual abuse. In the late nineties, we gathered about 350 people into different focus groups, the focus groups might be ten people. And we were really asking this question, how would we end the sexual abuse of children within a hundred years? How would we do that? What would we need to change?
It was amazing because of course it's very complex. So how would we pull that out of default cultural practice? And it's something that's already legislated as illegal, but that legislation makes no difference on people's behavior. Right. But one of the things that was so hopeful, there were three of these focus groups that were just adult survivors of child sexual abuse. Over and over again in those conversations, people said, 'I don't want this person picked up by the police. I do not want this person to go to jail. What I want is for this person to be able to transform. What I want is for them to stop that harmful behavior. What I want is for them to apologize to me. That's what I want.' And there is something in that because I resonated with that, too. That's what I wanted also.
Even now, there's a whole organizing project right now of. It's called Survivors of Crime. But anyway, it's survivors and people who've experienced violence who are organizing to get rid of all the three strikes laws because they do not believe in incarceration as a way to transform. They're really wanting restorative and transformative justice. So, yes, to what you're saying, how do we say we want the behavior to stop. We want to change the social norm and economy, patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism that keep training people into power-over. But we want to do that through organizing policy change, change of leadership, all the ways that we do social change.
We want to be able to hold a wide enough space for people who've caused harm, to believe in their humanity, to support them in learning how to be accountable, and in some ways bring them back into the fold of community in every case that we possibly can.
What future are we building? I can say a lot of different things, but this is for sure an aspect of it that we are cultivating love, accountability, humanity. And there's a room and a place for folks to transform, particularly the people who do and have done harm.
The last thing I'm going to say here, which is just the complexity, is not all people who have done or are doing harm are open to changing. And I just think we also have to be real about that. Sometimes the drivers inside of them are so deep and we do need to make sure they are not in positions of power where they can continue harm. We do need to make sure that they are in an environment in which they're not doing harm. And I don't mean an environment like a prison, I mean like a circle of accountability or a circle of support. But, you know, humans are complex. And when and how and under what conditions folks are really willing to engage in transformation is it's not actually the simplest answer.
Kamea Chayne: The contexts of trauma and harm are really important, and also the context of healing and transformation are also critical too. And it certainly sounds like it's a lot more challenging when we're talking about people contributing to systemic harm that may not be deemed as viscerally violent under the dominant lenses, but actually contribute to harm at such a wider and bigger scale. Or maybe people contributing to harm through the corporations that they work as a part of, but the corporations are driven by certain incentives that this human being, if left to act on their own, wouldn't make these same decisions—but when guided by the incentives of the corporation, are enacting or contributing to harm through that kind of social construct of an entity. So there's a lot more here.
I guess an uneasy question that remains on my mind is whether power-over dynamics are inherently trauma-inducing? And mind you, this is uneasy for me because I do see domination as likely being traumatic for those involved. But I'm curious if there are more layers of nuance here because we've talked about how individual trauma is collective and rooted in a lot of these power-over structures and economics and politics. But even though all parts of our more-than-human world have likely also been traumatized and ravaged by our dominant extractive systems, it feels like a stretch for me to say, for example, that the domination hierarchies present in many other social creatures come from that.
So, for example, we know that wolf packs, or baboons, or all sorts of other herd animals or pack animals or colony insects also have domination hierarchies in place just as a part of their social function. And most of the more-than-human world operates more so under a sort of messy, anarchic non-structure which is ever-changing. And so there is collaboration, there's reciprocity, there's symbiosis, and there's also competition and there's domination and taking over.
Also, various land-based cultures also have chiefs or kings and queens and leaders who exercise more power in certain areas than others in the collective. So I wonder if there are nuances within power-over dynamics that we could unravel further, as in, what leads some of such hierarchies to become traumatizing? And what is it that leads other hierarchies to even be supportive of a community's collective functioning and well-being? And maybe that lies in how we define hierarchy and power-over?
Staci Haines: I think when we're talking about power-over versus power-with, maybe we could be more nuanced in how we talk about the exploitation of people and land. The exploitation of people on the earth and inside of exploitation, the profit extracted from the land or from the people is kept by a small few. I don't think all hierarchies run on that notion. So when I'm talking or when we are talking about power-over inside of this conversation, I'm thinking much more about extraction, exploitation and the concentration of wealth, power and decision-making in a few people and the lack of agency for the majority exploited inside of that.
