My somatics story, and a request for your support

Over the 16 months since I have been writing this blog, I have received many expressions of thanks and admiration. I deeply appreciate these words, and: I want to give credit where credit is due and request your assistance in supporting the giants whose shoulders I stand on. Many of the gems of wisdom I have shared with you come either directly or indirectly from transformational leadership trainings I have had the incredible luck and privilege to be part of. So today I want to tell you more about one of these training modalities, somatics, and invite you, if you are so moved, to donate to help make this powerful work accessible to more social movement leaders.

When I first encountered the work of generative somatics in 2009, I was at a conference highlighting a variety of transformational methodologies for movement organizing. Staci Haines and a colleague gave a presentation and experiential taste of it in a large group setting. I was intrigued enough to attend a smaller breakout session on it, where leaders of an organization founded earlier by Staci, Generation 5, were presenting on how they use somatics in their work to end childhood sexual abuse within five generations. I was completely blown away by their demonstrations. It seemed to me that they were able to read people’s minds.

Now, as a child I was fascinated by the idea of ESP, but had its utter impossibility drilled into me by my scientist father. So I believed the Gen5 folks when they said they were not reading minds, but reading bodies. Reading the twitch of an eyebrow, the set of a jaw, the pitch of the shoulders, the stance of the feet and hips, and from this lightening-quick study, making educated guesses, in many cases correct ones, about a person – not just their current emotions, but their history and habits as well.

This somatics lineage weaves together insights and practices from Aikido (the pictures above are of me doing the 31-jo-kata, a movement form from Aikido using a wooden staff or jo), meditation, psychology, linguistics, bodywork, and management theory into a deep path of practice for leadership and organizational development. Our whole beings – body, mind, and energy – are understood to be shaped by our life experiences, including our families, institutions, culture, social structures, landscape, and spiritual context. We have areas of habitual tension, called “armoring,” that enable and inhibit our abilities. We have “conditioned tendencies,” our automatic go-to shape that we pop into when something triggers us. These conditioned tendencies, or “CTs” for short, are usually some combination of fight, flight, freeze, or appease.

Somatics provides practice in repeatedly re-centering when we are pulled off in this way, and other strategies for slowly, with much practice, becoming aware of and transforming these habits of mind-body-energy. Over time, we can become more free, alive, and effective at manifesting our fullest potential in the world. It is a deep, long-term path of practice, and is used in leadership and organizational development to help people coordinate more effectively with one another, provide and take in honest feedback, handle breakdowns in trust, and create strong and connected teams. It is one of the most powerful methodologies I have encountered for creating social transformation. In my own life, it has been a potent source of healing, support, and challenge, enabling me to reshape my physical body and my leadership in the world.

A few months after my initial introduction to somatics, I developed a painful overgrowth of nerve tissue in my right foot, a “Morton’s neuroma.” It caused me intense stabbing pain at random moments, including in the middle of the night. I went on a several-year-long odyssey to try to figure out its cause and to heal it, involving many interventions including: Podiatry, acupuncture, chiropractic, neuromuscular therapy, wearing a lift in my left shoe and under my left sit-bone while sitting, wearing toe-separators at night, individualized yoga therapy, physical therapy, zero-balancing bodywork, and, at times, drastically curtailing basic activities like dancing, walking, and driving.

By the time I had my next exposure to somatics, in the summer of 2011, I had become very mindful of all kinds of habits of movement that might be contributing to my problems, but was fairly tied up in knots trying to figure it all out. Wendy Palmer, a deeply skilled somatics trainer, affirmed that I had an admirable level of somatic awareness, and encouraged me to let go of trying to figure it all out. Instead, she suggested I imagine someone whose movement I admired, and allow that energy and imagery to move me. And her daughter and co-teacher Tiphani Palmer told me that the “reshaping” she’d undergone through somatics had taken at least two or three years, and that as some parts of the body adjust to a new shape, it can cause issues in other parts.

