Creating Just Human Cultures Starts in the Intimate Terrain of Our Bodies
From the moment I can remember having a social consciousness, I have been dedicated to women’s wellness and freedom. Because of this, I’ve been a staunch activist working to dismantle the violent millennia-old cross-cultural domination of women. In my 54 years, I’ve spent a fair amount of time on one version of the front lines or another, whether at rallies and protests, engaging in nonviolent direct action, working at Safehouses and rape crisis centers, or as a teacher, advocate and guide in the radical new activism of somatic sex education.
In the last two decades, I have come to understand that fundamental social change seeds and roots within the intimate and often uncharted terrain of our emotional and physical bodies. Terrain that has been devalued, colonized, and commercialized by the dominant culture just as it is often ignored by activists themselves.
The devaluing of our human bodies and their more vulnerable experiences of fear, longing, grief, and deep pleasure, makes perfect sense in a system that is operating within the sympathetic branch of its nervous system – when it is actively experiencing itself in a fight to the death. Pleasure is a luxury in this terrain. And grief is a vulnerability it cannot afford. Fear radically constricts the field of connection and possibility. It limits outcomes and the possibility of creative, never-before-seen solutions and connections. Pleasure, on the other hand, expands the possibility of outcomes. It infuses the soil with invitation and generativity, for the energy of life-giving eros to weave unimaginable seeds of wellness.
Fundamental systemic social change begins with the safety to feel our feelings, to befriend and learn to trust our intimate internal experiences. It begins with the reclaiming of our emotions – all of them – and it is rooted in practices that honor the wisdom that our pleasure is a pathway to our belonging, and belonging is the inoculation against hatred and fear and the injustices they spawn.
These days it may seem like we are surely tone-deaf if we are concerning ourselves with our embodiment and particularly, with what is pleasurable. With so much horrific violence, so much systemic injustice, how could we justify taking time to consider the extent of our embodiment or the pathways that nourish us with pleasure?
Yet it is imperative that we remember that true systemic change, change that comes from the soil and the roots and grows upward and outward, happens only through an embodied transformation; one that is lived within the intimate terrain of our individual bodies and the intimate terrain of our human communities. Cultural transformation happens as a result of an intrapersonal, interpersonal and transpersonal embodied transformation of belonging that necessarily leads to just, vibrant and diverse systems of radical wellness.
But what is embodied transformation and how does it happen? Embodied transformation is the intimate decolonization that occurs when:
We have a safe(enough) space and the necessary guidance to feel, in present moment, all the feelings (emotional, spiritual, and physical) that are living within us as a result of being human at this time
We cognitively understand and physically experience the vast tapestry of sensations involved in being a human who is paying attention – a human who is not actively numbing ourselves out
We acknowledge, specifically, that experiences of pleasure – in its myriad forms – are necessary to being a vibrantly well, responsibly engaged human.
Embodied transformation is the intimate, resilient adaptation and growth that occurs when each and every body is supported to experience its unique self-in-relation-to-the-world (physically, emotionally and spiritually), in community with other bodies (human and other-than-human). Bodies that are supported in this way are bodies that behave in a just, equitable and responsible way.
A body that is colonized to look, feel, and behave a certain way is a body that will create more of the tyranny that it has experienced. A decolonized body, one that has had the support and freedom to reclaim its physical, emotional, and spiritual shape, in relation and response to all other beings around it, is a body that is intelligent, generative, and generous.
So how do we take the very first step toward embodied transformation? We begin to understand the many ways we have slowly formed around the intimate physical, emotional, communal, and cultural tyrannies we have each experienced. We acknowledge and explore the extraordinary and complex terrain of our autonomic nervous system and the many ways it is designed, for better and for worse, to keep us alive.
But even more important, we begin to learn the many ways our autonomic nervous system is designed to experience deep states of pleasure and wellness. States of transformational embodiment, many of which are based in experiences of pleasure.
Our embodied pleasure affirms our place, belonging, value, and worth. Our embodied pleasure creates a neurological positive feedback loop, which then becomes the dominant orientation of the system as a whole. As this positive feedback loop takes hold and extends its benevolent intelligent roots throughout our entire emotional, physical, and spiritual ecosystem, we become less and less hospitable, less available, to the erroneous and dangerous stories, belief systems and behaviors of the dominant culture.
The caveat here, one that guides the Verdant Collective, is that this process of decolonizing our intimate terrain only works when it takes place in community. We do not become unwell on our own. We become unwell when we are isolated from communities of wellness and immersed in systems that are ill. A body (and nervous system) that is held in safe (enough) community has the foundation and nourishment to reclaim its intrinsic shimmering resilience and adaptive wellness.
And so, in our continued support of a much-needed human emotionally, physically, and spiritually embodied transformation for Earth and all its people, the Verdant Collective is offering a timely course: Erotic Embodiment and the Triune Autonomic Nervous System. Starting in just two weeks, we embark on an online, live adventure to explore, nourish and remember the many ways we are so beautifully, perfectly designed to feel, to heal, and to transform.