And right next to that, I believe in organizations and movement organizations. And I support all the experiments that are going on out there that are more flat structures. When I look at the organizations that I've operated inside of or worked with, there are hierarchies inside of those social and climate justice organizations. When I look at hierarchy, or even when I look at skill development- like mentorship, we could say is a power-over relationship. Although there's choice of agency for the mentor and the mentee, but there's a difference in capacity and competency, but passing on an uplifting skill and competency, that's a big part of what we want to do and how we get to be developed and develop each other. So I do think that unpacking what do we actually mean by hierarchy, and then what do we mean by extraction and exploitation, and wealth and decision-making and power being concentrated in a few people? That is traumatizing. That depends on violence, co-optation and trauma to keep that kind of system going. But hierarchies, especially, I think of them sometimes now as rotating hierarchies, like how is there ongoing leadership development where there might be a certain groupings of people in more leadership or more mentorship or more decision making? But those aren't permanent, and there can be a lifting up and leadership development of other people. I've also been part of a co-op. It took a long time to make any sense of a co-op structure. And I felt like we could have been a little bit more effective and efficient had we not had consensus voting.
There are a lot of decisions to make about how we operate as humans, but to me, this baseline is of a principle of equity, a principle of the well-being of our natural environment and the sustainability of our natural environment.
We're like in 7000 years of patriarchy. This is so old, so deep that it has to go, as does colonization and white supremacy.
I often think of humans as this: we're just this walking contradiction. The worst of us is the worst of us- power, trauma, violence, domination. That's in our capacity, obviously. And then there is the best of us; we're incredibly cooperative. We can be incredibly selfless and generous. We're incredibly feeling-full. Like we can feel the environment, we can feel each other, we can feel the vastness. What is the society and economy asking us to practice? What are we being asked to practice through social norms and through our economic structures and our governance? We want to keep uplifting the practices of cooperation, uplifting the practices of interdependence, uplifting the practices of generosity. Now, truth be told, I think we'll all be a lot happier then, too.
Kamea Chayne: Thank you for this. And yeah, it's definitely very important to distinguish hierarchy that is exploitative and extractive from different forms of experimental hierarchy that still ultimately is rooted in reciprocity and respect and collective growth and well-being.
Now, on this note, your book, The Politics of Trauma, helps people to identify, understand and address the deeper sources of trauma, like their political, social and economic roots in order to bridge individual healing with social transformation. Why do you think it is so critical, especially for activists and changemakers, to understand how trauma offers context as to how people, whether ourselves or those were organizing with or those were offering support for respond to situations or our conditions? And what should we ultimately about the relation between trauma healing and the societal and cultural changes that we hope to see and bring about in the world?
Staci Haines:
When we're thinking about strategy, movement strategy or project strategy, it can be so useful to recognize that most of us, or most people who are organizing have experienced either individual or systemic trauma.
So that means there's going to be certain survival strategies that we can predict. So that fight or flight response or appeasing. And if we don't address them proactively, they tend to act out on each other, which then weakens and makes our organizing less resilient. Another thing that somatics understands is we are inherently resilient and we can cultivate that resilience on purpose.
And when I think about a campaign or an organizing strategy, it can also be great in understanding somatic trauma and resilience to go, okay, what are the already [existing] 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? So it's almost like much more deeply knowing who we are and how we've been shaped, the communities we're organizing with, who they are and how they been shaped, and then how to work with these predictable strengths, like resilience or reactivity from trauma and oppression that are just inevitably going to be in mix.
Just like how political education or leadership development are such important parts of organizing, forms of healing or transformative development need to also be an inherent part of how we think about our organizing and social change work.
There might be study groups for political education or speakers or a program people take together, it's almost the same thing of like, of course we've been impacted by trauma and oppression, so let's proactively learn resilience building practices together, learn ways we can sit and be in support of each other's healing, learn how to become less reactive based out of our trauma and oppression and more responsive to our visions, our strategies, the totally natural conflicts and differences that are going to come up when we're working together. Let's weave in all these pieces to serve our broader visions for change because they're going to come up anyway.
Kamea Chayne: I feel like learning all of these things can support the growth in our capacities for empathy and strengthen our movements by lessening the chances of internal conflicts becoming implosive rather than generative, or harm even being perpetuated rather than disrupted and transformed every point that they could be within the movements. There are a lot of difficult dynamics and hierarchies that aren't necessarily healthy within a lot of movements made up of people from all walks of life. So I think that this is critical learning for everybody.