After this 4-day workshop, I decided to take a deeper and longer-term dive into the somatics path, and, at Staci Haines’ suggestion, traveled to Petaluma California six times over the course of 2012 to complete the Strozzi Institute’s Somatic Coaching certification. Part of what this branch of somatics takes from linguistics is an understanding of the power of making a declaration about what we want to embody or manifest in the world. I came home from the first set of trainings, in February 2012, with the declaration, “I am a commitment to letting my full power flow.”

Practicing with this declaration I made major leaps forward in my leadership, moving CORE, then a fledgling all-volunteer project I had been ambivalently managing, into a pilot project with paid staff. As I moved through the year of coaching training, applying the methods to my own being and life, my declaration evolved, and so did CORE.

My declaration came to include bringing joy to the work of social change, and at one point Melissa, one of my peers in the coaching training, asked me on a phone check-in, “how is that joy part going for you, Becca?” I knew she was onto something – if I wanted to bring joy to others, I had to learn how to let it bubble up through my own being more of the time. At the next training, I got back to my lodging one evening after an intense bodywork session (I’ll say more about the bodywork component of somatics in a bit), and realized that I was supposed to give a presentation about CORE to a my peer group the next day, and hadn’t planned what to say!

Still basking in the deeply generative energy unleashed by the training and bodywork, and percolating on Melissa’s prompt about joy, instead of going into panic / production mode, I proceeded to write an 11-verse limerick about CORE. I fell asleep writing it and woke up the next morning and finished it. Constrained by the limerick form, I explained what CORE was more clearly than I ever had before (one of my closest friends, who had heard me talk about it for a couple of years, said she finally understood it when she heard the limerick). I hadn’t been writing much poetry at that point, so this was something of a surprise. It is a great example of the kind of effects somatics has had on me.

One of the most powerful components of the somatics methodology is its gentle yet profound form of hands-on bodywork. Having been through neuromuscular therapy (an extremely painful form of bodywork similar to Rolfing) in my search to heal my neuroma, I was again astonished by somatics. It is mostly quite gentle touch, done with the body fully clothed, and includes at times specific patterns of breathing or vocalization. It can generate sometimes-unfamiliar bodily sensations such as tingling, tremors, feelings of energy movement, and deep emotional catharsis. The somatic practitioner/coach works with the whole person, attending to the stories and yearnings as well as their physical embodiment. The process leads to “de-armoring,” and creates openings to the possibilities of a new shape in the world.

Most importantly, I found the shifts in my shape created by the bodywork to be much more sustainable “off the table” than the other modalities I had tried. While my neuroma never went away, my relationship to it, and to my physical being in general, changed significantly. I began to be more athletic than I ever had been, even before the neuroma.

After I completed the coaching training sequence, I continued my somatics studies, attending the “School of Embodied Leadership” or SOEL course, one of the most intense courses offered in this tradition. It includes a physical training component, with Pilates and aerobic exercise. I was actually quite afraid of this course, and how I would handle my neuroma, weak knees, and other assorted worries. I anticipated the course for several months after signing up for it, and upped my exercise level in preparation, including joining a masters’ swim practice (also inspired by my desire to improve my ability to be a Special Olympics swimming coach).

After attending SOEL in the fall of 2013, I didn’t want to backslide, and began seeing a fitness trainer for the first time. I found the experience deeply empowering. SOEL’s philosophy is that in order to be the strongest leaders we can be, we need the strongest physical containers we can have. Remembering this helped motivate me when the exercises my fitness trainer set for me felt daunting.

I continued my increased athleticism through much of my chemotherapy for breast cancer in 2015, and this year I have been doing Pilates more intensively, and taken up the truly astonishing challenge of low-flying trapeze. As someone who was clumsy at gymnastics as a child, was one of the last people picked for teams in gym class, and was always afraid of getting hurt in new activities (and often actually did get hurt), this is a pretty remarkable reshaping!

In addition to my body, my poetry, and my leadership being positively impacted by somatics, relationships in my life have also benefitted. Rather than handling conflict mostly by avoiding it or appeasing the person who is upset (and then crawling off to sulk or lick my wounds), I am increasingly able to face into difficult interactions in a centered way, sometimes with remarkable effects, and I recover much more quickly from many interactions that once would have left me feeling triggered for hours.

Because of how powerful I find this work, I am moved to share it as widely as possible. As I have said, it is a deep, long-term path of practice, so it is not accessible to everyone. However, I believe it is one of the most powerful approaches there is to transforming our society, and it gives me hope.

My hopefulness is not just based on my own experience, but also on hearing stories of how somatics is being used in social movement campaigns. The National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), for example, has been training its staff and grassroots leaders in somatics through their “SOL” program, and has won a series of important legislative and policy victories organizing based on love and compassion rather than anger or fear. Bringing nannies, the upper-class women who employ them, the children they care for, and the nannies’ own children to state capitols to lobby together for a domestic workers’ bill of rights with signs saying “protect my nanny” and “protect my mommy” is one image that has stuck with me from stories of this amazing work. Ripples of this work have been far-reaching and have touched all of us; for instance, Alicia Garza, one of the co-creators of #BlackLivesMatter, is a Special Projects Director for NDWA.

I am so inspired by this work that for the past year, even during my cancer treatment, I have been working to share somatics with social movement activists in Wisconsin. I took a lead role in organizing and funding the first generative somatics training in Wisconsin in December of 2015. This was one of the only projects I kept working on through my chemo treatments and surgery recovery, including, at times, having phone meetings from various hospital and clinic rooms (one time a kind receptionist took pity on me and gave me access to the clinic conference room for a call!)

Though I have hopes of bringing a lot more somatics to Wisconsin, at this point generative somatics’ own capacity to deliver trainings like this is still quite limited. So, this year I signed up to be part of their Transformational Fundraising Pilot project. This team of 13 has committed to raise $100,000 by October to support the growth of gs’ own capacity, so that more people can benefit from this important movement development work.

This fundraising pilot project is aiming to be transformational in several ways. First, it is a mixed-class cohort of people involved with somatics. We each made a “give or get” pledge, with a sliding scale from $500 to $25,000, depending on our own financial capacity, the capacity of the people we know, and our fundraising experience. Building relationships across such differences, with explicit knowledge of and attention to the differences, is in and of itself a unique opportunity to look at this aspect of our social structure that is so often missing from our discussions and self-understandings. (See the fascinating book Missing Class by Betsy Leondar-Wright for an enlightening sociological discussion of how class cultures shape US activist groups, and how by missing their significance, we misunderstand conflicts within these groups and miss opportunities to build more effective organizations).

Secondly, as part of the project, we came together for a 4-day somatics training where we applied the methodology to look deeply at how we have been shaped by our experiences with money and class. We each researched and shared our own “emotional/political autobiographies” with respect to class. This assignment led me to many new conversations and insights about my own class background and trajectory. For instance, I have begun to understand how a very early experience of feeling like my own thriving was at another’s expense created an internal conflict over how much space to take up in the world that played out in many relationships throughout my life; and also how my current access to wealth reinforces my knee-jerk habit of trying to “fix” problems in order to avoid feeling the pain of them. My most recent declaration, which grew out of this work, is: “I am a commitment to being a humble, joyful, and loving channel of transformation toward the interdependent thriving of all beings.”

Because of my deep yearning for a better world and my confidence in somatics as a method of transformation towards that world, I am for the first time using this blog to make a fundraising request. I invite you, my readers, to be part of this movement. If you have found value in my writings over the past year and a half, you have benefited from my training in somatics. If you have the desire and the capacity to give back to support this movement, please click here to make a donation at whatever level feels right to you. Thank you for reading my story, supporting my transformation, and considering this request.