And while we're nearing the end of our main conversation here, the last thing I wanted to weave in is, there's a lot of burnout for people on the frontlines of community defense initiatives or resistance movements or labor organizing and so forth. This is totally understandable, given everything we just discussed in terms of the broader context of trauma. It's often those who carry the most weight from collective trauma and generational trauma who are standing on the frontlines of systemic pressure, creating cracks and leading a path towards other ways of being.
I wonder if you see this kind of sacrificial burnout as being inevitable and therefore different people just have to cycle through being out there, burning out, and then tapping in and tapping out, or otherwise, what are some practices people can engage in to embody the change that we wish to see more deeply in terms of our very personal healing and well-being in ways that can also support our how so that we're not self-destructive in this process, but maybe even doing things in ways that are life-enhancing for ultimately growing our sense of safety, belonging and dignity?
Staci Haines: I don't see it as inevitable, I see it as understandable given our conditions. While there's billions of dollars, I mean, how many new billionaires were there during the pandemic? It's heartbreaking. Our movements don't have that kind of budget. The more resourced we are, the more resourceful we can be and the more we can resource people, it's all interconnected. In somatics, we look through these through three lenses, we really look to cultivate somatic awareness. What am I noticing in my senses? What am I noticing in my emotions? What is the aliveness that's moving in my own soma, in myself, in my body? So growing somatic awareness. And then we have this orientation again towards somatic practice. How can we be practicing? What can we be purposefully practicing either individually or together that helps us live and lead in the ways that we want to? And then the third part is somatic opening, and that's really more of the deeper healing piece. How do we take these patterns that are lodged deeply in our tissues, in our thinking, in our emotions, and how do we unwind those thoughts, soften those again, to process those through so we're not carrying around or compartmentalizing these patterns and then acting from them?
There's a lot we can do with folks on the front line and the organizations that support them, because mostly those frontline folks are in organizations. There's a lot we can do around, again, what are our what's our strategy and tactics in organizing, but to say, let's all be in a practice of somatic awareness. What are we all noticing? Let's be in purposeful practices that are about knowing what brings each other resilience, that we say as a team we're going to literally practice resilience at least once a month on purpose. We're going to take time to go do that, or daily practices, like we'll use a centering practice, a practice that we call a 'hand on heart' or 'mutual connection', a practice is called a 'rowing practice' that can help move stress and energy. There are daily practices that folks on the front line and organizers can be in and that help process stress, help build more calmness, more responsiveness, less reactivity. So I think there's actually a lot we can do rather than just kind of running folks to burnout and then bringing in the next batch. But I think the organization itself has to support that.
The organization itself has to bring in people that are relevant to that community and [offer some] new practices, bring in and invest in some of that other support, so that folks have not just one more thing they're supposed to do in their spare time, but actually something that's built into the organization in support of folks on the frontline.
A couple of weeks ago, I was down in L.A. working with three organizations that do decarceration, anti-incarceration and abolition work. And all three of those organizations are very concretely investing in embodied somatic transformation work for their staff, for their organizers, and handpicking somatic practices that work for the folks that they organize, as well as integrating this orientation of trauma-informed, and cultivating resilience into a lot of their campaigns and their organizing approaches. So folks are out there doing that, folks are out there experimenting. And again, which of these these healing or transformative practices most resonate with the folks on staff, with the organizers, of the folks they're organizing with, and integrating those.
~ musical intermission ~
Kamea Chayne: What is one of the most impactful books you've read or publications you follow?
Staci Haines: The Trauma of Caste by Thenmozhi Soundararajan, which I just read, and it blew my mind.
Kamea Chayne: What is a personal motto, mantra or practice that you engage with to stay grounded?
Staci Haines: I regularly do a centering practice and a two step-practice, and then really it's expanding out and connecting to what I call spirit for guidance.
Kamea Chayne: And what is one of your greatest sources of inspiration at the moment?
Staci Haines: There's this dojo, this training center that I was working in for four days last week, and there's this big sliding glass door on one side. And in between the frame of the door and the wood of the floor, about 12 feet off the ground, there's this little piece of grass that was growing right there inside. That was very inspiring for me.
Kamea Chayne: Staci, thank you so much for joining me today, it was an honor to have you and just really grateful for this nourishing conversation. For now, what final words of wisdom do you have for us as Green Dreamers?
Staci Haines: What a beautiful question. How do we keep feeling for what's life giving and following that, even when it might not make sense in our current moment. But I really trust that longing, that impulse toward what's life giving.
(This conversation was originally recorded during the start of 2023.)
